- Email: [email protected]
Animating images
Perspectives
by assessing the association between country income growth and country change in happiness. Diener and colleagues do find a positive association, whereas Easterlin and Sawangfa do not in another chapter in this volume. More important than this disagreement is another major problem pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his Nobelwinning work on how we psychologically process evidence. With his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman identified a “law of small numbers”. Their satirical “law” was in contrast to the serious law of large numbers, in which a large sample gives rapidly increasing confidence on the true value of an average or other sample statistic.
Unfortunately, all of us too often do the reverse: we have way too much confidence in a statistical result that is based on a sample that is much too small. In the change in happiness and income growth association, the crosscountry sample is in this category— only 19 observations for Diener and colleagues and 15 for Easterlin and Sawangfa. It’s no wonder that the two chapters got different results, as such a small sample will be sensitive to one extreme datapoint, or to small changes in measuring the concepts. All one can say is that the original paradox was based on a sample of only one—the lack of increase in US happiness while US
per capita income rose. Now we have a few more cases and many of them do show happiness and income rising together over time. But the changes question won’t be settled unless we get much more data (cross-country or longitudinal individual data). Pending more data collection, at this point the Easterlin paradox looks like a badly cracked foundation for any major decisions on tax or development policy. If you want to enter the happiness wars yourself, one can hardly find a better volume to get you started than this splendid collection.
William Easterly [email protected]
In brief Courtesy The Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Exhibition Animating images
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, USA, until June 7, 2011 http://www.sfmoma.org/ exhibitions/418
1484
In the mid-19th century, portrait photographers used iron neck braces to steady their subjects and ensure that they remained static for the time required to expose photographic plates. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), who spent his working life in the USA, transformed photography by using linked sequences of cameras with fast shutter-speeds to record the components of animal and human locomotion. He also developed a primitive projector, the Zoopraxiscope, which used a stopmotion technique to show short, flickering sequences of animals in motion; and contributed to the development of the cinema. This pioneering work is the focus of an exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. In 1872, Muybridge invented and patented systems of cameras with high-speed electric or mechanical shutter releases that enabled him to make multiple exposures, lasting split seconds, in quick succession. He
famously printed the freeze frame images he captured of a trotting racehorse and proved, for the first time, that horses can simultaneously lift all four hooves off the ground for a fraction of a second. For the next 30 years he photographed and catalogued locomotion in people and different species of animals. Muybridge lectured in Paris in 1881, where his demonstration to Étienne-Jules Marey convinced the eminent physiologist to focus solely on photography, as the best means of investigating motion. But Leland Stanford’s book of 1882, The Horse in Motion, failed to acknowledge Muybridge’s contribution by relegating him to the role of a technician and thereby damaging his reputation. So, in 1884, Muybridge sought scientific validation of his work at the University of Pennsylvania, where his photography was overseen by a distinguished committee that included neurologist Francis Dercum, anatomist Joseph Leidy, physiologist Harrison Allen, and engineer William Marks. Working at the university until 1886, Muybridge
took more than 20 000 sequence photographs. Animal Locomotion was published in 11 volumes and comprised 19 347 individual shots. Pathological Locomotion (volume 8) includes about 30 sequences of clinical photographs, in which he captured impaired movement in patients at local hospitals. The clinical sequences include a boy with infantile paralysis, photographed walking on his hands and feet; and an adult man with hemiplegia, who was photographed walking with a cane. These images inspired some 20th-century artists. Francis Bacon owned three of Muybridge’s books and hundreds of sheets of his images, which he annotated and used as sources for his compositions and individual figures; he imbued the child’s apelike gait with pathos in Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) of 1961. Muybridge’s enduring legacy and influence is manifest in this remarkable exhibition.
Colin Martin [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 377 April 30, 2011
by assessing the association between country income growth and country change in happiness. Diener and colleagues do find a positive association, whereas Easterlin and Sawangfa do not in another chapter in this volume. More important than this disagreement is another major problem pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his Nobelwinning work on how we psychologically process evidence. With his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman identified a “law of small numbers”. Their satirical “law” was in contrast to the serious law of large numbers, in which a large sample gives rapidly increasing confidence on the true value of an average or other sample statistic.
Unfortunately, all of us too often do the reverse: we have way too much confidence in a statistical result that is based on a sample that is much too small. In the change in happiness and income growth association, the crosscountry sample is in this category— only 19 observations for Diener and colleagues and 15 for Easterlin and Sawangfa. It’s no wonder that the two chapters got different results, as such a small sample will be sensitive to one extreme datapoint, or to small changes in measuring the concepts. All one can say is that the original paradox was based on a sample of only one—the lack of increase in US happiness while US
per capita income rose. Now we have a few more cases and many of them do show happiness and income rising together over time. But the changes question won’t be settled unless we get much more data (cross-country or longitudinal individual data). Pending more data collection, at this point the Easterlin paradox looks like a badly cracked foundation for any major decisions on tax or development policy. If you want to enter the happiness wars yourself, one can hardly find a better volume to get you started than this splendid collection.
William Easterly [email protected]
In brief Courtesy The Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Exhibition Animating images
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, USA, until June 7, 2011 http://www.sfmoma.org/ exhibitions/418
1484
In the mid-19th century, portrait photographers used iron neck braces to steady their subjects and ensure that they remained static for the time required to expose photographic plates. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), who spent his working life in the USA, transformed photography by using linked sequences of cameras with fast shutter-speeds to record the components of animal and human locomotion. He also developed a primitive projector, the Zoopraxiscope, which used a stopmotion technique to show short, flickering sequences of animals in motion; and contributed to the development of the cinema. This pioneering work is the focus of an exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. In 1872, Muybridge invented and patented systems of cameras with high-speed electric or mechanical shutter releases that enabled him to make multiple exposures, lasting split seconds, in quick succession. He
famously printed the freeze frame images he captured of a trotting racehorse and proved, for the first time, that horses can simultaneously lift all four hooves off the ground for a fraction of a second. For the next 30 years he photographed and catalogued locomotion in people and different species of animals. Muybridge lectured in Paris in 1881, where his demonstration to Étienne-Jules Marey convinced the eminent physiologist to focus solely on photography, as the best means of investigating motion. But Leland Stanford’s book of 1882, The Horse in Motion, failed to acknowledge Muybridge’s contribution by relegating him to the role of a technician and thereby damaging his reputation. So, in 1884, Muybridge sought scientific validation of his work at the University of Pennsylvania, where his photography was overseen by a distinguished committee that included neurologist Francis Dercum, anatomist Joseph Leidy, physiologist Harrison Allen, and engineer William Marks. Working at the university until 1886, Muybridge
took more than 20 000 sequence photographs. Animal Locomotion was published in 11 volumes and comprised 19 347 individual shots. Pathological Locomotion (volume 8) includes about 30 sequences of clinical photographs, in which he captured impaired movement in patients at local hospitals. The clinical sequences include a boy with infantile paralysis, photographed walking on his hands and feet; and an adult man with hemiplegia, who was photographed walking with a cane. These images inspired some 20th-century artists. Francis Bacon owned three of Muybridge’s books and hundreds of sheets of his images, which he annotated and used as sources for his compositions and individual figures; he imbued the child’s apelike gait with pathos in Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) of 1961. Muybridge’s enduring legacy and influence is manifest in this remarkable exhibition.
Colin Martin [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 377 April 30, 2011