The Man Who Gave Us Less for More

Examining the crushing success of Steve Jobs

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Discover
(#8 of the top 100 science stories of 2011)

I was front row center when Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple Macintosh to the world in 1984 in 
Boston. While the crowd cheered and clapped 
and squealed, I was scratching my head. What did this pretty beige box offer that a hundred other computers didn’t already offer, besides a higher price, much less choice in software, and no 
compatibility with the rest of the world’s devices?…read more

Rebooting Eating Behavior with Technology

Layer by Layer

With 3-D printing, manufacturers can make existing products more efficiently—and create ones that weren’t possible before

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Technology Review

GE thinks it has a better way to make jet-engine fuel injectors: by printing them. To do it, a laser traces out the shape of the injector’s cross-section on a bed of cobalt-chrome powder, fusing the powder into solid form to build up the injector one ultrathin layer at a time. This promises to be less expensive than traditional manufacturing methods, and it should lead to a lighter part—which is to say a better one.

The innovation is at the forefront of a radical change in manufacturing technology that is especially appealing in advanced applications like aerospace and cars. The 3-D printing techniques won’t just make it more efficient to produce existing parts. They will also make it possible to produce things that weren’t even conceivable before—like parts with complex, scooped-out shapes that minimize weight without sacrificing strength. And the technology could reduce the need to store parts in inventory, because it’s just as easy to print another part—or an improved version of it—10 years after the first one was made. An automobile manufacturer receiving reports of a failure in a seat belt mechanism could have a reconfigured version on its way to dealers within days…read more

In Memoriam: The Space Shuttle

With great ambivalence we note the passing of 
the first and only reusable spaceship, the space shuttle, 
on July 21, 2011. Our prayers are with NASA.

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Discover, 
(#6 of the top 100 science stories of 2011)

The space shuttle, which long served NASA and humankind as a low-Earth-orbit 18-wheeler, died on July 21 at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after gliding to an uneventful touchdown from a routine mission. It was 39 years old. The shuttle program had been suffering for several years from a wasting loss of enthusiasm for its high price tag and untamed risks. The final cause of death was failure to find any reason to keep pouring billions of dollars into an obsolete space ferry that lacked a stirring mission…read more

A Few TV Appearances

I was on John Stossel’s show on Fox in September, discussing why experts often turn out to be wrong. You can watch it by clicking on the “play” icon above, or by going here.

And because of Andy Rooney’s death, I thought I’d repost the CBS segment in which Rooney and I tour his office to discuss the useful role that clutter can play. You can see the clip here.

Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong

A fundamental problem with the mathematics of models ensures we’ll always get unreliable predictions

From my article on the Scientific American Website, posted Oct. 26, 2011 (A companion piece to my feature article on economic models in the Nov. 2011 print edition, posted just below)

When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. But what if there were a way to come up with

simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?

   Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we’d still get bad predictions from models.

   The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate….read more

Study proves it’s not unhealthy to be overweight? Nah.

Researchersat the University of Manitoba have released a study on therelationship between body mass and health problems. Here’s a typicalmass-media reporton the findings, headlined, “Overweight people don’t havebigger health problems, study finds.”

It’san epidemiological study, which means researchers looked back at abunch of historical data about people and then tried to drawassociations between those people with certain characteristics orbehaviors, and how they fared over time. Epidemiological studies aremuch cheaper and easier and usually quicker to do than almost anyother type of study, and they seem impressive because they ofteninvolve large numbers of people. But they also are some of the leastreliable studies, being typically plagued with just about everyproblem that a study can have, including confounders (what happens topeople in the study may have little or nothing to do with the causesthat are being looked at), confusion of cause and effect (whathappens to people in the study may actually be causing the factorsthat are being studied, rather than being caused by them),unrepresentative samples (the people being studied may not be typicalof the population we care about), trying to draw conclusions fromsmall differences, and more. Most studies about the relationshipbetween health and weight we hear about are epidemiological studies,and we’ve had ample evidence over time that these are some of theleast reliable among generally unreliable epidemiological studies.

Butthere may be something else to worry about with the conclusions ofthis Manitoba study, something that makes me wonder if the findingsare actually right–but not for the reasons implied in reports of thestudy. 

Lastyear I met with Oberlin College biologist Keith Tarvin, who studiesforaging behavior in animals. Tarvin explained to me that throughoutmost of the animal kingdom, animals will generally put on excessweight when provided with plenty of calorie-rich food and not givenany reason to be physically active, such as having to forage or huntfor food, or having to avoid predators. (Animals that need to keepweight down in order to survive are sometimes an exception–birds,for example, can’t fly if they get too heavy.) Situations whereanimals lose weight, on the other hand, are usually associated withsome pathological state or threat–as for example when fish keepweight off in order stay small to be less visible to and appealing topredators, or to slow their maturation in order to preserve fertilityand lower energy needs during times of drought, extreme temperatures,food shortages or other environmental pressures.

Inother words–and at this point I’m merely expressing a conjecturethat came up in my chat with Tarvin—it may be that, weight-relatedhealth factors aside, having a stronger appetite is associated withbeing well-suited to the environment. Or to put it differently,keeping weight off when there is plenty of rich food around and nopressing reason to be physically active is, in a sense, apathological state. Apply this theory to human society today–andat this point I’m degenerating into my own conjecture–and we mightwell predict that being overweight is associated with being, in someways at least, healthier than those who keep weight off.

Doesthis mean we should stop worrying about being overweight? Absolutelynot. To conclude as much would be confusing cause and effect. If thisconjecture is right, it means that being overweight is in someways aneffect ofbeing healthy; it doesn’t mean that being overweight confers anyhealth benefits. And in fact, the possible rightness of thisconjecture should have no bearing whatsoever on the well-establishedfact that carrying excess fat is generally unhealthy, and that peopleimprove their health and lower their health risks when they loseexcess fat.

Evenif it’s true that people who are overweight are in many caseshealthier in some ways than many people who are not overweight, theselucky overweight would still on average even further improvetheir health by losing the excess weight, and those who are notoverweight would become less healthy by putting on excess weight.That doesn’t mean that weight loss is a pathological state, eventhough it’s usually associated with one in the animal kingdom. Weshould understand that the loss of excess weight is a good thing,even if, in a way, it is an unnatural thing in our society ofplentiful, overly stimulating, calorie-dense food and sedentarylifestyles. That’s why our goal should be, in effect, to changewhat’s natural in our society–so that people are pushed byeverything they see around them to avoiding excess weight, ratherthan being pushed to consume rich food and avoid physical activity asthey are today.

Tohave even a decent chance of proving that losing excess weight willmake you healthier–or to solidly prove just about any theory aboutthe relationship between excess weight and health–we’d need arandomized controlled trial in which people are randomly assigned toeither become fatter than they are, or lose weight, or maintain theirweight. That trial is never going to happen, for what I hope areobvious reasons. And this brings us back to the problems withepidemiological studies like the one done in Manitoba. They rarelyanswer the questions we really want to ask. Instead, they give usanswers that only raise more questions. There’s nothing wrong withthat–it’s how science operates. We should be grateful scientists areconducting these studies, and appreciate the fact that they add toour knowledge base. But we should also be aware of the extremelimitations and qualifications that attach to the findings.

Inthe case of the Manitoba study, I think it’s fair to say the study atbest tells us little about the healthfulness of avoiding beingoverweight, and at worst is, at least in how it’s being reported,extremely and even dangerously misleading. One of the biggestproblems with the obesity crisis is the lack of awareness andmotivation on the part of a sizable percentage of overweight people.When a study like this gets press claiming that being overweightseems to be as healthy as not being overweight, we take a big stepbackwards, and cause real damage that could in principle be measuredin the loss of many years of life in the population, not to mentionthe drop in quality of life experienced on average by the overweight.I wish scientists and journalists would start taking these issuesinto account in their reports to journals and the mass media.

A Formula for Economic Calamity

Despite the lessons of the 2008 collapse, Wall Street is betting our future on flimsy science

From my article in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American

The market crash of 2008 that plunged the world into the economic recession from which it is still reeling had many causes. One of them was mathematics. Financial investment firms had developed such complex ways of investing their clients’ money that they came to rely on arcane formulas to judge the risks they were taking on. Yet as we learned so painfully three years ago, those formulas, or models, are only pale reflections of the real world, and sometimes they can be woefully misleading….read more

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

[Includes my Atlantic article profiling meta-researcher John Ioannidis]

From the introduction, by Mary Roach:

…Good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels away the blinders, generates wonder, brings the open palm to the forehead: Oh! Now I get it! And sometimes it does much more than that…. (See the book.)

Doing Business in China

Michael Lee is on the verge of becoming the first American entrepreneur to build big in the world’s most populous country

From my article in the Oct. 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

Michael Lee is eerily quiet as his world comes down noisily around him. Packed into a cramped conference room in his company’s modest offices in Nanjing, China, Lee’s key managers are at one another’s throats. The more angrily they spit blame at one another for the disastrous, unsalvageable situation the company finds itself in, the more enervated Lee seems to become, until finally he is no more than a slumped statue following the action only with slight movements of his eyes….read more