Author: David Bradley

It would be so easy to latch on to one particular section in cunning linguist Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought. It’s full of expletives, cussing, and good old swear words. There’s a serious point to Pinker’s use of so many taboo words, and it interesting to say the least to hear him using them in interviews and to watch the unprepared interviewer squirm.

But, that’s as maybe. For a blog post aimed at a general audience it would be inappropriate to use some of the more savoury language discussed. Moreover, the post, and potentially the Sciencebase website itself could so easily be tagged as containing adult contact and be filtered out by search engines, proxy servers and nanny software. I could use asterisks to mask off the vowels, but you’d still know what words I was citing and it would look silly. More to the point, while the expletives, their context and usage are fascinating and certainly worthy of close scrutiny, it is the words that Pinker admits do not actually exist that are of most interest.

So what words can we discuss that don’t exist? Well, for instance, why is there no gender-free term for a single member of a herd of cattle in common usage? It sounds wrong to discuss “a cattle”, but on occasions when you do not know the sex of the bovine in question you cannot differentiate between a cow and bull.

And, what about a politically correct word to use instead of the uncomfortable his or her in a sentence where some people might use the grammatically incorrect “their” as a PC alternative. Similarly, there is apparently no emotion-free word for a heterosexual partnership as there is for married couples (spouse) or gay couples (partner). Pinker himself often feels obliged to qualify mention of his own partner as being a woman to save confusion, but suggests that lover is too romantic while, flatmate is not only too unromantic, but is seriously ambiguous, as is the word partner. I’m sure there are many more examples, but Pinker delves into what these missing words (actually the singular cattle is one of my pet peeves) tell us about language and how we think.

You can download a very entertaining interview with Pinker from The Grauniad (mp3 format, 33Mb).

I need your support! Sciencebase got nominated for a 2007 Weblog Award in the Science category, so it would be great if as many of you could vote for the site. This is the link – http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-science-blog-1.php – be sure to pick Sciencebase. I’ve been a bit slow off the mark on this one, and reckon there are probably too many others way ahead of me now to ever catch up, unless all 2604 of today’s Sciencebase’s RSS subscribers vote for me right now and pass the message on!

An intriguing paper on the notion of idea generation came to my attention this week. It’s from the International Journal of Management Practice, which might have suggested something rather dry and off topic, but the first named author Roy Woodhead is in the School of Technology, at Oxford Brookes University, UK and researches in the field of “IT service management” while his co-author, M.A. Berawi at the University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is currently researching value management and innovation in the context of major civil engineering projects.

So, what made this paper stand out? Well, seemingly its main conclusion is that over recent years management-speak has overtaken, perhaps not surprisingly some would say, the actual generation of ideas within an industry, an R&D environment, or elsewhere. So, the whole idea of coming up with something new, inventing, in other words, has become detached from the practical and been lost in the processes of managing information. Common sense, apparently, has once again been usurped by the need to organise.

Management is not wholly to blame for this disjuncture, the researchers hint. In fact, they point out that the reason for the split boils down to an assumption about how our brains work in creative mode. This cognitive theory of creativity holds that ideas are located exclusively within the human brain. This assumption, Woodhead and Berawi suggest has led to a dearth of research into how creativity leads to new ideas because it seems like a problem already solved. This has stifled research into idea generation.

Now, Woodhead and Berawi say it is time to challenge this assumption and to build an alternative view based on the relationship between our intentions and their effects, which could develop new perspectives on idea generation by helping us understand that ideas are not the simply the product of the human mind but are the product of a wide range of information sources and responses to them. It may be obvious, most ideas do not emerge spontaneously from our subconscious, they are seeded and moulded by what we sense and the information we acquire. It may be obvious, but this was apparently not considered part of the theory of idea generation.

The researchers tear into the conventional wisdom of idea generation and the approaches used in management to stimulate R&D and to appraise ideas, they have taken case studies among major technological organisations, predominantly in the oil industry as their raw materials. They emphasise that poor performance among those charged with generating ideas is usually seen as a weakness of the individuals involved, rather than a problem with the assumptions about the standard idea generation techniques employed. As such, the researchers say, under-performance of better idea generation is left unquestioned.

The researchers’ conclusions seem, in retrospect, rather obvious, but they have apparently been ignored for many years because of strongly held belief in a cognitive theory that does not bear closer scrutiny. “We believe our potential to generate new possibilities has been reduced by the view that ideas originate within an individual,” the researchers state. After all, you would not expect a child to be able to design an efficient nuclear power station or devise a recycling system for a metropolis. In this notion lies the key to better idea generation. “Idea generation is something to do with the way external systems work, our knowledge of their workings and an ability to conceive of alternative ways to make things happen.” In other words, our minds can manipulate a new idea, but the new idea emerges not endogenously but from the relationship between mind and world.

Is there any justification for spending public money on fundamental scientific research for which there is no obvious potential for technological application, wealth creation, or any obvious purpose other than the advancement of human knowledge? If the decision were left to the short-sighted or those with no appreciation of what it is to see the wider horizon of blue skies research then it is unlikely that budgets would ever be stretched beyond funding the kind of research that provides almost instantaneous gratification, immediate payback, and obvious applications.

Jean-Jacques Salomon emeritus Professor of Technology and Society and the Director of the Centre Science, Technologie et Société, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), in Paris, France, explains that there is no way to measure the pay-off of basic research activities. He suggests that the reason governments deem to spend taxpayers’ money in this area is actually quite ideological rather than bearing the stamp of economic common sense.

Writing in the International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development (2007, 1, 125-135), he explains that even in times of privatisation, liberalisation, and reduced state intervention, there are good reasons for such public investments. But, how much is enough and how much would be too much?

Many of those in the world of commercial science would perhaps see any spending on fundamental science as untenable unless there were at least some vague opportunity for commercial exploitation of the results within a reasonable timeframe. In contrast the scientists in academia carrying out fundamental research see it as an essential part of any nation’s science base. They often cite the case of the molecule that fell to earth, buckminsterfullerene. The discovery of the all-carbon C₆₀ molecule emerged from fundamental science that went even beyond blue skies into interstellar chemistry. Surely, this area of research could have no earthly application?

Well, yes and no. Buckminsterfullerene itself is yet to demonstrate any potent commercial viability, but on the other hand, without the discovery of that unique molecule we may not have seen the development of the so-called buckytubes, the elongated cousins of buckminsterfullerene known more formally as carbon nanotubes.

Fundamental, basic, or pure research is a fuzzy concept. There are of course, free-floating ideas that are perhaps nothing more than the rhetorical quests of scientists given the freedom to explore fully, but there are also designer labs that work on esoteric concepts, maverick hypotheses, and bizarre theoretical notions, purely with the aim of converting their outputs into something more tangible. That’s not to say they are commercially driven, just that they know that if only they can meld the right ingredients in the right proportions then something useful must emerge.

As Harvey Brooks said, ‘Basic science per se, contributes to culture, it contributes to our social well-being, including national defence, and public health; to our economic well-being, and it is an essential element of the education not only of scientists, but also of the population as a whole.’ Can you put a price on that? Well, governments must, Brooks is on record as suggesting that a 15% annual increase is minimal in order to cope with the forecast population of graduates students and faculty. But, Salomon points out that there is no fixed ratio between the amount of resources to which basic research can aspire and those devoted to other research activities.

In terms of fundamentals in Europe, Salomon suggests that the new European Research Council will be in a position to contribute to improvement of basic science. He asks whether assessing R&D indicators should therefore be part of the default responsibilities of any assessment of how well pure science should be funded.

Salomon, J. (2007). Why sustain fundamental research? International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1504/IJTLID.2007.015400