September 30, 2007
Cavan: remarkable landscape
No connection with anything: but I was just browsing Google Earth (it's on Google Maps too). Check out County Cavan (switch to satellite view, zoom in, and explore the area to the west of the arrow). This is arguably the best, worldwide, example of glacial drumlin-and-lake topography: mile after mile of textured landscape made of neatly-packed hills (aka "basket-of-eggs topography"). As Drumlins and subglacial meltwater floods describes, the mechanism of formation is still a matter of speculation.
September 26, 2007
Bringing Up Baby ... and alcohol sniffing
See Bringing Up Baby - theatre or bad science? and Smells of breathalyser myth at my new weblog Poor Pothecary. Bad Science topics will appear there in future.
September 25, 2007
Beyond the visible (#2)
A couple of years back - see Beyond the visible - I enthused about various sites about infrared light and photography. I'm still enthusing: Andy Finney's Invisible Light is one of my favourites as a starter site: I hadn't previously seen his Surrey Landscapes or his DigiColour ... 'Pseudo-Colour' Digital Infrared images. I ran also into a Flickr set by Zach Stern, Toy Infrared Camera, made using a cheap digital camera home-adapted to infrared (he took out the IR filter and replaced it with Congo Blue gel).
I've neither the nerve nor skill to do that, but I do have a really grubby scraps of lighting gel. Just holding a few layers in front of the camera - Congo Blue with a thinner red overlay to cut out the blue transmission - despite the state of the gel and it being rather chilly so (I assume) not much infrared about, I got some very moody shots of the local churchyard - here and here. They're not as far into the infrafred as they might be, but are at least a proof of concept. I'm well aware a Hoya R72 filter works perfectly well with my camera, but experimentation appeals.
Bill Beaty's Science Hobbyist site, where I first ran into the idea of using Congo Blue filters - see Infrared goggles for under $10 - now has some photos of what the world looks like through these filters, which transmit only blue and infrared.
I've neither the nerve nor skill to do that, but I do have a really grubby scraps of lighting gel. Just holding a few layers in front of the camera - Congo Blue with a thinner red overlay to cut out the blue transmission - despite the state of the gel and it being rather chilly so (I assume) not much infrared about, I got some very moody shots of the local churchyard - here and here. They're not as far into the infrafred as they might be, but are at least a proof of concept. I'm well aware a Hoya R72 filter works perfectly well with my camera, but experimentation appeals.
Bill Beaty's Science Hobbyist site, where I first ran into the idea of using Congo Blue filters - see Infrared goggles for under $10 - now has some photos of what the world looks like through these filters, which transmit only blue and infrared.
September 20, 2007
Photography ...
I've just updated the Photo Gallery with my favourites of the last couple of months (rather summer-y topics). It's a good opportunity to recommend The Growlery, where Felix Grant (a friend from way back who I deal with a lot re mathematical/photographical mattters) tackles topics more philosophical than I normally care to engage with. The current post, The Eye Altering, is about the relationship of photography to the world: what the choice of taking a photograph represents to the photographer ("the fact of capturing, for long enough to wonder at it, a fragment of what life is").
I've lost the e-mail discussion I had with Felix, but his view reminds me a lot of the ideas expressed in William Gibson's poem Agrippa - introduced here at Gibson's official site. Agrippa interweaves autobiography with themes about growing to adulthood, memory, the irrevocable loss of the past through family deaths and other life-changing events and decisions - all viewed through the metaphor of photography, the "mechanism" in which "The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this".
I'd be hard put to say what I get out of photography, except that it's probably more driven by a mix of personal aesthetics (I especially like scenes that present appealing pattern or complexity, such as this fern, spiderweb , staircase or cathedral ) and scenes that are emotionally striking, whether conventionally Grand Nature or appealing more personally (the final option being, I suppose, strength in evoking an "internal landscape" rooted in nostalgia relating to my small-town South Coast childhood and youth).
I've lost the e-mail discussion I had with Felix, but his view reminds me a lot of the ideas expressed in William Gibson's poem Agrippa - introduced here at Gibson's official site. Agrippa interweaves autobiography with themes about growing to adulthood, memory, the irrevocable loss of the past through family deaths and other life-changing events and decisions - all viewed through the metaphor of photography, the "mechanism" in which "The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this".
I'd be hard put to say what I get out of photography, except that it's probably more driven by a mix of personal aesthetics (I especially like scenes that present appealing pattern or complexity, such as this fern, spiderweb , staircase or cathedral ) and scenes that are emotionally striking, whether conventionally Grand Nature or appealing more personally (the final option being, I suppose, strength in evoking an "internal landscape" rooted in nostalgia relating to my small-town South Coast childhood and youth).
September 14, 2007
When science and journalism collide
When science and journalism collide by Nick Higham covers an altercation connected with the opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual Science Festival at York: Professor Peter Hammond pulled out of a News 24 interview because he was angry about reportage of his work in various newspapers.
Professor Hammond has developed a 3D facial scanning setup to aid the recognition of genetic disorders, some of which give characteristic facial features: as the BBC reported, 3D face scans spot gene syndromes. With conditions input so far, such as Down syndrome and Smith-Magenis Sydnrome, it manages 90% success rate. In forthcoming unpublished research, he is to describe the application to autism, having found evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders are more likely to have a certain pattern of forehead asymmetry.
The Yorkshire Post, however, boiled this provisional result down to the categorical "a computerised face recognition system that can instantly diagnose autism and other genetically inherited diseases". He was not pleased with this, nor with other statements he said were misquotes.
It's nice to see analysis of such issues covered in a news outlet (in this case, the BBC website) as generally this is the kind of problem that scientists bitch about in forums, while the media rarely allows ideas self-critical of their coverage to be expressed. Nick Higham characterises the divide as:
Scientists, operating in a culture which places enormous importance on accuracy and precision, can find reporters' occasional sloppiness infuriating. Equally, journalists often find scientists unworldly in their insistence on caveats and qualifications at every turn and their use of technical language, when reporters are desperately trying to simplify complex concepts and make them accessible to a general audience.
That's not a bad description, although I'd put it more strongly. Journalism, to sell stories, most often wants formulaic statements of some categorical simple truth. "X causes autism". "Y cures cancer". "Scientists are baffled by Z".
In the real world that scientists describe, there are rarely such black-and-white results. "A study which has yet to be replicated shows a slight correlation between X and autism but we don't know yet if it's a causative factor". "Y shows activity against cancer cells in culture, but we have no idea yet what it might do in the body". "Some scientists find Z interesting and unusual, but haven't investigated which of a variety of possibilities is the best hypothesis". This isn't unwordly but hard reality: experimental science produces results with a deal of uncertainty attached.
Few scientists, I think, would object to simplifying their ideas for accessibility. There are some excellent publications that do exactly that, such as Plus magazine, with its delightfully clear features on applied mathematics. The problem is when journalists ignore the caveats and present a highly uncertain conclusion as clear-cut: this goes beyond simplifying, and into the territory of actively distorting it into a lie.
There is a deeper problem, one that newspapers understandably are not likely to come clean to, that this distortion may be deliberate, Newspapers exist to sell themselves, and only report scientific truth to the extent that it doesn't conflict with this. They survive, largely, by printing what their readers already believe, and scientists are unlikely to get far in tackling this head-on. I've cited this before, but check out Covering Science: Why the Media So Seldom Get It Right.
Professor Hammond has developed a 3D facial scanning setup to aid the recognition of genetic disorders, some of which give characteristic facial features: as the BBC reported, 3D face scans spot gene syndromes. With conditions input so far, such as Down syndrome and Smith-Magenis Sydnrome, it manages 90% success rate. In forthcoming unpublished research, he is to describe the application to autism, having found evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders are more likely to have a certain pattern of forehead asymmetry.
The Yorkshire Post, however, boiled this provisional result down to the categorical "a computerised face recognition system that can instantly diagnose autism and other genetically inherited diseases". He was not pleased with this, nor with other statements he said were misquotes.
It's nice to see analysis of such issues covered in a news outlet (in this case, the BBC website) as generally this is the kind of problem that scientists bitch about in forums, while the media rarely allows ideas self-critical of their coverage to be expressed. Nick Higham characterises the divide as:
Scientists, operating in a culture which places enormous importance on accuracy and precision, can find reporters' occasional sloppiness infuriating. Equally, journalists often find scientists unworldly in their insistence on caveats and qualifications at every turn and their use of technical language, when reporters are desperately trying to simplify complex concepts and make them accessible to a general audience.
That's not a bad description, although I'd put it more strongly. Journalism, to sell stories, most often wants formulaic statements of some categorical simple truth. "X causes autism". "Y cures cancer". "Scientists are baffled by Z".
In the real world that scientists describe, there are rarely such black-and-white results. "A study which has yet to be replicated shows a slight correlation between X and autism but we don't know yet if it's a causative factor". "Y shows activity against cancer cells in culture, but we have no idea yet what it might do in the body". "Some scientists find Z interesting and unusual, but haven't investigated which of a variety of possibilities is the best hypothesis". This isn't unwordly but hard reality: experimental science produces results with a deal of uncertainty attached.
Few scientists, I think, would object to simplifying their ideas for accessibility. There are some excellent publications that do exactly that, such as Plus magazine, with its delightfully clear features on applied mathematics. The problem is when journalists ignore the caveats and present a highly uncertain conclusion as clear-cut: this goes beyond simplifying, and into the territory of actively distorting it into a lie.
There is a deeper problem, one that newspapers understandably are not likely to come clean to, that this distortion may be deliberate, Newspapers exist to sell themselves, and only report scientific truth to the extent that it doesn't conflict with this. They survive, largely, by printing what their readers already believe, and scientists are unlikely to get far in tackling this head-on. I've cited this before, but check out Covering Science: Why the Media So Seldom Get It Right.
September 13, 2007
Surf's up
A couple of interesting surfing videos via MetaFilter: Glacier surfing in Alaska; and Evan killing it in the St. Lawrence: interesting for the physics, as neither surfer is surfing on conventional waves. The Alaska example is on a type of bore, a turbulent-fronted step wave when formed when a glacier 'calves' and a large chunk drops into the water. This one is impressive enough, but small fry compared to the devastating waves that a similar mechanism can produce: see the classic paper Giant Waves in Lituya Bay, Alaska, which describes the 1958 megatsunami, a wave nearly a mile high, produced when an earthquake triggered a landslide that dropped millions of tons of rock into the Gilbert Inlet.
The St Lawrence one is on a standing wave, a more or less stationary wave where the surfer stays in the same location while the water flows underneath. John Newgard's Standing Waves article has more about the physics and surfing of the latter.
The St Lawrence one is on a standing wave, a more or less stationary wave where the surfer stays in the same location while the water flows underneath. John Newgard's Standing Waves article has more about the physics and surfing of the latter.
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