The key thing he mentions, to which all his other advice builds, is the need for good, constructive peer review.
So you need to surround yourself with fellow writers who are supportive but also honest. Some people will tell you that your writing is always good. These people are lying. And some people will tell you that your writing is always bad. These people are also lying. …But a few rare people will point out the stuff that they like, call you out on some of the dumb [stuff] that you’re writing, and gently but forcefully suggest ways to make your dumb [stuff] better [my italics]. Treasure these people. Learn to recognize them. These people are your only hope.
One of our economics assignments this cycle asks students to divvy up $200,000 among a group of ten people. One is a divorced mom, another a playboy, a third a bank manager, you get the gist. The purpose is to compare what students think it should be, to what a socialist might believe, to students’ estimation of reality. I’m really curious to see what they come up with.
Michael Norton and Dan Ariely have some actual data on the wealth distribution in the United States that might really challenge some assumptions (Norton and Ariely, 2011 pdf). They asked survey respondents what percentage of wealth they thought was owned by the poorest 20% of U.S. citizens, the next 20% and so on. They also asked what kind of wealth distribution people though would be ideal. Finally, they compared what people thought to what was actually there.
The actual distribution of wealth in the U.S. (top), what people think is the case (middle), and people's ideal distribution (bottom). Figure from Norton and Ariely (2011).
People, apparently, really underestimate the income inequality in the U.S..
A second part of the same study gave people pie charts of wealth distribution in different societies and asked them to pick out which one they would prefer to live in if they were dropped at random into one of these societies. They compared the more socialist-like Sweden, to the U.S., and to a perfectly even distribution. People greatly preferred societies with a more equal sharing of wealth.
How wealth is shared in the U.S. compared to and equal distribution (middle), compared to Sweden. Image adapted from Norton and Aireli (2011).
I think I’m going to have to modify this assignment to use these graphs. I’ll also have to use their definition of wealth:
Wealth, also known as net worth, is defined as the total value of everything someone owns minus any debt that he or she owes. A person’s net worth includes his or her bank account savings plus the value of other things such as property, stocks, bonds, art, collections, etc., minus the value of things like loans and mortgages.
The Economist has a wonderful graphic of the countries in the Arab World. Click on the countries for information about the country, including things related to civil rights.
A successful democratic revolution may well need a relatively wealthy and educated population, however, one of the main things that seem to drive revolutions themselves is just how many young adults there are in a country.
… countries in which 60 percent or more of the population is under the age of 30 are more likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those where age structures are more balanced.
— Madsen (2011): The Demographics of Revolt
When there are lots of young people getting to the age when they are just trying to find jobs and start families, but the country’s economy can’t grow fast enough to provide all the jobs they need, then you have a lot of dissatisfied, disaffected people with time on their hands; it’s a tinderbox ready for any spark.
I recently attended a talk by Jennifer Scuibba where she laid out the case. Scuibba’s blog, also has a
a very good set of links that look at the age demographics of the current revolutions in the Arab world.
One of the links goes to a report by Richard Cincotta and others (Cincotta et al., 2003) that used this type of demographic analysis to figure out which countries were most likely to end up in conflict.
They talk about the demographic transition, “a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death,” as being a key factor in reducing the likelihood of conflicts. Therefore, they suggest:
If civil conflict leads to a successful democratic transition, then political stability is probably not a net benefit.
However, once there is a democratic revolution, the same large cohort of young people still exists, which could make a country like Egypt unstable for quite a while, until it goes through the demographic transition. After all:
…countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usually go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with authoritarian elete politics in a volatile way. Statistical evidence covering the past two centuries shows that in this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less …
— Mansfield and Snyder (1995): Democratization and War
NPR reports on the discovery of a 11,500 year old house in Alaska that probably belonged to some of the first people to migrate to the Americas over the Bearing Land Bridge during the last Ice Age. Just 500 years later the Land Bridge was submerged by rising sea levels.
It’s a good article to go to for our discussion of human migration patterns. It also has the added poignancy of the fact that, at the end, the home was turned into a burial crypt for a young member of the family.
I get this question occasionally from my students, and the answer is, of course, that it depends on how you define the word “sound”. Jim Baggott, on the Oxford University Press blog, goes into more detail about the roots of this philosophical conundrum, and makes the parallel to quantum physics.
This tree fell in the woods in Little Rock. Did it make a sound? Depends on who you ask.
Physics and philosophy are a dangerous pairing, particularly since if you know enough about one to speak intelligently about it, your probably way out of your depth in talking about the other. Just because you’re an expert in one field does not mean you’re going to be an expert in another. This is especially true of physics and philosophy, which approach the world from such different perspectives and use such different languages: to a physicist, “sound” refers to the vibrations in the air, while a philosopher might argue that “sound” only exists in our minds.
Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all.
— Jim Baggott: Quantum Theory: If a tree falls in forest…
Arasmus is mapping all the events that are happening in Libya. A lot of it’s confusing, things are changing very fast, and who knows where it will end up.
Color 'fingerprints', with four color standards labeled Y (yellow), R (red), G (green), and B (blue).Gene sequences extracted from sediment in Buzzards Bay, MA, and separated using gel electrophoresis (Image from Ford et al., 1998)
One of the more basic techniques in the microbiologist’s toolkit is gel electrophoresis. It’s used to separate long molecules, like proteins, RNA and DNA from one another. Different organisms have different DNA sequences, so electrophoresis can be used to identify organisms and for DNA fingerprinting. Chromatography is also used to separate different molecules, usually pigments. Therefore, using some filter paper, food coloring, and popsicle sticks I created a nice little chromatographic fingerprinting lab exercise using chromatography as an analogue for electrophoresis.
Food colors and test tubes.
Using a standard set of four food colors (red, blue, green and yellow), I grabbed each students individually and had them add three drops of the colors of their choice to a test tube with 1 ml of water in it. One students went with three straight blue drops, but most picked some mixture of colors. I kept track of the color combinations they used, and labeled their test tube with a unique, random number.
When they’d all created their own “color fingerprint” in the test tubes, I handed them back out randomly, and gave them the key of names and color combinations (but no numbers). They had to find out whose test tube they had.
Diffusion of a drop of dye mixture through filter paper. At least three different colors are visible. The colors at the outer edge are the most difficult to distinguish.
I was kind enough to give them a few little demonstrations of chromatography I’d been experimenting with over the last day or so. The easiest technique is simply to place a couple drops of the sample on a filter paper (we used coffee filters “requisitioned” from the teachers lounge), and chase it with a couple drops of water to help the dye spread out. This method works, but since the sample spreads out in a circle, the inverse square law means that the separation of colors can be hard to see.
While the drop method worked well for most students, one who was a bit more analytically-minded, interested in the project, and had a particularly difficult sample, tried doing it using a filter paper column. Since I wanted to show them the proper way of conducting experiments, particularly about the importance of using standards, and I wanted to check if they were able to interpret their results correctly, I also did the full set of samples myself as columns. The standards are essential, because the green food color is actually a mixture of green and blue dyes.
Our color chromatography setup is as you see at the top of this post. We used popsicle sticks to keep the filter paper strips away from the glass surface.
Experiment with filter paper taped to the glass.
The experiments worked well, and for best results, let the it dry because the colors show up better. One focus with my students was on note-taking and recording results; after a few iterations that worked out well too. Another nice aspect of using the series of columns is that it looks a lot like the electrophoresis bands.
I did try some other variants of the chromatography: top down, bottom up and even taped down. The last version, where I taped the filter paper to the glass to create a restricted column, worked very well.
Variants of the experimental setup are shown in the three columns from left: taped down where the filter paper is taped to the glass; bottom up, where movement of the water and die is driven by capillary action; and top down, where the sample droplet is placed at the top of the column.
