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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Or maybe they're not really into creativity in the first place. They wouldn't be academics very long if they were. |
Too true! The dreadful dilemma for tenured/tethered academics is being creative means breaking with the consensus. In current mainstream university life, you can't get funding unless your pet project / potential research paper has been approved by the funding gatekeepers. And in some research areas (like climate change) breaking with the consensus is usually an instant death sentence.
It's a very brave academic indeed that risks their position and pension by leaving the mainstream and going it alone without funding. But bravery is not usually part of the job description.
A very rare example to the contrary is the skeptic scientist Peter Ridd.
A recent paper in Nature might be pertinent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9
| large teams demand an ongoing stream of funding and success to ‘pay the bills’, which makes them more sensitive to the loss of reputation and support that comes from failure. ... small groups with more to gain and less to lose are more likely to undertake new and untested opportunities that have the potential for high growth and failure… |
Fortunately (for me) the Chateau Boreades Research Lab is independently funded and is still winning awards for its creative output. Unfortunately (for you) most of the output involves fermented beverages, and we know you don't touch the stuff. That's why we've not sent you any anyway.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| large teams demand an ongoing stream of funding and success to ‘pay the bills’, which makes them more sensitive to the loss of reputation and support that comes from failure. ... small groups with more to gain and less to lose are more likely to undertake new and untested opportunities that have the potential for high growth and failure… |
This is a typical example of 'academic chat'. Switch it round and it makes equal sense
| small groups demand an ongoing stream of funding and success to ‘pay the bills’, which makes them more sensitive to the loss of reputation and support that comes from failure. ... large teams with more to gain and less to lose are more likely to undertake new and untested opportunities that have the potential for high growth and failure… |
Not that you would expect Nature to require statistical support for either statement. Appearing in Nature is proof enough.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Not that you would expect Nature to require statistical support for either statement. Appearing in Nature is proof enough. |
Oh, Harpo, you're such a tease. :-)
I appreciate checking sources and references is such a numbingly boring dull job, best left for the junior staff, interns, or the cleaners. But it almost sounds like you didn't actually read the article.
| Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. |
I look forward to your explanation why it is not necessary for you to bother reading references.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Well, yes, that's true and I apologise to both you and Nature. As far as it goes. As I am constantly pointing out, you can rely on orthodoxy for the blunt data, it's when they start waxing lyrical about it that the harm gets done. However, since I have been caught out so badly perhaps I might help out with the following
| smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology |
I keep saying it until I'm blue in the buttocks but science and technology are different things and should never be conjoined in this context.
| with new ideas and opportunities |
Did you spot the weasel word? That's it, opportunities. The number of times science and technology have been disrupted by new ideas in the period 1954-2014 is about ... three times and two of those were duff. (I'm quoting from memory.) New opportunities happen about two or three times a day.
| whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones |
As everyone here knows the word 'tended' is a sure sign of chicanery. It either has or it hasn't. It doesn't tend to have happened. We understand we are dealing with correlations but we expect a purported statistical paper not to say 'tend' unless the effect is so marginal that they are reluctant to use any other formulation. I will assume they established in advance criteria for defining when 'developing' stops and 'disruption' starts. I wish them well with that one.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | The number of times science and technology have been disrupted by new ideas in the period 1954-2014 is about ... three times and two of those were duff. (I'm quoting from memory.) |
Ah, is that old Metropolitan Elite Bubble rising to the surface again?
Granted that the Notting Hill area doesn't change much. One can still listen to the BBC Home Service / Radio 4 on a Long Wave Bush valve radio, and the man on the Clapham omnibus can still get a Routemaster bus. Even better, there's a little corner shop near Shepherd's Bush Market that still sells leather drive belts and spare parts for a Singer treadle sewing machine produced in 1958. As recommended by M'Lady Boreades, who approves not of new-fangled technology.
Paddington Bear is still waiting at the station. And they're still changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace.
So I'm not sure which of the following (a short list from my memory) you might say was not disruptive, or which were the duff ones that came to nothing. You may quibble (you probably will) and call them evolutionary or passing fads instead of revolutionary:
1954 : Transistor radio
1958 : Integrated circuits
1962 : Telstar
1966 : ARPANET and packet stream switching (--> Internet)
1973 : First public mobile phone call
1976 : Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Alto system)
1981 : IBM Personal Computer
1998 : Crazy Frog ringtone (earnings of half a billion dollars)
2007 : Apple iPhone
2014 : Drone warfare
2017 : High frequency ‘algorithmic trading’ (HFT) as c.90% of all stock market trading.
2018 : Vote Leave social media campaign
2019 : "Desktop/personal" DNA genome sequencing
20?? : Accidental release of mammalian-airborne-transmissible pathogens (bio-warfare)
Some might say: "science" is the creation of theories, hypothesis' and models. Nothing much happens in the "real world" until the "science" is applied. Applied Science *is* technology. But here's an "escape route" for you : the list above is all technology, not pure science.
Granted also that the kind of Metropolitan Elite Intelligentsia you are used to mixing with (along with our MPs and Civil Service mandarins) actually knows very little about science and technology. That is why it is so easily confused by (and unable to cope with) disruptive technology.
Like the Vote Leave Brexit campaign. Which against all the odds, with a small core team of less than 10 people (all Data Scientists), and with a budget many times less than the Remain campaign budget, used disruptive social media technology to upset the political apple cart - for "once in a generation" at least.
[Edit] somewhere in that timeline should be the start of the downfall of old-school printed media and advertising, and the start of a move to mobile networks, media aggregators and streaming, and trillion-dollar online media giants. Choose a date.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I agree with all this. Seems to underline the points I was making.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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I'm getting worried about M'Lady Boreades and the #1 Boreadette. Just last night they took it in turn to speak out in favour of Diane Abbot and Emma Thompson.
Wos'appnin? Has there been a seismic-scale shift in the Chateau Boreades political landscape?
Diane Abbot, it appears, has been scolded by puritanical spoilsports for daring to drink something alcoholic on a public train. M'Lady is of the opinion it's not fair, if an important MP person like Diane Abbot had been travelling First Class, she could do as she pleased. In that spirit, M'Lady is still lobbying the local village bus service to introduce a First Class section with in-bus catering. To encourage local people to stop using their Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Porsche, Jaguar, Range Rover, etc, thereby reducing the double-parking in the High Street outside the local branch of Waitrose. (Because these are VIPs who can't use the local public car park).
#1 Boreadette took her turn to speak up in favour of Emma Thompson. Who cares so much about Climate Change and stopping people travelling by air, she flew 5,000 miles from LA to join in the protests.
I had the temerity to point out to the #1 Boreadette that some might say there is a teensy-weensy whiff of hypocrisy in flying a long way to protest about flying.
I was sternly corrected: Ah, but she flew First Class.
Huh?
If more people flew First Class, there would be far fewer less-privileged lower class people flying Cabin Class and causing pollution and carbon and plastic in the sea.
I found it difficult to find fault with that logic (in a short and concise reply). Instead, I have forwarded it to Titiana McGrath as a Social Justice Warrior lesson that more people need to be scolded about.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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There is no hypocrisy.
In exchange for undertaking this demanding pilgrimage, God will ensure that St Emma's carbon footprint will slowly disappear.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You appear to be placing God above St Emma. You're a brave man.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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God, and Arnold Toynbee*.
(and stray neuron bouncing on the side-topic of Science or Technology)
Let's see who else has stray neurons:
| In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study Of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occurr. This one example among many should be sufficient to indicate the gulf that still seperates the Humanities from the Philosophy of Nature. I use this outmoded expression because the term "Science", which has come to replace it in more recent times, does not carry the same rich and universal associations which "Natural Philosophy" carried in the seventeenth century, in the days when Kepler wrote his Harmony of the World and Galileo his Message from the Stars. Those men who created the upheaval which we now call the "Scientific Revolution" called it by a quite different name: the "New Philosophy". |
The same being relevant to Gnostic Fish, and the connections between Euclid, the English Reformation, James Bond and the Rosicrucians.
*Any relation to vacuous Guardian privileged Ferrari-driving journos is entirely coincidental
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Which country introduced the first modern animal welfare laws including a complete ban on vivisection?
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Was that in National Socialist Germany, c.1936?
They were very keen on green & vegetarian issues.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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No, it was National Socialist Germany in 1933. The first thing they turned to. Now that is weird.
Of course in a hundred years' time when we have extended the felicific calculus to include the happiness (and suffering) of animals, the Nazis will be going up in our estimation and us industrial meat-eaters and wholesale vivisectionists will be going down. But I must say no more on this subject because Levi Roach is sub judice.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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I've noticed (elsewhere on t'interweb) that some people get very upset with the suggestion that the National Socialists were the original European Green Party.
Is it the Socialist part of their name that upsets them? Other people are scolded - you must call them Fascists not Socialists.
Different times?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The problem with this particular label is that the Fascists themselves were not terribly bad. Watching The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the other day I couldn't help noticing that her admiration for Mussolini was treated as ipso facto evidence of her dangerous unhingedness. I regard it as no such thing. A perfectly acceptable position for a woman of advanced views at that time. Admiration of either Hitler or Stalin would be evidence of dangerous naivety, if not worse, but then you could say that Musso was dangerously naive and became worse -- a proto-Hitlerite.
There is no doubt the Nazis were both socialist and green. Their control of the German economy was at least as statist as, say, the Attlee government's. And rather more efficient if truth be told. The trouble with today's Greens is that they have signed up to the present Tired Left Front and won't budge in any radical direction. I don't recommend they look to the Nazis for inspiration but they should be looking somewhere.
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