September!

Let me do a rundown of things I have heard since yesterday. Our MS is dying. Experiments fail. Some people are frustrated because of work overload. Others are unhappy because of lack of research directions. Project ideas have been scooped. Grants are running out. Culture medium is completely used up. Latest news, water is coming down from the ceiling.

And it’s only Tuesday!

I always think there is a right time for everything. Sometimes it’s right to get excited; sometimes it’s OK to get angry. Sometimes you need to be panicked. I think now it’s time to relax.

Today is time to forget about the “What” (“what experiment should I do now?”), the “Who” (“Who do we blame for the water leak?”), the “How” (“How to get the MS to work again?”), the “Where” (Where can we get more money?”).

Focus on the “Why”. Why do we do this? Why do we come to the lab everyday? If we don’t get this right, we will never be truly happy. We’ll take good data for granted, we’ll panic and hurt each again when time is bad.

Toward the end of Steve Jobs’ presentation last week, where he introduced a new series of re-designed iPods, he said, “sometimes we ask ourselves, why do we do this?” To make even more money? To destroy competitors? The reason, he said, is “because we love music”.

I am sure you have your own reasons for doing what you are doing. Let me tell you mine. I go to work everyday because I love science. Actually, science is just a tool. I love making discoveries. I love collecting data, play with them, I love to open things up and see what’s inside.

There are days (e.g., yesterday) when I forgot to remind myself this. On those days, going to work is all about secretly begging you to tell me some good data, trying to get one more paper accepted, hoping to get a praise from my colleagues, pushing to get one more little grant.

This is hard. Going to work for the wrong reasons. This is so hard, sometimes it pushes me to slowly become the type of persons I hate.

Today, I ask, once again, why am I doing what I am doing. I am glad I ask. Suddenly all the problems are not so big anymore. I am sure things will start to work again soon.

Thank you so much for working here. Every single one of you are so wonderful and so good at what you are doing. I love you all.

Life is wonderful. Sky is blue. Science is fun. There is no reason why it’s shouldn’t be.

Sept 7, 2010

Partly because of my job, I read scientific papers every day. I enjoy reading papers, not just those related to my work, but also papers of exceptional brillance (or notoriety). Occasionally, I encounter papers with observations so outlandish, conclusions so counterintuitive, that I put them in a special folder on my computer, unimaginatively called “crazy papers”.

Here is such a paper:

Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, from World Bank and Pennsylvania State University respectively, went to an Indian village where there are “castes” of people. 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste junior high school male student volunteers participated in an exercise involving solving mazes. At first, they did the exercise without being aware of each others’ castes. Predictably, those in low caste performed as well as the high caste boys.

Then the exercise was repeated, this time the boys were asked to state some information about themselves, including their names, fathers’ names and castes. After the public announcement of the students’ background, they did more mazes. This time, the low caste boy performed much worse than before. The high caste boys were, strangely, not affected.

Their intellectual performance, at least as judged by the ability of solving mazes, was not determined by their intelligence, but by their feeling of inferiority. Simply by stating their fathers’ names, these low caste boys immediately became more stupid!

In Hong Kong, even at the very beginning of their education, children have to go through endless examinations. Worse, their “performances” in exams are often publicly announced. They are categorized according to their grades. These are the castes in our society.

I believe the worst possible thing you can do a group of students is to separate them according to their grades, and then tell the group with the lowest grades, “You are in this class because of your poor exam results last year. You need special help.” If you are told in your face you are inferior to other students, how are you supposed to do well? Every time you go to that classroom for “stupid people”, you become a little more stupid. These castes are reinforced year after year; by the time they reach universities, the damage is irreversible.

Where does this discovery leave us?

There is another paper from my “Crazy papers” folder that offers some hope. Here is the story. There are many hotels in the world, and each hotel has many room attendants, whose job is to clean hotel rooms. Each room attendant has to clean 15 rooms a day, each room requiring 20-30 minutes of “walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying”. That’s more exercise than many people who go to the gym twice a week to stay in shape. In fact, the average daily activity of a hotel room attendant exceeds the daily exercise recommended by the US Surgeon General.

The authors of this paper, Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard University, did something crazy. They recruited 84 hotel room attendant across the city for this study. Half of them, the “informed group”, were “received a write-up discussing the benefits of exercise and were informed that their daily housekeeping work satisfied the CDC’s recommendations for an active lifestyle.” The other half, no such information was given. They were then sent back to work. Four weeks later, their body weight, waist/hip ratio, body fat and blood pressure were measured.

The control group, people who were not told their work was actually rigorous exercise, carried on their lives with no significant change in their weight. After all, many of these workers had been doing their job for years. But the strangest thing happened to the informed group. After being told that they were doing more exercise than most American people, they started to lose weight! Their lifestyle and workload were not changed from before the experiment, and were not different from the control group. The increase of fitness came not from their work, but just from being told the information about their work!

The data are crystal clear. The authors believe it’s the placebo effect in action. The act of being informed (by authoritative figures, e.g., Harvard University professors) that their work will make them fitter has created a psychological suggestion to which their bodies responded. Of course, many other scientists disagreed. Maybe the informed group, on learning that they were already doing so much exercise, became subconsciously more health minded, eating slightly more healthily, using the stairs a little more, sitting in their sofa a bit less, etc.

Whatever the explanation, one thing is clear: those people in the informed group became fitter after being shown a piece of paper.

Here is the point of my blog today. A public statement about your family can make you stupid. A piece of paper with health-related information can make you fitter. It’s all in your mind.

PS:

To all my beloved lab-members: I wish you remember this. Don’t you dare think you are not good enough.

To one student in my lab (you know who you are): please trust me this one time, you are actually very, very good at what you are doing. A failed experiment will make you smarter, NOT turn you into a failure. Everyday you are making a small step toward your goal: a more capable, experienced you, and a bright future for the humankind.

At first it sounds like a silly question. Someone has recently posted this observation on New Scientist’s Last Words blog (“the place where you ask questions about everyday science”):

“Athletics tracks are always run anticlockwise. Does this favour particular runners? Races could surely be run either way, so why never clockwise?”

To understand this question, think of the track of a stadium as a circle. The athletics start at one point, and run around the circle. The direction of their running is always anti-clockwise. All the tracks, in all the stadiums, in all the countries in the world, are designed that way.

Isn’t that strange? If you stand on a point in a circle, and want to run around it, there are two seemingly equal ways of doing so: clockwise and anti-clockwise. But in reality, there seems to be an unspoken agreement between the athletics, the spectators, builders of sport stadiums, organizers of track events, that the only direction the runners can take is anti-clockwise. The question is: who decided it, and what was the reason behind this decision?

A heated discussion in the New Scientist blog quickly ensued. I can summarise the outcome of the discussion in a few simple words: nine months and more than 50 comments later, no one seems to know the answer to this questions.

Bloggers are not shy to put their hypotheses forward, though. One school of thoughts states that the anti-clockwise running direction may have something to do with our handedness. “If you are right handed,” one blogger writes, “you most likely have a preference for your left foot as well. So, if you run counter clockwise, your left foot would be on the inside of the track and would take more force when turning a bend.”

Is there a physiological, or at least ergonomic reason behind this? But bear in mind that researchers have found that right-handed people (most of us) tend to turn right when asked to walk, blindfold, on a straight line. If you are running on a track anti-clockwise, you invariably turn left.

Other contributors suggest that the system was “invented” since track events became a spectator sport. “I believe it is because when the runners are nearest a spectator, that spectator will perceive the runners as moving left to right – the same direction our eyes move when we read.” Bingo.

My own theory is that maybe there is no reason at all. In the beginning people ran in either directions, because it didn’t really matter. Gradually, more people adopted, by chance, one of the two directions, and this caused even more people to favour that direction. Eventually, only one direction remained.

One of my favourite English phrases is “frozen accident”. It describes how some harmless serendipity become, by chance, trapped in eternity. It offers an explanation for why the genetic codes of all living organisms are more or less the same, and why all living things use the L-form of amino acids and not the D-form. Nothing was deliberately “chosen”, and yet things fell into places just fine.

Every single thing you do, no matter how trivial they seem, may be “frozen” and have unimaginable impacts on the course of history!

I have recently heard a nice (or horrible, depending on your mood) story about the history of anaesthesia. Many years ago, anaesthesia machines were produced by two main manufacturers. In the machines made by one manufacturer, you turned the valve clockwise to release more anaesthesia to the patient. In the machines made by the other company, you turned the valve clockwise to shut off the gas!

So, if you forgot to check the brand of the machine, you might end up shut off the anaesthesia when your patient needed more, or unknowingly killed your patient if giving him more gas just when he didn’t need it.

Of course, they figured out this unfortunate goof, and solved the problem by standardising the valves. Still the question remains: who decided which company’s system will be adopted (and which company will have to re-format all their valves)? Once again, no one knows the answer. Was it another frozen accident?

Our world seems to be full of “systems” no one can explain. Here is another example: if you take an escalator in the more civilised part of our city, you’ll see that people tend to stand on the right side, leaving the left side of the escalator open for people who want to talk. (Of course, there are always people who stand on the left side, and are generally met with the disgust of the people stuck behind.)

People have been using the system since my earliest memory. I can’t remember being taught to do it, nor have I heard of any explanation on why the right side of the escalator is a better side to stand on.

Is it because most of us are right-handed and it’s more natural to hold the handrail with our right hand?

Just like the “clockwiseness” of running tracks, the “handedness” of escalators is something that is close to our daily lives but no one seems to question.

To question these phenomena would be like questioning “why do we have 5 fingers per hand, not more”. Except that the handedness of escalator is a much newer event and should be easier to trace the origin of. We have been growing fingers for a few million years, but escalators didn’t exist until 150 years ago.

That’s why I went to a dinner party recently and met an escalator engineer, I pinned him down and questioned him about why everyone agreed on standing on the right side and walking on the left side.

He thought for a few seconds and quipped, “none of the manufacturers actually encourage people to walk on a moving escalator. Everyone is supposed to stand.” So, the official answer: no matter which side of the escalator you prefer to walk on, you are wrong!

Meanwhile, my quest for finding the rationale behind everything continues.

(The image above is of the Berlin stadium for the 1936 Olympics, where Jesse Owens won four track events. I read about the story of anaesthesia machines here. You can read here about how right-handed people tend to turn right. Wikipedia, as always, has a long and excellent article about right- and left-hand traffic, a wonderful night time reading for nerds like me.)

How do you explain to people a scene from a film that you are almost certain no one has watched?

I encountered this problem whenever I tried to tell people about a short scene in this film, “Ballad of a Soldier”, made by great Ukrainian director Grigori Chukhrai in 1959.

The name of this movie used to come up in boring dinner parties, when the conversation is drawn to topics like “where did you go on holiday this Christmas?” or “tell me again what your boss said the other day?” When it gets really desperate, the topic is “tell me what your favourite movie is” (Answer: I don’t have one, silly).

When I was younger, and I was in a one of those talkative moods, I would volunteer: “I don’t have the ONE favourite movie, but “Ballad of a Soldier” comes pretty close.”

What? Ballet? A soldier dancing?

There is very little point going on explaining. Especially when most people were having that “you pretentious bastard” look on their faces.

Now, when the same question comes up, I usually won’t say anything, or simply vote for “The Shawshank Redemption” like everyone else, just to be a good citizen.

(Only once a few years ago did I meet a young man in Glasgow, a friend of a friend of my wife, who told me his favourite movie was ‘Ballad of a Soldier’. But then he is a poet and therefore by definition an angel.)

When did I watch this film? I think it was between 1988 and 1990, the time when my only interest on the entire planet was cinema. Fall of Berlin Wall, freedom for Nelson Mandela, shadow of the first Gulf war: none of these things meant anything to me. I was more interested in how a single camera movement might make or ruin a film, and how a single movie could change the world. My biggest idol at that time was Eric Rohmer (who died this month), closely followed by Wim Wenders. I tried to watch as many movies as I could and my dream was to become a professional screenwriter, not knowing (and caring) that I actually had absolutely no talent whatsoever.

I was a student but I seldom studied. I never went to lectures and I had no friend. I was madly in love with a girl who had a (rich) boyfriend. Looking back, that was a period of naïve madness. But then isn’t it what being young is all about?

Anyway, that was more or less the time when I watched a screening of  “Ballad of a Soldier”. I have only watched it once and have forgotten most of it. But one scene has made a deep impression on me.

Set in World War Two, the film is about a few day in a young Russian soldier’s life. His unit is, like the rest of Russia, overwhelmed by the Nazi. By some comical luck, however, this young man manages to single-handedly eliminate two German tanks and saved the day. His officer offers to give him a medal, but the boy declines. When he left home, he says, the roof of his mom’s house needed to be fixed. He just wants to take a leave so that he can go back to Ukraine to help his mother repair the roof.

No medal? A holiday in return? Soldiers were dying like weeds. They can’t afford to have holidays! But the wish of a young hero needs to be heeded. They granted him the leave, only for only six days, reluctantly (otherwise there is no movie). The next 90 minutes of the movie depict his journey home and the people he meets on the way.

It was not a smooth trip. The Soviet Union was a war-torn country. Going to Ukraine from the front is not a walk in the park.  For a start, he manages to lose his luggage and all his money. Not that this affects his enthusiasm too much. He tries to cheer up everyone he meets (sometimes to precisely opposite effect). Since he has lost his train ticket, which makes his trip home a bit impossible, he needs to sneak on to a train and hide in a cargo carriage.

Soon the railway is bombed. Everywhere is bombed. With are no more trains and roads, he continued to journey on by foot. He is at last picked up by a truck driver who takes him all the way home. The driver tells him if he wants to make it back to the front on time, he can only stay for 1 minute. The driver will wait for him at the door.

One minute.

He finds his mom. She is working in the farm. She holds him like a baby. One minute.

That’s the end of the film. When he leaves, his mother runs after the truck. A voice tells us that this 19 year old young man would never go home again. “He dies in a foreign town with a foreign name. Strangers sometimes bring flowers to his grave.”

“All roads lead to home, but this mother has no one to wait for. Her son is not coming home.”

“Ballad of a Soldier” was once hailed as the best anti-war film ever made. Of the tens of millions of soldiers, regardless of their nations, who died during the war, any war, this is just one of their stories.

Now, the scene I wanted to tell you about.

He met a young girl, played by the beautiful Zhanna Prokhorenko, on the train. Both are without tickets. They are telling each other about their lives. In better days, they could have been university students. They could have been lovers. The door opens and in come the train conductor. Big man with no heart. His job is to keep people from getting on the train, and he does it with a vengence. Like, how many train conductors have you ever seen carrying a rifle? His policy is: buy a ticket or be shot!

Anyway, the boy has no ticket but he still has a bag of his military supply. What about a can of cooked beef in return for both of them to stay (in the train, and… not shot)? The train conductor takes the beef and walks away.

Then that’s the scene.  A beautiful scene, only lasts for about 5 second. The train conductor is sitting between two carriages of the moving train, scenery flying pass him. He is holding a spoon: he doesn’t look scary anymore. He is devouring the can of beef. He licks his spoon like a child.

He is not evil. He is just hungry!

I’d like to believe that is the point of the film: people are not bad, they do horrible things because they are hungry.

Whenever I think I am being treated badly, I try to recall that scene of a grown man in dusty uniform sitting outside the train, devouring a can of cooked meat. It warms my heart.

Of all the people you have met in your life so far, I am sure there are many awful people. But how many are truly bad, to the point of pure evil? How many inflict pain to the others for no reasons, except for the fun of doing that? I ask myself this question all the time, and my answer is: None, I have never met such a person. Not even one.

Of course, there are many evil people in the history, but I’d say they, like pure saints or pure geniuses, are extremely rare. Most people are OK, and they do bad things because they are hungry. Hungry for food, hungry for love, for power, for money, for health, for fame, for ego. For “X”.

“He is not bad, he is just hungry!”

Once we have this conclusion, the rest is easy.

This morning I look at my own reflection on the mirror. I also told myself, “I am not bad, I am just hungry.”

Today, my blog is about my belief that human beings are good in nature.

You can read more about this movie here. Some bad people have uploaded the entire film on youtube. This is illegal and an insult to the great filmmaker. I beg you not to watch it there. Buy a DVD instead.

But then those people are not bad, right? They are just hungry

In 1852, South African mathematician and botanist Francis Guthrie asked this question: What is the smallest number of colours do you need to colour a map of the counties in England, “so that no two regions sharing a common border were the same colour”? He realized that he needed only four colours to achieve this, and predicted that four colours were enough to colour any map. It was a nice discovery, but it took mathematicians nearly a century and a quarter to prove him right. Still, some mathematicians, including the main character in this movie (gorgeous Fukuyama Masaharu, rubbish movie), complain that the solution was not “elegant” enough.

At 10.00 am (ET), 5 December 2009, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, hoisted ten big red balloons in ten different fixed locations in the US. “The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads”. You were asked to find the exact locations, in latitude and longitude coordinates “entered in degree-minute-second (DD-MM-SS) format”. If you were the first to submit all ten correct locations to DARPA, you’d get a reward of US$ 40,000.

While the “four colour theorem” has inspired generations of mathematicians to ponder on the nature of topography, this 10 balloon challenge (called the DARPA network challenge) asks a totally different set of questions, from how information distribute, the power of social network, to the nature of incentive.

Think about it this way. 10 big red balloons were hoisted in 10 different public places in a vast country. All you need to do is, in the morning of December 5, asking every single person in America to look out of the window of their cars. If they saw a big red balloon that was not there the day before, they rang you on their mobile phones. I am sure you would get the correct locations of these 10 red balloons in a matter of minutes. The secret locations of the 10 balloons therefore represent a typical situation in scientific investigations, in which you are sure there are all the answers out there, so long as you have enough resources to test every hypotheses. Boon, systems biology.

Of course, you can also do it in a different way. You can launch a satellite that takes high resolution aerial photos of the US different day, and then write a visual recognition software that can extract from the huge volume of information captured on these photos the locations of ten tiny red balloons. You can also hack into the computers of DARPA, or bribe the employees there for the secret locations.

But the real problem is the size of the reward. 40,000 US dollars in not exactly a fortune. In order to mobilise “every single Americans to phone you when they see a balloon” is not an easy thing to achieve. Popular TV shows such as the “X-Factor” or “America’s got talents” enjoy huge mobilising power but economical incentive behind the success of these shows make the producers willing to invest a huge amount of money on them. $40,000 is not enough to buy even a 10 mini-second TV spot on these programmes. This amount of money will also not go very far in bribery. Hacking maybe the way, but it breaks the law and is not cool.

The real challenge behind the 10 balloon problem is therefore how to make discoveries while making the most with the available resources.

The DARPA website keeps a detailed log of exact what happened after the launch of the balloons. A number of contestants were willing to reveal the ideas behind the strategies they decided to use. Almost all the teams used “crowd-sourcing” in their approaches. “Facebook”, “internet”, etc: basically a modern version of the phone call method. But how to get people to join your group, and to email you the location? The winner, a team from the MIT Media Lab, has a unique solution to this problem.

You register on their website, and then invite your friends to do the same. Your friends can in turn invite their friends, and so on. If anyone identifies the balloon, then he or she will get $2000 (from the prize money). The person who introduced the winner to join the group gets $1000, and the one who invited that person gets $500, and so on. It’s summarised by the MIT team in their website:

Now, although I am not confident at all that I would encounter any of the balloons on that fateful day, I will be rewarded if one of my “descendants” does. Since it costs me almost nothing to play this game (except for the computer time I used for sending emails to my friends), any reward, even $15, would be quite nice for me. To get a reward of $15, I only need someone who is 7-degrees of separation from me to see the balloon. So, the way to maximise my chance of winning anything is to invite as many people as possible. For example, if I invited only 3 of my friends to play, and if each of them invites 3 friends, there will be more than 3000 people in my lineage up to the 7th degree of separation. If anyone of them spots the balloon, I will be at least $15 richer. (Of course, the reality is more complex than this, as we tend to share friends within a relative small social circle.)

To illustrate how powerful this approach, let’s see how fast the MIT team got the correct locations of all ten balloon.

Guess?

A little more than nine hours. DARPA originally estimated that the competition would end in 9 days, but a bunch of strangers, worked independently but coordinated by financial incentives, has found 10 balloons in 9 hours.

The lesson: Crowd-sourcing is definitely the way to go, but a cleverly deployed incentive seems to be essential. In the 10 balloon challenge, a contestant named “The Open Balloon Project” used a totally different strategy, in which they promised to give a single winner all $40,000. They were beaten hands down (they couldn’t find ANY balloon by the time the MIT team has found all). Another team, DARPA Network Challenge Search Group, promised to split the reward equally, also found nothing. The only teams that came closer to winning (found 9 balloons when the MIT team reached the target) all used the similar strategy of distributing the prize money.

What is the impact of this game on the future of our working style? The ten balloons can represent 10 genes involved in cancer or the whereabouts of the ten most wanted terrorists. Today, crowd-sourcing is not actively used in scientific research, or in crime investigations. We are still deluded by our perception of lone, scientific genius who win Nobel Prizes after decades of heroic struggles, and of brilliant anti-social detectives who fight crimes while tormented by their personal demons.

Our research funding system, for example, is monotonous and obsolete; it emphasises on competition and secrecy, despite the empty rhetoric of “collaboration”.  The true incentive behind these grants, apart from the noble need of contributing our time and effort on our scientific interests, is simply the struggle for survival. If you don’t get a grant, you’ll be ultimately fired. In the DARPA challenge, all the teams played for fun, or in order to support their favourite charities. No team joined because “it’d look bad on us if we can’t find the bloody balloons”.  The worst kind of incentive is the fear of losing.

Maybe the world is changing. The “Innocentive” organisation aims at turning the concept of research funding upside down. Traditional funding methods are based on the person – to get the grant you have to tell them what you want to do with the money AND who you are. Are you good enough to do what you propose to do? Let’s face it: this kind of reasoning will only produce work of guaranteed mediocrity. If you have published 35 papers on the same topic, how likely is it for you to do something that will totally revolutionise the field? Research grants from Innocentive all start with a clear challenge, e.g., “A formulation for enhanced binding of biocides to surfaces exposed to an aqueous environment is desired”, posted by someone called the Seeker (can be a company, can be me), followed by a reward (US$ 20,000). Everyone can submit your proposed solution to this problem. If the seeker thinks your solution is worth a try, you will be called a Solver, and will get the reward. You can negotiate with the seeker on the issue of intellectual property involved. The most interesting thing is you can introduce your friends to be solvers, and if your friends solve any challenge, you will be rewarded. That’s EXACTLY the way it worked for the MIT balloon team!

The world is shifting under our feet. The question is: do we dance with it, or do we stand still and be swept.

Photo of the balloon was taken from here. The MIT payoff distribution scheme was taken from here.

“It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

“The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.”

Years later, our grandchildren will be able to recite this passage by heart. Their grandchildren will learn this at school. Witness history today. Read the full editorial here.

Is that the only solution to the problem?

When telling this story, Rory Sutherland, an advertising guru, said, “Call me Mr. Picky, but isn’t it a slightly unimaginative way of trying to improve a train journey by merely making it shorter?” What’s his suggestion? What about using the 6 billion pounds to employ the world’s most beautiful male and female super models to walk along the length of the train, handing out free Champagne? “You’ll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change,” he said, “and people will ask for the train to be slow down!”

“Unimaginative ways of getting things done” is a common disease in Hong Kong. If some Martians landed in Hong Kong and see the way people here behave, they would probably think that there is a competition in Hong Kong for doing things in the most boring, unoriginal ways.

Let’s take an example. Like many people to study and work at CityU, I use the MTR (the Hong Kong subway system) everyday. The university campus is connected to a shopping mall, which is connected to the MTR station. (Don’t ask why our university is linked to a shopping mall. We don’t know. Like many things in Hong Kong, “it happens somehow”.) Anyway, to go from the subway station to the mall, you have to walk through a short passage. Some time last year, the subway company hired some young people, lined them up along the middle of the passage.

What were they doing? Their job was to tell people to walk on the right side of the corridor. If everyone uses the right side of the passage, then the people walking in opposite directions will not run into each other.

So, these young people, in bright uniforms, lined up in the middle, chanting slogans about walking on your right, and if they saw anyone trying to walk on the “illegal” side, they came to you and politely took you to your side. Brilliant idea.

These people were there for one month. During this month, everyone walked on the right side (we were pretty much not permitted to do otherwise). What happens after this month? Predictably, we fell back to our habits, walking any side we like. So, the lasting effect of this one-month campaign is: zero. This inability of sustaining a forced order indicates that whoever came up this idea has no understanding of human behaviour.

But this is not the true problem. Every morning at 8.30 am, most of the people were walking in one direction – from the subway station to the university – and every day at 7 pm, the direction is reversed. But these young people, having been told to stand in the middle and steer people to the “right” track, forced everyone to use only the right side. Instead of making people’s lives easier, they made a narrow tunnel even narrower, and slowed everyone down.

These young people were told to do something. They did it. They followed their instructions to the words, with devotion that would impress even the Singaporean. They probably didn’t understand the reasons behind their instructions (to help circulating people in peak hours). Or they did understand, they just dared not change the instructions. They dared not make mistakes.

The true problem is the level of inflexibility  in the mind of these young people.

Why? Is it because original behaviours are not rewarded in our schools? Is it because our school teachers are too good at pointing out to their children what they do wrong, and never tell them what they do right?

Think about this. Throughout our education system, students are graded by a system based on the deduction of marks. In this system, there exists a perfect, ideal model (100 marks), and we are all compared to that model. Our grades are decided by how much we are inferior to this model standard. I get 84 marks, and the girl sitting next to me gets 91 marks. There are two implications from this result. One, she is somehow better than me. Two, neither of us are perfect.

There are huge problems with these implications. How many times in reality have you encounter a problem that has a single, perfect solution? When two people come up with two different ways of solving a problem, why must one solution be right, the other is wrong (or, one is less wrong than the other)? Why can’t they both be right to some extent, and by collaborating, they can come up with the third, better, solution together? By punishing children who do not come up with the pre-determined answers, we are sending them two dangerous signals: that there is only one acceptable solution in any situation in the world, and that you will be punished if you don’t follow the rule.

I believe that these two signals are destroying our future.

Since the first day of school, we were told days after days, by some highly paid professionals (= teachers), what kinds of mistakes we made, how far (or how close) we were from the “model”. Gradually, we lose our originality. We become super-good at pointing out mistakes, trouble shooting, studying and summarising past experiences, criticising people and avoiding mistakes. We are no longer able to create something  - imperfect but original – completely new.

Back to our subway story. Imagine this situation. You are the manager of a station. In your station, there is an escalator and a stairs. Of course, most people use the escalator. Your boss tells you to increase the number of people taking the stairs. What will you do.

You may hire some young people to stand next to the escalator and politely ask people not to use it, and take the stairs instead. You may block the escalator altogether.

Or you may do this:

Somehow you find yourself in prison. You are sitting in your cell. It takes some time to adjust to your “prisoner status”. After that there is really very little you can do here. You pace in your cell, hands in your pockets. There is nothing in your left pocket, there is a coin in your right one. You take the coin out, flipping it from your right hand to your left hand. You sigh.

Some time ago I read this little passage from this book: “Toss a coin 10 times and you might observe 7 heads, but toss it one zillion times and you’ll most likely get very near 50%.” Okay, it’s bloody obvious isn’t it? But read on…

“In the 1940s a South African mathematician named John Kerrich decided to test this out in a practical experiment, tossing a coin what must have seemed like one zillion times – actually it was 10,000 – and recording the results of each toss. You might think Kerrich would have had better things to do, but he was a prisoner at the time…

“According to Kerrich’s data, after 100 throws he had only 44% heads, but by the time he reached 10,000, the number was much closer to half: 50.67%.”

Wow. That’s so crazy that it’s almost beautiful. If you don’t believe it, here is the actual data collected by Kerrich (reproduced from here).

This is an insignificant footnote in the history of statistics. In fact, after reading this passage I tried to gather as much information about John Kerrich as possible. I went to a library – something I haven’t done in years – in an attempt to look for a biography of this desperate man. Nothing. Google searches yielded only 4 hits about him, all telling more or less the same story. At least, happily, we know he did come out of the prison alive to publish his result.

In 1946 he published his finding in a monograph, “An Experimental Introduction to the Theory of Probability”. Here is what Nature said when the monograph came out: “When Denmark was overrun by the Germans various British subjects were caught, Mr Kerrich among them. He was interned in a camp under Danish control and spent part of his enforced leisure in coin-tossing experiments…”

In 1957, John Kerrich founded the Department of Statistics at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Those are more or less everything I could find about him. All attempts in obtaining a photo of John Kerrich, and in getting a copy of his famous monograph, have failed. Was he married? What was he like?

The idea of tossing a coin 10,000 times in order to test if it really landed on its head 50% of the time is both heroic and sad. The fact is John Kerrich has made a good use of the coin when he was in his cell, and contributed in his small way to science. For eternality, he will be immortalized as a sad man sitting alone in a prison cell tossing a coin.

If there is a patron saint of experimentalists, I think John Kerrick should be it.

I love science because it is wisdom built on data, and data is irresistably beautiful.

Someone told me the other day that she liked the image I used for my previous post: a full moon. No, I didn’t take that photo myself. It was taken from the CD cover of an album I like very much.

Today, I’d like to show you another photo, a reverse shot: it’s how the Earth looks from the moon. What a beautiful blue marble!

It is sometimes difficult to believe almost no one had seen how the earth looked like from space until 1968.

In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, sent back the iconic image of “earth rise” – the image of the earth rising from the barren horizon of the moon.

Before that, NASA did obtain satellite images of our planet from space, but those images were not released to the public, for reasons that only made sense during the Cold War, despite a campaign led by Stewart Brand.

So, it was not until December 1968 could people have the first glimpse of what their home really looked like.

40 years have passed. In April 2008, the Japanese moon satellite Kaguya took the above footage using its HD video camera. It’s the footage of the so-called “full earth-rise” – you can see the whole earth, not just part of it. There are only two times (April and September) a year you can see that, if you are living on the moon.

I love this footage. Even now, after having seen this footage about 150 times, I am still a bit tearful when I watch it.

I have been following the Kaguya mission closely since it was launched in October 2007 (OK, I am a nerd and I love space missions). And in the past two weeks, I read a lot about the Apollo 8 mission. Apollo 8 was less historic than Apollo 11 (the first moon landing), less tragic than Apollo 1 (the fire!), and less exciting than Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks!). But it was Apollo 8 that gave us the first photo of earth rise.

The legend has it that within 100 days after the release of this image, the environmental movement began. It’s this image of the beautiful, fragile blue marble that triggered off the first call for protecting the planet from ourselves.

These two images of the earth are the bookmarks of my life so far. In 1968, the year I was born, my father was 40 years old (he was born in 1928). He saw the image of the earth for the first time. In 2008, I was 40 years old. I saw the motion picture of earth rise for the first time. In between, many things happened. Like, I was born.

Sitting on the moon, we see this trivial but strangely beautiful planet rises and set like clockwork. 40 years have passed. Nothing really changes. Meanwhile, some people are born, some are dead. Some fall in love, some fall out of love.

We live.

Watching the footage of the earth rising silently from the moon horizon, I can’t help but think: how absolutely wonderful to be alive. And how amazing to be alive at the same time with my fellow earth-dwellers. Our lives are so short – what are the chances of us co-existing on this planet at the same time?

You can read more about the first earth image here. You can follow the Kaguya mission here. Read more about Stewart Brand, the father of the “Whole Earth Catalogue”, and his campaign to release the image of our planet here.

Today I would like to tell you two stories, one true and one made up.

First, the made-up one. It’s a famous joke, so famous that it actually is officially the second most favourite joke in the world.

It goes like this: “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner, they retire for the night, and go to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend.

“Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

“I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes,” exclaims Watson.

“And what do you deduce from that?”

Watson ponders for a minute.

“Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. What does it tell you, Holmes?”

And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent!”

The second story, the true one, is told by Nora Epron, the writer-director who famously wrote “When Harry met Sally”, “Sleepless in Seattle” and more recently, “Julie and Julia“. She began her career as a successful journalist. She told the following story when asked to talk about her education.

“I had a couple of great, great teachers. The teacher who changed my life was my journalism teacher, whose name was Charles Simms. I always tell this story. I love it. I had already decided that I was going to be a journalist. I didn’t know why exactly, except that I had seen a lot of Superman comics. Lois Lane and all of those major literary characters like that, but Mr. Simms got up the first day of class, and he went to the blackboard, and he wrote “Who, what, where, why, when, and how,” which are the six things that have to be in the lead of any newspaper story. Then he did what most journalism teachers do, which is that he dictated a set of facts to us, and then we were all meant to write the lead that was supposed to have “who, what, where, why, when, and how” in it.

He dictated a set of facts that went something like, “The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people.” So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, “Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento, Thursday, at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal announced today.” Something like that.

We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, “The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!” and it was this great epiphany moment for me. It was this, “Oh my God, it is about the point! It is about figuring out what the point is.” And I just fell in love with journalism at that moment.”

This is a very important realization: “It is about the point! It is about figuring out what the point is!”

I have used both stories when teaching my students. “It’s not about how much you do, silly – it’s about what the point is!” And I keep telling my graduate student, “it’s not about how many experiments you do. It’s ALL about being able to ask the right question.”

Every day lots of things happen to us. Some are tiny things, others are pretty huge. We can sit there pondering upon the meaning of these things. We can spend our lives dwelling on these things.

But, as Sherlock Holmes and Charles Simms taught us to ask, “What is the point?” What is the one most important point behind these trivial things?