What are your thoughts?

“I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure”. So runs one of the oldest entries in the bumper fun book of psychology jokes. It parallels one in the statistician’s equivalent volume: “statistics means never having to say you’re certain” (which, if you are too young to remember Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal^[1] in Love story, plays off the strapline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”) And both have a serious echoes in professional practice: because psychology is an area in which data trees are always compromised by a forest of confounding factors, and samples can often be small. In most pure, classical psychology, to an even greater extent than in the physical sciences, only statistical analysis can (to mix metaphors) tease out the pure signal from the white noise with confidence.

Even in its pure and classic form, the concerns of even the most abstract psychological research are rarely far from pragmatic utility. Roland Bremond, a mathematical morphologist currently concerned with the very down to earth business of transport planning, neatly encapsulated the data analytic nature of the beast^[2] in Saussurian terms: “La «réalité», du monde des objets, en psychologie expérimentale, est définie statistiquement comme l’ensemble des propriétés perçues partagées par tous les sujets «normaux» ... ... ... Autrement dit, la réalité est une propriété statistique, sur une population...” (In experimental psychology “reality”, the world of objects, is defined statistically as the set of properties shared by all perceived “normal” subjects ... ... ... or, to put it another way, reality is a statistical property of a population...)

Not that pure classical psychological research is the only strand or even the most evident. Without straying too far into monist and dualist controversies it’s fair to say that complete separation of mind from body was abandoned a long time ago, and psychology interpenetrates deeply with neuroscience and biochemistry amongst many other physical areas.

In its classic guise, especially in combination with modern computerised statistics, psychology is one of the areas of science where real, useful, original research can still be done by the solitary researcher without institutional funding or resources. In my freelance consultancy life I regularly work with research psychologists and frequently encounter such individuals, most of them right at home in one data analysis software package or another. In the run up to this article several lines of thought came from lone workers including the occasional pre-university student. [More]

Joining the tragic dots

As readers of The Growlery have noticed, I have been absent for just a heartbeat under four weeks now. Nothing to worry about; just the result of my having, yet again, overstretched and ended up for a while with too few hours in day or days in the week to keep every plate in the air. Thanks to all those who sent solicitous enquiries ... and apologies for the lateness or absence of responses. Apologies, too, to all those friends whose emails have gone unanswered, achievements unnoticed, birthdays and anniversaries unacknowledged...

Ploughing through the backlog, one of the highlights which I discovered that I had missed was a paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, coauthored by my long suffering friend (and fellow Melanie Safka fan) Barbara Claire. Barbara is a member of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis' Medical Center, which consistently does excellent work on causes of and contributory factors in violence related injury. She also manages to be president (also publisher and webmaster) of a historical society, a prime mover in a museum, rescuer of dogs in need, Charles Dickens enthusiast ... Amongst these and many other calls on her time, she finds time to heroically and single handedly sustain our friendship across the decades despite my abysmal failings as a correspondent. (Thank you, Barbara: I don't deserve you, but I'm so very glad you're still there.)

Anyway ... to return to the point: this research paper, which I have just belatedly read.

The paper is both instructive and depressing reading. One of the things which has occupied my excess time over the past month or so has been data collection and analysis for a group of charities dealing with a society thrown into a state of effective civil war. Injuries confronting overstretched (often overwhelmed) medical facilities in such a situation invariably include a very high proportion of what militaryspeak likes to call "collateral damage" casualties. Despite experience with that fact, and back of my mind knowledge that bystanders do get involved in criminal exchanges (the high profile cases of Jessica Crichlow and Thusha Kamaleswaran in London come to mind ), I have never really gotten around to joining up the dots between one context and the other. Reading this paper in its entirety gave me a great deal to think about; but it was a single background paragraph that suddenly made the emotional link.

“Stray bullet shootings contribute to a sense of insecurity and fear in affected communities. Children may be sent to stay with friends or relatives in lower risk neighborhoods after school and may be required to remain indoors after dark (and during the day, unless with an adult). They are taught to avoid crowds and people talking loudly, run when they see weapons, drop to the ground when they hear gunfire while outside, and take cover away from windows if indoors – in the bathtub, if possible. Adults become hypervigilant. They, too, stay indoors, during the day and at night. They may run errands in the morning or on weekends, when gunfire is less common.”

That could have been written about many communities recognised as being in fully blown civil war, including my focus of the last month. It could have been written about Beirut in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Bosnia after the break up of Jugoslavia, or Syria now. It could have been written about Belfast during the worst days of "The Troubles".

But it isn't. It's describing communities within a western liberal democracy assumed to be at peace, where the study nevertheless found that “stray bullet deaths accounted for 45% of all firearm homicides among children aged 10 years or younger”. It's left me very thoughtful.

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• Garen J Wintemute, Barbara E Claire, et al., "Epidemiology and clinical aspects of stray bullet shootings in the United States" in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, July 2012. 73(1): p. 215-223. [copy of the paper available here]

California arsenic dreaming

For at least as long as I've been reading it, speculative fiction has been proposing alternative biochemistries to the carbon based one which we know and love.

My first encounter with the idea was in one of Isaac Asimov's Wendell Urth mysteries, written when I was three years old though I didn't read it until I was ten. The talking stone, in which a race of "siliconies" live amongst the asteroids, posits a silicon based biochemical economy which, I later discovered, was popular with other writers and speculators too.

Another candidate is phosphorus which, like carbon, can (in combination with nitrogen) form a variety of complex molecules including long chains and phosphazene rings. But phosphorus also has a more conventional rôle in our own carbon based scheme of things, as one of the six main elements from which living matter is constructed. Amongst other things, phosphorus is a component in the cell's energy storage mechanisms, and in the binding together of DNA. Could phosphorus be replaced within our carbon ecology?

I am, as said recently, a mediocre chemist at best (and most chemists would describe me even less charitably than that), so I'm not in a position to have opinions on these speculations, but that doesn't stop me being interested. So, I was intrigued by an article in Science (organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) at the end of last year, positing a bacterium which had pulled exactly this trick: substituting arsenic for phosphorus.

As the authors point out, instances of biochemical substitution for trace elements are not unknown, examples being “tungsten for molybdenum and cadmium for zinc in some enzyme families and copper for iron as an oxygen-carrier in some arthropods and mollusks”. This would, however, be the first known example of substitution for one of the big six. Trace element substitutions rely on close similarity between the usual supects and their surrogates, and the authors argue for the same sort of similarity here:

“Arsenic ... is a chemical analog of phosphorus, which lies directly below [it] on the periodic table. Arsenic possesses a similar atomic radius, as well as near identical electronegativity to [phosphorus. The most common form of [phosphorus] in biology is phosphate ... which behaves similarly to arsenate over the range of biologically relevant pH and redox gradients. The physico-chemical similarity between [arsenate] and [phosphate] contributes to the biological toxicity of [arsenate] because metabolic pathways intended for [phosphate] cannot distinguish between the two molecules ... ... ... given the similarities of [arsenic] and [phosphorus] ... we hypothesized that [arsenate] could specifically substitute for [phosphate] in an organism possessing mechanisms to cope with the inherent instability of [arsenate] compounds.”

They then went on to identify a naturally occurring organism, a bacterium in a California lake, in which this substitution seemed in fact to have occurred.

My attraction to this is. of course, a potent amalgam of intellectual curiosity and childhood dreams. Alas, a number of comments in yesterday's issue (they are also available on the Science web site) dispute or question the findings. The authors respond; the debate continues...

As a nonchemist academic, I can only wait impartially for the final verdict. As a childhood dreamer, however, I surreptitiously cross my fingers and hope for that verdict to vindicate the original findings.

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• Isaac Asimov. "The talking stone" in Astounding science fiction. 1955, New York: Fantasy house.
• Felisa Wolfe-Simon, et al. 2010. "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus" in Science [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258.full.pdf [Accessed 2010-12-02].

In the heart of the storm

In the heart of the storm seems an appropriate title for Ray Girvan's latest post, in which he covers the most recent step in his self-set Odyssey through the entire output of Maxwell Gray.

Not just to read, either; to track down, first. And all of this for an author who frequently (see, as one example, A plea for the silence of the novelist) manages to exasperate him. And then to document the journey in fascinating detail for armchair travellers like myself. He originally described this as a project for 2010 ... while the timescale has expanded in practice, it's still both intensive and impressive.

Oh, I have often enough read the entire output of an author ... but never with Ray's combination of intellectual discipline and tenacity. When I think of such a project, my heart quails and I am full of admiration.

Counting on peace and war

Just under a century ago, a Quaker conscientious objector served during the first world war as a civilian volunteer ambulanceman. By this decision he ended his academic career, but nevertheless managed to leave behind numerous instances of his name in the academic fossil record. He become a primary figure in the origination of several new areas which later became fertile ground for scientific computing.

He was Lewis Fry Richardson, who died just as the computers began to appear which would make his theoretical work feasible in practice. His works on fractals was greeted with indifference at the time, but Benoit Mandelbrot would later^[1] acknowledge it. And his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels^[2,3] is a keystone for modern scientific study of peace and conflict. One of the world’s first Peace Studies research centres is named after him: the Richardson Institute within Lancaster University, host of this year’s Conflict Research Society annual conference.

Moving up to the present day, my writing of this article was overtaken in topicality by a flood of emails and data streaming in from the laptops of individuals handling rapidly changing analyses from the Maghreb and Persian Gulf. [more]

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1. Mandelbrot, B., How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Science, 1967. 156(3775): p.636-638.

2. Richardson, L.F., Statistics of Deadly Quarrels ... Part one of a comprehensive work on the Instability of Peace, etc. [With a bibliography. Typescript, with MS. and printed additions.]: pp. 421. The Author: [Kilmun,] 1950.

3. Richardson, L.F., Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. 1966, Stevens and Sons Limited.

Half a trillion words ... plus two

The ever enquiring young mind of Julie Heyward can always be relied upon for penetration to the philosophical heart of any issue without fear, favour or delay. In the case of Google's Ngram viewer and datasets, for example, she maintains this reputation with a comment heroically posted early on Christmas Day:

“How long can it take to run "chicken boogers" through that thing? Surely that was your first and most urgent task, on realizing the power of such linguistic machinery?”

... a question which subtly refines Edmund Burke's demand, in 1770, to know “where were the boogers?” Such serious enquiry deserves serious reply, so I immediately applied myself to the task.

The immediate headline answer is ... it took mere milliseconds to establish that the bigram "chicken boogers" seems, between 1500 and 2008 CE, to have appeared ... approximately ... zero times.

Undeterred, I tried the separate words. Boogers seem to first appear in print, as noted above, in the late 18th century. Chickens are immortalised in ink from almost two hundred year earlier, with a 1586 culinary reference from John Trusler – and Sir Philip Sidney, no less, was moved in 1599 to pen the words “O Mopsa my beloved chicken, here am I thine owne father...” (about which, perhaps, the least said the better).

Tracking both words across the same periods of time, chickens appear far more often (by roughly three orders of magnitude) than boogers, which makes a comparative graph on the same axes somewhat unenlightening. Rescaling and using two separate y axes, however, permits the illustration shown here (double click the graphic for a full size view in a separate window) which shows that there is an approximate correlation over most of the past century ... but that in the past decade chickens continue to increase their popularity while that of boogers may (only time will tell) have started to decline.

I am grateful to Ms Heyward for bringing this important and previously overlooked research issue to my attention.

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• Edward Burke, in The Annual register, or a view of the history, politics and literature of the year. 1771, London: J. Dodsley.
• John Trusler, The London Adviser and Guide: containing every instruction ... necessary to persons living in London, and coming to reside there ... together with an abstract of all those laws which regard their protection against the frauds ... to which they are there liable. 1586, London.
• Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. 1599, Edinburgh: printed by Robert Walde-graue.

Picking over half a trillion words

Following JSBlog's enthusiasm, yesterday, (“Google just blew my bibliographic socks off”) for Google's new Ngram viewer, I've been busily catching up.

First stop was the viewer itself. Then a start on downloading the raw data sets which lie behind it, for more detailed analysis than the online viewer can deliver. Finally, while the data downloaded in the background (almost two gigabytes of it just for single words in English, even in ZIP form ... nearer to ten when expanded), reading the associated Science article by Michel et al.

It's going to be a good while before anything significant comes of the downloads, but I've done a couple of test drives. They can be intuitively checked with a quick visit to the viewer.

First experiment, resulting from a recent off the cuff discussion amongst a group of students: correlating uses of the words "twat", "twit" and "twerp". It's interesting to find positive correlation between the first and last from 1935 to 1980, but negative between them and "twerp" over the same period – which then reverses so that all three positively correlate over the past thirty years.

Second: the tendency to concatenate "bigrams" into single words. This train of thought was started by Google's example comparison of "child care" with "nursery school" and "kindergarten" ... I tried it out, and then added "childcare" to see if it made a difference. As examples to cut a long story short, "child care" declines markedly as "childcare" slightly increases (a negative correlation) from 1996 to 2008; "brood mare" and "broodmare" show a similar negative correlation from 1960 to 2000 but then "brood mare" recovers and the correlation becomes positive through to the present.

Those are, of course, trivial investigations and show nothing ... I mention them only to show the sort of five finger exercises that I've been playing with since yesterday. Much more interesting is some of the investigation mentioned by the authors of the Science article.

For example:

“Suppression – of a person, or an idea – leaves quantifiable fingerprints... ... ... Such examples are found in many countries, including Russia (e.g. Trotsky), China (Tiananmen Square) and the US (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947)...

We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned... We plotted median usage in German for five such lists ... ... ... The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party members [a 500% increase...].

Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” s for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 – 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925-1933 and in 1955-1965... In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly centered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes... In German, the distribution in much wider, and skewed leftward: suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule... At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression... This population is highly enriched for documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso..., the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and Hermann Maas... ... ... At the other extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dramatic rise... This subpopulation is highly enriched for Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who benefited immensely from government propaganda...

These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlights how culturomic methods might complement existing historical approaches.”

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• Jean-Baptiste Michel, et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" in Science, 2010. DOI 10.1126/science.1199644
  

Wikileaks

I don't have anything original to say on the subject, and certainly nothing worth stopping to listen to, but it's necessary (in however small and insignificant way) to stand and be counted ... so ... I applaud what Wikileaks has done today.

There is never any such thing as an unmitigated good but, despite all freely acknowledged reservations and messy grey moral fogs, I do believe that releasing of truth is, in this case at least, the best available route through ambient evils.

Wikileaks

ORG: Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict

Iraq Body Count

...and, while I'm about it...

SIPRI

CCR

Something new under the sun[less sea]

Most of us live full, productive, valuable lives, contributing to the world but without fundamentally changing it.

I certainly see myself in that way. My involvement in research has discovered new things, but they were things which filled in small crevices entirely within what was already known, confirming rather than challenging existing structures ... they might be surprising, if I was very lucky they might prompt me or others to think differently, but they didn't upset anything or break new ground. I take photographs which I am satisfied earn their place in the world, and some which people buy, but I haven't taken the arts by the ears and taken it in a new direction or invented a new way of seeing. Same for my writing. I'm very happy with that as an epitaph: he kept the garden growing, he helped to keep it free of weeds, he left it a little tidier and perhaps just an imperceptibly tiny bit more colourful than he found it.

The same is true of most people I know. I know and have known some extraordinary people, who have done extraordinary things and made huge differences to others; but none of them altered the way the world is believed to be. Or, so I thought this time yesterday. Just after midnight, in a quiet and undramatic sort of way, that changed.

Kyle Reynolds is the first named author on a paper whose abstract I was sent last night. Having read the abstract, I had to go and fetch the whole thing and read it through: New Molluscan Larval Form: Brooding and Development in a Hydrothermal Vent Gastropod.

At this point, I should fess up: my claim to "know" Ms Reynolds is something of an exaggeration. In fact, the whole extent of our acquaintance is that we once exchanged elusive jazz CDs ... and by post, at that, not in person. No matter: the buzz is real.

If you have an interest in the biological sciences (you don't have to be a biologist; I'm certainly not), you will follow the link in my footnote below and realised how exciting it is. The illustration here, copied from the full article, shows the position (bp) of the brood pouch.

If not, then you may well have decided to stop reading by now ... I did try to develop an explanatory analogy, but it just sounded silly so I gave up; you'll just have to trust me: it is exciting, and will require that part of existing conventional zoological wisdom be revised. And have I mentioned that I once exchanged jazz CDs with the primary author?

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• Kyle C. Reynolds, et al., "New Molluscan Larval Form: Brooding and Development in a Hydrothermal Vent Gastropod, Ifremeria nautilei (Provannidae)" in Biological Bulletin, 2010(219): p. 7. Abstract available from: http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/219/1/7

Only connect

Once upon a time I spent several weeks, completely alone (long story; don’t ask), on top of a mesa with a precarious microecology, surrounded by desert. My only company was the local wildlife: mostly lizards, small rodents, and an unlikely colony of feral cats at the top of the food chain.

Those cats, as the only visible social species, became the focus of my attention for much of the time – particularly the complex network of behavioural relations that bound their tribe together. There were mentor/mentee relations. There were sibling and parent/offspring relations. There were hunting partners. There were bonded sexual pairings and temporary liaisons. There was a power hierarchy. And there was a rich web of what I could only describe as ‘best friend’ relations. Then there was also a small number of maverick individuals who appeared to be entirely outside all of this, part of the tribe, but operating alone, connected to the main only by apparently random acts of altruism or brigandism.

Studying systems of inter-relational linkage was, at that time, an important part of my day job. But computing resources were scarce in those days, and sheer volume of content and association limited what could realistically be done; things are very different today. While analysis of social networks stretches back at least to the 1940s (arguably to the late 19th century), and social network analysis (SNA) as a formal field has been well established in sociology (to which I shall return, shortly) for decades, ‘it has only recently been discovered by behavioural biologists as a useful tool in the study of animal behaviour’, to quote Amelia Coleing^* in Bioscience Horizons just over a year ago. Coleing goes on to observe that ‘...methods devised to measure social complexity in studies of animal behaviour... often reflect the social relationships between individuals indirectly... social network analysis provides formal descriptors... and by providing quantitative measures... allows testing of statistical models about relationships and structure’. [More]

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• Amelia Coleing, "The application of social network theory to animal behaviour" in Bioscience Horizons, 2009. 2(1): p. 32.

Eggsperimenting...

I did, in the end, do the eggmobile experiment – with a group of urban café teenagers. By the time we'd thought it through, it cost even more in call time than my first sight expectation; but in the scale of things it was still a cheap enough piece of research. And it enables me to hold up my head when urging others to check facts rather than believe everything they are told.

Cellphones vary in the amount of radiation they produce at the earpiece; generally speaking, it reduces with time as design improves in newer 'phones. A thorough study would look at many different combinations, but we contented ourselves with two: a pair of the latest 3G handsets, and a pair of older (1996) ones. We also set up a control: an egg sandwiched between two inactive phones which were switched off. Given the information available on Snopes, nobody expected the egg to hard boil although the possibility had to be allowed for. More plausible was a discovery that the temperature within the egg would rise detectably. Through holes drilled into each egg, we inserted temperature sensors (one in the dead centre of the egg, one against the inside of the shell at the closest point to each 'phone). The probes were attached to a data logger, and the reliable resolution of the system was 0·1°C.

To cut a long story short ... the temperatures in the egg flanked by new phones did not change at all in the hour, even at the shell closest to the 'phone. Nor did that in the control. In the egg between the older 'phones it rose by 0·3 degrees at the shell, but not by any measurable extent at the centre.

Running the older 'phone set up again with the handsets switched on but SIM cards removed, transmitters and aerials destroyed with a hot soldering iron, and the 'phone bodies wrapped in metal foil, produced exactly the same temperature results. With a 3mm layer of thin polystyrene foam added between 'phone and egg, the temperature rise disappeared entirely. It would seem that the heating cause is simply the warming up of the handset by power flow from the battery, not radiation resulting from communication. Attaching sensors to the 'phones themselves supported this: the old handsets warm up significantly in use, the new ones very little.

Food for a future

It’s fashionable to scoff at Thomas Robert Malthus’ predictions, two hundred years ago, that human populations would grow until stopped by famine, disease or ‘moral restraint’. He wrote before the arrival of modern scientific crop research or contraception, and it’s unfair to blame Malthus for not foreseeing those breakthroughs. However, he was essentially right: the food supply expanded but remains finite, and contraception has not fundamentally disrupted the shape of the population growth curve, which is asymptotically approaching the vertical.

What to do about it is a matter of vigorous debate. To simplify: in the red corner are those who focus on means of increasing supply; in the blue, those who emphasise a dietary shift away from inefficient use of that supply. An Isaac Asimov short story^[1] did suggest exploiting the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum physics to disperse a trillion-strong population by placing every family on its own otherwise uninhabited Earth, but that one is a little beyond the reach of even today’s scientific computing power. In the long run, if the upward population curve continues, neither red approach nor blue will do more than defer the problem; in the meantime, pragmatically, both are needed. [More]

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1. Isaac Asimov, “Living space”, in Science Fiction. 1956, New York (NY, USA): Columbia Publications.

Counting the cost of energy

“The problem with energy,” says the earnest civil servant across the café table from me, “is entropy. Actually, three problems. Where the energy comes from is a problem. Where it goes to when we’re done with it is a problem. And the process of using it is a problem. Those three things will always be true. They will always cost us in money, resources and consequences.” Then she adds, looking nervously about her: “But saying so is a shortcut to a short career. People want to hear that they can have unlimited free supplies, without spoiling their view, while saving the planet at the same time ... juggling things to try and square that circle is mostly computerised data analysis.”

The analysis to which she refers is not just application of a known set of techniques to a static set of criteria. Not only is the landscape changing as technologies and economics shift, but the analysis itself invariably informs change in both methodologies and approaches that in turn alter the criteria on which the analysis was based. This is not unique to energy issues, nor to the present time, but it does become more acute when (as here) both policy and innovation respond to pressure in an area where margins have become the main area for advance. As Tom Tietenberg commented in a recent survey of energy efficiency effectiveness, ‘policy makers must recognise an expanded set of barriers and respond with some ingenuity in applying an expanded set of available instruments’.¹ [More...]

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1. Tietenberg, T., "Reflections – Energy Efficiency Policy: Pipe Dream or Pipeline to the Future?" in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2009. 3(2): p. 304

Analysis is the mother of invention

Invention isn't what it used to be. When I made the decision (at age 11, or thereabouts) to be freelance scientist, I had a lot of role models in mind but prominent among them was the anarchic spirit of absent-minded inventor Professor Branestawm^[1]. It was still easy to find real inventors like him, then; I knew one, and was taught by a couple more as an undergraduate. Nowadays, while part of him still lurks in many outwardly staid scientists, they would never acknowledge him. His demise was inevitable, but was finally assured by the arrival of computerised data analysis.

Invention comes in two basic types: ‘let’s try this and see what we get’, and ‘this is what we want, so how are we going to get it?’ Branestawm, surprisingly for a scatterbrained professor archetype, was of the second kind: he started from an idea for an invention, and pursued likely paths to its realisation. Modern equivalents are easy to find, from James Dyson who envisaged a better way of picking up dust and made it happen, to Altair moon lander architect John Connelly. Shifting from physics to pharma, the search for an H1N1 vaccine (proceeding apace as I write this) is in the same category, but there are also many examples of the first type: batteries of agents tried in combination and in various situations until a therapeutic effect is identified. For the most part, of course, invention programmes are mixtures of the two approaches, especially when seeking a nonpatented way to compete with an existing solution. Regardless of approach, invention is (like all post-Branestawm science) highly dependent upon data analysis. [more...]

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This one benefited in different but equally significant ways from conversations with Julie Heywood, Jim Putnam and (as always) Ray Girvan. They may well disagree with me about the use I have made of their input, but it is no less valuable for that. There was no mechanism or opportunity for acknowledging this benefit in the article itself, so I do it here.

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1. Norman Hunter (ill: W Heath Robinson), The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm. 1933, London: John Lane.

Malleson: Prototype burglary simulation

Just a quick mention for the paper "Prototype burglary simulations for crime reduction and forecasting", written by Nicholas Malleson (see my "Patterns in crime" post of 12 June) and available online at the link provided in the reference below.

While you are there, if you are interested in either crime or data analysis, look at the other articles as well; it's a fascinating journal.

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• Nicholas Malleson and Pat Brantingham, "Prototype burglary simulations for crime reduction and forecasting" in Crime patterns and analysis, 2009. 2(1): p. 47.

Patterns in crime

Arguments over whether social sciences can truly be described as ‘science’ are perennial; they have been around much longer than I have, and no doubt will run and run long after I’m gone. What is not in doubt is that they are now at least as dependent on scientific computing methods and resources as their physical science counterparts – one project ... author comments: ‘I really can’t stress enough that the project might have ended if we hadn’t been given access to... the NGS.’^[1]

We will never approach the vision of Isaac Asimov^[2], whose ‘psychohistorian’, Hari Seldon made detailed predictions over millennia with an accuracy and precision approaching those of orbital mechanics. The data involved is too chaotic for even a remote approximation to that. Hypotheses can, however, be generated that are testable within bounds useful and valuable in budgetary and policy planning terms – and even an indicative pattern of association, with no hypothesised explanation, can improve the effectiveness of resource targeting. [more]

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Image: Visualising individuals’ movement through time and space (from Malleson, 2008^[13]; GeoTime® software used courtesy of Oculus Info Inc. All GeoTime rights reserved.)

Data across the divide

Technology transfer means an astonishing number of things to different people, in almost as many contexts – from large scale international cooperation programmes through internal corporate dispersion of methodologies to local reusability of information. Underpinning it all, regardless of scale or purpose, are data analytic needs/benefit assessments – data analysis, or data itself, may often be the technology to be transferred.

Perhaps the most widely familiar current case is strategic transfer of industrial technologies in pursuit of commercial or foreign policy objectives. Export of ‘cleaner’ (lower CO₂ emission) energy generation methods into developing economies is probably top of the bill here, though providing low-cost nuclear facilities as a disincentive to proliferative development of local expertise runs close behind.

Less dramatically visible, but perhaps just as significant and far reaching, is the transfer of information and communication technologies (including scientific computing manifestations) which can, and does, happen rapidly at all levels from the governmental to the informal. Transformation of many developing economies by arrival not only of such technologies, but of the thinking and approaches that accompany them, can be profound, unpredictable and uneven. Chatting about events in the mountain village from which she comes, a Pakistani colleague mentions in the same sentence GPS micromanaged agriculture and vendetta killings planned using a well-known data analysis product. In the seas off Somalia, both foreign seismologists and local pirates use the same data analysis product in conjunction with satellite communications to inform their very different professional practices. [more...]

Collisions

The Large Hadron Collider is a wonderful discussion fueller. My flippant reference to it on Wednesday prompted a perfectly serious exchange of theological views between a believer and a nonbeliever – it also brought a rash of rabid abuse which had to be consigned to the bit bucket, but there you go.

On the same day, I had a long lunchtime conversation with my friend and colleague Ivor McGillivray whom I'd not seen for a couple of months (he had been cycling to the moon, or something equally energetic) and the LHC kept recurring in a conversation about Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes. A conversation with Ivor is always stimulating and wide ranging.

Time and a half went by unnoticed, a lunch hour became two and a half hours, and we both suddenly realised that we were supposed to be elsewhere ... which was a shame because the talk had just turned (without abandoning either linguistics or particle physics) to cultural value.

My last question as we parted was: does a large collider necessarily have higher cultural value than a small haiku? But he was dashing to retrieve his bike in one direction, and I was running to a meeting in another, and the answer (never mind the follow up) was lost on the wind.

Me, I'm not at all sure that the answer is "yes". I'm not at all sure it's a meaningful question ... though it feels meaningful to me.

A definition of cultural value would be useful, but not easy to agree. The definition offered to a history of mathematics seminar during my own degree freshman year (back in the dark ages of late 1971 or early 1972) was: "the worth of an artefact or idea in terms of how a member of a culture was brought up to perceive that artefact or idea". If I accept that definition, then cultural value is a highly relative thing whose locus of meaning scores low in both accuracy and precision ... which is just academic delaying tactics before admitting that the definition doesn't ultimately tell us very much. Apart from anything else, only the youngest of us have been "brought up" to have any opinion on the LHC at all – for most of us, it arrived on the cultural landscape after our "bringing up" was complete.

Why does something have, or acquire, cultural value? And how is the value measured? What do I mean when I say "cultural value" ... and is it the same as Ivor, or anybody else, mean when they say it?

Does my question (LHC vs haiku) become more meaningful if we compare like for like? The collider promises increased knowledge of the physical universe within which we live, through two phases: gathering of data, followed by a long period of analysis. Four centuries ago the painstaking collection of data on the transits of Mars by Tycho Brahe, followed by a long period of analysis by Johannes Kepler, gave us the idea of elliptical planetary orbits. Both are examples of fundamental progress in physics; neither created a completely new physics. The collider involves a much greater economic investment in total, but not in terms of those involved - and when adjustments are made for the different socioeconomics of the two periods, the difference is less than it at first appears. The Copernican model (upon which Kepler's planetary mechanics were based) became part of every human being's gut level visualisation of the universe; it seems doubtful that particle physics will ever be able to do the same. How do the two compare in cultural value?

Or how about, very much in our own time, particle physics and genetic biology? The LHC and sequencing of the human genome?

Letting go of the small haiku, how about that old two cultures divide: all of science and all of art? If we were, hypothetically, able to agree that those two large abstractions are of equal cultural value, then what subsets of art would be equal first to physics, then to particle physics, then to the LHC? Can we perhaps offer up Renaissance painting against particle physics, Boccaccio's Decameron against the LHC?

Does the LHC have cultural value because a (our) culture has already invested five or six billion euros (or whatever) in it? Does it have cultural value because of what it will return to our culture – in knowledge, in economic and technological spin off, in mythology, in whatever? Does it have cultural value because our culture looks up to scientists, particularly physicists, and so what they do takes its value from that esteem? Is the esteem pragmatic, or religious, or something else?

Does the LHC acquire cultural value simply because (as I commented above) it crops up so often in conversation? And, if so, does that mean that its cultural value is at least partly down to a small group who tried to prevent it in the courts? Or to the spectacular economic investment?

Do we value things (like the collider, but also like the haiku) because they seem useless, and therefore symbolise the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of need (which also, somehow, made it's way into the lunchtime conversation)?

The more I turn the phrase "cultural value" over in my hands, the more I look at it, the less I understand it. The more it reveals itself to be a Saussurean arbitrary signifier whose locus of meaning wavers and melts into its own bell curve of uncertainty when interrogated – which is just academic gobbledygook for "my brain hurts".

Were it not for
cries in snow,
would herons be?^*

---

* Translation by Takashi Ikemoto, 1963, of a haiku by the Lady Chiyo-jo (1701-1775).

Asus eeePC - low cost power in the hand

A few months ago I briefly discussed personal machines for data analytic work in the field. At around the same time, the Asus EEE PC came along and I was given a batch of five to try out. Designed for primary school use as a 'go anywhere' one-per-pupil device (it is one result of Intel’s 'classmate' specification) it has been made robust, inexpensive, connected, and surprisingly powerful – all of which appeals equally to the 'go anywhere' scientist. I review it here, in what is usually a software slot, not just as itself but as a representative of the new 'netbook' class of devices and a fingerpost pointing to the possible future shape of individual scientific computing. [more...]

Beyond the skies

In a forest in southern England, Greg Parker runs a small astronomical observatory with the sort of individual love and enthusiasm that too often dies out as we leave childhood...

... ... ...

By the time an equivalent of Professor Parker’s observatory (run, of course, by a robot version of Professor Parker) gives us the first deep sky view from somewhere out on the orbit of Pluto, whether or not life has beenfound on the way, the solar system will be a fully wired (or, rather, wireless) data neighbourhood with its roots in the work being done today.

[Read full article here]