July 2017 – Mathematical Software

July 31, 2017August 5, 2017

Why Should You Learn Mathematics?

Mathematician with Calipers by Raphael — Mathematician with Calipers from The School of Athens fresco by Raphael (1509-1511)

Why should you learn mathematics? By mathematics, I am not referring to basic arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and raising a number to a power — for example for an interest calculation in personal finance. There is little debate that in the modern world the vast majority of people need to know basic arithmetic to buy and sell goods and services and perform many other common tasks. By mathematics I mean more advanced mathematics such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, and college level statistics.

I am not referring to highly specialized advanced areas of mathematics such as number theory or differential geometry generally taught after the sophomore year in college or in graduate school.

I am following the language of Andrew Hacker in his book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions in which he argues the algebra requirement should be eliminated in high schools, community colleges, and universities except for degrees that genuinely require mathematics. Hacker draws a distinction between arithmetic which is clearly needed by all and mathematics such as algebra which few use professionally.

A number of educators such as Eloy Ortiz Oakley, the chancellor of California’s community colleges, have embraced a similar view, even arguing that abolishing the algebra requirement is a civil rights issue since some minority groups fail the algebra requirement at higher rates than white students. Yes, he did say it is a civil rights issue:

The second thing I’d say is yes, this is a civil rights issue, but this is also something that plagues all Americans — particularly low-income Americans. If you think about all the underemployed or unemployed Americans in this country who cannot connect to a job in this economy — which is unforgiving of those students who don’t have a credential — the biggest barrier for them is this algebra requirement. It’s what has kept them from achieving a credential.

(emphasis added)

Eloy Ortiz Oakley on NPR (Say Goodbye to X + Y: Should Community Colleges Abolish Algebra? July 19, 2017)

At present, few jobs, including the much ballyhooed software development jobs, require more than basic arithmetic as defined above. For example, the famous code.org “What Most Schools Don’t Teach” video on coding features numerous software industry luminaries assuring the audience how easy software development is and how little math is involved. Notably Bill Gates at one minute and forty-eight seconds says: “addition, subtraction…that’s about it.”

Bill Gates assessment of the math required in software development today is largely true unless you are one of the few percent of software developers working on highly mathematical software: video codecs, speech recognition engines, gesture recognition algorithms, computer graphics for games and video special effects, GPS, Deep Learning, FDA drug approvals, and other exotic areas.

Thus, the question arises why people who do not use mathematics professionally ought to learn mathematics. I am not addressing the question of whether there should be a requirement to pass algebra to graduate high school or for a college degree such a veterinary degree where there is no professional need for mathematics. The question is whether people who do not need mathematics professionally should still learn mathematics — whether it is required or not.

People should learn mathematics because they need mathematics to make informed decisions about their health care, their finances, public policy issues that affect them such as global warming, and engineering issues such as the safety of buildings, aircraft, and automobiles — even though they don’t use mathematics professionally.

The need to understand mathematics to make informed decisions is increasing rapidly with the proliferation of “big data” and “data science” in recent years: the use and misuse of statistics and mathematical modeling on the large, rapidly expanding quantities of data now being collected with extremely powerful computers, high speed wired and wireless networks, cheap data storage capacity, and inexpensive miniature sensors.

Health and Medicine

An advanced knowledge of statistics is required to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of drugs, vaccines, medical treatments and devices including widely used prescription drugs. A study by the Mayo Clinic in 2013 found that nearly 7 in 10 (70%) of Americans take at least one prescription drug. Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2015 estimated about 59% of Americans are taking a prescription drug. Taking a prescription drug can be a life and death decision as the horrific case of the deadly pain reliever Vioxx discussed below illustrates.

The United States and the European Union have required randomized clinical trials and detailed sophisticated statistical analyses to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of drugs, medical devices, and treatments for many decades. Generally, these analyses are performed by medical and pharmaceutical companies who have an obvious conflict of interest. At present, doctors and patients often find themselves outmatched in evaluating the claims for the safety and effectiveness of drugs, both new and old.

In the United States, at least thirty-five FDA approved drugs have been withdrawn due to serious safety problems, generally killing or contributing to the deaths of patients taking the drugs.

The FDA has instituted an FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FDAERS) for doctors and other medical professionals to report deaths and serious health problems such as hospitalization suspected of being caused by adverse reactions to drugs. In 2014, 123,927 deaths were reported to the FDAERS and 807,270 serious health problems. Of course, suspicion is not proof and a report does not necessarily mean the reported drug was the cause of the adverse event.

Vioxx (generic name rofecoxib) was a pain-killer marketed by the giant pharmaceutical company Merck (NYSE:MRK) between May of 1999 when it was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and September of 2004 when it was withdrawn from the market. Vioxx was marketed as a “super-aspirin,” allegedly safer and implicitly more effective than aspirin and much more expensive, primarily to elderly patients with arthritis or other chronic pain. Vioxx was a “blockbuster” drug with sales peaking at about $2.5 billion in 2003 ¹ and about 20 million users ². Vioxx probably killed between 20,000 and 100,000 patients between 1999 and 2004 ³.

Faulty blood clotting is thought to be the main cause of most heart attacks and strokes. Unlike aspirin, which lowers the probability of blood coagulation (clotting) and therefore heart attacks and strokes, Vioxx increased the probability of blood clotting and the probability of strokes and heart attacks by about two to five times.

Remarkably, Merck proposed and the FDA approved Phase III clinical trials of Vioxx with too few patients to show that Vioxx was actually safer than the putative 3.8 deaths per 10,000 patients rate (16,500 deaths per year according to a controversial study used to promote Vioxx) from aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen (the active ingredient in Advil and Motrin), naproxen (the active ingredient in Aleve), and others.

The FDA guideline, Guideline for Industry: The Extent of Population Exposure to Assess Clinical Safety: For Drugs Intended for Long-Term Treatment of Non-Life-Threatening Conditions (March 1995), only required enough patients in the clinical trials to reliably detect a risk of about 0.5 percent (50 deaths per 10,000) of death in patients treated for six months or less (roughly equivalent to one percent death rate for one year assuming a constant risk level) and about 3 percent (300 deaths per 10,000) for one year (recommending about 1,500 patients for six months or less and about 100 patients for at least one year without supporting statistical power computations and assumptions in the guideline document).

The implicit death rate detection threshold in the FDA guideline was well above the risk from aspirin and other NSAIDs and at the upper end of the rate of cardiovascular “events” caused by Vioxx. FDA did not tighten these requirements for Vioxx even though the only good reason for the drug was improved safety compared to aspirin and other NSAIDs. In general, the randomized clinical trials required by the FDA for drug approval have too few patients – insufficient statistical power in statistics terminology – to detect these rare but deadly events ⁴.

To this day, most doctors and patients lack the statistical skills and knowledge to evaluate the safety level that can be inferred from the FDA required clinical trials. There are many other advanced statistical issues in evaluating the safety and effectiveness of drugs, vaccines, medical treatments, and devices.

Finance and Real Estate

Mathematical models have spread far and wide in finance and real estate, often behind the scenes invisible to casual investors. A particularly visible example is Zillow’s ZEstimate of the value of homes, consulted by home buyers and sellers every day. Zillow is arguably the leading online real estate company. In March 2014, Zillow had over one billion page views, beating competitors Trulia.com and Realtor.com by a wide margin; Zillow has since acquired Trulia.

According to a 2013 Gallup poll, sixty-two percent (62%) of Americans say they own their home. According to a May 2014 study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about eighty percent (80%) of Americans 65 and older own their home. Homes are a large fraction of personal wealth and retirement savings for a large percentage of Americans.

Zillow’s algorithm for valuing homes is proprietary and Zillow does not disclose the details and/or the source code. Zillow hedges by calling the estimate an “estimate” or a “starting point.” It is not an appraisal.

However, Zillow is large and widely used, claiming estimates for about 110 million homes in the United States. That is almost the total number of homes in the United States. There is the question whether it is so large and influential that it can effectively set the market price.

Zillow makes money by selling advertising to realty agents. Potential home buyers don’t pay for the estimates. Home sellers and potential home sellers don’t pay directly for the estimates either. This raises the question whether the advertising business model might have an incentive for a systematic bias in the estimates. One could argue that a lower valuation would speed sales and increase commissions for agents.

Zillow was recently sued in Illinois over the ZEstimate by a homeowner — real estate lawyer Barbara Andersen 🙂 — claiming the estimate undervalued her home and made it difficult therefore to sell the home. The suit argues that the estimate is in fact an appraisal, despite claims to the contrary by Zillow, and therefore subject to Illinois state regulations regarding appraisals. Andersen has reportedly dropped this suit and expanded to a class-action lawsuit by home builders in Chicago again alleging that the ZEstimate is an appraisal and undervalues homes.

The accuracy of Zillow’s estimate has been questioned by others over the years including home owners, real estate agents, brokers, and the Los Angeles Times. Complaints often seem to involve alleged undervaluation of homes.

On the other hand, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff’s Seattle home reportedly sold for $1.05 million on Feb. 29, 2016, 40 percent less than the Zestimate of $1.75 million shown on its property page a day later (March 1, 2016). 🙂

As in the example of Vioxx and other FDA drug approvals, it is actually a substantial statistical analysis project to independently evaluate the accuracy of Zillow’s estimates. What do you do if Zillow substantially undervalues your home when you need to sell it?

Murky mathematical models of the value of mortgage backed securities played a central role in the financial crash in 2008. In this case, the models were hidden behind the scenes and invisible to casual home buyers or other investors. Even if you are aware of these models, how do you properly evaluate their effect on your investment decisions?

Public Policy

Misleading and incorrect statistics have a long history in public policy and government. Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie With Statistics (1954) is mostly concerned with misleading and false polls, statistics, and claims from American politics in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It remains in print, popular and relevant today. Increasingly however political controversies involve often opaque computerized mathematical models rather than the relatively simple counting statistics debunked in Huff’s classic book.

Huff’s classic and the false or misleading counting statistics in it generally required only basic arithmetic to understand. Modern political controversies such as Value Added Models for teacher evaluation and the global climate models used in the global warming controversy go far beyond basic arithmetic and simple counting statistics.

The Misuse of Statistics and Mathematics

Precisely because many people are intimidated by mathematics and had difficulty with high school or college mathematics classes including failing the courses, statistics and mathematics are often used to exploit and defraud people. Often the victims are the poor, marginalized, and poorly educated. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil gives many examples of this in her recent book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016).

The misuse of statistics and mathematics is not limited to poor victims. Bernie Madoff successfully conned large numbers of wealthy, highly educated investors in both the United States and Europe using the arcane mathematics of options as a smokescreen. These sophisticated investors were often unable to perform the sort of mathematical analysis that would have exposed the fraud.

Rich and poor alike need to know mathematics to protect themselves from this frequent and growing misuse of statistics and mathematics.

Algebra and College Level Statistics

The misleading and false counting statistics lampooned by Darrell Huff in How to Lie With Statistics does not require algebra or calculus to understand. In contrast, the college level statistics often encountered in more complex issues today does require a mastery of algebra and sometimes calculus.

For example, one of the most common probability distributions encountered in real data and mathematical models is the Gaussian, better known as the Normal Distribution or Bell Curve. This is the common expression for the Gaussian in algebraic notation.

${P(x) = \frac{1}{{\sigma \sqrt {2\pi } }}e^{{{ - \left( {x - \mu } \right)^2 } \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{ - \left( {x - \mu } \right)^2 } {2\sigma ^2 }}} \right. \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {2\sigma ^2 }}}}$

$x$ is the position of the data point. $\mu$ is the mean of the distribution. If I have a data set obeying the Normal Distribution, most of the data points will be near the mean $\mu$ and fewer further away. $\sigma$ is the standard deviation — loosely the width — of the distribution. $\pi$ is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter. $e$ is Euler’s number (about 2.718281828459045).

This is a histogram of simulated data following the Normal Distribution/Bell Curve/Gaussian with a mean $\mu$ of zero (0.0) and a standard deviation $\sigma$ of one (1.0):

To truly understand the Normal Distribution you need to know Euler’s number e and algebraic notation and symbolic manipulation. It is very hard to express the Normal Distribution with English words or basic arithmetic. The Normal Distribution is just one example of the use of algebra in college level statistics. In fact, an understanding of calculus is needed to have a solid understanding and mastery of college level statistics.

Conclusion

People should learn mathematics — meaning subjects beyond basic arithmetic such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, and college level statistics — to make informed decisions about their health care, personal finances and retirement savings, important public policy issues such as teacher evaluation and public education, and other key issues such as evaluating the safety of buildings, airplanes, and automobiles.

There is no doubt that many people experience considerable difficulty learning mathematics whether due to poor teaching, inadequate learning materials or methods, or other causes. There is and has been heated debate over the reasons. These difficulties are not an argument for not learning mathematics. Rather they are an argument for finding better methods to learn and teach mathematics to everyone.

End Notes

1 “How did Vioxx debacle happen?” By Rita Rubin, USA Today, October 12, 2004 The move was a stunning denouement for a blockbuster drug that had been marketed in more than 80 countries with worldwide sales totaling $2.5 billion in 2003.

2 Several estimates of the number of patients killed and seriously harmed by Vioxx were made. Dr. David Graham’s November 2004 Testimony to the US Senate Finance Committee gives several estimates including his own.

3 A “blockbuster” drug is pharmaceutical industry jargon for a drug with at least $1 billion in annual sales. Like Vioxx, it need not be a “wonder drug” that cures or treats a fatal or very serious disease or condition.

4 Drug safety assessment in clinical trials: methodological challenges and opportunities

Sonal Singh and Yoon K Loke

Trials 2012 13:138

DOI: 10.1186/1745-6215-13-138© Singh and Loke; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012

Received: 9 February 2012 Accepted: 30 July 2012 Published: 20 August 2012

The premarketing clinical trials required for approval of a drug primarily guard against type 1 error. RCTs are usually statistically underpowered to detect the specific harm either by recruitment of a low-risk population or low intensity of ascertainment of events. The lack of statistical significance should not be used as proof of clinical safety in an underpowered clinical trial.

Credits

The image of an ancient mathematician or engineer with calipers, often identified as Euclid or Archimedes, is from The School of Athens fresco by Raphael by way of Wikimedia Commons. It is in the public domain.

About the author

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

July 26, 2017

Escaping the Distraction Economy: Seven Steps to Reduce Distractions

A few months ago, starting my new business, I noticed that I was spending large amounts of valuable time on valueless distractions — notifications, e-mails, and other disruptions from social media, web sites, mailing lists, other people, and other causes. This is a problem that had been growing over the last few years in part with the growth of social media and increased smartphone use.

I stopped and spent some time figuring out how to reduce the many distractions to a low level. Here are seven steps to reduce distractions.

Seven Steps to Reduce Distractions

Turn Off Non-Essential Notifications
Unsubscribe from Mailing Lists
Unfollow Distracting Friends and Colleagues
Remove Distracting Social Media Apps from Your Smartphone
Block Notifications from Distracting Apps You Can’t Remove
Get an Office or Work from Home
Read Deep Work by Cal Newport

Turning Off Non-Essential Notifications

By default, social media sites like Facebook and many other mobile/web sites/apps/services send large numbers of promotional and other e-mails to subscribers e-mail accounts and push notifications to subscriber smartphones. In most of these services, it is possible to turn off most or even all e-mail and smartphone notifications in the Settings for your account. Sometimes this is in Options or Account Options or some other section title, but Settings seems to be the most common at present.

This screenshot shows my Notifications settings on Facebook after aggressively turning off most of them:

Facebook Notifications Settings — Facebook Notification Settings

E-Mail notifications are controlled by a section further down in the list — not shown in the screenshot above. Here is a screenshot with the E-Mail section:

Clicking on Email gives:

Note that I select the “Only notifications about your account, security and privacy” option and other options to minimize the number of emails that I receive.

Most social media services, web sites, and apps have similar options to turn off all or most non-essential notifications, both push notifications and emails, buried in the Settings, Options, or a similar section.

Unsubscribe from Mailing Lists

Most modern mailings lists have an unsubscribe link buried in the email messages, usually at the bottom. This is required by law. In my experience, around eighty percent of these actually work. The unsubscribe links usually work for large high profile web sites and services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

With older mailing lists, you may need to hunt further, e-mail the administrator etc.

If unsubscribe does not work, you can block the mailing list using your SPAM filter or message rules in your mail program.

Unfollow Distracting Friends and Colleagues

One problem with social media is that you may get inundated with distracting or annoying posts from friends and colleagues. Nonetheless, you may not want to offend them by unfriending or disconnecting. Facebook and some other social media sites enable you to unfollow connections. You remain connected but you no longer see their posts in your feed.

Unfollow a friend in their Facebook profile

Remove Distracting Social Media Apps from Your Smartphone

I simply removed the Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a few other social media apps from my smartphone. This completely eliminates a large number of distracting and annoying notifications, saves space, and reduces the ability of your social media or other service to track you and invade your privacy.

Block Notifications from Distracting Apps You Can’t Remove

In my case, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and several other apps were useless fluff on my smartphone. I have a few apps that generate unnecessary notifications but that I would like to keep on my phone. In this case, I blocked the notifications in the Settings (I have an iPhone).

Get an Office or Work from Home

With the cult of “collaboration” and open offices, distractions have proliferated at work and it has become increasingly difficult for many workers to work productively or enjoyably. If possible, get an office with walls and a door you can close when you need to focus on your work or consider working from home.

Working from home has its own distractions including close proximity to a kitchen with food, small children, large children, spouses, books, toys, and other items that can distract you. Setting aside a room or a a dedicated office area with a divider can help with this.

In addition, working from home often makes it difficult to separate home/family/personal life from work/office life.

In my case, I am self-employed and opted to rent an office with walls and a door. This has worked well so far.

Obviously, these options depend on your situation and resources.

Read Deep Work by Cal Newport

Read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University who also writes self-help books about how to work more productively. I found Deep Work insightful with many useful thoughts and suggestions.

Cal Newport has also given a number of talks and interviews on his ideas available online including:

Quit Social Media (TEDxTysons on YouTube)

Deep Work: How to Focus and Resist Distractions (with Cal Newport) — The College Info Geek Podcast

Interview: Deep Work with Cal Newport (Brian Johnson)

There are several more available if you poke around with Google or another search engine.

Overall, Deep Work is a great book and the author has many great points. Like many self-help books, it tends to hyperbole and uses very exceptional people like Theodore Roosevelt as inspirational examples. The definition of “Deep Work” could be more precise. Pick the ideas that work for you.

Conclusion

These steps are not a complete cure for the tidal wave of distractions in modern society, most associated with the Internet, social media, and smartphones. However, taken together they can reduce the level of distractions in your life substantially, making it easier to focus on both work and your personal life productively.

About the Author

July 24, 2017July 23, 2017

A Murder Over Mars: Did Johannes Kepler Poison Tycho Brahe?

An Unexpected Death

On October 13, 1601 the famous astronomer and astrologer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) — new friend, confidant, and adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, one of the most powerful men in Europe — became unexpectedly and gravely ill at a banquet in the Imperial capital of Prague. Tycho was a colorful, athletic and brilliant Danish nobleman who had defied convention by taking a commoner as his wife and by pursuing the study of astronomy instead of the more common pastimes of his fellow nobles in Denmark which he pointedly disdained as frivolous and unimportant.

Tycho suffered horribly for about a week, seemed to begin recovering, and then died unexpectedly on October 24, 1601. Tycho was noted for his good health and vigor. His death came as a surprise to his family, friends, and colleagues.

The Imperial court was a hotbed of intrigue and filled with peculiar and often ambitious men who frequently worked with highly toxic chemicals: astrologers, alchemists and magicians in the employ of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) who hoped to unlock the secrets of the universe by funding a research program that might be called the Manhattan Project of its time.

From the start there were rumors Tycho had been poisoned and some suspected his assistant the young, equally brilliant mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, remembered today as the author of Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion.

Tycho was buried with great pomp and circumstance in Prague on November 4, 1601 with some of his friends and colleagues making pointed aspersions in Kepler’s direction during the ceremonies. In time, his beloved wife Kirsten Barbara Jørgensdatter was buried beside him.

Tycho and Kepler

By one year earlier (1600), Tycho had accumulated over a lifetime by far the most accurate measurements of the positions of the planets over time, especially the planet Mars thought by astrologers and kings to influence the occurrence and outcomes of wars and conflict. After years of lavish royal patronage in Denmark, Tycho had a falling out with the new king and fled to the mostly German-speaking Holy Roman Empire of Rudolf II. Here with funding from Rudolf II he hoped to analyze his data and confirm his own novel theory of the solar system, the known universe at the time, in which the Earth was the center with the Sun and Moon orbiting the Earth and all the other planets orbiting the Sun.

Tycho hired the brilliant young up-and-coming astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to analyze his data. Kepler hoped to use Tycho’s data to confirm his own Theory of Everything based on the hot new Sun-centered theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).

Tycho and Kepler had a stormy working relationship until Tycho’s untimely death in 1601 which left Kepler with the access to Tycho’s data that he desired. In the chaos accompanying Tycho’s death, Kepler quietly walked off with Brahe’s notebooks containing his data on Mars. The ensuing controversy with Brahe’s family was eventually resolved more-or-less amicably, but in the mean time Kepler had the data he had sought.

In one of the great ironies of scientific history, Kepler proceeded to discover that his pet theory, the other variants of Copernicus’s Sun-centered system, the traditional Earth-centered system of Klaudius Ptolemy, and Tycho’s hybrid Earth-Sun centered system were all wrong, although he was never able to fully accept that the data ruled out his system as well.

The models were all mathematically equivalent although they had different physical interpretations. All incorrectly assumed that the motions of Mars and the other planets were built up from uniform circular motion, the infamous epicycles.

Kepler’s analysis of Tycho’s data on the planet Mars took about five years — including his work in 1600 and 1601 when he had limited access to the full data set. In 1605, while taking a break during the Easter Holiday, Kepler had his Eureka moment. He realized that the orbit of Mars was elliptical with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse and that the speed of the planet varied inversely with distance from the Sun so that the plane swept out the same area in the same time. These two insights are now known as Kepler’s First and Second Laws, and they ensured the fame of both Brahe and Kepler to the present day.

Did Kepler Murder Tycho?

In 1991, soon after the end of the Cold War, the National Museum in Prague gave a somewhat peculiar goodwill gift to Denmark, a small box with a six centimeter long sample of Tycho Brahe’s mustache hair, acquired years earlier when Tycho’s crypt was refurbished in 1901. Tycho and his wife’s skeletons were examined and then reburied in 1901, but a few samples were taken and given to the National Museum in Prague.

The gift reopened the old question of whether Kepler or someone else had poisoned Tycho in 1601. Kepler had been a seemingly deeply religious man who had given up a comfortable teaching job in Graz rather than abandon his Lutheran faith and convert to Catholicism. He was later excommunicated from the Lutheran Church for publicly rejecting the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity with no apparent gain to himself. This latter doctrine was an esoteric theological issue nonetheless of paramount importance in the conflict between the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics that would soon lead to the horrific Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

This same stubbornness in holding to his views and perhaps the jealousy of his colleagues had led Kepler into bitter clashes with Tycho and others during his career. Could such a man have committed murder for the lucrative position of Imperial Mathematician in Rudolf II’s court, fame, or even a fanatical desire to extend human knowledge whatever the cost?

The hair from Tycho’s mustache was examined using modern forensic techniques by Bent Kaempe, Director of the Department of Forensic Chemistry at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Copenhagen — one of the leading toxicologists in Europe, and potentially lethal levels of mercury detected. Kaempe concluded that:

Tycho Brahe’s uremia can probably be traced to mercury poisoning, most likely due to Brahe’s experiments with his elixir 11-12 days before his death.

Mercury and mercury compounds, some extremely toxic, were widely used in alchemy. Tycho himself used a mercury compound at low doses, potentially deadly at higher doses, for his health — following the alchemical ideas of Paracelsus (1493-1541): the elixir mentioned by Kaempe.

Some experts argued the mercury measurements demonstrated that Tycho had been poisoned and murdered with a mercury compound. Others suggested that the mercury was due to the embalming process or some other contamination of Tycho’s remains.

In 2004, journalists Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder published a book Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries popularizing the theory that Kepler poisoned Tycho with mercuric chloride — based on the mercury measurements from Tycho’s mustache hair.

The controversy led to the exhumation of Tycho’s skeleton in 2010 in an attempt to settle the issue. The analysis of Tycho’s remains seemingly ruled out lethal levels of mercury as the cause of death in 2012 and seems to have been generally consistent with natural causes, a bladder infection.

The Limits of Forensic Science

After over four-hundred years, it seems unlikely that we will ever know for sure if Tycho Brahe was poisoned and, if so, by whom. Even today, people in their fifties die unexpectedly from heart attacks and other causes at rates substantially higher than people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Medicine was very limited in Tycho’s time — often more dangerous than doing nothing in fact. Modern sanitation measures were almost non-existent even at an Imperial court.

On the other hand, Rudolf II had recruited and gathered around himself in Prague some of the most brilliant, highly educated, ambitious, and strange men of his time, many experts like Tycho in toxic chemicals used in alchemy and medicine. Many were probably familiar with plants and herbs available in Renaissance Europe, some of which could have been used as deadly poisons as well. He offered these men enormous wealth at a time when most people in Europe lived in dire poverty.

Kepler’s own mother was accused of and convicted of witchcraft. She was specifically accused of poisoning another woman with a magic potion. Kepler himself was a highly educated and brilliant man. It is quite conceivable that he could have known much about poisons, perhaps even ones unknown or rarely used today. He had close access to Tycho, his boss.

The mercury measurements of Tycho’s mustache hair is one of many examples of overconfidence in forensic science. This overconfidence is often an explicit or implicit claim that forensic techniques — if done right — can give an absolutely certain or almost certain (for example, the one in many trillion odds often quoted for DNA matches in criminal cases) answer.

This false certainty is a claim made by governments, prosecutors, scientists who should know better, and many others. It is heavily promoted in the popular media with television shows like CSI (2000-2015), Numb3rs (2005-2010), Quincy (1976-1983), blockbuster movies like Silence of the Lambs (1991), and many others.

Numerous cases in recent years have demonstrated the uncertainty of forensic methods in the real world. These include the Brandon Mayfield case for fingerprint analysis, the questionable use of DNA “profiling” in the Amanda Knox murder case in Italy, the failure of DNA analysis in the Jaidyn Leskie case in Australia, and many more.

In the case of DNA, the astronomical DNA match odds frequently quoted by prosecutors are highly misleading because they do not include a valid statistical model for the probability of contamination of the samples in the field, at the crime scene by investigators, or at the forensic laboratory where the DNA match is performed. Almost certainly the odds of a false match due to some sort of contamination scenario are much higher than the one in several trillion odds often cited by prosecutors.

Contamination in the field is a likely explanation for the mercury levels in Tycho’s mustache. The mercury may have come from the embalming process. Perhaps Tycho or someone near him somehow spilled some mercury compound on his mustache while he was ill and dying. Tycho worked with and used mercury compounds frequently and they were likely present in his home.

The reality is that there is limited data in many crimes and possible crimes like Tycho’s death. There are usually many interpretations possible for that data, some more likely than others, some improbable but not impossible. In many cases, we don’t even know the prior probability of those interpretations. In the case of Tycho, we don’t know the probability that his mustache was contaminated with mercury by embalming or some other cause.

Mathematically, we now know there are an infinite number of mathematical models that can match any finite set of data with a desired level of accuracy. In an early example of this, Kepler was able to show that the traditional Ptolemaic Earth-centered model of the Solar System, the hot new Copernican Sun-centered model, and the hybrid model of Tycho were mathematically equivalent and matched the data equally well — predicting the future position of Mars in the Zodiac to about one percent accuracy, a few degrees.

Most of this infinity of mathematical models matching a finite data set are extremely complicated. We typically throw out the more complicated models to get a finite set of arguably plausible choices.

Historically, this method of selecting mathematical models has proven remarkably powerful in physics and astronomy. Kepler discovered that a simple mathematical model of non-uniform elliptical motion explained the seemingly extremely complex motions of Mars and the other planets. Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and others have repeated this success with other data and phenomena including gravitation, electromagnetism, and radioactive decay.

This infinity of possible mathematical models for a finite data set is the mathematical explanation for the many possible interpretations of the data from a crime scene. Even if we exclude extremely complicated and implausible models and interpretations a priori, we are still typically left with a number of possibilities, notably including contamination scenarios with DNA and other forensic methods such as the measurements of the mercury in Tycho’s mustache hair.

The figure above illustrates the many models problem in a forensic context. It shows a simulation with four simulated data points. These data points could be, for example, the strength of a DNA signal or the mercury level in different parts of Tycho’s body. The high point on the right is the mercury level in his mustache hair. The problem is the level could be lower in his body — too low to cause death. The other points could be measurements of the mercury level in various bones from his skeleton.

We don’t actually have the soft tissues where the putative poison would have done its deadly work. These have decayed away. The analyst must therefore infer the mercury level in those tissues over four hundred years ago from measurements today. The red line represents, for example, the threshold for a lethal level of mercury in Tycho’s body. Thus, depending on which model is chosen, mercury did or did not kill Tycho. In reality the forensic analysis is often much more complex and difficult to perform than this simple simulated example and illustration.

In conclusion, the certainty or near certainty often claimed or implied in many forensic analyses is frequently illusory.

Credits

The image of the planet Mars is from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and is in the public domain. It is a mosaic of images taken by observation satellites in orbit around Mars. It shows the giant Valles Marineris canyon on Mars front and center. It is one of the most popular images of Mars.

The image of Tycho Brahe is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

The image of Johannes Kepler is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

About the Author

July 23, 2017July 23, 2017

Coding Bootcamps Closing

Hack Education has a good article on the recent closures of Dev Bootcamp and The Iron Yard, early high profile “coding bootcamps.”

“Why are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?”

which has got some attention on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831918

A couple comments on the article:

In my experience in the Silicon Valley, software developers/engineers/programmers almost always have at least a bachelor’s degree from an accredited non-profit university or college, mostly in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) field with CS (Computer Science) and EE (Electrical Engineering) the largest sub-groups.

I have personally never encountered a graduate from controversial for-profit schools like DeVry, University of Phoenix, etc. or a bootcamp. Even developers with a solid work history but no bachelor’s degree seem to encounter a significant prejudice against them.

Yes, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college and made it big in software, but they are rich kids who graduated from elite prep schools and then dropped out of Harvard.

The article has a brief line about a Haskell programmer making $250,000 in the Silicon Valley. It is not clear if the author actually knows of a case like this. If real, it is probably very unusual.

Top software engineers seem to be bringing in a base salary of around $150,000 in the Silicon Valley:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/a-snapshot-of-software-engineering-salaries-at-silicon-valley-startups

There is always the question of stock options and RSU’s (restricted stock units) and cash bonuses which can sometimes boost the base salary significantly.

Keep in mind the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area is very expensive with some of the highest home prices and apartment rental rates in the United States. The salaries are still attractive but not nearly as large as they sound if you are from an inexpensive region like Texas.

The bottom line is to be very cautious about paying large sums of money for coding bootcamps or other non-traditional education.

About the Author

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

July 21, 2017July 21, 2017

The Accuracy of Fingerprint Identification in Criminal Cases

In the wake of the Brandon Mayfield case (2004) which raised serious questions about the accuracy of fingerprint identification by the FBI, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to perform a scientific assessment of the accuracy and reliability of latent fingerprint identification in criminal cases. Initial results were published in:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Bradford T. Ulery, 7733–7738, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018707108

Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions

Bradford T. Ulery (a), R. Austin Hicklin (a), JoAnn Buscaglia (b),1, and Maria Antonia Roberts (c)

Edited by Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and approved March 31, 2011 (received for review December 16, 2010)

ABSTRACT

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7733.full

Authors

Bradford T. Ulery

(a) Noblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;

R. Austin Hicklin (a) Noblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;

JoAnn Buscaglia (b) Counterterrorism and Forensic Science Research Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135; and

Maria Antonia Roberts (c) Latent Print Support Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135

Whether a 0.1 percent false positive rate is “small” is a subjective value judgement. Would you drive across a bridge that had a 1 in 1000 (0.1 percent) chance of collapsing and killing you as you drove across it? No, probably not.

In addition, the 0.1 percent false positive rate is based on a small sample of less than 1000 test cases, 744 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints. The Federal fingerprint databases such as the ones used in the Brandon Mayfield case have millions of people in them and may eventually have all US citizens (over 300 million people) in them. How does this “small” rate extrapolate when a fingerprint is compared to every fingerprint in the US or the world?

One might wonder why such an assessment was not done a long time ago.

This is a report on the Brandon Mayfield case:

https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0601/exec.pdf

The National Research Council also published a detailed report Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward in 2009 addressing the scientific issues raised by the Mayfield case and other questions about the scientific validity of forensic science methods.

Fingerprint identification: advances since the 2009 National Research Council report by Christophe Campod (Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2015 Aug 5; 370(1674): 20140259.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0259) has a summary of work on the issue since the 2009 National Research Council Report.

The bottom line is fingerprints are much more accurate than random chance but hardly infallible as used to be widely believed.

Credits

The fingerprint image is from the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by way of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

About the Author

July 20, 2017September 11, 2017

Microsoft Layoffs and STEM Shortage Claims (2009-2017)

Microsoft and its former CEO and founder Bill Gates are prominent in claiming that there is a severe shortage of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workers in the United States. Bill Gates testified on this claim to the House Committee on Science and Technology in 2008.

I know we all want the U.S. to continue to be the world’s center for innovation. But our position is at risk. There are many reasons for this but two stand out. First, U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs. Second, we don’t invest enough as a nation in the basic research needed to drive long-term innovation.

Bill Gates

Remarkably, Microsoft appears to have laid off about 35,000 of these allegedly rare, difficult to find STEM workers since 2008, with even more planned layoffs announced a few weeks ago.

Microsoft Layoffs

In January 2009, Microsoft announced planned layoffs of 5,000 employees, about five (5) percent of its workforce over the next eighteen months.

In July 2014, Microsoft announced layoffs of 18,000 employees. Most of these employees, reportedly about 12,500, were part of the Nokia mobile phone division, many in Finland. In 2015 Finland students were ranked sixth (6th) worldwide in math and science compared to the United States twenty-eighth (28th). In 2001 Finland was tops in the PISA international tests. The engineers and other STEM workers laid off by Microsoft would have been educated in Finland’s schools in the early 00’s when Finland was at or near the top.

UPDATE: added September 11, 2017

Remarkably, the same month that Microsoft announced these layoffs of 18,000 difficult to find STEM workers, the New York Times published an op-ed “Break the Immigration Impasse” by Sheldon G. Adelson, Warren E. Buffet, and Bill Gates (New York Times, July 11, 2014, page A25) calling for “immigration reform,” meaning more “immigrants” on dicey guest-worker visas (the controversial H1-B visa is actually a non-immigrant visa) for the technology industry, and again implying a shortage:

We believe it borders on insanity to train intelligent and motivated people in our universities — often subsidizing their education — and then to deport them when they graduate. Many of these people, of course, want to return to their home country — and that’s fine. But for those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let’s roll out the welcome mat.

A “talented graduate” reform was included in a bill that the Senate approved last year by a 68-to-32 vote. It would remove the worldwide cap on the number of visas that could be awarded to legal immigrants who had earned a graduate degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from an accredited institution of higher education in the United States, provided they had an offer of employment. The bill also included a sensible plan that would have allowed illegal residents to obtain citizenship, though only after they had earned the right to do so.

(emphasis added)

One is reminded of the definition of chutzpah as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”.

END UPDATE

In July 2015, Microsoft announced layoffs of 7,800 employees, also mostly related to Nokia.

In May 2016, Microsoft announced layoffs of about 2,000 employees, including about 1300 from Nokia.

In July 2016, Microsoft announced layoffs of about 2,850 employees.

In July 2017 (a few weeks ago) Microsoft confirmed reports of planned layoffs without confirming reports that about 3,000 employees would lose their jobs, primarily in sales.

Thus, Microsoft appears to have laid off about 35,000 employees with more cuts likely in the coming year since Bill Gates testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology. Microsoft reported to the SEC that it had about 114,000 full time employees in 2016.

Stack and Rank

Up until 2013, Microsoft overtly practiced a stack and rank employment system where employees were graded on a curve compared to co-workers and “low performers” apparently laid off or fired. This stack and rank system was the subject of a highly critical article in Vanity Fair by Kurt Eichenwald in July 2012 which probably contributed to the decision to shelve the system. It is unclear how many allegedly difficult to find and replace STEM workers were laid off, fired or constructively discharged due to stack ranking.

Microsoft has been sued over allegedly using stack ranking to discriminate against female employees.

Microsoft like other industry leaders such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon is noted for being extremely picky about who it even interviews for jobs and for a grueling, highly demanding interview process. Nonetheless, Microsoft appears to have had a policy of laying off a certain percentage of these highly qualified STEM workers every year despite repeatedly claiming to have great difficulty in finding these same STEM workers!

Conclusion

Microsoft is not alone in announcing sizable layoffs at the same time that it claims a STEM worker shortage. Many other large STEM worker employers do the same thing. In an exchange on Bloomberg TV in August 2014 interviewer Alix Steel confronted industry funded “immigration reform” PAC FWD.us then chief Joe Green on the inconsistency between numerous layoff announcements and the shortage claims. His answer was especially unconvincing and he soon resigned as chief of FWD.us probably at the behest of his friend and colleague Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

It is difficult to know what to make of this. On a short term quarterly basis replacing a highly experienced and more expensive STEM worker with a less experienced, cheaper, more error prone STEM worker is likely to make the quarterly and sometimes annual earnings numbers look better. However, there is a reason more experienced STEM workers are on average more expensive than less experienced STEM workers. Some problems simply require more experience to solve; two less experienced STEM workers is not always equivalent to one more experienced STEM worker.

I personally don’t doubt that these bizarre hiring and employment practices have seriously negative consequences in the longer term. Many of Kurt Eichenwald’s unnamed sources in his Vanity Fair article on Microsoft’s stack and rank employment system blamed the system for Microsoft’s faltering fortunes. Would Microsoft not have been better off reassigning its highly skilled workers in Finland to new projects?

Nonetheless, despite the STEM shortage claims and despite what seems like common sense, many major STEM worker employers like Microsoft continue to lay off, fire, or constructively discharge large numbers of the qualified STEM workers they claim they want.

Credits

The picture of Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum 2012 in Davos, Switzerland is from the World Economic Forum by way of Wikimedia Commons. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

About the author

July 20, 2017April 30, 2021

The Problems with STEM Shortage Claims

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) shortage claims are claims that there is a current or projected shortage of STEM workers in the United States and sometimes worldwide. These claims are promoted by large employers of STEM workers in private industry, academia, and the government. In the last few years the claims tend to be focused on a particular subset of STEM workers: programmers, software engineers, and other “technology” workers, where “technology” is implicitly equated with “computer technology.”

STEM Workers: Computer Science Pioneers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

A high profile example of these claims can be found in venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s widely cited Wall Street Journal article “Why Software is Eating the World” (August 20, 2011):

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

(Emphasis added)

Andreesen is far from an isolated instance of these claims. For example, in his testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology in 2008, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates claimed:

I know we all want the U.S. to continue to be the world’s center for innovation. But our position is at risk. There are many reasons for this but two stand out. First, U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs. Second, we don’t invest enough as a nation in the basic research needed to drive long-term innovation.

(Emphasis added)

Ironically, Microsoft, a highly profitable company, announced several thousand layoffs of its highly qualified and presumably difficult to replace employees a few months later. Both Bill Gates and Microsoft have been prominent in claiming shortages of qualified technology workers since 2009 even as Microsoft has announced a series of major layoffs of presumably highly qualified technology workers. Microsoft announced another round of about 3,000 layoffs a few weeks ago (July 2017).

Rising Above the Gathering Storm

In 2005, the COMMITTEE ON PROSPERING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY OF THE 21ST CENTURY produced a widely cited report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future” under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC) promoting similar claims. The committee members were:

NORMAN R. AUGUSTINE (Chair), Retired Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Bethesda, MD

CRAIG R. BARRETT, Chairman of the Board, Intel Corporation, Chandler, AZ

GAIL CASSELL, Vice President, Scientific Affairs, and Distinguished Lilly Research Scholar for Infectious Diseases, Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN

STEVEN CHU, Director, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA

ROBERT M. GATES, President, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

NANCY S. GRASMICK, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Baltimore, MD

CHARLES O. HOLLIDAY, JR., Chairman of the Board and CEO, DuPont Company, Wilmington, DE

SHIRLEY ANN JACKSON, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

ANITA K. JONES, Lawrence R. Quarles Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

JOSHUA LEDERBERG, Sackler Foundation Scholar, Rockefeller University, New York, NY

RICHARD LEVIN, President, Yale University, New Haven, CT C. D.

(DAN) MOTE, JR., President, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

CHERRY MURRAY, Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA

PETER O’DONNELL, JR., President, O’Donnell Foundation, Dallas, TX

LEE R. RAYMOND, Chairman and CEO, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Irving, TX

ROBERT C. RICHARDSON, F. R. Newman Professor of Physics and Vice Provost for Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

P. ROY VAGELOS, Retired Chairman and CEO, Merck, Whitehouse Station, NJ

CHARLES M. VEST, President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

GEORGE M. WHITESIDES, Woodford L. & Ann A. Flowers University Professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

RICHARD N. ZARE, Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Nearly all of the committee members were current or former top executives, frequently the CEO, of major employers of STEM workers, public and private.

The committee followed up with another report in 2010 “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” Category 5 is a reference to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale in which the highest classification Category 5 is reserved for extreme storms with winds exceeding 156 miles per hour.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, like most reports of this type (there are many), called for more STEM teachers, more STEM students, more visas for STEM worker immigrants and guest workers strongly implying a major shortage of STEM workers in the United States.

Ironically the report starts with a claim that appears grossly inconsistent with this, a quote from Nobel Laureate Julius Axelrod (Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Preface, Page ix):

Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by one percent of the scientists.

Julius Axelrod, Nobel Laureate

It is manifestly unclear why more scientists and more funding for science is needed if ninety-nine percent accomplish almost nothing. Why indeed not eliminate the nearly useless 99 percent and the 99 percent of funding that they consume? Federal R&D funding is over $100 billion per year. Why not free up over $99 billion to fund other more productive activities? 🙂

STEM shortage claims have a long history

STEM shortage claims predate the acronym STEM by many decades. STEM shortage claims date back at least to the early days of the Cold War, when much of the focus was on physics and physicists. Then, as now, the STEM shortage claims often involve an alleged existential threat to the nation.

Professor David Kaiser of MIT, a physicist turned historian of science, has written a number of articles and given a number of presentations on the Cold War physics and STEM claims, notably “TOIL, TROUBLE, AND THE COLD WAR BUBBLE: PHYSICS AND THE ACADEMY SINCE WORLD WAR II” at the Perimeter Institute in 2008.

In recent years, the STEM shortage claims tend to focus on computer science and software engineering rather than physics, although claims of this type are common for almost all forms of STEM work.

STEM shortage claims have many highly qualified critics

The claims have been questioned and challenged by a large number of academics, journalists and others for many years including Michael S. Teitelbaum (Senior Research Associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School), Norman Matloff (Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis), Peter Cappelli (George W. Taylor Professor of Management, Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania), Paula Stephan (Professor of Economics at Georgia State University), Ron Hira (Associate Professor, Howard University), Patrick Thibodeau (a Senior Editor at Computerworld), Robert N. Charette of the IEEE and author of “The STEM Crisis is a Myth,” and many others.

I have written many critical articles on the claims including “STEM Shortages, Purple Squirrels, and Leprechauns,” “STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook’s $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp”, “The Corinthian Colleges Scandal, STEM Shortage Claims, and Minorities.” The last includes a lengthy discussion of Microsoft’s numerous layoffs in the comments section. UPDATE (May 16, 2018) Also see my article: “Microsoft Layoffs and STEM Shortage Claims (2008-2017)”.

STEM shortage claims are closely connected to, although logically separate from, calls for increased immigration and guest worker visas such as the controversial H1-B visa. The claims are also closely connected to, though again logically separate from, claims that education in the United States is poor both in absolute terms and compared to other nations such as Finland and calls for “school reform” often promoted by extremely wealthy individuals such as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and others.

STEM shortage claims are confusing

STEM shortage claims are surprisingly difficult to pin down. The crux of the issue is what exactly constitutes a qualified STEM worker (software engineer, scientist,…)?

Many claims seem to imply a shortage of STEM workers with critical basic skills taught at the K-12 level such as basic arithmetic, algebra, AP Calculus, basic programming skills taught in AP Computer Science and other introductory CS courses (or for that matter learned programming a game on your laptop in Python or Java, a popular activity among STEM students who never take AP Computer Science).

Obviously, the tens of thousands of highly qualified engineers and other STEM workers laid off by Microsoft since 2008 have these K-12 skills in spades. Indeed many of the highly qualified engineers laid off by Microsoft were from Finland which has consistently scored top or near the top in the international comparisons of K-12 skills frequently cited in STEM shortage claims. So apparently this is not the STEM shortage referred to by Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Similarly, many older — over thirty-five, even over thirty sometimes — software engineers and other STEM workers report surprising difficulties finding jobs, a fair number leaving the STEM fields every year. Again there is little question these candidates have the K-12 level STEM skills and much more.

When pressed about these obvious inconsistencies, spokesmen for STEM employers will generally begin to claim they mean a shortage of very specific skills such as years of paid experience developing first person shooter apps for the iPhone (IOS) in Objective C (C++ on Android won’t cut it!) and often that they mean a shortage of the very best STEM workers — along the lines of the elite one percent in the Axelrod quote from the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report above. Often, years of specialized experience in narrowly defined skills and being the very best are implicitly conflated in these revised STEM shortage claims.

What do the STEM employers really want?

Yet, do the employers actually want either the candidates with years of specialized experience or the very best or both as they claim? There are some high profile rejections of candidates who would seem to meet these criteria such as Facebook’s infamous turndown of Brian Acton who went on to found WhatsApp which Facebook then acquired for $19 billion.

In recent years, many employers are noted for quizzing candidates about introductory data structures and algorithms taught in college CS courses rather than advanced specific skills learned on the job. This has spawned a large number of interview practice books, courses and programs such as Gayle Laakmann McDowell’s Cracking the Coding Interview.

It is difficult to see how these introductory questions would reliably identify the specialized skills learned on the job such as iPhone app programming that are often listed in job descriptions and cited in defenses of STEM hiring practices.

UPDATE April 30, 2021: These algorithmic coding interviews test knowledge of the implementation of introductory data structures and algorithms that those of us who develop advanced algorithms such as video compression, speech recognition, touch processing, or data analysis rarely implement in the real world. Most modern programming and languages such as C++, Python, R, MATLAB, and many others include data structures such as linked lists, trees, hash tables (also known as associative arrays or dictionaries) as built in language features or components of standard libraries always included with the language. Similarly the searching and sorting algorithms often used in coding interviews are built into modern programming languages, libraries and tools. Experienced developers reuse code and rarely re-implement these data structures and algorithms which date to the 1960’s or earlier.

Can these tests really identify the very best candidates either? More likely they identify candidates who have spent many hours drilling on the questions in books like Cracking the Coding Interview.

STEM shortage claims are highly questionable. For sure, there is no shortage of K-12 level STEM skills in the United States and probably world wide. Indeed, the actual hiring practices of STEM employers suggest they are often not interested in the specialized skills they claim to seek when confronted about refusing to hire, laying off, or firing seemingly highly qualified engineers and other STEM workers.

Is the real problem a STEM worker shortage or excessively picky, irrational, discriminatory and ultimately costly hiring and employment practices?

Credits

The picture of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

About the Author

July 13, 2017

A Personal Note: Break-in

Someone broke into my storage locker in Mountain View (best known as Google’s home town) over the past weekend. I was notified but was not able to take a look until this morning. Fortunately, so far, nothing appears to have been taken or damaged. I don’t of course keep anything valuable, important, or that I cannot afford to lose in my storage locker.

About a dozen lockers, several neighboring lockers on the same floor and several on another floor with the same locker numbers for that floor, were reportedly broken into at the same time.

Many boxes were thrown about and cut or torn open, but nothing appears (so far) to have been taken or damaged. Supposedly the most common motive for locker break-ins is to get personal financial records related to bank accounts and other financial accounts as a step to gaining access to the money in the accounts. I don’t keep any personal records like that in my locker for that and other similar reasons.

While it does not look like I was personally targeted, it still leaves an uneasy feeling! One cannot be sure. 🙁

The picture below shows the boxes strewn about when I opened the locker this morning. They were neatly stacked and packed together in one corner before. Many of the smaller boxes and some of the larger ones were torn or cut — mostly cut — open.

Post Break-in Locker Contents — Post Break-in Locker