Dementia prevention: reason enough for road tolls and public transit

I was a persistent skeptic. I didn't believe that exercise slowed the inevitable [1] onset of age related cognitive decline.

The animal models broke my resistance. Now we're exploring mechanisms (emphases mine) ...

Observations: Aerobic exercise bulks up hippocampus, improving memory in older adults

... adults aged 55 to 80 years who walked around a track for 40 minutes on three days a week for a year increased the volume of their hippocampus, the brain region that is implicated in memory and spatial reasoning. Older adults assigned to a stretching routine showed no hippocampal growth. The 120 previously sedentary older adults recruited for the study did not yet have diagnosable dementia but were experiencing typical age-related reduction of the hippocampus, according to pre-study MRIs. "We think of the atrophy of the hippocampus in later life as almost inevitable," ...

The growth of the hippocampus was modest, increasing 2.12 percent in the left hippocampus and 1.97 percent in the right hippocampus, which effectively turns back the clock one to two years in terms of volume. The stretching group, on the other hand, experienced continued reduction in pace with expected age-related losses, losing on average 1.40 percent and 1.43 percent in the volume of their left and right hippocampus, respectively...

In addition to the increased size of the hippocampus, the aerobic exercise group also tended to have a higher level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a compound that is associated with having a larger hippocampus and better memory. The researchers did not see any changes in the thalamus or caudate nucleus, two other parts of the brain that are involved with spatial sense and memory, respectively. Because only the hippocampus seemed to be affected by the aerobic exercise regime, the researchers reasoned that the activity might be acting specifically on certain molecular pathways to prompt "cell proliferation or dendritic branching," they noted...

This was a randomized (non-blinded of course) therapeutic trial and it's backed up by persuasive animal model studies. I think this is real.

I would not call the effects "modest". Over one year there was a 3.4% difference in hippocampal volume between the control and experimental groups. This corresponds to a 2-4 year age gap. There is no reason to assume the groups would not continue to diverge for additional time.

This is a big enough difference that ethics panels may not approve further experimental studies of this sort. Future control groups will have to include significant exercise (I would not call 40 minutes 3 times a week modest.)

So now we have a few known ways for individuals to reduce their personal risk of cognitive disability:

1. Don't hit your head. That means no football for your kids (and, worse, maybe no hockey).
2. Exercise (without hurting your head) a lot.
3. Don't smoke, drink to excess, eat too much, etc.

We know things that don't work at all ...

1. Playing bridge, cognitive work, crosswords, etc.
2. Nutritional supplements

And we're waiting to find out if sleeping 7-8 hours a night will matter. I have a hunch sleep duration will be found to be a key to amyloid turnover ...

Insights Give Hope for New Attack on Alzheimer’s - Gina Kolata - NYTimes.com

...  Dr. Bateman was his own first subject. He then did the test on people in their 30s and 40s, as well as healthy older people and people with Alzheimer’s...

The problem in Alzheimer’s, he found, is disposal. Beta amyloid, he found, normally is disposed of extremely quickly — within eight hours, half the beta amyloid in the brain has been washed away, replaced by new beta amyloid.

With Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Bateman discovered, beta amyloid is made at a normal rate, but it hangs around, draining at a rate that is 30 percent slower than in healthy people the same age. And healthy older people, in turn, clear the substance from their brains more slowly than healthy younger people.

... “What we think may be happening is that a clearance mechanism is broken first,” Dr. Bateman says. Slowly, as years go by, beta amyloid starts to accumulate in the brain. If that clearance can be fixed, or enhanced, the buildup might never occur...

Of course exercise helps regulate sleep as well ...

We know enough to make some policy decisions. The economic payoff to delaying cognitive disability across the US population is enormous. It's enough of a savings, for example, to justify a shift to public transit, which leads to higher levels of ambulation. A carbon tax, which makes sense in many other ways, can pay for public transit, reduce automobile use, and reduce dementia rates.

Science is stuck in a rut. What now?

I was surprised when I did my 2008 family medicine board exams...

Gordon's Notes 2008: Challenges to medicine and science – medication invention hits a brick wall

... To put it delicately, progress has sucked. If you put a good physician to sleep 7 years ago, and woke her up today, she’d be reasonable competent on day one. A week later she’d be fully up to speed ...

Sure, there were lots of new drugs, but they were mostly incremental improvements. Medicine got stuck around 1984. Smolin claims physics is just as bad. Now people are writing books about the "Great Stagnation".

This is good. The first step to getting out a rut is to stop spinning wheels. Even better, scientists are doing meta-science on this problem ...

Biologists Ignoring Low-Hanging Fruit, Says Drug Discovery Study  - Technology Review

The entire set of kinases in a given organism is called its kinome. The human kinome consists of 518 kinases. Unsurprisingly, biologists and pharmaceutical companies are intensely interested in understanding how these enzymes work and developing drugs that control their behaviour.

So it may come as a surprise to find that three quarters of the research in this area focuses on just 10 per cent of these enzymes, as measured by the number of times the kinases are cited in research papers. By contrast, 60 per cent of the kinome, some 300 kinases, is virtually ignored by the community and mentioned in only 5 per cent of the work.

This is known as the Harlow-Knapp effect after the researchers that discovered it a couple of years ago. The question it raises is why biologists ignore most of the kinome when there is good reason to think that careful study should pay off in silver dollars

Today, Ruth Isserlin at the University of Toronto in Canada and a few buddies take a more detailed look at the effect. They say it is more widespread than previously thought and also affects the study of other biological molecules too....

... One common idea is the Matthew effect--from the biblical reference that the rich get richer and poor get poorer. For example, it is common for well-known scientists to be awarded prizes, making them more famous, even if all the work was done by a graduate student who is ignored.

At first glance, it's easy to imagine that the Harlow Knapp effect is good example of this. Isserlin and co point out that current molecular biology is so rich that it is possible to ask important questions even of the most well-studied systems. And since its easier to get grants, to do good science and to get published in higher impact journals by sticking to well known systems, that's exactly what scientists do. So the best known systems become better studied.

That alone might explain this distribution. But there is something else going on too, say Isserlin and co. Biologists commonly screen the entire genome of an organism looking for interesting proteins. But when they find one, the amount of work they can do with it depends on the chemical tools available to interact with it.

In many cases, these tools are not available. And when that happens, the proteins are ignored. This, say Isserlin and co, is one of the important underlying reasons why so many kinases and other interesting biomolecules are so poorly studied...

Some good clues there, but we should look also into other domains of historic stasis. Music and art have gone through periods of stagnation and renaissance. So has religion ...

... Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed... [1]

"Priestes and Authority"? Sounds like the NIH.

So we've recognized the problem. How do we get out? It might be we'll get unstuck any minute now, but this is a good time to rethink how we fund and reward scientific endeavor. Should we be doing more prizes for discoveries instead of grants for research? Should we declare certain domains "boring" and off limits for NIH funding? Should we accelerate the demise of tenure?

I expect we're going to hear some interesting ideas over the next couple of years.

[1] Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.  Famous scholarly work. In some circles anyway. Ok, so I just like the book.

Bayes and the infinite universe

I used to teach Bayesian reasoning to informatics students. I couldn't justify to them why such simple math felt both spooky and profound. I still can't, but this story fits.

Cosmologists tell us that, comparing a subset of models to available data using Bayesian methods, the 14 billion year old universe is somewhere between 3,500,000,000,000 and an infinite number of light years across (emphases mine) ....

Cosmos At Least 250x Bigger Than Visible Universe - Technology Review

... the photons in the cosmic microwave background have travelled ... 45 billion light years to get here. That makes the visible universe some 90 billion light years across.

... one line of thinking is that if the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, then it ought to be 10^23 times bigger than the visible universe... .... Other estimates depend on a number factors and in particular on the curvature of the Universe: whether it is closed, like a sphere, flat or open. In the latter two cases, the Universe must be infinite.

... in recent years, astronomers have various ingenious ways of measuring the curvature of the Universe. One is to search for a distant object of known size and measure how big it looks. If it's bigger than it ought to be, the Universe is closed; if it's the right size, the universe is flat and if it's smaller, the Universe is open.

Astronomers know of one type of object that fits the bill: waves in the early universe that became frozen in the cosmic microwave background. They can measure the size of these waves, called baryonic acoustic oscillations, using space observatories such as WMAP.

There are also other indicators, such as the luminosity of type 1A supernovas in distant galaxies.

But when cosmologists examine all this data, different models of the Universe give different answers to the question of its curvature and size. Which to choose?

The breakthrough that Vardanyan and pals have made is to find a way to average the results of all the data in the simplest possible way. The technique they use is called Bayesian model averaging ...

... Instead of asking how well the model fits the data, its asks a different question: given the data, how likely is the model to be correct. This approach is automatically biased against complex models--it's a kind of statistical Occam's razor.

In applying it to various cosmological models of the universe, Vardanyan and co are able to place important constraints on the curvature and size of the Universe. In fact, it turns out that their constraints are much stricter than is possible with other approaches.

They say that the curvature of the Universe is tightly constrained around 0. In other words, the most likely model is that the Universe is flat. A flat Universe would also be infinite and their calculations are consistent with this too. These show that the Universe is at least 250 times bigger than the Hubble volume. (The Hubble volume is similar to the size of the observable universe.) ...

This is Occam's razor statistics - "... we should tend towards simpler theories .... until we can trade some simplicity for increased explanatory power".

Given the available information, the universe is most likely infinite, but it could be as "small" as 3,500,000,000,000 light years across. Big enough for one human like civilization for every human that has ever lived.

Probably though, much bigger than that.

It is a bit much. Surely, there is a simpler, less extravagant explanation. I'd like to see the authors rerun their analysis with a broader range of explanatory models. I think I know what the answer would be [1] ...

See also (Gordon's Notes unless otherwise noted)

• Earth: the measure of all things (3/2007): Back then we thought the universe might be "only" 140 light years across. So Earth was midway between the Planck length (quantum foam scale) and the universe.
• Bayes theorem: binding reasoning to the physical universe (5/2007)
• Boltzmann's brain hits the big Times (1/2008): We are the dreams of a desperate god in a terrible universe. It is the simplest explanation ...
• Reality, perception, Hume, the red pill - and John Tierney (8/2007): If you're going to be crazy like me, it helps to have David Humen for company.
• CV is hurting my head again: The anthropic principle and our peculiar relation to the arrow of time ... (8/2007): Too many coincidences
• The Algebraist and the religion of the eternal simulation (1/2008): Iain Banks is a fabulous writer.
• Ten cosmologies and Theory 10 (8/2006): The original page is gone. You can guess what theory 10 is.
• SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity: Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed (footnote 9) (@2003) Before I did blogging, I stuck these things in web pages. "... Vernor Vinge wrote a very short story for one of the millenial year issues of either Nature or Science where he explores exactly this premise ... It's interesting to think about how one would "detect" a simulation ... Vinge explored this in a 2004? short story about a woman who realizes she's been trapped in a simulation ... the simulation would be imperfect, that it would generate "artifacts" in the same sense that JPEG lossy compression of a stripped image will product artifacts. One might, for example, look for physical phenomena consistent with techniques that would reduce the computational demands of the simulation. Or one might attempt to expose flaws (bugs) in the simulation -- or even "crash" it (risky!) ... identify physical phenomena that are inexplicable except in the context of a "simulation" (such as "connectedness" in theoretically disconnected parts of the universe).
• Gordon's Notes: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (11/04 - one of my earliest posts in this particular thread)

- fn --

[1] An omniscient universe-creating deity is equivalent to the "Boltzmann's Brain" explanation, so creationists are in good company. Alas, this "deity" is not the one they're looking for.

Economics of POW Camp - whatever happened to R. A. Radford?

The conclusion of an essay beloved to Krugman and many other economists ...

Economics of POW Camp, R.A. Radford 1945
.... In January, 1945, supplies of Red Cross cigarettes ran out: and prices slumped still further: in February the supplies of food parcels were exhausted and the depression became a blizzard. Food, itself scarce, was almost given away in order to meet the non-monetary demand for cigarettes. Laundries ceased to operate, or worked for £s or RMk.s: food and cigarettes sold for fancy prices in £s, hitherto unheard of. The Restaurant was a memory and the BMk. a joke. The Shop was empty and the Exchange and Mart notices were full of unaccepted offers for cigarettes. Barter increased in volume, becoming a larger proportion of a smaller volume of trade. Thus, the first serious and prolonged food shortage in the writer's experience, caused the price structure to change again, partly because German rations were not easily divisible. A margarine ration gradually sank in value until it exchanged directly for a treacle ration. Sugar slumped sadly. Only bread retained its value. Several thousand cigarettes, the capital of the Shop, were distributed without any noticeable effect. A few fractional parcel and cigarette issues, such as one-sixth of a parcel and twelve cigarettes each, led to monetary price recoveries and feverish trade, especially when they coincided with good news from the Western Front, but the general position remained unaltered.

By April, 1945, chaos had replaced order in the economic sphere: sales were difficult, prices lacked stability. Economics has been defined as the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organization and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort.

The essay has a very English style. Radford's upper lip was rock solid.
A Caracas Chronicles 2002 post has a bit of background and some analysis of the article ...

In 1941, a British officer by the name of R.A. Radford was captured by the Nazis and confined to a POW camp. At the camp, Radford and 2400 other inmates were forced to live on meager rations delivered by the Red Cross. The rations issued to each prisoner contained a bit of bread, some sugar, biscuits, jam, margarine, tea and chocolate bars, with small rations of canned meat sporadically made available. They also included 25 cigarettes per prisoner per week. Radford, who had been trained in economics before the war, noticed how even in the extreme conditions of a Nazi prison camp, a rudimentary market system developed as prisoners traded with one another to maximize their satisfaction. The British army's Gurkahs, for instance were eager to trade their meat for other foods, since as Hindus they were strict vegetarians. Prisoners who didn’t smoke were eager to trade their cigarettes for food. At first, each of these trades was a simple barter. But soon enough, the inmates realized the need for a more sophisticated system of exchange. Lacking money, they started using cigarrettes as prison currency. A ration of margarine might be bought for seven cigarrettes, which could then be used to buy one and a half chocolate bars, and so on.
Soon after his release, Radford described the system that developed in a classic paper entitled “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp,” a write-up that's much appreciated by undergraduates everywhere for its skill at explaining the mysteries of monetary systems. What interested Radford the most was the way that cigarrettes, as a means of exchange, were subject to all of the fluctuations of normal currency. So long as there was a roughly steady relationship between the number of cigarettes in circulation and the goods those cigarettes could be traded for, “prices” in terms of cigarettes remained more or less stable. But when a shipment of cigarrettes unexpectedly arrived, an inflationary spiral was set in motion. With the camp suddenly awash in “unbacked cigarettes” (additional cigarettes that circulated without a corresponding increase in the amount of other goods they could buy) prisoners would demand more and more of them in exchange for other goods. Alternatively, when cigarettes failed to arrive for one reason or another (an allied bombing raid, for instance,) a liquidity crunch took hold of the camp. These currency shortfalls would actually lead to recessions at the camp: with inmates eager to hang on to their scarce cigarettes, it became more and more difficult to find people to trade with.

So what happened to Radford after the war? There's no Wikipedia entry for him, and I couldn't find a biography or a reference to anything but his 1945 publication. I couldn't even find out what the initials "R.A." stood for.

It is a mystery.

Update 10/21/2011: Mystery solved in a comment on this post. R stood for Richard, he moved to the US to work for the IMF. See: http://faculty.csusb.edu/urmann/POW_Article.pdf

Google Art Project

Google Art Project hosts seventeen museums worth of paintings with gigapixel imaging - including Rembrandt's Night Watch...

Yes, it's Flash based. More's the pity. Churlish to complain though.

This is a glorious marvel. Most of these paintings can be seen only at a distance. Now you can put your eye next to them.

Google moves into positive Kharma territory with this one.

From the FAQ ...

Why is there a difference between the museums in terms of the number of galleries, artworks and related information?

Google approached the museum partners without any curatorial direction, and each museum was able to chose the number of galleries, artwork and information they wanted to include, based on reasons specific to them. All content in the information panel pertaining to individual artworks was also provided by the museums.

Why are some areas or specific paintings in the museum Street View imagery blurred?

Some of the paintings and features captured with Street View were required to be blurred by the museums for reasons pertaining to copyrights.

Are the images on the Art Project site copyright protected?

Yes. The high resolution imagery of artworks featured on the art project site are owned by the museums, and these images are protected by copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the art project site, in the manner permitted by Google’s Terms of Service.

Update: Unsurprisingly, given the use of Flash, it's buggy on a Mac. I had more luck using Chrome for OS X than using Safari. I created a shareable collection but it took a few tries to get it saved. Doubtless a part of Google Social to be. Did I mention Flash sucks?

Unemployment and the great stagnation

In the past week or so I wrote a summary post on how the people I read think about unemployment and the new American economy.

I also wrote a related post on how little medicine has progressed over the past 27 years. That lack of progress has a lot to do with why health care costs have risen faster than GDP. In the absence of substantial innovation the only way to improve outcomes is to spend more.

These memes are in the air. Two days ago Paul Krugman claimed that the large surge in US productivity from 1995 to 2004 was largely due to Walmart-style retail innovation (which, of course, required advanced IT support).

Yesterday Sewell Chan tagged the financialization [1] of the US economy as big contributor to the (second)  great crash of '09 (emphases mine) ...

Looking for a Legacy of the Financial Crisis Inquiry - NYTimes.com

... Greta R. Krippner, a University of Michigan sociologist whose book “Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance” (Harvard University Press) comes out next month.

“The report reinforces the view that financial activities should serve the nonfinancial economy, rather than the other way around, as has been the case in the U.S. economy over the last several decades,” she said.

That orientation toward finance — rather than the deregulation and avarice — is the real source of instability, according to Judith Stein, a historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of “Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the ’70s,” published last year by Yale University Press.

“Low wages, low interest rates to encourage consumption, and too much investment in housing and financial services because of the decline in manufacturing and other tradable goods – those are the underlying causes.”

That same day Tyler Cowen tied some threads, while plugging his Great Stagnation book in the NYT (emphases mine) ...

Incomes Are Stuck on Technology’s Plateau - Tyler Cown NYTimes.com

... From 1947 to 1973 — a period of just 26 years — inflation-adjusted median income in the United States more than doubled. But in the 31 years from 1973 to 2004, it rose only 22 percent. And, over the last decade, it actually declined.

Most well-off countries have experienced income growth slowdowns since the early 1970s, so it would seem that a single cause is transcending national borders: the reaching of a technological plateau. The numbers suggest that for almost 40 years, we’ve had near-universal dissemination of the major innovations stemming from the Industrial Revolution, many of which combined efficient machines with potent fossil fuels. Today, no huge improvement for the automobile or airplane is in sight, and the major struggle is to limit their pollution, not to vastly improve their capabilities.

Although America produces plenty of innovations, most are not geared toward significantly raising the average standard of living. It seems that we are coming up with ideas that benefit relatively small numbers of people, compared with the broad-based advances of earlier decades, when the modern world was put into place. If pre-1973 growth rates had continued, for example, median family income in the United States would now be more than $90,000, as opposed to its current range of around $50,000.

... there have certainly been gains in medical treatment, we may be overvaluing them. In education, we are spending more each year, but test scores have stagnated for decades, graduation rates are down and America’s worst schools are disasters.

There is an even broader problem. When it comes to measuring national income, we’re generally valuing expenditures at cost, rather than tracking productivity in terms of results. In other words, our statistics may be deceiving us — by accepting, say, our health care and educational expenditures at face value. This theme has been emphasized by the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in his public talks and by the economist Michael Mandel in his writings. And I’ve stressed it in a recent e-book, “The Great Stagnation.”

Sooner or later, new technological revolutions will occur, perhaps in the biosciences, through genome sequencing, or in energy production, through viable solar power, for example. But these transformations won’t come overnight, and we’ll have to make do in the meantime. Instead of facing up to this scarcity, politicians promote tax cuts and income redistribution policies to benefit favored constituencies. Yet these are one-off adjustments and, over time, they cannot undo the slower rate of growth in average living standards...

Cowen is infected with the Marketarian meme [3]. Since the Market is divine, the failure must be in innovation. Even so, I think he has some important things right.

He is too tentative though when he questions how much progress medicine has really made over the pasts quarter century. If we went back in time, and told doctors of 1984 what medicine  in 2011 was like, they would weep. "Surely", they would protest, "we must at least have beaten something like Rheumatoid arthritis or Multiple sclerosis".

On the other hand, I think Cowen (and, for that matter, Krugman), are missing the enormous impacts of IT innovation. Our Finance innovations were IT enabled, and our disastrous inability to measure and manage them arose in part from our inability to understand the systems we'd created.

So we've had three new additions to my summary article in one week. I think we're closing in on what whacked America between 1999 and 2011. Congress may again need four tries to get it right [2], but we are making progress. Once we understand what the heck happened, we have a start at recovering.

- fn --

[1] I point to the "virtual economy", more in my summary post. The rise of Finance was driven by both IT innovations and the rise of the vast manufacturing powers of China, Brazil and India.

[2] Washington’s Financial Disaster - Frank Portnoy - NYTimes.com - "Few people remember that the early investigations of the 1929 crash also failed due to political battles and ambiguous missions. Ferdinand Pecora was Congress’s fourth chief counsel, not its first, and he did not complete his work until five years after the crisis. Congress should try again."

[3] He is in denial about the extent of income skew vs. income growth. For example.

See also

• Japan Blocks the Young, Stifling the Economy: Another example of asymmetric distribution of employment. In the US we bias to the Finance industry, in the Japan it is biased against young workers. Same problems, different biases.
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/22/11
• The Great Stagnation – Medicine or Who Ate My Prosperity «  Modeled Behavior: Smith agrees with me about medicine
• Krugman agrees with Tyler on the failure of technological innovation. As noted above, I think he's off about IT. Problem is IT is an enabling technology, not an end in itself.

Dilbert shout out

Dilbert 1/30/11 - "Option two: I could lie, and tell you that everything is perfect". Perfect.

Scott Adams has been at this for 22 years. Some years he does better than others, but in the past six months he's hit the spot more often than not. Nice to see a veteran in good form.

Teaching science - how to improve

I have children in public schools in grades 3 through 8. This isn't surprising ...

Minn. science proficiency results called a shock | StarTribune.com

... national tests given in 2009, showed that 40 percent of Minnesota eighth-graders and 43 percent of fourth-graders were either 'proficient' or 'advanced' in science."...

In other words, 60% failed.

I'm not concerned about science teaching in grades 1 to 4. Maybe someday, but not today. We do have a problem with teaching science in Minnesota's public schools between grades 5 and 8.

So what should we do about it?

We need old, cynical, hard bitten teachers nearing retirement to tell us what needs to change. I can only suggest a solution based on what I know about doctors. Since doctors and teachers have a lot in common, this may be relevant.

I was a real family doc once. I switched careers about fifteen years ago, but my wife still sees patients. There are a lot of superb family physicians, particularly in rural America but also in urban settings. On the other hand, radiologists make far more money for less work. The gap has grown over the past decades. Since most radiologists would be lousy family physicians, and most family physicians would die of boredom doing radiology, the impact isn't as large as it might be. Still, it's real. If you want to get more quality family physicians (or pediatricians, internists, etc), the cheapest solution is to pay radiologists less [1].

I suspect the same is true in teaching. Science teachers and reading teachers draw from somewhat similar candidate pools. The quality of science teaching will depend on the relative prestige and rewards between one domain and the other. If we want better science teaching in America, we need to make teaching science relatively more attractive than the alternatives.

Any comments from those who teach young students?

[1] You'll know you're paying too little when it becomes hard to read MRIs or get an interventional procedure performed. I suspect that would take a vast reduction in income.

Administrivia: return of the captcha

Google's spam comment detection isn't good enough. After a one month test I've given up and restored a captcha function (yech) for Gordon's Notes comments.

Sorry.

Turbulent world, rigid software

One of the fringe benefits of playing professor is that I can insert my idiosyncratic observations into relatively innocent minds.

Last night, during a health informatics lecture, I described the remarkable rigidities in an intersecting set of vertical software systems I know well. Some of the applications are older than the younger students, others are just maturing. They're all strung together by a rickety set of interfaces and interdependencies; even routine data configuration is problematic. It's an interlocking and rigid system of brittleware. When business conditions change, brittleware breaks.

That's not unusual. We see it even on solitary desktop applications. PowerPoint 2007 is clearly senile; it needs a long cruise on a railing-free ship. Brittleware is everywhere.

Problem is, the world changes. Of course that's not new; the 20th century was packed with change. For most of that time, however, we used people and paper. People and paper are relatively easy to change. Even hardware is easy to change. Software though, software is hard.

So what impact does rigid software have on the ability of businesses to adopt to changing conditions? Does it become a true impediment to adaptation?

Things that stopped progressing: medicine and theoretical physics

I'm surprised more people haven't noticed that medical progress slowed way down after 1984.

It's not just medical science that's hit a wall. Lee Smolin's 2004 The Trouble With Physics claims physics has been frozen for decades. (At least physics has a book on this. I think physicians are in denial.)

What other sciences have stopped making progress? Biology seems to be very healthy ...

School segregation - by class

Americans are used to schools being by race. It seems we accept it and expect it...

Marginal Revolution: U.S. fact of the day

... American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino...

I'm interested in how segregated schools are by class -- including private schools. I'm not sure how to measure it, but my suspicion is that the kids of the top 5% no longer mix with the bottom 95%.

In a related vein, one of the great scandals of American society is that most public schools are funded by local taxation. It's appalling, but Americans seems to accept it without question.

Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes

The thinkers I follow [2] have been struggling to understand why America's unemployment is so high. Productivity is rising, the economy is growing, but workers are not in demand. Obama has hired Jeffrey Immelt to help, which is either clever politics or a sign that Obama's not as smart as I thought he was.

There's too much to say here. So I'll drop seven bullet points and a set of the best links. This is what I think is happening ...

• The Great Recession has exposed structural unemployment that otherwise would have become evident around 2015.
• The digital economy (IT) impacts predicted in the 1970s have come about thirty years later than expected. [3]
• The extremely rapid industrialization and post-industrialization of about 3 billion people is incredibly destabilizing. It is a testament to the power of civilization that we're not yet living in caves.
• In a virtualized economy workers with average analytic and social IQ less than 125 are increasingly disabled. Since this average falls with age the rate of disability is rising as the we boomers accumulate entropy. Experience counts for less.
• America is the world's most virtualized economy. We have invested more intellectual capital in Finance, entertainment and software than any other nation. We are also aging, though less quickly than many. We are the harbinger.
• China is going to hit the wall between 2011 and 2012.
• Peak Oil is here, soon and then later. Oil prices will rise until China's 2012 recession, then fall, then rise again.

Here is what I think we need to do ...

• Institute a Carbon Tax with a component that drops as supply decreases to both decrease carbon emissions and stabilize energy prices. We need a predictable rise to help us with extensive adaptations. Whether this is revenue neutral or not depends on politics. Global warming is real.
• Prepare for China's coming recession. The world needs a health, wealthy China. There are things we can say and do that will help China pass through these times and recover.
• Slow the progress of economic virtualization over the next five years[4]. I think this is going to happen anyway, but we need to encourage and support diversion to an economy with more employment niches. Throwing sand in the gears of Finance is a good idea. One way to do that would be to give Goldman Sachs more competition. Regulation, taxation, and, paradoxically, reducing barriers to entry into the Finance market are all important.
• Start applying the lessons learned from providing employment to cognitively impaired adults to the entire US population. The US is a world leader (yes, this shocks me [1]) in the integration and support of adults with disabilities. Might as well learn something.

See also

What I've been reading lately ...

• Why is the U.S. so awful at job creation? - How the World Works - Andrew Leonard, 1/18/2011. The US is unusual - in a bad way.
• The Age-Income Profile Is Less Steeply Sloped than I Had Thought It Was - DeLong 1/21/2011. Income basically peaks at 35, flatlines to 54, then falls quickly. This is important.
• Why Might There Be High Unemployment? DeLong commenting on WCI's ZMP post. Zero Marginal Product (ZMP) is the economic term for disability. WCI writes: "It is possible that some potential workers, perhaps because of severe disabilities, simply cannot produce anything useful, even in a perfectly functioning economy... They have a Zero Value Marginal Product. There's no coordination failure. The problem simply can't be solved, given existing technology, tastes, and resources.". This is what I call "mass disability". Disability, remember, is a relative term. I would be disabled in much of pre-industrial history.
• Nancy Folbre: Borderless Economy, Jobless Prosperity - Nancy Folbre, NYT 1/2011. Corporate incentives, and the incentives of the investors (I claim these aren't the same thing), no long align with American society. She includes a wide review of recent discussions.
• What Have We Unlearned from Our Great Recession? DeLong 1/15/2011
• William PFAFF-Are We Committing Economic Suicide?: This isn't terribly useful, but it's a common meme. Our problem isn't money. We are doing well by skimming the wealth of India and China. The problem is that we're now living in Goldman Sachs plantation.
• A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail 10/8/2010. He makes me seem like a bundle of cheer. I admit though, we could be kin.

Some relevant old posts of mine

• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III. IT and the rise of the world means whitewater economics.
• Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world 5/2010
• Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010
• Why your daughters should be roofers -- not architects 3/2004
• Krugman on globalization: how to manage the losers 12/2007 - I think he still believes this, but it's not politic to say it
• 2011: The year American life changes: 7/2007. I predicted then that gas prices would hit $5/gallon in the US in 2011. I didn't expect the Great Recession, but I'll stand by this prediction. Note gas hit $3.60 in Chicago in 5/2007, we're heading back to that this May.
• Deficits, climate, BP and immigration: Saving America is suspiciously easy. 7/2007. Our problems are fixable. And ... American crisis – imagining a way out 2/2010.
• Retiring at 70? Don't legalize marijuana. 7/2010. Raising the retirement age is spitting in the hurricane.
• What would make Krugman wrong about spending? 6/2010. Not entirely successful post, but there's something there.
• Gasoline prices: refining or secular trend - the 11 year chart: 5/2007. I need to redo this now.
• Employment in the Great Stagnation: 8/2010. Remembering the Zero Sum Society.
• Peak Oil? Hell, yes. 10/2008, after pump prices cratered in the Great Recession. See also The three meanings of peak light sweet oil and praise for rational speculation and Oil price speculation: is it rational investment or a bubble? 3/2008
• My Peak Oil Call 8/2008. I make my call. Then the Great Recession hit and prices fell. Funny.
• When the market is your deity, there is no such thing as corruption 7/2009 - why the GOP can't help
• Welcome to the wild times... 5/2010. Don't believe in predictions, including these.

- fn --

[1] The ADA was enacted in 1990 under Bush I (!).
[2] Beyond my own stuff, I'm a DeLongian. DeLongian's are closely aligned with Krumanians, but are less constrained by the conventions of polemical discourse. I suspect, for example, that, in his heart, Krugman believes a lot of what I've written above. It's just not something he dares to say just now.
[3] Gibson's Neuromancer, written in 1984 and influenced by the memes of the late 70s and early 80s deserves a re-read.
[4] I'm being terse by necessity. The thesis is that virtual economies are winner-take-all; effectively, they create mass disability. We need to shift to an economy that has more diverse employment niches -- effectively lowering disability.

Update 1/30/11: Gordon's Notes: Unemployment and the great stagnation - this meme is in the air.

Suzhou

A student of mine grew up in Suzhou, China; she left about six years ago. It was, she said, an  hour west of Shanghai, and had a population of about 1 million.

Today it has a population of about 6 million. By way of comparison, Chicago has a population of about 2.9 million.

Google Earth still shows a gap of green between Suzhou and Shanghai, but that will not last long.

When I asked how her home differed from a city like Houston, she said it was much more compact, and that it was a continuous landscape of towers - "downtown" everywhere. I imagined something like downtown Chicago, but more widespread.

I imagined wrong. This is a random grab from Google Earth ...

"Downtown everywhere" was probably a language limitation. From Google Earth photos I see that each building brick is a multi-story apartment building. Many thousands of them, each holding hundreds to thousands of people. Much of Suzhou is now a continuous landscape of identical residential multi-story housing units.

Dog 2.0

A randomly selected purebred border collie associates sounds with objects, and perhaps sound permutations with objects and actions.

There are mid-sized dog breeds that live as long as 25 years. Given low cost whole genome sequencing, we could create a dog breed a 25 year lifespan and enhanced communication skills.

To develop greater language skills within a short time period would probably take some germline engineering. Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to do the germline engineering.

So does dog 2.0 get to vote in 2060?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: What will be unacceptable in 50 years?
• Gordon's Notes: Dogs