Science, Technology & Health: September 2005 Archives

It looks like the Simputer is facing some American competition in the ultra-low-cost computing market.

One man in Boston has a plan that he hopes will bridge the world's gaping digital divide - and quickly. The visionary is Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his idea consists of a new kind of laptop computer that will cost just $100 (£57) to buy. ...

In fact, he expects to churn out about 15 million of them within one year, shipping most of them at first to children in Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa.

Describing the unusual design of his sub-laptop yesterday, Mr Negroponte insisted that it would "have to be absolutely indestructible". The mission is to create a tool that children almost anywhere can use and can easily carry between their classrooms and their homes. For that reason, for instance, the AC adaptor cable will double as a shoulder strap.

Few things will improve the quality of life around the world more than cheap computing.

NASA chief Michael Griffin made a startling admission yesterday, echoing what many private space pundits have been arguing for years (including myself): the Space Shuttle program was a mistake.

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.”

As many have argued, the right path is for the government bureaucracy to open up space to private industry, and to encourage innovation and exploration through the use of prize money. If space is worth exploring but isn't yet profitable, prizes are the most efficient form of subsidy possible because they prevent the government from picking the recipients and they allow market forces to choose the methods.

I usually like statistics, but what I've come to realize is that I only like reading statistics, I don't like calculating them. I've spent most of my school time for the past few days trying to figure out how to calculate confidence intervals and p-values for some data sets I've generated as part of my dissertation project. Aside from not knowing how to do this for simple cases, my sets of data are far from simple.

Briefly, I've got dozens of trials, each of which produces, among other variables, a score for each tribe of animats (artificial life agents) in the trial. However, this score is actually the average of 1,000 intermediate scores taken at 1,000 second intervals (total of 1,000,000 seconds per trial). Further, the animats in each tribe change over time, as animats are born and die; an animat dies and a new one is created, in each tribe, every 20,000 seconds. So, there are 50 distinct (overlapping) sets of animats per tribe over the course of a trial, and complete turn-over within a tribe every 200,000 seconds (since there are 10 animats per tribe). This yields five non-overlapping sets of animats per tribe per trial, but they aren't independent because the whole point of the experiment is that animats transmit knowledge and behavior (culture) across generations.

Whew. So, I have a bunch of data, and some experiments consist of only 20 trials. However, because of my setup, I think that these 20 trials have the statistical significance of nearly 100 shorter trials because of the non-overlapping sets and multiple tribes per trial. I have calculated correlation coefficients between scores and other measurements, and between scores and various animat characteristics that I want to test the usefulness of, but I am getting thoroughly lost as I try to figure out the statistical significance of my numbers, if any.

Here's a good example of the difference between theory and practice: The St. Petersburg Paradox.

The St. Petersburg game is played by flipping a fair coin until it comes up tails, and the total number of flips, n, determines the prize, which equals $2ⁿ. Thus if the coin comes up tails the first time, the prize is $2¹ = $2, and the game ends. If the coin comes up heads the first time, it is flipped again. If it comes up tails the second time, the prize is $2², = $4, and the game ends. If it comes up heads the second time, it is flipped again. And so on. There are an infinite number of possible ‘consequences’ (runs of heads followed by one tail) possible. The probability of a consequence of n flips (‘P(n)’) is 1 divided by 2ⁿ, and the ‘expected payoff’ of each consequence is the prize times its probability. ....

The ‘expected value’ of the game is the sum of the expected payoffs of all the consequences. Since the expected payoff of each possible consequence is $1, and there are an infinite number of them, this sum is an infinite number of dollars. A rational gambler would enter a game iff the price of entry was less than the expected value. In the St. Petersburg game, any finite price of entry is smaller than the expected value of the game. Thus, the rational gambler would play no matter how large the finite entry price was. But it seems obvious that some prices are too high for a rational agent to pay to play. Many commentators agree with Hacking's (1980) estimation that "few of us would pay even $25 to enter such a game." If this is correct, then something has gone wrong with the standard decision-theory calculations of expected value above. This problem, discovered by the Swiss eighteenth-century mathematician Daniel Bernoulli (1738; English trans. 1954) is the St. Petersburg paradox.

Similarly, and more simply, no one would risk their life savings of (say) $100,000 on a one-in-a-million chance to win $100 billion, or even $200 billion. Remember: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.

(HT: Daniel Davies I think, somehow.)

I can't remember how I found this article, but Wendy McElroy recently raised an issue I wrote about earlier: will science trump politics with regards to the abortion issue?

For better or worse, new reproductive technologies are redefining the ground rules of reproduction. (And, no, the force of law can not hold back scientific 'progress,' as authorities have discovered repeatedly since Galileo's day.) ...

This possibility becomes more likely in the presence of two factors.
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First, viability is being established at ever-earlier stages of pregnancy.

Recently, doctors have been successful in administering perflubron — a liquid that replaces the amniotic fluid — to babies as young as 23-weeks-old, with a 70 percent survival rate.

Second, ectogenesis [growing an embryo outside the mother's womb] seems to be experiencing breakthroughs.

In 2002, a team at Cornell University used cells from a human uterus to grow an artificial womb. When a fertilized human egg was introduced, it implanted itself in the uterus wall as in a natural pregnancy. After six days of gestation, the experiment was halted due solely to legal constraints.

Meanwhile, half-a-world away, Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University in Japan has been removing fetuses from goats and keeping them alive for weeks in clear plastic tanks of amniotic fluid with machine-driven 'umbilical cords'.

The point is, it won't be long until there are more choices available than birth or abortion. Currently, mothers of unwanted children can't really be rid of them without abortion until after birth. However, upcoming technology will allow a woman to have her baby removed and grown elsewhere from a very early age, even as soon as the pregnancy is discovered.

That sounds like a fascinating possibility, but it also raises a lot of questions.

1. Is there a segment of the population that currently believes in abortion rights, but would be in favor of outlawing abortion if the mother could simply have the baby transferred out of her body without harm? Such a procedure would probably be invasive, even if no incisions had to be made. Even if not required by law, such a procedure would likely dramatically reduce the number of abortions.

2. Who would pay for these procedures? If abortion were outlawed, would the public have a duty to pay to remove unwanted babies, or would the mothers be forced to pay (just as they pay for a birth or an abortion)? Who would pay to preserve the babies in artificial wombs? Who would pay to support the babies after "birth" if they aren't adopted?

3. Should the federal government get involved? State laws requiring transplant instead of abortion would certainly depend on a reversal of Roe v. Wade, but aside from that should there be federal standards for the programs? Should there be a federal baby-care program?

Does anyone have any personal experience with the therapeutic use of Vitamin C?

Vitamin C is needed in the diet to prevent scurvy. It also has a reputation for being useful in the treatment of colds and flu. The evidence to support this idea, however, is ambiguous, unless the studies are divided by dose size and dosing regime. When that is done, it is remarkable that most of the studies showing little or no effect employ quite small doses of ascorbate such as 100 mg to 500 mg per day ("small" according to the vitamin C advocates). The Vitamin C foundation (1) recommends 8 grams of vitamin C every half hour in order to show an effect on the symptoms of a cold infection that is in progress. ...

A minority of medical and scientific opinion sees vitamin C as being a low cost and safe way to treat viral disease and to deal with a wide range of poisons. The large doses, in the tens of grams per day, put ascorbic acid in a different class to almost all other therapeutic agents. It has been suggested that ascorbic acid is really a food group in its own right like carbohydrates and protein and should not be seen as a pharmaceutical or vitamin at all.

Some vitamin C advocates hold that the wider adoption of vitamin C for therapeutic use is hindered by the fact that it cannot now be patented. This means that pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to fund research or promotion of a substance in which they stand to make little profit and which will compete with some of their own patented medicines in which they have invested large sums.

Does anyone know more about this?

Ok, this is possibly the coolest thing ever. If you've ever wanted a creepy robot to call your friends and scare the crap out of them, now you can with NotifyPhoneBasic, a free service by CDYNE. Use LicenseKey == 0 to test it out.

(HT: Lifehacker.)

Yet another nifty Google Maps application, ACME Laboratories presents the Google Aerometer which allows you to measure the area of regions on a map just by clicking on a few points. It even calculates lines as great circles to correct for the shape of the earth so that measurements are correct for large areas. It probably treats the earth as a sphere though, rather than a collapsed ellipsoid.

(HT: Lifehacker and JV.)

I was just musing today that I wouldn't be surprised if the Space Shuttle orbiters are armed with some sort of simple ballistic weaponry. Think about it... the commander and pilot are always military officers, and no one else aboard the shuttle would need to know.

Most people would look at the AD-1 Oblique Wing aircraft and think it's crazy.

Why is the wing at such a strange angle relative to the fuselage? If you think that's weird, get ready for the Oblique Flying Wing, basically the same as the AD-1 but with no fuselage -- a wing that points at an oblique angle relative to the direction of flight. DARPA is requesting proposals for a program called Switchblade that will explore the feasibility of building and controlling an OFW at low supersonic speeds.

The trick is that the optimal sway angle depends on the speed of the craft, which means that it has to change during flight... which means that the engines and any sensors/weapons systems on the aircraft have to pivot. Ultimately, there's talk of building a wing 400 feet long to carry passengers across continents at supersonic speeds.

Contra all the comments to my earlier posts about the myth of depletion, it looks like rising oil prices actually are increasing the quantity of available oil. As I've explained many times, as oil prices rise, oil sources that were previously un-exploitable due to high costs become profitable.

The United States has an oil reserve at least three times that of Saudi Arabia locked in oil-shale deposits beneath federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, according to a study released yesterday. ...

For years, the industry and the government considered oil shale — a rock that produces petroleum when heated — too expensive to be a feasible source of oil.

However, oil prices, which spiked above $70 a barrel this week, combined with advances in technology could soon make it possible to tap the estimated 500 billion to 1.1 trillion recoverable barrels, the report found.

Yes, oil will stay expensive, but prices will drop once refining processes are optimized and infrastructure is in place. It's simple economics: as price rises, so does supply.

(HT: Glenn Reynolds.)