The Joy of Stats and the Visigasm

If you have never seen one of Hans Rosling's talks or videos then you need to. He is an example of how you can make the presentation of data both interesting and also clear and simple. Along with Edward Tufte he has made data visualisation an art form. The BBC have recently made a documentary about him and there is also a  Wired article about the Data Visgasm.

Peer Review Again: NASA arsenic based life and the bloggers

A critique of the Science paper by NASA investigators saying that they have discovered a new form of life that does not use phosphorous in the DNA nucleotides has been published on a Blog by a researcher in the field. The response from NASA is to put their fingers in their ears and to say they are not listening because it is not criticism from a peer reviewed journal. This is exactly the same as the authors of "The Spirit Level" who also refused to respond to criticism that was not in peer reviewed journals.

Here is a wired article discussing the NASA response and comparing it to the arguments made by the Church in pre-enlightenment times. I especially like the title - The Wrong Stuff.

The Guardian has an interesting story tracker following events

Conspiracy and Coincidence

How common is the surname Aylward?

It does not seem too common to me. I cannot remember meeting anyone who has the surname but that might reflect regional variations in surnames. My own surname is not very common outside of its ancestral home in Leicestershire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

So what are the chances of the surname being involved in two major news events on the same day?

Two BBC news headlines for the 25th of October involved Aylwards.

Violetta Aylward was a nurse who accidentally switched off the life support systems of a tetraplegic man in her care leaving him with brain damage.
Rebecca Aylward was found murdered in woodland after she had been attacked by two teenage boys.

What are the chances of that happening? It did happen and there is obviously no connection but chance patterns arise all around us, and it is difficult to escape trying to read too much into them.

Dirty Tricks against Lisa Murkowski

When Lisa Murkowski narrowly lost the primary for the Republican nomination to run  for senate in Alaska to Joe Millar a Tea Party supported candidate, she decided to run a "write-in" campaign. The last time this had been successful was Strom Thurmond in 1954, and Murkowski does not have the easiest name to spell. This campaign also did not have the support of the Alaskan Republican party or the national level party who both strongly opposed the move.

Internet presence is an important part of a campaign which is going to have negative media coverage and which does not have the big money support of one of the parties or their allied groups, although her campaign still aired commercials. Accidentally I typed Linda and not Lisa Murkowski into Google trying to find her campaign, and almost all the hits pointed to the headline "Linda Murkowski: Screw you, AK Republican voters, this seat is mine". This was on five or six bulletin boards as posts mostly posted on the 19th of September, one is a disgruntled Tea Party member but more than one is a campaign. So this caught my interest and I thought I might look further.

The first place for an attack is on a candidate's wikipedia entry, as this is where many people will look for background. On the day she announced the write-in campaign her page had been vandalised by an anonymous user from 108.122.217.233. This is a Washington DC address, so I hope it wasn't a sloppy congressional staffer. Murkowski's entry was then amended to include her having failed the bar examinations four times. This was inserted by InaMaka on the 4th of October along with a citation to the Tea Party who had exposed this fact. He had been active on her page since the 20th September. After repeated warnings about bias in his submissions especially in the run-up to an election InaMaka was blocked for a week.

Feynman on Magnetism

Here is a video of Richard Feynman talking about magnetism.

Now the reason this is more interesting is the debate on Sean Carroll's Blog about whether you think Feynman is being arrogant of being honest. Now his view is similar to that from Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in their books The Collapse of Chaos and the Science of Discworld where they talk about "lies to children".

However, the question is older than this, and is really the same on that Plato was talking about with the cave allegory in The Republic. When we give explanations do we ever give complete and definitive explanations or are they all transitory - explanations for now that will be replaced by better explanations in the future. Does knowledge depend on context?

For me Feynman was forgetting that scientists always have a duty to explain and to educate and to not assume that the level of thought of the person you are answering is far below your own. This may be the case sometimes but I prefer to find that people can manage more complex explanations than you would expect. If you get to see the Horrible Science Theatre Show then there they emphasize the problem of scientists avoiding giving explanations. In this case Feynman also cheated by making it a "why" question when it did not start out as one, but his final explanation is very good.

Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics

The five great problems in theoretical physics

1. Combining Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in a background independent way as relativity requires a space time (background) that evolves. There is also the problems of determinism,different observational perspectives and continuity of space and time.
   
2. Resolve the foundational problems of quantum mechanics that deal with the problems of realism and determinism to avoid the problem of observers.
3. Determine whether the particles and forces can be united in a single theory. This means combining bosons with fermions with the introduction of a limited number of tuning constants.
4. Explain how the free constants of the standard model occur - why do they take their particular values?
5. Deal with the problems of dark matter and dark energy - the apparent contradictions of general relativity at the galactic scale with respect to acceleration and the need for a positive cosmological constant for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
   

Dissecting a Politician

The unlucky focus of my dissection is Nigel Lawson who was actually the MP for the constituency where I grew up. The book I wanted to take some quotes from is "An appeal to reason: A cool look at global warming".

Even before the main text starts he uses some political tricks. This is from the Foreword:

"... this book, despite being promoted by an outstanding literary agent, was rejected by every British publisher to whom it was submitted - and there were a considerable number of them.

As one rejection put it: 'My fear, with this cogently argued book, is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide marker'. The prevailing orthodoxy can be both stifling and intolerant. Those that have the temerity to question it have to become accustomed to being labelled 'deniers' - a loaded term ..." 

Now this is already loading the book for the reader. There is no sense of objectivity and reason here. This is saying here is my reasoned argument that has been rejected by closed minded orthodoxy and I am right and they are wrong. The prevailing orthodoxy might actually be correct and so it might be the right thing not to publish something that is wrong.

Next in the Introduction:

"By way of preamble, I readily admit that I am not a scientist. But then neither are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter with far greater certainty than I shall do here. Moreover (and this is frequently overlooked) the great majority of those scientists who speak with such certainty and apparent authority about global warming and climate change, are not in fact climate scientists, or indeed earth scientists, of any kind and thus have no special knowledge to contribute."

So, he is ignorant but that is alright because everyone else is ignorant as well. So his voice should count equally to all the others. Actually there are various levels of ignorance. If you are stuck in an isolated valley on a camping trip with a party of friends and you break a leg. None of the party are doctors, but who would you rather have treat you, your friend the vet or your friend the accountant? I might not be a climate scientist but as a scientist I know how to weigh up data and make scientific arguments and I know what limitations there are in the data. This is a use of an appeal to authority and underneath it all his authority is that he is a famous politician who now sits in the House of Lords where they debated these issues. I remember Lord Ackner giving a similar argument about his authority as head of the bar and why it should not be questioned. Authority should always be questioned.

Next in chapter one is the absolute howler:

"Nor, incidentally, does the fact that a scientific hypothesis has been published in a 'peer reviewed' learned journal provide ipso facto any evidence either that the science is 'settled', or that the hypothesis in question is likely to be proved correct. It does not even mean that the author's data and methods are available for scrutiny, or that his results are reproducible, as scientific journals, in contrast to most leading economic journals, do not require this."

That is wrong in so many ways. Firstly they do require the data and methods to be available for scrutiny. Most of the references cited come from Science and Nature which are both poor at making the methods and data available in the articles as they are in the accompanying web material as they have strict limits on article size. Real scientific journals should contain all the details. Here he is using an ad hominem argument against all science. He also cites Popper and how theories need to be refutable, but here he talks about proving a hypothesis. According to Popper you can NEVER prove a hypothesis, knowledge is always contingent.

I hate peer review as well and as he later points out it can lead to conventional wisdom dominating and a lack of  risk taking,  but if done well by open minded reviewers who take it that they might be wrong it does strenghten papers by improving the arguments. This is so long as it is not used as a political tool as it so often is. Economics is actually critiqued by Popper in the Poverty of Historicism where he says we cannot predict the future and so it is doomed to fail, as it is based purely on induction. What we observe now might not be what happens in the future.