Link of the day: Bill Gates tries to save the world through vaccines

I find it demoralizing to read about the plight of the world economy, skyrocketing health care costs, and disregard for environmental and climate issues.  It makes me think that the only solution is to reduce the world's population.  Suddenly, those evil antagonists in movies who want to destroy everything don't seem so bad. Fortunately, I read this Forbes article about how Bill Gates is trying to reduce the world's population by distributing vaccines to Africa. If that didn't make sense to you, Gates felt the same way at first:

So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health... they focused on birth control... The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?

The problem was that people were having huge families because so many children died in infancy. Vaccines drastically reduce the child mortality rate so that families can plan. The end result is a suppression of population growth. It's not obvious to me that this is true, but if Bill Gates did his homework and is spending millions of dollars to distribute vaccine, I'm inclined to believe in it. The cool thing is that Gates is putting his business skills to use. By guaranteeing a market for vaccines in developing countries, drug companies are competing to supply the product and this is driving the cost of vaccines down. Clever man!

Link of the day: Nun activism

Activism is important, but I've always found public protesting uncomfortable.  So I was happy today to read about nuns who lobby major corporations about social issues.  Check out the New York Times article "Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging".

Eventually, they developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual shareholder meeting. (Securities laws require shareholders to own at least $2,000 of stock before submitting resolutions.) That gave them a nuclear option, in the event the company’s executives refused to meet with them.

Unsurprisingly, most companies decided they would rather let the nuns in the door than confront religious dissenters in public.

Some quotation marks

I'm trying out a new Blogger template, one of the standard ones from Google.  I wanted to customize it with my own blockquote style.

Here are a couple images for quotes:

Also reduced size:

Where does the future of American innovation lie?

Our department chair send out a personal email telling us to attend a special event.  A prominent former head of a major government agency was visiting and the chair, being a personal friend, persuaded him to come talk to grad students and postdocs about careers.

As expected, he was opinionated but sincere and charismatic.  He thought that American innovation will come from startups, not government or academia.  In his opinion, government is paralyzed by interpersonal politics and it is so difficult to get grants in academia (average age of first NIH grant is 43).  Scientists, especially postdocs, are encouraged to do incremental work, rather than something revolutionary.

I asked a question about why it seemed like all the startups were internet software companies.  He said it has to do with scale.  It is much easier to be an internet startup than a startup that has to build something (e.g. clean energy).  The internet startup only has to pay for office space, computers, and salaries.  Since their product is available on internet, there is a huge multiplication factor, as everyone has a computer and a smartphone.  A clean energy startup could take ten years to become profitable.  The key to building a successful startup is that you need to beat a well-established company by an order-of-magnitude, whether that is price or efficiency.

He talked a little about his experience working in government.  He was rather frustrated with how much money is wasted in space science and exploration.  The problem is that the American public doesn't believe anyone should die in exploration or war.  They have to spend money to ensure the safety of astronauts to an extreme degree.  That's why he eventually quit.  Because the stress of being responsible for space shuttle launches was overwhelming.

Yet, he though highly of people who worked in government.  He told us rather emphatically, "If the president asks you to work for him, you should say yes!"  As the discussion wound down, he said "Let me end by telling this story... " (Such a polished, prepared guy that he had a heart-warming story for the end.)  He went to USSR in 1991 to talk with the Soviet space agency.  While he was there, the coup d'état started.  There was shooting and tanks everywhere.  He became alarmed and tried to contact the American embassy.  They said they couldn't help because people were shooting into the windows of the building.  He tried to contact the White House and ask the president what to do.  Meanwhile, he found the pilot and asked him if he could fly them out.  The pilot said that if he took everyone, including all the staff, they wouldn't have enough fuel to get to Helsinki.  He asked the pilot to take out the seats and they found that this reduction of weight would be sufficient.  Eventually, he was told that the president would appreciate it if he stayed as a show of support for democracy.  He apprised his staff of the situation and told them it was their personal choice whether to go or stay.  Everyone stayed.  Then he asked the Soviet space agency director if they were still going to hold their discussion.  The director acted like it was any other day and they got the deal done.  If you're not a complete cynic, I would call that a beautiful patriotic moment.

What is good writing?

Good writing has a specific audience in mind and tries to relate to that audience.

Good writing is interesting and engaging. When I read good writing, I come away feeling like I learned something new or read something beautiful. It's fun to read (I think it's possible to make even boring scientific papers at least a little fun to read.)

Good writing provides details, enough to be interesting and instructive, but not details that are irrelevant or inappropriate for the audience. You don't want to overwhelm the reader.

Good writing has a logical flow and a structure that makes it easy for the reader to follow.

Good writing is concise and precise (not the same thing). You want to use just enough words to convey your meaning. You want to be clear in conveying your thoughts (especially important in scientific writing). If you are having trouble writing a sentence and have the choice between being more concise or being more precise, I would always choose precision, because the content of your writing is more important than the style.

Good writing has music and personality in it. Maybe there are a few exceptions, like writing an instruction manual, but I think it's possible to incorporate "music" and "personality" into research papers. It's very hard to be interested in writing that is dry and abstract. I'm no expert on this, but there are ways to make your writing more dynamic. You can vary the lengths of your sentences and the constructions of your sentences. In classical music, you notice that the tempo of the music changes, or the key switches from major to minor. You can do similar things in writing.

Hermit crab metaphor for writing scientific introduction

I've been taking a writing workshop for the past few weeks.  The instructor taught us something really cool.  The introduction to a scientific paper can be thought of as a hermit crab finding its shell.  Swales and Feak [1] call this "moves in introductions."

1. Establish a research territory.
2. Find a niche.
3. Occupy the niche.

I thought this metaphor was really cute and colorful.  I'll think of hermit crabs the next time I read or write an introduction.

[1] Swales, John M. and Christine B. Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students, The University of Michigan Press (2004)

Magazines for travel reading

I recently endured a six hour flight and this time I didn't bring my Nintendo. Maybe I'm growing out of my video game habit. I've been trying to read more; I like this new reading habit. Being slightly claustrophobic, I hate doing work on a cramped airplane. So, no work or video games. Something new I'm trying is reading magazines. I'd like to read a magazine directed towards thinkers as opposed to a populist news magazine like Time or Newsweek. The major literary magazines in America seem to be The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's Magazine. I've tried reading The New Yorker and I don't really like it. I prefer non-fiction and there are too many creative pieces in it. I tried The Atlantic and that was good. Maybe I'll pick up Harper's Magazine next. I've also read some interesting things in The New York Review of Books and The American Scholar. My favorite technology magazine is Technology Review

Link of the day: "The Once and Future Way to Run"

I enjoyed this New York Times article investigating what is the best -- most natural and injury free -- way to run.

The author purports that the best way to run goes back to the roots of human civilization when we ran barefoot.  The key is to land lightly on your forefoot and not on your heel.  Here are some quotes from the article.

The “one best way” isn’t about footwear. It’s about form. Learn to run gently, and you can wear anything. Fail to do so, and no shoe — or lack of shoe — will make a difference.

Back at the lab, Lieberman found that barefoot runners land with almost zero initial impact shock. Heel-strikers, by comparison, collide with the ground with a force equal to as much as three times their body weight.

Physics as a subject for a kids comic book and how to get kids interested in science

For several years now, I've wanted to write a physics comic book with the goal of getting kids interested in science. The problem is that I just don't have a good idea how to do it. I need a really great idea because a comic book has to compete with TV, video games, internet, and all the other entertainment children are exposed to in the modern world.

I'm starting to feel like physics is simply not a good subject for a kids comic book. Anything that is abstract like physics will be difficult to pick up quickly and therefore you need to be able to play with it, experiment. Programming is abstract but lots of kids pick it up because you can write code and run it immediately. You can quickly progress to the point where you can make images fly across the screen. You know if the program works, because either the image flies across the screen or it doesn't. Instant feedback. That is fun, exciting, and addictive (in a good way). When you do a physics problem and you get an answer, it's very difficult to know if your answer is correct or if it makes sense. You could do a real physics experiment, but physics experiments are notoriously difficult to do right and require special equipment. I was always amazed in high school at how much equipment we needed to do simple experiments let measuring the velocity of an object moving along a track. When you do a chemistry experiment, you mix two solutions and the color changes. You can see or feel the result qualitatively. Physics experiments require too much precision; you actually have to measure the exact numbers to see if you're doing it right.

I'm starting to think that if you want to get kids interested in science and engineering without much equipment, the appropriate subjects are programming and math. I've already discussed programming. You can come up with all sorts of interesting math problems at all different levels. You can get a sense of whether your answer is correct by plugging in numbers. For geometric problems, you can often solve them by drawing pictures. Best of all, you don't have to worry about equipment failing in your experiments. Mathematics isn't constrained by the physical world, so there are lots of different ideas you can talk about, whereas in physics you are stuck discussing Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, etc. For older kids who want to do something hands-on, I would recommend electronics. The parts are small and you don't need to go a machine shop.

Quote of the day: Depression is sometimes a disease of the strong

Here's an interesting quote I read in the June 2011 issue of Fear.less, a web magazine devoted to interviews with people about fear. The quote comes from Australian comedian Marty Wilson.

But depression is actually a disease of the strong, I think. If people don’t have a mental breakdown, they remain fixated in the cycle of "I must get through this. I must push on. I must do this. I must do that." It’s the depression that allows one to break through that cycle and admit to others that you need help.

I think depression is different for everyone, but I agree that this characterization of depression is true for many people.