Science in Society - NYAS

The globalization of universities must be embraced, not feared, in order to advance STEM research internationally and empower the next generation.

Published March 1, 2010

By Ben Wildavsky

Image courtesy of Алексей Доненко via stock.adobe.com.

For several years now—and not for the first time in our nation’s history—CEOs, politicians, and education leaders have regularly decried the shortcomings of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in America’s elementary and secondary schools. And they have vigorously promoted a reform agenda aimed at tackling those problems.

But what about our colleges and universities? On the one hand, America’s research universities are universally acknowledged as the world’s leaders in science and engineering, unsurpassed since World War II in the sheer volume and excellence of the scholarship and innovation they generate. On the other, there are signs that the rest of the world is gaining on us fast—building new universities, improving existing ones, competing hard for the best students, and recruiting U.S.-trained PhDs to return home to work in university and industry labs. Should we be worried?

There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularly in the sciences. Overall, nearly three million students now study outside their home nations—a 57 percent increase in the last decade. In the United States, by far the largest magnet for students from overseas, foreign students now dominate doctoral programs in STEM fields, constituting, for example, 65 percent, 64 percent, and 56 percent, respectively, of PhDs in computer science, engineering, and physics. Tsinghua and Peking universities together recently surpassed Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on to earn American PhD’s.

A Race to Create World Class Universities

Faculty are on the move, too: Half the world’s top physicists no longer work in their native countries. And major institutions such as New York University and the University of Nottingham are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia—there are now 162 satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43 percent in just the past three years. At the same time, growing numbers of traditional student “sender” nations, from South Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia to France and Germany, are trying to improve both the quantity and the quality of their own degrees, engaging in a fierce—and expensive—race to create world-class research universities.

All this competition has led to considerable handwringing. During a 2008 campaign stop, for instance, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in alarmed tones about the threat such academic competition poses to the United States. “If we want to keep on building the cars of the future here in America,” he declared, “we can’t afford to see the number of PhD’s in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it’s dropped here in America.”

Nor are such concerns limited to the U.S. Beyond anxious rhetoric, in a number of nations worries about brain drain and educational competition have led to outright academic protectionism. India and China are notorious for the legal and bureaucratic obstacles they erect to West-ern universities wishing to set up satellite campuses catering to local students. And some countries erect barriers to students who want to leave: The president of one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology effectively banned undergraduates from taking academic or business internships overseas.

Quotas on Foreign Students

Elsewhere, educators institute quotas on foreign students, as in Malaysia, which places a five percent cap on the number of foreign undergraduates who can attend the country’s public universities (just as the University of Tennessee once placed a 20 percent cap on the percentage of foreign graduate students in each department). Perhaps the silliest example of this protectionist mentality can be found in Germany, which for years prevented holders of doctorates earned outside the European Union from using the title “Dr.” Even a recent reform plan would extend that privilege only to holders of doctorates from 200 U.S. research universities and a limited number of universities in Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, and Russia.

There are other impediments to global mobility, too, not always explicitly protectionist, but all having the de facto effect of discouraging or preventing open access to universities around the world. In the post-9/11 era, legitimate security concerns led to enormous student visa delays and bureaucratic hassles for foreigners aspiring to study in Great Britain and the United States. As the problem was recognized and visa processing was streamlined, international student numbers rebounded and eventually increased.

By 2009, however, visa delays became common again, particularly for graduate and postdoctoral students in science and engineering, who form the backbone of many university-based research laboratories and thus serve as key players in the U.S. drive for scientific and technical innovation. Then there are severe limits on H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners, usually in science and engineering, to work temporarily in the United States and serve as an enticement for the best and brightest to study and perhaps remain here. With just 85,000 or so H-1B visas issued each year—and permanent-resident visas for skilled workers also scarce—waiting lists are long, which sends some talented students elsewhere.

Free Trade in Mind

Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable, particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But setting up protectionist obstacles is a big mistake. The globalization of higher education should be embraced, not feared—including in the U.S. In the near term, it’s worth remembering that, despite the alarmism often heard about the global academic wars, U.S. dominance of the research world remains near-complete.

A RAND report found that almost two-thirds of highly cited articles in science and technology come from the U.S. Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners are employed by U.S. universities, which lead global college rankings. And Yale president Richard Levin notes that the U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global spending on higher education.

That said, it’s quite true that other countries are scrambling to emulate the American model and to give us a run for our money. Yet there is every reason to believe that the worldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push to extend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to produce talented graduates who can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for us as well. Why? First and foremost, because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Intellectual gains by one country often benefit others.

More PhD production and burgeoning research in China, for instance, doesn’t take away from American’s store of learning—it enhances what we know and can accomplish. In fact, Chinese research may well provide the building blocks for innovation by U.S. entrepreneurs—or those from other nations. “When new knowledge is created, it’s a public good and can be used by many,” RAND economist James Hosek told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Economics of Global Academic Culture

Indeed, the economic benefits of a global academic culture are significant. In a recent essay, Harvard economist Richard Freeman says these gains should accrue both to the U.S. and the rest of the world. The globalization of higher education, he writes, “by accelerating the rate of technological advance associated with science and engineering and by speeding the adoption of best practices around the world…will lower the costs of production and prices of goods.”

Just as free trade in manufacturing or call-center support provides the lowest-cost goods and services, benefiting both consumers and the most efficient producers, global academic competition is making free movement of people and ideas, on the basis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, and for nations. Today’s swirling patterns of mobility and knowledge transmission constitute a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.

Still, even if the new world of academic globalization brings economic benefits, won’t it weaken American universities? Quite the contrary, says Freeman, who predicts that by educating top students, attracting some to stay, and “positioning the U.S. as an open hub of ideas and connections” for college graduates around the world, the nation can hold on to “excellence and leadership in the ‘empire of the mind’ and in the economic world more so than if it views the rapid increase in graduates overseas as a competitive threat.”

Less Angst, More Sense of Possibility

National borders simply don’t have the symbolic or practical meaning they once did, which bodes well for academic quality on all sides. Already, the degree of international collaboration on scientific papers has risen substantially. And there is early evidence that the most influential scholars are particularly likely to have international research experience: Well over half the highly cited researchers based in Australia, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland have spent time outside their home countries at some point during their academic careers, according to a 2005 study.

The United States should respond to the globalization of higher education not with angst but with a sense of possibility. Neither a gradual erosion in the U.S. market share of students nor the emergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means that American universities are on some in-evitable path to decline. There is nothing wrong with nations competing, trying to improve their citizens’ human capital and to reap the economic benefits that come with more and better education.

By eliminating protectionist barriers at home, by lobbying for their removal abroad, by continuing to recruit and welcome the best students in the world, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-national research collaboration, and by strengthening its own research universities in science, engineering, and other fields, the U.S. will not only sustain its own academic excellence but will continue to expand the sum total of global knowledge and prosperity.

Also read: Climate Change and Collective Action: The Knowledge Resistance Problem

About the Author

Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. This essay is adapted from The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, published by Princeton University Press.

A Case for American STEM Education

Acts of Congress, research studies, passionate scientiﬁc community leaders, and a new Academy initiative all aim to stem the collapse of American STEM education.

Published March 1, 2010

By Alan Dove, PhD

On October 4, 1957, a rocket launched from the steppes of Kazakhstan delivered the first artificial satellite into Earth’s orbit, giving the Soviet Union an early lead in the defining technological competition of the Cold War. In response, a new generation of American students rushed into careers in science and engineering. Less than 12 years later, this home-grown talent pool helped land the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon, planting the Stars and Stripes in lunar soil and establishing the dominance of American science.

Or not.

The Sputnik story has become one of the most enduring myths in American science education, but it’s mostly fiction. While Sputnik did spark widespread public fear and inspire a strong political response in the form of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the actual number of science and engineering enrollments at colleges remained virtually flat throughout the 1960s. Instead of a homegrown talent pool, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs relied heavily on engineers educated in Europe. The Apollo landing was a thoroughly impressive engineering feat, but it produced little new science.

Indeed, as a long succession of international studies and government reports have argued, American science education largely stagnated after World War II: The average American public school graduate is scientifically illiterate, they say.

On October 23, 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, citing disturbing statistics about the state of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education in the United States: “In science, our eighth graders are behind their peers in eight countries… Four countries—Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Finland—outperform U.S. students on math, science and all other subjects.”

Closing the Achievement Gap

Secretary Duncan outlined a number of goals that must be reached in order to close the achievement gap and improve American students’ comprehension of the STEM disciplines. Aided by this new Federal push for STEM education, experts from diverse fields and political viewpoints are now trying to address the longstanding failure. In the process, they are asking fundamental questions about the way America educates its citizens: how worried does the U.S. need to be about science education, why has it been so bad for so long, and what can be done to improve it?

Anyone studying American science education must immediately confront a paradox: despite decades of documenting its own weaknesses in science education at the K-12 level, the nation has remained a world leader in scientific and technological achievement. If the U.S. is so awful at teaching science, why are Americans still so good at practicing it?

One explanation is the time lag inherent in scientific training. “I’ve always called the whole situation the quiet crisis,” says Shirley Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. “It’s quiet because it takes years to educate a world-class scientist or engineer. It starts with the very early educational years and goes all the way through levels of advanced study,” she says. As a result, problems in the public school system could take a generation to manifest themselves in university laboratories and corporate R&D campuses.

Imported Talent

Imported talent also masks the issue. “After World War II something like 70 percent of the world’s economic output was centered here in the United States,” says Jim Gates, professor of physics at the University of Maryland in College Park. “That meant that as a society we could count on the brightest minds from around the world seeking opportunity to come to us because we were the place where the most opportunity was apparent.”

In recent years, though, educators have begun worrying about two additional trends. “There are stories of very talented colleagues from Asia who have essentially decided to repatriate either to India or China…and this is a phenomenon I think we’ve seen in academia increasing for the last several years,” says Gates. At the same time, emerging economies such as China and India have made enormous investments in science and engineering education in order to mine rich veins of talent in their immense populations.

It’s been a hard threat to quantify, though. The 2005 National Academy of Sciences report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” presented some attention-grabbing statistics. For example, the report asserted that in 2004 China graduated 600,000 new engineers, India 350,000, and the U.S. only 70,000. However, the committee’s methods for deriving those figures came under fire from critics who pointed out that the definition of “engineer” varied considerably from one country to another. Correcting that error halved the number of Chinese engineers, doubled the American number, and showed that the U.S. still had a commanding lead in engineers per capita.

Choosing Careers Outside of Science and Engineering

More recently, a report released in October 2009 by investigators at Rutgers and Georgetown argued that U.S. universities are graduating more than enough scientists and engineers, but many choose jobs outside of their major field. According to that report, which was sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the perceived shortage of technical expertise is more likely due to American companies’ unwillingness to pay for it.

That viewpoint has its critics, of course. “I’m well familiar with the Sloan study, but what we’re really talking about is innovation capacity,” says Jackson, who helped write the 2005 National Academy report. She adds that the real problem will manifest itself over the next few years, as the first rounds of baby boomers begin to leave the workforce. “We have a population of people…from the various sectors who are beginning to retire, and those retirements are beginning to accelerate.” While current employment statistics might show plenty of scientists and engineers for available positions, Jackson and others expect the impending retirements to alter that.

While debate about whether the U.S. is adequately training the next generation of professional scientists rages on, it’s hard to disagree with those who argue that the country needs to improve the scientific literacy of its lay public. “We seem to accept that people need to be able to read and write in order to be educated, to be able to function in society, and that is obviously critical, but what we have to also recognize is that people need certain baseline mathematical skills and some knowledge of science and technology in order to be literate,” says Jackson.

A Scientifically Literate Public

Gates concurs: “Having a scientifically literate public is going to be critical as our nation wrestles with problems whose solutions seem inherently to involve science and technology.” In particular, he cites climate change, where scientists have had considerable difficulty explaining a well-established phenomenon to politicians and citizens who have little understanding of basic math and physics. “Having a public that is scientifically illiterate doesn’t bode well for the future of our country,” he says.

Other education reform proponents are more blunt. “I regard the collapse of math and science education as the greatest long-term strategic problem the United States has, and likely to end our role as the leading country in the world,” says former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Famous for engineering the 1994 Republican Congressional victories, Gingrich, a former college history professor, is outspoken about the need to reform a public education system that he says values certification over knowledge. “We…don’t have physicists teaching physics, we don’t have chemists teaching chemistry, and we don’t have biologists teaching biology,” he says.

Highlighting the political breadth of the issue, Gingrich recently accompanied Education Secretary Duncan and Reverend Al Sharpton on a tour of high schools in Philadelphia. Despite their radically different positions on other issues, the three agreed that American science education urgently needs help.

Others point out that improving public science education is also a prerequisite to training more scientists. “Without that…educational base, we don’t have the base to draw indigenous talent from, talent that may then actually become the next generation of scientists and engineers, so they’re two issues, but they are linked,” says Jackson.

Resistance is Feudal

There is no shortage of potential causes for the nation’s scientific ignorance. Indeed, critics of the educational system often focus on whichever problems seem most relevant to their agenda. Advocates of charter schools like to point to powerful teachers’ unions and administratively bloated school systems. Privatizing education with charter schools, they argue, would give these bureaucracies nimble, efficient competition, forcing the public system to reform or die.

Others emphasize staffing problems instead, such as the tendency for science teachers to have majored in education rather than science, and a transient labor pool in which a third of K-12 teachers leave the profession within five years of being hired. In their view, both public and charter schools must draw and retain more highly trained science teachers.

Still others point to the balkanization of the American educational system, which allows each state and even each school district, wide latitude in setting curricula and standards. “Most developed countries have not just national tests, but national curricula,” says Gates. “We can’t say that the quality of education can differ in California and New York versus Wyoming and Florida,” he adds. “We want to have a common, internationally competitive set of standards.”

Getting more than 14,000 school districts in 50 states to agree on those standards, however, remains difficult. Gates has seen the problem firsthand from his seat on Maryland’s school board. “School boards and superintendents basically have their own feifdoms,” he says.

School districts aren’t the only feudal systems. Getting the national-level education agencies to coordinate their activities has been a tall order. An analysis by the Department of Education found that in 2006, a dozen different Federal agencies spent a total of more than $3 billion on science education initiatives, but a lack of coordination often made the efforts redundant or counterproductive.

The America COMPETES Act of 2007

To address some of these problems, Congressman Bart Gordon, D-TN, introduced the America COMPETES Act of 2007 which, among other things, established the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship. The fund, which Congress endowed with $115 million this year, encourages math and science majors to become teachers, and current math and science teachers to go back for more training. “We found that a very large percent of our teachers who teach math and science have neither certification nor a degree to teach those two subjects, so we have set up programs to help with that competency,” says Gordon.

Gordon, who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, also wrote the STEM Act of 2009. That bill aims to improve the coordination of Federal STEM education efforts and make them more user-friendly. “We did some digging and found that there were a number of STEM education programs all across the Federal government…that you couldn’t find just by looking down a table of contents, you really had to dig in, and so we felt that by having better coordination, that we would be able to get better leverage there,” says Gordon. The STEM Act passed the House in June and is now awaiting action in the Senate.

Besides streamlining the system, national standards and more unified Federal efforts could help nip some antiscientific trends, such as creationist school boards that attempt to undermine the central organizing principle of biology. American creationists, who preach a literal interpretation of the Bible, have often aligned themselves with conservative Republicans for political leverage.

Reducing the Attention Deficit

The party is not of one mind on the issue, though. “There have been four parallel evolutions of sabertoothed cats over the last 40 million years…and you can see literally almost the exact same steps of adaptation. Now, it’s very hard to look at that and not believe some kind of evolution occurs,” says Gingrich. He adds that the lesson for educational policy is equally obvious: “I have no problem with creationism being taught as a philosophical or cultural course, as long as you teach evolution as a science course, because I think they’re two fundamentally different things.”

Winning the argument for evolution in biology is only a small step toward reforming STEM education nationwide, though. Indeed, some critics of the current system advocate widespread and radical changes. Gingrich, for example, suggests incentive programs to pay students for performance: “I propose in every state that we adopt a position that if you can graduate a year early, you get the extra cost of your 12th year as an automatic scholarship to either [vocational] school or college.”

Others advocate much faster adoption of technology in the classroom. Jim Gates says the average modern science classroom has few technological advances over the classroom of 50 or 60 years ago. Instead of continuing to rely on textbooks and chalkboards, he suggests switching to electronic texts and presentations, and allowing teachers to download new material instantly as it becomes available. “We have this incredible technology that’s remaking the world around us…and to think that somehow education will be untouched by this revolution…is extremely naive,” he says.

Past Reform Efforts

Radical innovations certainly sound interesting, but the history of past reform efforts in American science education provides a sobering counterpoint. Early in the Clinton administration, for example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched an ambitious program called Systemic Initiatives to help whole school systems make large-scale changes in science education. The initiatives achieved some notable successes in boosting science achievement, particularly in poor rural and urban districts.

Then, in 2002, Congress passed a mammoth set of reforms called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). To fund NCLB projects, the NSF had to drain $160 million from the Systemic Initiatives budget, effectively sidelining the program less than 10 years after it had begun. NCLB, in turn, has been widely panned by educators, politicians, and scientists. Critics argue that NCLB’s heavy emphasis on standardized testing has encouraged states and school districts to manipulate the tests rather than make genuine improvements. Because of this, NCLB is now set for its own overhaul, potentially shifting the science education agenda yet again.

This time, though, reformers have brought a new constituency into the discussion: state governors. Aided by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Governors’ Association has now developed a STEM Education initiative, including grants to fund reform efforts in individual states. Such state-level programs could go a long way toward improving the system nationwide if they are properly coordinated. “We need to think about what can be done to knit together the range of activities across the local, state and Federal level that involve public, private, and academic sectors, and that’s a challenge,” says Jackson.

An Interesting Trend

Scientists and engineers can also take heart from an interesting trend in college data: while the Space Race had little effect on the number of new enrollments in these fields, they spiked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Various commentators have suggested that students were following an altruistic urge to solve pressing environmental and energy problems, which were just coming to the fore then, or that they simply wanted to improve their employability during an epic recession.

In either case, history seems primed to repeat itself. Both environmental degradation and skyrocketing unemployment are making headlines again, and science and engineering enrollments are once again on the rise.

A Science Collaboration Between the U.S. and Russia

A man wearing a suit and tie poses for the camera.

Academy President and CEO Ellis Rubinstein is part of the first “U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue”

Published February 24, 2010

By Adrienne J. Burke

Academy President and CEO Ellis Rubinstein joined a ground-breaking delegation of U.S. technology experts in Russia last week. The first “U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue” was held in Moscow and Novosibirsk, Siberia, and was an outgrowth of a pact made between Presidents Obama and Medvedev last July 6 in Moscow, through which they agreed to engage in multiple partnerships for economic and social good as part of a “reset” of Russian-American relations. Following their meeting in the Kremlin, the two presidents created a U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission charged to organize productive exchanges.

Last week, the State Department and National Security Council kicked off these exchanges by partnering with their counterparts in Russia to schedule an intense series of meetings between an elite group of Americans and a broad mix of Russians including the first deputies to President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, as well as several Ministers, leading academicians, corporate leaders, young entrepreneurs, and even college and high school students.

Co-led by Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and Jared Cohen of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, the delegation included the CEOs, CTOs, founders, and chairs of companies including eBay, Cisco, Mozilla, EDventure, Howcast, Twitter, Social Gaming Network, and Katalyst. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, and actor Ashton Kutcher, known as the most followed user on the social-networking site Twitter, also participated.

Meetings focused on the role technology can play in promoting better governance, combating corruption and trafficking in persons, improving healthcare, and expanding educational opportunities for youth and teachers. The American delegation strove successfully to ensure that there would be multiple outcomes of each interaction.

Before departing Russia, the U.S. Innovation Delegation proposed 19 projects for collaboration between the U.S. and Russia in six areas of technology development. The proposal included the suggestion that The New York Academy of Sciences help to establish a U.S.-Russia “Young Scientists Innovation Network.” Additional ideas for immediate collaboration, from exchanging ideas for incubating entrepreneurs to using mobile messaging to promote infant health, follow:

Theme 1: Education, Entrepreneurship Training, and Mentorship

U.S.-Novosibirsk IT Internship Program. Recognizing the strong legacy of education in science and technology in Russia, the U.S. innovation delegation participants have agreed to establish 6-month internships in Silicon Valley. These internships are designed to expose Novosibirsk’s most promising young engineering talent to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial experience, culture, and environment. The internships will be designed to cultivate a renewed interest in science and technology and expose interns to models and mentoring that could foster entrepreneurship and social development in Russia.

Establish Pilot Incubators in Select Regions of Russia. In an effort to foster greater entrepreneurship and establish innovation hubs, members of the Innovation Delegation will create entrepreneurship incubators in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk that are linked to specialized incentives (e.g. subsidized accommodation, moving expenses, etc.).

Exchange of Experiences and Best Practices. Members of the Innovation Delegation will offer their expertise and intellectual collaboration as the Russian government pursues creating its own entrepreneurship incubators.

Public Awareness Campaign to Foster Entrepreneurship. Members of the Innovation Delegation will partner with Russian government, private sector, and media entities to celebrate Russian entrepreneurial heroes/role models and cultivate self-confidence in taking risks, learning from failures, and striving to succeed with new and innovative business ideas.

X-Prize Collaborations in Education and Health. The Innovation Delegation, in coordination with the X Prize Foundation, will investigate the design and implementation of health and education-related X Prizes relevant to Russia.

Establish a U.S.-Russia Young Scientists Innovation Network. The New York Academy of Sciences will partner with Russian stakeholders to promote career mentoring and the development of “frontiers of sciences” communities. The mechanisms through which this network will exist are physical events in Russia, web-based exchanges, global memberships, travel exchanges, and competitions with prizes.

Make Lectures Available Online. Innovation Delegation will partner with Russian institutions of higher learning to provide lectures and coursework that can be made available to the general public.

Institutionalize a Dialogue between Silicon Valley and Academic Institutions. Innovation Delegation will work with Academic institutions to develop a platform through which experts in the industry can virtually provide perspectives, mentorship, and insights that aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from.

Theme 2: Anti-Trafficking and Child Protection

U.S.-Novosibirsk Digital Kids Pilot Project. The Innovation Delegation has agreed to provide laptops, computer accessories, and teacher training to Novosibirsk’s city and state run orphanages. Each computer will include applications and programs that will enable them to connect with children around the world and obtain useful and life-enhancing skills and tools. Each computer will also include Skype so that those who receive the computers can stay in touch with those who donated them. The program will incorporate a mentoring component as well as an appropriate curriculum that will prepare them for life after the orphanage.

Establish Competition to Promote Technology Solutions to Fight Human Trafficking. Working with Russian private sector and other stakeholders, the Demi and Ashton Foundation has agreed to establish a $50,000 prize for Russian software developers and engineers to create new technology tools to prevent trafficking in women and children.

Create Safe Jobs Index and Trafficking Violators “Most Wanted” List. Working with international non-governmental organizations focused on anti-trafficking and relevant government agencies, the Demi and Ashton Foundation will create a safe jobs index to assist young women in finding safe employment. A list of identified and convicted traffickers will also be compiled and distributed where in accordance with national legislation.

Develop Anonymous Mobile Message-Based Platform for Reporting Cases of Trafficking. The Innovation delegation will partner with Russian mobile services, Internet providers, civil society actors, and Russian law enforcement authorities, to implement an anonymous mobile message program to alert authorities to possible trafficking cases, collect geo-tracking data, and share information on the web.

Establish Public Awareness and Classroom Education Campaign. Working with social media and networking organizations, develop a public awareness campaign on the harms of trafficking that includes an in-class educational curriculum. The Demi and Ashton Foundation will establish prizes for the development of content-based public awareness tools and programs.

Tech/Civil Society Conference. Innovation Delegation will work with the local technology sector to facilitate a conference that links technology stakeholders and civil society organizations based on a shared interest in addressing trafficking, health, education, and anti-corruption.

Theme 3: Combating Cyber Crime

Establish Public-Private Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Cyber Security. Establish a process through which private sector companies interested in investing in Russia can raise issues of cyber crime with the government. We can do this by providing points of contact in U.S. and Russian law enforcement agencies to private sector information technology companies to collaborate in our efforts to fight cyber crime. To facilitate these goals, we recommend that officials from leading companies in the Internet industry, including those companies listed above and possibly others, come to Moscow by the end of June, 2010, to meet with the appropriate government and law enforcement officials in Russia to establish a partnership to combat cyber crime.

Develop Alternative Livelihoods for Cyber Criminals or Those Susceptible to Committing Cyber-Crime. Participants will engage with relevant government and private sector entities and other stakeholders to develop means to provide programmers legitimate and profitable uses for their talent.

Theme 4: Health

Text4Baby. Given the high priority President Obama and President Medvedev have placed on promoting maternal and infant health, Healthy Russia Foundation will partner with Russian mobile service providers, software developers, Russian health industry representatives, and Russian health authorities to establish a mobile message program where pregnant women and new mothers can receive weekly alerts and advice to help those maintain a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their babies. More important, this program provides a platform for women to consult directly with health professionals as appropriate.

Theme 5: E-governance and Collaboration

E-governance and Collaboration. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and the Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Sobyanin will collaborate broadly on e-governance issues, such as the development of platforms for making government data accessible to the public.

Theme 6: Promoting Cultural Collaboration

Integrate Technology into the Moscow Arts Theater. To celebrate our respective cultures and broaden our understanding of one another, the Innovation Delegation will work with the Moscow Arts Theater to assess their technology needs, provide technical assistance, and facilitate partnerships to use technology to extend the cultural reach of the Moscow Arts Theater and deepen connections between theater students in the United States and Russia.

Forge Partnerships between U.S. and Russian Local Media Outlets. Recognizing the growth of the digital media environment, local media outlets in both the U.S. and Russia share common challenges of survival and adaptability. As such, we will work together in the Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Working Group on Education, Culture, Mass Media and Sports to facilitate exchanges and build partnerships that will address the shared challenges and identify opportunities to take advantage of the changing media environment.

The Growth of Citizen Science: Amateur Research

New technology and changing attitudes have made it so that science is no longer restricted to those who have PhDs and wear lab coats.

Published December 1, 2009

By Darlene Cavalier and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

A child experiments with a walkie talkie. Image courtesy of LumineImages – via stock.adobe.com.

Yale University astrophysics professor Kevin Schawinski studies how galaxies form. But his most valuable tool isn’t a telescope or arcane theory. It’s Galaxy Zoo, a project that has enlisted the help of more than 150,000 “citizen scientists” to classify a million galaxies.

Why use people rather than computers for such an undertaking? At least for now, humans with a little training are more accurate than expensive software. And when you have a million galaxies to classify, you want all the help you can get.

Not so long ago, “citizen scientist” would have seemed to be a contradiction in terms. Science is traditionally something done by people in lab coats who hold PhDs. As with classical music or acting, amateurs might be able to appreciate science, but they could not contribute to it. Today, however, enabled by technology and empowered by social change, science-interested laypeople are transforming the way science gets done.

Satisfied Citizens

Who are citizen scientists? A survey conducted by the forthcoming ScienceForCitizens.net web site found that 46 percent of citizen scientists have graduate degrees (compared to the national average of 10 percent). Like President Obama and 53 million other Americans, a majority of citizen scientists hail from the Generation Jones group, aged 44-55, described by commentator Jonathan Pontell as having “a general aching to act.”

Technology makes it easier for people to get involved in serious science. The Internet has dramatically reduced the cost and difficulty of sharing information and obtaining or using high-quality scientific instruments. The spread of mobile smartphones has been especially important for democratizing participation in science. GPS and digital photography have become available to the masses; soon, we will even see cell phone microscopes that take color images of malaria parasites and TB bacteria using fluorescent markers.

Citizen scientists don’t do scientific research for a living; they practice science for personal satisfaction. Many work with grassroots organizations or professional scientists in academia or government, or form their own social networks. They believe that research and discovery should be accessible and useful. The US federal government funds more than half of all basic research, after all. And it doesn’t take a PhD to grasp modern scientific problems like climate change, become involved in monitoring environmental conditions, or participate in policy discussions. Turns out, it’s a short leap from supporting science to participating.

Contributing to Contemporary Science

Some citizen scientists look to the stars. GalaxyZoo is just one program popular with amateur astronomers. Other citizen scientists focus on Earth through formal and recreational projects. BeeWatchers, a program sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, relies on citizen scientists in its preservation efforts to identify more than 200 types of native bees and the plants they pollinate.

Some of the more than 670,000 recreational fishermen in North Carolina are using Twitter to log their catches, sharing critical data with marine biologists and state officials in the process. Across the country, more than a half million amateur chemists and biologists monitor the quality of America’s waterways. Many organize into local chapters operating on $2,000 a year or less and feed their findings to databases used by professional scientists and policymakers.

Through projects like these, citizen scientists are collaborating with professionals, conducting field studies, and adding valuable local detail to research. Their data are improving local decisions and policy-making. And their independence sometimes frees them to ask questions that lead science in new directions.

The Final Citizen Frontier

What’s next for citizen science? We may soon see the citizen science equivalent of Big Science or Revolutionary Science—discoveries and collaborations that bring together millions of people, and change the dynamics of innovation and research. Yale’s Kevin Schawinski envisions a day “when you’ve got a quarter of a million enthusiastic people knocking on your door.” At that scale, “the kinds of tasks that suddenly become possible are on an entirely different level.”

Citizen scientists may also move into space. CubeSats—satellites roughly the size of large coffee mugs—are already being put into space by NASA, and some experts predict they will be affordable to the masses within a decade. Imagine one of science’s final frontiers, formerly open only to governments and rocket scientists, accessible to all.

No matter what fields they work in, citizen scientists will continue. As Schawinski puts it, to “bring their insights, organizational skills, and a sense of community” to science.

Read more from the Citizen Science in the Digital Age series:

About the Authors

Darlene Cavalier is the founder of ScienceCheerleader.com, a blog that advances adult science literacy and promotes the involvement of citizens in science and science-related policy. She is developing Science-ForCitizens.net with her partner Michael Gold and Science House. This major multifunctional Web site will act as a centralized hub to enable people to learn about, participate in, and contribute to science through recreational and formal research activities.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University and cofounder of the Palo Alto Strategy Studio, a research and consulting group based in Silicon Valley. He specializes in forecasting the future of science and technology.

A Mind for Math, A Heart for Helping

Darwin Society donor and award-winning mathematician Peter D. Lax reflects on a career in mathematics, the Manhattan Project, and the paradox of education.

Published December 1, 2009

By Adelle C. Pelekanos

Peter D. Lax

Lauded for his numerous contributions to pure and applied mathematics and physics, and his integral role in the development of modern computational mathematics, Peter D. Lax is one of the greatest minds in his field. He has earned the highest honors a mathematician can receive for his versatility and ability to connect abstract mathematical knowledge with real-world problems. Among the many major mathematical results and numerical methods to his credit are the Lax-Milgram Lemma, the Lax Equivalence Theorem, the Lax-Friedrichs Scheme, the Lax-Wendroff Scheme, the Lax Entropy Condition, and the Lax-Levermore Theory. About his extraordinarily nimble mind, he is quite humble: “In mathematics, your brain is wired somewhat differently,” he says.

Lax is an Honorary Life Member of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and served on the Board of Governors from 1986 to 1987. He has continued his support of the Academy as an active member of the Charles Darwin Society.

Born in Budapest in 1926, Lax displayed a natural aptitude and interest in mathematics that was fostered from an early age. “In Hungary, there was the tradition to mentor talented young people, so at every step I got advice and help,” he says. Prominent mathematician Rozsa Peter was his primary tutor.

In 1941, the Lax family caught the last boat to leave Lisbon, two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to settle in New York City. The gifted 15-year-old Peter briefly attended Stuyvesant High School before winning the opportunity to study with Richard Courant at New York University. “Courant was known to be very good with young people, and that was a wonderful experience,” Lax says.

From Engineering Student to Manhattan Project

At 18, Lax was drafted and, after basic training, sent to Texas A&M to study engineering. In 1945, he went to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to participate in the Manhattan Project. Working there with some of the greatest minds of the time was “like living science fiction,” he says. He stayed at Los Alamos for a year, finished his degree, and returned to NYU to pursue a PhD with Courant as his thesis advisor. In 1949, Lax went back to Los Alamos, and throughout the 1950s spent almost every summer at the lab as a consultant.

It was at Los Alamos, under the direction of fellow Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, that Lax was first exposed to computational mathematics. “The development of computers was in a large part motivated by the needs of the atomic weapons program,” Lax says. “You can’t build an atomic bomb just by trial and error—you have to be able to quickly calculate how the design will work. Von Neumann was very broad-minded—he saw it was important not only for the atomic program, but for other engineering and technology projects, and also for pure science.”

The Paradox of Education

In 1958, Lax became a professor at NYU, and he has remained at the Courant Institute ever since. Throughout his career, he has contributed to both pure and applied fields in math and science, making notable discoveries in fluid dynamics and shock waves, integrable systems, solitonic physics, and computational mathematics, among others. Among his numerous awards and honors are the 1986 National Medal of Science, the 1987 Wolf Prize, the 1992 Steele Prize, and the 1995 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2005, he achieved the highest award in mathematics, the Abel Prize, for his “groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and the computation of their solutions.”

Lax is presently at work refashioning a textbook he first wrote 40 years ago, with his late wife, mathematician Anneli Cahn-Lax. “It was the first calculus book with applications and computing, and it had lots of good ideas, but it was spectacularly unsuccessful at the time,” Lax says. With the help of collaborator Maria Terrell at Cornell University, he hopes the revamped text will be better received.

Lax is passionate about the need for education reform. “I’ve seen for a long time what I call the paradox of education: Science and mathematics are growing by leaps and bounds on the research frontier, so what we teach in high school, college, and graduate school is falling behind by leaps and bounds.” But by fostering intimate cooperation between research mathematicians and educators, he says, we can “simplify the teaching of old topics, and make room for new ones.”

Also read: An Interview with NYU’s Peter D. Lax

About the Author

Adelle C. Pelekanos is a freelance science writer in New York City.

A New Approach to Treating HIV/AIDS in Iran

The recipients of the 2009 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award are a widely acclaimed brother duo known for their successful HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment work.

Published September 17, 2009

By Adrienne J. Burke

Image courtesy of stu-khaii via stock.adobe.com.

Two Iranian physicians, brothers long involved in fighting HIV/AIDS in that country and tried and sentenced to prison in January 2009, have been named recipients of the 2009 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy).

Drs. Arash and Kamiar Alaei “have worked tirelessly and selflessly for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Iran over a period of many years,” the Academy’s Board of Governors Committee on Human Rights of Scientists said in issuing the award.

“Their work has been successful in diminishing the spread of this serious illness in Iran and in publicizing concrete and specific ways to move forward in the struggle to achieve this goal…They have persisted against opposition within Iran at great personal cost.”

The Alaeis’ work “has been recognized by major international organizations, including the 2008 report by the UNAIDS organization, which referred to their activities as a model for other developing nations,” the committee said.

The award was presented this evening at the Academy’s 191st Annual Meeting by Henry Greenberg, chair of the Human Rights of Scientists Committee. Ladan Alomar, Executive Director of the Centro Civico of Amsterdam, Inc., accepted the award on behalf of the doctors.

Dr. Arash Alaei is the former Director of the International Education and Research Cooperation of the Iranian National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. His brother, Kamiar, is a Fellow of the Asia Society and doctoral candidate at the SUNY Albany School of Public Health.

Helping the Ostracized and Stigmatized

In addition to their work in Iran, the Alaeis have held training courses for Afghan and Tajik medical workers. Their work with drug addicts and prostitutes in Tehran was featured in a 2004 BBC television documentary, Mohammed and the Matchmaker, in which Kamiar Alaei said: “We face a huge potential HIV problem in Iran, and in order to start to confront it we need to talk about the root causes…Many people are still afraid to talk about it. Some people with HIV are ostracized and stigmatized, and they are often very isolated.”

Despite the Alaeis’ success – Iran’s response to HIV/AIDS has won international acclaim and World Health Organization recognition as a model of best practice – the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not been supportive.

Arash Alaei was arrested by Iranian security forces in June 2008, his brother the next day. Iranian authorities accused the two, and two other defendants, of “communications with an enemy government” and of seeking to overthrow the Iranian government. The brothers, who have no history of political activism, were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison in January 2009.

The Alaeis’ imprisonment has drawn protests from numerous international human rights groups, including Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. The American Medical Association has lent its support as well, including sending a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which it strongly urged “that discussions of human rights, justice and respect for the medical profession (and the Alaei brothers specifically) must be a part of any opening dialogue with Iran.”

Also read: Promoting Science, Human Rights in the Middle-East

Celebrating the “The Century of Science”

A chalkboard with mathematical formulas.

Old and new friends gather to celebrate science at The New York Academy of Sciences’ Fifth Annual President’s Reception.

Published August 10, 2009

By Adrienne J. Burke

An illustration of the 7 World Trade Center building. — An illustration of the 7 World Trade Center building, home to The New York Academy of Sciences.

The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) prides itself on being an institution that builds bridges and establishes connections between people who might otherwise not have the chance to get together. One good example was the Fifth Annual President’s Reception in June, where scores of scientists, physicians, philanthropists, artists, entrepreneurs and others gathered to celebrate the Academy’s role in supporting science and scientists worldwide.

President Ellis Rubinstein took particular note of the mix of long-time Academy friends and new members of the Academy’s growing circle.

“When I was running a scientific conference on regenerative medicine in Beijing,” he said, “the Minister of Health of China…opened the conference by saying that the most important thing in life is the friendships that you make and the ones that you retain by the end of your life. I thought, ‘that’s an unusual thing for a scientist to say at the beginning of a scientific meeting. But it’s appropriate for this group here.”

Others addressing the audience included inventor Dean Kamen, who holds more than 440 patents on products ranging from the Segway transporter to the wearable infusion pump, and Academy Governor and Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene, the impetus behind the novel World Science Festival in New York City.

An Engaging Exploration of Science and Culture

Greene used the occasion to kick off the Festival, outlining the eclectic range of programming that has come to characterize this engaging annual exploration of science and culture. Kamen then introduced the audience to the success he’s had engaging young people in science and technology through his national robot-building contest, known as FIRST, which treats this technical challenge like a major sports competition. Teams from nearly 17,000 schools in 43 US cities participate in the FIRST program, backed by 85,000 scientists and engineers who serve as volunteer mentors.

“Kids are so distracted by what appear to be more exciting alternative career options than science, technology, inventing, and innovating, which…astounds me,” Kamen said. “Every major career opportunity they’re going to have available to them in the next 10 or 20 years is going to require a fundamental appreciation and awareness of science and technology–even if they don’t want to be a scientist or a technologist!”

NYU President and Academy Board Chair John Sexton echoed that sentiment in closing remarks.

“We have entered the century that will be defined by science,” he said. “It will be critical that we do all we can…to push the awareness of science as deeply as possible into society.” And the Academy, he added, has a unique capacity to serve that convening and catalyzing role.

“That’s why I’m committed to it,” he added. “That’s the vision of it that I hope all of you see.”

Also read: Academy’s Soiree Recognizes Excellence in Science

New Advances in Algorithmic Trading Strategies

A hand points to bar graphs on a printed document.

From “dark pools” to “algorithmic trading”, Wall Street is adapting to meet the needs of the 21st century finance world. But what does this mean for investors?

Posted June 30, 2009

By Alan Dove, PhD

Image courtesy of wutzkoh via stock.adobe.com.

Algorithmic trading is a complex undertaking that isn’t always optimally employed. One area in which the strategy can go awry is when it is used in dark pools. Dark pools of liquidity are a type of trading venue designed to minimize the market impact of large trades. On April 16, 2009, members of the Academy’s Quantitative Finance Discussion group met to talk about the trading in dark pools as well as other areas. The event was sponsored by the Moody’s Foundation.

Ian Domowitz of the Investment Technology Group explained that algorithms that trade in multiple dark pools may leak information concerning the trade, making it riskier. Lee Maclin of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences outlined the use of algorithms beyond dark pool trading. He explained that traders and portfolio managers pursue slightly different agendas, often resulting in suboptimal strategies. Portfolios that are managed “passively” should instead adopt a continuous trading approach.

The Chips are Down

The argot of Wall Street is thick with technical jargon. Behind the talk of options, alpha, and basis points, though, lies an enterprise strikingly similar to gambling. Traders constantly calculate odds and place bets, trying to beat the market the way a Vegas high-roller wagers against the house.

In this high-stakes game, the developers of quantitative trading algorithms are the card counters, closely watching and analyzing the market’s behavior to pick the best bets. At first glance, the problem looks straightforward: trades on the open market are a matter of public record, and powerful computers capable of analyzing those data are relatively cheap. However, the market’s players can hide some trades, making the game as subtle and risky as a hand of Texas hold ’em. On April 16, 2009, members of the Academy’s Quantitative Finance Discussion group met to talk about the science of uncovering the market’s hidden cards.

Probing the Dark Pools

Ian Domowitz of the Investment Technology Group explained, “Texas hold ’em…is a game where most cards are actually displayed, and a few cards are hidden, and so everybody gets to figure out what’s going on with the other people’s hands.” The key to winning in this popular poker variant is to understand the odds on other players’ cards, and to place bets without revealing information about your own hand.

A similar challenge confronts traders who deal with dark pools. Despite their sinister sounding name, dark pools are a simple financial tool for solving a basic economic problem. If a trader needs to sell a large number of shares of a stock, the act of selling them will increase the market’s supply of that stock, driving the price down. The trader could try to solve this by selling the stock off very slowly, or in very small increments, but holding a volatile stock too long can also be costly.

Minimizing the Market Impact of Large Trades

Dark pools, first developed in the 1980s, offer a better solution. “A dark pool is a venue for executing trades off the exchange in a completely anonymous and confidential manner,” said Domowitz. Because the supply and demand in a dark pool are completely hidden from the broader market, selling a large quantity of stock in such an exchange should not cause its price to drop. Automated systems match sellers’ offer prices with buyers’ bids, without revealing the outcome of the trades to anyone else. Once shares have been traded in a dark pool, the buyer can hold onto them, sell them on the open market, or trade them in another dark pool transaction.

Until very recently, there were only a few dark pools in existence. The concept was profitable, and not patented or particularly difficult to understand, but starting a successful dark pool required an enormous amount of liquidity. Smaller pools were worthless, because traders could not trade large orders in them.

That all changed about two years ago, when a new crop of dark pools suddenly appeared. “The reason for the explosion was algorithmic trading,” said Domowitz. Using new algorithms, traders can now take a large block of stock and move it through different dark pools, selling off chunks of the order in each pool. The algorithms can find a pool of liquidity very quickly, then sell as much of the order as possible there before moving on.

Gauging Productivity

To determine whether this new landscape of dark pool trading is actually productive, Domowitz and his colleagues analyzed 12.6 million orders that were placed over the course of 2007. For some parts of the analysis, they also supplemented the data with another 8 million recorded orders, providing a robust statistical base.

The data reveal that dark pool trading decreases transaction costs compared to other strategies, even in highly volatile markets. That result was both timely and surprising. “The news is full of the fact that we are high volatility these days, and actually it is conventional wisdom that you don’t use these algorithms to access dark pools in high volatility environments,” said Domowitz, but he added that “the evidence suggests otherwise.”

There are some pitfalls to using algorithms to trade in dark pools, though. Looking at the distribution of outcomes across many order executions, the team found that the algorithmic approach sometimes risked large losses. “That gain you get from using an algorithm to access these pools, although overall it’s beneficial, has introduced risk into the equation that you didn’t have before,” said Domowitz.

The risk appears to come from slippage, or accidentally revealing one’s hidden cards. Because the algorithms shop through multiple dark pools to complete an order, the strategy leaves tracks in the market that sharp-witted competitors could detect. Knowing that someone else is trying to push a large quantity of a stock onto the market, another trader could exploit that information and make money at the seller’s expense.

Revealing Information About a Trade

Traders themselves may exacerbate the problem by failing to understand how the algorithms work. For example, Domowitz says that traders may send part of a big order into a dark pool algorithm, and another part into the public market, without realizing that this compromises the algorithm. “It’s almost like they took one of their hole cards and put it up with the displayed cards in Texas hold ’em, and then they wonder why there’s information leakage,” said Domowitz.

The team also compared the individual dark pools to each other, and found that different pools vary widely in execution quality. Large, deep pools can move orders of magnitude more shares in a given period of time than small, shallow pools, so by constantly moving through different pools, modern algorithms may actually do worse than traditional dark pool strategies. “No matter what time period I look at, no matter what order duration, I get very distinct differences in execution quality across pools, all of which are being touched by the same algorithm,” said Domowitz, adding that “aggregation of crossing system liquidity through algorithms is not a panacea.”

The Portfolio That Never Sleeps

Lee Maclin of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences broadened the discussion to cover the use of algorithms beyond dark pool trading. In a persuasive introduction, he outlined how algorithmic strategies have come to dominate everything from portfolio theory to market making. “Virtually everything that we know about modern finance is in fact related to algorithmic trading and optimal execution,” said Maclin.

In an idealized model, a marketable buy (sell) order will disrupt the equilibrium of the market, causing the value of the traded stock to rise (fall). Once the trade is done, the market slowly recovers to a new equilibrium, which will inevitably be higher (lower) than the pre-trade price. Splitting the trade into two separate orders, and waiting for the market to stabilize between them, will instead cause two smaller price changes. The final impact on the market is still the same—the stock equilibrates at the same price after all of the trades are done—but the trader’s average loss due to market impact are lower.

The Theoretical Market Impact

Modern trading algorithms elaborate on that concept, allowing traders to parcel their orders in sophisticated ways to minimize their market impact. Meanwhile, portfolio managers can optimize their strategies with similar algorithms. Unfortunately, no algorithm can account for the conflicts that arise between the portfolio manager and trader.

“Traders don’t see risk and reward the same way as portfolio managers do, meaning they’re separate desks in many firms,” said Maclin. Typically, a trader gets an order from the portfolio manager, but doesn’t know anything about the portfolio it comes from. The trader’s priority is simply to execute the order. “They just feel risk in having that order on their desk, and they want to reduce that risk over time, whereas the portfolio manager of course sees the risk to the entire portfolio, which is different,” said Maclin.

Worse, firms generally provide incentives for traders to reduce their risk and for portfolio managers to maximize their returns; for either one, accommodating the other’s needs could mean taking a pay cut. That raises a major barrier to adopting the optimum set of algorithms. “If you force people into this new framework, you’re not going to be able to hire good traders or portfolio managers. Portfolio managers will not be willing to share risk, traders will not be willing to be benchmarked on someone else’s performance on that trade,” said Maclin.

Fewer Hedge Funds Means More Passive Strategies

Overcoming that problem will be hard, but firms can still learn important lessons about portfolio management from the underlying theory. That will be especially important in the aftermath of a major shakedown in the money management field. “Recently we’ve witnessed a collapse of the hedge fund industry,” said Maclin, adding that “in fact what we saw was that there weren’t a thousand different strategies, there were only half a dozen different strategies, and when they lost money, they all lost money together.”

One result has been a new appreciation for “passive,” or low-return portfolios. In these strategies, managers allocate their assets in a particular way, then wait for some period of time, usually measured in days or weeks, then reallocate. According to Maclin’s analysis, though, that’s a bad approach: “You should be trading all the time—what you’re doing by holding your positions constant is taking on more risk.” Furthermore, the expected deltas of the portfolio—the changes required to move the portfolio from its current holdings to its new optimal risk/reward state—grow over time, eventually necessitating large, compressed, impact-heavy executions. Therefore, it can be said that these lazy portfolios ultimately increase both risk and costs.

A more insidious problem is that alpha, or expectation of a return, decays throughout the holding period. By holding stocks as alpha decays, passive portfolio managers are losing money. Instead, Maclin argues, managers should trade constantly. “The biggest gain to come out of the new framework is going to be when people take a realistic assessment of investment management returns and start applying the principles of…continuous trading.”

Also read: Bringing a Scientific Perspective to Wall Street

A “New Economy” for Scientific Innovation

Gov. David Paterson announced a new multiyear program to support science-based innovation in the Empire State.

Published June 12, 2009

By Adrienne J. Burke

Gov. Patterson (left) shares remarks at The New York Academy of Sciences.

New York Governor David Paterson chose The New York Academy of Sciences as a backdrop for his announcement of a new multiyear program to support science-based innovation in the state.

Paterson said the state will commit up to $100 million to the “Innovation Economy Matching Grants” program, one of several initiatives he offered under the general theme of spurring development of a “new economy” in New York. The Governor said the state also will provide 10 cents in matching funds for every federal stimulus dollar awarded to New York research facilities.

Paterson cited clean energy as the industry likely to be the biggest beneficiary of the “new economy” effort. What is clear, he said, is that the state can no longer rely on manufacturing and the financial industry as the engines that once supported much of its economic base.

Academy Board Chair John Sexton (left) confers with Gov. Paterson and Academy President Ellis Rubinstein (right) during Paterson’s “new economy” announcement at the Academy

A New Economy

“A new economy is emerging,” Paterson said. “It is knowledge-based, it is tech-based and it is based on innovation.”

Academy President Ellis Rubinstein introduced Paterson. Rubinstein said he was “delighted” Paterson chose to make his announcement at the Academy.

“We are thrilled to work with the Governor and the Governor’s team to connect the best of global science and technology to our State institutions and to enrich the economies not just of New York City but also Upstate New York and Eastern Long Island.”

Also read: A Science State of Mind in the Empire State and Celebrating New York as a World Science Center

The Culture Crosser: The Sciences and Humanities

The Academy’s symposium “The Two Cultures in the 21st Century” considers a now 50-year-old lament that a divide between the sciences and the humanities impedes social progress. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum put C.P. Snow’s famous University of Cambridge Rede Lecture into context.

Published May 1, 2009

By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

Raffaello Sanzio, *The School of Athens*, 1511

Born in 1905 in Leicester, Charles Percy Snow grew up in a family that barely clung to the British middle class. His father taught piano lessons and clerked in a shoe factory. The family home didn’t even have a real bathroom.

But Snow would pull himself up through education: A prestigious science scholarship took him to Cambridge and gave him the opportunity to study physics at the famed Cavendish Laboratory alongside Ernest Rutherford, who pioneered our understanding of the atomic nucleus.

Soon Snow launched what would become a highly successful career as a novelist, and then began to serve Her Majesty’s government in a variety of science-related capacities. By 1959 he had already become Sir Charles and was en route to Lord Snow. Soon to leave government service, he began to punditize and pronounce in nonfiction format—to say what he really thought.

And so late in the day on May 7, 1959, Snow rose to a Cambridge lectern to deliver the yearly Rede lecture, a centuries-old affair, and an invitation to pontificate for someone deemed to have earned it.

He was 53 years old and, as a contemporary put it, “a kindly looking, avuncular figure, who beams at the world out of a round face through round glasses in a way which in-spires a belief in man’s better nature and the benevolence of the universe.”

Snow had spent his life up to that point moving among two separate and atomized groups of very smart people: literary intellectuals on the one hand, and scientists on the other. Now he seized the occasion to address a problem that had been “on my mind for some time…a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life…By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer.”

This pedigree gave Snow a natural credibility as he went on to describe a disturbing “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between these two intellectual groups. Soon he illustrated the point with a canonical example:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

This tends to be how we think of Snow today: A man at a cocktail party, trying to broker a peace between warring tribes of eggheads. It’s also how we tend to think about the “two cultures”: A divide between people who do equations, and people who do Shakespeare.

Such interpretations aren’t wrong, they’re merely simplistic. They don’t help us understand why Snow would later express the wish that he had titled his lecture “The Rich and the Poor,” and suggest many had missed its central point. Snow cared a great deal about breakdowns between scientists and writers, but the reasons he cared are what ought to most concern us, because they still resonate across the 50-year remove that separates us from Snow’s immediate circumstances.

Above all, Snow feared a world in which science could grow divorced from politics and culture. Science, he recognized, was becoming too powerful and too important; a society living disconnected from it couldn’t be healthy. You had cause to worry about that society’s future—about its handling of the future.

For this lament about two estranged cultures came from a man who had not only studied physics and written novels, but who had spent much of his life, including the terrifying period of World War II, working to ensure that the British government received the best scientific advice possible.

That included the secret wartime recruitment of physicists and other scientists to work on weapons and defenses, activities which put Snow high up on the Gestapo’s Black List. So, no: Snow’s words weren’t merely about communication breakdowns between humanists and scientists. They were considerably more ambitious than that—and considerably more urgent, and poignant, and pained.

It helps to think of Snow as an early theorist on a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well-meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision-making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical? At best that’s a difficult quandary; there are many ways in which the translation can go wrong, and few in which it can go right. Yet World War II had demonstrated beyond question that the nations that best marshal their scientific resources have the best chance of survival and success, making sound science policy an essential component of modern, advanced democracies.

The oft-told story of the atomic bomb, in which a letter from none other than Albert Einstein helped alert President Roosevelt to the danger, makes this point most profoundly. But in a lecture delivered at Harvard little more than a year after his “Two Cultures” address and entitled “Science and Government,” Snow illustrated the same dilemma through the example of radar.

He argued that if a small group of British government science advisers, operating in conditions of high wartime secrecy, had not spearheaded the development and deployment of this technology in close conjunction with the Air Ministry, the pivotal 1940 Battle of Britain—fought in the skies over his nation—would have gone very differently. And Snow went further, identifying a bad guy in the story: Winston Churchill’s science adviser and ally F.A. Lindemann, who Snow described as having succumbed to the “euphoria of gadgets.”

Rather than recognizing radar as the only hope to bolster British air defenses, Lindemann favored the fantastical idea of dropping parachute bombs and mines in front of enemy aircraft, and tried (unsuccessfully) to derail the other, pro-radar science advisers. Churchill’s rise to power was an extremely good thing for Britain and the world, but as Snow noted, it’s also fortunate that the radar decision came about before Churchill could empower Lindemann as his science czar.

So, no wonder Snow opposed any force that might blunt the beneficial influence of science upon high-level decision-making. That force might be a “solitary scientific overlord”—Snow’s term for Lindemann—or it might be something more nebulous and diffuse, such as an overarching culture that disregards science on anything but the most superficial of levels, and so fails to comprehend how the advancement of knowledge and the progress of technology simultaneously threaten us and yet also offer great hope.

Such a culture is what Snow detected in Great Britain in 1959; such a culture is also, to a great extent, what we find in the United States today—albeit for very different reasons.

With this background in place, we can begin to understand and translate one of the more seemingly antiquated parts of Snow’s lecture: His particular beef with literary intellectuals, who come in for by far the greatest thrashing in the speech. Nowadays, when the profession of academic literary criticism is “losing its will to live” (as one Yale English prof recently put it), it’s hard to imagine a period when literary intellects virtually ran things. Yet that is what Snow claimed to observe around him, and what he was reacting to.

It’s not that bookworms were directly controlling the British government. But Snow felt that his country’s “traditional culture” strongly privileged training in literature and the classics, rather than in the sciences; the assumptions of this traditional culture then greatly influenced society and its institutions. As a consequence, much of the British intelligentsia failed to comprehend science and seemed to abhor its extension in the form of industrialization, technological advancement, and economic growth. For Snow, such an attitude was wrong-headed: Technological advancement held great hope for improving the health and welfare of the poor people of the world.

In a nod toward even-handedness, Snow delineated the faults of both intellectual groups treated in his lecture. But any-one could see he did not regard those faults as entirely equal. His scientists come off as can-do men of great sympathy and optimism, albeit “self-impoverished” because of their inability to see the relevance of literature to their lives. But as for the other camp, the literati who fail to comprehend science, but enjoy sneering at it?

They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it.” Snow even observed that while scientists have “the future in their bones,” literary types respond “by wishing the future did not exist.” They were, in Snow’s words, “natural Luddites.” Such a quality did not recommend itself at a time when science had begun to transform the world far more rapidly than ever before.

To the “two cultures” problem, Snow saw just one solution. England had the most specialized educational system in the world—one that separated students with scientific talent from those with humanistic leanings at an early age, and then funneled them in different directions—and for Snow it simply had to change.

Otherwise, his country would remain ill-equipped to tackle the leading political problems of the day, especially the gap between the industrialized and developing world—an issue Snow thought the scientists understood best, and could best address by working to spread the benefits of technology abroad. Or as he put it:

For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country’s special danger, for the sake of the western society living precariously rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans and the whole West to look at our education with fresh eyes.

Seen through an adequate lens, then, Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture, his “Science and Government” speech, and in fact all of his other major addresses reduce to the same point: Let’s align our intellectual resources so science can achieve its full world-changing potential. Let’s not let anything get in the way of the translation of scientific knowledge into social relevance and action—not petty rivalries and egos, not scientific overlords and their pet theories and gadgets, and not disciplinary divides or cultural disconnects. Because it’s simply too important.

Today, Snow’s point is more poignant than ever. Innovative scientific and technological solutions are the key to meet the 21st century’s economic, environmental, public health, and security challenges that transcend political borders. Just 50 years ago, Snow probably could not have foreseen global threats such as climate change, bird flu, or bioterrorism. But his vision of the need to unify the disparate intellectual camps in order to achieve the world-changing potential of science was prescient.

Also read: Building Bridges in the Humanities and Sciences

About the Authors

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist. Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist and author at Duke University. Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s forthcoming book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, will be published in the summer of 2009.

Older posts

Newer posts