Category Archives: economist

Evolutionary design – getting the computer to evolve novel designs

The Economist has this article about how designers are using software to evolve better designs. The approach is called evolutionary design and it “enables a computer to run through tens of millions of variations on an invention until it hits on the best solution to a problem.”

The system takes the design blueprints as a genetic makeup and then evolves a population of different designs. Ones, that work well, are discarded and those that are promising are mixed with other promising designs. This process is repeated for perhaps millions of generations until some truly “inspired” designs are generated.

The article describes cases where evolutionary design has come up with novel designs that human designers had not thought of. For instance:

At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary algorithm to come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre’s bandwidth.

The evolutionary algorithm (creating and mixing blueprints) is quite easy to develop (I once wrote one), the hard part is evaluating which designs are “good”. That is done using a software simulation of the designs and is the true constraint on this novel technology.

Still, very interesting.

The Sudanese teddy bear circus

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You may well have heard about the British volunteer teacher Gillian Gibbons who has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation from Sudan because she allowed her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. She was convicted of “insulting religion” because any depictions of Muhammad are deemed insulting – so naming a teddy bear Muhammad is a no-no.

I must admit that I find this kind of thing a little crazy. As I have said in the past, I think it’s very important to be tolerant of other cultures and open to other ways of life. However, I just can’t respect the kind of country/culture that thinks this reaction is OK. Ridiculous.

Even more worrying is the fact that it seems many people in the area thought that this punishment was too lenient for the crime and have been protesting and calling for the death sentence! These guys are completely mental. They need some perspective.

The Economist has an article on the the subject. What they say there is what I have found to be true here in Cape Town: most Muslims in democratic countries also think this kind of reaction is unjust.

Update: I have just read that the woman was given a presidential pardon and has been released. A good step, but I still think that the law was a crazy one.

How rich mothers have more sons

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It has been known for years that couples in powerful or rich positions have more sons that daughters. The opposite is also true, poor parents have slightly more daughters than sons. This all makes excellent evolutionary sense because a poor daughter is very likely to have children anyway, and in human society can marry upwards.

Poor sons however, are far less likely to have children due to competition from other males. A rich son could have many children, possibly with many women. His rich sister however, can only have a few children and will not really be benefit from being rich. So if you are rich have more sons, if you are poor have more daughters. It makes good sense and the strategy can be seen in the data.

I always liked the results and the evolutionary logic of this little story. But I wondered what mechanism was used to impart knowledge of one’s social position on the choice of sex in a child. The Economist has this article showing a beautifully simple mechanism of doing this – stress! For instance data shows that of the babies conceived in New York the week after 9/11, significantly more were ~~boys~~ girls.

It’s so simple. If you are highly stressed during pregnancy have more daughters because they will probably have more children. If you are unstressed then have more sons – they can probably better take advantage of your situation.

Is organic necessarily good?

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The Economist has this article discussing the latest trends in ‘green’ foods like organic farming and buying local. I am regularly reminded of the article when I hear people advocating organic farming, etc.

If you look at the whole picture, organic farming is not as good as it seems.

Farming is bad for the environment – that is a given.
We need to minimize the impact of farming, but still feed the masses.
Organic farming is not nearly as efficient as that assisted (even responsibly) by synthetic fertilizers, genetic modification, etc
Therefore, unless you want people to starve, it is better to use more intensive (non-organic) farming methods
The alternative is to farm more land which would have disastrous impacts on the environment

For instance, the article points out that:

Global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation.

It’s great that people are willing to make the effort to “go green”. But you have to look at the bigger picture when evaluating the impact of your actions.

Racial quotas and the rugby world cup

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The Economist has two articles (here and here) about our Rugby World Cup victory and racial quotas in sport. From the article:

They think it “pragmatic” to have “brief periods of positive discrimination to jump-start any group that has been racially oppressed for generations and has been unable to achieve its potential.”
“But once a big affirmative shove towards greater fairness has been engineered, it is dangerous to perpetuate a system of quotas, racial or otherwise, because it always risks undermining the principle of individual merit.”
“Far better for the government to concentrate on investment, training and talent-spotting in poor black schools.”

As far as I am concerned, it is almost always best not to impose quotas on sports. Time and energy should instead be focussed on developing affirmative talent young so that real stars are developed.

Lucky Dube

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I was recently on a street in Moshi, Tanzania when a street vendor told me that Lucky Dube had been murdered. I was amazed that Mr Dube had made such an impact all the way up in Tanzania. (I later found that Reggae is extremely popular in Tanzania)

The Economist has this obituary on Lucky Dube who was murdered during a hijacking recently. From the article:

Lucky Dube was “the best-loved and biggest-selling reggae star in South Africa.”
He “drifted into Rastafarianism out of schoolboy curiosity, believing only parts of it and smoking no ganja.”
Dube eventually persuaded the SABC to air “the first anti-apartheid song to be played on a white station.”
He took on drugs (“You go sniffling them glue/No good for you”); promiscuity and AIDS (“Don’t you think it’s time/to be a little more responsible”) and racial quotas (“We are tired of people who/think that affirmative action is the way out/and is another way of putting puppets/where they don’t belong.”)
“He also sang against South Africa’s appalling crime wave” which eventually claimed his life

Fertile lap-dancers earn substantially more

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The Economist has this very interesting article about a study into human evolution conducted in strip clubs. Basically:

In humans, women have evolved the ability to hide when they are ovulating (and therefore fertile) from men
In evolutionary terms this is beneficial to the women because the men never know when they are fertile and must therefore hang around all month
The theory is that this would trigger an evolutionary arms race and that men would evovle heightened sensitivity to women’s fertility

To test this, the researcher enlisted the help of lap-dancers. His idea was that attractiveness would translate into earnings:

Lap-dancers who were ovulating (and therefore fertile) earned an average of $335 per shift compared to just $185 for those who were menstruating.
Those on the pill (and therefore never fertile) earned a flat average of $185 per shift.

So it seems that men have evolved a sensitivity to femail fertility and that fertile women seem more attractive to us.

Che – not many people know what he really was

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Forty years ago last week Che Guevara was killed by government soldiers in Bolivia. Since then, his image has become highly fashionable and this iconic photo “has become one of the world’s most familiar images”.

The image is so popular that at one point I read a lengthy synopsis on the man to find out what everyone was on about. I was mildly surprised to find that a lot about Che does not tie up with his modern day image.

The Economist has this article describing just that disconnect. From the article:

The wider the cult spreads, the further it strays from the man. Rather than a Christian romantic, Guevara was a ruthless and dogmatic Marxist, who stood not for liberation but for a new tyranny. In the Sierra Maestra, he shot those suspected of treachery; in victory, Mr [Fidel] Castro placed him in charge of the firing squads that executed “counter-revolutionaries”; as minister of industries, Guevara advocated expropriation down to the last farm and shop. His exhortation to guerrilla warfare, irrespective of political circumstance, lured thousands of idealistic Latin Americans to their deaths, helped to create brutal dictatorships and delayed the achievement of democracy.

As the article says: “Sadly, most of those who buy the T-shirt neither know nor care.”

People are better at spotting animals than cars

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The Economist has this article about research suggesting that people have built-in modules in their brains to spot animals. The experiment described shows that people notice moving animals better than moving vehicles.

The hypothesized reason for this is that the ability to notice moving animals has been made innate in people through evolution. Evolution just hasn’t had time to get people to notice moving cars as well.

This morning on the way to work a cat ran along the sidewalk and I noticed it immediately even though I wasn’t really looking in that direction. Perhaps if it had been a skateboard I wouldn’t have noticed it…

The Economist on Manto and the ANC

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In the last two weeks The Economist has had two articles (here and here) on our health minister, Manto. From the articles:

AIDS is now thought to kill 1,000 South Africans each day
Some 12% of the population, more than 5m people, are infected with HIV
She [Manto] has sown deadly confusion in the minds of many HIV sufferers by questioning the efficacy of ARVs and exaggerating their side-effects, instead promoting the curative benefits of beetroots, garlic and African potatoes.

Now she has been accused of receiving a liver transplant because of a serious drink problem, and of continuing to drink since her transplant. The local Sunday Times, in possession of her confidential medical records, also alleges that hospital staff were forced to bring her booze during an earlier hospital stint for a shoulder operation. The newspaper maintains that she was convicted of stealing patients’ jewellery and hospital supplies while working in Botswana in the 1970s, following which she was banned from the country for ten years.

The more general of the articles criticizes Thabo and the ANC in general for firing the effective deputy minister of health instead of Manto:

“Ms Madlala-Routledge was certainly feisty. She was, for instance, fond of visiting hospitals unannounced. Often she witnessed dreadful conditions and poor management—and then talked honestly about these problems in public. To Mr Mbeki and others in the African National Congress-dominated government, this sort of initiative and candour were not evidence of a democratic representative doing her job but of an undisciplined cadre refusing to defer to her bosses, who prefer to discuss such matters behind closed doors.”

I have often thought along similar lines about the ANC. The organization had to survive years of exile and oppression so it had to develop a strong emphasis on providing a united front and absolute loyalty. When your lives are at stake and you’re fighting an oppressive regime you can’t afford to show any dissension.

The problem is that those times are gone and the ANC still emphasizes the same culture – which is bad for a democracy. Absolute loyalty is not only unnecessary, it is having a negative effect on the country.