Author Archives for brentn

It’s Nobel time again!

More exciting to me and certainly more impactful to humanity than the NCAA, Nobel season is a great time to reflect on major advances in science. I’m going to walk through my top contenders for the Chemistry and Physics Prizes. While I’m interested in all the Nobel prize winners and their work – whether it is in one of the sciences or in literature – the Physics and Chemistry Prizes hold a special appeal to me as a scientist working somewhere between those two fields.

The chemists in the blogosphere generally have a better game on about the odds on the potential future laureates than the physicists. I am particularly intrigued by Chembark and The Curious Wavefunction‘s  predictions. Given a recent shift away from the bio-related topics, this might be a year to bet that way. I thus find myself in agreement with Chembark’s 6-1 odds on Pierre Chambon for nuclear hormone signalling. Moerner’s work on single molecule spectroscopy is also another favorite of mine, for which he won the Wolf Prize in 2008 and the Langmuir Prize in 2009. In Physics, a Wolf Prize is a very strong indicator of soon-to-come Nobel. I’m not sure if this is true for Chemistry or not.

The dark horse in this race, in my opinion, is Allen Bard, the noted electrochemist, for the discovery of electron transfer in biological systems. This would tickle the bio-partisans and recognize the crowning contribution by someone for whom a lifetime achievement award would not be unreasonable. Chembark is quoting 19-1 odds on Bard. I think the chances are higher.

Usually, no one from the physics community handicaps the Physics Nobel race like the chemists do theirs. Poor showing, my fellow physicists!  This year, however, there is a heavyweight contender for the prize. With the exciting results from the Large Hadron Collider, I think that the Nobel Committee will have a hard time ignoring nominations for Peter Higgs (of the eponymous boson) and Francois Englert. The Atlantic has made a case for one of the trio of Hagen, Guralnik, and Kibble, who also published extensively (and a case can be made for independently) on what we now refer to as the Higgs boson. All 5 of these men (and one other, deceased) shared the Sakurai prize for work on the Higgs, so their contribution has been recognized. I will predict that if the Academy presents a medal based on this work, it will be to Higgs and Englert alone. The only thing I see that can be argued against a Higgs win here is the relative recency of the results. The committee, which includes two particle physicists, (Brink and Bergström) might reasonably choose to wait a year to ensure a more thorough analysis of the LHC data.

If they choose to delay on an award for Peter Higgs, the field is fairly wide open. There are several strong contenders in this case. The leading contenders, in my opinion, are Anton Zeilinger, John Clauser, and Alain Aspect for discoveries around quantum entanglement. With Zeilinger’s recent paper in arXiv.org building on his 2007 work on quantum teleportation, its clear that a path exists towards development of a practical quantum communications system. Zeilinger won the Wolf Prize in 2010 for this work.

Last year’s Wolf Prize winners in Physics are also strong contenders. Maximilian Haider, Harald Rose, and Knut Urban received the Wolf Prize in 2011 for their work on aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy. Bekenstein’s Wolf Prize winning work on the thermodynamics of black holes is certainly worthy of a prize, but I have a hard time seeing that this year.

In any case, October of 2012 is fast approaching. I can’t wait to find out who will get the call from Stockholm.

This is your brain on management

Here’s a great piece from the Neuroskeptic blog. They’re covering this new paper from PLoS ONE about fMRI imaging of manager’s brains.

The upshot of the paper is that managers tend to use less of their brain to make decisions, relying on established heuristics rather than fully engaging their cerebral cortex. This leads to fast, efficient decision making.

The implication I take away from this is that you get managerial failure in highly unusual (Black Swan, perhaps) situations that cannot be handled with existing heuristics and that managers are probably not inclined on the first blush to think outside the box.

Being in a managerial position myself, but one where I still am actively involved in the lab and in product development, I find that I appreciate the time I have where I’m not being expected to make rapid, effective decisions. It could be the case that letting your managers exercise these other areas of their cerebral cortex will produce better managers, ones who are able to make the rapid decisions that this paper indicates they can make, but who still have the facility to think more fully about the decision.

Nature Magazine’s job satisfaction survey

Nature has just published the results of their 2012 Salary and Satisfaction survey. It’s interesting reading, especially in light of the global economy. The primary takeaway is that in countries that have seen the most disruption, scientists are generally more worried about the stability of their funding sources and their jobs. This is unsurprising and mirrors the economic uncertainty felt in other professions. What is more surprising is that in some countries that have had relatively less economic disruption, such as China, India, and Japan, job satisfaction is lower than in countries like Spain, Italy, and the UK. A sidebar in the article speculates based on survey responses that factors such as the lack of good mentors or the lack of academic freedom contribute as much to job satisfaction for scientists as the economy.

Readers of Daniel Pink’s Drive will immediately be thinking about his trinity of motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Certainly, this particular result of the survey seems to be indicative that failure to provide these things leads to dissatisfied workers. The countries with the lowest satisfaction correlated with the countries that scored lowest on ‘degree of independence.’

 

The Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Technology Review has a great article about complex, interconnected systems and the risks associated with them. I suspect that this is a teaser for the authors’ new book on the subject, which ought to make for interesting reading.

Making highly interconnected systems robust is not a trivial problem, but the early pioneers of information theory developed some pretty good ways to ensure fidelity over networks. It makes sense to me that this work would be the basis of increasing robustness in modern systems. All redundancy comes with a cost, however, and it will likely be insurance companies that will lead the way in placing a value on robustness.

In transit

Hi, folks. I’m working on transitioning my blog from my own hosting to WordPress.com. The folks here are great and I trust them more than I trust myself to keep the lights on. Bear with me while I get the content moved.

What kinds of geniuses are we developing?

I just re-read Jonah Lehrer’s Wired article about geniuses. Still particularly struck by the call-out quote: “The US is good at generating geniuses. The problem is that they’re all athletes.”

Since I tend to follow Nobel Prizes, Wolf Prizes, and MacArthur Grants rather than the NCAA Final Four, I can intuitively grasp this. What does it say to our children when we obsess more over a basketball tournament than we do about who is going to get a MacArthur Grant? I’m not going to make dire predictions about the shallowness of our culture or use catchphrases like “dumbing-down” or anything else that might make me appear to be older and more crochety than I really am.

What I will say instead is that children reflect the values they see exhibited, and while it may take a genius to discover quantum dots or self-assembly, it certainly does not take any special genius to appreciate these concepts and to dream about what they might mean and how they might be applied.

2012 Abel Prize in Mathematics

A somewhat belated congratulations to Endre Szemerédi, who won this year’s Abel Prize. Szemerédi is well-known for his contributions to combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, and computer science. Szemerédi is affiliated with the Renyi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Rutgers University.

His faculty page at the Renyi Insitute is here and there is an excellent profile of him at Wikipedia.

Nature cannot be fooled

This quote from Richard Feynman in the appendix of the final report on the Challenger disaster should be remembered by all scientists, whether in industry or academia.

Derek Lowe at the Pipeline Blog writes most eloquently on the subject: “Not even with our latest management techniques can nature be fooled, no matter how much six-sigma, 4S, and what-have-you gets deployed. Nothing else works, either. Nature does not care where you went to school, what it says on your business cards, how glossy your presentation is, or how expensive your shirt.”

Mass balance analysis of algal biodiesel

Physorg.com reports on a recent paper in which the authors analyze the sustainability of algal biodiesel from a mass balance perspective. The paper, Bioresource Tech. 102, 1185, essentially highlights one of the tradeoffs with algal biodiesel. The low tech route of large containment ponds limits the total output of dry biomass per hectare, as evidenced by the author’s computation that even 11 square miles of algae ponds, at a growth rate of 50 g of bone-dry biomass per square meter per day, would only be sufficient to replace 0.1% of the US consumption of diesel.

Of course, there are many ways to increase the output per hectare. One of these are vertical tubes, or bioreactors, for algae growth. The issue with this approach is that it is capital intensive, requiring not only the tubes, but cooling systems to prevent algae death from overheating and requires higher overhead, since the tubes must be scrubbed occasionally to reduce fouling.

If I were to be looking at this area for technology breakthroughs, I’d be looking at people applying anti-fouling or other surface chemistry applications to reduce the maintenance costs, or clever engineers designing passive cooling systems for these reactors. I can imagine a system where the bioreactors were built to exchange heat with an HVAC system in cooler environments, or with their own ground-sourced heat pump in warmer times. The cost of the cooling is a major barrier and it would be a win to spread that cost around amongst several different systems.

Measuring shape

I’m breaking the long silence here to mention that amongst the other reasons I’ve been quiet, I am now working on a book with my friend and mentor, John Russ. The tentative title of the book is Measuring Shape, which describes its subject pretty accurately.  We’re intending this work to be a good handbook for people who are looking to measure and classify shapes in images. This is a subject in which I’ve done some work on and off for the past decade or so and I’m super-excited to finally be condensing my knowledge into something concise.  I’m also very excited to be working with John professionally for the first time in quite a few years. As we get deeper into this project, I’ll share more about where we’re going and hopefully get some feedback on topics that might be of interest.