tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33756846023710611392024-03-05T09:41:52.061-08:00Nathan Explains ScienceScience news and commentary from an actual scientist.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-72393838324458548102014-01-25T11:54:00.002-08:002014-01-25T12:09:24.205-08:00Could dark energy just be discrete space-time? <div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If there’s anything in the cosmos more mysterious than dark matter, it’s probably dark energy. It makes up more than two-thirds the energy in the universe and encourages the universe’s accelerating expansion. Yet no one has the slightest clue what it is. Some undiscovered particle? A cosmological constant? Or perhaps dark energy emerges as a sign that space and time aren’t what they seem.</span></div>
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Every graduate student who studies particle theory suspects at one time or another that space-time might be discrete. There's a surprising reason behind that: the sums at the heart of quantum field theory are hopelessly, woefully infinite, primarily because the theory misbehaves at very short distances — ironically, this is exactly the reason it's so hard to figure out a quantum theory of gravity. If we just made it so there was a smallest possible distance, a tiniest possible step you could take, that problem would evaporate. But theorists figured out another way to deal with most of the infinities — one that does a remarkable job of explaining how particles behave — and anyway, how do you define a tiniest step? What should it look like?<br />
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Well, it should look like a pyramid. Space and time really might not be what they seem.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That view, recently proposed in the journal <i>PLOS One</i>, stems<i> </i>from a controversial idea called dynamical triangulation. First proposed as a theory of quantum gravity, DT holds that minute tetrahedrons—triangle-bottomed pyramids—are the fundamental units of space and time. Viewed from a distance, these units disappear into the smooth, continuous world of everyday life. Up close, churning stacks of tetrahedrons bend left, right, front, and back—and that’s where dark energy might lie. Calculations suggest that energy stored in the bends is distributed almost uniformly, just as observations suggest dark energy should be. And while the model’s predictions for dark energy’s density are rough at best, they manage to come within a factor of ten of the measured value, something quantum field theory ignominiously fails to do—it misses the mark by a factor of 10^107, or 1 followed by 107 zeros.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-78083037186158093012014-01-16T11:44:00.001-08:002014-01-16T11:46:25.968-08:00An economist walks into a bar...<i>First, HOLY COW IT'S BEEN A WHILE. Well, that's what having a baby will do to you, I suppose. That, and Twitter. I'm still recovering, but in the meantime, I'll be posting some short stuff I wrote that didn't, for whatever reason, end up in print. Some of it is...old. But still fun! Enjoy.<br />
<br />Cheers,</i><br />
<i>Nathan E. Science</i><br />
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Liquor is big business in the U.S., and with drunk drivers involved in about 40 percent of traffic fatalities, it’s also a serious public health threat. Acting on the assumption that drinking leads to increasingly risky decisions, many states prohibit happy hours or serving alcohol to clearly intoxicated people. But is the “more liquor, worse choices” axiom correct?
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To find out, a team of economists armed with a breathalyzer and a laptop headed to a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. Once there, they asked 317 men and women of varying inebriation to make different bar-oriented decisions—between different combinations of sliders and dumplings, or between different cash lotteries—all the while looking for subtle inconsistencies in their subjects’ choices. Remarkably, even stumbling-drunk participants made sensible choices. The main exception: as they drank more, women became slightly more comfortable taking risks when choosing between lotteries.
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If confirmed by further experiments, the results suggest that efforts to curb drunk driving or other negative consequences of drinking should focus on making better decisions while drinking rather than on discouraging drinking in the first place. The paper appeared last June in the <i>Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.
</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-39667624090211155512013-10-18T14:38:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:38:25.633-07:00People Are Ignorant. Big Deal, Right? Well, Yeah.We've been on the theme of political ignorance for nearly a month now, and so far we've concluded that people are generally pretty ignorant, but we don't yet understand whether this is such a bad thing. Recall from <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-are-ignorant-big-dealright.html">last time</a> there were three arguments about whether political ignorance matters.<br />
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1) People don't need to know all the details as long as they know enough to figure out what's best for them.<br />
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2) People don't need to know very much as long as the voting public as a whole gets the answer right.<br />
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3) On the other hand, it's not about whether people can get by or whether groups get things right—it's about making sure everyone's voice is heard, and those with more knowledge have an easier time getting their voices heard.<br />
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We looked last time at the first argument and concluded there might be something to it, but maybe only when voters know what they want and who shares those wants. Then, they can infer what choices to make based on who endorses a policy proposal. This could work—in fact, did work in at least one case—in things like voter referenda, but might not work so well when choosing between political candidates.<br />
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Today, I'll look at the second argument. Then I will tear in to it until it runs screaming and bloody back from whence it came.<br />
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<b>Maybe groups get it right, but probably not, or: How applying basic statistics seems clever but can go horribly wrong</b><br />
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One hope is that even though people don't know much by themselves, as a group they do. You may have heard of this idea under the title "the wisdom of crowds," and in some cases it might work. In politics, the idea is that no individual voter has a very good idea which candidate is best, but by voting, people can contribute their (largely inaccurate) information to a greater whole, and that greater whole might be accurate. We're going to see how the argument can go wrong, but first let's go through it in more detail.<br />
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Underlying this version of the wisdom-of-crowds argument is something called the central limit theorem, one of the most important results in statistics. It's an idea best conveyed by an example. Suppose you're part of a Science Bowl team tasked with estimating the size of a watermelon. If any one member of your team estimates the size, that estimate will surely be off by a little bit. But let's say that everyone writes down an estimate, and then you, as team captain, read them and average them together. Everyone's estimate will be off, but some people will overestimate and others will underestimate. As long as there aren't any systematic biases in the way people estimate, these over- and underestimates balance each other out, so the average will be likely be pretty accurate. Not only that, the team as a whole will be much more certain because everyone has contributed their estimates. Think of it this way. If one or two people say the watermelon is about six feet around, you might not be so confident, but if eight people say it's about six feet around, you'll start to be pretty confident of the watermelon's size.<br />
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In politics, the wisdom of crowds idea is that people might have what's called private information about candidates, that is, their own personal estimates of the relative quality of two candidates. By voting, they are saying, "I think candidate X is the better quality candidate," and by summing up everyone's votes, the group as a whole can get a good idea of who the best candidate actually is.<br />
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Unfortunately, the central limit theorem/wisdom of crowds argument makes two implicit assumptions that work in the watermelon example (as I've described it) but are dubious at best in politics. <br />
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The first is the assumption that the voting public all want the same thing, that is, that they all want to find the highest quality candidate. In reality, not everyone wants the same things. Some people want more environmental regulation. Some people want to build big houses on little mountains overlooking Malibu. Everyone surely wants to figure out the best candidate, but by "best" they can mean different things.<br />
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Maybe we could get around this "politics is not watermelon-size estimation" problem, but even then we would have a more pernicious problem, namely that our beliefs about watermelons and politicians depend on others' beliefs. If that's the case, the central limit theorem argument no longer applies because aggregating everyone's beliefs won't do anything to cancel out the mistakes that individuals make.<br />
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Here's an example, called an information cascade, of how interdependent beliefs mess things up. Let's say you're wandering around 9th and Irving in San Francisco patiently looking for somewhere good to eat. You notice Pasquale's Pizzeria, some sushi joint, and Crepe Vine, but then you notice the crowd outside Park Chow. Reasonably assuming that other people also want somewhere good to eat, you infer that Park Chow must have some tasty bites, so you hop in line and prepare to eat the best spaghetti and meatballs in the universe. (Okay, I'm biased, but they are good.)<br />
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Here's the fun fact: <i>each person in the line might be there for the same reason as you.</i> Why? Let's say everybody was just looking for a good place to eat, but nobody knew where to go. One guy picks Park Chow. Then, some other person comes along, figures that first guy knows something she doesn't, and heads to Park Chow (she'll take the Smiling Noodles, please). Pretty soon the whole of the Inner Sunset is waiting on a strangely narrow sidewalk near Golden Gate Park waiting to eat.<br />
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What's the point of all this? The point is, let's say your "friend" tells you that Obama is a socialist. You figure he's not dumb and knows something you don't, so you believe him. Pretty soon, the idea becomes sort of popular, and other people start thinking a million people can't be wrong. Guess what. They are. An information cascades is only one kind of interdependent-beliefs problem, but it's a nasty one.<br />
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A related issue is anchoring, where people's estimates can depend on not just other people's estimates, but also completely random numbers. For example, some decades ago, psychologists showed they could affect estimates of US spending on the United Nations <i>with a Roulette wheel</i>. Some time I'll say more about this one.<br />
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To sum up, the wisdom of crowds idea is an appealing one, and it might work for some things, but it depends on a number of assumptions that probably don't hold up, at least in politics. First, people aren't trying to figure out how to get what's best—they don't even agree on what "best" means. Second, their beliefs depend on each others', so rather than actually aggregating a bunch of independent pieces of information, they might just be going off what the first guy says. Third, their beliefs are easily swayed by random, irrelevant information. It all ends up to a strong argument against crowds being in any sense wise.<br />
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More next time. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-75366437497227600832013-10-18T10:16:00.000-07:002013-10-18T12:36:04.788-07:00Science, Reporters, Teaching, and More Coffee: Part II<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 19px;">Every year, or most every year at least, I head off to Eastern Washington University to teach and counsel at Satori, a summer camp for kids who like to learn stuff—and learn them we instructors do. But in between learnings, there’s a lot of time for conversation and a lot of time for a lot of coffee. Seeing as I’m a reporter now, I have an excuse to talk to anyone about anything, so I asked Thomas Hammer barista-manager Abby* whether she’d talk with me about science. She cheerfully obliged, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 19px;">though she also had to work. When she was off doing that, Satori director and Spokane school teacher Mike Cantlon filled in, making for an interesting back-and-forth that ranged from—well, this to that and a number of places in between.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 19px;">This is part two of two, wherein we talk about beauty and the importance of how reporters and professors talk about science. Read the first part <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/2013/09/science-reporters-teaching-and-more.html">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>*History, or more precisely my phone’s audio recording application, does not record her last name.</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Nathan Explains Science: Mike, did you ever have beliefs that were sort of challenged by something that you saw in science and then had to think about where you came down on an issue?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mike Cantlon: Yeah, I think that I was raised in a very religious family. Yet I don’t remember people saying that evolution doesn’t exist. As an example, evolution, because that seems to be the most </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">controversial issue when it comes down to religion versus science. I don’t remember ever having the conflict in conversation, but I remember believing just avidly in evolution, because that was the only thing that made sense to me. Then as I started working in biology and started getting into single cells and watching and taking a look at what happened, I thought, how can evolution exist? I mean, evolution exists, but how did all this start? Why does all this decide to get together and do what it does? What’s the coordinating principle behind all of that? So then you start having doubts. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But here’s the way I respond my students who ask me if I believe in evolution or not. My response is that, yes, I believe in evolution, but I kind of reject the creation versus evolution idea, and the reason is it could be something much more beautiful than all of that. I have no idea what that would be, but I think that at some point we will gain more knowledge, scientific knowledge, and we will discover something magnificent that we didn’t know before. I don’t know. That’s just my thought.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Why I is it significant to you that there be—the word you used was beautiful. Why is that significant to you?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Because no matter what happens I can’t quit being a philosopher. As a philosopher I personally can’t accept absolute truth. To say definitively, “this is the way it is”, is extremely difficult for me. I see things as parts of things and I see things – so for example evolution. If the scientific community decided that evolution is this way, all laid out nicely, I keep thinking, okay, it would be one thing to say that and take a look at the fossil evidence and all that stuff, but okay, fine. Is that a truth? I don’t think so. Not yet. There’s too much more involved with evolution than that simple idea. I think of it as a very much more complex thing, and I think that it’s—in that sense that means to me beauty.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>I know a lot of scientists for whom there is a notion of beauty that’s within the science itself. Do you need more than the beauty that’s inherent in the science?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The problem is, physics for example, you could take a look at the inherent beauty in the physics. But then you also realize that physics is so interconnected to so many other things that to isolate physics in and of itself, to be an isolated entity, to me it’s not as simple as that, because it reaches out into everything else we do. So physics is a part of biology, physics is part of all that stuff, and so that’s where I think beauty is – the complexity.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Let’s look at an issue that’s been pretty much at the forefront in the last several months with the elections and Supreme Court decisions, and that’s the questions about gay marriage. Does the scientific aspect of that debate trump at all any moral questions that people have about homosexuality?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think science has a huge impact on belief systems and therefore morality. The Lawrence Kohlberg idea is that levels of morality have very little to do with thinking in terms of science versus religion. Morality is the degree to which you believe that all people have the same rights. No person should be isolated from that. And therefore if we have a Constitution set up the way it is, then every human in this country, perhaps the world—if we believe it be a moral document of some sort, I don’t think that you can argue against homosexuality. It just doesn’t work. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Now let’s see if we can get Abigail back into this. Has there ever been a time when somebody figured something out about biology or geophysics or something where a belief you had came into conflict with that, and you had to think about whether your belief was really correct?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Abby the Barista: Yes. Both sides. I’ve had both experiences where it’s challenged, and where it’s been more readily affirmed in me. I had a professor—he was a psychology professor I believe—and he was supposed to be doing psychology 101, just basic theory, but he used it as a platform to push on all of us about how awful our country is and about how awful all of our politicians are. He kind of used science to try to justify that a little bit, because based on science this and this and this. And it’s not that what he was saying was wrong, but his pushiness made me look at him like, you’re kind of pushing what you’re believing. And because I’m a communications major, half of what you’re saying can be how you say it. So if you push it on me...</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Did you think that he was trying to find little pieces of science to justify opinions he already had?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes. He’d pull pieces. He wasn’t basing his argument solely on science, but he’d pull pieces from science and make it seem like he was more legitimate.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>It sounds like that actually made you think that his argument was less legitimate.</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes. I’m sure that some of the facts, if you looked them up ,were true, but they weren’t anchoring his argument by any means. So it made us discredit the science little bit. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>You said there was another experience where something you learned did actually change your view.</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had women and gender studies, and I grew up in a super conservative household. This professor was awesome because she was subtle in how she taught. She would show us facts and theories. We learned all about transgender, transsexual, and about all that kind of stuff. And I just didn’t know about it. I didn’t know the science behind it. But it was just something that was just different about a person, something they were actually born with, and so learning changed my view about all that stuff. Kind of eye-opening, I think, in a positive way.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>So it was really about the communication aspect of it?</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Totally. And I think that’s maybe just how I was raised. My parents are super calm. I don’t respond to yelling or pushing or shoving very well. I don’t care what you’re selling, I’m not going to buy no matter how legitimate you are. And the professor that taught women and gender, she was great. She didn’t want us to think how she thought. She put out the facts, versus the other professor who is kind of like, “Oh, you don’t believe like I do? Well then you’re wrong.”</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-57939629975625106692013-09-02T11:47:00.000-07:002013-10-18T12:36:43.968-07:00Science, Reporters, Teaching, And More Coffee: Part I<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every year, or most every year at least, I head off to Eastern Washington University to teach and counsel at Satori, a summer camp for kids who like to learn stuff—and learn them we instructors do. But in between learnings, there’s a lot of time for conversation and a lot of time for a lot of coffee. Seeing as I’m a reporter now, I have an excuse to talk to anyone about anything, so I asked Thomas Hammer barista-manager Abby* whether she’d talk with me about science. She cheerfully obliged, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">though she also had to work. When she was off doing that, Satori director and Spokane school teacher Mike Cantlon filled in, making for an interesting back-and-forth of sorts that ranged from—well, this to that and a number of places in between.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is part one of two. Next time, more on religion, beauty, and communication. Enjoy!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>*History, or more precisely my phone’s audio recording application, does not record her last name.</i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Nathan Explains Science: Tell me a little about yourself.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Abby: I was born and raised in Spokane, went to school here at Eastern [Washington University]. Grew up all my life in the same house. Got a degree in communication.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>And what do you do now?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I am the manager of the Thomas Hammer here at Eastern and I’m also a barista. I do all the manager paperwork.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>What comes to mind when you think about science?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Honestly, I think of the word “fancy”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>You think of “fancy”?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think of fancy. Because it’s something that’s not in common use in my everyday life. So if I do have to use it or be around it, it’s one of those things like, “Ooo that’s really cool and different”. My dad is a stockbroker, my mom’s an opera singer, so I never was super exposed. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Do you trust scientists? If you read something in the newspaper, “Scientists say X..”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I believe that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Is there any circumstance when you wouldn’t believe it?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tom Cruise. Scientology. Is that considered your idea of science?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>No, that’s something else. Yeah. [Everyone laughs.] Climate change. What do you think of that?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yeah. I guess so.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>That sounded a little bit—maybe not.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, I think sometimes, especially in college you have these generic classes. You have this professor that teaches we’re going to be living on an iceberg in five years. I’m out of college and that was five years ago, and I’m looking around. There’s no iceberg yet, so I think that the lack of trust or belief—I think things change a whole lot and it’s updated. Scientists don’t ever believe they’re totally right, and I wouldn’t trust them at that time, but I think things also change daily sometimes. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>You’re not sure that what gets reported is necessarily correct? Or is it that you think that the science itself is changing quickly enough that you don’t really know what to –</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reports. I think the problem lies more with the journalist side of it. Because the stories of journalists, you know what I mean, that are crooked or are supporting one side, like a political side or like corporate side, so they report the story to convey that side. But that doesn’t always happen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>So let me take a different tack here. Is there a particular science or a particular topic that interests you more than another?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The technology part of science. I’m part of a company [that does] home automation and home installation for smart homes. I think it’s an aspect of it for our architect and our designer, that they have to think of the field of the room and how it will change with the climate. So that part interests me. And I like to run a lot so I get to think of the science for my body.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>So in that sense do you think now that we say that, is it more a part of your daily life then maybe you would’ve said initially?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actually yeah probably. A lot more than I actually thought originally.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[At this point Mike Cantlon sits down.]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Mike, when you think about science, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind? </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The very first thing is teaching. That’s the first thing I love—teaching science. Being in a classroom and sharing science with people to me is a wonderful experience. The second thing about science is the controversy over science. It seems to me there’s a whole faction of people that thinks science gets in the way of real information or something. I don’t know what I mean by that exactly except I do know that there’s a whole group of people who think that science will interfere with their belief systems and they don’t want that, so they reject science as a result of the conflict with their belief system.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>So you’re thinking about religious belief systems?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Correct. That’s the second thing that comes to my mind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Abigail, were you raised with any particular religious or political belief system?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was raised Episcopalian.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Did an understanding of science ever come into conflict with something that you believed?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sure, like the age-old—evolution versus not, definitely it’s come up. Maybe not from church, more from just talking about it with friends from classes. Definitely that came up, for sure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Do you believe in evolution?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m actually very back-and-forth about that. I’m not sure if I do. I’m not going to be that person that says, “no I do not”, or, “I definitely do”. I think that I’m 23 years old and I haven’t experienced enough in my life to really pick my side. So I don’t know.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Mike, did you ever have beliefs that were sort of challenged by something that you saw in science and then had to think about where you came down on an issue?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yeah, I think that I was raised in a very religious family. Yet I don’t remember people saying that evolution doesn’t exist. As an example, evolution, because that seems to be the most controversial issue when it comes down to religion versus science. I don’t remember ever having the conflict in conversation, but I remember believing just avidly in evolution, because that was the only thing that made sense to me. Then as I started working in biology and started getting into single cells and watching and taking a look at what happened, I thought, how can evolution exist? I mean, evolution exists, but how did all this start? Why does all this decide to get together and do what it does? What’s the coordinating principle behind all of that? So then you start having doubts. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But here’s the way I respond my students who ask me if I believe in evolution or not. My response is that, yes, I believe in evolution, but I kind of reject the creation versus evolution idea, and the reason is it could be something much more beautiful than all of that. I have no idea what that would be, but I think that at some point we will gain more knowledge, scientific knowledge, and we will discover something magnificent that we didn’t know before. I don’t know. That’s just my thought.</span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0Eastern Washington University47.490821 -117.5779790000000347.4800915 -117.59814900000002 47.501550499999993 -117.55780900000003tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-75123939384952645782013-06-08T11:16:00.000-07:002013-06-08T11:16:02.654-07:00In case you missed it...A few, short, cool stories I did for ScienceNOW. Check them out. Comment and ask me questions in the comments!<br />
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<a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/video-when-predators-attack.html?ref=hp">When Predators Attack!</a><br />
Watch out!<br />
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<a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/scienceshot-towards-shatter-proo.html?ref=hp">Toward Shatterproof Glass</a><br />
Possibly helpful when dealing with predators.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-17987080769540104292013-06-06T16:28:00.001-07:002013-10-18T12:37:08.727-07:00How to cloak a Fisher space pen...or a satelliteThere's an apocryphal story that, faced with the fact that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity, NASA paid a lot of money to develop the Fisher space pen. Meanwhile, the Russians used pencils.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>That story isn't really true, but I thought of it today when flipping through Technology Review's <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/the-physics-arxiv-blog/">Physics arXiv blog</a> and saw a clever paper on cloaking devices by a Rochester physics professor and his son, who's apparently still in middle school.<br />
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Cloaking experiments pop up every few years, and everyone gets really excited because, let's face it, it's pretty awesome to put on an invisibility tee shirt. But cloaking devices have problems. Some of them work only on a narrow range of light frequencies, and others can't hide anything of appreciable size, like, say, a person.<br />
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Enter the Howells, John and Benjamin. Where every other research team went high tech, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0863">they went decidedly low tech</a> and used tools magicians have known about for approximately forever. Using tanks of water, Fresnel lenses, and mirrors — no smoke, though — along with some clamps and scraps of wood, they successfully cloaked toy helicopters, chairs, and other things they found laying around.<br />
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Despite the fun and games, the "why didn't I think of that?" solution might actually have some practical value. Because it's easy to build big mirrors, such devices could be used to disguise satellites or maybe buildings, just as long the magicians can distract you from what they're really doing.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-23801733176634603022013-05-24T12:08:00.003-07:002013-10-18T14:17:25.747-07:00"A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom" at ScienceNOWMy first story for ScienceNOW in quite a long time, and it's a fun one. Scientists at FOM Institute AMOLF took a picture of the quantum wave function of electrons as they emerged from hydrogen atoms.<br />
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Wave function? AMOLF? Google the latter. As for the former, the wave function is the fundamental piece of quantum weirdness, something that physicists have tried to wrap their heads around for eighty or ninety years — and failed. For more, <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/a-snapshot-of-the-inside-of-an-a.html?ref=hp">read the story</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-73710845390775403902013-05-22T09:09:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:18:35.370-07:00Seeing the Forest for the Splotchy Green BlobLesson for today: statistics is hard. Specifically, it's hard to sort out real patterns from random noise, especially when you don't have a lot of data. Nonetheless, people sure do their darndest.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>A little bit randomly — I followed a link from Facebook, then another mentioned on a Web site — I found this: <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/03/cancer_cluster_in_toms_river_new_jersey_the_link_to_a_superfund_site_is.single.html">Cancer Cluster or Chance?</a> by George Johnson, a New York Times writer who's been working on a book on cancer for a couple years now. His story in Slate explains something called the Texas Sharpshooter Effect.<br />
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I'll leave the colorful details to others, but basically what this effect means is that it's very easy to take a slight uptick in the rate of cancer over time or an area with a slightly higher incidence of cancer and infer that <i>something must have caused that</i>. Referring to stories like <i>A Civil Action </i>or <i>Erin Brockovich, </i>Johnson writes, "the bigger story was how human grief can drive the brain to see cause and effect whether or not it's really there."<br />
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The key is "whether or not it's really there." Now, seriously, I'm not taking a stand on whether or not chromium 6 from a PG&E plant in Hinkley, Calif., led to 196 cancers and made Erin Brockovich famous. I'm not an epidemiologist or a cancer specialist or a lawyer for that matter.<br />
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But I do know a thing or two about how the brain works, and the thing that <i>isn't</i> key is "grief." It takes very little — actually, nothing at all — for people to find patterns in noise. This manifests itself in all kinds of ways: the belief in <a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/giants/2013/05/17/tulowitzki-angers-bumgarner-in-crazy-sf-giants-loss/">streaks in sports</a>, the gambler's fallacy, i.e., <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/">the belief that after enough tails, heads becomes more likely</a>, and this <a href="http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/284831">particularly entertaining paper</a>. Well, I haven't read the paper, but the title's entertaining.<br />
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Again, this doesn't mean that there's no such thing as cancer clusters or maybe even ESP. What it means is that very often we just can't tell, and we have to be awfully careful to avoid seeing the forest for the possibly-non-existent trees.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-77316812295982788882013-02-23T12:04:00.001-08:002013-10-18T14:23:16.124-07:00Coffee Science with Four Barrel's Alex PowarWe're talking chemistry. Sort of.
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Chlorogenic acid, for instance, esterizes into quinic and caffeic acid. Quinic acid...so that produces a lot of bitterness. That's why you never want to reheat coffee. It catalyzes that reaction."</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alex Powar is talking chemistry — the chemistry of coffee. We're sipping espresso in Caledonia Alley, right behind San Francisco's Four Barrel Coffee, where Powar works as director of research and education. Originally a pre-med student back east, he encountered the coffee world through a training program while working in a Palo Alto restaurant. He now trains baristas and the public on how to make the best coffee possible.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Full disclosure: I'm a regular, and I'm really enjoying the espresso.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Nathan Explains Science:</i> <i>One of things I'm really interested in is what do people who aren't professionally scientists think about science and think about how that plays a role </i></span></span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">in everyday life. And coffee's an interesting place for me to start, because it seems like there's some overlap there, and it's one of those things where there's a lot of technique involved and also perhaps a bit of mysticism as well.</span></i><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alex Powar: A lot of joining between science and craft, I think, which is common in a lot of different craft disciplines. But coffee is essentially a solubility reaction, so actually over the course of the past century there's been a lot of research done in chemistry labs and physics labs about what makes coffee tick. We have the breakdown of particular acids, how they contribute to flavor. Cloragenic acid, for instance, esterizes into quinic and caffeic acid. Quinic acid —</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">As in quinine [the chemical that gives tonic water its flavor]?</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Exactly — so that produces a lot of bitterness. That's why you never want to reheat coffee. It catalyzes that reaction. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's talk about that a little bit more later on. I wanted to first find out a little bit about you. First of all, where are you from?</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I grew up in Palo Alto. My dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse. That was my path. So, yeah, I did my education at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and I studied Pre Med.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wow. So you were thinking you'd maybe be a doctor.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yes, that was my intent for a pretty long time. I decided at the last minute that it wasn't for me, partially as a result of the liberal arts courses that I did. I studied this program called Science and Society. After I graduated I wanted to be an academic...and my parents said "no, you have to get a real job." [laughs] "You have to go to medicine or else." I decided to go "or else."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I started working for a restaurant, with the goal of maybe going into food. They were buying coffee from Barefoot Coffee at the time and for all their wholesale accounts, their wholesale baristas went through sixteen hours of training, so I learned a lot. [They] really encouraged passion in coffee preparation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm really methodical, and I think what interested me in food is an understanding of the kind of mechanics of what makes food really good, when it is really good. The language that they were using around coffee at Barefoot was closer to where my interests in food lie. And also the integrity of people in the coffee industry tends to be really high. That's not saying that people don't have great integrity in food as well. But it seems to be less of a financial motivation, more just like we're going to seek out the best quality coffee and try to prepare it the best we possibly can. Be really uncompromising about it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">What was the word you used — you said what interested you about food and coffee was—</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mechanics.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mechanics. So when you say mechanics, what does that mean exactly to you?</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Literally, what is happening when you heat a pan to a particular temperature, what physical changes are going on in the food that produce like a better steak or a worse steak. Kind of like the breakdown of particular things at particular temperatures. You know, braising leeks, for example, the breakdown of cellulose. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And in coffee we see that a lot as well. People who are most successful in the coffee industry - there's a lot of intuition involved, and coffee preparation, but that only takes you so far. Having a knowledge of physical and chemical interactions in coffee, like variables, being very specific about keeping track of the variability in these products is really important for consistency. Otherwise if you brew coffee one way, and it's great, it can be a total fluke. You don't understand what's going on. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The word artisanal gets thrown around a lot these days. Do people think of it in that sort of old-timey craftsmanship sort of way? Or is there more of a movement toward toward talking about the chemistry of coffee? Is there a balance there, or is it one way or another?</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the biggest problem in the coffee industry, a lot of people will tell you, is a lack of systemized education, and I think that kind of precludes us from having that kind of information, you know? Artisanal production of anything always requires a certain degree of juju, and that kind of intuition, kind of feel. As an educator here at Four Barrel, moving forward, I hope to build an education program that provides people with the skills to be able to make much more informed decisions in coffee. We do really focus on precision here and understanding the basics of what's happening in coffee — literally physically what's happening with an individual coffee particle, when you run a solvent through it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Do you want to have everyone here understand that, or—</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yeah. I don't think you can be a good barista without understanding what's happening on that scale. The resources for everybody to have that kind of knowledge just don't exist quite yet, so it took me years to accumulate of talking to the right people and working in the right places.... My job essentially every day is to make coffee taste better and take as much time as I need. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>How do you go about making coffee better, whether that's taking a certain amount of time just to make coffee and taste it yourself, or making it better for other people</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's a lot of A-B testing involved. It's very coffee dependent too, so you need to set a certain number of controls using the same coffee on the same roast date on the same grind — kind of finding what your variables are, then altering one at a time. Like you were saying earlier coffee is this weird hybrid between the more systematic elements, you know? These are the variables, you can alter one or any of them, but also kind of like how this understanding ties into an overall flavor. So our goal at Four barrel is to source coffees that are fruit-forward and really floral that remind the customer, the last link in the chain, remind them that it comes from a place, that it comes from a fruit, that it's grown on a shrub, and coffees that really taste like origin, that taste very specific to a place. Then we roast it to really amplify that. and our preparation method, that's our goal as well. It's a really funny ingredient in that you can treat it really well on any link in that chain, and then completely screw it up in the end. And you can also make it taste really good, but you can interpret it in such a way that it's really far from our overall goal, kind of like what we're trying to represent in the coffee.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So generally, to answer your original question, generally when I'm running brew method experiments, I look for existing brew methods, see how well they play in my understanding of whats going on in coffee on a physical level, and then essentially just brewing a ton of cups, just altering one variable at a time, seeing, what if I take this in this direction, what's that going to do?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thanks to Alex Powar for taking the time to talk coffee and science. Thanks also to Four Barrel’s Matthew Hein for helping set up the interview and roaster Sarah Bouldin for letting me taste freshly roasted coffee beans — they were yummy.</span></i></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-35896505146598588012012-12-28T21:25:00.001-08:002013-10-18T14:22:30.466-07:00These are a few of my favorite sciences.<b>What's your favorite thing about the natural world?</b> There are lots of things to choose from. The profound tension between natural selection and biological diversity. The fact that no matter how fast you're going, you'll never catch up with a beam of light. The way snowflakes form.<br />
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My favorite? It's hard to say, but most days it's the concept of curved spacetime. Those two words, curved spacetime, contain within them some of the strangest and most beautiful ideas in nature: the bewildering truth that the earth is traveling on a straight line around the sun, the fact that clocks run at very slightly different rates at different elevations, and the observation that you can never actually see something fall into a black hole — instead, you watch it turn ever more red until it fades away forever. <br />
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It is also the most beautiful mathematical theory ever built, but I respect the fact that not everyone understands that.<br />
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<b>Now here's what I really want to write about: your favorite things, whatever they are.</b> Maybe it's a weird flower. Maybe it's a cool experiment you did in high school. Maybe it's Wick rotation (though I doubt it). Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and if you're okay talking to me, let me know how to contact you. I really can't wait to hear all about it.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-77059062672722835392012-11-06T10:48:00.001-08:002013-10-18T14:02:52.815-07:00Nathan Explains Science Just Voted, and You Can Too.I just voted. You should too. Well, if you're 18 or older, anyway.<br />
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Nathan Explains Science has spent a fair amount of time explaining why people don't vote — the hassle of getting to the polls, the difficulty of seeing the impact of electoral outcomes in our daily lives, the cost spent in time and effort on learning about the differences between different proposals. Today, November 6, 2012, forget all that. Go vote. Do a little homework first, please — <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/2011/06/people-are-ignorant-big-dealright.html">for instance, know that the guy behind the auto insurance initiative on the California ballot (Prop 33) is in charge of Mercury Insurance</a> — but get out and vote.<br />
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The argument against voting goes like this: your vote is like your place in the universe, that is, tiny. My vote here in San Francisco is profoundly unlikely to have any impact on anything, simply because lots of other people are voting. Elections rarely come down to a single vote, so what's the point, especially if you have to take a fifteen minute drive and then wait in line for an hour just to fill out a stupid form you might not even care about.<br />
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(Fortunately, my polling place is less than a block from Nathan Explains Science World Headquarters, and I do kinda care.)<br />
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Here's the problem. Suppose that nobody voted. Then you're automatically pivotal. All you'd have to do to get your way is to be the one person who showed up. Like Jill Stein for President? Or the Barr/Sheehan ticket? Like that option enough that you'll walk/bus/drive down to the polls? You got it. Yours for a song. In the language of political scientists, you're pivotal.<br />
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Or, if that keeps up long enough, you're a sort of de facto dictator.<br />
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In the short run, maybe that's okay. But in the long run, that's not exactly a healthy democracy. Hardly anyone cares, not a whole lot gets done, and we sort of fizzle out.<br />
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Voting today isn't just about the outcome of this election. It's about believing in the admittedly flawed, tenuous, and often dubious institutions that separate us from <u>Lord of the Flies</u>, or, say, Stalinism. The short run choice is obvious. The long run choice is, too.<br />
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Don't wait for things to get bad — or worse, as the case may be. Play the long game. Get out and vote.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-26775246427568267722012-10-30T09:55:00.001-07:002012-10-30T11:08:36.304-07:00Errol Morris usually says it better.Nathan Explains Science has spent a fair amount of resources to convince you that politics doesn't work quite the way that pundits would like you to believe. Among the topics: the many reasons — sometimes arguably legitimate — not to vote. Among them, your vote is unlikely to count, and even if it counted toward deciding your state's electoral college votes in a presidential election, your state's choice might not ultimately matter. Who gets elected might not matter — though Nathan Explains Science emphatically denies that assertion as it applies to recent presidential elections.<br />
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On the other hand, if no one votes, then anybody who does makes the decision for everyone. Thus, in an incremental sort of way, the fact that you vote makes democracy just a little bit safer.<br />
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I'm bringing this up because Errol Morris, innovative director of the documentaries <u>The Thin Blue Line</u> and <u>The Fog of War</u>, just shot a short film on the subject of why we don't vote. You can view it here: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/opinion/errol-morris-11-excellent-reasons-not-to-vote.html?hp" style="text-decoration: underline;">11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote</a>. It's about seven and a half minutes, and Morris does not disappoint.<br />
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I'd love to hear your thoughts.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-68053737715697326812012-10-11T19:01:00.002-07:002012-10-11T19:08:33.792-07:00Nathan Explains Science Was Going To Blog About The Debates, But....Dear Readers,<br />
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Nathan (of <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/">Nathan Explains Science</a> fame) really wanted to explain why he (and many others) won't be watching any of the (vice-)presidential debates, but he's been working hard all day, he's tired, it's the bottom of the 7th and the O's are tied with the Yankees in the ALDS, he's already decided whom he's voting for, the election isn't all that exciting this year, and he should probably make some dinner.<br />
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Catch all that? Good. Anthony Downs and I are proud we've taught you something. More next time.<br />
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Cheers,<br />
Nathan Explains ScienceAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-74756642616817360672012-09-29T18:57:00.002-07:002013-10-18T14:05:45.947-07:00LA Cars and Santa Fe Bars: Carmageddon 2 and the El Farol ProblemThink fast: what do the freeways of Los Angeles have in common with a bar in far-away Santa Fe, New Mexico? This weekend, it turns out, quite a lot.<br />
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What was that about some bar in the Land of Enchantment?
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What L.A. drivers face this weekend is called the El Farol Problem, named for a bar down the street from the old offices of the Santa Fe Institute, or SFI. Here’s the problem in a nutshell. You want to go to a cool bar — or go driving on the streets of Los Angeles — but so does everyone else in town. If everybody heads out, it’ll be crowded, noisier than usual, and generally no fun — the bar, I mean. But if nobody goes, you and your friends will have the whole bar to yourself, and you’ll have a grand old time.
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When SFI economist Brian Arthur cooked up the problem, he wasn’t interested in the conventional explanation of the problem, which is simple, if implausible — the standard prediction is that everyone decides completely at random.
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Instead, Arthur wanted to ponder how real people would think through the problem, and that’s where Carmageddon 2 comes in. Will Angelenos will stay home in fear, or will they learn, so to speak, from last year and venture out to what they anticipate will be empty streets? Will some drive as an act of defiance? Will anyone actually roll dice? Probably all of the above, but the truth is, we still don’t really know.<br />
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Like many SFI social scientists, Arthur thought conventional economics swept the interesting details of decision making under the rug, favoring instead elegant but sometimes inaccurate theories based on the assertion that people are rational decision makers. The unfortunate truth is that, while we have made progress, we still don’t understand how people decide well enough — not well enough, for example, to understand who will vote in the upcoming election, and not well enough to prevent another economic crisis like the one we had in 2008.
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Nor, I’m afraid, well enough to say how long it’ll take to get to Santa Monica tomorrow. Good luck with that one.<br />
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*Actually, things are looking okay for the moment, despite a glitch in the construction timeline.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-37243317345903785842012-09-17T20:01:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:05:11.978-07:00Nathan Explains Romney...Maybe...By now you've likely heard all about the Super Secret Awful Romney Video, uncovered by <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser">Mother Jones</a> and covered by basically everyone from the Washington Post to Drudge.*<br />
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No doubt it will be as politically significant in the long run as the Super Secret Awful Obama Video, which is to say hardly at all, but in the meantime there something Romney said that struck me as wrong. And the funny thing is, even my most liberal readers might think he was right about this one.<br />
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Here's what he said: <b>"And there are, there are, there are—for instance, this president won because of hope and change."</b><br />
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That's a lot of "there are"s, but never you mind that.<br />
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The oft-repeated line is that Obama won the election because he represented something new, something different — a man full of hope and promise that things — politics — were going to change. One might even say it was going to be a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/dustbowl-new-deal/">new deal</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY">morning in America</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63h_v6uf0Ao">that little girls could once again pick daisies without fear of nuclear holocaust</a>.**<br />
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Please. Remember what happened right around the time of the conventions in 2008? That's right: <i>the economy was right in the middle of tanking in a major, thank-heavens-I-got-an-academic-job kind of way.</i> Recall your Clinton: "It's the economy, stupid."<br />
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Sure, McCain's haphazard campaign didn't help, and yes, hope and change fired up the base and may have had some impact on swing voters — as in "let's try a change and hope for something better." Political scientists have debated how big a deal this and what form it takes, but the core idea is clear: when the economy as a whole is bad, incumbent political parties better watch out.<br />
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<b>Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?</b><br />
Mother Jones was quick to argue that this was the real, sinister Romney we were seeing in a blurry video shot some time earlier this year — just like conservatives argued it was the real Obama who made the now-kinda-famous "guns and religion" remark. The political (in)significance of these two events aside, were these the real Romney and Obama?<br />
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I won't belabor the point, but it struck me that maybe this wasn't Romney being real. Instead, maybe what he was doing, and maybe what Obama was doing, was tailoring his message. Out in public, candidates can't be quite so direct — in fact, recent work suggests they may have an incentive to be ambiguous*** — but with a small group of people, they can basically say whatever they want, or more to the point, whatever that group of people wants to hear. Romney's audience in the video was a group of wealthy white conservatives. Maybe all Romney was doing, really, was pandering — not to the general public, but pandering nonetheless.<br />
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Comments welcome.<br />
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*I had to check, but yes, he's still around.<br />
**No kids, hope and change — and fear — are not new themes. Did you really think they were?<br />
***Steve Callender and Catherine Wilson did the original theoretical work, and Mike Tomz and Rob Van Houweling were the first to look into it experimentally.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-2557906367827885392012-09-15T20:31:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:06:02.438-07:00Politics, Decline, & Stress BallsIn my last <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/2012/09/weird-social-science.html">post</a>, I wrote about how important it was to pursue seemingly odd social and political science, and I cited as an example a study that showed squeezing a stress ball can make you more likely to believe random strangers were Democrats.<br />
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You might have some doubts. The stress ball study is a weird one among weird ones, and you might wonder whether its important and whether it will hold up under scrutiny. But the stress ball study is important, and I think it will hold up. Here's why.<br />
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<b>The stress ball study</b><br />
First, what's the stress ball study all about? The paper, "Proprioception and Person Perception: Politicians and Professors," published just a few weeks ago in <i>Personality and Social Pshychology Bulletin</i>, essentially asks whether physically exerting yourself might change how you feel about other people.
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It turns out it does. In one experiment, 52 undergraduates guessed whether four women and four men pictured in photographs were Republicans or Democrats. Half of them squeezed a hard latex ball while viewing the photos, and the other half squeezed a soft polyurethane ball — a stress ball. Those who squeezed a hard ball thought on average that 53 percent of the people in the pictures were Republicans, compared with 43 percent for those who squeezed a stress ball. In other words, playing with a stress ball makes you more likely to think people are Democrats.
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That might seem odd, but it isn't that surprising. Psychologists have long known that events, images, and smells — not to mention words — trigger us to think about abstract concepts that in turn influence our behavior. Extra-weird example: Michael Ramscar and Lera Boroditsky once showed that whether you were physically moving or not could change whether you think moving Wednesday's meeting up two days meant moving it to Monday or Friday.*
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Closer to politics, we know that while it's hard to change what you think about a given issue, it's easy to change the basis of your choices by focusing on, say, fears about the economy, terrorism, or crime.**
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<b>So why is the stress ball study important?</b><br />
If the result isn't that surprising, why is it important? First, it adds to the odd list of things we can do to influence voters beliefs. That furthers our understanding of the weirdness that is our political behavior, and it makes that understanding more robust — it makes us more likely to think the weirdness is real.
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Second, it shows just how far down the rabbit hole we can go. <i>Stress balls? Really?</i> Well, yes, apparently, at least a little bit.***
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<b>And why do I think it will hold up?</b><br />
Over there on the facebooks, a Nathan Explains Science reader whom I'll call Jimmy O.D. (huge punk rocker) asked whether the stress ball study might fall victim to the so-called Decline Effect, whereby the bias toward publishing results that confirm hypotheses — especially results that confirm odd hypotheses — rather than disconfirm them leads many published results to be disconfirmed later on.
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I don't think that will happen with this study, and my reasons are basically the same as above: while the stress ball study seems odd in isolation, it's part of a much larger body of research that shows how irrational we can be — how the funny ways we connect different ideas in our heads change our behavior in equally funny ways. In particular it's part of a line of research on how suggestible we are, whether that takes the form of words, political ads, or stress balls. In that light, the result seems quite likely to hold up. In fact, it doesn't even seem that strange.
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<b>Review</b><br />
So what have we learned? People are weird, and that weirdness affects important things like politics, and it isn't likely to go away any time soon. Just another day here at Nathan Explains Science.
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*Ramscar told my cognitive psychology class that he came up with the idea after having downed a few drinks on an airplane, leading him to go around asking people about moving meetings up. How's that for a pilot study?
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**See my much earlier post on, among other things, <a href="http://nathanexplainsscience.blogspot.com/2011/10/brain-regions-errors-of-logic-and.html">Willie Horton</a> and the 1988 presidential election.
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***Now, a lot of these effects don't hold up with strong partisans, but then it's not strong partisans that generally decide elections — it's middle-of-the-road voters, and they are susceptible to these effects. Maybe stress balls won't affect an election, but then again I don't think anyone's tried.****
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****Try to be a little surprised when you see me standing 100 yards from your polling place handing out Nathan Explains Science stress balls.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-39874628729799692752012-09-10T20:56:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:24:34.509-07:00Weird (Social) Science, and Why We Need ItSocial psychologists in particular are fond of what Lee Ross once called "demonstration experiments," that is, experiments that show in more or less dramatic fashion the weird things you can get people to do if you try hard enough. Even social scientists have derided demonstration experiments as goofy, sometimes useless, but they have their value.<br />
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The most famous of these is the Milgram experiment, in which psychologist Stanley Milgram got people to electrically shock somebody in another room simply by telling them to do so. (Don't worry. The person in the other room was just a tape recording.)<br />
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Scary, isn't it? Milgram had actually set out to show that we Americans simply weren't capable of being monsters — we were supposed to be the control group, and bad Germans were the treatment — and he found out that all it took to turn us into monsters was a simple, calm command.<br />
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Here's something scarier: the bizarre plethora of things that affect your vote without having the slightest thing to do with politics. <a href="http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/72/5/935.short">Facial similarity</a> between voters and candidates, the subtle effects of <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/politicians-watch-your-grammar.html">grammar</a> on candidate perceptions, the fact that how high on a ballot a candidate appears affects your likelihood of voting for that candidate, and <a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/04/0146167212457786.full.pdf+html">this one</a>, which shows that if you happen to be squeezing a foam stress ball, you're more likely to think a random stranger is a Democrat.<br />
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Scary? Or just weird? Yes, it is weird that a stress ball could affect your political perceptions, but it's scary, <i>because it really, really shouldn't.</i> For all those who actually care about The People making good decisions, this is important: you've got an uphil battle, and one that you don't totally understand.<br />
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Scarier still: there's a long-running effort to stifle this kind of research because it's weird, especially when it's weird and has something to do with politics. The Washington Post has a nice <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-get-serious-about-science/2012/09/09/5b5c1472-f129-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html">editorial</a> on weird but important natural science research, but let's remember the importance of the weird in social science, too.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-71223201439280407282012-08-30T11:27:00.002-07:002013-10-18T14:25:24.732-07:00Nathan Explains Science on Santa Fe Radio CafeSadly, my real job has kept me from doing my real avocation, blogging, and it's especially unfortunate this week since the Republican National Convention is in full swing just in time for hurricane season.<br />
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But fear not!<br />
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The lovely and talented Mary-Charlotte over at Santa Fe Radio Cafe interviewed me recently on matters political, and you can listen here:<br />
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http://www.santaferadiocafe.org/podcasts/?p=2961Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-89376405006460146402012-08-20T20:33:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:14:48.572-07:00Jesus? He's On Your SideA string of attacks on religious institutions including Muslim and Sikh houses of worship got me thinking about the sort of psychology that justifies these things. That led me indirectly to one of the more significant questions of our time: What would Jesus do?<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">According to a recent study, He’d do whatever you’d like him to — except that He’s more liberal than you on caring for the poor and more conservative on gay marriage.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The finding, write Stanford University psychologists Lee Ross, Yphtach Lelkes, and Alexandra Russell in a study published in </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Proceedings of the National Academy of Science</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> last December, is a consequence of cognitive dissonance theory. In short, the theory says that people try to reduce the mental tension stemming from conflicting feelings, beliefs, and actions the easiest way they can. For example, if you discover a close friend harbors racist views, you’re likely to downplay those views rather than disown your friend. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Or, if you’re a liberal Christian who supports gay marriage, you might say that Jesus did too.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Curious how both liberals and conservatives resolved inconsistencies between their politics and the biblical tales of Jesus, the researchers recruited 451 people via the survey Web site SurveyMonkey and asked them to place themselves — and the Son of God — on a 100-point, liberal-to-conservative scale. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not surprisingly, liberals thought Jesus was much more liberal than conservatives did. On average, liberals placed themselves at 20.75 points on the scale and placed Jesus at 26.98 points, while conservatives placed themselves at 77.09 points and placed Jesus at 72.82 points.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the other hand, both liberals and conservatives thought Jesus would be more politically liberal on issues like welfare and more conservative on social issues such as gay marriage. While liberals’ and conservatives’ beliefs about where Jesus would stand on raising taxes on the wealthy differed by 42.6 points, both viewed their own positions as less liberal than those they attributed to Jesus by roughly five points. Likewise, survey participants viewed themselves as more conservative on treatment of illegal immigrants and more liberal than Jesus on abortion or gay marriage. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So do our political views come from our perceptions of Jesus, or is it the other way around, and what might the answer mean? The authors are careful not to say: since the data come from a survey, it’s impossible to say what caused what. Instead, they argue, the causality goes both ways — a bit of a cop out, but probably an appropriate one.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-46306164111918174152012-08-16T10:28:00.002-07:002013-10-18T14:14:11.687-07:00How to read graphs: The public policy versionI follow The New Teacher Project on ye olde Facebooks, and lately they've been on a rant/rave/something about what they call irreplaceable teachers. This morning, TNTP posted this statement and the following graph:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">"For decades, principals have assumed that more years in the classroom mean better teaching. But while teacher experience helps, it doesn't guarantee excellence."</span><br />
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Here's what I think this graph really says: everyone improves over time, and partly because of that the lowest-performing teachers likely won't catch up with the highest performing ones.<br />
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Let's parse this, shall we?<br />
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From a scientific point of view, this graph makes two statements. First, the average low-performing teacher is worse at teaching than the average brand new teacher. What does that actually mean? It means that if you take the worst of the experienced teachers and compare them with<b> </b>all<b> </b>new teachers, the new teachers are better — the problem is, how did TNTP define "worst"?<br />
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If you dig deep into TNTP's <a href="http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_Irreplaceables_2012.pdf">report</a>, you'll find out that in each of the four — yes, four — school districts they analyzed, they used a different methodology to define low-performing teachers, with the result that they classified between 10 and 24 percent of teachers as low performing.<br />
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Now look at the graph again. Despite making up at most a quarter of the teachers supposedly at the bottom of the pile, "Experienced Low Performers" are nonetheless doing better than about 35 percent of all teachers on average? And why is that? Without spending a lot more time on this than I'd like to, I can't be sure, but I'll bet it's because there are some new teachers that are really, really bad — but you wouldn't know that looking at this graph, because it compares bad but experienced teachers with all new teachers.<br />
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<b>Takeaway part one:</b> some experienced teachers are worse than the average new teacher, but likely there are many new teachers that are even worse or at least no better.<br />
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The second thing to take away from the graph is something TNTP sort of doesn't want you to pay attention to: over a three-year time period, both new teachers and low-performing experienced teachers improve. Why do I say TNTP sort of doesn't want you to pay attention to that? "For decades, principals have assumed that more years in the classroom mean better teaching." And, guess what, they're right.<br />
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(By the way, did you notice how the first claim above doesn't actually contradict the second? That's an elementary public relations, um, method.)<br />
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<b>So, takeaway part two:</b> everybody gets better with experience.<br />
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For me, the conclusion is this: there's a lot of variation in teacher quality, but everybody gets better with time. And, probably because everybody gets better with time, the low performers are going to continue to be low performers compared with everyone else — though, if you read the graph carefully, they won't continue to be quite so low performing as time goes on — in percentile terms, they actually improve a decent amount.<br />
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Now, I don't want to be too hard on TNTP, who are doing some interesting and maybe even useful work. What they're trying to say is not inaccurate, really — it really is true that there there are teachers that remain near the bottom of the barrel even with experience.<br />
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<b>What I'd encourage, however,</b> is that you think critically about what a graph like this means, and think about the methods — and the motivations — that someone put into this in order to try to persuade you of something.<br />
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Now back to work...at another education nonprofit that shall remain nameless.<br />
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EDIT (18 Oct 2013): Oh, it was Teach For America. Whatever.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-71495418611732014672012-07-17T21:57:00.002-07:002013-10-18T14:08:39.159-07:00How the Universe got its mass: the Higgs explained (better)By now, you probably know what the Higgs boson does — it gives everything in the universe mass. What you probably don’t know is why, and you could be forgiven for that given all the terrible explanations out there, including an uncharacteristically confusing and visually displeasing one by the guy that does the <i>Ph.D.</i> comics.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Today, I’m going to explain the Higgs in detail. I’m late to the party, but just because you’re late to the party doesn’t mean you don’t have the best, um, fun. </span>Let’s get started.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>What is mass? Mass is energy that slows you down.</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We usually think of mass as the property of matter that gives it weight, and that’s partly true — things need mass in order to have weight — but mass itself is something more. Rather than giving things weight, what mass really gives things is energy.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, there are all kinds of energy. There’s kinetic energy, the sort you have when a ball is bouncing around, and there’s chemical energy, the sort that’s stored in the bonds between atoms. Mass is a special kind of energy, a sort of minimum energy below which you can’t go under any circumstances.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That particle-physics particles have mass has special consequences. Most important, mass prevents them from traveling at the speed of light — only zero-mass particles like photons, which carry energy in the form of light, can do that. Having mass, it turns out, means that not all of a objects energy can go into kinetic energy. In a sense, mass is a special kind of energy that actually slows things down. Keep that in mind.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Just because you have no energy doesn’t make you weak. </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now step way back, forget about particles for a minute, and picture a lake with an island in the middle of it. When the weather is very stormy, the water in the lake might go anywhere left, right, forwards, and backwards, and if the storm is strong enough, water can go up and over the island. When the weather is calm, the water in the lake can’t go anywhere it likes — it has to stay in the trough that encircles the island. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This observation goes by the funny name spontaneous symmetry breaking: when the lake is calm, the water can’t go anywhere it likes, but when the lake is stormy, it’s free to roam, as water should be.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Our lake is a metaphor for particle physics: the water in the lake represents a quantum field, such as the electroweak fields that hold protons and neutrons together. How stormy the lake gets is this field’s energy, and how far the water flows from the center of the island is the field’s strength. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now when the weather is most calm, the water in the lake is always some distance away from the center of the island. For quantum fields that act like the water in our lake — for fields that experience spontaneous symmetry breaking — we have an incredible result: these fields remain strong even when they have the least energy. The electromagnetic fields that carry light aren’t like that — you need energy to shine a bright light — but the field that represents the Higgs boson is.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The Higgs boson is a force field that pulls on everything.</b></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Did he just write “the field that represents the Higgs”?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Although you’ve heard a lot of talk about Higgs, the particle, particles and fields are really interchangeable ideas. If it’s convenient, we can talk about a field pulling on a particle. For example, a gravitational field pulls on all kinds of things — bosons, leptons, and you and me — but we can also think of it as a particle called the graviton.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When fields pull on particles and other things, they very often slow them down. Gravity is like that. If you throw a ball in the air, gravity slows its upward progress, eventually turning it around and making it fall back down.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Higgs is something special. It pulls on pretty much everything, and it pulls in a way that always — always — slows them down. See where this is going?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>How the universe got its mass</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We now have three facts that together explain the origins of mass.</span><br />
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<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mass is a special kind of energy that slows things down.</span></li>
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<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because of spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Higgs is strong even when it doesn’t have much energy.</span></li>
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<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Higgs pulls on everything, and when it pulls on a particle, it always slows them down.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And voila — because the Higgs always pulls hard on other particles and always slows them down, it makes those particles behave as if they had mass — which is to say, they actually do have mass. (In physics, to behave as if you have something is the same as having it. Wouldn’t it be nice if it applied to daily life?)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Detecting the Higgs</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The last piece of the puzzle you may be wondering about is why it took so long to detect the Higgs boson, and why those wacky physicists went looking for a particle rather than a field. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Spontaneous symmetry breaking is responsible once more. At low energies, the Higgs isn’t really itself. It’s constrained, and some of its essential properties are all tied up in giving things mass, which is quite a workout. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To really see the Higgs as itself, you have to go to really high energies, at which it no longer makes sense to talk about the Higgs as a field. Instead, it makes sense to talk about it as a particle, or rather, as a particle that collides with other particles and eventually breaks up into thousands of other particles — the sorts of particles that after half a century of hoping, we’ve finally seen.</span><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-5902187086677195442012-07-02T10:33:00.000-07:002013-10-18T14:07:26.752-07:00The Perils of Predicting Politics, or Hari Seldon Was Right<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When Hari Seldon, the sort-of protagonist of Isaac Asimov’s <i>Foundation</i> novels, developed a method of forecasting he called psychohistory, he never thought it could predict the future perfectly — any number of fundamentally random events might intervene and muck around with what he thought most likely to happen. Seldon had no illusions that he could predict exactly what would happen — instead, he argued he could compute <i>how likely an event was to occur.</i></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A friend asked me recently to comment on recent debates over whether social science research deserved government support when it has such a bad track record of predicting things. Various people have made various arguments, but here’s what I told my friend: Hari Seldon was right. Predicting election outcomes more than a few months in advance is and probably always will be a fool’s errand. Calculating the probability Obama will win reelection this year, on the other hand, is more manageable. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the point goes deeper than that, and I want to make this clear: no serious prediction about anything at all concerns anything but probabilities, because there is nothing in this world that is certain.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Consider physics, a discipline with an excellent track record when it comes to prediction. What is it that physicists predict? They predict probabilities — the probability that a given high-energy atomic collision will produce the Higgs boson, for example. They do not predict that a given collision will<i> </i>produce the Higgs. Likewise, climate scientists might predict the probability that the oceans will rise by four feet or more in the next century — though, to be clear, that probability is very close to 100 percent.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Social science is no different, and the reasons are many. Human beings are not just hard to understand and predict; they are very often actually random, even on important matters such as whom to vote for. Social systems are also complex, meaning that even if the rules are simple, there are so many people interacting with each other that the outcomes may be quite complicated. Take just those two things together, and you have a system that’s hard to predict exactly. Probabilities, yes. Certainty, never.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I used to say, and I stand by this claim, that predicting what Congress will do is like predicting a tree. I can tell you how trees — plural — grow, but I can’t tell you what this particular tree will do. I can tell you things about how people behave, and I can tell you things about how Congress behaves, but is John Boehner actually going to do anything about the Affordable Care Act?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ask Hari Seldon.</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-15351471384196239102011-12-13T14:54:00.005-08:002013-10-18T14:06:50.544-07:00On Stupid Names and Poorly-Understood StatisticsLet's get one thing right out of the way: the "God particle" is a stupid, nearly nonsensical name for it. It's called the Higgs boson, and that's all I'm going to say about stupid names.<br />
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You may have noticed the Higgs boson in the news the last few days, since a couple teams at CERN have announced growing evidence, though not yet "definitive proof," that the particle exists. Physicists believe that the Higgs particle is, long story short, responsible for things having mass — that is, weighing something other than zero. It would be a big deal indeed if they had definitive proof of its existence.<br />
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Trouble is, there is no such thing as definitive proof. You should understand why that's so, because knowing why make you wiser. Wiser, that is, about people trying to manipulate your beliefs about science.<br />
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Why can't there be definitive proof? No matter how hard you try, you can't do an infinite number of measurements, consider all the other possibilities, and generally be omniscient. What you can do is be really, really confident, and the more evidence you have, the more confident you can be. Thus, a few years from now when someone inevitably claims there is definitive proof of the Higgs's existence, what that really means is that physicists are really, really confident that it exists. Scientists are fairly confident now, but as the evidence grows, so will the confidence.<br />
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Now, why am I ranting about this? Because the idea that definitive proof could exist is a nefarious one. If a scientist admits that there isn't definitive proof of an idea, others will sometimes deride it as "just a theory." That's a red herring — some theories are right, and some are wrong. By collecting more and more data to test a theory, we can be more confident about whether the theory is right or wrong.<br />
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Probably this isn't a big deal for the Higgs, but there are times when this seemingly minor point takes on political baggage — climate change and evolution come to mind. If you hear a politician saying there's no definitive proof of this or that, well, now you know better. The right question isn't whether there's definitive proof — there isn't. The right question is how confident we should be. On climate change and evolution, scientists are quite confident.<br />
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As for the Higgs, we'll have to wait and see.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3375684602371061139.post-785314388294183622011-11-29T15:50:00.001-08:002011-11-29T19:27:35.665-08:00Walking Through Walls (Sort Of) at ScienceNOWA long while ago, I taught a <a href="http://www.satoricamp.org/">summer camp</a> class called "How to Walk Through Walls." It was a physics class that culminated in the idea that matter is really made of waves of probability, and these waves could in principle transport through barriers — that is, you could in theory walk, metaphorically speaking, through a wall.<br />
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Well, you can't, but a team in Finland has proposed observing the effect, called quantum tunneling, in a mechanical system. That's something no one's done before, and if they succeed, it will be really, really cool.<br />
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Read the story <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/walk-through-wall-effect-might-b.html?ref=hp">here</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07722092273431720361noreply@blogger.com2