The President’s budget proposal appeared this week, and funding for scientific research was largely protected from the budget freeze on discretionary spending [1][2]. There are losses, but primarily where it’s especially hard to justify the expenditure (e.g. returning people to the Moon). It’s remarkable when words meet actions, but the work has only now begun. The President has laid out a vision, one that actually supports programs important to long-term U.S. leadership and competition. Two parties now have their work cut out for them: Congress needs to show its own leadership (and backbone) and preserve the support for science, and scientists need to show gratitude AND a vision for what will come from this continued investment.
Our job is both hard and simple. The benefits of physics are everywhere; we need only point them out. Be careful when pointing to future benefits from the investment in the field, but do not shy from saying that basic research in the physical sciences is predictably unpredictable – that “black swans” rise from the field every decade or so, many of them improving our health, our economy, and our philosophy.
Our job is hard because we have to deliver on the investment, which means not getting distracted by the opportunity, but rather seizing it. Pursuing our research in a responsible and determined way is the best means we have to repay the trust and the money. We can talk when we’ve succeeded, so now is the time to put our heads down and dig into the research.
Let’s do everything we can to prevent science from being sacrificed for political expediency. And while that’s in progress, let’s go figure out this universe.
In his state of the union address, President Obama said that
“Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. (Applause.) Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will. (Applause.)” [1]
There are fudge phrases in here, like “prepared to freeze” – leaving a little wiggle room for tough choices. But again, as always, science (discretionary spending in the federal budget) faces a climate where few people champion its cause in Congress and, regardless of the party in power, is likely on deck for the freezer. This can happen for several reasons.
The first is the stimulus bill. Scientific agencies received one-time injections of cash that they are still pushing out the door (and likely will be until 2011). But stimulus spending is not a long-term investment in anything. Stimulus spending gets things moving, but it’s adrenaline into a stopped heart; you do it once to get the heart pumping, then you find the nearest hospital and start long-term rehabilitation. The danger is that the Congress and the President will see the stimulus spending on science as the only success they needed score in science.
Science policy and support in this country was saved, but not healed, by the stimulus bill. Since the President only talked about energy research in his address,
Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history -– (applause) — an investment that could lead to the world’s cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy -– in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries; or in the California business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels.
but failed to highlight the other areas of science that can now hire. The Department of Energy alone just awarded about 100 Early Career Awards, with enough money in each of those over a five year period that each grant could support at least one new Ph.D. researcher who otherwise might have left the field or the country (or both). Congress and the President decry the loss of a high-tech workforce, but seem to neglect to mention when such jobs are created or saved outside of some factory. And while it’s nice that a boutique area like energy research gets mention, the risk is that you forget to talk about supporting general areas like chemistry, biology, math, physics, computing. Forgetting the base puts at risk the ability to invest in the next boutique project.
Independent of the stimulus bill, the profile for science funding has still been stale or declining for at least a decade. It’s easy to become complacent and think that science can manage on such budgets, since it’s still going in the U.S. But alive does not mean living, and breathing does not mean thriving. Keeping science alive, and giving it the means to live, are two completely different things. The Congress needs to understand this, and the President needs to be reminded of this.
None of this is to say that science, for sure, will face the freezer this year. But if we don’t hold the line, and fight to force the line outward so that we gain more ground, we will all have to go elsewhere to pursue our research. Science knows no borders – decades of international cooperation has demonstrated that. The flip-side is that science will go where the money is plentiful, where the path of least resistance between an idea and a lab is possible. Science will go where students are eager to learn and contribute. Patriotism only lasts so long in the heart of the scientist, because understanding nature is more important than clinging to a flag.
If the President was serious when he said,
How long should America put its future on hold? (Applause.) You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations — they’re not standing still. These nations aren’t playing for second place. They’re putting more emphasis on math and science.
then I had better see science agencies protected from another long stint in the freezer when the President’s proposed budget appears this week. Where will the emphasis be in this budget proposal, and will it plunge us further from leadership or give us the framework to define our success on our own terms?
A beautiful press release from NASA just appeared which concisely and directly summarizes the analysis of global temperature since 1880 using three data sources. Find the article here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html. I particularly like that they make a clear distinction between short-term local effects (El Nino, La Nina), short-term cyclic effects (solar irradiance), and long term global trends (temperature increases). It’s those short-term local or cyclic effects that most global climate change deniers like to use to cheat the public out of an understanding of the long-term effects. The NASA article quickly makes the distinction and nicely illustrates how those effects are accounted for.
On this day remembering the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , I performed my annual ritual of listening to his “I Have a Dream” speech. This year, I tried for focus my attention on one of the early themes of the speech: the bad check. King wrote and said,
“In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Transcript from [1])
Dr. King goes on to talk about how “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” In 1963, when he gave this speech, his words were cast in the movement of the time – civil rights, focused on black men and women – but they live on from generation to generation. These words are are true in every struggle, in every generation, where any minority works to gain equality in a society.
I focused on this part of the speech because there has been a terrifying thing going on in Texas of late. It started a year ago with changes to the Texas public education science standards. Texas, the second-largest textbook market in the U.S., sets standards for the nation because if companies want to sell school texts they have to sell them to Texas. It is too costly to print editions that satisfy Texas standards. Thus, the Texas State Board of Education makes decisions that affect the entire nation.
The board has been steered by many of its members toward views on science that are neither scientific nor standard [2]. Now, they are focusing on standards for social studies and history. Among the philosophies being brought to bear by members of the board are views that rights for minorities come not from the struggle of the minorities but from the graciousness of majorities [3]. This downplays the role of great men and women (such as Dr. King) and instead claims to put the victory in the hands of politicians or the voting majority. Quite apart from the myopic view of history this presents – after all, it is the struggle of the minority that leads to public outcry and pressure on populist politicians – this represents a re-writing of history, taking the success of the civil rights or labor movements out of the hands of the activist and the organizer and into the hands of the establishment, who at the time wielded the technical power.
Science is an interesting place to study the role of minorities. In almost all areas of science, women are still a minority (societal minorities, such as certain racial or ethic groups, are even moreso in science). Thinking for a moment about the struggle of women to gain equality in all parts of society, science finds itself no discipline apart from others (such as the corporate world). As a member of the scientific community who watches women and others rise up and struggle in the field, I have a duty and a responsibility to make sure that this field provides the opportunity and flexibility that each individual needs to achieve the success they are capable of pursuing. This duty is equally placed upon every member of the community.
However, the laying of a duty upon the heads of all members of a community is not sufficient for the achievement of success for each community member. Take a minority as an example. Recognition that they have unique needs is not guaranteed unless members of that minority rise up and speak out for what is needed to achieve equality. The majority cannot be expected, nor historically has it managed, to identify what the minority needs to achieve the equality needed to make possible their success. Be it ways to bring people out of poverty (e.g. scholarships), or flexibility in the expected hours or periods of work (e.g. flex-time), or ways to create more of the leadership positions hoarded by those at the top and protected from those below (e.g. terms limits on service), it is incumbent upon the minority to speak and the majority to join them in acting.
Equality in science, as in other areas of society, will not be achieved by the benevolence of the majority – certainly, it cannot be achieved by any tyranny of the majority. While majorities control resources and access, minorities have the ability to work actively to advocate for their needs in society. For a majority to part with the status quo requires many things to align, but none of them align without the struggle of the minority for equality.
The promise of equal rights lies not in the hands of the majority. It lies in the principles that define and govern society. For the U.S., those principles are encoded in the U.S. Constitution ultimately, and spiritually in the Declaration of Independence. Those principles are not the property of the majority – they are the property of all men and women. While the majority may control the means to achieve equality, they do not themselves control the truth that equality must be. In science, as in U.S. society, there are principles of equality whereby all people bring their talent and experience to the scientific method in the search for an ultimate and underlying truth. Science is a culture, but not one that is vastly apart from those controlled by self-evident truths. In serving science, we as scientists must also serve the men and women who support, promote, and perhaps become scientists.
If it is not majorities that give rights to minorities, but rather fundamental principles that apply in equal measure to both majorities and minorities, then it is the struggle of the minority to get their access that eventually ends the distinction between the two groups. The only role a majority seems to serve, then, is to separate a minority from their rights. It is a bad check, indeed, (and at the very least, self-serving to the majority) to think that the opposite is true.
In a lifetime, your chance of dying from heart disease is 1 in 5. Your chance of dying in a car accident is 1 in 272. Your chance of dying while walking is 1 in 623. Your chance of dying due to drowning or accidental submersion is 1 in 1073. Your chance of dying due to exposure to forces of nature is 1 in 2866. Your chance of dying from intentional assault (excluding terrorism) is 1 in 207. What is your chance of dying, over a lifetime, from an act of terrorism?
While the definition of “terrorism” is being changed everyday by modern fear culture, using the classical definition of ” . . . a random act of mass destruction perpetrated against a group of civilian targets . . . “, we can explore two different scenarios. In the year 2006, your chance of dying from a terrorist attack was < 3/298,362,973, or less than 1 in 99,454,324, at the 95% confidence level. For a person born in 2006, their life expectancy is 77.7 years. That means their integrated lifetime probability of dying in a terrorist attack is less than 1 in 7.7 billion. Why a limit? The data used here [1] came from the National Safety Council in 2006, and there were no deaths of U.S. civilians due to terrorism in 2006; therefore, one has to apply Poisson statistics and use the upper limit on the number of deaths (at 95% confidence level) in a given year. Granted, this number is unstable over time since it’s so small in a given year, but even taking a extreme year like 2001 into account (where 3000 people died in the U.S. from an attack) the integrated lifetime probability of dying would be 1 in 13 million.
A false debate has begun recently about airport security. Prompted by the failed attempt to bring down a plane on Christmas, crazies have been coming out of the woodwork calling for tighter U.S. airport security and political officials have been scrambling to say or do something to respond to those voice. But the debate is false for several reasons:
The failure of security occurred at overseas airports, which while they are required to implement U.S. security procedures for flights in-bound to the U.S. are not themselves under direct scrutiny by U.S. security agencies. Therefore, the failure of foreign agencies to screen passengers is a key failure in this event.
A wider failure to “connect the dots” on intelligence in U.S. hands contributed to this person being able to fly to the U.S. in the first place. In that sense, airport security wasn’t as direct a factor, since he could have been prevented from flying by paperwork in the first place.
The technology available to detect the bomb carried by this man exists, is already deployed, but is neither sexy nor headline-grabbing.
Instead of having a real discussion about improving intelligence assembly and action, or a real discussion about how our international partners are creating weaknesses in our security, instead we’re talking about stripping more privacy and rights (and clothing) from passengers in the name of security. But the real irony is the third item above: the technology to prevent such walk-ons exists, but is neither sexy nor controversial and thus uninteresting to the press or people at large.
What tech is this? Dogs and G.E. Air Puffer machines. Dogs have many times more smell receptors than humans, and thus can be trained to respond to even small quantities of certain classes of chemicals [2]. So why aren’t there more bomb-sniffing dogs deployed in airports? I see a growth industry here, if people would just wake up and realize that dogs could be part of the solution to personal privacy that we have been asking for.
The G.E. air sniffers blow short, sharps bursts of air over your clothing and scan for trace amounts of dangerous chemicals, indicative of bomb-making or other shenanigans. I’ve only seen a handful of these at major airports in the U.S., and NONE overseas. I don’t know if they’re effective, but in concert with dogs they must make a for a tight net. Why not spend some of that stimulus money to order more of these, and, heck, even arrange for G.E. to export the technology to foreign airports at prices that can make them a fortune? Why can’t capitalism and existing technology meet and help serve our economy while making us more secure?
Ultimately, the reason that this whole idea of full-body scanning is a joke is simple: suppository weaponry. Imagine a situation where a terrorist hides the components for a weapon up their ass. Body scanners peel away clothing but not flesh and muscle and bone. It doesn’t take much high explosive to blow a hole in a plane, and since plastic explosive can be shaped into convenient forms (that’s what makes it so useful), it’s only a matter of time before a colon bomb becomes the weapon of choice. But inserting that device ought to leave a mess of smells of chemicals on you and/or your clothes, and I’ll bet dogs or puffers can still find it.
Ben Franklin is over-quoted at times like this. I’ll paraphrase him and say that when America cannot safely combine liberty, security, and capitalism, it deserves none of them.
After years of colorful verbal expressions regarding the quality of Microsoft Windows Vista, dad is upgrading his desktop from Vista to W7. Here is a live blog of the process.
7:15 pm: Dad has already tried upgrading once. The upgrade tool sat for about 10-15 minutes, then told him he needed to remove a bunch of software and re-run the tool. It took Vista 20 minutes to remove the software. He then started the upgrade tool again. It’s been doing its thing for the last 10-15 minutes.
7:16 pm: “I’m gonna waste three or four hours and get nothing done . . . which will make me happy.”
7:20 pm: Windows upgrader wants dad to uninstall iTunes. Screw it! He doesn’t use iTunes. Here we go!
7:24 pm: Copying over 2 GB f installation files. So far, this is like a linux upgrade!
7:31 pm: gathering files and settings…
7:39 pm: “Good God – it’s only gathered 6% of the information it needs.”
7:45 pm: 17%
8:19 pm: 77%
8:35 pm: Windows had to restart the machine. We’re not sure why.
8:37 pm: Hey! It’s the Windows 7 start logo. Yay! It now says “Upgrading Windows”
8:53 pm: Still upgrading. Dad tossed his hands into the air. “You’ve been at 21% for a long time.”
8:57 pm: Moving again!
9:10 pm: Rebooted again! Could this be the last? (At least, until the endless cycle of patches and updates)
9:22 pm: W7 has been restoring settings and files ever since the reboot. Cross your fingers…
9:37 pm: All Dad wants for Christmas is to go to bed – but W7 is still upgrading, and apparently Vista tied his sleep schedule to the operating system.
10:05 pm: Setup will continue after rebooting your computer. Linux never made me reboot this much during upgrades.
10:08 pm: It rebooted, but this marks only the 68% mark for transferring files and settings.
10:25 pm: Want to go to bed SO BAD.
10:30 pm: Rebooting AGAIN.
10:32 pm: Yes! W7 is preparing the computer for the first use!
10:33 pm: Enter the product key. It’s in such small print on the disc box, we’ve busted out the magnifying glass. Hmm. Product key. That’s a funny notion! Windows is weird.
10:46 pm: Machine is still a little pokey, but W7 is up and running. G’night!
In the last two parts of this essay, I discussed my thoughts on the veil protecting private inquiry from public scrutiny and I discussed the meaning of stolen e-mails made public. In this last part, I discuss my thoughts on the handling of conflicting data.
Quotes extracted from the stolen e-mail suggested that data which should have entered into the famous “hockey stick plot” was deliberately ignored [1]. I’ve certainly commented on the hockey stick plot before [2], and I will be the first to admit that I felt somewhat concerned when I heard that conflicting data was excluded from the plot. On the other hand, the scientist in me knows that excluding data happens all the time; when you do it, you must say so and state why.
Before going further on that specific subject, let’s take a moment to think about a situation that is quite common in science. In fact, I would say that most scientists face this problem the very first time they are asked to conduct a controlled experiment for a high school or college laboratory class.
You are asked to conduct an experiment; for instance, you are asked to attach a piece of ticker-tape paper to a weight, raise the weight to the ceiling and thread the paper between two electrodes, and then drop the weight. The electrodes fire at fast, regular intervals, marking the paper every time they fire. The spacing of the marks on the paper, and knowing the time between the sparks, tells you about the acceleration of the weight. You are asked to determine the acceleration due to gravity by doing this experiment.
You find the acceleration to be LESS than 9.8 m/s^2. You do the experiment several times, to build up a sample of repetitions. This reduces the statistical uncertainty, but each measurement confirms the original result with improved uncertainty each time. You bring your conclusions to the instructor, who then asks you to simply discuss your findings and hand in your report. What do you do?
You’ve learned in class that all objects on earth fall at 9.8 m/s^2. Yet, here is an experiment that measures something much less – let’s say (7.4 +/- 0.4) m/s^2. This is significantly different from what you learned in class. What do you do? Do you throw out the result and simply say that since you were told that acceleration on earth is 9.8 m/s^2, your result must be wrong? Do you fudge the data and try to get closer to the stated value? Do you repeat the experiment with somebody else’s sparker? Do you work to study how your own sparker functions (e.g. maybe the time between sparks is NOT what the manufacturer reported)? You have limited time – the report is due by the end of lab. What do you do?
This is the same situation that all scientists face in their work. You have a deadline – a meeting, a conference, a review, a threat of a competitor scooping you. You have a result that doesn’t agree with other measurements. It could signal something new; it could signal that other results are wrong; it could be that you didn’t understand your experiment. What do you do?
This is not an easy dilemma. The overwhelming set of measurements in climate data point to global-scale change, centered on average temperature increases that are more rapid since the mid 1800s than in any previous known period. Yet, here is data that contradicts that observation. You badly want your detractors to go away. What do you do?
There are few right answers to this question, and lots of wrong ones. Of course, few of us know enough about that climate data to make an intelligent answer to the question. The safe answer would be to report the results from the raw data, record your hypotheses about why the data do what they do, and make the result public (perhaps as a pre-print, since it’s likely such an incomplete analysis won’t withstand peer review).
I’ll close with a final thought on all of this. The veil that protects the messy process of science is important for the promotion of free thought, but cannot be relied upon to hide irresponsible action from public scrutiny. The release of electronic documents is a piercing of the veil, but unethically snapshots only a part of the overall scientific process (and, from my own experience, a part of that process where people speak all too freely and easily in ways incongruent with their final decisions). Faced with inconsistent data, the scientist faces an unpleasant set of choices where the best answer brings the least glory or recognition. But, what of the data itself? Does the public have a right to the data itself?
There is no easy answer to this as well. Many collaborations own their data, while many others are required to release the data to the public after a period of closed access. Even publicly released data has already been corrected and filtered, so public data is rarely “complete” in the sense that it’s the same data that came fresh off the instrumentation. The public is ill-equipped, either by their own dis-interest in scientific methods or by the poor quality of the educational highway for science, to deal with data. Yet the demand for the raw climate data behind the “Climate-gate” e-mails is real, and must be considered. Certainly, there can be real value in making data available to other scientists, but personally I think that the data should come with strings attached.
Here are the strings: publications on the data are not official unless they are blessed by the original person or collaboration that collected the data. Therefore, journals should not accept papers that are not affiliated with the original owners. In cases where data is old enough that it outlived the experiment or the original researchers, the journals should be required to review the paper by panel and not by just a few peer referees. They need a diversity of experts in the field, not just a few people in the field to sign-off on the analysis. The data must be released with all of the filters and calibrations that have been applied clearly documented, and the data source must also be thoroughly documented. If the original instrumentation is still available, it should be made available to the analysts. This latter issue is critical so that instrumental effects can be understood; they often shape the data in unknown or unpredictable ways.
The responsible release of data is a partnership between the original researchers, the public entity using the data, and the journals reviewing the work. Without this partnership, nobody should believe what comes from the new research.
“Climate-gate” is a window not just on the scientific process, but a means by which scientists themselves can think about the way they conduct their work. The ultimate question – does this change how we think about the climate research itself – still needs to be answered. But I won’t answer it, because I am not a climate researcher. I will say that I am taking personal responsibility for my carbon emissions, because there is no reason I need to produce as much carbon as the world has made me capable of producing. I am conserving water, I am changing my eating habits, and I am using habit and technology to throttle electrical usage.
Check out this analysis of the most held-up “conspiracy” e-mails; it’s fun, and shows what you can learn by thinking deeply about these matters and going even a little bit below the surface (thanks to Randy Scalise for bringing this to my attention):
It was Christmas, and from many lands far away
The family convened to mark Christmas Day.
A year or more since the last time we had been
a family together, united as kin.
“Where is Sister?” asked Brother upon his arrival.
“She is busy at church; it’s her organ recital.
Each Christmas she plays for the holiday service.”
“Will we see her at all?” asked the Brother, quite nervous.
“Perhaps,” said his Mother, “but then, perhaps not,
for the organist bears a particular lot:
the children all singing must learn not to fidget -
tis the organist’s job to steady their digits!
the choir must wow during each carol singing;
tis the organist’s task to keep spirits ringing!
Add that to her day job stuck down at the mall -
It’s a miracle if we can see her at all.”
So we called her at work and we called her at church,
but her schedule left most of us stuck in the lurch;
we Facebooked and Twittered and tried her GMail -
But piles of carols walled her world like a jail.
‘Neath many a copy of old “Silent Night”
the organist toils by frail candle light;
her fingers, curled up as if by arthritis,
from practicing too much “What Child is This?”
When finally we raised her between pageant trials,
All she offered her family were frequent denials
of having no time for her kin this year -
“Let’s go out for dinner,” she said, “Never fear!”
But then when the phone rang as supper was nearing,
‘Twas the call from the Sister we all had been fearing:
In a statement that signaled a total reversal,
“I can’t go; I must schedule another rehearsal!”
The family then piled in the old minivan
And we rushed to the church (every stop light we ran!).
We burst through the doors of the church in a fury;
all the choir and the children looked on, filled with worry.
Sister, she calmed them, as organists do,
then turned to her family and tried to subdue.
“I promise, one practice, then dinner we’ll savor;
I ask of you just this, a small Christmas favor.”
The family then bristled and buzzed with commotion,
Each person still filled with a flood of emotion.
“Come now!” shouted Mother. “Yes, now!” shouted Father.
Brother thought he would add something, but then didn’t bother.
Sister blushed, clearly worried her response would bore us:
“I can’t; I must master the Hallelujah Chorus!”
So family left church for our fine Christmas homestead,
Our dreams filled with sugarplums, tucked in our warm beds,
While sister stayed late at the church with her choir.
They practiced until they came down to the wire;
The Christmas Eve service went off with no hitch
(Loved even by Ms. McGee, that nasty old . . .)
which meant Sister could finally pack up all her things,
discard her copies of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”,
and go home for Christmas, away from her duty,
in the hopes of scoring some sweet Christmas booty.
Alas, as she readied, she found she was pinned
To the organ, which by stacks of sheet music, rimmed,
had been walled like a cell by the choir, for fear
that she might have tried leaving before the premier
of the Christmas-time pageant, the Christmas-time cheer;
then the choir had left and forgotten to free her!
Surrounded by music, hemmed in by the carols,
The organist wailed at the cause of her peril,
She cried and she cried, no cause to be merry,
Trapped like a rat in the dark sanctuary,
When, suddenly, light o’er the the sheet music poured,
As if someone had opened the big chapel doors.
She heard the sweet voices of her own happy kin
and the smells of a Christmas goose wafting in;
With hammers and axes they broke down the wall!
A happy Christmas was then had by all -
Father and Mother and Brother . . . and Sister -
everybody said just how much they had missed her.
She was freed from the bond to direct Christmas cheer -
at least, that is, ’til this time next year.
It’s the end of 2009, and time to have a little blog fun. Here are my tech recommendations for things I’ve discovered (or re-discovered) in the last year.
Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala!): it seems that each time Ubuntu releases a new version of their Linux/GNU/open-source remix, they out-do themselves. Version 9.10 is no different. With an excellent desktop experience framing everything, and the latest in open-source available (from OpenOffice 3, to Firefox 3.5, to GNOME Shell), I cannot recommend more strongly that people give Ubuntu a shot. Take it for a test drive without installing it using their Live CD, or install it in a virtual machine.
Firefox Extensions:
Zotero: organize your scientific papers, search them, generate bibliographies, tag papers for use as sources in a new paper . . . in short, do it all with Zotero! No scientist should be without, and unlike programs like “Papers” for Mac, you can use it on something other than a Mac!
FoxTab: want a modern way to navigate your tabs? Like 3-D? You’ll love FoxTab! Key combos like CTRL+PAGE UP will now bring up a 3-D view of your tabs as thumbnails of what they currently display. You can flip through them, select the one you want, and you’re done. And don’t tell me that “Safari has had this forever,” because what matters is that now all of us can have this kind of nifty feature.
Total ReChrome and Chromifox Basic: like the Chrome browser but hate how it works? Like Firefox but wish it looked more like Chrome? You can be happy now. Combining the Chromifox Basic theme with the Total ReChrome addon will bring Chromey bliss to Firefox.
TiddlyWiki and jsMath and the jsMath Plugin: I’ve commented on this in my professional blog, but if you’re a scientist who wants a wiki experience without the need for a remote server, and who wants LaTeX in that wiki without all the headache, combining these three technologies is the way to go. TiddlyWiki gives you a go-anywhere wiki experience, jsMath gives you the javascript engine for rendering LaTeX, and the jsMath Plugin for TiddlyWiki gives you the path between them.
GNOME Do: here’s one for you Linux folks out there. GNOME Do is your command-line in the desktop, and so much more. A single keystroke brings up the GNOME Do window, and a few letters in the name of an application and a quick smack of the ENTER key will launch your desired program. With dozens of plugins, it can do so much more. GNOME Do is my cure for the menu/submenu/subsubmenu nightmare.
There is more to discuss about “Climate-gate.” There is the release of e-mails from the scientists. There are the choices scientists make when faced with data. While no doubt it relieves many climate science detractors that the veil was lifted on climate research, they also should stop to wonder what the release of e-mails means. First off, the mails were not released by the scientists; they were deliberately stolen and put on the Internet. If science is about the integrity of process, then disclosure should also be about process and this specific disclosure should make the hair stand on the back of your neck. While researchers at institutions often give up to the institution their ownership of electronic communications and logbooks, the release of those communications belongs to the institution. It was not the institution that released the mail, but rather some third party intending to do harm to the reputations of the scientists.
The illegal release of material on the Internet requires two critical questions to be asked: should a person be judged on their personal communications which they expected to be private, and what WASN’T in the e-mails?
Let’s tackle the first question. Should a person be judged by things they expected to be private? This is a difficult question; we all have a mask we wear, a public face that hides the seething private underbelly of our natures. How many ill thoughts bubble to the surface in a day, only to be suppressed by the moral actor we know we must be in public? These e-mails are a window into the dark thoughts of scientists. How do you cope with detractors? How do you handle data with which you don’t agree, worry might be flawed, or don’t understand at all? How do you deal with the pressure, not just from your peers or your boss, but from the inconsistent data? Behind the veil, we can deal with these painful issues, distill the results, and then produce the public face of the work for review and presentation.
The second question bears on the first. What isn’t in these mails? The release of documents is usually not a totality; we can’t assume these e-mails represent the whole scientific process. Yes, it seems clear from things in them that the scientists wrestled with the meaning of conflicting data and chose to ignore some of that data. They bad-mouthed their competitors and climate-change deniers. What we don’t know is how final decisions were really made. We don’t know whether there was some face-to-face or phone meeting that went unrecorded, unreflected in the e-mails, where a reasonable approach was distilled from the initial shock at the conflicting data. We don’t know how the journal review of their work proceeded. We may rush to conclusions about the people involved, but cooler heads do prevail and we cannot disregard the whole process because we do not agree with a part of it.
As an example of this, I have over the years seen back-and-forth flame wars in collaboration forums which paint the participants as petty, mean, or ill-intentioned. Yet, in private conversations those same people, who find it so easy to mis-behave in an electronic format, I find them to be reasonable people, aware of the poor quality of their electronic persona, who take reasonable steps to mend the divide and produce a high-quality result. Does their action in the electronic forum cast doubt on their methods? Yes. But, they are not the only persons who make the decision and their work is extensively reviewed. Their behavior in the forum is not the totality of the science, and in the end is only a small blemish on an otherwise fine portfolio of research.
Does this mean the scientists in “Climate-gate” are actually good scientists whose electronic communications belies the depth of their commitment to the truth? I don’t know, and I won’t speak for them. I do know that science is self-correcting and diverse, and climate science is no different from any other line of research. Of course, there is one issue left that bears on the final impact of their choices on the verity of the climate research: what do you do when faced with conflicting data?
In the final part of this essay, I’ll discuss my thoughts on the handling of contradicting data.
Our job is both hard and simple. The benefits of physics are everywhere; we need only point them out. Be careful when pointing to future benefits from the investment in the field, but do not shy from saying that basic research in the physical sciences is predictably unpredictable – that “black swans” rise from the field every decade or so, many of them improving our health, our economy, and our philosophy.
