Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

The recently extinct Pyrenean ibex has been resurrected by cloning cryopreserved tissue samples:

Pyrenean ibex, which have distinctive curved horns, were once common in northern Spain and in the French Pyrenees, but extensive hunting during the 19th century reduced their numbers to fewer than 100 individuals.

They were eventually declared protected in 1973, but by 1981 just 30 remained in their last foothold in the Ordesa National Park in the Aragon District of the Pyrenees.

The last bucardo [Pyrenean ibex], a 13-year-old female known as Celia, was found dead in January 2000 by park rangers near the French border with her skull crushed.

Dr Folch and his colleagues, who were funded by the Aragon regional government, had, however, captured the bucardo the previous year and had taken a tissue sample from her ear for cryopreservation.

Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females.

Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.

Despite the highly inefficient cloning process and death of the cloned bucardo, many scientists believe similar approaches may be the only way to save critically endangered species from disappearing.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

If we could teach intuition, people would be smarter

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Martin Seligman says that if we could teach intuition, people would be smarter, and that would change everything:

Most of real world “intelligent” performance is based on intuition, not on reasoning. The expert surgeon just “knows” where to cut. The experienced farmer just “knows” that it is going to rain. The expert firefighter just “knows” that the roof is about to collapse. The judge just “knows” the defendant is lying. These finely honed intuitions are fast, unconscious, multidimensional, inarticulate, and are made confidently. What separates intelligent from mechanically stupid action is wrapped up in this mysterious process. If we could only teach intuition, we could raise human intelligence substantially.

I believe that the teaching of intuition is on the horizon by computationally driven simulation.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

From GeekDad project to real business

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Chris Anderson has taken his DIY UAV from GeekDad project to real business:

About two years ago, my then-9-year-old and I worked on a cool project to program Lego Mindstorms to fly a RC plane, which we cheekily called a Lego UAV. (And were then, even more cheekily, accused of “weaponizing Lego” — UAVs are export controlled as weapons!). It worked, amazingly, and was a lot of fun.

Then, as sometimes happens, I got obsessed, while he moved on to other things. In the past two years, I’ve made cellphone UAVs, Basic Stamp UAVs, autonomous blimps, and a true gyros+acellerometers+GPS autopilot version of the Lego Mindstorms UAV that’s now in the Lego Museum in Billund, Denmark. We set up an amateur UAV community at DIYDrones.com, and get thousands of people each day exploring this new dimension of aerial robotics.

Now this project has gone pro. Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it’s $24.95!

Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing.

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Stimulus: The Power of Names

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

David Friedman discusses The Power of Names:

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them. Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education. Label something “pollution” and is no longer necessary to offer evidence that it is bad, since everyone knows pollution is bad—even thermal pollution, otherwise described as warm water. Occasionally we even get dueling names. Both “right to life” and “pro-choice” are obviously good things; how could anyone be against either?

For a more recent example, consider Obama’s economic policy. Everyone—including Obama, back when he was running for President—is against deficit spending. Relabel it “stimulus” and everyone is for it. The label neatly evades the question of whether having the government borrow money and spend it is actually a way of getting out of a recession—a claim for which evidence is distinctly thin. It is stimulus, so obviously it must stimulate.

The success of the relabelling with the general public is not surprising. What is somewhat surprising is the way in which much, although not all, of the economics profession has suddenly adopted as gospel the 1960′s Keynesianism that most of the profession rejected several decades back. Everyone talks as though deficit spending was a way, indeed the way, of reducing unemployment, a central recommendation of that theory.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Bitter Brew

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence, Michael Idov explains:

It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of “cozy”) are such that the place will stay afloat — barely — as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There’s an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven’t hit the latter mark in a month, close.

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you’ve found that guy, you’re already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You’re also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let’s say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

Mr. Idov, by the way, did open a charming little cafe, and it did fail.

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The Most Offensive Idea in All of Science

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Jonathan Haidt says that the most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis:

Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism.

Once we accept that human evolution didn’t stop 50,000 years ago, things get awkward:

Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event.

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The DNA of Politics

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

James Q. Wilson looks at The DNA of Politics:

Three political science professors — John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing — have studied political attitudes among a large number of twins in America and Australia. They measured the attitudes with something called the Wilson-Patterson Scale (I am not the Wilson after whom it was named), which asks whether a respondent agrees or disagrees with 28 words or phrases, such as “death penalty,” “school prayer,” “pacifism,” or “gay rights.” They then compared the similarity of the responses among identical twins with the similarity among fraternal twins. They found that, for all 28 taken together, the identical twins did indeed agree with each other more often than the fraternal ones did — and that genes accounted for about 40 percent of the difference between the two groups. On the other hand, the answers these people gave to the words “Democrat” or “Republican” had a very weak genetic basis. In politics, genes help us understand fundamental attitudes — that is, whether we are liberal or conservative — but do not explain what party we choose to join.

Genes also influence how frequently we vote. Voting has always puzzled scholars: How is it rational to wait in line on a cold November afternoon when there is almost no chance that your ballot will make any difference? Apparently, people who vote often feel a strong sense of civic duty or like to express themselves. But who are these people? James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christopher Dawes studied political participation in Los Angeles by comparing voting among identical and fraternal twins. Their conclusion: among registered voters, genetic factors explain about 60 percent of the difference between those who vote and those who do not.

Nature and nurture interact:

When campus protests and attacks on university administrators began in the late 1960s, it was not because a biological upheaval had increased the number of radicals; it was because such people encountered events (the war in Vietnam, the struggle over civil rights) and group pressures that induced them to take strong actions. By the same token, lynchings in the South did not become common because there were suddenly more ultra-racists around. Rather, mob scenes, media frenzies, and the shock of criminal events motivated people already skeptical of civil rights to do terrible things.

The research itself is inherently political:

Ever since 1950, when Theodor Adorno and his colleagues published The Authoritarian Personality, scholars have studied right-wing authoritarianism but neglected its counterpart on the left. In his study of identical twins reared apart, Bouchard concludes that right-wing authoritarianism is, to a large degree, inherited — but he says nothing about the Left. This omission is puzzling, since as Bouchard was studying twins at the University of Minnesota, he was regularly attacked by left-wing students outraged by the idea that any traits might be inherited. A few students even threatened to kill him. When I pointed this out to him, he suggested, in good humor, that I was a troublemaker.

Yet if you ask who in this country has prevented people from speaking on college campuses, it is overwhelmingly leftists. If you ask who storms the streets and shatters the windows of Starbucks coffee shops to protest the World Trade Organization, it is overwhelmingly leftists. If you ask who produces campus codes that infringe on free speech, it is overwhelmingly leftists. If you ask who invaded the classroom of my late colleague Richard Herrnstein and tried to prevent him from teaching, it was overwhelmingly leftists.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses — not as terminators, but as docile stock pickers:

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.

All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.

“It’s a major game-changer. There’s no question about that. You can increase productivity immensely,” said Michael Levans, editorial director for a group of supply-chain trade magazines like Logistics Management. “The Zappos guys claim that from the moment you put your order in and it is submitted to the time the box is on the dock and ready to be put on a truck is 12 minutes.”

The robots, which in the largest distribution center currently number over 500, are built by a small company called Kiva Systems (no relation to the microfinance outfit). In total, they’ve installed more than 1,000 bots at a dozen warehouses and are growing quickly. By the end of this year, they expect single locations to have systems with 1,000 of the machines.

Dreamed up and executed by old M.I.T. buddies, these teams of retail robots presage an automated future in which multiagent robotic systems put computer science theories into practice.
[...]
Kiva robots are different: They’re both autonomous and networked.

What that means for workers in the warehouse is that the Henry Ford-era distribution system of the conveyor belt has been broken into pieces and distributed across the entire operation. Any worker (sometimes called “pickers” in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.

“Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse,” Wurman said.

The system adjusts to the nature of the products and workers, too. In a typical setup, the humans are placed around the edges of the room. As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. More popular products end up around the edges of the warehouse while more obscure products, like those acid-washed bell bottoms, end up buried deep in the stacks. The self-tuning nature of the system creates big efficiencies.

“We find that it’s two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse],” said Wurman. “A big chunk of the benefit comes from the fact that we’ve eliminated all of the walking.”
[...]
Kiva robots don’t look anything like a human or try to perceive the world through humanlike senses. They don’t use sophisticated visual sensors to navigate; instead, they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that’s stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.

That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse.

Watch the little orange Kiva robots at work at Zappos’ new warehouse:

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Clayton M. Christensen, et al. may overstate their case when they call discounted cash flow (DCF) and net present value (NPV) calculations innovation killers, and I would hardly say that such “financial tools destroy your capacity to do new things,” but they do point to a common misapplication of those tools:

While the mathematics of discounting is logically impeccable, analysts commonly commit two errors that create an anti-innovation bias. The first error is to assume that the base case of not investing in the innovation — the do-nothing scenario against which cash flows from the innovation are compared — is that the present health of the company will persist indefinitely into the future if the investment is not made. As shown in the exhibit “The DCF Trap,” the mathematics considers the investment in isolation and compares the present value of the innovation’s cash stream less project costs with the cash stream in the absence of the investment, which is assumed to be unchanging. In most situations, however, competitors’ sustaining and disruptive investments over time result in price and margin pressure, technology changes, market share losses, sales volume decreases, and a declining stock price. As Eileen Rudden at Boston Consulting Group pointed out, the most likely stream of cash for the company in the do-nothing scenario is not a continuation of the status quo. It is a nonlinear decline in performance.

It’s tempting but wrong to assess the value of a proposed investment by measuring whether it will make us better off than we are now. It’s wrong because, if things are deteriorating on their own, we might be worse off than we are now after we make the proposed investment but better off than we would have been without it. Philip Bobbitt calls this logic Parmenides’ Fallacy, after the ancient Greek logician who claimed to have proved that conditions in the real world must necessarily be unchanging. Analysts who attempt to distill the value of an innovation into one simple number that they can compare with other simple numbers are generally trapped by Parmenides’ Fallacy.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

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