Michael Crichton Speech - “Science Policy in the 21st Century”

On January 28, 2005, Michael Crichton gave a speech titled "Science Policy in the 21st Century" for the American Enterprise Institute. The video lasts an hour and 15 minutes.

The speech covers issues addressed in State of Fear, though much of what Crichton said can be applied to a number of other situations.

Michael Crichton: “What I Have Learned from Reactions to My Books”

Michael Crichton: “What I Have Learned from Reactions to My Books”

This is a publication of a speech that Michael Crichton made on May 21, 2007 at the "Who Owns Your Body?" symposium at the Kent School of Law in Chicago. It was published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in 2009 and has recently been made available through Law Commons.

Michael Crichton on Goals and Intentions

At the Academy of Achievement’s 1992 Summit in Las Vegas, Michael Crichton gave a brief talk on goals and intentions. The talk, length [11:10], is available as a free download through iTunes.

Crichton illustrated the roles of the conscious and unconscious minds by comparing them to a small mouse on top of an enormous elephant. The mouse represents the conscious mind; the elephant – the unconscious mind. He said, “And if you want to knock down walls, the notion of which animal, which mind you want to enlist, is I think, very clear.”

Michael Crichton Speech Videos

Just found some of Michael Crichton’s speeches and public appearances online.

National Press Club - November 28, 2006
Crichton discusses some of the issues raised in his novel Next.

Students and Leaders - March 16, 2005
Crichton takes questions from students at Cleveland High School in Reseda, California.

Science Policy in the 21st Century - January 25, 2005

National Press Club - April 6, 1993
This was Crichton’s famous Mediasaurus speech. In May 2008, Slate declared Michael Crichton Vindicated in his predictions for the media. The article by Jack Shafer was based on an email interview.

Complexity, Financial Markets, and Suspicious Graphs

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently watched a DVD of Michael Crichton’s 2005 speech to the Independent Institute.

I’ve viewed the speech before several times, but this time something caught my eye. Crichton’s speech was accompanied by slides. About 43 minutes into the speech, Crichton said:

Here’s a financial market, and we all know that if you were to make one single change, say, increase the price of crude oil or charge a White House aide with a felony, you could not be sure how the financial system would react. Nobody knows in advance. People make their businesses out of trying to figure it out, but nobody knows except for inside traders. And that’s the same for financial systems all around the world.

The slide shown during this was a photograph Chicago Board of Trade by Andreas Gursky. This was one of the artworks owned by Crichton that was auctioned off at Christie’s in May 2010.

A short time later I was reading the book No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos. It was Markopolos who discovered that Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and he warned the SEC several times, to great futility.

Markopolos was asked by his firm to replicate Madoff’s results, and in doing so, he realized the implausibility of those results:

At the bottom of the page, a chart of Madoff’s return stream rose steadily at a 45-degree angle, which simply doesn’t exist in finance…. Volatility is a natural part of the market. It moves up and down—and does it every day. Any graphic representation of the market has to reflect that. Yet Madoff’s 45-degree rise represented a market without that volatility. It wasn’t possible. (pp. 30, 35-36)

This made me recall not only Crichton’s speech, but also another infamous graph—the “hockey stick” graph. As Crichton explained in his speech “Science Policy in the 21st Century”:

In 1998, an American climate researcher named Michael Mann, along with his co-workers, published an estimation of global temperatures from 1000 to 1980….Mann's results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last one thousand years. As a result, his report achieved immediate and world-wide fame. It also formed the centerpiece of the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report, in 2001, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….The next chapter in the story began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, obtained Mann's data and repeated his study. They found numerous grave and astonishing errors in Mann's work, which they detailed in 2003.

Steve McIntyre, like Harry Markopolos, was skeptical when viewed the graph in question. From a 2010 interview:

In financial circles, we talk about a hockey stick curve when some investor presents you with a nice, steep curve in the hope of palming something off on you.

Just as Madoff’s return graph didn’t reflect reality, neither did Mann’s hockey stick.

Some useful links:

Climate Audit - Steve McIntyre’s blog

McIntyre and McKitrick Slide Show on the Hockey Stick

2004 Technology Review article on McIntyre and McKitrick

Michael Crichton - Independent Institute Speech DVD

Last night I watched a DVD of a speech Michael Crichton gave on November 15, 2005 for the Independent Institute at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. You can see Crichton’s speech on his website, but the DVD has much more.

The video on Crichton’s website runs 52:07, while the DVD runs 117 minutes and includes the entire event. In addition to Crichton’s speech, there are also short talks by:

Bruce Ames - Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley

Sallie Louise Baliunas - a research astrophysicist and former Deputy Director and Director of Science Programs at Mount Wilson Observatory. The recipient of the Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize and the Bok Prize, she received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University

William M. Gray - Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society

George H. Taylor - the State Climatologist for Oregon and Professor of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University

The DVD States of Fear: Science or Politics? can be purchased for $16.95 from the Independent Institute. It also contains a question and answer section with more remarks from Crichton.

The transcript for the event can be read online, but I highly recommend purchasing the DVD, as the transcript does not show slides and visuals from the other speakers’ talks.


Links and more info on Michael Crichton at:
Kahlessa's Corner

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day everyone! I feel the need to point out yet again, that being skeptical about mankind's contribution to global warming does not mean you don't care about the planet. It's interesting that if you express the slightest reservation about the causes and cures of global warming, people act like you're going on a hunting trip for endangered species.

This exchange between Kenner and Ted Bradley in Michael Crichton's State of Fear makes a good point:

“So what exactly is your point?” Bradley said. “You're saying that we don't need to pay any attention to the environment, that we can just leave it alone and let industry pollute and everything will be hunky-dory?”
For a moment, it looked to Sarah as if Kenner would get angry, but he did not. He said, “If you oppose the death penalty, does it also mean you are in favor of doing nothing at all about crime?”
“No,” Ted said.
”You can oppose the death penalty but still favor punishing criminals?”
”Yes. Of course.”
”Then I can say that global warning is not a threat, but still favor environmental controls, can't I?” (426-427)

Crichton clarified his own position during his testimony in the Senate hearing on September 28, 2005:

“In closing, I want to state emphatically that nothing in my remarks should be taken to imply that we can ignore our environment, or that we should not take climate change seriously. On the contrary, we must dramatically improve our record on environmental management. That's why a focused effort on climate science, aimed at securing sound, independently verified answers to policy questions, is so important now.”

Links and more info on Michael Crichton at:
http://kahlessa.proboards80.com/index.cgi

New Book Update - 9/7/08

Something new on the Wikipedia link:

It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern:

Unsourced content and, as best as I can tell, an unverifiable title. There is a Michael Crichton untitled novel coming up, just no reliable source for this title and summary.

If you can address this concern by improving, copyediting, sourcing, renaming or merging the page, please edit this page and do so. You may remove this message if you improve the article or otherwise object to its deletion for any reason. To avoid confusion, it helps to explain why you object to the deletion, either in the edit summary or on the talk page. If this template is removed, it should not be replaced.

The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for five days.Prod, concern: Unsourced content and, as best as I can tell, an unverifiable title. There is a Michael Crichton untitled novel coming up, just no reliable source for this title and summary. This template was added 2008-09-06 05:55; five days from then is 2008-09-11 05:55.

If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, consider improving the article so that it is acceptable according to the deletion policy.
Author(s) notification template: {{subst:prodwarning|Final Day of Happiness (novel)}} ~~~~

We should be getting an announcement on Crichton’s website soon, so we’ll know one way or another. I wonder if there’s a leak at Harper Collins

Taking a look back, Next was announced on or around September 12, 2006. So hang on everyone!

Crichton speech from May 21, 2007
On May 21, 2007, there was a conference in Chicago on "Legal and Ethical Issues raised by Michael Crichton's Next." Here’s a link to the speech Dr. Crichton made there. I just discovered this on Crichton’s website in the Next section. It isn’t listed in the speeches section. This must have been added fairly recently to his website.

What I Have Learned From Reactions to My Books