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22.9.15

Bad Deals: ME countries attract islamic extremists and export their educated to Europe

Since the large wave of war refugees from middle eastern countries like Syria, Iraq, Eritrea arrived in Germany, I have harsh fights with some people, usually colleagues or even friends.
The worst is a "professor" in my institute, whom I call a Zombie-Professor, since in his whole professional career he has not done anything a normal professor is supposed to do. He has not done a single lecture, he has not supervised a single master- or PhD student, he has never attracted grant money for a research project. He received his professor-ship from a mediocre university, simply by submitting a mediocre thesis. Since than (and perhaps for the remaining two years untill he retires) he spend a lazy life, like a parasite in our research center. He occasionally published some theoretical papers on subjects that nobody is interested and nobody can validate, not even himself. 
He publishes about statistics of cancer after radiation exposure, but he has never heard that cancer is based on genetic alterations in asingle cell, he has never heard that cancer can be cured in about 60% of cases today and that there is a lot of progress going on using stemcell-therapy, gene-therapy and immuno-therapies. For him, cancer patients are simply number or even points in a graph. And as superficial he is considering cancer patients, he is equally stubborn about people emmigrating to Germany on their escape from war, terror and death. He insists that these people are treatening his life, that they cost to much and that they spoil the Western culture. I usually respond to him that people fleeing a life of war, religious terror and unfreedom will be much more loyal citizens in the West than he has ever been. None of them will be such a parasite as he always was, but they will accept hard and dirty jobs, just to ensure a better life to their families and kids.
And many of these people, although not granted a professor-title from a mediocre German university, have more education, culture and intellectual spirit than him. It is worth noting that there is even a converse migration stream since a year or so: homegrown islamic extremists from European countries (Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, UK) leave to join the IS war, and I hope that none of them will ever come back. But in exchange, the peaceful, educated, tollerant people from Middle Eastern countries, those with a good education and with the dream to build a better future for themself and for their kids, are risking their life to settle in Europe. For us and for them, it is a good deal.   For the countries they are leaving, it is a brain drain of their future intellectual generation.
 
POOR countries often complain that their best minds are draining away—and for the most part they are right. The poorer the country, the larger the proportion of inventors who push off. Between 2007 and 2012, for example, 86% of Vietnam-born people who filed for patents did so while working outside Vietnam. By contrast, only 8% of Norwegian-born inventors were living outside Norway when they applied for patents. We know this because of the remarkably detailed records kept by the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
This does not mean that countries will become more skilled if they prevent their most talented people from leaving, of course. Even if it were possible to identify the brainiest inhabitants of a country and take away their passports, they would not all become inventors. Some could end up sweeping the streets due to lack of opportunity at home. It is probably better to let them leave for countries where their talents are better used, and then try to entice them back (as China does) or at least try to persuade them to lend their skills to the country of their birth.
A scattering of countries sit some distance from the trend line. Small nations like Cyprus, Iceland and Luxembourg export a lot of inventors, given their wealth. This isn’t surprising: academic and business opportunities are generally fewer in small countries. Conversely, big countries like America and China send few inventors overseas (though India sends a lot). As is so often the case, Estonia seems to be doing its own thing. Surprisingly few of its inventors go abroad, given the country’s small size and middling wealth. 


17.9.15

Ancestrial Mathematics



At a recent discussion with a couple of friends who - like ourself have mixed ethnic background - somebody came up with the remark that he is one third Polish and two third French. The others nodded with appreciation, perhaps considering that 1/3 might contribute the braveness of the Polish military to fight for their independent nation, 1/3 French provides the beauty of their ladies and 1/3 of course would be the French cuisine, making a 100% perfekt person. 
But as a geneticist, I tried to sort out how 1/3 versus 2/3 inheritance might happen. For sure, not on the generation of your parents. Since one definitely has only one dad and one mom, one can either be 100% of one ethnicity (if both have the same ethnic origin) or 50% this and 50% that. On the previous generation (with 4 grandparents) one could be anything of 100%, 75%, 50% or 25% of a particular ethnicity. And with each generation the possible frequencies become more and more.
But if one counts back more and more generation, will there be any stage at which exactly 1/3 (or 33.333 ...%) of the individuals of that generation could represent one particular ethnicity ?  The question therefore is if the number of ancestors in any one generation can be devided by 3.

 
 So I did this quick check for the first 25 generations (i.e. ancestors of us who lived over the last 800 years) and was unlucky. In neither generation were the number of people an multiple of three. Or in other words: Devision of the number of people in each generation by three always left a fractional component different from zero. The fractional component always alternated between 0,666666.... and 0,333333......  Since this seemed to be pretty regular, one could guess that it runs like this until infinity, and hence would suggest that in neither generation the number of people can be divided by three.


But in mathematics, suggestion is virtually of no value at all. Only strong and formal evidence counts. This is perfectly right, since when suggestive conclusions would be allowed in mathematics, this science would have long ceased to exist. Any error in precision and in the formal correctness in mathematics would have sooner or later "contaminated" the entire discipline and cause erosion of its basis.
But in our case, the formal prove that neither of the ancestrial generations contains 3 x N people is simple. And honestly, here I understoud for the first time the purpose of Prime Factorization. It is a key method in number theory, and became recently of great importance for digital encryption. 
The background is that any positive integral number can be written (in a unique way) as a product of prime numbers (or their powers). It is easily done by hand, for small integers (up to several hundreds) using a recursive algorithm (see here for an web-based calculator). But even using powerful computers, prime factorization for big integral numbers requires exponentially increasing computing time. Thats the reason why with longer encryption keys one virtually make any attempt to break an encrypted code using computers useless. 
What has prime factorization to do with our initial problem of finding out if the number of people in one particular ancestral generations is a multiple of three (or can be devided by three) ? This problem is equivalent to the question if a 3 (prime number) is part of the prime factorization of the number of people. If we look to the number of 33.554.432, i.e. an 8-digit integer, than solving this task by hand (using recursive trial devision) would take us several days perhaps.
But in our special case there waits great help, thanks to our logically working brain. All the numbers in the above tables second column (the members of a specific generation) are simply powers of 2 themself (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so one). And primer factorization of an integer that is a power of two simply gives back 2 power N. There will never occur a 3 or any other prime number. Hence the number of people in each generation can never be divided by 3 (or by any other prime number or products of any other prime numbers).

Gender Relationships in Action

Mid September, and the 2015 summer has not yet lost any of its intensity. But since summer vacations in Bulgaria are over, I should better stop wallowing in memories of mountains, sandy beaches and musical night life. I better try to see how much I can recall of the last things that happened in my lab before vacations.
There were a really remarkable two weeks with high school students who did a practical lab project here. They were Italians who attend the Munich European High School. These were 3 boys and 3 girls, and I thought to split them in two mixed groups, group 1 with two girls (Costanza and Julia) and 1 boy (Francesco), and group 2 vice-versa with two boys (Andrea and Guiseppe) and 1 girl (Antonia). They were given instructorial courses in cell and molecular biology, a bit about genetics and radiation-effects and cancer research, but half of the time they did hands-on work mainly on cell biology experiments. They were supposed to collect data in a systematic manner on stem-cells that grew over one week under the influence of an gamma-irradiation.

After a while, however, I more and more felt that the whole project was not with them as researchers and the cells in the incubator being the object of their research, but I understoud that I could equally consider the 6 students as objects of my (social-psychological) studies and myself (officially the supervisor) as the researcher. And I observed something that in the first instance started as an annoyance. Whereas teaching and working with group 1 (i.e. 2 girls + 1 boy) in the first week was extremely pleasant, having group 2 (i.e. 2 boys + 1 girl) in the second week appeared to be a nightmare. I first thought that maybe in the second week of the project group 2 was simply tired already, and therefore had a lower motivation, was unconcentrated and used every moment just to deviate and giggling and talking about teenager problems. But after talking to my colleagues who supervised group 2 in the first week it seemed that it had nothing to do with time, but there was a dramatic and lasting difference between the attitude towards science and learning between group 1 and group 2. 
The three students in group 1 were always highly motivated throughout the entire 2 weeks, they were following the theoretical courses, liked to discuss and ask questions and worked very committed in the laboratory. The three students in group 2, however were almost the opposite: They were more bussy typing and receiving new status messages in their smart phones, used every moment for gossiping and I think they virtually did not learned anything from what I have shown them. It was a really annoyance, and I was close to send them home.
But since I am a scientist because of my never resting curiosity on all aspects of nature and life, I tried to find out the reason of this difference between the two groups of students. And than I observed something funny: In group 1 (2 girls and 1 boy), it were mainly the girls (Costanza and Julia) who played a very active and constructive role. They were asking questions, they were making suggestions and contributed their knowledge from school to the instructions I gave them. The boy in this group (Francesco) was less vivid, but concentrated and worked well in the lab. He was more the resting pole in the group, but obviously also had a stabilizing function. As a whole, this group 1 formed a perfect team, in terms of social interactions. There were the two girls who competed for the single boys attention by showing high committment, responsibility for the work program and constructive participation in the progress of their project.
In group 2 there was a lot of social interaction as well, maybe even more than in first group if one only measured it by their vocal intensity. But here the competition was done in another way. The two boys were the driving forces of all the unrest. The two (Andrea and Guiseppe) were trying to get the most attention from the single girl (Antonia) by showing her how "cool" they are, telling her in detail what crazy plans they had for the evening, how successful they have been in some computer games and on and on and on. But the sad thing was that Antonia (the object of their daylong performance) did not showed any sign of desinterest, rather she seemed to encourage the two teenage boys to fight harder for her attention.

I think that fighting for attention by the opposite sex is nothing bad, or to be denounced as contraprodictive. In opposite, it can be (and for sure always was in human history) a very productive motivation for good purposes. But the problem is which sex is fighting for attention, and what are the instruments they use:
If several woman are fighting for attention of a man, they usually do it by trying to outcompete one another with showing high commitment, organizational talent, taking challenging tasks and so on.
If several men are fighting of attention of only a few (or even a single) woman, than they do it too often by unpleasant and destructive activities. In the least disabiliting way, they do it by jumping up and down in front of the woman, like a clown or a rubble ball, and role their eyes and make funny faces. Their habit often reminds one of a typical fool, or somebody who is drunken. But in the worst case and in large groups, men try to fight for womans attention by showing their uncontrolled physical force, starting violent terror or war.
What is the conclusion from this observation ?   That groups that socially interact should not consist of more men than woman.  If you want to form a productive team, it is better to have a few men (forming the quiet poles) and more woman or girls (who try to perform better than the other). This gives stability and a excellent performance of the entire team.