What, me, worry?

When it comes to masterplans for a global reduction in carbon emissions, it's usually taken as read that the world's richest economies will take the lead. Not only are they (well, we) best resourced to lead the necessary technological investment, and have the necessary economic and political stability to achieve their targets, they're generally also the ones responsible for large amounts of historical emissions. In short, it's their fault there's a problem, and they're the ones bet placed to help provide a remedy.

Of course, thing's are never that simple. Particularly when, it seems, the richest and most polluting countries are the least inclined to see the need to actually do anything.

That's long been a strong suspicion for many, but it's one that's borne out by new research by Hanno Sandvik of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Sandvik's paper, forthcoming in Climatic Change, finds a strong inverse correlation between the level of concern in a country’s population about the costs of climate change, and that country’s gross national product and greenhouse gas emissions.

Sandvik's explanation is primarily a psychological one. From the university's press release:
“People are all too willing to repress unpleasant truths, particularly if one is responsible for something that’s not good. I had a theory that the countries that contribute the most to global warming might perhaps have a population that would rather not believe so much in the dangers from climate change,” Sandvik says.

When Sandvik compared data on level of concern to data on emissions, he found support for his theory: the more responsibility a country had for causing global warming, the greater the tendency of its citizens to explain away or ignore the problem. And as a country’s emissions levels increased, the level of concern sank even further.
[...]
The five richest countries in the dataset were Norway, the United States, Ireland, Denmark and Canada. All of these countries are also considered to be among the worst in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. That consequently doubles the fertile ground for the lack of worry. Researchers were not particularly surprised by the findings. All “idealism research” shows that those who are most well off are always the least willing to contribute.

“If you take global warming to heart, you understand that you have to sacrifice something. And the richer you are, the less willing you are to sacrifice. It’s far more pleasant to decide that you actually don’t quite believe in the climate threat”, Sandvik says.

This also gives the lie to the line, occasionally parroted by the climate change denial lobby, that reducing emissions is the preoccupation of a wealthy minority who don't care about the wealth of developing countries. Like virtually all their arguments, that's demonstrably utter bollocks.

Of balls and busts

It's not often that neuroscience/economics research hits the headlines, but a paper in this week's PNAS, concerning hormonal influences on the behaviour of individual stock traders, has sired prominent stories in many of today's organs - see, for instance, the Guardian or BBC.

The research is be John Coates and Joe Herbert of Cambridge uni. Their abstract sums it up nicely:
Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking. Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.

It's not a new concept, of course - I wrote about a related behavioural economics study two years ago (a post that, because of the title, is actually one of my most frequently accessed items by people coming to this blog via search engines - I suspect most of them will be disappointed).

And it doesn't take a genius to spot why this is now a lot more newsworthy - boom and bust economics seems to be on people's minds...

New reviews

Just added three new pieces to the Reviews section of the main site:
The Artist and the Mathematician by Amir Aczel;
New Theories of Everything by John Barrow; and
Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres.
All three are pop science of various flavours (as the titles suggest, variously covering maths, statistics and, well, pretty much everything) which I've reviewed for the Fortean Times in recent months, all of which are interesting if flawed. I've also just submitted another review, of David Toomey's The New Time Travellers which is highly recommended for anyone with a passing interest in real-life adventures in time and space.

Halifax's knockout Nobel

Congratulations to Oliver Smithies, joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine. Along with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, Smithies wins the prize for helping develop the 'knockout' technique for using embryonic stem cells in genetic modification - a technique that remains rather controversial in some areas.

Science and controversy aside, the (entirely parochial) interest here is that Smithies was born here in Halifax, and educated at the former Heath Grammar School just down the hill from me. That makes him, as far as I can tell, Halifax's first Nobel Laureate. Not the first for Calderdale though - Todmorden has John Cockcroft (Physics, 1951) and Geoffrey Wilkinson (Chemistry, 1973) to its credit. Not too bad for a small Pennine borough that doesn't even have a university.

Sustainable chaos

Interesting short paper by Jacques Nihoul of the University of Liège on the role of chaos theory in models of sustainable development, which ties in with a number of subjects recently mentioned here. From the journal press release:

Current approaches to sustainable development do not fully involve complete methods and techniques for using, recycling, and replacing natural resources. Moreover, they do not take into consideration the effects of ongoing economic policies and fluctuating human populations. This is where the butterfly effect of chaos theory fame must be resurrected, says Nihoul [...]
Chaos theory is a major component of the computer models used by climatologists and weather forecasters as well as economists seeking patterns in the rise and fall of stock market values. However, Nihoul explains that while these models can provide useful information to feed into a global sustainable development policy, they must also take into account those butterflies on the periphery too. "Models of sustainable development on the ten-year and century-long timescales, must take into account both the diversity and the ‘turbulence’, the fluctuations on much shorter and more local scales," explains Nihoul.
Nihoul has developed a new modelling approach to climate, resources, economics, and policy, that sees the world system as interconnected local happenings rather than taking the smoothed global view favoured in much simpler studies. The earth cannot be modelled as a whole, he says, but rather as a mosaic of different systems, each with its own network of smaller systems and so on. Such an approach recognises the importance of global effects but also of the tiny deviations, the exquisite flapping wing of a butterfly as having a potentially enormous effect, chaotically speaking.

Ref:
Jacques C.J. Nihoul, "Chaos, diversity, turbulence and sustainable
development", Int. J. Computing Science and Mathematics, 2007, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp 107-114
available here.

Gamesmanship theory

Intriguing paper by Stuart Macdonald of the University of Sheffield and Jacqueline Kam of Bristol on the politics of journal publication in their own field of Management Studies. Shockingly, they find the whole area rife with gamesmanship, with who publishes what where apparently more important than the actual content.

From their abstract:
Pressure to publish in [quality] journals and the triumph of managerialism over professionalism in the modern university have undermined peer review. In consequence, the same old hands are publishing the same old ideas in the same old journals. Quality journals must be taken much less seriously if there is ever to be any real enthusiasm for new ideas from new blood in Management Studies[...] Cunning and calculation now support scholarship in Management Studies. Gamesmanship will remain common until the rewards for publishing attach to the content of papers, to what is published rather than where it is published. We propose a Tinkerbell Solution: without belief in the value of a paper in a quality journal, the game is no longer worth playing.
[Stuart Macdonald and Jacqueline Kam, 'Ring a Ring o' Roses: Quality Journals and Gamesmanship in Management Studies', Journal of Management Studies, 44, 4, 2007, pp.640-655]

Still, such gamesmanship doesn't seem entirely alien to the practice of Management. And of course, such practices couldn't possibly be so dominant in other fields - could they?

Psychophysics, according to Hoyle

Intriguing letter in last week's Nature on how an aside in the great Fred Hoyle's early SF novel The Black Cloud proved hugely influential in perceptual research -

The characters in the book discover an ominous black cloud that appears to be heading towards Earth. Will the cloud hit Earth and, if so, when? The first question is solved when the characters examine the relative speed at which the cloud is translating across the night sky to the rate at which it is looming, or seeming to get larger. The second question is tackled with a bit of impromptu algebra in which the time until impact is calculated from the ratio of the current size of the cloud to its rate of change. A mathematical derivation of the formula is provided.
A footballer wishing to head an approaching ball needs to know where the ball is going relative to the head, and when it will hit or pass the head. The player could estimate the trajectory of the ball from knowledge of its position and velocity. However, David Lee realized in the 1970s that the brain can use the ratio of size to its rate of change, previously identified by Hoyle, to estimate the imminence of arrival. David Regan realized soon afterwards that the brain can use the ratio of lateral speed to looming rate to calculate where an object is travelling. [...]
Since the early work of Lee and Regan, a considerable amount of research in areas including psychophysics, motor action, neurophysiology and computational modelling has followed. The whole body of work that exists today can be traced back to a casual footnote and a couple of sketches in a science-fiction novel.

Pull the string

Provocative (and rather ironic) review in the Economist (subscription only) of two books criticising the dominance of string theory in modern physics. String theory, it is argued, is simply bad science - there's too many different versions of the core theory from which theorists can pick and choose according to circumstance, it's over-dependent on mathematics rather than experimentation or observation, it's too easily retro-engineered to fit new discoveries but has little or no predictive power, and it's just plain unfalsifiable, putting it closer to metaphysics than actual physics.

However, the biggest problem, both authors believe, is that string theorists have promoted their subject aggressively, often taking the best jobs in universities and blocking the advancement of physicists who would seek to use other means to unify the laws of physics. As string theory involves intricate mathematics, the barrier to entry into its community is high. The very difficulty in overcoming this barrier makes it hard for those who have gained entry to leave. The self-interest of string theorists is thus stifling physics.
...
[Lee] Smolin argues that the insularity of the theoretical physics community leaves it vulnerable to “groupthink”, a term coined to explain how many intelligent like-minded people can nevertheless be catastrophically wrong.

So where's the irony? It's that all these accusations could, with very little modification, be levelled at academic and applied economics, and the dominance of econometric-heavy neo-classical theory (and its pretensions towards the status of science). Except in that field, the good old Economist seems a lot less sceptical.

Mandelbrot's telescope

I'm currently rereading Benoit Mandelbrot's The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets, as preparation for an essay on the option-pricing implications of non-normal distributions of stock prices (ripping stuff, I assure you).

Mandelbrot's basic argument here is that stock price movements don't have the log-normal distribution assumed by the conventional theory underpinning the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing formulae, but rather a power-law distribution, as the evidence appears to bear out. This means that much of modern finance theory is based on assumptions that are demonstrably wrong. As Mandelbrot (and/or his co-author Richard Hudson) puts in, an a passage I found rather endearing -

If this were astronomy, the argument would have ended long ago. Imagine observatories suddenly finding a new planet where, the standard theory says, none should be. And then another, and another and another. Astronomers, after checking their instruments, would not ignore the data; they would question their understanding of celestial mechanics and a new and fruitful episode in astronomy would dawn. But it does not work that way in economics, even though the equivalent of countless new planetary systems have been recorded.

Fair comment on the reluctance of economists to change their paradigms (although it does seem as though power-law distributions are now well established in the statistical finance field). But I do think he's being rather generous in his assessment of astronomers...

I interviewed Mandelbrot about his financial work a few years ago. He's probably the most egotistical person I've ever interviewed, but I guess he's entitled to be. And I'll always treasure his explanation of why his work is like a beautiful woman.

Life in a 5-d hole

The current New Scientist has one of those intriguing articles on speculative cosmology, with US astrophysicist Paul Wesson asking - what if the universe was a five-dimensional black hole? (The full feature is sadly subscription-only online.)

The answer to what it would be like is that it would be remarkably similar to what we see. These 5-d ones aren't like the familar four-dimensional (that's three of space, and one of time) black holes - and by 'familiar' I mean that even if you don't have much of a grasp on general relativity, you'll probably get the idea from if you get too close to one, it'll suck you in, rip you apart, and not even your constituent atoms will be seen again.

These 5-d ones are much friendlier places to hang around. And handily, there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that suggests that the universe has at least five dimensions, otherwise it just shouldn't work in the way that it apparently does. A 5-d universe just wouldn't look any different to what we see as a 4-d one.

The most persuasive clue found by Wesson is that the universe (as it would be in a variant of the big bang model dubbed the 'big bounce', which seems to demand five dimensions) looks remarkably like a hypothetical five-dimensional black hole, if you look at a ballpark measure of their physical characteristics called the Kretschman Scalar. This measure basically measures the gravitational field at some point in space, and takes a variety of dimensional forms for different models - but in these two cases, it comes out very similar. As Wesson says:
It is conceivable that a bouncing universe and a 5D black hole could have identical Kretschmann scalars by coincidence alone, but given the number of parameters involved, it is very unlikely. Much more likely is that there is some kind of similarity between the two objects.

Intriguing stuff, that demands further investigation. Wesson throws in a coda illustrating the possible ramifications, albeit in a way that risks drawing in the astral-travelling crowd:
We are led to consider the idea of a set of "Russian doll universes", with each world embedded in another world of higher dimensions. There is as yet no way to know what we will discover when we probe these higher-dimensional universes.

Life is like a cup of tea

A charming line of reasoning from expert witnesses in the Pennsylvania 'Intelligent Design' case, as reported in The Economist:

The plaintiffs have carefully called expert witnesses who believe not only in the separation of church and state but also in God. Mr [Kenneth] Miller [author of a biology textbook] is a practising Roman Catholic. So is John Haught, a theology professor who testified on September 30th that life is like a cup of tea.

To illustrate the difference between scientific and religious “levels of understanding”, Mr Haught asked a simple question. What causes a kettle to boil? One could answer, he said, that it is the rapid vibration of water molecules. Or that it is because one has asked one's spouse to switch on the stove. Or that it is “because I want a cup of tea.” None of these explanations conflicts with the others. In the same way, belief in evolution is compatible with religious faith: an omnipotent God could have created a universe in which life subsequently evolved.

It makes no sense, argued the professor, to confuse the study of molecular movements by bringing in the “I want tea” explanation. That, he argued, is what the proponents of intelligent design are trying to do when they seek to air their theory—which he called “appalling theology”—in science classes.

Imperial empiricals

A feature by Philip Ball in the Guardian on ecologist Peter Turchin's theory of cliodynamics, a mathematical model of history:

Turchin believes that history can indeed be a science, with laws as inexorable as the law of gravity. He claims to have found the general mechanisms that cause empires to wax and wane - laws as true today as they were during the Roman or Ottoman Empires. According to this view, the world order is in a state of perpetual change and the global powers today will inevitably be replaced in the coming centuries.
[...]
For example, Turchin argues that the fluctuations in population of pre-industrial societies can be linked to periods of political instability and civil war. His theory shows how population growth caused by increased prosperity can itself trigger such social instability, thus sowing the seeds of its own decline. This, says Turchin, is how civilisations and empires collapse.

Fascinating stuff, if only for giving a new statistical gloss to some old ideas of cyclic or mechanical history, but I suspect cliodynamics will remain a reductionist oddity, much like the other areas of 'social physics' explored by Ball in his book Critical Mass. Still, it's nice to see that in this new article, Ball finally gives credit to that notable fictional precedent for the field, the psychohistory of Asimov's Foundation novels.