2 posts tagged “books”
This looks like an interesting book. I took a class with Orrin Pilkey, lo those many years ago, and he's a bit of a nut, but he does know what he's talking about based on on-the-ground observation and experience. My first reaction to this was "what the hell?" but then reading further I realized I totally agree. My Master's was based on an ecological model I developed of a commercial fishery in Chesapeake Bay. It was developed using a tool that was intended to make such modeling as transparent as possible. When I gave my results, I gave ballpark ranges, not predictions. I think when used that way, with all the caveats, assumptions, and weaknesses of the model fully laid out and understood, then models do have their place. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater and give up on modeling just because we can't accurately predict the future with them. They are a tool, one which has to be used with caution and with common sense and instinct fully intact.
February 20, 2007
NY Times Books on Science
The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach. (more at the link above)
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Excerpt from Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future
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Excellent quote from the first page of the book:
Whenever I hear a fishery scientist proclaim that his analysis is rigorous, I am reminded about what John Kenneth Galbraith is reputed to have said once to a group of economists: that the prestige of mathematics has given economics rigor but, alas, also mortis.
-Jim O'Malley, fishing industry representative and executive director of the East Coast Fisheries Federation
I just finished reading Unbowed Wangari Muta Maathai's memoir (she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, in part for her work founding the Green Belt Movement in Kenya). Not the best-written memoir, and definitely not well annotated or complete (she barely mentions her children or how she managed her high-profile work while they were small except to say she had a housekeeper who watched them). But what struck me most was how she plowed through times of failure and despair and stuck with her original idea even when it seemed like it wasn't going anywhere. I'm a really impatient and easily frustrated person. If my ideas don't get traction quickly, I tend to abandon them figuring if they were good ideas, I'd find support for them immediately. I don't think many people could possibly have the perserverance as this woman had (she was beaten, jailed and exiled) but it's a good example to keep in mind whenever the thought pops into my head: "Nobody cares about what I'm doing. I can't get any funding. I'm just going to quit and do something else."
