Australian wins Fields Medal

It deserves mention that an Australian, Terence Tao has won the Fields Medal for mathematics becoming the first Australian to win the prize. Up to four Fields Medals are handed out once every four years, and it is the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

AT THE age of two, Terence Tao could already add up and subtract using the magnetic numbers his parents stuck on the fridge.

At eight, he scored better than 99 per cent of 17-year-old prospective university students on an international aptitude test for mathematics.

The Adelaide-born prodigy was appointed a professor at 24, and now, at 31, has become the first Australian to win a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel prize.

The award was presented in Madrid yesterday by Spain’s King Juan Carlos I at a congress attended by 4000 international mathematicians.

Its a bit difficult to work out what exactly he won it for as the Medal is not awarded for specific pieces of work. His website states a fairly broad area of mathematical interest, although it is suggested here that:

It is awarded for a body of work rather than a single achievement but Professor Tao is most recently celebrated for showing, with Ben Green of Cambridge, that there are long strings of prime numbers a constant distance apart, work that is important for the coding of information such as banking details.

Well done Terence.

Hair affair

Was Darrell Hair’s first decision to penalise Pakistan for ball tampering right? I don’t know. Was he and his co-umpire right to call the game off when Pakistan refused to come out and play? Yes, they were absolutely correct.

Anyone who has played any sport knows that the umpire’s decision is final. You can appeal the decision later through appropriate channels if its so grossly unreasonable but if, even once, umpires start letting themselves be pushed around during the game by player protests then players will always protest. If this had been allowed to occur Pakistan would potentially be able to refuse to play every time a dodgy LBW decision is given. A bad LBW decision being a worse penalty than 5 runs in terms of the game outcome.

Cricinfo described it like this

After waiting in the middle of the pitch for twenty minutes, the umpires went to the Pakistan dressing-room to ask whether or not Inzamam-ul-Haq would lead out his team or not before they went out, took the bails off and left, thus awarding the Test to England.

Bob Woolmer told Cricinfo that after Pakistan refused to come out after the tea break, both umpires, after waiting on the field, went to the Pakistan dressing room to ask whether or not they would continue to play. Inzamam countered by asking the umpires why they had changed the ball, which led to the Pakistan team protesting.

“We are not here to answer that question,” Hair was reported to have said, and when Inzamam didn’t provide any reply to their initial query, they walked back out again. By the time Pakistan were eventually led out onto the field by Inzamam, the umpires had already walked on, knocked the bails off and gone back inside, refusing to come out again.

The umpires came onto the field and waited for twenty minutes then came back in and asked them to come out. To give any more chances would be to cave into the Pakistan’s petulance, and at that point would have brought the whole authority of the umpires into question. You can blame Hair perhaps for a bad ball tampering decision, but the forfeiture of the game was wholly Pakistan’s fault.

Fooled by Randomness

I’ve just finished reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2nd edition). Its a good book which makes some great points, but also has plenty of stuff that is annoying in it. The style as he describes it is not mathematical but literary-philosophical, which I don’t have issue with but I did find the author’s sneering and arrogance sometimes a little overwhelming.

The book is structured as a series of essays about the nature of probability and randomness, and how people can deal with it. Taleb is a derivatives trader who worked on Wall Street for many years and now runs a hedge fund of his own. As the heading quote on his website states:

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….

and much of the book is just this, mocking all those who make predictions, well beyond their knowledge. Journalists and others who ascribe causal relationships to random outcomes also get considerable attention. He makes much of the way that survivor bias distorts our opinions on things. We look at someone who had been extraordinarily successful in some activity and assume it relates to skill without asking how many people who did something similar failed. Are they good and we have something to learn from them, or are they just the lucky 1-in-32 who got five heads in a row? Without knowing how many people started in the endeavour and whether the successes have survived longer than we would expect in a random environment is the only way of having some confidence.

More than anything else Taleb’s focus is on what he calls “Black Swans”, the rare occurrences that inductive reasoning will never tell you about. His points are coloured particularly by two experiences. Growing up in Lebanon in the early 80’s war and by his experience of highly successful traders who, after years of success, lost everything they had made and much more in less than one month including their jobs by the Russian default in 1998. In the aftermath many would claim that such an event was completely unusual and unexpected, Taleb argues that our past experience will never be a good guide to such things and we will always run into these outlier events.

The Ethics of What We Eat – part II

In the first part of this I dicussed what I saw as shortcomings from an Australian perspective, here I’ll actually discuss the book.

The book itself it is divided into roughly three sections, the first being a typical American family, who on analysis eat food that mostly comes from “factory farms”. The second family are “conscientious omnivores”, they are more discriminating the father is vegetarian and the meat that is bought is mostly free range. They also purchase on the basis on such concepts as buying locally, fair trade and organic food. The third family are vegan family, their main ethical concerns are about avoiding GM eating organic food and the question of whether it is ethical to raise children as vegans.

The attempt is made to trace where the food they purchase in each situation comes from, how that food is produced and what are the effects of producing it.

The Ethics of What We Eat – Part I

I’ve just finished reading “The Ethics of What We Eat” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (apparently called “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter” in the US). Not the sort of thing I usually read, but I was offered it by a vegetarian friend of mine who thought it would turn you off eating meat. I thought I might as well read it and, if the arguments really were that persuasive, well so be it (not likely but I would give it a go). Anyway what I have to say about it was getting long so I am cutting it into a few pieces so I actually get it out.

My wife commented that if someone sees you reading this book they’ll think you are a vegan (and possibly smelly), and I think she’s right. It’s a bit sad that people will assume that you read to confirm your beliefs rather than challenge them, but its probably what people mostly do. Certainly when I searched for reviews it seems that they are mostly done by people sympathetic to the general thrust of the arguments.

Over all I enjoyed the book, although I have numerous objections. In general I think the ethical logic is pretty well argued, its just I’m starting from some different precepts. I’ll come right out now and say it hasn’t convinced me to stop eating meat, but perhaps in one or two issues has swayed me a little into thinking about what food I should buy. In the end though I just plain disagree with the authors on the degree we should care about animal’s welfare. I value the suffering of the cow I eat my way through every 5-6 years less than my enjoyment of eating meat. Sounds a little heartless but I’ll elaborate later on.

Long time no post

Rest assured anyone who is stopping by here I haven’t closed shop, just been busy and not completed any of the posts I have started writing. I will return soon.

Howard’s trump card?

It seems that the suggestion that people should take responsibility for their own impact on global warming has made Clive Hamilton chuck a wobbly and write rather a nasty op-ed.

The answer is that Flannery’s book does not make life harder for the Government, but sends the sort of message the Government wants us to hear.

Flannery is an advocate of individual consumer action as the answer to environmental problems. Instead of being understood as a set of problems endemic to our economic and social structures, we are told we each have to take personal responsibility for our contribution to every problem.
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This is music to the Government’s ears. The assignment of individual responsibility is consistent with the economic rationalist view of the world, which wants everything left to the market, even when the market manifestly fails.

Yet it is at best a naive, and at worst a reckless, approach to the looming catastrophe of climate change. The world did not eliminate the production of ozone-depleting substances by relying on the good sense of consumers in buying CFC-free fridges. We insisted governments negotiate an international treaty that banned CFCs. We did not invite car buyers to pay more to install catalytic converters, the greatest factor in reducing urban air pollution. We called on government to legislate to require all car makers to include them.

The idea that individuals should take some responsibility and that we should consider nuclear power has annoyed Clive Hamilton. Apparently Tim Flannery has lost sight of the main game of opposing the government as opposed to actually fighting global warming. As such saying anything the government may like is wrong, even if it is true.

The environmental damage of agricultural subsidies

When discussing the need for dropping tariffs and other subsidies for agriculture, its common to make arguments along the lines of the fact that it makes prices cheaper for consumers and helps third world farmers enter first world markets and so eases poverty. Rarely though have I seen it argued that agricultural price subsidies massively increase usage of fertilizer and pesticides.

Now obviously if you are directly subsidising those inputs then usage will go up. A bit more subtle is the the point that if you are supporting the end price of the product that usage can go up massively. Here is Tim Harford in an interview

So you have got acres of fertile land in Guatemala that you could grow sugar there. But because of protectionism, the sugar is grown in Florida and the Everglades are destroyed. And meanwhile the Guatemalans are either growing coffee for basically nothing, or like the Columbians, they think, well, maybe we should grow cocaine instead.

Now this is not a good idea. And I have a little graph — I don’t have a lot of graphs in my book. I prefer the written word. But sometimes the picture is worth 1,000 words — and it’s just a graph of trade barriers for different countries and how much fertilizer they use on their agricultural land. The countries that have the highest trade barriers, Japan and Korea use so much fertilizer. Then it is the EU. They use a lot. American less, but you know they still have quite a lot of protectionism and they still use quite a lot of fertilizer.

Once you think about it its obvious. If prices are made higher then people will farm more marginal land. The land is marginal for some reason, soil infertility, pests or perhaps poor water supply requiring more external inputs to be usable. Additional land will be cleared for this purpose. Not only that but even productive land will be pushed that much harder. More fertilizer, more pesticides and additional water brought in to raise every bit extra yield. Because these additional inputs are necessarily much less productive, otherwise they would be done anyway, they naturally have much greater effect on the surrounding environment compared with the additional yield they bring.

Men and women’s brains

A nice piece (free) in The Economist reviewing current research on the innate differences between men and women.

Female is the default brain setting. Until the eighth week of gestation every human fetal brain looks female. The brain, like the rest of the human body, becomes male as a result of surges of testosterone—one during gestation and one shortly after birth.

This wash of hormones creates an organ that generates typically boyish behaviour, such as rough-and-tumble play. Behavioural differences appear early. For example, a one-day-old girl will look for longer at a face than at a mechanical mobile; a boy will prefer the mobile.
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Within a year of birth, boys and girls also prefer different toys. Boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns. Girls prefer dolls and tea sets. Although evolution has clearly not had the opportunity to mould a preference for tea sets, there is evidence from another species which suggests that human infants might be predisposed to prefer toys that have particular adaptive significance to their sex. Several years ago, Melissa Hines, of City University in London, and Gerianne Alexander, of Texas A&M University, gave some vervet monkeys a selection of toys, including rag dolls, pans, balls and trucks. Male monkeys spent more time with the trucks and balls. Females played for longer with the dolls.

References for the article are here:

Turnbull on public transport

Interesting piece in the SMH by public transport fan Malcolm Turnbull on public transport infrastructure and the need to invest more in public transport rather than the toll roads which recent NSW state governments have preferred. There is a bit of partisan spruiking as well, but he makes some good points regardless.

An excerpt:

There is more to this congestion than pure economics. The shift in reliance for our transport task onto private automobiles as opposed to public transport works real injustice and those who suffer are the young, the poor, the sick and the old. Lack of access to mobility is a significant contributor to poverty, social division, and isolation. Higher income groups are more likely to be located in well-serviced affluent inner city suburbs, whereas lower income groups are more likely to be located in poorly-serviced areas, often on the fringes of cities with the worst public transport