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MIT Announces Top 35 Innovators Under 35
nursegirl writes "MIT's Technology Review has posted their top 35 innovators under the age of 35 for 2006. The 2006 Young Innovator is Joshua Schachter, of del.icio.us fame. The 2006 Young Humanitarian is Christina Galitsky from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Galitsky has done various projects related to energy efficiency, from introducing energy efficient practices to wineries, to helping bring stoves that use less wood to Sudanese refugees, to working on cheap ways to filter arsenic from wells in Bangladesh. Technology Review has also published a related article, titled 10 Ways To Think about Innovation."
The problems with that article are basically as follows:
1. It doesn't say what you seem to think it does. For that matter, it contradicts its own quotes and anecdotes given in support of that idea. If you look at what it does say, it says that the peak of the curve is at 35.4 years old and most inventions are made in a 12 year interval around that. I.e., roughly between 29 and 41.
I.e., pay attention: the actual data says that someone aged 25 is _less_ likely to innovate than someone aged 35 or 40.
In other domains it gets even funnier. If you look at the "age-genius" curve in painters and Jazz musicians, it peaks at 40. For authors it peaks at 50. In fact, if you look at the authors curve, someone aged 25 is about as likely to be a creative genius as someone aged 75.
So it seems to me utter bullshit to take that as evidence that "only the young are innovative/creative/whatever." At best what it says is, basically, "middle-aged people are more creative". I mean, seriously, by what criterion _do_ you define 50 (the peak of creative genius for authors) as "young"? Or take the upper half of the curve there and you get something like 30 to 70 years old when the best novels are written. How _can_ one define that as "young" or supportive of the idea that young people are more creative, is simply mind-boggling.
2. Treating it as "innovators can _only_ be young" is bullshit anyway. Even going by their graphs, they have data going all the way to 90 years old. So even someone that age, yes, _can_ and occasionally did make scientiffic breakthroughs, wrote excellent novels or composed great music.
3. I'm suspicious of studies where they hand-wave in conclusions and explanations unsupported by _any_ data.
E.g., take blaming the decline on marriage and kids. You'd think that most people are married (legally or de-facto by having a stable girlfriend) long before reaching the age of 50. Most authors I can think of were married. Ok, that's just anecdote, but so is their inferrence. That is actually the whole point: where is the data to support that kind of assertion? Where are the graphs correlating marriage/kids/whatever to inventions? If they're going to make that correlation, then show me the data, not just a bogus assertions pulled out of the ass.
Ditto for postulating that it's because of some anti-social tendencies in the teens and 20's, when the peak is anywhere between 35 and 50 depending on the curve, is simply idiotic. Given the age interval where that actually happens, at best you could blame it on mid-life crisis, if anything. But at any rate, if they're going to correlate genius to anti-social tendencies, again: show me the data. See how many of those people got parking tickets, jaywalking fines, speeding tickets, got reprimanded at work, etc. If there actually was an anti-social rebellious tendency driving them, then it can't have been 100% channeled into science or art.
Plus, it's important to know such things. If anti-social rebellious attitudes actually correlate with creativity and genius, then maybe we can simply stop demanding conformity and ties. Encourage them to be non-conformists for longer. Stuff like that. Is it really age, or can you encourage that attitude to stay alive and kicking longer? You can't just handwave it in, handwave in a corelation to age, and have your neatly packed conclusion. Where's the data?
4. It skips over other very important factors. E.g., life expectancy, diseases, etc. If you're going to plot the curve all the way to the 90, then I can tell you that most people would be dead by then, and a lot would be senile by then. So does that tappering of the number of great inventions/songs/novels in the 60's and 70's happen because people lose their creativity _or_ simply because people start to die off? The only way such a graph would be meaningful is if they compensated for that. But they don't do that. Bullshit pseudo-science at its finest, really.
5. It's just one article, and other than the pretty graphs, it's very light on data. E.g., there is no mention of who _are_ the 280 scientists they plot there, and by what criterion were they picked. You can argue or correlate whatever you want, if you can cherry-pick your sample to support it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1) Apostolos Argyris
2) Manolis Kellis
3) Nikos Paragios
4) Paris Smaragdis
And they all seem to have done their Ba or Ms in Greece. In fact Argyris is doing his research at the university of Athens.
Very impressive for a small nation of 11 million people.
2006 Young Innovators Under 35 ..
.. and Kohler hopes that within a few years, Asbestos will be an alternative to server operating systems such as Linux and Windows."
Eddie Kohler
A better operating system
"Asbestos keeps personal data secure by "tagging" it with information about which programs or users can access it
"(NSA) worked with Secure Computing Corporation (SCC) to develop a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture based on Type Enforcement, a mechanism first developed for the LOCK system."
"AppArmor security policies, called "profiles", completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges."
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