How Novel: Novelty Indicators

Humans crave novelty. Our visual cortex is stimulated by changes in our visual field. Even infants show more interest in new sights and sounds. Curiosity doesn’t entirely distinguish homo sapiens from other species, but we certainly would win the prize for maximizing its value. Science, art, and music wouldn’t exist without our drive for novelty. Science in particular thrives on some scientist thinking, “hmm, isn’t that interesting?” then turning it into something that helps us understand the universe we live in better, often with practical applications.

We don't always recognize important novelty when we see it

Depending on what source one believes, there are somewhere between 3 million and 7 million scientific papers published each year; whatever the number, it is growing rapidly, and impossible for a scientist in any particular field to keep up with, much less to look for insights from other fields. Most of these papers, of course, are likely to be incremental work, building on previous research and probably not reflecting true breakthroughs. How then, do researchers, and the people who fund them, spot the truly novel papers that may spark breakthroughs?

Enter the idea of a “novelty indicator” – and welcome to the Metascience Novelty Indicator Challenge.

The need for something to help identify scientific novelty has been recognized for some time. A 2016 paper by Wang, et. al warned that there was, in fact, a bias against such novelty. “Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a higher uncertainty of having impact,’ the authors warn. “These findings suggest that science policy, in particular funding decisions which rely on traditional bibliometric indicators based on short-term direct citation counts and Journal Impact Factors, may be biased against “high risk/high gain” novel research.”

Similarly, a 2019 paper by Veugelers and Wang emphasizes:

We find that the small proportion of scientific publications which score on novelty, particularly the 1% highly novel scientific publications in their field, are significantly and sizably more likely to have direct technological impact than comparable non-novel publications. In addition to this superior likelihood of direct impact, novel science also has a higher probability for indirect technological impact. being more likely to be cited by other scientific publications which have technological impact.

The issue is, how to best do such a score?

In Nature, Dr. Benjamin Steyn, co-head of the UK Metascience Unit, laments that he has “been stumped by the fact that there are no good ways to measure novelty,” and so: “Without good indicators, researchers can’t assess the prevalence of original papers or their value in scientific progress.”

He mentions work done by DeSci Labs and others on novelty scores, but believes “none of which are foolproof.” There has to be a better way:

That’s why the UK Metascience Unit has partnered with the non-profit organization RAND Europe; the Sussex Science Policy Research Unit; and the publisher Elsevier, to launch MetaNIC (see go.nature.com/3hhsdp3) — a competition to produce and validate indicators for scientific novelty in academic papers. Running until November, MetaNIC is open to researchers all around the world.

Participants will test their algorithm against 50,000 scientific papers that will have been ranked by 10,000 researchers on their novelty. The team whose indicator best matches the humans’ assessments will win £300,000 (US$407, 000). 

The Challenge website explains the importance:

If the global science system had responsibly used better and more timely indicators of research excellence, this could have a profound impact on the incentives of researchers, our understanding of the factors which make excellence more likely, and in turn, the pace of research progress. Better metascience indicators can help funders, governments, academic institutions, and individuals get more high-quality research out of limited resources.

As Dr. Steyn says: “Better indicators could improve our understanding of the factors that make research excellence more likely, the incentives of scientists and so the pace of scientific progress. That is worth exploring.”

Credit: MetaNIC

It’s worth pointing out exactly what the Metascience Unit that he is co-head of is for. It is a branch of the UK government, and the website explains: “Metascience typically examines the institutional structures, practices and incentives explaining how researchers spend their time and the speed, direction, nature and impact of their outputs.”

To put that in practice:

All our work starts from a simple idea: that the scientific method, so powerful in so many areas of life, should be systematically and routinely applied to how we practice, fund and support science itself.

Investing in research, development and innovation is vital to UK and international economic growth and prosperity. However, it is not just the quantity of that investment that matters, but also the quality. How research is funded and practiced is critical to accelerating scientific breakthroughs and innovations, nurturing talent, and shaping research culture.”

It makes me wish the U.S. had a Metascience Unit. Instead, we have DOGE, which is slashing federal scientific funding in the name of curbing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” crushing anything that can even remotely be considered “DEI,” and, while they are at it, punishing universities that President Trump is mad at. That’s no way to invest in science, to discover innovation, or to prepare for the future. If anything, it scorns novelty.

In JAMA Network, David Cutler and Edward Glaeser warn that the proposed NIH cuts are “the $8 trillion health care catastrophe.” In Forbes, John Drake, a professor at the University of Georgia, points out: “New macro-empirical research finds that every dollar invested in non-defense public R&D yields $1.40–$2.10 in economic output, and since World War II, government funding has driven roughly 20% of U.S. productivity.”  A paper from American University researchers concludes: “…budget cuts to public R&D would significantly hurt the economy in the long run, with large negative effects on GDP, investment, and government revenue. A 25 percent cut to public R&D spending would reduce GDP by an amount comparable to the decline in GDP during the Great Recession.”

So, yeah, how one cuts research, and which research gets cut, makes a difference, not just to researchers and their institutions but to all of us and the future of our country. 

I understand that federal funding isn’t unlimited and perhaps could be spent more judiciously, but arbitrary cuts are perhaps the worst way to do it. It sure seems like focusing on novelty, with its bigger potential for large impacts, could be a much better way to direct funding.

Maybe you, or a researcher you know, should sign up for the Metascience Novelty Indicators Challenge! 

The Long Game Should Have Already Started

Two books I recently read reminded me that, when it comes to playing the long game, conservatives have it all over, well, let’s not call them liberals, since the conservatives have managed to make that a pejorative term. Let’s just say left/center-left/center or even -- dare I say it? – progressives. Whatever we call them, they better get in that game.

Andrew C. McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America details how over the past sixty years conservatives successfully fought against efforts to regulate the sale, ownership, and use of guns, with the Heller decision opening up the doors and gun advocates flooding through them ever since.

Cara Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America shows how conservatives sought to divert funds from public schools to private schools, even religious ones, for over seventy years. Conservatives recently “lost” a Supreme Court ruling (St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond) that would have allowed the nation’s first religious charter school, but no one should think the war is over or that advocates of public education are even holding their own, much less winning. Voucher programs are in place in most states and are on their way in most others.  

And, of course, conservatives spent forty years trying to overturn Roe v. Wade (see The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer), succeeding with Dobbs. That was the long game played masterfully.

Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Most Americans support some form of gun control, public schools, and abortion rights, so the conservatives’ long game required shrewd planning and unrelenting persistence. What I don’t see -- what I’m worried is not happening -- are the long games on issues that people who aren’t hard right conservatives care about. Maybe they’re happening and are too subtle for me to be aware of, but I fear conservatives are just better at the long game.

Here are some of the key issues I mean:

Campaign finance:  It is appalling that the world’s richest man – who is not even a U.S. citizen – can essentially buy a Presidential election and several other races (along with fellow billionaires). It’s appalling that Citizens United held that corporations had the same rights as citizens to political donations and allowed them to flood campaigns with money. It's appalling that there was over $1b in “dark money” contributed in the 2024 election.  

This is not a way to run a democracy. In fact, it is a way to ensure we don’t have a democracy. We need real, meaningful campaign finance reform that returns power to the voters.

Voting Rights: The 1960’s saw some apparent victories in achieving voting rights, but sixty years later those rights are under attack again – in more pernicious ways. The Supreme Court is considering a case that would “gut” the Voting Rights Act, and states continue to chip away. Gerrymandering is widespread, in both red and blue states. Our vote is being neutered.

Conservatives talk about ID and other requirements, but let’s remind ourselves: in many other countries, if you are a citizen, you’re eligible to vote. In some countries, you are expected to vote. In the U.S., less than 75% of eligible voters were registered to vote in 2024, and that was for a hotly contested Presidential race.  Citizens should have both a right and a duty to vote. “States rights” to oversee elections don’t supersede our right to vote.

Privacy: We say we value our privacy, but we don’t act as though it actually is important. We’ve given it away to Big Tech and other corporations, and that is only going to get worse. Roe was based on an inferred right to privacy, and we saw how easily the Supreme Court swept that away.

The founders did not foresee Facebook, Google, surveillance cameras, or big data, and so the Bill of Rights doesn’t mention a right to privacy. If there is one thing that conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between should be able to agree on, it is that we deserve a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy.

Credit: Tor Project

Living Wage: the federal minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009. Take that in: 2009. Meanwhile, most workers have seen wage stagnation, our income and wealth inequalities are at record levels, and intergenerational social mobility – e.g., the American Dream that your kids will do better than you did – has crashed.

We cannot have a democracy where the vast majority of our wealth goes to a tiny minority. We cannot have a stable country that is clearly split into the have and have-nots. Workers need to be paid a living wage -- one that doesn’t require them to work multiple jobs, that gives their children the upbringing and opportunities they should have, and that lets them have suitable housing.

Health care: I am so sick of conservatives saying people on Medicaid who don’t work don’t deserve coverage.  I’m disgusted that ten states, including two of our largest, never felt that their poor deserved Medicaid expansion at all. I’m dismayed that it is considered a victory that, due to ACA, we “only” have 30 million people without insurance (not to mention the tens of millions who are underinsured).  

People in America should have a right to health care (just as they should have a right to clean air and water, safe and sufficient food, and adequate housing). These should not have to be “earned” or given on the whims of the legislators. And don’t talk to me about “Medicare for All,” a meaningless phrase; if we ever get universal coverage, it shouldn’t look, or be financed, anything like Medicare. We can do much, much better.

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You may have your own list of priorities. I could probably come up with a few more. But that’s the thing about priorities: if too many things are a priority, then nothing is.  Those five are big, big asks, but I’m hard pressed to see what I’d take away.

So, where’s the long game for these? Not just looking ahead to the next election cycle or the next Presidential race, but knowing what the end game is and plotting out the gritty detail about how to get there, no matter how long it takes or what setbacks are encountered. Who is doing that work, what are they doing – and how can we help?

There’s famous saying that applies here: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is now. Let’s start planting. 

The Future Is Here - and We're Not Ready

The war in Ukraine started out pretty much like you’d expect a 20^th century war might: aerial and artillery bombardment, followed by massed troops behind tanks and armed vehicles. It devolved into an early 20^th century war, complete with trenches and suicidal frontal attacks. Somewhere along the line, though, it turned into an actual 21^st century war, with cyberattacks and, most of all, drones dictating the battles.

That's the future knocking. Credit: Microsoft Designer

The latest surprise was Ukraine hitting Russian airbases as far as 3,000 miles away, using trucks with camouflaged drones to get near the bases, deployed remotely to great effect. Russia didn’t see it coming; neither did NATO or the U.S.

We think about the future, we try to prepare for it, but somehow it still manages to surprise us.

W.J. Hennigan writes in The New York Times:

The mission, called Operation Spider’s Web, was a fresh reminder to leaders of the world’s most advanced militaries that the toughest threats they face today are not limited to their regular rivals with expensive gear. Instead, swarms of small, off-the-shelf drones that can evade ground defenses can also knock out billions of dollars of military hardware in an instant.

What happened in Russia can happen in the United States — or anywhere else. The risk facing military bases, ports and command headquarters peppered across the globe is now undeniably clear.

The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal (with whom I seldom agree!) felt similarly: “ One urgent lesson beyond that conflict is that the U.S. homeland is far more vulnerable than most Americans realize.” 

“The Pentagon should be very worried about this,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who focuses on drone warfare and nuclear deterrence, told The Washington Post. Jason Matheny, CEO of the Rand Corporation, added: “Any country that has strategic bombers, strategic missiles and silos, or strategic nuclear submarines at port is looking at the attack and thinking the risk to our arsenal from a containerized set of drones disguised as a semitrailer poses a real risk.”

“If I think asymmetrically, if you’re Russia or China or another actor, what they’d likely do is try to infiltrate the United States and build their weapon from within the country,” retired General Glen VanHerck told WaPo. “Or if they put a container ship carrying drones into the Port of Long Beach or somewhere in close proximity to our critical infrastructure, including nuclear ports, that would be really hard to detect.”

The WaPo article also quotes Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, in an April Congressional hearing: The “character of warfare is changing at a ratio faster than we’ve ever seen. Our adversaries use $10,000 one-way drones that we shoot down with $2 million missiles. That cost-benefit curve is upside down.”

Mr. Hennigan warns: “The U.S. military has globe-spanning technology to detect, track and shoot down ballistic missiles, but — so far — its multimillion-dollar systems remain helpless against the drone threat. The Pentagon has tried to develop technologies and defensive tactics, but results have been spotty at best.” 

One only also has to think about how Ukraine had previously used cheap drones to sink expensive Russian ships last year, how the ragtag Houthis have rattled the mighty U.S. Navy in the Red Sea using drone attacks, or how the Israelis snuck explosives in the pagers and cell phones using by Hezbollah in a devastating “red button” attack last fall. This is war in a new age.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado) told WaPo: “This conflict has already fundamentally changed the nature of warfare,” with the Pentagon still spending “exorbitant amounts of money” on military programs for conflicts “that would be relevant decades ago.”

Billion dollar warships are impressive, multi-million dollar warplanes are the norm, pricy ballistic missiles are assumed, and who doesn’t like a fancy tank? But we’re learning that enough drones in the right places handled by the right people (or an AI) can negate all those investments in the past.

We’re seeing the future of war right now, and our slow moving military-industrial complex is too focused on what it has been doing -- and the trillions of dollars it brings them -- to react quickly enough. And guess what: its evolution won’t stop with drones.

All this came home to me in a New York Times opinion piece by Thomas Friedman:

[Trump’s] ridiculous right-wing woke obsession with destroying the U.S. electric vehicle industry that President Joe Biden was trying to build up undermines U.S. efforts to compete with China in electric batteries. Batteries are the new oil; they will power the new industrial ecosystem of A.I.-infused self-driving cars, robots, drones and clean tech.

The consequence of this, the economics writer Noah Smith observed, is the weakening of America’s capacity to build the kind of cheap, battery-powered drones that Ukraine just used to destroy part of Russia’s air fleet — and that China could use the same way against our aircraft carriers. “Trump and the G.O.P.,” Smith noted, “have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

Add to that Trump’s war on science, especially on health care, makes this all so much worse. Mr. Friedman continued:

What has distinguished and enriched the United States for so many years — and kept it the dominant global economic and military power — has been the ability to consistently attract that extra scientist or ambitious immigrant, that extra dollar of investment and that extra dollop of trust from allies. As the biggest economy in the world, we benefited disproportionately from a stable, global free market.

“Any conventional understanding of U.S. power would say that we would be crazy to put all three at risk, but that is exactly what we are doing today,” Nader Mousavizadeh, a founder of the geopolitical consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, told me.

The lowest level in 35 years. Source: NYT/NSF

The future is happening now. All the money we’ve been spending, on so many things in so many ways, are sunk costs. They may or may not be the best things to be spending money on in the 21^st century. Chances are, many of them are not. Where’s our UBI? Where is our 21^st century healthcare financing and delivery system? Where is our robotics industry, our EV industry, our alternative energy industries? Where is our AI strategy?

Meanwhile, we’re driving away the people who are inventing the future, and that future is happening now. We have a geriatric President bent on personal vengeance and a geriatric Congress busy fighting pointless cultural wars. They are not equipped to lead us into the future. But it is coming nonetheless.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse - Oh, My!

So the House has passed their “big, beautiful bill,” by the narrowest of margins. Crucial to the bill are large savings from Medicaid, which in past years Republicans would have taken some glee from but now they are careful to explain away as just cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” having finally realized that many MAGA voters depend on Medicaid.

Much of those savings come from proposed work requirements for Medicaid recipients, long a favored Republican tactic that the Biden Administration kept rejecting. Speaker Mike Johnson is very vocal about their importance. The people impacted by the work requirements, he insisted on Face the Nation:

If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system. You're cheating the system. And no one in the country believes that that's right. So there's a moral component to what we're doing. And when you make young men work, it's good for them, it's good for their dignity, it's good for their self-worth, and it's good for the community that they live in.

He's convinced that, instead of working, too many of them – especially young men – “playing video games all day.” He and other Republicans want to return Medicaid to what they see as its original purpose: “It’s intended for young, you know, single, pregnant women and the disabled and the elderly,” Speaker Johnson said. “But what’s happening right now is you have a lot of people, for example, young men, able-bodied workers, who are on Medicaid. They’re not working when they can.”

Maybe he should be working, but does this mean he shouldn't have Medicaid? Credit: Microsoft Designer

He’s generally right that, for most of its existence, Medicaid was not truly a program for the poor so much as for certain kinds of poor people, especially low income pregnant women and children, and the medically impoverished. It took Obamacare to widen coverage to all people under the poverty line, although the Supreme Court allowed states to decide if they wanted to do so, and ten states still have not.

It is, indeed, a moral question, just not the kind that Speaker Johnson likes, about whether there is a moral imperative to give more people, especially poor people, health coverage.  

The issue of these non-working Medicaid recipients is something of a shibboleth. Kaiser Family Foundation, for example, found “that 92% of Medicaid adults are either working (64%) or have circumstances that may qualify them for an exemption.” A 2023 CBO analysis cast doubt that such work requirements wouldn’t have much impact on the number of Medicaid recipients working. Work requirements are a solution in search of a problem.

Credit: Kaiser Family Foundation

What we do know about work requirements, from waiver programs in Arkansas and Georgia, is that they do, indeed, reduce the number of people on Medicaid, but largely by making it more difficult to verify eligibility. The requirements are confusing, the processes the recipients/potential recipients have to follow are cumbersome, and the mechanisms required to oversee them are expensive (or, depending on your perspective, lucrative for some vendors).

It's not about getting able-bodied people on Medicaid to work, and it is not about “waste, fraud and abuse;” it’s about getting fewer people enrolled in Medicaid.

The calls to return Medicaid to its original purpose seem very self-serving. Medicare, for example, did not original cover people with ESRD or disabled people under 65. Social Security did not originally cover farm workers or self-employed workers, and didn’t include benefits for disabled people or survivors of retired persons (spouses and children). We could save lots of money by returning those programs to their original purposes, but those are bridges that Republicans are not ready to cross…yet.

If we think Medicaid is not the right program for many poor people, well, that’s a fair discussion. Medicaid has more than its share of problems, not the least of which are low reimbursement rates in most states and a resulting lack of participating health care providers. Many poor people might, indeed, be better served by just letting them enroll in an ACA plan.

Unfortunately, though, ACA wasn’t designed for poor people, Its premium subsidies and cost sharing reductions do not apply to people with incomes under the federal poverty level. It was assumed that such people would all be covered by Medicaid expansion. Sure, low income people could get an ACA plan, but it is hard to see how they could afford the premiums or to pay deductibles/coinsurance amounts for care they might receive.

Maybe those low income, videogame playing young men could get jobs, but there’s a good chance their employers wouldn’t offer health insurance, or, even if they did, the required employee premium contribution would be unaffordable, or they could try to get an even more unaffordable ACA plan. For better or for worse, in the convoluted system we have Medicaid is the best place for them.

The moral component that Speaker Johnson and others – many of whom profess to be devout Christians – seem to miss is that in the richest country in the world no one should not get the health care they should have due to its cost. The best way the U.S. has found to try to achieve that – and it is a wildly imperfect solution -- is to get more people covered by some form of health insurance. ACA cut the number of those without insurance almost in half, but that still leaves almost 30 million people without coverage.  

The ”big, beautiful bill” is estimated to add another 10+ million people to the ranks of the uninsured, most but not all of whom would come from people losing Medicaid coverage. It could also, oh-by-the-way, further cripple safety net hospitals and professionals, further exacerbating the impact.

So when you hear Republicans talk about “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid, what they’re saying is that some people do not deserve to get health care (similar SNAP cuts mean some people don’t deserve to eat). I have a hard time with that, and I don’t even need to check my Bible to be pretty sure it’s morally wrong.

Whether or not those people are playing videogames.

If they want to go after fraudulent billing, overtreatment, kickbacks, and so on, yeah, I’m all onboard for targeting those kinds of waste, fraud and abuse. But kicking poor people when they’re already down, no.