Recently in the Science Category

My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours -- literally hours -- wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long division or word problems. Yet for pleasure, he reads Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries and the last two bedtime stories we've finished have been kid-friendly biographies of Archimedes and Galen.

My son wants to be a scientist, but finds math boring. Clearly we have to do something about this!

Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn't hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. --Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society

One day, my wife put the book 10 Things All Future Mathematicians And Scientists Must Know: But Are Rarely Taught into the stack of books at my son's bedside. I glanced through the table of contents and got very excited.  The book mentions the Challenger disaster (managers ignored the engineers who warned that a low-temperature launch was risky), Dr. Snow's study of a cholera outbreak (he plotted deaths on a map and realized one water pump in the neighborhood was infected), and the principle of Occam's razor (which, in the absence of compelling evidence either way, favors the simple explanation over the complex).

Each chapter features a series of anecdotes that explain a big-picture concept (causation and correlation; bias; mistakes as an integral part of scientific inquiry; ethical experimentation), a cartoon mouse and cartoon Einstein comment on the stories, and the chapter ends with discussion questions that first require you to solve a word problem before you can weigh in with an opinion. This chapter is training young minds not to jump to conclusions, especially when all the information they need is right in front of them.

While I won't pretend this one book has solved all our math woes, I will say that at bedtime the other night, Peter was happily pondering this question:

A hot-air balloon can safely hold 1055 pounds. It currently has 6 people in it whose average weight is 128 pounds. In addition, it has a 4-foot by 6-foot metal floor that weights 8 pounds per square foot. How many 25-pound bags of sand can be safely placed in the balloon?

This question came at the end of a chapter that described the 2001 death of the up-and-coming singer Aaliyah. (A pilot initially said it was unsafe for her entourage and all their baggage to fly in a small plane; but the group refused to leave any people or any baggage behind. The pilot relented, the plane crashed soon after takeoff, and all nine people aboard were killed.) My son has a well-developed sense of morality, so he was pretty much furious at that pilot.  The emotion motivated him to answer the word problem number story.

I guided him through the process, of course, asking questions to make sure he remembered the various subtotals.

When my wife came past the door and saw that we were still up reading (and calculating), she ordered us to stop for the night.

Awesome Flash animation from the University of Utah, showing relative sizes from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.

I wish it could also zoom out and show astronomical sizes, too, like this FSU slide show (not as smooth as the Utah one) or the famous Powers of Ten movie.

Yesterday in my journalism class, I asked everyone in the room to take out a coin and flip it twice, and raise their hand if it came up the same.  Then I asked the ones whose hands were up to flip again, and keep their hand up if the coin came up the same yet again.  As it happened, the ones with their hands still up were women, and they both had a big shoulder bag on the table right in front of them.  So I made up a headline about a connection found between women carrying handbags and magical coin-flipping abilities. 

Beware of activists bearing statistics, I told them.  The activist sincerely believes that the statistics prove the issue, and has only the best intentions in mind when he or she uses numbers to answer your questions.  If an activist walks into a room and finds fifteen scientific studies on a desk, and 12 of them are inconclusive, and two of them contain evidence that contradicts whatever's on the hand-painted protest sign he or she is carrying, and one study supports the cause, which study is the activist going to try to get into the journalist's hands?

The same goes for governments bearing statistics, corporations bearing statistics, and, for that matter, statisticians bearing statistics.

The public prefers its science news cut-and-dried. Over the past few years, I've tracked the global warming debate as it appears in the media. According to this BBC article, the hottest year on record was 1998, and temperatures have actually been dropping for 11 years.  The Pacific Ocean seems to be headed into a cool cycle, which will likely affect global temperatures.  Is this a brief natural cooling cycle, only temporarily offsetting the effects of carbon emissions, or was the rise in global temperatures that set off the "global warming" panic just the upswing of a natural temperature fluctuation? 

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. --BBC

I've blogged on this before.

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

If language is as instinctive  to  humans as  dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our  brains,  why,  you might  wonder,  is  the  English language in such a mess?  Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts  pen to paper? 
 

The contradiction begins in the fact that the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.   The  rules  people learn  (or  more  likely,  fail  to  learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought"  to  talk.    Scientists  studying  language propose  [descriptive]  rules,  describing  how  people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people  who  speak the language and ask them.  Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely different things, and there is a good  reason  that  scientists  focus  on  the descriptive rules. --Steven Pinker, The New Republic

For anyone who's ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone. --Wired

Not as cleverly written as that video that has a line or two about each U.S. president (which I can't locate at the moment) but still very nicely done.

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world. --Robert Booth, Guardian

I remember some years ago reading an article that used a similar strategy to describe exactly what it would feel like to stand on Mars.

One of things Ford wasn't ready for is the weird smell.

"From the [spacewalks] there really is a distinct smell of space when they come back in," Ford said from the station in a Friday night news conference. "It's like...something I haven't ever smelled before, but I'll never forget it. You know how those things stick with you."

In the past, astronauts have described the smell of space as something akin to gunpowder or ozone.

The sounds of spaceflight have also been surprising, especially when Discovery fires up its large maneuvering thrusters, Ford said. -- Fox News

Some of these wacky rookies forgot to strap themselves down while sleeping, and just as the gruff, no-nonsense mission commander is in the conference room asking for a more experienced crew, the snoring rookies float past the camera.  The next morning, they try to make popcorn in the kitchen, and watch with wide eyes as various items ping-pong throughout the cabin, causing a low-gravity chain-reaction that sends a communications satellite to fiery doom.  When a capsule of Soviet cosmonauts starts running out of air, the motley crew of unlikely recruits is the only rescue team available. Will they show NASA they have the right stuff, or will NASA tell them to stuff it?  Starring Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Leslie Nielsen. Introducing Mischa the Chimp as Dr. Bananas.

Zombie math. Yay! (PDF. Boo!)

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. --  Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress

Mike points out the professor named "Robert Smith?" ("the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake," according to the BBC).

Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu.

In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu.  As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to control and ultimately defeat the virus.  As the pandemic intensifies, the player is given information about the history and science of epidemics through a series of newspaper articles and videos.  Eventually, if the player is successful, the game ends with a count of the number of people infected and killed over the pandemic's life span, and the money spent containing the virus.

I think the game succeeds in presenting players with a lot of information through the multimedia featured in the game, and by including hints in it, giving players incentive to absorb it.  Furthermore, it nicely illustrates the dangers of our highly connected world: there's nothing more jarring than fighting a virus raging in Central and North America only to glance at Europe and find the epidemic exploding half way across the globe.  However, the game does suffer from a few common pitfalls, and going over them might shed some light on some of the challenges with using games for education.

Imagine if all teaching happened like this... if all persuasion came from demonstrations like this.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival.

I've watched it three more times since blogging it, and it still makes me smile.

Lunar Lander -- the game -- at 40.

Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity's greatest technological achievement on his school's Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 minicomputer system.

Tom Wolfe (author of space program biography The Right Stuff (which incidentally was the movie I took my first-ever date to see back in 1983) ) describes how the Cold War derailed the grand adventure of space exploration. Shockingly, the decay started while the Apollo program was still underway.

[I]n October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists -- irreplaceable! -- there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert" ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

The first man on the moon doesn't feel his life is defined by being the first man on the moon? As if the world would remember much more than Armstrong's "one piece of fireworks"? Would his name belong beside Magellan's or Marco Polo's if not for Armstrong's singular achievement? --Paul Farhi, Washington Post

Talk about penny wise and pound foolish!

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed -- magnetically erased -- and re-used to save money. --Reuters

So the tapes NASA recently released are restored from less-degraded copies.

Amazing!

A website will re-create the 1969 moon mission in real time (allowing for the 40-year time lag).  http://wechoosethemoon.org/

This bit of educational theatrical fun sounds awesome! Via.

Travelling from past to future through a landscape of machines and ideas Walk the Plank and Thingumajig Theatre have created an interactive journey through the courtyard of Manchester's Town Hall. The audience will help inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage find the clues to repair his Difference Engine; solve the spider's riddles, hidden in the worldwide web; persuade the counting madman to open the gates to the Hall of Shadows...and discover the secret workings of the steampunk arcade. --The Manchester International Festival

The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, according to the Daily Express, the original high-quality recordings have been found. (It looks like NASA was planning to surprise the world a little closer to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic

A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago - a yardstick to judge and compare games.--  Keith Suart, Guardian

The first article in a series.

I enjoy steampunk, a cultural aesthetic which celebrates what both ordinary and extraordinary things might look like, had technology progressed along the lines that Jules Verne and his contemporaries imagined. As a literary subgenre, it imagines that the immeasurable power of steam has opened the skies, leading legions of top-hatted gentlemen-explorers and parasol-wielding adventuresses to the heavens beyond.

With steampunk on my mind, after submitting the final semester grades, I took a moment to celebrate by poking through the stacks. I found this absolutely beautiful book, A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine, by Robert H. Thurston, published in 1878. (Full text via Google Books.)

This isn't just a retro aesthetic, reacting against the streamlined and textureless Apple assembly line, or a self-conscious choice to make every bolt and gear visible in order to force us to come into direct contact with the technology. This is the real thing.
This engraving of the Worthington Pumping-Engine made my heart stop.

I also love the detail in this Compound Marine Engine. It's proportioned so that it looks to my eye almost like a desk toy, but I assume that's a person-sized hatchway visible on the left image. No riveted portholes? C'mon! I left the pages and my hand in the frame, so you can get a better idea of the materiality, the hefty bookiness of this book.

That's the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis, with the Hubble Space Telescope, in front of the sun. Wow!

It's difficult to imagine a more epic scene, but this photo has modest origins: amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault shot it with nothing but his own telescope, a solar prism and a Canon 5D Mk II. -- Gizmodo

This paper riffs on one of the most popular handouts on my website -- Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers (originally written by one of my technical writing students in 2002, though I continue to tweak it), and applies it to mathematics.

[B]efore anyone can understand a piece of mathematics, they must first become interested in it. So, for a mathematician who wants to fully develop a piece of mathematics, discovery and proof are only the first steps on a longer road. The next step is getting people interested.

Unfortunately, mathematicians are not trained in this art. Indeed, their writing is famous for being "dry". There are exceptions, and these exceptions are worth studying. But it also makes sense to look to people whose whole business is getting people interested: story-tellers.

Everyone enjoys a good story. We have been telling and listening to stories for untold millennia. Stories are one of our basic ways of understanding the world. I believe that when we read a piece of mathematics, part of us is reading it as a highly refined and sublimated sort of story, with characters and a plot, conflict and resolution.

If this is true, maybe we should consider some tips for short story writers, and see how they can be applied -- in transmuted form -- to the writing of mathematics. These tips may sound a bit crass to mathematicians, or even readers of "serious" fiction. But they go straight to the heart of what gets people interested, and what keeps them interested, in a piece of writing. -- John C Baez (PDF | HTML by Google)

An interesting introduction to literary Darwinism, from LiveScience.com:

Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation -- similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior.

He joined forces with another Literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, as well as two evolutionary psychologists on the study. Their online survey asked respondents to identify characters from classic 19th century British novels as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, and to rate character traits and emotional responses based on a psychological model of personality.

As predicted, people rated protagonists as displaying cooperative behavior that produced feel-good, positive responses from readers. They rated antagonists as being motivated by desire for social dominance, which drew negative emotional responses.

The study also found strong agreement among respondents rating character traits, even if just two people responded regarding a certain character. "Pride and Prejudice" had no lack of responses -- 81 people showed a familiarity with heroine Elizabeth Bennett that might have made the Austen protagonist blush.

Researchers quizzed 571 people aged 17 to 25 about their lives and found those who grew up with sisters were more likely to be happy and balanced.--BBC News

Well, at least "Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families." The words "make people happy" only appear in the headline.

From another point of view, the researchers learned that brothers make people sad. Or rather, "Boys tend to internalise problems and in families where there are lots of sons, I can see that can cause problems," which doesn't fit nicely in a news headline.