That picture that changed everything. Nice piece in Nature tells the story. (Image: NASA)

In climate science, you can check out of the lab anytime you like, but you can never leave.

How I stave off despair as a climate scientist.

Dave Reay, University of Edinburgh, quoted in Nature this week.

UK regulator warns on degree grade inflation | Financial Times

The OFS report on degree class awards at UK English unviersities has attracted lots of press attention today. Rightly so. But the report looks back only a decade. One commentator (bd d’Avranche)  in the FT urges us to delve a little deeper:

Please take the research back to 1980 and then prepare to be astounded.

Alison Wolf has written somewhere that the quality of what constituted a particular award was, not so long ago, fairly consistent across UK universities. No longer. Academics should hold their heads in shame, as they have shorted what many of us hold most dear about higher education.

 “criticism and optimism are the same thing. When you criticize things, it’s because you think they can be improved. It’s the complacent person or the fanatic who’s the true pessimist, because they feel they already have the answer. It’s the people who think that things are open-ended, that things can still be changed through thought, through creativity—those are the true optimists. So I worry, sure, but it’s optimistic worry.” Jaron Lanier. We Need to Have an Honest Talk About Our Data

Google’s AI Guru Wants Computers to Think More Like Brains | WIRED

This is from an interview with Geoffrey Hinton who — to paraphrase Peter Medawar’s comments about Jim Watson — has something to be clever about. The article is worth reading in full, but here are a few snippets.

Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there’s no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it’s going to get some junior reviewer who doesn’t understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who’s trying to review too many papers and doesn’t understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that’s really bad…

What we should be going for, particularly in the basic science conferences, is radically new ideas. Because we know a radically new idea in the long run is going to be much more influential than a tiny improvement. That’s I think the main downside of the fact that we’ve got this inversion now, where you’ve got a few senior guys and a gazillion young guys.

I would make a few comments:

1. First the history of neural nets is long: even people like me had heard about them in the late 1980s. The history of ideas is often like that.
2. The academy is being sidetracked into thinking it should innovate or develop ideas that whilst important are not revolutionary. Failure should be the norm, rather than the continued treadmill of grant income and papers.
3. Scale and genuine discovery — for functioning of peer groups — seldom go together.
4. Whilst most of the really good ideas are still out there, it is possible to create structures that stop people looking for them.
5. Hinton makes a very important point in the article with broad relevance. He argues that you cannot judge (or restrict the use of) AI on the basis of whether or not it can justify its behaviour in terms of rules or logic — you have to judge it on it ability to work, in general. This is the same standard we apply to humans, or at least we did, until we thought it wise or expedient to create the fiction that much of human decision making is capable of conscious scrutiny. This applies to medicine, to the extent that clinical reasoning is often a fiction that masters like to tell novices about. Just-so stories, to torment the young with. And elsewhere in the academy for the outlandish claims that are made for changing human behaviour by signing up for online (“human remains”)courses (TIJABP).

All has been said before, I know, but no apology will be forthcoming.

JLR has been seriously mismanaged in recent years.

Agreed. But this one is about the car manufacturer rather than yours truly.

Jaguar Land Rover set to cut thousands of jobs in new year | Financial Times

How a Welsh schoolgirl rewrote the rules of publishing | Financial Times by Gillian Tett

In 2011, Beth Reeks, a 15-year-old Welsh schoolgirl studying for her GCSE exams, decided to write a teenage romantic novel. So she started tapping on her laptop with the kind of obsessive creative focus – and initial secrecy – that has been familiar to writers throughout history. “My parents assumed I was on Facebook or something when I was on my laptop – or I’d call up a document or internet page so it looked like I was doing homework,” she explained at a recent writers’ convention. “I wrote a lot in secret… and at night. I was obsessed.”

But Reeks took a different route: after penning eight chapters of her boy-meets-girl novel, The Kissing Booth, she posted three of them on Wattpad, an online story-sharing platform …. As comments poured in, Reeks turned to social media for more ideas. “I started a Tumblr blog and a Twitter account for my writing. I used them to promote the book…[and] respond to anyone who said they liked the story,” she explained in a recent blog post. 

… while Reeks was at university studying physics, her work was turned into an ebook, then a paperback (she was offered a three-book deal by the mighty Random House) and, this year, Netflix released it as a film, which has become essential viewing for many teenage girls.

This is from an article by Stephen Senn in Nature. He keeps making this point — for the very good reason that people want to pretend there is no problem. But there is.

Personalized medicine aims to match individuals with the therapy that is best suited to them and their condition. Advocates proclaim the potential of this approach to improve treatment outcomes by pointing to statistics about how most drugs — for conditions ranging from arthritis to heartburn — do not work for most people. That might or might not be true, but the statistics are being misinterpreted. There is no reason to think that a drug that shows itself to be marginally effective in a general population is simply in want of an appropriate subpopulation in which it will perform spectacularly.

When you treat patients with chronic diseases such as psoriasis, it quickly becomes clear that there is considerable within person variation is response to treatments. We do not understand what this variation is due to. What we do know however, is that assuming variation in response between people at single time points may be misleading in that we have no measure of within person variance. This is only one of the problems. But hey, precision, personalised.. whatever: it shifts units (as Frank Zappa once said of Michael Jackson).

This is from a book review in the FT of American Overdose. by Chris McGreal — prescription for carnage.

McGreal has written an interview-based book, with especially vivid reporting from West Virginia, the state hit hardest by the epidemic. In the little town of Williamson, or Pilliamson as people came to call it, pharmacies were dispensing opioids at a staggering rate both to locals and to out-of-state visitors, who clogged its streets with their cars but boosted some local businesses as well as city tax revenues.

When the federal authorities belatedly raided one Williamson clinic in late 2009, they found that an individual doctor had written 355,132 opioid prescriptions over the previous seven years — about 1,000 for every inhabitant of the town. Another wrote 118,443 scrips over the same period. Most were handed out for cash fees without the doctors bothering to see their patients. The investigators estimated that the clinic took in $4.6m cash during 2009 and they found banknotes stuffed into safes and cupboards in the doctors’ homes and offices.

My  “Beginner’s Guide” to the messy world of medical education over at Wonkhe.

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