Eureka Moment Research Articles

Elinor Ostrom’s contributions to the experimental study of social dilemmas

The second author vividly remembers dashing into Lin Ostrom’s office in 1980 and asking her about using experiments. Wilson was looking for a dissertation topic and was in the middle of a pilot observational study on the provisioning of public goods. He was frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t find enough institutional variation to test key conjectures about how institutional rules affected behavior. He stumbled on a working paper by Plott (1981) who argued that experiments were a great way to test for institutional variation because the experimenter could design those institutions. It was a eureka moment for Wilson. He asked Lin “did she know this Plott guy and what did she think about experiments?” Lin, as always, was enthusiastic. She knew Plott, she knew about experiments, but she wondered whether Wilson had a question worth asking. When it seemed there was a glimmer of an idea, she indicated that experiments might be a useful method for addressing the question. In her usual low key manner she gave Wilson a lengthy reading list and pressed him to go visit a brand new assistant professor who had just been hired in economics—Arlington Williams. At the time Wilson thought this was simply routine; he did not realize that Lin had never designed or run an experiment, instead she always kept her eyes open for methods to tackle interesting questions and knew everyone who was doing exciting work. Lin Ostrom has always pressed her students (and co-authors) to come up with a key question. Once defined she presses for the appropriate empirical method. Ostrom has encouraged students and colleagues alike to explore new methods in the social sciences so as to gain greater precision in measurement. Among the methods she has championed has been

‘Tin Trunk Literati’ and Beyond: hidden sources for Africa's History

Serendipity and surprise occasionally contribute to the work of the historian. A chance discovery of crucial documents, a word from an informant, or a brief text helping to resolve a puzzle from the past, can set the adrenalin pulsing. Despite the apparent dull, desk-bound procedures of historical research it can at times be a rather exciting venture with eureka moments. There is another dimension that never ceases to thrill me: bringing to life an insignificant voice from the past, recovering the words of those supposedly ‘without history’, giving flesh and being to a forgotten ‘common person’, and contributing a further piece of evidence to history ‘from below’.Here is aeurekamoment, John L. Comaroff, the South African social anthropologist describing finding the diary of Sol T. Plaatje written about the siege of Mafeking in 1899: “The document was discovered by accident rather than by design.

The Eureka Moment: An Interview with Sir Alec Jeffreys

In 1984, while tracking the veins of globin gene evolution and panning the human genome for hypervariable linkage markers, Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally struck gold—he discovered a way to identify any human being by a DNA “fingerprint”. To use Jeffreys' words, he has been “branded” by DNA fingerprinting, but he delights in its application and the hook it provides for public curiosity about science. Like Jeffreys himself, I wanted to dig below the surface of this discovery as well as that of another genetic nugget—the intervening sequence—found as a post-doctoral fellow seven years earlier.

Martin Brodie: epilepsy expertise and whisky wisdom

Martin Brodie: epilepsy expertise and whisky wisdom

Lord of the Ants (review)

Reviewed by: Lord of the Ants Lawrence Mastroni Lord of the Ants (2008). Produced by David Dugan. A NOVA production for PBS. www.pbs.org 54 minutes. David Dugan’s Lord of the Ants, a NOVA production for PBS, offers a compelling portrait of entomologist, Sociobiology founder, and biodiversity advocate E.O. Wilson. The documentary provides a chronological sweep of Wilson’s life and work, from his early childhood fascination with nature to the controversies surrounding his 1975 publication of Sociobiology: the New Synthesis and his more recent work with biodiversity. Reenactments of his childhood and early career are punctuated with comments from the narrator, Wilson, and his scientific supporters and critics. Lord of the Ants also provides stunning close-ups of the insect world, as well as footage of Wilson working in the field and laboratory. The images of Wilson at work highlight a repeated theme in The Lord of the Ants: Wilson never lost his boyhood enchantment with the natural world. This enchantment encouraged Wilson to approach science from the perspective of a naturalist, a perspective for which he won both accolades and derision. On the one hand, he was praised (at the age of thirteen) for his identification of a fire ant that had migrated to Alabama from South America. On the other hand, in his early days at Harvard in the 1950s, his approach to science was viewed as “stamp collecting” and out of touch with the new molecular biology that stemmed from the discovery of the structure of DNA. Soon, however, Wilson had his scientific “eureka moment” that placed him closer to the scientific mainstream (by drawing upon chemistry) and influenced his future work: he discovered that ants “communicate” with one another by exuding chemicals. Wilson realized that this chemical-exuding behavior is encoded in the ants’ genes. From this insight, the narrator notes, “Ed Wilson set himself a daunting task: to investigate the origins of all animal behavior, from ants to monkeys, right through to the most social of all primates, humans. He even invented a name for this new discipline: Sociobiology.” Wilson’s 1975 publication of Sociobiology: the New Synthesis ignited a heated debate about the role of genes in determining human behavior. The suggestion that behavior was biologically based had a strong association with nineteenth-century scientific racism and with the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Some critics believed Sociobiology, like scientific racism and eugenics, sanctioned a biological determinism that justified existing hierarchies and inequalities. Wilson, however, gave an equivocal conclusion in Sociobiology about the exact influence of genes: “Although [End Page 76] the genes have given away most of their sovereignty [in determining human culture], they maintain a certain amount of influence in at least the behavioral qualities that underlie variations between cultures.” Lord of the Ants gives a sympathetic account of Wilson as he was subjected to acrimonious criticism from other scientists who saw the potential resurgence of scientific racism. However, the film fails to present the controversy over Sociobiology in all its complexity. More was at stake than a challenge to a liberal faith in the plasticity of human culture and the non-influence of genes. Some scientists and philosophers raised epistemological questions about Sociobiology and sociobiologists, suggesting that many of the field’s practitioners do not subject their claims to rigorous tests of falsification. Instead, according to Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, sociobiologists construct “plausible stories” that may or may not be true. The documentary also lacks an adequate transition from the controversy over Sociobiology to the controversy over biodiversity. The omission is puzzling: The strife over Sociobiology suggests that Wilson became a pariah in the scientific community, especially among social scientists. Despite his diminished status, the narrator states: “The Sociobiology controversy forced Ed Wilson, reluctantly, into the limelight. He learned to use his celebrity status to alert the world to another passion: his growing concern about the state of the world.” The camera reinforces the narrator’s point as Wilson is seen receiving an award, standing next to former President Clinton. However, no explanation is offered explaining how Wilson became a “celebrity” after being chastised for his views in Sociobiology and how his “celebrity...

Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment

This dossier of articles on the uses of reenactment in documentary-based film, video, and performance art of the past quarter-century originated in panels that I organized and participated in at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Visible Evidence conferences in 2007 and 2008. The impetus for those panels was a critical hunch that reenactment was making a comeback, a feeling that throughout the landscape of contemporary moving-image culture-in mainstream film and television, at festivals of documentary and avant-garde cinema, and in galleries and museums-one was seeing the return of techniques of historical restaging that had once been quite common in documentary and social realist film. The eureka moment for me came when I found myself, in the space of a week or so, listening to presentations at my university by two quite different American filmmakers, George Stoney and Liza Johnson. Both had been invited to discuss projects that had taken them to impoverished areas of the American South, where two quite different (but not unrelated) kinds of oppression and neglect had made daily life a struggle. The resulting films had been crafted with local residents, whom the filmmakers had asked to play themselves in small quotidian dramas. A half-century apart, Stoney and Johnson had created American versions of what Cesare Zavattini, one of the pioneering theorists and practitioners of Italian neorealism, called pedinamento, which Ivone Margulies translates in an important essay on cinematic reenactment as the shadowing of everyday facts at close range.1 Margulies uses the documentary work of Zavattini and his fellow neorealists as the model for a social pedagogy of reenactment in cinema, in which ordinary people are given the task of interpret[ing] their human roles in society, so as to give themselves and others a second chance, when psychological or social circumstances have initially prevented them from acting as they would have liked.2 We tend to think that documentary filmmaking became aware of itself (or, in the critical jargon, self-reflexive) quite recently: at some point, say, after Stoney made his classic works of documentary reenactment for the Georgia State Department of Health, including Palmour Street: A Study of Family Life (US, 1949), his first film as a director, and All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story (US, 1953), the film I had heard him speak about at NYU. Made in a semi-narrative style that had been conventional for decades, the innovation of Palmour Street and All My Babies was to put black people in speaking roles in which they could act out the challenges for impoverished communities of maintaining good health (mental health, in Palmour Street; natal and maternal health in All My Babies), as well as some of the methods of addressing them and the racial discrimination that was the unspoken subject of both films, and of Stoney's interracial production methods.3 It has been convenient to distinguish the era of Stoney's earliest films from a later period of filmmaking and viewing-arriving some time in the 1980s or 1990s-by the term postmodernity, which has been taken to mean, when applied to realist and documentary cinema, the end of credulity in methods of narrative construction and historical explanation. But it was clear to me that the film I heard Johnson discussing, South of Ten (US, 2006), an experimental documentary made with residents of the devastated Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was no less a work of pedinamento than Stoney's. Both films could be said to serve the exemplary or redemptive function that characterized, according to Margulies, the neorealist sense of reenactment. And in both films, acting serves as the critical, if not contradictory, foundation of a documentary effect, wherein the nonprofessional actors' theatricality calls into question the authenticity of [their] gestures.4 My interest in convening public conversations on reenactment was spurred, in part, by the coincidence of these two film presentations, and the deja vu experience of seeing methods of performance and storytelling in documentary film of the 1950s apparently revived for a film of the recent past. …

Marie-Germaine Bousser: going against the grain

Marie-Germaine Bousser: going against the grain

The birth of spectral decomposition

It was definitely a eureka moment, in fact several eureka moments along the way. The first came in 1991–1992 when I was working in the technology group at Amoco Canada. A key processing step before handing seismic data to the interpreters was shaping the source wavelet in each 2D line to a consistent spectral shape. Some of the data sets contained strong coal reflections overlying the geologic zone of interest. It was very important to stay away from such coal reflections when doing the spectral matching/shaping because the interference from these strong coal reflections would contaminate the wavelet information. Such contaminated spectra seemed to show more about the coals than about the wavelet we were trying to characterize. So the thought was, if a short window around the coals tells us something about the coals, then why don't we see if a short window around a target zone of interest tells us something about that zone of interest. A 2D testline across well control seemed like a good place to start investigating this idea. The resulting trace-by-trace, short window amplitude spectra revealed a great deal of interesting variability. The eureka moment occurred as soon as I saw that those variations in spectral content seemed to be associated with geologic heterogeneity. Repeating the experiment on a 2D stratigraphic seismic model showed interference patterns that were similar to those observed in the real data. At that point, I was hooked and knew there was so much more potential under that rock.

How successful startups capitalize on IP

Any successful founder of a technology-based company can tell you, with an ethereal smile, exactly when and where "the big idea" hit him. Then his expression will flash to a serious battle-worn stare as he explains all the work he had to do to get his product launched. The intellectual property (IP) aspects of a typical odyssey from startup to product release requires one to go beyond the "eureka moment" and ask if you have discovered a viable "big idea".

The Back Page

During the 1970s–1980s, most attributes were amplitude-based instantaneous attributes. In the 1990s, we were able to calculate attributes ranging from event (also called horizon) attributes calculated over multiple traces and/or variable time windows to entire volumes of seismic attributes. There was no eureka moment associated with this evolution. Rather, I believe it was the outcome of several decades of work in computer science, geophysical interpretation, and reservoir characterization.

Living with History

Living with History

Scientific discovery, peak experiences and the Col-oh-nell Flastratus! phenomenon

Once I had a bizarre dream in which I was vouchsafed a secret which would ensure my wealth and success. It was the title for a comic novel; one supposedly so funny that it would guarantee classic status for any book: Oh Colonel Flastratus! The distinctive feature about my dream was its quality of profound significance, which felt akin to the Eureka moment of a scientific discovery. This led me to question whether the 'peak experience' (PE) of scientific discovery might be as delusional as my dream. On the one hand, euphoric elation attached to a discovery does not guarantee that insights objective truth - implications must be spelled-out and checked. The easy induction of pseudo-profound insights by intoxicants serves as a warning of the potential pitfalls. An arbitrary object becomes labeled with an obscure sense of delight and personal relevance in a process that could be termed the Colonel Flastratus! phenomenon. But neither are peak experiences irrelevant. A scientific PE is some kind of personal guarantee of the subjective truth of an insight - a signal that states: 'This is high quality stuff, by your standards. Do not ignore it, do not forget it, try to understand it'. Peak experiences in science could therefore be considered the result of a 'significance alarm' going off in the brain and their objective value depends on the specialized cognitive quality of that specific brain. So scientists may be correct to take peak experiences seriously. Perhaps the best approach is to regard the scientific PE as a signal from the self to the self, a subjectively evaluated and auto-administered emotional reward for good thinking.

The new medicines: how drugs are created, approved, marketed, and sold

List of Illustrations Preface Abbreviations and Acronyms The Path from Bench to Bedside How did the FDA get to be in charge? The History of Human Drugs The Eureka Moment: How New Medicines Are Discovered Test Tube Results Are Not Enough - Animal Tests for a Drug's Utility The Business Decisions - Committing to Development Production of the New Drug Laboratory and Animal Safety Testing Getting Set for Clinical Trials Phase 1 Clinical Trials Phase 2 Clinical Testing Phase 3 Testing Putting Together the Application for Approval: The New Drug Application (NDA) Now Everybody Holds Their Breath (and some people may brush up on the rules for insider trading) - Will the FDA File the NDA? The FDA Review What do outside experts think? The Advisory Committee Meeting and FDA Approval The Launch: Marketing the Drug It's Not Over Till It's Over: Post Approval Studies Are we well served?

Eureka moment as X-rays slice through forgery

Eureka moment as X-rays slice through forgery

Concept-matching in the brain depends on serotonin and gamma-frequency shifts

A Eureka moment has three components--puzzle, solution and hedonic response (elation etc.). Puzzle and solution come together in the association cortex and are immensely variable from instance to instance. By contrast, the hedonic response is subcortical and almost one-dimensional; how is it triggered? It is triggered by the relation between puzzle and solution, a good fit or good match, like the relation between two words that rhyme. In 1999 J.W. Fost proposed that serotonin is a crucial agent; here it is proposed that a frequency-jump initiates the serotonin causal chain, as energy shifts from 20 to 40 Hz or some such jump. The hypothesis assumes that any discrete idea is embodied in a time-course of electrical and chemical changes in a network of neurons, and that keeping the idea in mind involves repeating more or less the same time-course over and over. If observed frequencies in the gamma range result from such repetition, the period for running the time-course once is of the order of 25 ms. Also accepted is the suggestion that, although the brain runs many processes simultaneously, in the conscious mind attention focuses on only one idea at a time; an attempt to "think of two things at once" actually results only in giving them attention alternately, with a repeat-time of the order of 50 ms and frequency 20 Hz. Only if the two time-courses have certain elements in common will there be any repetition at 40 Hz. Now suppose a thinker takes up a problem and makes a succession of attempts at solution. As long as he thinks of wrong answers, he generates activity only at 20 Hz, but when he hits upon the right answer, activity at 40 Hz shows up. This is a highly oversimplified scenario but its essential features might carry over to the vastly more complicated workings of a real brain. The virtue of the proposed mechanism is its generality. Under the proposal, any ideas in mind that do not match give no result but as soon as two ideas match, results ensue. This behavior in the model, wholly general except in one specific respect, is needed for conformity with real human brains' behavior. In normal people, production of this "link-joy" is an important reward mechanism and malfunction of this system may contribute to Capgras syndrome and some varieties of autism.

Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and La France déchirée

Le peuple constitue ses propres archives. —Michel Foucault, 1974

How crosstalk creates vision-related eureka moments

The discussion begins with a familiar and defensible characterization of the eureka moment, according to which it is the unexpected product of separate and often seemingly incompatible perspectives. The principal aim of the discussion is to explain how, so characterized, vision-related eureka moments can occur. To fulfill this aim, the discussion employs a notion of crosstalk, in which cognitive interference slightly increases as a result of the creative thinker's considerable, albeit only partly successful, pre-eureka cognitive effort. Such crosstalk, it is suggested, is likely to occur when top-down visual imaging repeatedly stimulates pyramidal cells closely apposed to others that, although simultaneously active, are part of bottom-up visual perception that is initially cognitively unrelated to such imaging. It is further suggested that local circuitry, in the form of inhibitory interneurons, can synchronize cells associated with these initially separate processes, thus causing subsequent perceptual patterns to be subtly modified by pre-eureka problem-solving imagery. This modification, it is claimed, may help explain the unexpected shift in visual perception that accompanies the creative thinker's eureka moment, a shift that can improve the thinker's subsequent understanding of the relevance of information to a problem's solution.

Chiropractic and the Social Context of Medical Technology, 1895–1925

Chiropractic and the Social Context of Medical Technology, 1895—1925 STEVEN C. MARTIN In 1924, B. J. Palmer, America’s foremost chiropractor, revealed “the most valuable invention of history,” the neurocalometer. A thermopile connected to a galvanometer that measured temperature differences along the spinal column, the neurocalometer would revolutionize chiropractic because “it picks, proves and locates the CAUSE of all diseases of the human race.”1 In response to this dramatic announcement, Palmer was widely condemned by many of his most ardent supporters in the chiropractic community. Many chiropractors scorned Palmer as a traitor to the cause, and nearly half the faculty of his Palmer School of Chiropractic (PSC) resigned. Palmer fled his headquarters, disappearing with his family on a round-the-world journey that lasted eight months. The proud PSC plummeted, and what had once been the premier chiropractic educational institution nearly folded a year later.2 Dr. Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine and the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is writing a book on the history of chiropractic. He gratefully acknowledges the support of a grant from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation and a travel grant from the Bakken: A Library and Museum of Electricity in Life. The author is indebted to the librarians and archivists at the Bakken, the Palmer College of Chiropractic, the National College of Chiropractic, and the Logan College of Chiropractic. He also thanks Ellen Koch and Ruth Schwartz Cowan for their help and encouragement. ‘B. J. Palmer, The Hour Has Struck (n.p., 1924), p. 35. ‘Details of the neurocalometer episode are derived from the following sources: ibid.; B.J. Palmer, The Neurocalometer (n.p., 1924), Why Did B.J.? (n.p., n.d.); the special neurocalometer issues of the Fountain Head News, eds. 1 —18, vol. 14, no. 18 (August 22, 1924)-vol. 15, no. 14 (February 6, 1927). These sources are available in the Archives of the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. Secondary sources include Chittenden Turner, The Rise of Chiropractic (Los Angeles, 1931), pp. 39-45; A. A. Dye, The Evolution ofChiropractic: Its Discovery and Development (Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 127— 45; Russell W. Gibbons, “Assessing the Oracle at the Fountain Head: B.J. Palmer and His Times, 1902—1962,” Chiropractic History 7 (1987): 9—14; Joseph C. Keating, “Introducing the Neurocalometer: A View from the Fountain Head,” Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association 35 (1991): 165— 78.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3404-0003S01.00 808 Chiropractic and the Social Context of Medical Technology 809 The neurocalometer controversy highlights the critically important role that technology plays in the history of chiropractic. Throughout their history chiropractors have clashed over the appropriate place of machines in health care. As a profession self-consciously defining an alternative approach to health care, chiropractic struggled with the appropriate role of medical technology. In this article I explore this facet of chiropractic history as a means of illustrating how technology helped define both orthodox and unorthodox medicine. In addition, I argue that the evolution of chiropractic attitudes toward technology illustrates important changes in popular American attitudes toward medical machines.’ Early Chiropractic, 1895—1910 Chiropractic was founded by Daniel David (D. D.) Palmer (fig. 1). Born into a Canadian frontier family, Palmer emigrated to the American Midwest as a young man. Without formal education, he supported himself as a grocery clerk, beekeeper, fish seller, and schoolteacher before turning to magnetic healing in 1886.4 He developed a successful practice in Iowa and later claimed to have spent the following decade searching for the underlying cause of disease/ In September 1895 he experienced his “eureka moment.”1’ He described it so: 'Surprisingly little literature exists on the history of medical technology. Useful sources include Audrey Davis, Medicine and Its Technology (Westport, Conn., 1981); Joel D. Howell, “The Meaning of Medical Machines” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1987); Stanley J- Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge, 1978); Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: A History of Their Interaction (San Francisco, 1984); Ellen Koch, “The Process of Innovation in...