The Half-Life of Facts (32 page)

53      
actuarial escape velocity:
Grey, Aubrey D. N. J. de. “Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now.”
PLoS Biol
2, no. 6 (June 15, 2004): e187. Further reading: Finch, Caleb E., and Eileen M. Crimmins. “Inflammatory Exposure and Historical Changes in Human Life-Spans.”
Science
305, no. 5691 (September 17, 2004): 1736–39.

55      
The physicist Tom Murphy has shown:
Murphy, Tom. “Galactic-Scale Energy.”
Do the Math
, 2011. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy.

55      
self-fulfilling propositions:
Kelly.
What Technology Wants
.

56      
The Hawthorne effect was defined:
McCarney, Rob, et al. “The Hawthorne Effect: A Randomised, Controlled Trial.”
BMC Medical Research Methodology
7, no. 1 (2007): 30.

57      
The tiny population of Tasmania:
Henrich, Joseph. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case.”
American Antiquity
69, no. 2 (April 1, 2004): 197–214.

58      
“The more populous periods”:
Caplan, Bryan. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/05/replies_to_crit.xhtml. 2011.

58      
A classic paper by economist Michael Kremer:
Kremer, Michael. “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990.”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
108, no. 3 (August 1, 1993): 681–716.

59      
More recent research:
Bettencourt, L. M. A., J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kuhnert, and G. B. West. “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
104, no. 17 (2007): 7301–06.

59      
Using these two assumptions:
Kremer. “Population Growth.”

60      
first-order model:
The very simplest model is a zeroth-order model, but here we have at least the relationship between population and technological progress.

61      
higher population densities in certain regions:
Ashraf, Quamrul, and Oded Galor. “Dynamics and Stagnation in the Malthusian Epoch.”
National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
no. 17037 (2011).

61      
the concerns of the English people:
Merton, Robert K. “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.”
Osiris
4 (January 1, 1938): 360–632.

62      
decided in 1989 to make a special sort of map:
Cliff, Andrew, and Peter Haggett. “Time, Travel and Infection.”
British Medical Bulletin
69 (January 2004): 87–99.

63      
these other modes of transportation:
Ibid.; Grübler, Arnulf.
Technology and Global Change
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2003.

64      
examined the city of Berlin:
Marchetti, Cesare. “Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior.”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
47, no. 1 (September 1994): 75–88.

64      
The Black Death spread:
Noble, J. V. “Geographic and Temporal Development of Plagues.”
Nature
250, no. 5469 (August 30, 1974): 726–29.

CHAPTER 5: THE SPREAD OF FACTS

66      
a group of telephone interviewers:
Schwartz, David A. “How Fast Does News Travel?”
The Public Opinion Quarterly
37, no. 4 (December 1, 1973): 625–27.

67      
Consider the case of Mary Tai:
Tai, Mary M. “A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose
Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves.”
Diabetes Care
17, no. 2 (February 1, 1994): 152–54.

71      
how certain cities were affected:
Dittmar, Jeremiah E. “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press.”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
126, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 1133–72.

71      
Gutenberg combined and extended a whole host of technologies:
I recommend going to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, which goes into all of this in astonishing depth.

74–75 
we have measured the average number of close social connections:
Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler.
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
. New York: Little Brown, 2009.

75      
We understand how social groups are distributed:
Onnela, Jukka-Pekka, et al. “Geographic Constraints on Social Network Groups.”
PLoS ONE
6, no. 4 (April 5, 2011): e16939.

75      
work done by him and his longtime collaborator James Fowler:
Christakis and Fowler.
Connected
. The methodology in this research has been critiqued more recently. For details, see the following papers: VanderWeele, T. J. “Sensitivity Analysis for Contagion Effects in Social Networks.”
Sociological Methods and Research
40 (2011): 240–55; Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler. “Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks.”
Statistics in Medicine
32, no. 4 (February 20, 2013): 556–77.

81      
“[c]onclusions based on such work”:
Gould, Stephen Jay.
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

83–84  
an article in the
British Medical Journal
:
Hamblin, T. J. “Fake!”
British Medical Journal
283 (1981): 19–26.

84      
Mike Sutton, a reader in criminology:
The examination of what Sutton refers to as a Supermyth (a myth about a myth) is still in progress but a good overview of this is here: Sutton, M. “The Spinach Popeye Iron Decimal Error Myth is Finally Busted.” BestThinking.Com. (2010); http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/the-spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth-is-finally-busted. The original incorrect story of Hamblin even made it into the initial edition of this book and is discussed further in the Afterword. The persistence of incorrect facts in the literature over time was also explored in Tatsioni, Athina, Nikolaos G. Bonitsis, and John P. A. Ioannidis. “Persistence of Contradicted Claims in the Literature.”
JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
298, no. 21 (December 5, 2007): 2517–26.

84      
While working on his book:
Mauboussin, Michael J.
Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
. Harvard Business School Press, 2009;
See For Yourself: The Importance of Checking Claims
, Legg Mason Global Asset Management, 2009.

84      
author Randall Munroe wishes for a world:
Munroe, Randall. “Misconceptions.”
xkcd
. https://www.xkcd.com/843/.

85      
I have found instances of it:
For these and more, search for the phrase
contrary to popular belief
in Google Books.

85      
“Dynamics of an asteroid”:
Bothamley, Jennifer, ed.
Dictionary of Theories
. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research International Ltd., 1993.

85      
the article referenced in
New Scientist:
Bowers, John F. “James Moriarty: A Forgotten Mathematician.”
New Scientist
(December 23–30, 1989).

86      
But the citations to Moriarty’s work:
Kennaway, K. D. “String Theory and the Vacuum Structure of Confining Gauge Theories.” PhD dissertation. University of Southern California, 2004.

86      
These errors “will live on and on”:
Mauboussin,
See For Yourself
.

86      
I was taken to task soon after by James Fallows:
Fallows, James. “Boiled Frog Does a Surreal Meta-Backflip.”
The Atlantic
, March 2, 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/03/boiled-frog-does-a-surreal-meta-backflip/36934/.

90      
research that quantitatively studied the differences:
Barbrook, Adrian C. et al. “The Phylogeny of
The Canterbury Tales
.”
Nature
394, no. 6696 (August 27, 1998): 839.

91      
actually measured:
Among others, here are a couple of their papers: Simkin, M. V., and V. P. Roychowdhury. “Stochastic Modeling of Citation Slips.”
Scientometrics
62 (2005): 367–84; “Read Before You Cite!” arXiv:cond-mat/0212043 (December 2002).

92      
From their paper:
Liben-Nowell, David, and Jon Kleinberg. “Tracing Information Flow on a Global Scale Using Internet Chain-letter Data.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
105, no. 12 (March 25, 2008): 4633–38.

93      
it is often the case that credible information or news spreads faster:
Castillo, Carlos, Marcelo Mendoza, and Barbara Poblete. “Information Credibility on Twitter.” In
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web
. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2011. 675–84

CHAPTER 6: HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

96      
increased use of antibacterial soaps:
Arbesman, Harvey. “Is Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma Associated with the Use of
Antibacterial Soaps?”
Medical Hypotheses
53, no. 1 (July 1999): 73–75.

96      
dairy consumption is related to acne:
Arbesman, Harvey. “Dairy and Acne—the Iodine Connection.”
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
53(6): 1102. December 2005.

97      
when Roche brought a problem:
“The Benefits of Open Innovation.” InnoCentive. http://www.innocentive.com/seekers/benefits-open-innovation.

97      
When NASA used InnoCentive:
Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship. “Legatum Lecture Series Presents: Alpheus Bingham of InnoCentive, Inc.” http://legatum.mit.edu/binghamlecture.

99      
He demonstrated this with a novel finding:
Swanson, Don R. “Undiscovered Public Knowledge.”
The Library Quarterly
56, no. 2 (April 1, 1986): 103–18.

99      
Building on this, Swanson continued:
Swanson, Don R. “Medical Literature as a Potential Source of New Knowledge.”
Bulletin of the Medical Library Association
78, no. 1 (January 1990): 29–37; Swanson, Don R. “Migraine and Magnesium: Eleven Neglected Connections.”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
31, no. 4 (1988): 526–57.

100    
revisited undiscovered public knowledge:
Swanson, Don R., and Neil Smalheiser. “Undiscovered Public Knowledge: A Ten-Year Update.” In
KDD-96 Proceedings
. Edited by Evangelos Simoudis, Jia Han, and Usama Fayyad, 295–98. AAAI Press, 1996.

102    
has a greater chance of solving a problem than do the experts:
About one-third of all InnoCentive challenges yield solutions. Lakhani, K. R., et al. “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving.” Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07—050. (2007); http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07—050.pdf.

103    
the same scientists who explored the errors:
Simkin, M. V., and V. P. Roychowdhury. “Re-inventing Willis.”
Physics Reports
502, no. 1 (May 2011): 1–35.

104    
Certain concepts in computer science:
Trakhtenbrot, B. A. “A Survey of Russian Approaches to Perebor (Brute-Force Searches) Algorithms.”
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
6 (October 1, 1984): 384–400.

107    
how often scientists were aware of previous research:
Robinson, Karen A., and Steven N. Goodman. “A Systematic Examination of the Citation of Prior Research in Reports of Randomized, Controlled Trials.”
Annals of Internal Medicine
154, no. 1 (January 4, 2011): 50–55.

108    
a team of scientists from the hospitals and schools:
Lau, Joseph, et al. “Cumulative Meta-Analysis of Therapeutic Trials for Myocardial Infarction.”
New England Journal of Medicine
327, no. 4 (July 23, 1992): 248–54.

110    
the creation of a massive database:
Frijters, Raoul, et al. “Literature Mining for the Discovery of Hidden Connections between Drugs, Genes and Diseases.”
PLoS Computational Biology
6, no. 9 (September 23, 2010): e1000943.

110    
CoPub Discovery involved:
Frijters, Raoul, et al. “CoPub: A Literature-Based Keyword Enrichment Tool for Microarray Data Analysis.”
Nucleic Acids Research
36, no. supplement 2 (July 1, 2008): W406–W410.

111    
CoPub Discovery predicted:
Another example of a tool like this: Kuhn, Michael, et al. “Large-Scale Prediction of Drug-Target Relationships.”
Federation of European Biochemical Societies Letters
582, no. 8 (April 9, 2008): 1283–90.

112    
One of the most celebrated examples of drug repurposing:
Ghofrani, Hossein A., Osterloh, Ian H, and Friedrich Grimminger. “Sildenafil: from angina to erectile dysfunction to pulmonary hypertension and beyond.”
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
5, no. 8 (August 2006): 689–702.

112    
software designed to find undiscovered patterns:
See TRIZ, a method of invention and discovery. For example, here: www.aitriz.org.

112    
computerized systems devoted to drug repurposing:
Sanseau, Philippe, and Jacob Koehler. “Editorial: Computational Methods for Drug Repurposing.”
Briefings in Bioinformatics
12, no. 4 (July 1, 2011): 301–2.