For those interested, here is a four page summary of my research activities that I wrote for my upcoming quadrennial review at NIH. It doesn’t include everything I’ve done in the past four years, just the main lines of research.
June 24, 2013: Corrected a small typo in the summary.
a couple comments–
never heard of the average versus excess average effect (have read little fisher—tho i do know in his later years he helped show smoking could not be related to cancer using his formidable math tools).
the fisher stuff i looked at most was ‘fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection’ which overlaps with stuff by price, hamilton, and more recently e o wilson and ds wilson on group selection (also nowak as well as the statistical physics approaches from NECCS and Barton in UK (or Stella in israel, which rediscovered Barton and Rhouani—path integral approach from the 90’s in JTB).
issue here often was is fisher’s theorem equivalent to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or is it a newtonian system. (e.g. eliott sober). its basically solved; but like global warming a matter of dispute.
this does remind of ‘granger causality’ in economics—difference between a causeand a correlation.
on obesity or weight, i note anecdotally i have about 4 ‘setpoints’ (almost bifurcations) which are basically 5 pounds apart, and which depend on food availability. (i guess this is like the Pima of SW usa and mexico, who have one setpoint in the usa—availability of foodstamps and agribusiness subsidized junk food, and another in mexico of subsistance).
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I plan to write a post on our average effects paper shortly. Fisher was skeptical that smoking caused cancer because no one had done a randomized clinical trial.
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if i get my printer working i’ll print it out so i can read it. interesting stuff—when does a difference make a difference? (slutsky-yule theorem (eugene slutsky econometrica 1937)—depends how you clump the data). people are still worrying about boltzman vs gibbs, and wright versus fisher. (saw a story on the news that says ancient hominids sued nocotine.)
for corrections, its ‘new england complex systems institute’ (NECSI yaneer bar-yam)–had a paper in PNAS july 27 2004, tho i’m not sure its the one i was thinking of. also, its ‘sella and hirsh’ pnas 2005. the nick barton papers are in JTB, and also genetical research from 90’s (where in the appendix they show what sella and hirsh showed—wright distribution=boltzmann. its all free energy except pep(si)co(la)). he describes this on arxiv.
the more things remain the same, the more they’re changed into dollars. fossil fuel.
D Ludwig wrote a paper in SIAM review in 1975 i think which goes through the same stuff—random perterbations; or it may be a book on population genetics . (now in bc canada they have stuff which rewrites it in to dirac bra/ket formalism).
there’s a guy at nih who has the correct view of group slection (against pinker and dawkins). i was going to try to study with ds wilson but they had 2 spots, i looked at my test scores which probably were ok but i decided not good enough so i spent the money i was supposed to use for the application. also it was off my territory (charles lmsden who i met in toronto and wrote a book with e o wi,son told me i shoudl go to scotland with the barton crew but i wasnt going).
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