On Thomas Kuhn and Paradigm breaking…

From this weekend’s Guardian, here.

Money quote:

But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn’s account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There’s no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn’t that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?

The trouble with Italian science support….

The interview with Italy’s new science minister, Fracesco Profumo is at ScienceInsider, here.

The quote from his which best captures the essence of the problem (although not the way I suspect he intended) is here:

We contributed 15% to the cost of Framework Programme 7, the predecessor to Horizon 2020, but we received only 8.5% of the funding in return—in other words, we lost about €500 million per year. Those are worrisome data.

He then, to be sure, goes on to suggest that Italy needs to submit better proposals.

Digital humanities?

Maria Konnikova on Scientific American’s Blog site, here.

Her thesis is that the tools of science–say statistics or small world network analysis–only detract and distract from our understanding of human artifacts like fiction. Perhaps so–certainly the meaning of Hamlet is not to be found in its word frequency histogram. And yet, without question, some human art forms like music are intensely mathematical and here, the meaning does have close relations with the underlying natural order of the thing.

Last thoughts before Fall semester….

First, we need to think about how an institute for advanced study fits into the current rapidly evolving American public university. Second, we need to engage far more actively with the private sector so that the resources for our research mission remain stable, even as Federal R&D decreases. Third, we need to  tell our story more effectively and certainly more often. Finally, we need to think about how our education mission–at all levels from undergraduate to executive short courses–can take better advantage of technology to reach more learners.

The overarching theme for the Institute remains how human cognition emerges from the biological activity of brains, individually and played out across societies, all of them embedded in the larger biosphere.

The human talent for making Krasnow the special place it is, remains our greatest resource: faculty, students and staff alike.

The Institute gears up for Fall semester…

On Wednesday of this week, the University begins to stir from Summer with the annual planning conference that, to my mind, marks the beginning of the semester. Classes don’t begin for another ten days or so, but you can already feel the Institution picking up its pace.

Superimposed upon a sense of impending activity are the concerns about the macro-changes that are central to the current higher education debate and the sense that political paralysis may indeed lead to this country going over a “fiscal cliff” in January.

I’m sure these will be among the major topics for discussion in Aspen, later this month….

David Frum’s take on the current American anxiety

From The Daily Beast, here.

Money quote:

In 1959, during the golden age of the American middle class, bestselling writer Allen Drury set the scene for his novel Advise and Consent by describing a world that “had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others …”
This is the fear that haunts us now, the worry above all worries: Has the golden legend of America-the constantly renewed promise of a better economic future for its citizens-finally reached an end? And if so, what alternative future awaits us?

Shout out to one of our own: Claudio Cioffi…

From Nature Magazine, the link is here. Money quote:

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computer social scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, welcomes cliodynamics as a natural complement to his own field: doing simulations using ‘agent-based’ computer models. Cioffi-Revilla and his team are developing one such model to capture the effects of modern-day climate change on the Rift Valley region in East Africa, a populous area that is in the grip of a drought. The model starts with a series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact, following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances. The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots. Cioffi-Revilla says that cliodynamics could strengthen the model by providing the agents with rules extracted from historical data.