My time at TRB CATE 2024

Last month, I attended the TRB 2024 Conference on Advancing Transportation Equity (TRB CATE 2024). The conference, which was held in Baltimore, was probably the most enjoyable conference that I have attended thus far (though I have not attended that many), for the following reasons mostly related to how good it was for networking. First, the number of attendees, which was around 500, was enough for almost all of the attendees to meet new people & network effectively; the presence of fewer attendees might lead to a situation where a large percentage of the attendees know each other, leading to other attendees feeling left out, while the presence of more attendees might lead to most attendees feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of meeting attendees unknown to them and therefore discouraged to do much other than spend time with known attendees (as often happens in the TRB Annual Meetings). Second, the conference was more focused on equity issues in transportation, so attendees were very passionate about this issue, and this led to more positive vibes & more fruitful discussions (in contrast to something like the TRB Annual Meeting, where the breadth of topics means that it is unlikely for someone working on pavement engineering to have much in common with someone working on public transit network redesigns). Third, conference organizers explicitly encouraged (at multiple points during the conference) attendees to network, and the schedule (especially including the presence of multiple poster sessions structured as receptions/mixers) included a lot of time for networking instead of being packed from start to finish with highly structured sessions.

I am especially grateful to my current employer for sponsoring my attendance given that I presented a poster about work from my previous job (and, interestingly enough, this was personally my first time presenting a poster in any professional setting). It reflects well on my current employer's willingness to take chances with their employees and supporting employees' presence at such conferences so that the employer's name is more publicized and the employee gets the professional development benefits of learning & networking. Additionally, I got to meet several of my colleagues in person, which felt even better given that most of us work remotely and many of them live in different parts of the US. As this conference happened during the second week of my current job, it really felt like an auspicious way to start this job.

Starting a Job at Cambridge Systematics

I am pleased to share that I have started a job at the transportation consulting company Cambridge Systematics as of 2 weeks ago, being based out of its office in the DC area (where I grew up). (Note that this company, which was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US, is a different company than the social media data mining company Cambridge Analytica, which was founded in Cambridge in the UK and was notable for its mining of user data from social media sites for the purpose of targeted political advertising in the 2016 presidential election in the US [LINK from Wikipedia].) The company takes on clients primarily from government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to do work on long-range planning, travel demand forecasting, big data analytics & modeling for passenger & freight transportation, transportation safety planning, public transit planning & operations, and public transit & highway asset management. I will primarily be working on projects related to shared mobility, public transit, long-range planning, and transportation safety, but I will not necessarily be restricted to these areas.

I am excited to be working at this company, as it will give me a different perspective on transportation than I had within academia. Additionally, unlike in academia where I was focused on leading & managing a few projects over a long period of time in which those projects would lead to research products but might not necessarily have any more immediate tangible impact, in this company, I will be able to work on a wide variety of shorter-term projects that will have more immediate tangible impacts for people. I got into the transportation sector to help people with disabilities, and although many of the projects at this company might not directly relate to the needs of people with disabilities, I look forward to bringing up those issues where possible & applicable, using these projects to educate colleagues & clients about these issues where possible & applicable, and having tangible (even if incremental) positive influences on transportation for people with disabilities through the completion of these projects.

Reflection: Leaving UC Davis

This week is my last week as a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS-Davis). I am glad that I was able to transition from physics to transportation policy within the setting of academia and to particularly to so at ITS-Davis, which is renowned for having multidisciplinary transportation research & education that has included an increasing focus on issues of equity & accessibility in transportation planning. I learned so much, not just about transportation per se (which, in a professional context, was totally new to me when I started this job) but also about hiring, advising, and managing graduate students, applying for grants, managing grant-funded projects, communicating with different audiences beyond academia in many different forms, working on projects that are not just academic research ending in a peer-reviewed journal article, forming & managing relationships with stakeholders from government agencies, community-based organizations, and other organizations, and expanding my professional network on my own. This ultimately became the right time for me to leave ITS-Davis, but I will be grateful for the experiences & opportunities that I had in it and for the people that I got to work with.

My time at the TRB 2024 Annual Meeting

Last month, I attended the TRB 2024 Annual Meeting. The conference, which was held in DC, was a lot of fun. The graduate student researcher working with me was able to present our work as a poster. Additionally, although I didn't meet as many people whom I had not met before, this was a good opportunity for me to deepen connections with people with whom I had connected more briefly in past conferences in person or remotely. In particular, these included people working like me at the intersection of transportation & disability as well as people working in the autonomous vehicle industry. Strengthening connections with people in the former group was especially important to me because of the relevance of my work, how few of us there are in the US, and being able to feel like I am part of a group of like-minded academic researchers (given that I lead so much of my work essentially alone in the context of academic researchers). Strengthening connections with people in the latter group was important to me because of recent turbulence in the space of autonomous vehicles and the need for consistent pushes for inclusion of people with disabilities as users of such vehicles.

My Time at the 2023 TRB Annual Meeting

Last month, I attended the 2023 TRB Annual Meeting. I meant to write this post immediately afterwards, but I became busy with work and with preparing for international travel which I started soon after that and finished just yesterday. Thus, for the first time in the history of this blog, there was a month with no new post. I'll try my best going forward to continue posting at least once each month, but sometimes, these issues can come up.

The conference, which was held in DC, was a lot of fun. The graduate student researcher working with me was able to present our work as a poster. Additionally, it was my first experience attending an external conference (i.e. one not hosted by UC Davis) since changing fields to get into transportation policy research, so it was an excellent opportunity for professional networking. Because I had previously attended the APS March Meeting for 3 years (2017-2019), I was prepared for a conference of a similar size and scope; in particular, I intentionally avoided overloading my schedule with presentation sessions, made time to take breaks, and made time to meet people informally. Additionally, as transportation is a much more policy-oriented field than physics and is not confined to academia, I made sure to attend TRB committee meetings, different organizations' receptions in the evenings, and other events technically outside of the conference itself. I certainly professionally got what I wanted out of it, and I look forward to attending again in the future.

Reflection: Starting a Shift to a New Career in Transportation Policy

This post is the second in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university"). As a write this, I am still technically a PhD student enrolled full-time in the university, working on topics in nanophotonics & fluctuational electromagnetics. Next fall (assuming the current public health crisis abates to an extent that it is safe for me to do so — please note that I am not a public health expert or epidemiologist, so I am not making predictions in this regard), however, I will start a postdoctoral research position in the University of California Davis analyzing transportation policy, with a particular eye toward the effects of such current & future policies on the mobility and resulting socioeconomic opportunities for those who have been marginalized by current transportation systems, including people who are poor or have disabilities (like myself). This is a fairly drastic, and arguably surprising, change of career; I have told many friends and relatives about this, but not all of them, so I'd like to use this space to explain my thought process over the years leading up to this decision. Follow the jump to see more.

Book Review: "Capitalism Without Capital" by Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake

I've recently read the book "Capitalism Without Capital" by Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake. I found out about this book from a reading list by Bill Gates that was circulated by various media outlets online, which suggested that this book would have a lot to say about the currently relevant issue of people's personal data held by large online companies like Facebook & Google. This turned out to not be the case, as there was only a single brief mention of this point later in the book. Instead, this book is a discussion about how companies in many developed countries rely more on intangible assets than tangible assets, how associated trends can explain many issues faced by societies in those countries today, and why governments need to take notice of these trends. The authors start by carefully defining their notions of investments & assets, along with tangibility (essentially physical goods that can be valued & traded relatively easily) versus intangibility (things like institutions, rules, know-how, intellectual property, and social relationships that are much harder to quantify & trade), and then discuss why the values of intangible assets are harder to measure and how various econometric organizations are trying to improve this situation. They then describe their central thesis, which is that intangible assets have much greater scalability, sunk costs, spillover effects, and synergistic effects compared to tangible assets, and this leads to qualitatively different economic & political outcomes. This leads to discussion of specific points, including the role of intangible assets in secular stagnation (low business investment levels despite low interest rates) as well as income & wealth inequality, the issues associated with creating infrastructure for as well as financing investment in intangible assets, the role of intangible assets in promoting a cult of management and the greater role of management in turn as intangible assets become more important, and the questions governments will have to face with respect to managing this growth in intangible assets.

I thought this book was meant for lay readers, but it seems more meant for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the like, and it is a bit dense. Nonetheless, it is quite well-written, and I enjoyed gaining more perspective about these aspects of the economy that I wouldn't have consciously considered otherwise. I particularly appreciated the summaries at the end of each chapter, as the authors seemed to implicitly acknowledge the density of information in their book and wanted to refresh readers' minds after going through each chapter. Moreover, I really liked the fact that the authors were more interested in laying out the facts as they interpreted them instead of making bold, sweeping proclamations about the generality of their analysis: they really tried to avoid the golden hammer fallacy of trying to contort their explanation to fit every possible problem. As a particular example, one of the features of intangible goods being synergy would seem to suggest that as synergistic/agglomeration effects are correlated with dense urban development, then policymakers should promote dense urban development to promote the formation of synergy/agglomeration clusters and that this should be a guaranteed way of growing a local economy; however, the authors take pains to mention at multiple points in the book that the empirical evidence for this is sparse in general, and where it does exist, the results are mixed, thereby providing a testable & falsifiable scenario that leads to a failure to reject the null hypothesis. As another example, both this book and the book Radical Markets by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl (which I have reviewed here) discuss Friedrich Hayek's anecdote of pencil-making to illustrate how markets efficiently communicate information via prices, but while the authors of the other book uncritically praise and extend that notion, the authors of this book are quick to show how in practice, gathering price & other information as well as conducting bargaining can be quite costly, which is how Ronald Coase concluded that people organize into firms with hierarchies in order to lessen these costs and uncertainties. Also, in the chapter about what governments should consider doing, the authors explicitly state that they are not trying to suggest the existence of quick fixes, but are instead laying out the challenges in full and suggesting possible general approaches that governments can tailor to their specific needs. Overall, I would need to read a lot more to more seriously evaluate the claims in the book, so I wouldn't be able to recommend this to lay readers, but specialists in the field may find this book interesting & thought-provoking.

Book Reviews: "An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper" by Roberta Corvi & "Philosophy and the Real World" by Bryan Magee

I've recently read two books about the life and philosophy of Karl Popper. One is An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper by Roberta Corvi (translated from Italian to English by Patrick Camiller, while the other is Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee. Both have some similarities in form and structure. They are both relatively shorter books (under 200 pages, each in hardback form). They both devote a single chapter as an overview to Karl Popper's life, and then devote subsequent chapters to his philosophy of science, philosophy of politics, and the broader themes of his philosophy. Furthermore, they were both written during Popper's life, with some level of consultation with him.

As a layperson when it comes to philosophy, I found Corvi's book, which I read first, to be a bit of a struggle to understand. The prose used in the book is often unclear, and I especially found the first 30 pages to be so densely packed with jargon and assumed background on philosophy that I was tempted to put the book down at that point; thankfully, my persistence paid off, as I found the rest of the book to be progressively clearer. Additionally, there are some tonal shifts throughout the book that I found a bit odd; Corvi does not uniformly praise nor criticize Popper's philosophy, but while her criticism is generally clear, her praise merely restates his philosophy as if it were self-evident fact. I'm not sure if the abstruseness of Corvi's book is due to her own writing style and assumption of a more philosophically-educated audience, due to issues with the translation, or due to the translator's own deliberate choices in tackling the subject of Karl Popper. The book claims to be an accessible introduction to Popper's philosophy, but I'm not sure if that really means accessibility for lay readers (as opposed to philosophy students early in their careers).

By contrast, Magee's book, which I read second, has much more clear and accessible prose. In particular, there were a few misconceptions that I had about Popper's beliefs from Corvi's book that I felt Magee's book cleared up, such as the extent of Popper's rejection of Marxism and disdain for socialism as a political practice versus his belief in essentially social democratic ideals. This book is also shorter, and because Magee was a student of Popper, the narration of this book seems more self-consistent and intimate, reflecting Magee's emotional and ideological closeness to Popper, and it even includes a few points where he makes explicit mention of discussions with Popper; Corvi's book, in comparison, is much more dispassionate and disinterested. However, that intimacy in turn raises questions about the impartiality of Magee's narration. For example, Corvi spends a little time questioning the philosophical foundation of Popper's belief in indeterminism, while Magee completely sweeps this under the rug; this appears to be a broader trend, as Corvi does generally do a better job formulating her own and addressing other people's criticisms of Popper's philosophies.

Both of these books were written before or around the time of the end of the Cold War. This makes the political views espoused in the book somewhat dated; of course hindsight is 20/20, but that throws into especially stark relief the rather inductive nature of the arguments positing ever-increasing rationality and liberal democracy around the world. The arguments that the development of ideas, logic, technology, structures, and so on are indicative of human evolution seem similarly inductive, especially considering that these changes have happened over such shorter time scales compared to typical evolutionary changes observed in humans (over tens of thousands of years and more), and this may also be because understanding of evolution was less sophisticated at that time than it is now, though I'm not entirely sure of that considering that I'm not in the field of evolution. In any case, these books' ages show, and it isn't clear how much of the description of evolution and politics comes in each book from Popper himself versus each respective author's interpolation & interpretation; I'd be curious to see more modern books that address these recent issues. With these issues aside, overall, I think Corvi's book gives a fuller picture, but Magee's book is the clearer introduction for a philosophical layperson like myself.

Book Review: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

I generally don't read works of fiction, as I don't have as much interest in them as I do in well-crafted nonfiction works, but Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of the classics of dystopic science fiction; in particular, many comparisons have been made to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, with the latter surging in popularity in the last few months in the context of the current political climate in the US, so I figured I might give this one a read instead. This book is set in a time where society is explicitly stratified into castes and everyone is conditioned, through physical, chemical, and psychological means from [artificial] fertilization through death at age 60, to behave in ways that would never lead them to question their roles in society; this is further helped by the omnipresence of a pleasurable drug called soma and by the omnipresence of this very conditioning, such that social ostracism is feared perhaps above all else. With that in mind, the main story primarily involves two characters, one named Bernard Marx who is born and raised in this society but finds himself dissatisfied with the society and his role in it, the other named John the savage who is born to a woman (named Linda) outside of this society and becomes repulsed after understanding the superficiality of the existence of members of that society.

The initial parts of the story seem to drag a little bit as it isn't initially clear to which character the reader's attention should primarily be drawn, but after the introduction of Bernard Marx, it becomes much clearer that the initial parts paint the setting of this world to make it clear why Bernard Marx is out of place. Additionally, in terms of movement of the narrative, the extended dialogue between John the savage and the controller Mustapha Mond drags a little, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the author's true view of such a futuristic world. What I found most interesting is that both Bernard Marx and John the savage keep trying but failing to escape the oppressive social confines of their world, though the issues at play are different. Bernard Marx feels socially isolated due to his short height relative to his upper caste and due to his (perhaps related) desires to have time from himself, away from the rest of society. However, his psychosocial conditioning is fairly thorough, such that even when he visits the tribe of savages and has a chance to live a simple and isolated life among them, he chooses instead to bring John the savage as well as Linda back to the main society in London so that he can gain credibility in that society that he finds hard to come by; when John the savage rejects further gawking visitors (which reflects poorly on Bernard Marx, being the custodian of John the savage), rather than joining John the savage in solitude, Bernard Marx becomes despondent about his renewed feelings of alienation and ostracism from society at large. This deepens near the end of the book, when he is exiled to Iceland; his thoroughly conditioned worry about social alienation overcomes any excitement he may have felt at realizing that he would be among high-caste misfits like himself instead of in the superficial society for which he ostensibly does not care so much. Likewise, John the savage is initially delighted by what he sees after traveling from his tribe to London, but having been raised and conditioned outside of that society, he is disgusted by the superficiality, free love (though that may have more to do with his early childhood trauma of seeing his mother, who was brought up in the society, attempt to practice free love with the men of the tribe, consequently leading to his and his mother's ostracism from the tribe by the women and children of the tribe, respectively), and inability to find solitude in the main society. Yet at the end of the book, when he attempts to escape and live an ascetic penitent life outside of the city, the other members of society relentlessly hound him as an exhibition for their amusement; even at the very end, when he takes his own life, his limp hanging body is seen as another cheap spectacle, so even in death, his earthly remains cannot escape the superficiality of that society. Overall, I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in this sort of thing. Follow the jump to see more discussion of my thoughts about how this relates to today's society in the US (disclaimer: this is coming from a lay observer of American politics and society, so don't take anything too seriously; moreover, I'm sure that many of these observations have been made in the past by various people at different times).

Book Review: "The Marketplace of Ideas" by Louis Menand

The book that I have been able to read most recently is The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. The author generally discusses the current state of the liberal arts and humanities in higher education in a historical context, focusing on the tensions that have pervaded it for many decades, including the distinctions between the useful/practical versus learning for its own sake, disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity, generally teaching the liberal arts to all students via a distribution versus core curriculum model, et cetera. The author further discusses how political issues have shaped academic discourse in the liberal arts, as well as how certain features of academia that are perceived to be new are actually logical extensions of features that were in place long ago, and vice versa. Overall, the author argues that much of academic work in the liberal arts, as it is conducted today, is structurally bound by how things were more than a century ago, even as the objects of study have themselves evolved quite a bit over that time.

Having completed my undergraduate education at a technical institution, I expected to see a bit more about the simultaneous evolution of science, engineering, and humanities curricula, given that the author does discuss the shifts in emphasis from teaching to research at major universities, and given the rather broad title and description of the book. Instead, the author admits fairly early on that because he is a history professor by training, his focus is almost exclusively on the liberal arts and humanities. That focus is understandable, yet I feel like by essentially ignoring simultaneous developments in science and engineering in academia, the discussion of the developments in the liberal arts and humanities in academia seems strangely divorced from the historical events surrounding those developments. Moreover, I feel that the author is somewhat siloed in his own view of disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity in academia by focusing only on the liberal arts and humanities and ignoring how interdisciplinary research has evolved among the various branches of natural science and engineering, which is ironic considering his arguments that interdisciplinarity in the liberal arts and humanities has actually reinforced disciplinary rigidity in those fields; perhaps the author would have been better served by more extensively consulting (or coauthoring) with someone who is familiar with STEM fields in academia, but if he felt that such interactions would only reinforce rigid disciplinary boundaries and would not help mutual understanding across fields, then that may be more reflective of his own siloed experiences and resulting biases than of anything else. Additionally, the author has an occasional tendency to slip into technical philosophical and literary jargon; while the context makes the meaning of such jargon clear enough, it would have been nicer for the author to use more broadly accessible terminology, given that the book seems to be marketed toward a general audience (in line with some of the ideas discussed in the book itself). With all that said, I do appreciate seeing this aspect of academia that I otherwise would not have really seen, given my undergraduate education in physics at a technical education followed by my current status as a graduate student in electrical engineering. While it is short on prescriptions, it is long on context, which is its aim in any case. Finally, the book itself is generally clear and concise, and it is a short, quick read.

Economics and Empiricism

I know it has been a while since I've posted anything here. That's because I had been busy until the end of last month with studying for the Physics GRE. Since then, my life has been dominated by a combination of classes, my UROP, and graduate school applications. That also means that for the next several weeks, posts here will once again be fairly infrequent. That said, I read an article today in the New York Times by economist Raj Chetty, who would like to convince readers that economics is a science like any of the natural sciences. Having seen such arguments poorly presented in my economics textbooks, I figured this would make for a nice quick rant. But then as I thought about it more, I realized that this issue is actually a lot more subtle than I originally imagined.

As a physics student, I don't know if I can ever shake the gut feeling that economics somehow will always be "mushier" in some way compared to the natural sciences. But I need to make sure that there is solid grounding for that feeling, or else I should be casting away that feeling as well. So why do I feel that economics is "mushier"?

Let's take the following sentence: "I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions." I'm sure there are people who believe that having multiple opinions and interpretations of even raw empirical data alone makes economics untrustworthy. I'm sure this thought may have crossed my mind at various points as well, but I realize this isn't why I feel economics is mushy. As I think about, I realize for example that after electroweak symmetry breaking (i.e. the reason why electromagnetic and weak interactions become identical at certain energy scales, but why at the scales we usually observe the photon is massless while the W and Z bosons are massive) was discovered, a few different explanations were posited for the underlying cause. One was the Higgs boson, and the other was technicolor. After the discoveries of the past two years, of course, it is safe to say the Higgs boson is a much more likely candidate than technicolor, but there was a decades-long gap between the theory and experiment. Clearly this is an instance in physics where before further experiments could be performed, two competing explanations were jockeying for attention in the physics community. So I can't say that economics is mushy because there are disagreements among economists in their interpretations and explanations of the same sets of data. So why do I feel that it is mushy?

It's likely because of what happened with Reinhart/Rogoff. From what I understand, Reinhart and Rogoff published an influential paper which posited that a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio pushes above 90% will quickly be plunged from economic growth into a recession (or worse if the starting conditions are worse). As it turns out, a graduate student found an error in the calculations that led to this conclusion and showed that in fact no such debt-to-GDP threshold ratio causing a sharp reversal of macroeconomic fortunes exists. As far as I can tell, rather than backing down, Reinhart and Rogoff have been pushing their findings harder than ever. So I may think economics is mushy because there seems to be little drive at the upper echelons to maintain scientific skepticism and admit errors as they happen, especially when it comes to macroeconomics. Granted, it took a long time after the first cosmic microwave background measurements came in for the steady-state theory to be cast out of cosmology, but it seems like especially in macroeconomics, this is a more prevalent problem than in the natural sciences.

In fact, the author of the article briefly touches on this, but proceeds to pretend that this is not the reason why people don't believe that economics is a science. Yes, the article does go through in pretty good detail what advances have been made in empirical microeconomics and econometrics that should earn economics the respect given to other sciences. And after having taken the class 14.03 — Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy and having learned there a little about empirical microeconomics and econometrics, I'm actually rather inclined to agree (as I actually learned some of the details of some of the examples in this article).

The issue is that when most news articles quote economists, it's usually in the context of macroeconomics, as macroeconomic activity will by definition affect the largest segment of the readership, as opposed to microeconomic moves taken by certain firms, labor groups, or municipalities. Macroeconomics is a very young field with not a whole lot of data as yet. Additionally, there is a lot of disagreement among macroeconomic theorists about how to interpret macroeconomic events/trends, and too many of them are acting more for political gain than for the sake of advancing the field (see: Reinhart/Rogoff). It's really cool when the LHC performs experiments to further probe the Higgs boson (i.e. science), but honestly, people will care a lot more if their federal income taxes change (i.e. macroeconomics), and such a change cannot be effected in a controlled environment (in relative contrast to the Higgs boson experiments). Regarding that last point, macroeconomic models are too unreliable compared to scientific models of macroscopic systems that economists would love to emulate, because they very frequently fail to predict the outcomes of certain economic events or enacted policies. So it's the combination of the fact that macroeconomics is unreliable and that its scholars have the very real power to personally gain from their models being correct potentially at the expense of other people's livelihoods (where I've emphasized that last point in contrast to natural sciences) that makes myself want to push economics away from the natural sciences.

But this isn't fair to microeconomics. So what's the solution? I would personally split microeconomics and macroeconomics much more. In any case, the author says that more and more research that even affects macroeconomic decisions is coming from empirical microeconomics. In that case, I would say that news outlets should devote more space to highlighting empirical research done in microeconomics that clearly affects people's lives, such as those highlighted in the article. And maybe farther in the future, all economics will basically be microeconomics, and macroeconomics will become what classical thermodynamics has become in relation to statistical mechanics: a bulk limit that is only obtainable under very specific conditions.

Statins in Hot Water

This comes from a discussion I was having with my family about the UK's National Health Service proposing putting statins in drinking water to combat the widespread problems of high cholesterol and triglycerides resulting from widespread obesity. While the idea was floated as early as 2004 (it may have been even earlier, but that was the earliest BBC.com news story I could find about it), as far as I know, it came up again just a few months ago.
Follow the jump to read my take on it.