Weekend longread for the #sciencepolicy crowd.

@AnEmergentI and I have been digging at how good UK research really is. And have come up with some worrying findings....

S&T - Is the UK a world leader in science? jameswphillips.substack.com/p/s-and-t-is-t… There is a lot of guff about how world leading UK science is, and James and I have worked in US, Switzerland, Korea, Denmark etc.... and shared a little scepticism.

So we asked "Is it *really* though?"

This is interesting. Though a lot of things that are taken for granted are much more questionable than the authors suggest.

https://twitter.com/ukonward/status/1626911471056691202

I'm extremely sceptical of the science superpower talk.

Even more so than the ingredients listed here.

1. Excellent academic base - hummmm. UK research is good. But it's certainly not universally excellent. ...

A little Saturday morning STS thread on intangibles:

1/n So which nation is the top of the rankings for scientific quality in computer science (an important area) between 1996-2021?

2/n

I did a lot of work pushing the policy of building new applied research focused universities to help regenerate areas of the UK (based on the success of the Swiss model). Nothing has come of it so far.

Manchester has 5 universities

Birmingham has 5

Boston has 16
(+19 CC etc) If we wanted to be more radical (and more successful) we could build a load of diffusion focused universities as well, funded by @tonydanker's new diffusion focused bit of UKRI - "Accelerate UK", and connected to the catapults.

Dull academic thread. Sorry.

SPRU 101 is about to start... So some thoughts on PhD reading suggestions.

Basic issue I'm struggling with is new PhDs need to build a *lot* of skills very quickly. What should they read?

So some suggested reading, comments welcome. 1/n 2/n
Starting with basic data skills. The books to just buy and slowly work through.

First the classic, and still the best.

The terrible explosion in Beirut looks like an industrial accident. Initial fire possibly ammunition or fireworks, that then ignites stored fertilizer, possibly in a ship?? Very similar to the Texas City disaster in 1947. Reports now that it was stored explosive.

Problems with simplistic arguments that there aren't enough STEM graduates were pointed out by Ken Arrow a long old time ago....

And yet, 70 years later, this debate keeps on running.

now with working link - click on the pdf top right

scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&… More recently The Chronicle of Higher Education covered it well

"The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth?"

rit.edu/ritnews/pdfs/C…

I was going to do a thread on how to understand the risks of Covid-10 infection. But it all got too complicated, so I’m going to summarise what I have read by tweeting a bit about something else:

Bats.

And why knowing about bats helps you know about Covid. If you are only going to read 2 tweets, this is the take away: to avoid getting infected you and your loved ones should try and avoid behaving like bats which are Covid-19’s natural host.

2/n

For you younger viewers I should probably explain what Excel was.

It was a programme that academics used to use that made it really easy to do things that modern technology makes really hard.

Things like mixing your data and analysis files .... 1/n Making things called pie charts, & my favorite - turning SIC codes, the names of genes, or patent identifiers into dates in the Georgian calendar.

It also made it really easy to modify your analysis and data without having to waste time documenting what you were doing or why 2/n

@Gilesyb This sums up much of my academic pubs/policy work 2010-2014.
* most start ups just add to wasteful economic churn and apart from a tiny percentage are bad for the economy, the UK has a very large and probably excessive number and we certainly shouldn't be subsidizing more @Gilesyb * transparency encourages a culture of risk avoidance and blame, and prevents open-ness and learning from mistakes.
* lots of investment is wasted, maybe 90% of well designed evaluations show zero of negative impacts

Lots of UK twitter talk on encouraging entrepreneurship.

Couple of points:

1. We spend more on supporting small firms than we do no the police or universities, with little evidence it makes much difference. It substantially distorts the market. 2. There is already a massive amount of market entry in UK and good case can be made that it is excessive. Most common outcome is failure. Half of firms gone in 4-5 years.

3. The returns for most are zero or negative, raising moral questions about encouraging people to do it.

Steve Rayner was a fine social scientist and a wonderful kind person.

He did his PhD on far left political cults and came up with Rayner's law:

Rayner's Law of extreme left-wing groups: "the longer the name the smaller the number of members" From Rayner's law we can make an educated guess that the "Revolutionary Communist Workers Maoist Marxist Leninist Popular People's Front (North Korean Solidarity Faction)" is a sad old guy sitting alone in the pub.

So what has happened to economics research in the last decade?

This is economics in 2009
(ISI, articles, 1-1000 by citation, all countries) and a close up

What journals do ESRC funded researchers, who have published in the last 5 years, *and* cite their funders, and cite journals that are cited over 50 times, cite, cite together, and how do they relate to one another Close up of economics, sociology, policy clusters

So what are @ESRC funded social scientists* working on and how do their keywords relate to one another?

* who publish @ESRC Close up

Economist trying to understand value of history: "trust reduces transaction costs and information asymmetries, and academic history reduces information asymmetries in that trust..... And Pocock was right it also gives agents sovereignty" I think economists are probably right here. It's a much richer theory of the value of history than science policy has come up with... (and I'm a Prof of science policy)

OECD 2019 data on R&D intensity. Business R&D holding up well.

Fusion thread:

The problems with fusion aren't, I think, the engineering/scientific problem of getting it to work. If you spend enough money on very smart people, I'm pretty sure you can get it to work. It might cost high-tens of billions, maybe over $100bn, but it will be done The problems are much more difficult.

First, project management. ITER is *supposed* to be a demo project showing it can work. Its a hugely complex project ... and, how shall I put this, some people are worried it might not come in on time or budget...

1. OK. So pulling causality out of cross sectional data is meant to be impossible.

Obviously its impossible, it says so in all the textbooks If you have cross sectional data then how can you know if x causes y, or y causes x? So why are there papers claiming to do it? 2. I want to give a little example to show that it is possible. Hopefully something clear and simple and interesting.

Lets suppose that men and women differ slightly in their temperatures, in part because some women are pregnant (a thought experiment, so sci might be wrong)

Graham Stringer MP asked me if there was any evidence that spreading research around the country might help with economic growth. Well it turns out that the Swedes have done just that. And luckily its been evaluated. This is what the evidence suggests... 1/n Rowland Andersson and coauthors looked at the data and found a strong positive impact

Andersson, Roland, John M. Quigley, and Mats Wilhelmsson. 2009. “Urbanization, Productivity, and Innovation: Evidence from Investment in Higher Education,” J of Urban Economics, 66 (1), 2-15.