Paradigms: Shannon and Wiener

The IEEE is honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Claude Shannon. In contrast Norbert Wiener seems to slowly go into the history books and not as well praised as Shannon. I had the opportunity to see both at a distance and to have studied under their students. Each introduced a new paradigm, a simple example as how to see things.

For Shannon it was the binary symmetric channel, BSC as shown above. Bits, probabilities, information, coding. For Wiener it was the feedback loop, cybernetics, least square estimation, and the Wiener process. Both are paradigms of uncertainty. For Shannon it was p as the probability of sending a bit correctly and q for not. For Wiener it was noise introduced into the system at various points.

As they IEEE article states:

Bell Labs, now part of Nokia, organized the Claude Shannon Centennial Conference to reflect on the immense legacy of one of its most legendary alumni and look at the future of the information age he helped launch. Invited speakers discussed how Shannon’s work transformed their research fields and their own careers, and what lessons his life offers to today’s innovators.

 Now Murray Hill is a long stones thrown from my computer. It is now owned by Nokia, formerly Alcatel, formerly Lucent, formerly AT&T. The parking lot is now filled with solar arrays, that seems to be it most profitable output. Thus one wonders why the fuss?

Was Shannon as important as Wiener or the reverse. Wiener thought in the large. He saw the world as massive feedback loops driven by uncertainty. Shannon saw BSCs and codes. Wiener worried about the automation of manufacturing and the impact on workers, kind of like the current political campaign. Shannon did games.

Yet this was a gathering to honor Shannon. His impact was that his writing was simple, clear, and spawned careers that were in turn Shannonesque. Wiener wrote and thought, yet he like Shannon was a bit of a loner, yet Cybernetics took hold in Russia and not the US, yet Black-Scholes the option trading formula is merely an artifact of Wiener and his theory. One changed communications the other finance. One played games the other worried about the world. You choose.

Paradigm changes are critical. Yet what one does with them is also important.

Lysenko and The Soviet Academy

Graham has written a wonderful book on Lysenko and the Russian School of Genetics during the Stalin era. Lysenko viewed inheritance in the sense that certain characteristics could be handed down in generations based upon environmental factors experienced by parents. That is the change in a genetic makeup was not solely due to genetic changes per se. He could turn summer wheat to winter wheat by getting it used to a change in weather. Thus he did not need a genetic alteration but an environmental alteration was sufficient. In a sense the concept did play into the hands of the Marxist reasoning.

Graham blends the understanding of epigenetic changes that are currently being understood with the ideas of Lysenko and asks if this new understand then justifies Lysenko's ideas. On the other hand, Graham details Lysenko's way of dealing with his academic adversaries often resulting in their imprisonment and demise. The current understanding of gene expression and thus phenotype is that genes can be turned on and off by such epigenetic factors as methylation. Methyl groups bind to the nucleotides and also suppress expression directly by blocking the gene or indirectly by blocking transcription factors.

This is somatic epigenetics. Germ line epigenetics, parent to child has also been observed. Namely effects on the parent causing epigenetic changes can be handed down to the child, where it was assumed that the methylation of certain bases was eliminate but somehow they can be preserved. Thus, in a simplistic sense, an environmental change imprinting the parent can imprint the offspring. This may or may not be consistent in a broad sense with Lysenko but the author discusses it in some detail. Graham's discussion is limited as one would expect in a short book of this type but he does explain some of the issues well including the event of the "Dutch Winter", an epigenetic benchmark.

Graham has a wonderful discussion of his opportunistic meeting with Lysenko at a lunch table in the Russian Academy, and the brief attempt to elicit some explanation from Lysenko. Lysenko was as one would expect defensive since this occurred after he was taken down from his perch yet retained his academic credentials. This discussion is quintessential east meets west based upon my personal experiences in Russia when first meeting some notable. It was clear from Graham's description that Lysenko was still wary especially since Graham had been critical of him in Graham's prior writings.

Graham also presents a clear and coherent discussion of the players in this tragedy, the geneticists following the true path and how Lysenko and his actions resulted in their fall.

The only point that would have been useful to explore would be the need by the Marxist theorists to have a Lysenko position versus a Darwinian one. I had seen this battle with the probabilists. Marxist theory is deterministic and probability is its enemy. Yet many probabilists managed to work and prosper. Individuals like Gnedenko, Kolmogorov, Stratonovich, Markov and others developed the basis for stochastic processes that we see used in fields as broad as finance with the Black-Scholes theorem in options trading, a thought anathema to the Marxists. Graham does provide some insight but it would be worthwhile to have a more in depth discussion of this potential conflict.

Overall the book is an excellent addition to understanding both the Russian Academy and its functioning, the Stalinist management of the overall society, and a petri dish model of Academic infighting. It is very worthwhile for those seeking to understand both Russia as well as the politics of Science, albeit in a different vein.

GDP and the Great Economy

So how is the economy doing? As we see above the GDP is dragging at best. A growth rate of 3-4% would be necessary to stay ahead of the debt bow wave but at just above 1% we are treading on a recession again. Since 2008 we have been periodically dropping to 1% or below.

The above shows the GDP elements. Some growth but anemic.

The above shows the relative percent as well. No big change here either.

Overall we are weak and getting weaker. Costs of doing business are increasing and more and more employees are being supported by fewer workers.

Tech Anchor?

What is a Tech Anchor? Some writer in the NY Times argues that Tech anchors are companies. Sorry folks but they are Universities. The writer argues:

Silicon Valley and the surrounding region have had these companies for decades, from Hewlett-Packard and Intel to Facebook and Google. The Seattle area has its giants in Microsoft and Amazon. Even Austin has had its own tech powerhouse in Dell, though that company has seen better days. But New York? The biggest city in the country has plenty of tech companies and plenty of tech workers and it is second — though a distant second — among regional tech investment. A giant that can compete with behemoths of Silicon Valley, however, remains elusive. 

First did the writer ever hear of Boston? Route 128? Try taking a trip to Kendall Square! The Tech anchor is a place called MIT. Then Silicon Valley, ever heard of Stanford? Then Austin, how about UT.

Now for New York. There is an effort to put a high tech entity on the abandoned tip of an island in the East River. Land was available but every time I go by I wonder how one gets there. I can take a T train to MIT, and possibly even a car, although Google has apparently bought up all parking spaces, not environmentally friendly but this is not California.

New York has no real high tech institution. Columbia struggles, it is really a Liberal Arts shop, they try to do engineering but not really. NYU, well they got Brooklyn Poly, let's see how that works. Not really that much else.

So one needs a Tech Anchor, the anchor is academic not some start up and the anchor takes a while to mellow. So don't expect this for a few decades at best.

Department of Energy

Most people do not know that the largest portion of DoE's business is nuclear weapons. Somehow over the decades from Carter thru the current administration we have had Secretaries who at times were clueless as to their domain. Perhaps that has been planned, after all you can get a lot more done if your boss has no idea that you may even exist. But generally we do not appoint Secretary of Defense individuals who cannot distinguish a tank from an aircraft carrier. But well all too often have Sec DoE who would not know a MIRVed warhead from an electric car!

I just noted, perhaps with some humor, but also with possible abject terror, the Hill stating a potential DoE head. As The Hill states:

Trump said early in his campaign that he’d welcome the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee into his administration — “I’d love that,” he said in July — and Palin wasted little time specifying the post she’d want. The former Alaska governor said she’d like to head the Energy Department — for the opportunity to dismantle it. “I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby — oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations,” Palin told CNN last fall. “I’d get rid of [the DOE], and I’d let the states start having more control.”

This is concerning. You could get rid of the electric car project at DoE but what of those nukes! It is not as if the understanding of DoE is unknown by all, the Russians and the Chinese are very familiar with DoE weapons programs. Perhaps for once we could get a DoE head who knows something about its core business, the potential destruction of all life on the planet!

Ginkgo Nuts, Biodiversity and Climate Change

Some twenty five or so years ago I got some ginkgo nuts from the New York Botanical Garden. I planted them and last year one of the trees, a female, was filled with nuts. Fantastic. The squirrels did not seem to have any interest, smelly seed coats, but well that was not the end. Come Spring, the coat had gone and the squirrels managed to consume every one! The ginkgo has managed to survive some 100 million plus years but it had not faced the squirrel.

Now as we go further north we see the grey squirrel also going there as the warming occurs and thus many flora that were dependent on small consumption by red squirrels will be under siege by grey ones. The issue of changing and complex biodiversity means that there will be challenges to flora and fauna.

I make this comment because I have read a paper by Dr. Victoria Karchenko at The Botanical Garden Institute in Vladivostok where she states:


Now the climate changes become more pronounced. This affects to biodiversity and distribution of plants. Therefore, we need to study of the biodiversity and trends distribution of plants in specific environments. In this connection is necessary to clarify real composition of species in the of regional floras potential of their variability of and disseminating. A pressing problem remains the creation of a unified database of the flora of Russia, which takes into account the data of regional studies.  Research program allows executing posed problems if it would coordinate with other botanical gardens. This program will allow revealing structural and functional adaptation of species to various environmental conditions. This will help create a basis for design ways to regulation the development of plants and biotops.

As I had indicated, the paper by Dr. Kharchenko presents a very compelling argument for the development of a detailed flora for Russia especially the Eastern parts. We have been using certain sentinel plants such as Hemerocallis which are native to this part of Russia to measure long term climate changes. It is essential to have a detailed data base not only of the flora per se but more importantly an understanding of their propagation status based upon the balance with pollinators as well as fauna which may consume the plants before they can complete their re population cycle. We have seen not only a shift in bloom time and divergence with pollinators but more importantly animal predators on plants growing in numbers. This is a critical study especially in this highly bio-diverse area.

Eastern Russia is an relatively unexplored treasure trove of biological species. Many of my Hemerocallis are from there and there are still new species of that genus being discovered. However there may have been a balance in biodiversity for millennium but as we see warming we would expect drastic changes. To understand the changes we need a baseline and the proposal to establish such a well defined baseline is essential. There clearly should be substantial support for this effort, since one would expect the time scale for change to be quite short.