Science Reporting

Visualizing Poverty

2009-01-19T13:22:00.024-05:00

Flowing Data, a site devoted to data visualizations, offers a challenge to its readers. It's called Visualize This.

Every two weeks I will post a dataset to the FlowingData forums for all of you to visualize. Download the data, visualize it (graph, chart, map, infographic, animation, etc), and post your work to the thread. As we've seen already, there are many ways to visualize a single dataset, and with multiple pairs of eyes, we get stories from different points of view. I will post the best visualization at the end of each cycle.

The current challenge is to visualize US poverty statistics.

On the right is the [revised] graphic I put together. Click to enlarge. A PDF is available here.

The graphic succeeds in some ways. And it is less successful in others. In all, I'm proud of it. But I am going to go into detail on how it was put together plus it's strengths and limitations. I was very excited to try this precisely because it is not a professional job. This allowed for some experimentation.

Hard Numbers

The original data from Kaiser State Health Facts provides basic percentages by state and age group. I wanted to try assembling data that would show the actual numbers of people living in poverty.

I found state population numbers with almost identical age breakdowns at the Northeast Midwest Institute from the same time period as the poverty stats. I found the DC stats at the Census Bureau. By correlating percentages with populations, I was able to derive hard numbers on the general populations and the numbers in poverty.

One glitch in this was in the age breaks. The poverty stats' first age group is 0-18. The population stats' first age group is 0-17. This skewed the size of the first age bracket by well over 1 percentage point. To correct this, I extrapolated. By multiplying the youth population by 1.056 (19/18), and subtracting that amount from the 18-64 category, I was able to take the skew well below 1 percent, and well within the resolution of the data.

It's important to note that this had no effect on the numbers in the graphic which are directly from the original poverty data.

I should make clear I am not a statistician. I would ask anyone who does work heavily with statistics whether my extrapolation was valid. (And also, what would be the margin of error from the extrapolation.) For this and other reasons, there is a note at the top of the image, "This graphic is an exercise. Do not use for reference." More on the disclaimer below.

Making the Image

I put the graphic together using Excel, CorelDraw and Photoshop. Excel matched the poverty and population numbers. CorelDraw assembled the bar graphs. Photoshop converted exported EPS files.

I already have CorelDraw set up to easily operate in increments of .1 inches so I'd have simple spatial relationships to work with. (Some of you might say, "can't the guy just use metric?" Well, I could, but just about all of my customers are Americans.)

Initially, I wanted the graphs laid out horizontally. But his proved troublesome. States with small populations forced the text into vanishing tininess.

At first I thought having the graph show "above" and "below" the poverty line would fit with common parlance. But the visual impact connoted the stats as buoyant -- as though, like a water line, it was keeping a population afloat. This visual connotation would have been extremely misleading.

Strengths

The main strength of the graphic is that it shows populations. Each full square represent 100,000 people. A full account of the data was still able to fit in 11x17 inches without scaling.

Collected stats for the US as a whole provides a key for reading at the state-by-state level. It invites comparison within state populations and across various states. And there is enough empty space to allow for easy reading.

Breakdowns by age group are color coordinated for quick reference. For those who are blue-green color blind, there is enough contrast and visual breaks to understand the graph.

Most important, the graph highlights the enormous problem of child poverty in the US.

Limitations

The greatest flaw is in the US threshholds for poverty. If you are a single adult who made only $11,000 last year, you are above the poverty threshhold. If you are a wife and husband with two children, the 2007 threshhold is $21,027. These standards are set nationally and there has been little political will to change them.

Since the numbers are set nationally, there is no accounting for the various standards of living in different parts of the country. We all know it's much more expensive to live in New York City than in Detroit. National poverty stats do not reflect this.

Also the data pre-dates the economic crisis. This is unavoidable because those numbers have yet to be calculated. It's safe to assume the figures will become much worse.

Aside from that, there are problems with the graphic.

First, small populations do not represent the percentages well. For example, Alaska and the District of Columbia look similar graphically. But the numbers contrast starkly.

On a related note, the graph does not adequately show the problem of concentration of poverty. This is endemic to the poverty problem. In areas with high concentrations, poverty becomes both entrenched and invisible to the larger public.

Another problem with the image is in combining bar graphs with boxes representing population numbers. While the boxes do show hard numbers, it creates discrepancies for the viewer. We humans are much better at comparing one-dimensional lines than in comparing two-dimensional areas. The confines of the graph necessitated making choices on the thickness of each color area in order to properly represent proportion. This often meant compromises. In general, the youth population is almost one quarter of the broader population. So, when possible, I kept that proportion for the thickness of the bars. For those graphs that do not adhere, the image demands more difficult attention from the viewer.

The giant image of the US statistics gets across the numbers. But it is extremely bulky. While I think it works in this case, it does come at a cost of information density.

A minor problem is that the population boxes suggest an even distribution of income as a varying distance from a poverty line. I would hope people would not read that into the graphic, but I am not sure. The graphic may suggest that the number of the highest incomes number the same as middle and low incomes. While I hope very few people read that conclusion into the graphic, it does raise an interesting question. I would be very interested in visualizing data (like a histogram) that would show the proportions of incomes by age, state and amount. Perhaps a future challenge.

Disclaimer

As I mentioned above the top of the graphic says, "This graphic is an exercise. Do not use for reference." Partly, this is because I used a statistical extrapolation to adjust for age groups, and I'm not a statistician. But there is a much more important reason.

The graphic has not been properly fact-checked. It would have been nice to have software that would assemble this visualization automatically, but I transcribed the numbers and built the graphs rectangle by rectangle. While I worked some double-checks into my process, the rigorous thing to do is have a second party check the data.

Without a proof reading, I cannot have anyone use it as reference. (If you want to proof it, go ahead and let me know of any corrections! But I do not envy you the task.) For the same reasons, I did not post my sources on the graphic. But those sources are listed at the top of this blog post.

Conclusion

It was a great to submit something to Visualize This. Again, part of the excitement was that since this was a non-professional gig, I could try some things I hadn't done before and expand my repertoire.

Also, the subject of poverty in America is one of the most under-reported issues we face. It was sobering to work with the numbers involved.

Again, a big thanks to Flowing Data. I hope your future Visualize This entries are as challenging.

-----

Update: I adjusted the thickness of the bars on the US graph so the adjacent 15% value are represented more flush with one-another. -- Pat

The Confirmation-Bias-Based Community

2008-04-08T17:32:00.006-04:00

On this week's On the Media, Brooke Gladstone interviews Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. They discuss how humans filter out undesirable facts. And they talk about how our new media culture reinforces this tendency.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You use examples from... decades ago to illustrate selective exposure and selective interpretation, but you contend in your book that these are really manifestations of the current media world of blogs and talk radio and email.

FARHAD MANJOO: Yeah. And in this world, there is the front door, the big newspapers and big network news outlets. The side doors are the blogs, talk radio, cable news, which actually draws a very small audience.

These side doors allow us to kind of amplify these factors of selective exposure and selective interpretation, and they make these factors kind of more important today than they were in the past, because in the past, you couldn't really seek out media that comported with your beliefs because, well, there weren't that many media choices...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you show how false facts on both the right and the left make their way through partisan echo chambers, but you do suggest that conservatives have a different relationship with their media.

FARHAD MANJOO: Right. People have studied how conservative blogs, for instance, link to each other and how liberal blogs link to each other, and they found that the people on the right generally have a tighter network and are more likely to indulge in only those sources.

And this has been a longstanding pattern where psychologists have noticed that people on the right are more efficient at filtering out things that kind of don't really support their views.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know it's really easy to manipulate audio, video, and especially with Photoshop and digital images. But it was interesting – you said that the biggest effect of the Photoshopification of our society is not that it's easier to fool people but that now they have even more reason not to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears if they don't want to.

FARHAD MANJOO: If you live in a world where everything is possibly fake, where every photo you see could have been Photoshopped, it gives you license to dismiss that photo. This is true not only of photos but of basically all kind of documentary evidence that comes at us these days. We can always assume that there's been some digital foul play there and that it's possibly not a truth.

Grid Hype

2008-04-08T00:24:00.010-04:00

When CERN's Large Hadron Collider goes online, a high-bandwidth computer network will crunch the numbers. This new network is called the Grid. To do this, CERN has linked itself with research institutions around the world.

This is a genuine technical achievement. But there is currently some misleading hype. Here are some of the spectacular headlines: The Internet's over.. here comes the Grid, Interweb made obsolete and It’s The End Of The Internet As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

Some of these stories erroneously claim that CERN invented the Internet. (Readers should take that as a red flag. The US Department of Defense came up with the Internet. CERN invented the World-Wide Web. The web is just part of the Internet.) But there are more significant problems with the hype:

First off, the Internet is not going to be obsolete. At best, we can hope for improvements in the Internet. As a journalist myself, I know the next-big-thing story may sound irresistible. But the Internet will continue to grow and modify. It's a little too big and entrenched for outright replacement.

Second, CERN's Grid is built to handle CERN's data. Yes, it's very high bandwidth. But it's not going to replace consumer connectivity right now. Just consider the last mile problem. It's one thing to lay 1,000 miles of fiber between CERN and a university. It's another thing to lay tens of millions of 100 meter fibers to homes. If the Grid can alleviate bottlenecks in traffic, great. But let's not pretend the whole system will be overhauled just yet.

Third, some of the stories talk about downloading movies in seconds and transmitting holograms. Movie distributors might have a problem with instantly downloadable movies. Also, your current monitor probably doesn't support holographic displays. While the Grid's bandwidth may be able to handle all this data, the hype completely ignores the economic and proprietary interests involved.

Still, what CERN is doing is still quite impressive. According to Scientific American:

The nearly 100 million channels of data streaming from each of the two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have what are called trigger and data-acquisition systems, which act like vast spam filters, immediately discarding almost all the information and sending the data from only the most promising-looking 100 events each second to the LHC’s central computing system at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics and the collider’s home, for archiving and later analysis.

A “farm” of a few thousand computers at CERN will turn the filtered raw data into more compact data sets organized for physicists to comb through. Their analyses will take place on a so-called grid network comprising tens of thousands of PCs at institutes around the world, all connected to a hub of a dozen major centers on three continents that are in turn linked to CERN by dedicated optical cables.

If this functionality can expand to benefit Internet users at large, beautiful! But please be skeptical of the "end of the Internet" stories. As we all know, the Internet is going to end when we are struck by a giant asteroid without warning.

Diamonds in Quantum Computing

2008-04-05T17:54:00.012-04:00

Quantum particles have the bizarre capacity to contain a variety of different states at once. This is called superposition. A quantum particle may be in a superposition of states but it will break down into one of those states once it is observed. In fact, it will break down if the particle interacts too much with the external environment.

This delicate property makes the quantum world appealing to computer scientists. By exploiting superposition, many different mathematical values may be explored simultaneously. That would make computers thousands of times faster and solve mathematical problems that are too complex for classical machines. But the difficulty of keeping those quantum bits in causal isolation is a huge technical challenge. Often, it has required cooling materials close to absolute zero.

Diamond is now showing promise as a material that can perform quantum computing functions at room temperature. "The beauty of diamond is that it brings all of this physics to a desktop," says David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Science News posts an article about how diamonds -- or more precisely, flaws in diamonds -- are showing promise. In a natural diamond lattice, flaws are inevitable. The most common impurity is a nitrogen atom. Another kind of flaw is a vacancy in the lattice where a carbon would otherwise sit.

When a diamond crystal contains a nitrogen and a vacancy next to each other, something strange happens. Electrons from the nitrogen will orbit the vacancy as though an atom is there.

This virtual molecule, called a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center, possesses spin, the quantum form of magnetism.
Spins are like microscopic bar magnets and can encode and store information by pointing in different directions. A single unit of information, called a bit, can be, say, a 1 if the spin points up or a 0 if it points down.
...Researchers have so far managed to store and manipulate only a handful of qubits [quantum bits] in superbly well-controlled systems, such as single ions suspended in an electromagnetic trap or superconducting materials cooled to very low temperatures. In a paper to be published in Science, Awschalom and his collaborators describe how they achieved a similar level of control over NV centers in diamond.

The October 2007 issue of Scientific American had an excellent article on this research [subscription]:

Diamond has a track record of extremes, including ultrahardness, higher thermal conductivity than any other solid material and transparency to ultraviolet light. In addition, diamond has recently become much more attractive for solid-state electronics, with the development of techniques to grow high-purity, single-crystal synthetic diamonds and insert suitable impurities into them (doping). Pure diamond is an electrical insulator, but doped, it can become a semiconductor with exceptional properties. It could be used for detecting ultraviolet light, ultraviolet light-emitting diodes and optics, and high-power microwave electronics. But the application that has many researchers excited is quantum spintronics, which could lead to a practical quantum computer—capable of feats believed impossible for regular computers—and ultrasecure communication.

Competing Theory of Menopause

2008-04-04T15:44:00.008-04:00

Scientific American posts an article about why menopause may have been favored by natural selection. The prevailing argument, called the "grandmother hypothesis," states that non-reproductive women enhance their inclusive fitness by caring for existing children and grandchildren.

A new study says there is a problem with the inclusive fitness argument for menopause:

"The problem is that these grandmother benefits aren't big enough to ever favor stopping breeding between the ages of 40 and 50," says Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in England and co-author of a new study on the genesis of menopause published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "When you look at data from hunter-gatherers and other natural fertility populations, the sums just don't add up." Grandmothers do benefit their descendants, he says, but the genetic payoff is small compared with those of producing another child.

Cant and Rufus Johnstone offer a new hypothesis based on reproductive competition between generations. Their model is based on the idea that reproductive-age women migrate to new communities with less similar genetic make-ups:

The rapid senescence of the human female reproductive system coincides with the age at which, in natural fertility populations, women are expected to encounter reproductive competition from breeding females of the next generation. Several lines of evidence suggest that in ancestral hominids, this younger generation typically comprised immigrant females. In these circumstances, relatedness asymmetries within families are predicted to give younger females a decisive advantage in reproductive conflict with older females. A model incorporating both the costs of reproductive competition and the benefits of grandmothering can account for the timing of reproductive cessation in humans and so offers an improved understanding of the evolution of menopause.

The Scientific American article continues:

The mother of the grandmother hypothesis, anthropologist Kirsten Hawkes of the University of Utah, says Cant and Johnstone are right to focus on intergenerational conflict. Elephants have babies in their 60s, and some whales give birth in their 80s. "It's clearly something selection can adjust," she says. "So explaining why it hasn't in us has to be part of the story." But she disputes their claim that female-bias dispersal is, in fact, the universal human/ape residence pattern, pointing out that half of the young female chimps at anthropologist Jane Goodall's Gombe Stream Research Center remain with their mothers, and that recent studies show that hunter-gatherers often live with the wife's family as well.

Global Sunblock Using Sulfur

2008-04-04T14:33:00.003-04:00

Last week's podcast of CBC's Quirks and Quarks discusses the radical idea of blocking the sun's rays to mitigate climate change. Bob McDonald interviews Dr. David Keith, the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary. Keith is not necessarily recommending the idea but he does believe we should put it on the research agenda. One option -- a pretty shocking one -- is to release sulfur into the upper atmosphere. From volcanic activity in the past, we already know this would have an immediate cooling effect on the climate.

Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen^ also recommends looking into such research [PDF]. But he warns:

I must stress here that the albedo enhancement scheme should only be deployed when there are proven net advantages and in particular when rapid climate warming is developing, paradoxically, in part due to improvements in worldwide air quality. Importantly, its possibility should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating.

Keith says in the podcast that many climate scientists are reluctant to discuss this because it would only treat the symptoms of climate change and not the cause. At the same time, he found policy-makers who were all too eager to deploy such a program.

In this panel discussion on geoengineering, Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag^ points out:

If we're going to use the Earth as an experiment -- which we're already doing by adding greenhouse gases -- if we're going to do an experiment by testing injection of reflective material, say, sulfur, into the stratosphere, we don't have a control. And so if something happens, it's almost impossible, given the complexity of the system, to attribute it either to the CO2 or the sulfur.

Sulfur injection into the upper atmosphere, says Keith, is within the power of poorer nations and even within the power of the richest individuals. And like the current trend in climate change, there would be winners and losers. Since we are already altering the atmosphere, is this something we should consider? And if so, who would be responsible? Who should be allowed to fiddle with the global thermostat?

April Fools' Day

2008-04-01T12:34:00.009-04:00

The calendar conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian (in the 1500's) is the origin of April Fools' Day, right? Well, according to the master debunkers at Snopes.com, that's not entirely clear. What is more clear is that pranks have existed throughout human history and across cultures. Today's Science section of the New York Times discusses the social utility of practical jokes:

Jonathan Wynn, a cultural sociologist at Smith College, said pranks served to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. “And you gain status by being picked on in some ways,” he said. “It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.”

One of the most highly respected pranks was the 1957 BBC Broadcast about the Swiss spaghetti harvest:

On the Media this week profiled Alan Abel. He's made a career of creating fake news events and is the subject of the new documentary, Abel Raises Cain.

The Yes Men take pranks to activism, impersonating such groups as the WTO, Exxon and Halliburton. Before they were known as The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno participated in the Barbie Liberation Organization. The BLO is the group that switched the voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls.

In science and math, we have Alabama Changing Pi to the Biblical Value of 3. This is a personal favorite which seems to resurface every few years.

The Museum of Hoaxes site lovingly enumerates the Top 100 April Fools' Hoaxes Of All Time.

In 1987, philosopher Daniel Dennett, Dr. Richard Paul Astley, and biologists Richard Dawkins and William Hamilton discussed the evolutionary adaptiveness of humor and pranks on the WYNS show, Perspectives. Video here.

Raymond Scott 100

2008-03-31T07:23:00.019-04:00

"It's all very well to write screwy music, and imitate things like wooden Indians and powerhouses, but just writing screwy music isn't enough. If it's screwy music you want, there's plenty of that in Stravinsky..."
-- Harold Taylor, 1939, from the Rhythm Magazine article, You Can Keep Raymond Scott

In addition to making some of the most joyously intricate and distinctive melodies of the 20th Century, Raymond Scott was also a leading pioneer in multi-track recording, electronic music and collaborated with the likes of Robert Moog, Jim Henson and Motown. But odds are you will recognize his tunes from Warner Brothers cartoons. He is arguably one of the most influential musician/inventors in American music. Here is his signature song, "Powerhouse," as performed by the band Racalmuto.

"The compositions of Raymond Scott are etched, it seems, into the fabric of 20th century culture like some strand of DNA sequence coding our collective memory for future-mutations."
-- Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. Dj Spooky

Raymond's six-piece band was called the "Raymond Scott Quintette." (Apparently, Raymond thought the word "sextet" would distract from the music and the Frenchie "ette" lent a touch of class.) While the music was classified as jazz, jazz critics were frequently hostile. Despite the critics, the music proved highly popular with the buying public.

It was not so popular with the band members. Raymond coerced them into upwards of 60 takes, performing dizzying riffs -- and sometimes under weird acoustic circumstances in order to achieve a particular sound. Unlike other jazz acts, improvisation was not allowed. The songs are intricately assembled as though they were designed by an engineer. Band members could not deviate from the strict tune structure any more than parts manufacturers could deviate from an engine design. Raymond didn't use sheet music either. He recorded the players, edited the strips, played them back and asked the players to play the re-ordered arrangements from memory.

"What can you say about a man who inspired cartoon melodies and bebop, invented Frank Zappa and electronic music, and still found time to work for Motown?"
-- Andy Partridge, XTC

Here is the Raymond Scott Quintette performing War Dance for Wooden Indians. The image to the left is from a comic strip biography of Raymond Scott by Justin Green, available at the Official Raymond Scott site.

The 1940's saw a lot of changes for Raymond Scott. In 1941, he sold his compositions (finally rendered in musical notation) to Warner Brothers. The music was enthusiastically seized upon by Carl Stalling, the man who scored the Warner Brothers cartoons -- which is largely why these tunes are so embedded in our consciousness. (To this day, people think Raymond wrote for cartoons, but he never did. He never even watched cartoons.)

"The music of Raymond Scott is positively exhilarating. Its intricacies mesmerize, because they're part of a unique and utterly disarming musical tapestry."
-- Leonard Maltin, film critic

In 1942, he became Music Director for CBS Radio and made history by hiring black musicians. His CBS band was the first racially integrated band for radio. In 1946, he founded Manhattan Research Inc, "the world's most extensive facility for the creation of Electronic Music and Musique Concrete." It was the first electronic music studio.

Raymond's brother Mark Warnow died in 1949 and Raymond took over Mark's job: Orchestra Leader for Your Hit Parade. Raymond Scott and his wife, Dorothy Collins, became early TV celebrities. Here is the Raymond Scott Quintette performing "Powerhouse" on Your Hit Parade. Raymond called it a "rent gig." In fact, he used his handsome salary to invest in electronic equipment. In the late 40's, along with Les Paul, Raymond started experimenting with a new recording technique called multi-track.

"Raymond Scott was like an audio version of Andy Warhol; he preceded Pop-Art sensibilities, and he played with that line between commercial art and fine art, mixing elements of both worlds together. I love and respect Raymond Scott's work, and it influenced me a lot. I'm a big fan.''
-- Mark Mothersbaugh, Devo

In 1949, Raymond said, "Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely think his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener."

By the mid-50's his studio began to look (according to friends such as Robert Moog) like a science fiction set. Over the years, Raymond invented numerous electronic musical instruments including the Clavivox and the Electronium.

Robert Moog credits Raymond as an important influence on the invention of the Moog Synthesizer. In 1962 and 1963, Raymond released Soothing Sounds for Baby. It was entirely electronic music he composed as an "aural toy" for children. While it was a commercial failure at the time, some now regard it as a strong pre-cursor to ambient music (over a decade before Brian Eno's recordings).

Electronic music can suffer from an outdated sound very quickly. However, Raymond Scott's electronic music from the 60's still hold up today. In a 1962 lecture, Raymond said, "To say that we haven't scratched the surface in this field wouldn't be exactly right. Because every time we scratch we find the surface thicker and thicker and thicker. For the possibilities in electronic music are really quite infinite."

"It's those front-line types that go into uncharted areas, and pave the way for others. Always go to the source, sources like Raymond Scott."
-- Henry Rollins, Black Flag, Rollins Band

In the early 70's, Raymond was hired by Barry Gordy to develop new electronic sounds when Motown was positioning itself as a leader in cutting-edge music. Today, we don't know the degree of influence Raymond had on the 70's Motown sound. (If you've seen "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" you know that the Motown star-machine, as policy, kept the support crew on the down-low.)

One very unique collaboration was with an up-and-coming puppeteer. Raymond Scott and Jim Henson collaborated on "Limbo - The Organized Mind" a very unique performance which appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

"Raymond Scott was definitely in the forefront of developing electronic music technology, and in the forefront of using it commercially as a musician."
-- Bob Moog, inventor of Moog synthesizers

Scott fans include Igor Stravinsky, Henry Rollins, XTC, Elvis Costello, the Kronos Quartet, They Might Be Giants, Devo, Jascha Heifetz, Art Blakey and Danny Elfman. You can hear Scott's influence in Benny Goodman, bebop, ambient, electronica and The Simpsons theme. In 1986, Raymond composed his last known work, "Beautiful Little Butterfly," in Midi. In 1992, a retrospective of Raymond Scott's work, Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights, brought Raymond Scott to a new audience. Raymond died in 1994.

Concordia University in Montreal recently hosted a Raymond Scott Centennial Tribute Concert:

157 West 57th Street
Boy Scout in Switzerland
Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals
A Message from Where
The Rhythm Modulator
Twilight in Turkey
War Dance for Wooden Indians

As more music lovers discover him, Raymond Scott is gradually becoming recognized as one of the great innovators in American music. September 10th of 2008, will be Scott's 100th birthday. For much more, here is the official Raymond Scott site, the Raymond Scott Blog and the Raymond Scott MySpace page.

"Being introduced to the music of Raymond Scott was like being given the name of a composer I feel I have heard my whole life, who until now was nameless. Clearly he is a major American composer."
-- David Harrington, Kronos Quartet

__________________________

Hello to MATRIXSYNTH Readers: A big thank you to Matrix for linking to this post. I hope you find this interesting and informative. Science Reporting is a fairly new blog devoted to public understanding of science. Please leave a comment if you like. I'm glad to see so many people who appreciate the legacy of Raymond Scott. Scott really is one of the great under-appreciated innovators in 20th Century music.

Evolution and Suicide Terror

2008-03-29T12:33:00.008-04:00

Drawing from a variety of studies, evolutionary psychologist Andy Thomson has developed a hypothesis of suicide terrorism. He says we can understand three aspects behind the motivation:

The capacity for male-bonded coalitionary violence against innocents is as old as our species and may date to our common ancestry with chimpanzees.

The capacity for suicide exists in men and women alike. It is not necessarily the product of illness. Some suicides are the product of depression and social rejection. Other suicides are an attempt at "retaliation bargaining" waged from a position of powerlessness -- to force change from an enemy.
Our evolved mechanisms which make us vulnerable to religious beliefs are the same mechanisms which can be exploited to motivate suicide terrorism. Thomson asserts that religion, more than any other ideology, is able to hijack our capacity for male coalitionary violence and suicide.

Thomson discusses his theory in the latest podcast of Humanist Network News. He also presented his findings at the Atheist Alliance International conference in September. Thomson's paper on the subject [Word Document].

The podcast also touches on the work of Robert Pape, author of the book, "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism"

They also discuss an interesting common denominator among male suicide terrorists -- immaturity and inexperience with sexuality.

This aspect of terrorism was identified years ago by comedian Marc Maron.

Human Cloning and Human Dignity

2008-03-28T09:37:00.003-04:00

The President's Council on Bioethics has issued it's recommendations on cloning. The majority recommendation is a ban on cloning for human reproduction and a four-year moratorium on cloning for medical research. The moral basis for the recommendations rests on a concept of "dignity" as defined by Christian theology.

Steven Pinker, responding to the Council report, points out that 12 of the 23 contributors are from organizations with Christian mandates (almost entirely Catholic) and four of the remaining 11 advocate a greater role for religion in public life. Pinker states:

It's also conspicuous that the essayists did not include a single scientist, this on a topic inspired by scientific advances. The essayists did not include any empirical scholar who studies the facts of human life—no psychologist, no social scientist, no historian, and hence, no one who could enlighten us on the psychological basis of ascriptions of dignity or how standards of dignity vary across cultures and historical periods.

On the subject of dignity, Pinker says that our "squishy" concept of dignity is relative, fungible and in some cases, morally undesirable:

[M]edical procedures necessarily subjects us to all kinds of indignities. Everyone in this room has—or I assume—undergone a rectal examination. Many people have undergone pelvic examinations. Those of us over 50 have undergone colonoscopies. Needless to say, these are deeply undignified, and that's fine because we sacrifice dignity for other goods in life.

The third point is that dignity can be a bad thing, and Prof. Elshtain asked can any good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity, and the answer is an unambiguous yes. For example, any third-world tinhorn dictator, bemedaled, sashed, epauletted, strutting on his reviewing platform solemnly reviewing the goose-stepping soldiers parading in front of him, is an epitome of human dignity. That is not necessarily a good thing.

Political repression works by preserving a kind of dignity. Those who ridicule or satirize or even criticize their political leaders are subject to imprison, torture, or death, justified in many cases by their assault on the dignity of the state or the leader. Religious fanaticism is driven by an attempt to safeguard dignity, most appallingly in the recent story in Sudan where a British schoolteacher was imprisoned and threatened with death by an angry mob because she allowed her first-grade class to name a teddy bear Mohammed . Likewise, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie , the death threats against the publishers of the Danish cartoons on Mohammed , were all justified by their assault on the dignity of religion.

...Indeed, I would say that a foundation of democracies is that the right to dignity is extremely limited. We enshrine a right to make fun of our political leaders. You can turn on the TV set any night at 11:35 and watch Leno and Letterman and Jon Stewart reduce the dignity of our political candidates and leaders, and that is a good thing. [more...]

Steven Pinker discusses his testimony on the most recent podcast of Freethought Radio [MP3].

Laurie Anderson on "Here and Now"

2008-03-28T01:11:00.005-04:00

Laurie Anderson is interviewed for WBUR's "Here and Now."

Laurie: The trend to life on the net is not as satisfying to me. So I find myself doing projects that have nothing to do with digital stuff -- doing things that have scale, doing things outside.

...Q: I'm just so surprised to hear you say that you are rejecting in some ways the Internet and digitizing and you want to move away. Because I would have thought, Laurie Anderson, this would have been your perfect playground. Because you were so in the forefront of electronics. Inventing the tape-bow violin in 1977, incorporating all these different electronic sounds, changing your voice to sound so many different ways.

Laurie: Well, I only say that because I, like everybody else, love it and hate it, sort of equally. And I'm so afraid because I love it that I'll get sucked into it and forget there are other things to life than looking at that screen.

Laurie discusses her show Homeland -- about the America she sees today and how it's changed since her recording United States * in 1983. (Tip to Donna)

The Legacy of War of the Worlds

2008-03-25T17:27:00.006-04:00

This coming Halloween will mark the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles' radio-vérité broadcast of "War of the Worlds." Radiolab just posted an outstanding podcast of the "War of the Wolds" legacy. Why did it fool people then? And why does it continue to fool people?

First they look at the context of the times -- the recent destruction of the Hindenberg and the new media form of the day which is now part of our mental furniture. It starts, "We interrupt this program..." As Hitler continued his attacks throughout Europe, special bulletins became an authoritative and attention-getting feature of radio -- a feature Welles exploited. Tellingly, many of the listener's fooled by Welles' broadcast believed that it was Germans attacking, rather than Martians.

Other radio stations have staged their own versions of "War of the Worlds" over the years. And again people were fooled. The most disastrous example is the profoundly ill-advised broadcast in the capital city of Ecuador, Quito. The Quito broadcast was produced without any warning to anyone. In fact, the producer planted fictitious stories of strange phenomena in the days preceding the broadcast -- to whip up paranoia. At the end of the evening, the radio station was set on fire by an angry mob. Six people died that night.

Buffalo's WKBW (my hometown and my favorite station in the 70's) first broadcast "War of the Worlds" in 1968 -- modernized and set in the Western New York landscape. The 1971 WKBW broadcast is available online. The page contains a link to the full show (with great opening music) plus a making-of video. The climax of the '71 broadcast has iconic TV news anchor Irv Weinstein reporting from a rooftop like Edward R. Murrow. Except Irv is reporting on an approaching robot. It's really quite brilliant.

Google Visualization API

2008-03-25T11:29:00.010-04:00

Google recently released a new application program interface for visualizations. Google Visualization API:

[It] lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.
Embed visualizations directly into your website: Display attractive data on your website by choosing from a vast array of visualizations created by the developer community.
Write, share and reuse: The Google Visualization API provides simple Gadget extensions to its API to create visualization Gadgets. Publish these here or in the Gadget directory. Become an active participant in the developer community; reuse and share visualizations with others.
Create extensions to Google products: Write visualization applications for Google products such as Google Docs. With a growing list of products that support Gadgets, syndicate your app.
Use many data sources, one API: Visualization apps created using the API are able to access any compliant data source with no required code changes to your application. Developers can start building apps immediately using Google Spreadsheets as a supported data source.

Information Aesthetics asks, "will this shape the future of data visualization online? if so, how?"

Flowing Data picks up on the question and responds:

If Google visualization becomes popular, visualization, in general, grows in popularity. People who weren't exposed will now know more, and if all goes according to plan, data awareness has a chance to develop.

As an example, Google Maps made online mapping what it is now - commonplace. Remember when online mapping was only limited to the big boys? Now everyone can mashup to their heart's content. People know how to use it and similar mapping applications and because of that, more "idea people" ask for mapping. As a result there is more opportunity.

Flowing Data then asks:

What do you think? Is the Google visualization API going to limit our imagination where we get stuck in a Google-ish funk; or is data and visualization awareness ready to rise to a point where we all benefit?

The responses are clearly positive. Flowing Data reader escargot points out:

It’s not going to limit our imagination any more than Excel does. Everyone has access to the standard bar, pie and scatter plots in Excel, and they’re by far the most common plots you see. And yet, you still see creative and informative visualizations.

Google is just offering a few more standard plots. Nice to have, but by no means limiting.

I've not used the API yet but my response is very positive. Information graphics will be more accessible. That's good for everyone... except, of course... graphic artists. Wait a minute. That's taking work away from me! I take it back, it's a terrible idea!

Just kidding. Some of the graphical styles are a little too cutesy. The gauge graphic to right is a fun visual analogy to traditional gauges. But it takes up a lot of space to deliver three data points.

In contrast, (fans of Edward Tufte take note) Google has included sparklines, which may be the most graphically efficient use of data space.

The example to the left is from Edward Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence.

If Google visualizations take hold, I'm anxious to see how they'll be used.

PZ, ID and BS

2008-03-24T10:03:00.025-04:00

It happened just this Friday, but it's already the stuff of legend.

An advance screening of Ben Stein's anti-evolution, pro-ID documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" was held in Minneapolis. Atheist blogger PZ Myers, who is one of the stars of the movie, signed up himself and a number of guests. The film's producer spotted Myers in the theater and had him expelled by security.

The guests were able to attend, though. Who was one of the guests?

Richard Dawkins.

Evolutionists have been grinning all weekend. That's the very short version.

For those who savor irony like a fine wine, I will try to decant the whole story.

Last April, atheist, blogger and evolutionary biologist PZ Myers received an interview request for a documentary called "Crossroads."

PR gaffe #1: It was a con. Under false pretenses, PZ was actually being interviewed for "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," Ben Stein's new documentary against evolution. Richard Dawkins was similarly duped into participating in the film.

PR gaffe #2: The producer of the film, Mark Mathis, claims that "Crossroads" was just the working title. That's a fib. The domain dame for expelledthemovie.com was registered the previous March. Here's the Whois page to prove it.

Currently, the movie is touring the country with advanced screenings in various cities. In February, critic Roger Moore saw the movie and wrote a scathing review for the Orlando Sentinel. The producers of "Expelled: No Critics Allowed" responded with a media alert demonizing Moore. The alert quotes Stein, "The only thing I find despicable is when reporters sneak into screenings by pretending to be ministers. This is a new low even for liberal reporters." Moore says he never portrayed himself as anything but a reporter. That story made it to the New York Times.

PR gaffe #3: A pre-screening of "Expelled: No Skeptics Allowed" was held at the Mall of America during the same weekend as the American Atheists Conference in Minneapolis. So PZ signed up for the movie online -- for himself a number of guests from the conference.

PR gaffe #4: But PZ was ID-ed. Producer Mark Mathis told a guard to expel PZ Myers from the theater. When PZ asked why, he was informed that they didn't need to give a reason. PZ went to explain the situation to his guests, including ... here's PR gaffe #5: the most prominent evolutionary biologist in the world, Richard Dawkins. If anyone at the theater recognized Dawkins, no one greeted him. Dawkins is, after all, the most famous star in the film aside from Ben Stein.

The guard prompted PZ to leave immediately under threat of arrest. The guests entered the theater. PZ went to the Apple store and blogged the moment for posterity. His blog Pharyngula, owing to his red-meat style of humor, is one of the most popular blogs in the atheism movement. If producer Mathis was seeking ridicule, he could not have designed it more intelligently.

Pharyngula's Expelled post received record traffic. Within a day, it clocked well over 1000 responses in the comment thread.

Back at the theater, Myers' family, friends and the most prominent atheist in the world, Richard Dawkins, watched the movie. Here are reviews/eyewitness accounts by PZ's daughter Skatje, her boyfriend, Collin, and friend Kristine.

And here is an excerpt from Dawkins' account entitled, "Lying for Jesus?"*

...did he [Mathis] not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised that Mathis was deceitful. I didn't know he was a bungling incompetent. Not just incompetent at public relations, incompetent in his chosen profession of film-making, for the film itself, as I discovered when I saw it on Friday (and this genuinely surprised me) is dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed and utterly devoid of any style, wit or subtlety. It bears all the hallmarks of a film-maker who knows nothing about the craft of making films.

Dawkins says quite a bit more about the film itself:

A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.

In the question-and-answer after the movie, Dawkins stood up and asked, "Why, when he was featured in your film, when the entire theme of your film was free speech and oppression, did you EXPEL my friend and colleague Dr. PZ Myers from the viewing tonight?"

PR gaffe #6: Mathis gave the old "no ticket" line. This is a canard. People could sign up online to see "Expelled: No Ticket Necessary." Recently, Mathis changed his story, "I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more."

That evening, PZ and Dawkins taped a short discussion of the event on video.**

The New York Times reports:

Mark Mathis, a producer of the film who attended the screening, said that “of course” he had recognized Dr. Dawkins, but allowed him to attend because “he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film.”

PR gaffe #7: Mathis' claim is ridiculous. Dawkins writes:

...Mathis almost certainly detected Myers' name on the list of those who signed up on the Expelled website. Since my name was not on that list, it is highly likely that Mathis didn't spot me until the moment I stood up in the Question session, when it was too late to expel me. So all that stuff about allowing me to attend because I have handled myself fairly honourably is almost certainly dishonourable spinning. As for the implication that I might have flown all the way from England to see his disreputable film, the very idea is as ludicrous as the film itself. Like PZ Myers, I was in Minneapolis for the conference of the American Atheists.

PR gaffe #8: A summary gaff -- attempting to create "positive buzz" by screening the audience on ideological grounds could not have backfired more spectacularly.

For a list of the dozens of blog posts and articles on "Good Friday Fiasco," check Greg Laden's Blog.

Sites sympathetic to the film have set out to demonize PZ and Dawkins. Here and here.

PZ blogged late that night:

This outcome so far has been absolutely perfect, as far as I'm concerned. The hypocrisy of the Expelled makers has been exposed by their expulsion of one of the people they filmed (final lovely irony: I'm also thanked for my contributions in the credits), they've revealed their incompetence by throwing me out when Richard Dawkins was right next to me, and I didn't have to waste two hours on a bad movie.

I've also got a story to tell: when the creationists saw me and Dawkins in a lineup, I am the one that had them so frightened that they had to call for the guards. I feel mighty.

The story reads like an urban legend except far more multi-layered and nuanced. The story also has the virtue of being true.

In all honesty, I have been a fan of Ben Stein. He is obviously very intelligent and very knowledgeable. His public persona has been one where he doesn't take himself too seriously. Granted, his ultra-conservative views are bonkers but he seemed likable in other respects.

In fact, I sent him an email saying as much and hoping he had some other projects in the pipeline. I could anticipate that his "Expelled" movie looked like a very bad move.

He replied graciously, thanking me for the email but saying that the movie is not what I had expected. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have seen Ben Stein on Bill O'Reilly and the "Expelled" trailer. These two videos are actually worse than I expected. Here are just a few problems with Ben Stein's arguments:

Believing the fact that evolution happened does not mean one endorses brutal selection processes in society. That's the the is/ought or naturalistic fallacy.
Calling modern evolutionary thought an imperialist relic of Darwin's days completely ignores 150 years of advances in the field. That's a straw man.
Blaming "Darwinism" for Hitler is several fallacies at once. It's false cause, appealing to emotions, appealing to the crowd, and cherry-picking. Capitalism too has been justified on flimsy evolutionary terms. See William Graham Sumner for an influential example.
Portraying evolutionists as an ideologically-driven cabal which demands party-line orthodoxy is a mischaracterization. It's a smear. It sounds paranoid. Calling it "Big Science" is a misapplication of the term. And given the events at the theater, it also sounds like psychological projection.

Ben Stein's no dummy. He should know better. He is presenting dishonest and manipulative arguments. Maybe the film will be better than its "hype" -- which itself is pretty disastrous. Maybe the film will be completely re-edited before its release next month and it will present excellent arguments. This hope bucks probabilities.

You need to be smart and very well educated to become a presidential speech writer (as Ben was for Nixon and Ford). I'm sure Ben is familiar with logical fallacies. But being a smart, well-educated Presidential speech writer doesn't necessarily mean one is honest. So far, given the fibs, the canards, the ridiculous statements, the fallacies and the weirdly clumsy PR gaffes, this is all pretty dishonest work. And the movie isn't even released yet.

Why'd you have to do it, Ben? Why'd you have to do it?

*Note: The title refers to whether Mathis is a liar for Jesus. I don't think Ben Stein himself is a Christian, perhaps I'm wrong. I do know he is a very devout Republican.

**Note: In the video PZ and Dawkins mention a slick computer animation. Mistakenly, they attribute the footage to an XVIVO visualization which was recently plagiarized by the ID crowd. (They have since stopped using it.) For the purposes of the movie, a new animation was produced which is clearly based on the XVIVO work, ~~but it's not, legally speaking, plagiarism~~. The copy job may or may not constitute plagiarism.

The Fossils in the Genome

2008-03-19T21:27:00.005-04:00

Pharyngula posts a piece about the fossil record preserved in our DNA. The example he uses is the yolk sac:

By comparing the sequences of genes of known function in different lineages, we can get a measure of divergence times … and in the case of some genes which have discrete functions, we can even plot the times of origin or loss of those particular functions in the organism's history.
Here's one example. We don't have any fossilized placentas, but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta. We modern mammals don't need yolk at all … but could there be vestiges of yolk proteins still left buried in our genome? The answer, which you already know since I'm writing this, is yes.
more...

Possible Agent for Gulf War Syndrome

2008-03-18T18:14:00.004-04:00

Of Two Minds has an excellent post today on a possible agent for Gulf War Syndrome (via The Economist).

Speculation has roamed from blaming the anthrax vaccine that troops received, to depleted-uranium weapons, to intense exposure to pollution from burning oil wells. Now, a provocative article in the Economist suggests that the symptoms may be the result of neurochemical warfare. Specifically, that troops were exposed to acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEis) found in pesticides used to protect the troops from sand flies, in the nerve gas Sarin, and in pyridostigmine bromide pills given to troops as pre-treatment against nerve gas. AChEis prevent the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, causing it to remain in the synpase for longer than it should. This causes those neurons to fire excessively, causing abnormal brain and muscle activity as well as possible loss of white matter (myelin).
Dr. Beatrice Golomb, whose theory is currently published in PNAS, points out that severe exposure to AChEis mimics the range of chronic symptoms that many veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome report. more...

Paul Krugman on Interstellar Trade

2008-03-18T17:03:00.011-04:00

In 1978 Paul Krugman took on the pressing problem of how to set prices when goods are traveling near the speed of light. His opus, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade" [PDF] takes the relativistic economics head-on:

"These complications make the theory of interstellar trade appear at first quite alien to our usual trade models; presumably it seems equally human to alien trade theorists... I do not pretend to develop here a theory which is universally valid, but it may at least have some galactic relevance.

The remainder of this paper is, or will be, or has been, depending on the reader's inertial frame, divided into three sections. Section II develops the basic Einsteinian framework of the analysis. In Section III this framework is used to analyze interstellar trade in goods. Section IV then considers the role of interstellar capital movements. It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

Via Slashdot.

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

2008-03-17T13:43:00.005-04:00

A new anthology edited by Richard Dawkins is now hitting bookstores. It features popular science writing from a truly impressive array of several dozen authors.

The publisher, Oxford University Press describes the book:

Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and many dozens more. Readers will find excerpts from bestsellers such as Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach , Francis Crick's Life Itself , Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey , Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea , and Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us . There are classic essays ranging from J.B.S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" to Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and Albert Einstein's famed New York Times article on "Relativity." And readers will also discover lesser-known but engaging pieces such as Lewis Thomas's "Seven Wonders of Science," J. Robert Oppenheimer on "War and Physicists," and Freeman Dyson's memoir of studying under Hans Bethe.

I recall Dawkins asking for suggestions via his forum at RichardDawkins.net I see many of the most suggested, including the wonderful Lewis Thomas, made the cut. (Alas my candidate, Heinz R. Pagels does not appear on the list.)

Seeing the list of hugely popular and influential writings, this looks like it may be the closest to a definitive collection yet published. I have some science writing anthologies on my shelf but this looks far more comprehensive.

Busy, Busy...

2008-03-17T13:32:00.003-04:00

I've had a lot going on recently and I expect to be busy for the next while. This week, I won't be able to post very frequently but I will try to keep up as best I can. Stay tuned...

Hope You had a Happy Pi Day

2008-03-17T12:00:00.006-04:00

Pi Day was march 14th (3.14) and the day seems to get a little more popuar every year. Since it fell on a Friday this time, it was the subject of a geekily delightful segment on NPR's Science Friday. Part of the segment is devoted to Pi Limericks and Pi-Ku.

I once wrote a song about pi which was comprised of singing the digits while playing an Am-G-F-E progression on the guitar. While I did this just for a lark, it became one of my most requested tunes. Still, others have composed better songs.

Pi Day originated 20 years ago from San Francisco's Exploratorium. The celebration is two-fold as 3/14 is also Einstein's birthday.

The world record for memorizing the decimal expansion of pi is held by Chao Lu of China. It took him slightly over 24 hours to recite 67,890 digits. According to the rules of the competition there can be no gaps longer than 15 seconds. So he had no meals or bathroom breaks.

The record for computing pi is held by a team led by Yasumasa Kanada who have calculated the number to 1,241,100,000,000 (1.24 trillion) digits. For comparison, you only need 39 digits to calculate the circumference of the visible universe to the precision of a hydrogen atom. 63 digits gives you Planck scale precision.

Maybe a million digits will do for you. If not, here are 70 billion. Actually, everyone's favorite way of celebrating pi day is pretty obvious.

Tips for a Better Live Science Presentation

2008-03-13T11:56:00.004-04:00

Of Two Minds posts this video featuring some simple yet extremely useful tips on improving science lectures. Good tips and a good sense of humor.

The video was made by Timothy Marzullo and Gregory Gage from UofM.

Shockwave Traffic Jams

2008-03-12T00:57:00.006-04:00

From New Scientist:

The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.
After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.

The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now. more...

Via the mighty 3 Quarks Daily

Earth, Water, Air and Factcheck

2008-03-11T18:06:00.005-04:00

Dan Phiffer's blog posts this image he found on an Internet message board. On the left is all of Earth's water gathered in one place. On the right, all the air. Both are set relative to the scale of the planet.

The image is getting a lot of attention (I found it via BoingBoing). But a question remained. Is it accurate?

A reader, Pat Stanton, does the math:

My son sent me a link to the image of spheres representing all the water and air on Earth. He was skeptical and suspected it was an example of “tree-hugger shock media.”

I decided to do the math, starting with the data provided by Andrew Nowicki. The math appears to verify the posted image. Although I applaud my son’s skepticism, tree-hugger shock media sometimes brings us an important and informative message.

General approach:

Measure the spheres representing Earth, water and air in the image. Obtain the diameter in pixels of each sphere. Also, identify relevant physical constants.
Starting with data independently provided by Andrew Nowicki, calculate the diameters of spheres that would contain Earth’s water and air.
Normalize the results from Step 2 into pixels and compare with measurements from Step 1.
Detailed results

Pat details his calculations in the full post -- and the image is legit. Impressive work all around. The image does emphasize the thin film our known biomass occupies.

Are We Alone - Art and Science

2008-03-11T16:07:00.005-04:00

The good people at the Are We Alone podcast have put together another great show. This week, they hit a topic near and dear to my heart and blog. How do science and art overlap?

mp3 - Higher Quality
wma - Faster Download

They talk with Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, on the subject of artists' insights into human experience which are finding experimental validation today. Their dependably funny radio theater imagines putting DNA on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They look at the work of Leonel Moura who designs robots which make art. They also discuss the possible evolutionary advantages of our artistic sense with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. And more stuff too. Highly recommended.

Stephen Hawking on Charlie Rose

2008-03-09T15:53:00.009-04:00

The most quotable moment comes from Rose asking Hawking about God and religion:

Hawking: "Physicists believe that the universe is governed by scientific laws. These laws must hold without exceptions or they wouldn't be laws. That doesn't leave much room for miracles or God. I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark."

The end of the interview is pure Charlie Rose:

Rose: One last question. Is there a word -- "determination" "passion" "will" -- that has enabled you to survive, and to be the force you are around the world, and to have people see in you a representation of the great quest to understand who we are and how we fit?

Hawking: I had just always done what seemed the obvious thing to do.

Rose: That says it all.

Now available on Google Video. From the Charlie Rose site:

A conversation with Dr. Stephen Hawking & Lucy Hawking. They discuss their book George's Secret Key to the Universe, an adventure story about two children who find a sort of computer portal through which they can slip into the solar system and beyond.

"We are Inhabitants of a Planet Called 'Earth' and We Bear a Message Brought to You by Doritos"

2008-03-09T10:53:00.008-04:00

From Science Daily:

The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos 'You Make It, We Play It' user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth's atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone 'out there' that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.

On 12th June, the space-bound ad will be broadcast from a 500MHz Ultra High Frequency Radar from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, which lies in the Arctic Ocean about midway between northern Norway and the North Pole.

The transmission is being directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth with planets that orbit its star '47 Ursae Majoris' (UMa). 47 UMa is located in the Great Bear Constellation (also known as "The Plough") - easily identifiable to even the most amateur stargazer. It is very similar to our Sun and is believed to host a habitable zone that could potentially harbour small terrestrial planets and support life as we know it.

Maybe we can send "My Speech to the Martians" by Jack Handey (audio from Studio 360, text from the New Yorker).

Image from UCSD Bookstore.

The Geometry of Music

2008-03-09T09:46:00.007-04:00

Dmitri Tymoczko is a composer and music theorist who explores the geometry of music. His site includes visualizations of musical patterns including "Smoke on the Water" on a Möbius strip (mov) and Chopin's prelude in E minor on a circle (mov) and in 4D space (mov). His ChordGeometries 1.1 application represents chords and voice leadings in a variety of 3D geometrical spaces.

From Science News:

Music theorists have long found Chopin's E minor prelude puzzling. Although the chord progressions sound smooth to the ear, they don't quite follow the traditional rules of harmony. When Tymoczko looked at the piece and watched the composition's motion through his geometrical space, he saw that Chopin was moving in a systematic way among the different layers of the four-dimensional cubes. "It's almost as if he's an improviser with a set of rules and set of constraints," Tymoczko says.

The image above is from Andrew Lipson's Lego Page.

Physicist Elected to Congress

2008-03-09T07:39:00.006-04:00

Particle physicist and Democrat, Bill Foster has just won a special election to replace former House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Foster worked at Fermilab for 22 years. He is credited, among other things, for developing equipment and data analysis software for the Collider Detector at Fermilab. His equipment helped find the Top Quark.

Now if he can make a detector to find some spine in those Washington Democrats, am I right people? Eh? Eh? Is this thing on?

Science bloggers are rejoicing from Pharyngula to Bad Astronomy to Cosmic Invariance.

Foster's first term will be very short as his Illinois district will have its regular election in November.

Beaumont Hospitals Plan a Proton-Beam Site to Target Cancers

2008-03-07T10:07:00.002-05:00

The Detroit Free Press reports:

In a move generating controversy among Michigan's top hospitals, Beaumont Hospitals announced plans Thursday to team up with an Indiana company to build a $159-million proton-beam cancer radiation facility on its Royal Oak campus.
The debate centers on a type of cancer radiation therapy offered at about a half-dozen U.S. sites called proton-beam therapy. By comparison with traditional radiation therapy, which uses X-ray or photon light particles to zap tumors, proton-beam therapy releases tiny atomic particles that are expected to more closely target a tumor without hurting nearby tissue as the energy moves in and out of a cancer site. more...

Study: Snapping Three Times Leading Way To Recall Movies, Actors

2008-03-07T09:49:00.003-05:00

From the Onion:

According to a study published Tuesday in the Journal Of Neuroscience, snapping three times in rapid succession is the most effective method for remembering the names of films and actors that have slipped one's mind. "When denied access to IMDb, subjects who were able to correctly remember semi-obscure movie trivia invariably used the tri-snapping method," head researcher Dr. Ward Connell said of the study, which consisted of asking volunteers several questions pertaining to a photograph of Dermot Mulroney.

Via Of Two Minds

Researchers control growth rate of replacement blood vessels, tissues

2008-03-07T08:39:00.005-05:00

University of Michigan researchers have developed a new technique for administering growth factor to heal injuries. It combines nanotechnology with platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF). As Wikipedia puts it, PDGF is "one of the numerous growth factors, or proteins that regulate cell growth and division. In particular, it plays a significant role in blood vessel formation (angiogenesis), the growth of blood vessels from already existing blood vessel tissue."

The following is from the UofM News Service:

Researchers put platelet-derived growth factor into nanoparticles and then attached them to a lattice-like, biodegradable scaffold. In experiments, the growth factor recruited cells that stimulate the body's own machinery responsible for healing, said (Peter) Ma, whose lab developed the scaffold and the nanoparticles.

As the tissue grows, it crawls into the scaffold, which eventually dissolves.

"Growth factor is typically dumped in and releases over a period of hours," said (William) Giannobile, who also directs the Michigan Center for Oral Health Research. "With certain wounds you might want a lot (of growth factor) in the beginning, and with others you might want a little released over a longer period of time. We've basically found a way to dial up or dial down the release rate of these growth factors."

Their results are available at the Public Library of Science.

More information on the images above.

UK May Shut Down Jodrell Bank Observatory

2008-03-06T17:23:00.000-05:00

Jodrell Bank observatory may shut down according to a UK funding proposal (via Bad Astronomy). The observatory is comprised of several radio telescopes including Lovell, the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world. The proposed budget cuts would save the UK £2.5 million per year. Perhaps Lovell can be converted (again) to an outdoor movie screen. (Cross-posted from MetaFilter.)

Mathematician Sophie Germain

2008-03-06T12:59:00.011-05:00

Science News posts a two-part series on Sophie Germain [Wiki] -- a mathematician born in France in 1776. The article describes Germain as "the first woman known to have discovered significant mathematical theorems." (Hypatia from the 4th Century is worth noting, though she is not known for any particular theorems)

Germain assumed the identity of a male student and took classes from Lagrange. She read class notes and sent in assignments under the name of the male drop-out. Lagrange found out her secret:

According to a commentator at the time, Lagrange "went to her to express his astonishment in the most flattering of terms," and the commentator goes on to say that "the appearance of this young 'geomètre' made quite a stir." Nevertheless, the barriers against Germain's inclusion in the mathematical community didn't come tumbling down.

Later, she corresponded with Gauss under the male pseudonym, "Antoine-August LeBlanc." Gauss too discovered her real identity:

In 1806, Napoleon's armies were marching into Prussia, and Germain became concerned that Gauss might be in danger. She asked a friend who was a commander in the French artillery to find Gauss and ensure his safety. Her friend followed her request—but revealed her identity in the process.
Gauss initially responded with delight, writing to Germain: "The taste for the abstract sciences in general and, above all, for the mysteries of numbers, is very rare.… But when a woman, because of her sex, our customs and prejudices, encounters infinitely more obstacles than men in familiarizing herself with their knotty problems, yet overcomes these fetters and penetrates that which is most hidden, she doubtless has the most noble courage, extraordinary talent, and superior genius."

Gauss broke off correspondence with her shortly thereafter -- saying he was turning to astronomy and would have no more time for math.

Germain worked in isolation, taking on one of the most difficult problems in math, Fermat's Last Theorem. (It was not until 1995 that the theory was proven by Andrew Wiles, and that was in a roundabout fashion.) She defined what would be called Sophie Germain primes and worked on the math of elastic surfaces.

Gauss convinced the University of Göttingen to give her an honorary degree. Unfortunately she died in 1831 before receiving it.

The two-part series on Sophie Germain: 1, 2.

Foodsel

2008-03-05T16:19:00.007-05:00

Foodsel is a site that visualizes the energy represented in food. How much exercise is implicit in a candy bar? What is its equivalent in batteries or sugar cubes?

Interesting tool. I am curious how nutritionists would evaluate the site.

It could benefit from some redundancy in its navigation. To compare a variety of foods, I did find myself shuttling back and forth a lot. It would also be nifty to have English units in addition to the metric units (for we poorly educated Americans).

For such an ambitious site, I'm not going to get too critical. It's quite a project.

(I wonder how many hours of blogging it takes to work off a bowl of ramen. Hm.)

Via Dave Faris at MetaFilter.

Visualization of Einstein's Special Relativity

2008-03-04T22:10:00.005-05:00

This is a recent visualization showing Einstein's theory of special relativity. A couple moments are not entirely intuitive, but the main idea is very well illustrated. Using a third spatial dimension to represent time is surprisingly effective. Well done.

Another visualization from the same person(s) is of the Coriolis and centrifugal forces also very well done. (No audio on either video.)

Saturday Morning Physics Returns

2008-03-04T14:22:00.005-05:00

Saturday Morning Physics is a very popular lecture series in Ann Arbor. UofM offers fascinating physics lectures to the public -- plus coffee, donuts and bagels! It took a two-week hiatus for spring break but returns this coming Saturday morning with "Modeling the Cosmos -- Observations and Simulations:"

Cosmology has been "the study of the Universe in its totality". Both sky observations and simulations have taken huge steps forward in the recent past. Dr. Rasia will explain the most important successes achieved in our understanding of the Universe and its main components: dark matter and dark energy. She will discuss the future of this field, and UM’s involvement in one of the biggest future sky surveys.

It starts at 10:30 but it's a good idea to show up pretty early. The lecture hall at 170 Dennison fills up quickly.

The schedule of presentations includes PowerPoint downloads of the recent presentations on string theory.

Videos of previous Saturday Morning Physics.

Primer, Fractal Mazes and Mulholland Drive

2008-03-03T23:26:00.015-05:00

I just finished re-watching (again) the 2004 movie "Primer." It's brilliant. I'm willing to give a film major points just for being unlikely. This does much better than just "unlikely." At only an hour and 17 minutes, it takes about four hours of repeat viewing to get a handle on the intricate plot.

I won't be spoiling much to explain the movie is about time travel. It confronts the paradoxes of time travel and concludes that duplicates of people can alter their own past without disappearing (in contrast to Michael J. Fox's hand in "Back to the Future").

I'll get to the complexity of the plot in a minute. First, it's worth mentioning that the movie is stylistically very slick for such a low budget. It's very cleverly shot and the acting of the two leads is surprisingly good. The world the movie shows is a hyper-realized cosmos of pale shirts and power-ties of high-tech entrepreneurs. They even wear ties when they scavenge for metal parts.

At it's heart the movie is a very elegantly designed puzzle. Here are some of the rules:

The characters in-the-know have access to two storage-box-sized time machines
These characters can change their own past without nullifying themselves
Anyone who travels back it time will have their time-line overlap with their earlier selves
Time travel can be done repeatedly
A character might time travel without letting the audience know

Can a character go back to a time before the time machine was invented? Right now, I'd argue this is an open question. It does not seem to follow from the logic of the machine but there are some tantalizing clues in the script which suggest otherwise.

The rules of "Primer's" plot are similar to puzzles called fractal mazes. Fractal mazes are recursive and so is the plot to "Primer." Pathways are used repeatedly to different ends.

My guess is, that like a fractal maze, "Primer" is open to a variety of solutions. Though not all attempts at solutions work.

It's very easy to run into a dead-end in a fractal maze. In "Primer," not all story interpretations work. Any plot-solution that contradicts the logic (including growth of facial hair or Aaron's use of headphones) runs into its own "dead-end."

Rather than explain how fractal mazes work, better you just give 'em a try via the links below:

For a JavaScript version of the fractal maze to the left, go here. The page also includes a variety of solutions.

For a more complex fractal maze, try this. (Various solutions here.)

My guess is, the plot was designed with a particular solution in mind. Shane Carruth (writer, director, producer and actor for Aaron) is a mathematician and engineer. (YouTube interview here.) So I'm guessing he pieced this together with a particular solution in mind. But, again, clues to various solutions abound.

There is an online subculture of people trying to solve the plot. This post is fairly close to my current grokking. This thread offers additional interpretations.

And then there is this ambitious piece of work which I think might be more confusing than the movie.

If there is a specific solution to the "Primer" puzzle, these all may still be wrong. Then again, more than one may fit logically.

Maybe I'm wrong. When I first saw "Mulholland Drive," I simply accepted the plot as surrealism -- open to any dream interpretation. I've since been convinced otherwise by the site Lost on Mulholland Drive which offers a very persuasive analysis of the movie in logical terms.

Others are way ahead of me on the view-count for "Primer." I'll see if I can get a better picture of the story soon.

Image to the left from LOL Science.

This is Your Brain on Brands

2008-03-03T16:32:00.009-05:00

The Neurocritic has a refreshingly skeptical post about neuromarketing:

Advertisers, neuroscientists combine forces to produce outlandish headlines:
Advertisers, neuroscientists trace source of emotions in brain
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — First came direct marketing, then focus groups. Now, advertisers, with the help of neuroscientists, are closing in on the holy grail: mind reading.

At least, that’s what is suggested in a paper published today in the journal Human Brain Mapping authored by a group of professors in advertising and communication and neuroscience at the University of Florida [Morris et al., 2008].
Not only outlandish headlines, the holy grail of "mind reading" is within the grasp of their PR department. more...

I've been following the neuromarketing thing for a few years now (Google alerts be thanked). The story of neuromarketing actually started with the Pepsi Challenge ad campaign. People in a blind taste-test actually do prefer the taste of Pepsi. So why so people still prefer to buy Coca-Cola?

To answer this question, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was put to use, measuring the activated parts of the brain of cola drinkers.

From Frontline's The Persuaders:

Coke "lit up" the medial prefrontal cortex -- a part of the brain that controls higher thinking. Montague's hunch was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers' choices. Now, there appeared to be solid neurological proof. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a cottage industry was born.

Neuromarketing, in one form or another, is now one of the hottest new tools of its trade. At the most basic levels, companies are starting to sift through the piles of psychological literature that have been steadily growing since the 1990s' boom in brain-imaging technology.

There is a great deal of hype in the field of neuromarketing. (They're marketers after all.) For a recent example, here's a press release excerpt on the brainwaves of subjects watching Hillary and Obama YouTube ads (see if you can spot any selection bias):

Researchers found that the Obama "Yes We Can" viral video generated the highest brain response.

The study involved 25 subjects under 30 years of age who were tested using caps with electrodes that are linked to electroencephalography (EEG) equipment, which measured and recorded brain activity in millisecond increments.

Michigan Pharyngulite Meet-Up

2008-03-03T16:06:00.001-05:00

Michigan fans of the PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula are looking to organize a meet-up in Ann Arbor.

If you're interested in participating, just send me an email: PAT HAT 32 at HOT MAIL dot COM.

People Power on OTM

2008-03-03T15:29:00.001-05:00

On the Media has a very interesting segment about the changing behavior of audiences inside the InterTubes:

There's a new era of online community and it's challenging our notions of entertainment, activism and audience. Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, depicts this online world, driven by networks that grow and act in never-before-seen ways.

This link takes you to the transcript and downloadable audio for the segment.

(Disclaimer: I confess, I find most ruminations on the "unprecedented nature" of net phenomena pretty tedious. But this is an exception. -- Pat)

My Books part 01: Dictionary of Science & Technology

2008-03-03T07:43:00.002-05:00

I collect dictionaries. The Wordsworth Reference series has a number of interesting dictionaries. My favorite of theirs is "The Wordsworth Dictionary of Science & Technology." The tag line reads, "A 'user-friendly' guide to the modern world."

At over 1000 pages and packed with tiny type it's positively dense with useful information and definitions.

But it's the choice of cover that fascinates me. Is it a picture of the Space Shuttle (as in another edition)? Is it that first crystallographic image of a DNA molecule? Is it a picture that in any way celebrates science? No.

It is the haunting painting "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" by Joseph Wright, 1768.

The painting depicts a demonstration of a bird suffocating in a vacuum, to the mixed reactions of the audience. The man on the far left is rapt with fascination. The woman next to him gives him the "I'm not sure I know who you are" look. Cropped off the cover is a young girl fixated on the suffering of the bird and (presumably) an older sister shielding herself from the view. Father figure looks like he's attempting to comfort her with an explanation of the science going on. The eldest person is lost in troubled thoughts -- but he is painted in the same lifeless colors as the bird. And on the far right, a boy opens a window to the open air -- not so much for the bird but for the viewer.

The genius of the painting is in the depiction of the "natural philosopher" looking at us directly. His hand at first appears to be inviting us in. But a closer look shows that the hand is operating the pump. His face is disturbingly ambiguous. Maybe he is placidly explaining the principle of the vacuum. Maybe he is asking forgiveness. Maybe he just lost his soul. He's a cypher looking at us -- but there is a clear sadness in his eyes. He does indeed suck the air out of the room.

It's an outstanding painting. But it's not the celebration of science you'd expect on the cover of a trade paperback dictionary.

New Blog

2008-03-03T07:22:00.001-05:00

Retrospectacle blogger Shelley Batts has merged with Steve Higgins of OmniBrain to form the brand new Of Two Minds. Like their previous blogs, Of Two Minds is part of the ScienceBlogs cosmos. Both Shelley and Steve are in neuroscience (she hearing, he seeing) -- but their posts show hugely diverse interests.

Congrats! Looking forward to the new stuff.

Journalism 3G: Computation + Journalism

2008-03-03T07:01:00.001-05:00

This is a conference held last month at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Videos of presentations are available here (beware of hostile interface but they'll be updating it soon).

The keynote by Google News creator Krishna Bharat is quite good as is the series of talks on "Sensemaking and Information Visualization" (available in the first link).

A Shout-Out to...

2008-02-29T00:06:00.001-05:00

Ja Rule, Tony Robbins, Dinah Shore, Jimmy Dorsey, Pope Paul III and Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenber----dorff, Sr.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

It only comes once every four years!

(...except on years that are divisible by 100, which are not leap years, unless they are also divisible by 400, in which case, they are leap years*).

Joel Hodgson, "TV's Frank" Conniff and J. Elvis "Early Servo" Weinstein on TSOYA

2008-02-28T08:46:00.000-05:00

Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America interviews the MST3K crew who are now embarking upon Cinematic Titanic.

The Sound of Young America: Cinematic Titanic

It's a very interesting interview which, among other topics, covers Joel's unusual career.

Cinematic Titanic's first movie is "The Oozing Skull" (originally released as "Brain of Blood").

MSTies will also enjoy RiffTrax, featuring Mike Nelson and many familiar voices. Their "Matrix" kung fu scene is grand.

The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 - 2007

2008-02-28T04:57:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has posted a visualization of movie grosses from 1986-2007. The technique they use is called ThemeRiver which was developed in 1999 [PDF].

It's an interesting graphic but I do have some problems with it. The actual numbers behind it are not available in the graphic. The Times could have overcome this problem but didn't.

With this technique, instead of the height being relative to a base line (which would have forced some data elements to eclipse one another) the amounts are represented by visible areas. This means there is no simple way to plot the values on the vertical side of the graph.

The New York Times could have overcome this by making the interactive part show the numbers. Instead, it shows a synopsis of the movie and a link to the Times' summary.

The coloration indicates box office gross over time. But the color breaks are a little odd. A color change which would distinguish the $500 mark would make sense in this case. The lightest color designation is superfluous because it is effectively blotted out by its white outline.

While the grosses are calculated in inflation-adjusted dollars, it appears that the weekly box office is mapped in non-adjusted dollars. Just compare the big hits of the 80's to recent hits and you'll see what I mean. On the techie side, a better scroll bar and a zoom feature would be useful.

My only other complaint is more of a quibble. The smooth continuous curves suggest high resolution data that does not exist. These figures are based on weekly box office -- only four or five horizontal chunks per month. While there is an undeniable grooviness to the interpolated curves, revealing the data in its choppy weekly form might have yielded some interesting facts. But it would probably be much harder to read.

OK, all that having been said, it's a very interesting graphic. The visualization technique is intuitive and invites comparisons among the different elements -- search for "The Full Monty" for interesting example.

ThemeRiver reminds me of a more rigorous version of the Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music graphic discussed in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. There a lot of imaging techniques being developed and very few of them get much traction. ThemeRiver might just catch on. Being in the New York Times certainly helps.

via infosthetics, flowingdata and boingboing.

Kimodo Dragons in Kansas Zoo Conceive without Mating

2008-02-27T21:40:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reports on female lizards essentially cloning themselves:

Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.
Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year...
The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Tip to Afua.

DU Video Hits 50,000 Views

2008-02-26T13:58:00.000-05:00

A couple years ago when YouTube was young, I posted a US Army training video, "Depleted Uranium Hazard Awareness." It has received far more traffic than I expected -- over 50,000 views -- and I am very happy to report that a good chunk of those viewings are from troops in the field.

I found the video at Information Clearinghouse. Because the original file has such a small screen, the video quality is terrible. Fortunately the most valuable information is in the audio track. The video was originally made in the mid-90's but at the time of posting it still sat on the shelf. The video is now available at a number of sites. The YouTube video alone goes out to dozens of links.

In one respect I am pleased that anything I posted drew the attention of 50,000. But more important, I am thrilled that thorough, non-controversial and vital information is reaching the people who need it most.

There are edited version of this video that have higher quality images, but are remixed and edited with lefty agitprop. While I'm sympathetic with some of those messages, they ultimately dilute the value of the video.

Moderating the comments for the video has been its own story. Every few months, there will be a wave of comments which try to dismiss the content of the video. Other times, there is the occasional hate speech. (A lot of anti-Arab bigotry and one commenter who wished cancer on the children of service members, calling it "karma." If wishing cancer on someone's children isn't hate speech, I don't know what is.) So I've been applying rules for moderating the comments. They have to be either about DU or the video itself, and no hate speech. I haven't had to delete many comments lately.

For something that took me less than a half-hour, I'm glad it's been put to such good use.

The God Particle

2008-02-26T01:44:00.002-05:00

The National Geographic site posts a very funny article about the Large Hadron Collider. While it assumes general familiarity with physics, it uses a goofy sense of humor to illustrate it's points. After a quick overview of 20th century particle physics, the article turns to the search for the Higgs particle:

There's one puzzle piece in particular that physicists hope to pick out of the debris from the LHC's high-energy collisions. Some call it the God particle.
The first thing you learn when you ask scientists about the God particle is that it's bad form to call it that. The particle was named a few years back by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who has a knack for turning a phrase. Naturally the moniker took root among journalists, who know a good name for a particle when they hear one (it beats the heck out of the muon or the Z-boson).

The preferred name for the God particle among physicists is the Higgs boson, or the Higgs particle, or simply the Higgs, in honor of the University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed its existence more than 40 years ago. Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force." The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one's ever found it.

Not your usual National Geographic article, but very well done.

As a side note, the article dismisses the idea that the LHC will make a black hole which will swallow up the Earth. This fear needs the smack-down at every opportunity. Our humble planet is bombarded with particle collisions all the time (in the form of cosmic rays) which dwarf any collisions the LHC will ever produce. Somehow we have endured.

Still, lolscience posted a fun riff off the photo National Geographic used:

The tag line reads:
"Now witness the true power of this fully functional large hadron collider"

Human Genetic Diversity Map

2008-02-24T14:08:00.002-05:00

Scientists from the University of Michigan, Stanford and the National Institute on Aging have created the highest resolution map yet of human genetic diversity. Their findings are published in both Science and Nature.
This story is receiving plenty of popular coverage, including this segment on NPR's Science Friday and Wired:

Their findings support the widely accepted hypothesis that humanity's ancestors traveled from East Africa through Central Asia and then to the rest of the world. More importantly, they point the way towards fine-grained future studies of population variation, allowing people to pinpoint their own ancestral wanderings and scientists to focus on genomic regions that have experienced intensive historical pressure.

Science journalists approached the story from an anthropological angle -- understandably, because that's the takeaway with the broadest appeal -- but when I spoke earlier this week to researchers from the three teams, they were much more excited about the studies' nuts-and-bolts.

PZ Myers on Skepticast

2008-02-21T14:38:00.000-05:00

PZ Myers, blogger for the mighty Pharyngula, is a guest on the podcast The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. They discuss his recent radio debate with Intelligent Design proponent Geoffrey Simmons.
The radio debate is something to behold. Myers is able to rebut Simmons off the top of his head, while Simmons is unaware of the fossil record he himself mentions and wrote about. Myers points out that Simmons does not know what he is talking about. Then Myers is warned against making personal attacks.
It is actually not an ad hominem attack to call someone an ignoramus. I am a complete ignoramus when it comes to the sport of cricket. I happen to be ignorant of the sport. It says nothing about my character.
In Simmons' case, his ignorance of biological evidence is a touchier subject because he has placed himself as an authority on the subject -- albiet an authority who emphasizes the role of magic in natural history.

Radiolab is Back

2008-02-21T14:14:00.001-05:00

Radiolab, one of my favorite public radio shows, is back with a new batch of shows. The newest is on laughter -- a typically fascinating topic for the show.
Is Laughter just a Human Thing?

Aristotle thinks that laughter is what separates us from the beasts. That a baby does not have a SOUL, until the moment it laughs for the first time. Historian Barry Sanders, author of Sudden Glory, says that according to Aristotle, this moment of "human ensouling" is supposed to happen when a baby is 40 days old. We follow radio producer Amanda Aronczyk as she tests this theory on her newborn baby.

Then we go to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, to tickle rats with psychobiologist Dr. Jaak Panksepp. It's his notion that laughter is found all across the animal kindgom. Boom, Aristotle! Then Dr. Robert Provine, author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, shows us chimps who seem to be laughing. Boom Boom!
We also get the giggles with a bit of archival tape from comedians Elaine May and Mike Nichols. And Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, eloquently delineates the awesomeness of laughter.

One of the segments discusses something I'd written off years ago as an urban legend -- an outbreak of contagious laughter in an African village. Well, it actually happened. A few possible causes are explored. The explanation that the reporter thinks is the most plausible (anxieties surrounding abrupt changes following national independence) sounds like at least a strong contributing factor. Very interesting show all around.

What's more, the Radiolab's hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were guests on another fine show, The Sound of Young America.

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

2008-02-21T13:53:00.000-05:00

Report about changes in children's play from NPR's Morning Edition.

T-Rays for Art's Sake

2008-02-15T23:09:00.001-05:00

Remember those terahertz detection devices for seeing through clothes in airports? Well, those T-rays are now going to be deployed to reveal hidden artwork. According to the University of Michigan News Service:

..."T-rays" could let art historians see murals hidden beneath coats of plaster or paint in centuries-old buildings, University of Michigan engineering researchers say.

T-rays, pulses of terahertz radiation, could also illuminate penciled sketches under paintings on canvas without harming the artwork, the researchers say. Current methods of imaging underdrawings can't detect certain art materials such as graphite or sanguine, a red chalk that some of the masters are believed to have used.

If successful, the only naked people will be of the tasteful and arty variety.

Venus with cell phone courtesy of Photobucket, via Pandagon.

A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems

2008-02-15T22:52:00.001-05:00

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis has posted an atlas showing humans' impact on the oceans. Their site includes a downloadable file for Google Earth users. Researcher from the project were also featured on Talk of the Nation's Science Friday earlier today. (Embedded audio available.)
Their analysis is published in the February 15, 2008 issue of Science.

The NCEAS site says:

There were 4 steps to creating this composite map.
1. We gathered or created maps (with global coverage) of all types of human activities that directly or indirectly have an impact on the ecological communities in the ocean's ecosystems. In total, we used maps for 17 different activities in categories like fishing, climate change, and pollution. We also gathered maps for 14 distinct marine ecosystems and modeled the distribution of 6 others.
2. To estimate the ecological consequences of these activities, we created an approach to quantify the vulnerability of different marine ecosystems (e.g., mangroves, coral reefs, or seamounts) to each of these activities, published in Conservation Biology, October 2007. For example, fertilizer runoff has been shown to have a large effect on coral reefs but a much smaller one on kelp forests.
3. We then created the cumulative impact map by overlaying the 17 threat maps onto the ecosystems, and using the vulnerability scores to translate the threats into a metric of ecological impact.
4. Finally, using global estimates of the condition of marine ecosystems from previous studies, we were able to ground-truth their impact scores.

Relativistic Baseball

2008-02-15T15:54:00.001-05:00

This is a visualization I created to show the effects of dilation at relativistic speeds. This is in preparation for a series I am putting together about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
This is still in draft phase so any feedback is appreciated. Just click on the "comments" link.

Hope you like it. -- Pat

Scientific American on the Large Hadron Collider

2008-02-13T23:19:00.001-05:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to go online later this year. Scientific American printed a great series of articles on the LHC in their February 2008 issue. Non-subscribers can access two of the main articles online:

Large Hadron Collider: The Discovery Machine and
The Coming Revolution in Particle Physics

Here's a taste of what to expect from the first article:

[T]he LHC’s basic parameters outdo those of previous colliders in almost every respect. It starts by producing proton beams of far higher energies than ever before. Its nearly 7,000 magnets, chilled by liquid helium to less than two kelvins to make them superconducting, will steer and focus two beams of protons traveling within a millionth of a percent of the speed of light. Each proton will have about 7 TeV of energy—7,000 times as much energy as a proton at rest has embodied in its mass, courtesy of Einstein’s E = mc2. That is about seven times the energy of the reigning record holder, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Equally important, the machine is designed to produce beams with 40 times the intensity, or luminosity, of the Tevatron’s beams. When it is fully loaded and at maximum energy, all the circulating particles will carry energy roughly equal to the kinetic energy of about 900 cars traveling at 100 kilometers per hour..."

The picture on the right is of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). It is one of the four experiments built into the LHC. The other experiments are ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb.

Carl Sagan Stamps?

2008-02-13T21:22:00.000-05:00

Cornell University's Chronicle Online reports, "A movement to immortalize famed Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan with a U.S. postage stamp was launched Feb. 11..."

Carl Sagan is certainly deserving of a stamp. He was a pioneer in expanding the public's understanding of science. Sagan arguably invented a new form of educational television. And as a cultural icon, he put a face to the wonder of science and a passionate humanist ethic. [via]

Job Opening at Oxford

2008-02-12T15:27:00.000-05:00

There is some graffiti in the men's room at Oxford's Department of Zoology. It says, "What's the difference between God and Richard Dawkins?"
The answer: "God is here but everywhere; Dawkins is everywhere but here."

Now it's official. Richard Dawkins is retiring from his position as the Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science. He has set a very high bar for any future Simonyi Professors. The enormous success of "The God Delusion" and his subsequent international campaign for atheism is unprecedented.

I'm sure Dawkins will remain an active public figure. But his current professorship is now open. If your application to the US Supreme Court didn't pan out, you might try applying for the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science. Here are the submission guidelines.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?

2008-01-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

Edge.org asks it's annual question. The 2008 question:
"What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?"
So far the response is huge. At the time of this post, they have already received 163 responses -- from Alan Alda to Anton Zeilinger.

Previous questions:
2007: What are you optimistic about? Why?
2006: What is your dangerous idea?
2005: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?"
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Möbius Transformations Revealed

2008-01-01T20:12:00.000-05:00

"A short film depicting the beauty of Moebius Transformations in mathematics. The movie shows how moving to a higher dimension can make the transformations easier to understand."