blake johnson

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, jumped back into the national spotlight this weekend after making some controversial remarks at a conference last friday. His speech discussed the gender gap in the sciences in academia and new research which offers some possible explanations. One of these explanations is that men may have an innate genetic advantage over women in the sciences.

Coverage of this issue differs widely between the national/international media like BBC News and the The Harvard Crimson. Something that the national media is leaving out is that Summers apparently followed his comment about innate differences with the statement: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”

The impetus for Summers comment is recent research which shows that the variance in science test scores is greater for men than for women. Consequently, there are more men that are really good at science, but also more men that are really bad at science.

This controversy seems awfully reminiscent of what Steven Pinker shows in The Blank Slate: modern society displays great resisitance to any explanation which is based on genetics rather than on social factors. That is not to say that in the particular case of women in science social factors are unimportant. But, clearly there are differences between men and women, and if there are factors which make men more inclined toward science, we should try to discover what those factors are, rather than ignoring them.

I heard an interesting talk from a Bell Labs scientist on Friday regarding the use of techniques borrowed from physics in modern wireless communication schemes. Specifically, these schemes have multiple antennas at both the sending and receiving end. Taking advantage of the multiple antennas requires modeling the effect of the environment on the progating waves. To do this, the Bells Labs scientists have borrowed some techniques from mesoscopic physics, particularly the random matrix methods developed by Dyson et al. Apparently, they published an article regarding this work in Science in 2001. I should try to find it.

Apparently stem cell research is proceeding with some sucess in this country (despite Pres. Bush’s ridiculous restrictions). See Wired News: Stem Cells May Open Some Eyes for some information on an experiment which converted stem cells into eye cells. If we could actually “grow” new eyes, that would certainly beat the current efforts with implanted CCD chips.

So, I’ve been in grad school for almost a month now, which seems incredible. I guess I should be used to time whizzing by now, but I still find it surprising. Classes are going okay. The problem sets are really rolling in now, but so far they have been manageable. I worry about when the problem sets really start getting difficult.

I haven’t been able to devote much time to research questions. Rob asked me to calculate the landscape of phase changes to the measuring pulse for the 2-qubit cQED system. It took me a while to figure out how to do this for the 1-qubit case, and by the time I thought I knew how to do 2-qubits, I was already deep in problem sets. So, I’ve been reduced to working on physics during time which I would normally set aside for relaxation. Oh well.

I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, but I suppose it is time to start posting again. The web address will probably change soon. I’m thinking about taking down needcollegestuff.com indefinitely. So, this will likely move to an address I bought 6 months ago: blakerobertjohnson.com. We’ll see if I can get the hosting company to do the changeover gracefully.

Alright, I’m out. Gotta get to group meeting.

I read a really interesting paper by Sherrilyn Roush that provides an important insight into the way in which the weak anthropic principle is important to science:

The idea that we must avoid thinking of ourselves as special encourages us to think that the best epistemic policy for arriving at objective knowledge is to ignore the subject, the one who observes, even to the extent of never considering that subject except as an object, an extended body, or a thing. The general notion of a selection effect, and the WAP, encourage in contrast the valuable recognition that we do not arrive at objective knowledge except by correcting for the biases of the observing subject, and, further, that one does not achieve this correction except through a great deal of attention to the observing subject. It is not only naive self-love, but also naive self-loathing or self-avoidance, that must be rejected to come to an objective view.