Case in point

A collection of case studies from recent science literature highlight the importance of statistics...

• Beating the drought: using GenStat to investigate drought tolerance in chick peas.

• Reading the future: multivariate data analysis of brain patterns using IDL gives improved prognosis for improved reading in dyslexia sufferers.

• Committing fluicide: OriginPro analyses the viricidal potential of hydrophobic polycations.

• Fishy business: Statistica analysis of otolith microchemistry data illuminates population relationships amongst Atlantic herring.

• Wears the diamonds?: Multiple linear regression in SPSS offers a way to better prediction of wear rates in industrial cutting tools.

• Learning from past mistakes: Pursuing future geopolitics through historical data with Wolfram Mathematica.

Material values

Early in the film Up in the Air¹, characters played by George Clooney and Vera Farmiga start a casual relationship whose emptiness is emphasised in a pointedly tragicomic scene. Picking up one of Clooney’s airline loyalty cards, Farmiga asks “what is that, carbon fibre? ... I love the weight!” and follows up shortly thereafter with “pretty sexy”. It’s a whole new way of looking at materials science.

Carbon fibre, now so ubiquitous that it can be wasted in Clooney’s loyalty card, was of course a fairly early stage in the down-scale migration of materials science. What was considered daringly tiny when I learned my chemistry is now referred to as ‘bulk scale’, the nanoscale has become every day, and quantum effects are the new hunting ground. [More...]

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1. Reitman, J., Up in the Air. 2009, Hollywood CA: Paramount Pictures.

Beauty is skin deep

“These lenses have a surface coating,” said my partner, waving her spectacles at me, “and it’s a nightmare because it comes off. Stick that in your article!”

So I did (stick it in my article, that is), because it served to bring together and focus several different skeins of thought. Surface coating is one of the oldest human technologies, but still at the cutting edge and a prime consumer of scientific computing. Biomimetic or nanoscale, from reduction of optical reflections in lens systems to protection of components in orbit, taking in paper manufacture and dental treatment in between it is crucial to almost every area of endeavour. How might we make an optical surface coating less likely to come off? The obvious answer is improved adhesion, but to strengthen it or make it self-healing would be alternative approaches. After a detour through various mesoscale approaches it seems fairly certain that the answer, whatever it is, will lie in nanotechnology.

The archetypal adhesive surface coating is a protective layer of paint, pitch or varnish, first recorded in Genesis 6:14. Noah’s account lacks computational detail, but requirements for precision have certainly tightened since Cennini^[1] specified, some time around the end of the 14th century CE: ‘take one pound, or two, or three, or four, of linseed oil, and put it into a new casserole...’ [more]

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Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, trans D.V. Thompson, The craftsman's handbook : the Italian "Il libro dell'arte". 1960, New York,: Dover Publications. 048620054X (pbk.)

Avoid wind and welds for successful manufacturing

I've been intermittently tied up with two different challenges over recent months. Both were concerned with industrial quality issues but, despite that superficial semblance of a link, they couldn't have been more different. One was in a large plant, part of a regional economic development plan with government start-up funding; the other concerned a small village co-operative. One could offer me live access to its own data stores. The other had no process records or quality assurance expertise of any kind, until I started to design some; no telecommunications either, and the staff would have to do most of the work themselves under my intermittent direction. Both were concerned with manufacture of containers: milled steel in one case; fired clay in the other. Losses in the first, though so eye-wateringly large that my contingency fee was a pinprick, were being covered by deficit funding in the interest of public relations; those in the other were tiny, but would quickly cripple the co-operative, if not stemmed.

The two cases called for different approaches to a similar question: what production factors led to delayed fracture faults in a significant minority of the finished units?

I had encountered a detective-style case similar in some ways to the milled steel problem a couple of years ago, putting a review copy of Statistica Data miner release 6 to good use. I learnt a lot on that job, and applied the knowledge to the current concerns. It also happened, by a happy coincidence, that Statistica release 7 had just come to hand as this current pair of challenges hove into sight - so I earmarked it immediately for the larger-scale plant. The small village enterprise, though, called for a very different approach: something that could be applied by inexperienced and untrained users, so that every stage didn't have to wait on communications back to me. I had a copy of SigmaStat 3.0 lying around, which had impressed me by the ease with which it was accessed by novice users during a trial run in another industrial context; Systat International advised that a new 3.1 update was available, and sent a copy of for use in the co-op. [more...]