Using a new administrative panel data set from the University of Maryland, this paper explores conventional peer effects and the effects of socially proximate peers at a large public university where some students are randomly assigned to housing. Results show that there is little evidence of robust residential peer effects on undergraduate performance. The impact of socially proximate peers’ characteristics on student achievement is then examined using an instrumental variables technique. Results indicate that social “friends” do not impact performance more than randomized peers. The paper casts doubt on the notion that social tie formation is the route to peer effects, and urges caution in the continued pursuit of peer effects in education without substantial empirical or theoretical innovation.
Deep geologic repositories are difficult spaces to imagine. They exist below us, hundreds of feet into the earth. Their spaces are not easily accessed by the public, if at all. The most challenging thing to imagine about a deep geologic repository is invisible to human eyes: its relationship to geologic time.
Geologic repositories are mandated to secure their contents for monumental lengths of time. Depending on the nation, this can be between 100,000 and 1 million years. Humans evolved into modern homo sapiens (Latin: “wise man” or “knowing man”) within the last 200,000 years. This means humans are suddenly faced with having to design a space that, at it’s minimum, will last for a time equal to half our evolutionary history.
In an installation entitled Containing Uncertainty, we (Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, the co-founders of FOP) take up one geologic repository and the “infinite” quarantine that it is designed to attempt.
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism. About Pawan Sinha (Via Ted)
Pawan Sinha researches how our brains interpret what our eyes see — and uses that research to give blind children the gift of sight.
The human brain is a big believer in equality—and a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has become the first to gather the images to prove it.
Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s.
Summary (via SciAm)
American science education lags behind that of many other nations, right? So why does it produce so many talented young researchers who cannot find a job in their chosen field of study?
Introduction (via SciAm)
For years, Americans have heard blue-ribbon commissions and major industrialists bemoan a shortage of scientists caused by an inadequate education system. A lack of high-tech talent, these critics warn, so threatens the nation’s continued competitiveness that the U.S. must drastically upgrade its K-12 science and math education and import large numbers of technically trained foreigners by promptly raising the current limit on the number of skilled foreigners allowed to enter the country to work in private industry. “We face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates testified to Congress in March 2008.
But many less publicized Americans, including prominent labor economists, disagree. “There is no scientist shortage,” says Harvard University economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor force. The great lack in the American scientific labor market, he and other observers argue, is not top-flight technical talent but attractive career opportunities for the approximately 30,000 scientists and engineers—about 18,000 of them American citizens—who earn PhDs in the U.S. each year.
“People should have a reasonable expectation of being able to practice their science if they’re encouraged to become scientists,” says labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation “It shouldn’t be a guarantee, but they ought to have a reasonable prospect.” But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions. Instead, scores of thousands of them spend the years after they earn their doctorates toiling in low-paying, dead-end postdoctoral “training” appointments (called postdocs) in the laboratories of professors, where they ostensibly hone skills they would need to start labs of their own when they become professors. In fact, however, only about 25 percent of those earning American science PhDs will ever land a faculty job that enables them to apply for the competitive grants that support academic research. And even fewer—15 percent by some estimates—will get a post at the kind of research university where the nation’s significant scientific work takes place.
Interesting Bits (via SciAm)
The competition for science faculty jobs is so intense that every advertised opening routinely attracts hundreds of qualified applicants. Most PhDs hired into faculty-level jobs get so-called “soft-money” posts, dependent on the renewal of year-to-year funding rather than the traditional tenure-track positions that offer long-term security. In the information technology field, meanwhile, experienced professionals blame outsourcing and industry’s preference for cheap young foreigners for blighting their careers. The firms using the largest number of H-1B visas, the type of immigration document that admits highly skilled temporary residents to the U.S workforce, are not supposedly talent-starved American technology companies but Indian-owned firms in the business of outsourcing work from American companies to the subcontinent.
But the real dearth—the lack of clear pathways into careers that could enable today’s generation of gifted young Americans to become the researchers who make tomorrow’s great discoveries—is convincing more and more of the nation’s best students not to seek careers in fields such as law, finance, medicine and other fields that offer much better short- and long-term career prospects instead of dedicating an average of seven years to PhD study plus an additional five years or more of postdoctoral training now considered necessary to compete for an academic career in many scientific fields.
The Real Problem (via SciAm)
The root of the problem, many believe, is what Teitelbaum calls the “perverse funding structure for science graduate education… a recipe for instability.” Since the 1940s, when the U.S. government began to invest seriously in civilian research, the work has been done largely at the nation’s universities and paid for through competitive, temporary grants awarded to individual professors by federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Since then, these agencies have become the major funders of academic research in this country, and, indeed, the world. The National Institutes of Health, which now dispenses more than $28 billion a year, is largest funder of non-military research on the planet.
Through decisions made haphazardly 60 years ago, “we chose as a country to staff our labs primarily with graduate students and postdocs and a few non-tenured staff people, while other countries have permanent ways of staffing their labs,” often with PhD staff scientists in career positions, says Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan, an authority on the academic labor force. Under some of those other systems, research institutions employ many scientists as long-term, career staff members who have professional-level salaries and clear career paths potentially leading to greater responsibility and leadership.
Distorted Incentives (via SciAm)
This dynamic creates distorted incentives, an artificial sense of shortage and a vicious circle. From the standpoint of a department chairman, Teitelbaum says, “you’ve got this research funding [that] will finance 15 graduate research assistants and 10 postdocs and your department and your faculty are committed to doing the research because you won the grants, but there aren’t enough people applying to be graduate students and postdocs from the U.S. From your perspective, that could be deemed to be shortage.” But, he emphasizes, “the demand is inside the institution, it’s not in the labor market.” Faculty members intent on getting the research done are “not thinking about…whether there’s post-university demand for people who have gotten PhDs or done postdocs.”
When James Watson was 24 years old, he spent more time thinking about women than work, according to his memoir “Genes, Girls and Gamow.” His hair was unkempt and his letters home were full of references to “wine-soaked lunches.” But when Mr. Watson wasn’t chasing after girls, he was hard at work in his Cambridge lab, trying to puzzle out the structure of DNA. In 1953, when Mr. Watson was only 25, he co-wrote one of the most important scientific papers of all time.
Scientific revolutions are often led by the youngest scientists. Isaac Newton was 23 when he began inventing calculus; Albert Einstein published several of his most important papers at the tender age of 26; Werner Heisenberg pioneered quantum mechanics in his mid-20s. At the time, these men were all inexperienced and immature, and yet they managed to transform their fields.
Youth and creativity have long been interwoven; as Samuel Johnson once said, “Youth is the time of enterprise and hope.” Unburdened by old habits and prejudices, a mind in fresh bloom is poised to see the world anew and come up with fresh innovations—solutions to problems that have sometimes eluded others for ages.
Interesting Excerpts (via WSJ)
Such innovation could be at risk in modern science, as the number of successful young scientists dramatically shrinks.
In 1980, the largest share of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) went to scientists in their late 30s. By 2006 the curve had been shifted sharply to the right, with the highest proportion of grants going to scientists in their late 40s. This shift came largely at the expense of America’s youngest scientists. In 1980, researchers between the ages of 31 and 33 received nearly 10% of all grants; by 2006 they accounted for approximately 1%. And the trend shows no signs of abating: In 2007, the most recent year available, there were more grants to 70-year-old researchers than there were to researchers under the age of 30.
“This is definitely an issue we’re concerned with,” says Francis Collins, the 59-year-old director of the NIH. “One thing I’ve learned from being in science is that the researchers in the early stages of their careers tend to be the ones with the fire in the belly. They’re not afraid of tackling the really hard problems.” In recent years, the NIH has responded to this concern by increasing the percentage of its grants going to new investigators, or scientists applying for their first grant, from 25% to 30%.
Another post from my friend Matt Kukla an expert on health care economics..
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Regulation – perhaps one of the most disliked words by businesses, fundamental economists and the average American citizen. Most of us have grown to believe the market knows best; when left alone it operates more efficiently and produces better outcomes than the public sector ever could. This may be true, under certain conditions, but the devil is always in the details. Even where markets operate perfectly, government must still regulate to establish rules that present an open and honest playing field for consumers and businesses. From an ethical standpoint, they also regulate, because these markets may provide inadequate equity and well-being among the population; in other words, perfect markets do not consider unbalanced distributions of income or differences in health care needs. However, there are times when markets simply don’t function properly, thereby requiring governments to improve their performance. Such is the case of health care.
In the first two categories, for instance, government may protect patients’ rights when dealing with health care providers and insurers, as the latter will risk select and take advantage of ill patients if left unregulated (even when their illness may be unavoidable). Additionally, governments might reallocate recent medical graduates to rural areas where services are in low supply. In the third group, several types of “market failures” exist. Externalities, like immunizations, are goods that have unintended benefits or costs on society beyond the scope of transaction between an individual consumer and seller. As more people are immunized to a given disease, the population is less likely to catch that disease – thus in order to convince individuals to purchase immunizations, governments may need to provide subsidies. For bad externalities, like cigarettes, governments tax consumers or businesses to improve social welfare. Regulation is also crucial when helping patients or consumers make informed choices, because there exists severe “asymmetric information” in the health care sector. The knowledge gap between buyers and sellers in health care is enormous and wide-spread; we see this in pharmaceutical drug advertising, where patients often know very little about the product being marketed. Providers know far more than patients about necessary treatments and quality of health care, thus it is crucial for governments to regulate by establishing quality indicators for hospitals and doctors as well as creating incentives to provide sound levels of care. Finally, regulation can limit monopolies throughout the health sector. Failure to regulate often leads to poor health outcomes, higher costs & inequity through mechanisms such as supplier induced demand and weak competition – i.e. the most crucial element of functioning markets.
In developed economies, like the United States, regulation is much easier due to greater resource capacity, laws and human capital (though political and cultural challenges abound). Developing societies, however, lack such administrative resources and experience severe regulatory challenges – which are often the greatest cause of failing health care markets and high inequity among the population. For instance, unqualified practitioners and clinics in addition to poor medical supplies and ineffective drugs run rampant in parts of rural India, because it is impossible for all levels of government to enforce licensing, maintain transparency and reduce corruption.
Let’s briefly take the provider and insurance industries as an example and break down several wrong assumptions circulating among the U.S. population. First, doctors do make more, relatively, than other workers and international physicians. However, when we consider the cost of education this payment gap shrinks; moreover, physicians only make up about 20 percent of the health care market so if their income was severely cut, it might shrink health care costs by roughly 2-3 percent. However, the extreme demoralization of this group would probably hurt quality of care and certainly incentives to work. Now for insurance companies – they make, on average, 5-6% profits which really aren’t that much and wouldn’t drastically cut health care costs either. Yet the biggest problems in the U.S. market are administrative costs and paperwork due to the horrendous complexities of our free market system. Would providers and insurance companies be making more profit if they had a less inefficient, more simplified financing and payment scheme? Absolutely. So we may be barking up the right tree but in the wrong direction – but realize that the actions of these organizations are merely reflections of the institutions that allowed them to grow. There exist two solutions to this issue – both require better regulation. As I just mentioned, simplification would be a start. The second would improve equity and reduce costs throughout the population and has been done by most other developed nations. It includes setting premiums according to the overall community, rather than individual risk, preventing insurers from risk selecting based on illness and avoiding free riding among healthy patients by mandating that everyone purchase health insurance. Interestingly, such changes, under additional conditions, can actually open up the door to more and better competition, where insurers and providers thrive by reducing costs and improving quality. (Note: The Swiss have done just that, but for basic health insurance provided to everyone. Supplemental care, for individuals able to pay, is a less regulated, free market approach like the U.S. But the Swiss experience can attest that this second method leads to escalating costs and rising inequity). I’ll expand on these factors in the next post, and explain why political systems and cultural norms create enormous difficulties in achieving successful health reform. Here are a few links:
Melvyn Bragg and guests John Barrow, Colva Roney-Dougal and Marcus du Sautoy explore the unintended consequences of mathematical discoveries, from the computer to online encryption, to alternating current and predicting the path of asteroids.
In his book The Mathematician’s Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it was this field which played a major role in the work of his younger colleague, Alan Turing, as he worked first to crack Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and then on one of the first computers.
Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the many surprising and completely unintended uses to which mathematical discoveries have been put.
These include:
The cubic equations which led, after 400 years, to the development of alternating current – and the electric chair.
The centuries-old work on games of chance which eventually contributed to the birth of population statistics.
The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, which crucially provided an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution which helped Albert Einstein forge his theory of relativity.
The 17th-century theorem which became the basis for credit card encryption.
In the light of these stories, Melvyn and his guests discuss how and why pure mathematics has had such a range of unintended consequences.
John Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London; Colva Roney-Dougal is Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews; Marcus du Sautoy is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
The emerging and surprising view of how the enteric nervous system in our bellies goes far beyond just processing the food we eat
Introduction (Via SciAm)
As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of “butterflies” in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our “second brain”.
A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.
Although its influence is far-reaching, the second brain is not the seat of any conscious thoughts or decision-making.
Key Points (Via SciAm)
“The second brain doesn’t help with the great thought processes…religion, philosophy and poetry is left to the brain in the head,” says Michael Gershon, chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, an expert in the nascent field of neurogastroenterology and author of the 1998 book The Second Brain (HarperCollins).
Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, Gershon says.
This multitude of neurons in the enteric nervous system enables us to “feel” the inner world of our gut and its contents. Much of this neural firepower comes to bear in the elaborate daily grind of digestion. Breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, and expelling of waste requires chemical processing, mechanical mixing and rhythmic muscle contractions that move everything on down the line.
Thus equipped with its own reflexes and senses, the second brain can control gut behavior independently of the brain, Gershon says. We likely evolved this intricate web of nerves to perform digestion and excretion “on site,” rather than remotely from our brains through the middleman of the spinal cord. “The brain in the head doesn’t need to get its hands dirty with the messy business of digestion, which is delegated to the brain in the gut,” Gershon says. He and other researchers explain, however, that the second brain’s complexity likely cannot be interpreted through this process alone.
Wrap-up (Via SciAm)
Cutting-edge research is currently investigating how the second brain mediates the body’s immune response; after all, at least 70 percent of our immune system is aimed at the gut to expel and kill foreign invaders.
