Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - science

Uncaged Monkeys

2011-05-13T13:09:00+01:00

I find it heartening that a thing like Uncaged Monkeys exists. While I doubt science based entertainment will ever reach the stadium busting state that stand-up comedy did a few years ago I hope the trend continues.

The format worked well and was a lively cross between lecture and stand-up routine. Most of the comedy was handled my Mr Ince but the others more than held their own keeping the audience engaged. The topics covered included Simon Singh with a quick overview of cryptography which included a live demonstration with a real Engima Machine. Foxy Coxy waxed on about the LHC's search for the Higgs Boson and the evolution of the Cosmos. Being so enthusiastic about the subject he also overran making the first half of the show quite long.

There was a musical interlude by the rather charming geek songstress Helen Arney who played a few songs on her ukulele.

Due to the over-run of the first half the second half started with a very brief question and answer session with Cox and Singh. It's a shame they didn't get to do more but I did find the answer to the question "What's the biggest small thing in the universe?" fascinating. After the Q&A there was a little section on mapping the genetic history of humans were I learnt some interesting facts about earwax. The presenter Professor Steve Jones painted himself as a Dawkins lite but was funny and engaging nevertheless. Finally the energetic Ben Goldacre ran through the placebo effect and how to design drug trials. The data he presented about trail bias was was slightly concerning. Although he had no qualms about rubbishing the quack pill pushers it seems even the proper scientific approach of the big pharmacology companies is not averse to being gamed to show one treatment is better than another. Finally Cox brought the evening to a close introducing an audio clip of Carl Sagan musing on the Pale Blue Dot.

Although I was familiar with some of the material from Ince's previous show Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People I still learnt new things at this one. I hope the trend for taking science out to the people continues and I look forward to going to more like it.

Star Stuff

2011-03-17T12:21:00+00:00

Fliss is fairly convinced I have a man crush on Brian Cox. If I have it's because it is nice to have a telegenic scientist on our TV screens who is obviously so excited by the science he wants to share it with his audience. Last week's Wonders left me a little cold as it plodded through entropy theory and it's implications for the end of the universe. This weeks episode was much better paced as Cox went through the from the Big Bang and Stellar Nucleosynthesis and Super Nova processes which are responsible for all the diversity of elements found in our solar system. He even touched upon the stellar chemistry which has been detected which is hinting that much of the organic starter materials for life may already have existed in the dust clouds before the planet was formed.

For me there wasn't much new but I readily accept I'm not really the target audience for the program. However it was still fun to watch and a definite improvement on last weeks episode.

Cox has been quoted as saying he's heavily influenced by the late great Carl Sagan and his seminal Cosmos: A Personal Voyage which we have recently acquired on DVD. Having watched a few episodes of Cosmos so far it's hard not to draw comparisons. However the Cosmos series has the advantage of being 13 episodes long and therefor being much broader in scope in what it tries to cover. While the Wonders series attempts to describe the physics of the universe as it is in 4 episodes Cosmos is able to spend more time on the history of scientific endeavour. It takes time to detail some of the early experiments that started to peel back the mysteries of the universe. On balance I think that makes Cosmos a more interesting series to watch. However if Wonders is sufficiently engaging to make kids think that physics is cool and science is worthy of study then I'm more than happy for it to succeed.

Doom posts

2011-03-14T20:26:00+00:00

Let me start by saying that I in no way want to minimise the horror the Japanese have been going through. By any standard the recent earthquake has a big one. Despite their advanced technology and modern 21st century infrastructure there isn't a lot more they could have done to mitigate the effects of nature at it's peak. Having said that the fact Japan is a modern advanced democratic state will no doubt aid it in picking itself up and rebuilding.

However now the news media have shown the awesome power of nature and replayed the footage they have latched onto a new story. I've seen reports comparing the situation to Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island. The fact the buildings housing the reactors have blown up in a photogenic way has no doubt added to the drama. I found it useful to read up on the details in plain English as written by a good friend of mine. As someone who actually knows about nuclear safety she's well worth the read.

There may well be questions about this incident after they have resolved the situation. Nothing can ever be made 100% safe, not everything can be anticipated. What will happen is a long careful analysis of what didn't work (and what did) which will inform the engineering that will go into the next generation of reactors (these having been built in 1971). The anti-nuclear campaigns should think on these facts before declaring that Fukushima demonstrates we should give up on building our own next generation power stations.

Holy exponential parking charges Batman!

2011-03-07T12:53:00+00:00

There wasn't much to be achieved at the weekend although I did pick my parents up from their last minute skiing holiday. It did lead to some colourful language when I got tagged by the airports parking scam.

I carefully timed the drive down to arrive as my parented landed. In fact they were slightly early so I move from holding point at the local garage to the short stay pick-up parking. However the airport managed to temporally misplace one of their bags delaying their exit just long enough to push the parked time over to 46 minutes and an eye watering £30 parking charge. A cynic might conclude the two things are related. It would be an interesting exercise to work out how much of the car parks profits are due to slow baggage processing.

The rest of the weekend was fairly relaxed although I did win brownie points for cleaning the kitchen floor while Fliss was out LARPing. Technically of course it was a left over job from the big pre-spring clean two weeks ago.

I watched the first episode of [STRIKEOUT:Holiday with Brian Cox]Wonders of the Universe. I have to say this episode left me a little underwhelmed but possibly because of the glacial introduction of entropy and the heat death of the universe. I'm hoping the next episode is better because I did enjoy the Wonders of the Solar System. We might have to watch the Sky at Night for a little less dumbed down science.

Help! Most of our Universe is missing

2010-01-19T12:14:00+00:00

We went to an interesting lecture last night at Churchill College.

There is a problem with the universe. It doesn't quite behave as we would expect it to given the amount of mass we can see in it. To account for the difference in the observed universe and the what the gravitational models predict in simulations cosmologists have created two cosmic fudge factors, Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which when added to the simulations produce a universe structured much like what we observe today. Together these account for around 95% of the mass-energy of the universe (leaving ~5% for stars, planets, gas clouds and everything else we see, basically all the atoms in the universe). Dr King's talk focused only on the problem of Dark Matter which the models predict makes up ~24% of the universe and left the remaining ~71% of the equation to attributed to dark energy as a problem for someone else to solve.

The problem with observing dark matter is the fact that it is dark. It doesn't emit any radiation and doesn't interact with any of the baryonic matter other than by it's mass effects. The topic of what it actually made of was again left to others to investigate, most probably the particle physics bods at the LHC.

The phenomenon of Gravitational lensing was predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. In fact Arthur Eddington's observation of light bending around the Sun during a solar eclipse was one of the early successful tests of Einstein's theory. In the lecture Dr King talked about using lensing as an indirect detection method for proving the existence of all this invisible mass. Detecting lensing on a galaxy cluster scale (hundreds to thousands of galaxies) is one thing, they don't move that fast relative to the observer and the evidence for dark matter is fairly compelling. However it doesn't really address the problem of where the matter is. We know our galaxy has significant amount of dark matter to hold it together but detecting it with micro-lensing is much harder as things are moving much faster in comparison with each other. The question I never got to ask was how much can we determine about the density of dark matter? Are there clumpy blocks of it or is it spread more homogeneously throughout the galaxy? Does dark matter exist for example in our solar system but at a density too low to detect by it's effects on the local orbital mechanics?

All in all it was a fascinating talk and I certainly learnt more about the topic. Completely un-related to the talk I also learnt that it's now possible to sequence the entire human genome in one week. Go science!

Simon Singh

2009-12-11T11:37:00+00:00

As the nights draw in again it's time to hit the lecture circuit. Cambridge is pretty well served with public lectures as well as a number of other organisations that organises talks in return for a small donation on the day or subscription. Last night I went to the IET's "Christmas" lecture by author, producer and journalist Simon Singh. If you haven't heard of him you may be familiar with his Horizon documentary on Fermat's Last Theorem (and a follow-up book) or his excellent book on the history of codes and code breaking.

The talk was nominally titled "Science and the Media - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly". He started with an interesting observation that he used to believe we should get as much science in the media as possible but wonders if now that is a bad thing. There is a tendency now for journalists to jump on the latest random case studies (or worse University issued press releases) and write stories without surrounding context. This is how we get to the confused state that Wine is both good and bad for you, depending on which paper you have read today. The true picture is generally more complex and nuanced than the column inches allow.

Simon Singh presented a couple of examples of editing in science documentaries and discussed the ethics of the choices made. The first was an example from his own film on Fermat's Last Theorem where he made the choice to edit one of his contributors discussing why computers can't prove theorems. The actual edit can bee seen about at about 07:30 into the film where the mathematically significant word "prime" is cut between "1000" and "numbers". The argument being that to get the point across about why it's not a proof it would have been an unnecessary distraction to discuss why primes are significant in this exercise. While standing behind his decision in this case he left it to the audience to come to their own conclusion on where on the ethical spectrum this editorial choice lay.

The next example was the sensationalist introduction to the OU and BBC's documentary Alternative Medicine: The Evidence which showed (warning graphic medical procedure footage) someone having open heart surgery while conscious and undergoing acupressure. Although apparently mentioned later on in the episode the intro made no mention of the 3 strong sedatives and local anaesthetic being used during the procedure (possibly rendering the acupuncture rather superfluous). This led to Singh feeling compelled to make a complaint to the BBC which after several appeals they finally responded too. It's probably fair to say the audience considered this example of editing as being on the darker side of the ethical spectrum.

In the final section of the talk he discussed the Ugly side of science and the media. The main bugbear hear being the increasing use of liable law to silence or suppress criticism of "alternative" medicine. Singh's own case was launched by the British Chiropractic Association after daring to suggest there may not be evidence for efficacy of chiropractic treatments of some medical conditions. It's not the first such case, the main reason being that even if you win, you lose. The current state of liable law means that even though Ben Goldacre won his case against a vitamin pill magnet he and the Guardian ended up £170,000 poorer than they started. That's without getting into the discussion about whether the courts are the best place to decide on scientific facts. There is more information on Simon Singh's website as well as a relaunch of a campaign to reform UK liable laws. I strongly urge UK readers to read the site and perhaps write to your MP to ensure they are on side for reform.

For Science!

2009-11-24T15:14:00+00:00

A couple of stories recently have gotten me thinking about the process of doing science and how it may change in the coming years. The current approach is to spend time doing your research and once your happy you have a defensible theory you write a paper explaining what you did and submit it to one of the journals appropriate to your field. The paper will then spend some time being peer reviewed, possibly bouncing back and forth before (hopefully) being accepted and published. At this point you score science points which can be spent on doing more science*. If the journal doesn't accept your paper you either go back to square one or possibly submit to a less well known journal that is a little more forgiving.

This is all well and good as peer review is an important aspect of the scientific process. However it takes time and there is always the risk that some other group gets through the publishing process first. There isn't really a concept of a second prize and journals loose interest in publishing papers that just confirm what the first guy said (unless it brings some new revelation that builds on previous work). It also has potential problems with bias as members of the review pool may be working on different theories.

The Internet has long been a tool of academia and allows disparate groups scattered around the world to collaborate on shared areas of interest through email. However emails are by their very nature private and even public mailing lists don't really approach the rigour of a properly cited and argued paper. Sites such as ArXiv offer an additional place to get ideas out there. Scientists can publish to ArXiv while waiting for papers to go through the review process and it can be argued the additional scrutiny of being read by people on the site adds to the quality of peer review. Some people take things even further, for example Garrett Lisi who's theory of everything offers an intriguing potential solution to grand unification, does all his work in public on his website. Of course Lisi is in an interesting position as being privately funded he doesn't *need* the academic points to secure future funding. However from my experience with Open Source software I can see the attraction of a more open collaborative approach to research. After all scientists in the main are all about improving the body of public knowledge about how things work.

It's interesting to consider the principles of open collaboration in the light of the recent selective leaking of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit's emails.

On the face of it there are two main concerns raised by the incident. The first being a generally poor attitude held by member of the CRU to people that hold opposing views and their attempts to use Freedom of Information legislation to obtain access to the raw data. The other the fact that for research that involves a lot of simulation the raw source data and simulation code is kept secret. The first is probably a reflection of the intensity of the debate between the two sides of the argument (and not treating anything committed to an electronic medium as potentially public). The second is most likely a function of worrying about exposing potentially hacky code to critical eyes and the perceived value of the data-set that has involved many man-years of effort to build.

Let me be clear that I'm perfectly happy with accepting the current scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change. However it is important for the progress of science to keep testing all the theories until they break. The current frothing over the leak while raising eyebrows doesn't expose a conspiracy to defraud the worldwide community with fake science. However I can't help wondering if the current hullabaloo could have been avoided if a more open approach had been taken towards doing the science?

Bad Science

2009-11-03T14:42:00+00:00

I finally finished Bad Science last night, written by the excellent Guardian science reporter Ben Goldacre. It's a tour-de-force of rage against the combined forces of exploitative quacks, big pharma and of course the media. Throughout the book he lays down the basics of the scientific method and how it related to epidemiological research while debunking the many quack claims that get dredged up by the alternative medicine brigade. Topics covered include homoeopathy, chiropractors, faux nutritionists as well as the failings of real scientists that should have known better. It's all written in a calm measured style that doesn't come across nearly as hectoring as someone like Dawkins can do. While a lot of the basic science concepts were already familiar to me the additional details on things like selection bias and other biases less prevalent in the pure physical science experiments was concisely explained. I feel his suggestion of representing all risks in the media as natural frequencies (i.e. 1 person dies for every 100,000 horse rides*) is worthy of a campaign.

All in all I can highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the way medical science is reported in the media. I look forward to what he has to say in The Atheist's Guide to Christmas :-)

* I have no idea what the actual risk is, it just seemed a pertinent example given recent events