Personal

It’s been a while, and I’ve been meaning to provide an update on our little charity suggestion bleg. If you’ll recall, I wanted to take my ill-gotten gains from the 3 Quarks Daily Prize and send them to a worthy charity, but rather than just defaulting to my usual favorites I sought from new wisdom from the collective intelligence out there.

The bad news — in some sense — is that there are far too many truly worthy causes. Apparently we have a way to go before achieving a utopian condition throughout all the countries of Earth. Who knew?

Nevertheless I was happy to learn about GiveWell, an organization whose purpose it to figure out what kinds of charitable donations actually have the greatest impact. (It was advocated by Ian, Edgar, and Rationalist.) It’s obvious that different types of giving can have disparate impacts, but it’s very hard to figure out what approach is most effective, and having an organization dedicated to doing the hard work of figuring that out is invaluable.

Just to get an idea of what we’re talking about: to rate the relative effectiveness of different programs, GiveWell uses a metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY). It’s a well-known (in these circles) number, also used by the World Health Organization and others. The idea is to make some attempt — as hard as this may be from a rigorous philosophical perspective — to boil different kinds of good deeds to a single number. Maybe you actually increase someone’s lifespan, or maybe you prevent blindness — DALY boils it all down to one quantity.

And what you then find is — an extraordinary range of different values for different forms of charity. At the extreme end, consider supporting improved water sanitation to prevent diarrhea, which certainly sounds like a good idea to me. That gets you $4,185/DALY, so it takes about four grand to do the equivalent of giving someone an extra year of life. Compare this to deworming programs, which come in at $3/DALY. In this metric, in other words, deworming is about a thousand times more cost-effective than water sanitation. Obviously this is a crude measure, but it gives some idea of the range of possible outcomes.

When it comes to messy human problems, I don’t actually valorize “metrics” and “data” above all else; sometimes things work but it’s hard to quantify how much good they are actually doing. Nevertheless, in a situation of relative ignorance it’s really wonderful to have an organization trying to work out these numbers the best they can. My favorite part of the GiveWell website was the page labeled Shortcomings — not other people’s shortcomings, but their own shortcomings. They want to be as upfront and transparent as possible about their mistakes, and strive to do better. Yay!

After all that, I didn’t actually give the donation to GiveWell itself. Rather, I just followed their advice and gave to their highest-ranked charity: Village Reach, an organization that works to improve access to healthcare in remote and underserved areas in Africa and elsewhere. (Immunization programs, in general, are extremely cost-effective ways of improving health in poor communities.) It’s a relatively new, still quite small program, but with impressive effectiveness. I was very happy to donate, and certainly will continue to do so.

Which doesn’t mean that there still aren’t many other great choices. Thanks to everyone for chipping in with suggestions.

Don’t worry, we’re not asking for money. Admittedly, that’s what usually happens when the word “charity” appears, i.e. at our Donors Choose challenges. But now I have a whopping $100 burning a hole in my pocket, due to my plucky third-place finish in the 3 Quarks Daily contest. Back when I was a struggling grad student or post doc, this would have gone straight to pay for Ramen noodles or whatever. But now that I am a faculty member who lives in a nice house and drives a fancy car, I can pay it forward a bit.

Thus, I’m going to take the $100 and match it myself, donating $200 to charity. (Yes I know, the big spender. Hey, it was only 3rd place.) There are plenty of charities I know about already, but I thought that since these ill-gotten gains were based on the blog, I should ask the blog for advice.

So in comments I’d like to get your pitches for a worthy cause I might not have heard of. The winner — in a contest judged only by me — will get the $200. It will be most effective if you leave both an explanation of why this charity is so great, and a link to an easy way to donate.

Of course there is a hidden agenda here — while I’m giving away this huge pile of money, anyone else who reads the list is welcome to be inspired to donate as well. No pressure, except that you would be a better person and feel good about yourself.

Pitch away.

Bruce Winstein, an experimental physicist at the University of Chicago, passed away this morning. He had been fighting cancer.

Bruce was a fantastic physicist and person. He became well-known as a particle experimentalist, forgoing giant collaborations to work in small groups where he could do something unique. He was the leader of the KTeV experiment at Fermilab, which measured the very subtle “direct” CP violation effect. He won the Panofsky Prize from the American Physical Society for this work.

In an especially impressive move, he then decided that he wanted to switch fields, into cosmology. He took a sabbatical year and went to Princeton, where he basically worked as a grad student in Suzanne Staggs’ lab, learning the trade of cosmic microwave background observations from the ground up. Then he came back to Chicago, where he started and was the founding director of the Center for Cosmological Physics, later the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Once that was up and running, he moved back into research full-time, becoming a leader of the QUIET collaboration.

Bruce was a great friend, and a valued mentor while I was at Chicago. He was one of the few faculty members to reach out and invite me into his office when I arrived, and was always ready to talk about physics — or music. He was a true audiophile, and connoisseur of jazz in particular. It was Bruce who introduced me to the music of Von Freeman (who just won the prestigious Rosenberger Medal from the University of Chicago).

Bruce died far too young. We’ll miss him greatly.

Talks from the TEDxCaltech event are gradually coming online. You’ll definitely want to check out Scott Aaronson’s contribution, which was a clear highlight. (The biggest highlight was the closing jam session featuring keyboard wizard Lyle Mays and Tuvan throat-singer Ondar. You heard right.)

Bloggy narcissism demands that I feature my own talk. It was about the arrow of time, with some Feynman thrown in. As usual, the clip is frozen at at point that shows me to best advantage.

But just to show it’s not all about me, you should also see this talk by awesome undergrad Jordan Theriot. I would have been a puddle of nervous jelly in this venue at that age.

Have I mentioned that my lovely wife Jennifer writes a blog called Cocktail Party Physics? And that she’s written a wonderful book called The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, And Survive a Zombie Apocalypse?

Well it’s hardly any secret now. Last night she was on one of the best things on TV these days, the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Where she rocked, both literally and figuratively.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWycEo2J4HA

How much more proud could I be? None more proud.

For you L.A. locals, tonight I’m giving an informal talk at the Alhambra Library; all are welcome. Which reminds me of a few other public events coming up:

• Of course TEDxCaltech is this Friday.
• On Monday 24 January I’m giving a public lecture at my alma mater, Villanova University, on Philadelphia’s scenic Main Line.
• For any glamorous cinephiles who will be at the Sundance Film Festival, I’ll be on a panel on Friday the 28th to talk about science and movies.
• On January 30 I’m giving a talk for the Skeptic Society. No details yet, but it will be at Caltech. I’ll be busting out a brand new talk, on the laws of nature and the meaning of life.
• On February 21 I’m giving a colloquium at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. No explicit public talk, but they usually allow interlopers.
• On March 1 I’m giving a public lecture at Reed College in Portland. Back to the arrow of time for this one.
• The last weekend in March, Jennifer and I are doing some sort of joint gig at the San Diego Science Festival. Details yet to coalesce.
• On April 5 I’m doing a fun event as part of the ALOUD series at the LA public library. It’s a joint appearance with poet Jane Hirshfield. We’ll be seeking common ground between our disciplines; failing that, fisticuffs.

There are also some special big-ticket events coming up this summer — more once they are whipped into shape.