Science

Robert KC Johnson claims that the New York State legislature’s creation of a commission to examine curricula and textbooks to see whether they properly reflect the African-American experience demonstrates the convergence of the far left and far right.

bq. Whoa. Isn’t that exactly what the Kansas board of Education is doing with intelligent design? Where is the AAUP, or the CUNY faculty union, denouncing the threat to academic freedom inherent in a politically-appointed board making “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks”? I’m not holding my breath waiting for either group to act.

Tripe and nonsense. It very obviously _isn’t_ what the Kansas board of Education is doing. What’s at issue in Kansas is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a wedge in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory. What’s at issue here is whether or not school curricula and textbooks should reflect the historic experience of a particular group. Now you can criticize the latter on its own terms (as Tim Burke has done with regard to a similar proposal in Pennsylvania), but it clearly isn’t even the same _type_ of issue as trying to steamroller Intelligent Design into the curriculum. It’s a question of the kind of collective understanding of history that schools should be teaching, which is a very different, and much fuzzier thing.

(Nor, as an aside, do curriculum committees of this sort necessarily produce the kinds of one-dimensional history that Tim rightly fears. A friend of mine was heavily involved in another committee which was mandated by the Albany legislature a few years ago to include the Irish famine on the state’s Human Rights Curriculum. It’s probably safe to guess that the Irish-American legislators who came up with this initiative anticipated schoolkids being fed wrap-the-green-flag-round-me nationalism, the wickedness of perfidious Albion etc etc. The committee’s final curriculum didn't do this – instead it used the Famine and the Irish emigrant experience to ask more general questions about the relationship between politics, economics and hunger, to draw the connections with contemporary politics, and to talk bluntly about some of the nastier aspects of the Irish-American experience, such as racism and the Draft Riots).

On the way in to work I was listening to a story about the latest round of proposed radiation standards for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Because spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste lasts a terrifically long time, and because the project is so controversial, the EPA has had to come up with a standard for storing the stuff. Yesterday they announced one designed to protect public health for a million years, or, in the words of an EPA administrator “the next 25,000 generations of Americans.”

I’m not an expert on any of this, but it seems that the inescapable fact about this sort of policy document is that the premise is wholly absurd. The sociologist Lee Clarke has argued that plans of this sort, designed to cope with huge disasters or accidents, are fundamentally rhetorical “fantasy documents” that have no prospect of working but which are produced as ritual symbols of social order and control. It’s bad enough when the disasters in question are things like a large-scale terrorist attack or a big oil spill. But a million years is about two hundred times longer than the whole of recorded human history, and the idea that we can design something built to work over that time-span is just ridiculous. Even the short-range standard proposed by the EPA covers a period of ten thousand years. At the same time, both the political fight and the nuclear waste are real, so you have to do something. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” to coin a phrase.

Cosma Shalizi on intelligent design.

bq. The thing is, this leads to bad science, and, if an unbeliever can say so, bad religion. The stakes are more serious here than with silly “devotionals with mathematical content”, but the issues are not that different. Doing what you must know is shoddy science, in the hope that it will provide cover for propagating the gospel, shows a poor opinion of your fellow creatures, of the gospel, and of God. Of your fellow creatures, because you are resorting to trickery, rather than honest persuasion or the example of your own life, to win converts. Of the gospel, because you do not trust its ability to change lives and win souls. Last and worst, of God, because you are perverting what you believe to be the divine gift of intelligence, and refusing to learn about the Creator from the creation. And for what? To protect your opinion about what measure you think it fitting for God to employ.

bq. One of the greatest passages in the Bible is when “the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind”:

bq. Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

bq. Creationism is a way of responding to this profound challenge by saying “I know! I know! You did it _just like I woulda!_”

Reading John and Belle’s blog, not the place I would usually look for unfamiliar maths results, I discovered that the circle can be squared in Gauss-Bolyai-Lobachevsky space . Checking a bit further, I found this was not a new result but was shown by Bolyai back in C19.

I haven’t found a link that shows how the construction was done, though. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?

Teresa Nielsen Hayden links to a terrific paper by E.M. Purcell called “Life at Low Reynolds Number.” The Reynolds Number is, roughly, the ratio of intertia to viscosity in fluids, and if you want to learn more about it I strongly urge you to read the rest of the talk for yourself. I learned about the Reynolds Number in graduate school. It’s not something they teach sociologists, as a rule, but I discovered during my first year that Princeton University Press often had sales at the University Store. Because I am in inveterate dilettante — er, I mean, polymath — I picked up a great book by Steven Vogel called Life's Devices.

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Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Of course, we at CT like to be ahead of the curve and thanks to Kieran’s ingenuity reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.

There has been much excitement about and focus on social networks in the past few years ranging from social networking sites to several high-profile books on the topic.

Interestingly, much of the buzz about recent work covers research by physicists. It’s curious how physicists have expanded their research agenda to cover social phenomena. I thought their realm was the physical world. Of course, since social phenomena are extremely complex to study, as a social scientist, I certainly welcome the extra efforts put into this field of inquiry.

What is less welcomed is watching people reinvent the wheel. Sure, partly it’s an ego thing. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate if the overall goal is scientific progress. Much of the recent work in this area by physicists has completely ignored decades worth of work by social scientists. If we really do live in such a networked world where information is so easy to access, how have these researchers managed to miss all the existing relevant scholarship? Recently Kieran pointed me to an informative graph published by Lin Freeman in his recent book on The Development of Social Network Analysis:

People whose overall work focuses on social networks are represented by white dots, physicists by black ones, others by grey circles. As is clear on the image, the worlds exist in isolation from each other. It would be interesting to see year-of-publication attached to the nodes to see the progression of work.

I have been meaning to write about all of this for a while, but John Scott from the Univ. Essex addressed these issues quite well in some notes he sent to INSNA‘s SOCNET mailing list a few months ago so I will just reproduce those here. (I do so with permission.)

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For some neat images, check out the Art of Science online exhibition hosted at Princeton. [thanks]

PZ Myers has a useful roundup of the current round of “hearings” on evolution that are going on in Topkea, Kansas. He also points to Red State Rabble, where you’ll find on-the-spot reports. The usual Creationist/ID guff is in full flower. The funniest sideshow is the appearance (at local taxpayer’s expense) of Mustafa Akyol, an Islamic ID proponent from Turkey and all-round scheming pain in the neck. As a sociologist, these fights for footing in the public sphere and for control over things like the school curriculum are interesting for all kinds of reasons — knowledge, power, rationality, all that stuff. But personally I just find them depressing. The most annoying thing about the whole clown show is the legalistic format chosen for the “hearings,” with cross-examination of “witnesses” and other pseudo-courtroom theatrics. Such rubbish. It just feeds the he-said/she-said storytelling format that lazy reporters like best, never mind the legal profession’s tendency to believe that their adversarial methods are the best way to come to the right conclusions about any given question. Lawyers have a lot to answer for.

There’s been a minor controversy recently over Naomi Oreskes’ literature study in _Science_. Oreske found that of 928 paper abstracts on climate change, taken from the ISI database, precisely none disagreed with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change is real. Now Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University says that after searching the same database, he’s found 34 article abstracts that “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years.”” Peiser wrote a letter to _Science_, putting forward his alternate findings, which Science declined to publish; in Peiser’s view using “a contrived technicality as an excuse.” This has gotten some attention from the Telegraph, which hints at skulduggery and low standards in high scientific places.

Now, however, Tim Lambert has gotten Peiser to cough up the goods – the 34 (now, for some mysterious reason, 33) scientific abstracts that cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming. Tim is inviting readers to go through the abstracts, and record their own conclusions. My take after reading them: the claim that Peiser’s 33 abstracts “reject or doubt the view …” is completely unsustainable. There’s one undoubted rejection of the anthropogenic case (no. 27) – but it comes from that well-known arbiter of peer-reviewed scientific neutrality, the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues’ of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There are a few others that could be construed as scepticism (the explicit ones appear to be either outdated or else personal views), but the vast majority of the papers that Peiser cites don’t even begin to make any general arguments about global warming, let alone claims that the anthropogenic argument is bogus. Abstracts no. 12, 13 and 25 aren’t even _scientific research_; they appear to be postmodern inquiries into the construction of scientific authority. If I’d been asked (while wearing my hat as a member of GWU’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy) to review Peiser’s letter and evidence for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d have rejected them summarily, and made some fairly warm comments in my rejection letter. I’d have done exactly the same if it had been making the opposite argument (that is if Peiser had used similar evidence to argue that there was support for global warming). Simply put, I don’t think Peiser’s evidence even begins to provide proper support for his claims. But, in fairness to Peiser, he’s made the evidence that he’s using publicly available, so you can go over to Tim’s place and take the taste-test for yourself.

Lorelei Kelly at Democracy Arsenal writes:

Two cliches that the conservative movement lives by: “Nature abhors a vacuum” AND “Half of winning is just showing up”. So conservative leaders proceed to destroy public infrastructure–thereby creating a vacuum–and then outsource its replacement to their friends and allies. A great example of this occurred with the “reforms” implemented by the Contract with America–the de facto elimination of much of the cooperative informal infrastructure like staffed caucuses–that helped Members stay educated and also built alliances between Democrats and Republicans on issues of interest (like arms control or the environment). Congressional staff from the old days refer to 1995 as “the lobotomy of Congress”. Gingrich had no need for these informal venues … he consolidated formal power of recognition to himself and simply outsourced substantive policy needs to the Heritage Foundation. The left had nothing similar to Heritage in 1995. Now we’ve got Center for American Progress, but also years of catching up to do.

While Kelly is bang on in her diagnosis, I don’t think that think tanks like the Center for American Progress provide a very good solution, useful though they may be in other senses. Much of the dumbing down of political debate in the last decade was indeed an intended consequence of the Gingrich revolution. Congressional institutions which provided impartial information were axed, and replaced by spin from handpicked “experts” and right wing think-tanks. The prime example was the closing of the Office of Technology Assessment (which had peeved Gingrich by exploding some of the bogus science underpinning the Star Wars initiative). Still, creating “our own” think-tanks isn’t a solution to the underlying problem (although it may be a necessary political strategy). It would be far preferable to try to recreate some of the previously existing infrastructure, as Congressman Rush Holt has proposed (it wasn’t very expensive in the first place). This would make it far more difficult for bullshit artists like Senator James Inhofe to get away with murder on the floor of Congress. Doubtless, this would sometimes prove inconvenient for the left, whenever the existing research or scientific consensus presented awkward or uncomfortable facts for left-wing policy positions. But it would improve the quality of political debate in areas such as stem cell research, global warming and missile defence, where right wing politicians continually and persistently make claims that are bizarrely at odds with the existing body of scientific research.

This may just be the single most random post ever on Crooked Timber, but I, er, soldier on. Perhaps an entomologist or two reads this blog? Leftist entomologists who are sticking it to the man with their ground-breaking research in Roraima? So, I live in Singapore, where we’ve got lotsa ants. Big soldier ants. Little stinging ants. Medium-sized stinging ants. Demi-hemi stinging ants. And so on. When I walk my daughter to school we often see them running in little glistening jointed rivers, 15 ants wide, streaming from the corpse of a snail to the detritus at the edge of the sidewalk. And when the new queen ants are making their maiden flights we are tediously overrun by drones, even on the nineteenth story. They throng to the lights if you forget to close the windows. They also tend to induce menlancholy “to dust thou shalt return” feelings, being, as they are, so poorly put together. Their wings fall off at the feeblest provocation, leaving them to crawl around on the floor in circles. It’s as if a heartless Nature has put them together with the least possible care, thinking, “well, if they haven’t made it to the queen by that time…”. I have to kill dozens of them, usually smushing them with a wadded-up paper towel which I then throw away. This seems a peculiarly modern response; “I’m done with this insect—let’s throw it away in the trash!” But what I am I supposed to do, herd them back to the balcony in some Jain fashion? If they’re in my apartment, they ain’t impregnating the queen. Anyway, if I were to brush against them even slightly, their stupid wings would fall off. This wasn’t my point, though. Yesterday, I went out for a swim with my daughter around 4 o’clock. There is a waist-high stucco wall all around the pool. When I went to put our things on a chair, I noticed a strange sight. The top edge of the wall was thronged with ants, all of whom had their abdomen flexed up at a 90 degree angle to their thoraxes. They weren’t interacting with each other much, and were mostly all facing the same direction. When I leant over to look they rippled back in waves, then slowly edged back to their original positions, abdomens high as flags. WTF was up with that, then? I was struck with the vague thought that they were cooling off, but that didn’t really make any sense. When I got out of the pool 20 minutes later, they were still there, rippling back and forth, peculiarly bent. Thoughts?

Chris Mooney has a great piece of investigative reporting at Mother Jones detailing Exxon’s funding of anti-global warming groups ranging from Steven Milloy’s one-man disinformation campaign at junkscience.com to the American Enterprise Institute. Bottom line: there’s now an overwhelming scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gases are causing the world’s temperature to rise. Many previous skeptics (e.g. BP and Shell) have now been convinced on the basic facts of global warming. Yet Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, an organization with which Exxon has close links, have sought to cast doubt on this consensus through funding spurious “reports” and other publications that don’t meet the minimal standards to get published in peer-reviewed journals.[1]
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“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.

Via Slashdot, a commentary by Michael Huang on The Top Three Reasons for Humans in Space:

Humans are in space:
3. To work
2. To live
1. To survive

The idea is that we should be out there exploring and colonizing because people are better than robots at doing a lot of things, because more life is better than less and so we should “establish habitats beyond Earth,” and because life on earth is increasingly under threat and so “If we were [living] throughout the solar system, at multiple locations, a disaster at one location would not end everything.”

These all seem like pretty weak reasons to me.

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