Links

1. Barbara Oakley in Nautilus: How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math. "Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need."

2. William Kremer in BBC: The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain. A truly bizarre story.

3. Steven Shapin in WSJ: Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History. A review of Steven Weinberg's book To Explain the World. The following excerpt gets to the main problem with an enterprise like Weinberg's:

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

Doing Science is, in fact, "Rocket Science"

Leonard Mlodinov has an op-ed in NYTimes arguing against the myth that science is just a series of flashes of intuitive insights that just hit people by accident.

Two thousand years ago, Aristotle’s “Physics” was a wide-ranging set of theories that were easy to state and understand. But his ideas were almost completely wrong. Newton’s “Principia” ushered in the age of modern science, but remains one of the most impenetrable books ever written. There is a reason: The truths of nature are subtle, and require deep and careful thought.

Over the past few centuries we have invested that level of thought, and so while in the 19th century the Reuters news service used carrier pigeons to fly stock prices between cities, today we have the Internet.

Even if we are not scientists, every day we are challenged to make judgments and decisions about technical matters like vaccinations, financial investments, diet supplements and, of course, global warming. If our discourse on such topics is to be intelligent and productive, we need to dip below the surface and grapple with the complex underlying issues. The myths can seduce one into believing there is an easier path, one that doesn’t require such hard work.

But even beyond issues of science, there is a broader lesson ... We all run into difficult problems in life, and we will be happier and more successful if we appreciate that the answers often aren’t quick, or easy.

Links

1. Susannah Locke in Vox.com: 15 ways to tell if that science news story is hogwash

   The excellent chart ... offers "A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science." It was put together by the blogger [Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher in the UK] behind the chemistry site Compound Interest. It isn't meant to be an exhaustive list — and not all of these flaws are necessarily fatal.

2. A bold initiative in France: Ambition in Paris:

   The creation of the University of Paris-Saclay’s campus will cost €2 billion ($2.17 billion), and a government-funded €2.5 billion ($2.72 billion) extension of the Paris Métro will connect the high-tech hub to the center of the French capital in 35 minutes.

   However, Dominique Vernay, president of Paris-Saclay, has bigger concerns than the infrastructure challenges involved in constructing the university’s 1,300-acre campus over the next few years, namely how to get 19 fiercely independent organizations to pull together and move in the same direction. [...]

   “They were not that keen to work together in the beginning, but they have taken steps over the past seven years to come together -- the commitment was to set up a common organization.”

   To this end, nine of France’s most prestigious grandes écoles, such as the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure, will work with less selective traditional universities, business schools and national research organizations at Paris-Saclay.

   Within 10 years, 12,000 researchers and 70,000 students will be based at the Paris-Saclay campus, with the institution aiming to take its place among the world’s top 10 universities by 2025.

3. Charles Seife in Slate: Science’s Big Scandal. "Even legitimate publishers are faking peer review."

   It can be read alone, but it's even better to read it with Seife's previous article in Scientific American: For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal. "An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities."

4. Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed: New Predatory Publishing in Old Bottles. "... What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue stream that can be both open and closed – earning money through subscriptions and author fees. [...]"

Links: Parenting Edition

Two links. The first one is a summary of an economics paper: Tiger moms and helicopter parents: The economics of parenting style by Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, who use cross-country data to support their conclusion that in times of rising inequality, a more authoritarian parenting style will likely be chosen by parents:

This column argues that the choice of parenting style is driven by incentives. Parents weigh the expected costs and benefits of implementing a certain parenting style. The popularity of the authoritarian style is declining because the economic returns to the independence of children have risen. The rising inequality implies higher returns to education. This calls for pushier parenting styles, such as the authoritative one. A decline in inequality is likely to prompt a more relaxed parenting.

The second is a column by Pamela Druckerman: A Cure for Hyper-Parenting.

Measuring the effectiveness of medication

Sarah Fallon at Wired has an informative story on putting a number, called the number needed to treat (NNT), on the effectiveness of medication and procedures.

Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. [...] If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5, meaning that only five kids need to take Zofran for one of them to stop throwing up.

The story goes on to talk about a site called TheNNT.com with the tagline, "Quick summaries of evidence-based medicine."

It’s unfortunate ... that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site’s dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results.

Here's a bit more on NNT and how it is assigned to a medication or a treatment procedure:

As statistical tools go, the idea of the number needed to treat is relatively new. It was first described in 1988 by epidemiologists Andreas Laupacis, David Sackett, and Robin Roberts in a New England Journal of Medicine article titled “An Assessment of Clinically Useful Measures of the Consequences of Treatment.” They start by sketching out the problems with a number called the relative risk reduction. That’s the measure you often see hyped in media reports of scientific studies. Imagine, for example, a study of heart disease that finds that a new drug reduces the risk of death by an astonishing 50 percent. The reality behind that number is that the risk of death over a 10-year period for, say, a healthy 45-year-old man weighing 200 pounds went from 5 percent to 2.5 percent—50 percent! Such a finding is clinically significant, yes. Worthy of publication, maybe. But not quite as astonishing.

It would be better, the authors write, to look at a number called the absolute risk reduction—the 2.5 percent reduction that resulted from the new drug. But working with that measure can be hard to understand, because it is actually a percent of a percent. To make it more intuitive and apprehendable, the authors explain, you can use the inverse of absolute risk reduction: Divide 1 by 2.5 percent, or .025, to get 40. And that’s the number needed to treat. Forty people have to take the drug for one person to benefit. So is it worth taking? That depends. The NNT isn’t crazy high, so you might go for it, especially since a heart attack can kill you. But if the drug has terrible side effects, you might not.

News Link

Today's Chennai edition of Deccan Chronicle features a short take on my science outreach work.

Pet-peeve: At least, the titles of the books could have been mentioned...instead of, say, my picture... Well, all of us are learning how to do this anyway...

Science in Tamil - My Talk

Sometime back I had mentioned about my popular science books in Tamil language.

Few days back, without much warning, the IIT Madras Muthamil Mandram invited me for a felicitation on this 'precocious punditry', I presume. They also honored the publisher for his derring-do act of investing on such geek-horn verbal gymnastics in vernacular.

They demanded a speech from me as comeuppance, I presume, which I gave -- promising for ten minutes and delivering for forty minutes.

Here is the talk (mostly in 'spoken' Tamil) in two parts, which touches upon the why and how of Science in Tamil -- i.e., my  take of it -- and the contents of two of the books.

part 1 (23 minutes)

part 2 (20 minutes)

 
If the videos don't work here, check them in the related post in Tamil.

My Popular Science Books in Tamil

Three of my popular science books in Tamil language have been published now by Tamizhini and Amrutha publishers.

Details with links to Introductions are available in Tamil here http://www.ommachi.net/archives/4555



The books should be sold in Tamizhini and Amrutha book stalls (No. 436 and 437) in the 2014 Chennai book fair between Jan 10 (today) and 22, at the YMCA grounds, Nandhanam.

Online ordering should commence after the book fair. Shall update.

Do also spread the word around.

Of Cellphone Radiation and Sparrows

[UPDATE: Harmful but not lethal an article from the print edition of today's The Hindu newspaper has some content from the essay below.]

A wave has a wavelength, usually thought of as the length of a successive crest and trough. When continuous and unobstructed, a wave repeats this ‘crest+trough unit’ endlessly. If we stand at a location, how many such crest+trough units pass us in a given time determines the frequency of the wave. Longer the wavelength, shorter the frequency of a wave.

Sea waves and sound waves require medium (matter) to propagate. But electromagnetic (EM) radiation are waves that don’t require a medium to propagate. Sunlight is an example, called the visible radiation. All such EM waves we put to use can be placed in a slot in the electromagnetic spectrum, a continuous band of several wavelengths (and hence, frequencies) as shown in the accompanied graphics.

In photoelectric effect electrons are released from metals subjected to EM radiation bombardment. Importantly, this effect depends on the frequency of the incident radiation and not on its intensity. This was shown in 1905 by Einstein and is a direct proof of the quantized nature of electromagnetic radiation. In 1922, he won his Nobel for this proof. Take home point? Higher the radiation frequency of the EM wave, greater the ‘damage’ caused by that radiation.

Links

1. A nice video from the Royal Institution -- Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip:

2. Bruce Upbin in Forbes: Debunking The Narrative Of Silicon Valley's Innovation Might:

   This is going to sound completely heretical to everything Forbes has stood for over 96 years (and The Economist for a few decades longer than that) but here goes: The real innovation engine in the global economy is not the entrepreneurial class blazing capitalist trails through the thicket of government red tape and taxation. No. The real engine of innovation is government.

3. Feminist Philosophers excerpts the Chronicle story entitled Philosopher’s Downfall, From Star to ‘Ruin,’ Divides a Discipline -- the star philosopher is UMiami's McGinn, and his career turned towards ruin "after a graduate student complained that he behaved inappropriately toward her."

4. The state of Oregon in the US is debating a plan in which students will receive free university education "in return for agreeing to be taxed a set percentage of their income for the first twenty years after they leave college." Calling it "an audacious, innovative, terrible idea," Matt Reed provides many arguments against this plan.

Liquid Oxygen

An "Ajit joke" popular among college-goers of a certain era had the great villain saying this to one of his sidekicks:

Robert, dump this man in liquid oxygen. Liquid won't let him live, and oxygen won't let him die.

Here's a video of a version of this idea -- dumping a piece of burning charcoal in liquid oxygen:

Annals of Popular Science: NLP Edition

Over at Lingua Franca, Geoffrey Pullum has a series of posts on "three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging ... development [of Natural Language Processing (NLP)]." Even if you, like me, are not particularly invested in this topic, there's a lot of interesting stuff about algorithms, such as Google Search and Google Translate, at the core of "developments elsewhere" that do a good-enough approximation of NLP's fully developed version (which is still far, far away).

All in all, a great example of popular science writing.

Here are the posts, in chronological order:

1. Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?

2. Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

3. Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

4. Machine Translation Without the Translation

Prince Rupert's Drop

A cool demo of the very interesting form of fragility of the toad-shaped glass object called Prince Rupert's Drop [hat tip: Biswajit Banerjee at iMechanica]. And also an excellent use of high-speed photography in popular science.

The Scientific Legacy of Jožef Stefan

How many scientists have a law, a constant, a dimensionless variable and a problem named for them? And go on to be hailed as a great teacher of the subject? I know one. Jožef Stefan.
In 2009 I wrote a post on a paper that discussed about the scientific deeds of Jožef Stefan. The author of that paper, Prof. John Crepeau, after reading that post, invited me to write a chapter for an e-book on Stefan that he was editing. As he had already lined up several experts by then to write on specific contributions of Stefan, I was commissioned to write the last word -- chapter -- to summarize things in a chapter titled "The Scientific Legacy of Stefan".

Yesterday, that book Jožef Stefan: His Scientific Legacy on the 175th Anniversary of His Birth got published. Here is the preface. You can purchase separate chapters; write to me for a pre-print version of mine.

On the Errors of SuperFreakonomics

In a must-read article in the recent American Scientist, Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung summarizes the take-downs of several error-prone examples in SuperFreakonomics, the new 'pop science' book by Levitt and Dubner (authors of the popular Freakonomics book), and the associated Freakonomics blog.
An extended quote about a sample case:

Monica Das Gupta is a World Bank researcher [...] attributed the abnormally high ratio of boy-to-girl births in Asian countries to a preference for sons, which manifests in selective abortion and, possibly, infanticide. [...] Emily Oster (now a professor at the University of Chicago) attacked this conventional wisdom. [...] Dubner and Levitt praised Oster and her study, [...] published in the Journal of Political Economy during Levitt’s tenure as editor:

[Oster] measured the incidence of hepatitis B in the populations of China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and other countries where mothers gave birth to an unnaturally high number of boys. Sure enough, the regions with the most hepatitis B were the regions with the most “missing” women. Except the women weren’t really missing at all, for they had never been born.

Oster [...] eventually [she] admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B.
In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.

The article is a reminder of the perils of 'popularizing science' for all of us who attempt dissemination of science in some form or other. A relevant passage from a separate section that discusses the perils of pop-science:

Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt’s own peer-reviewed research. In contrast, the Freakonomics blog features the work of Levitt’s friends, and SuperFreakonomics relies heavily on anecdotes, gee-whiz technology reporting and work by Levitt’s friends and colleagues. Just like good science, good writing takes time.

I liked the 'blog' part of that quote.

The Story of Vitreous Circulation

Several months back my father noticed black spots in his vision in the right eye. After a thorough check-up at a premier eye hospital in Chennai, he was diagnosed with a 'retinal tear'. Read more in wikipedia, under retinal detachment. Why does this happen? Remedy? What has this got to do with the title story of vitreous circulation?

The human eye is an imperfect sphere, about 24 mm (just about an inch) thick in the major axis, from the cornea on the front side to the retina on the back side. In between we have the lens supported on the front side by two tubular 'hooks' containing the aqueous humor fluid. As the name implies, this fluid is aqueous and can even circulate within the tubular 'hooks'. The retina, on which the lens focuses the images of what we see, is separated from the lens by a vitreous humor. This vitreous humour, by default, is not aqueous; it is jelly-like, what is known technically as a Non-Newtonian fluid. It maintains the shape of the eye, keeping the distance between the lens and the retina. As we age, the vitreous gel loses its aqueous nature and hardens. Unfortunately, as it hardens and contracts, confined between the retina and the lens, it 'pulls' on the walls. In effect, for some of us as we age, the retina is pulled in -- a retinal 'tear'.

The remedy is to stick the retina, figuratively, back in its place. For this, first we need to slice open the eye behind the lens and scoop off the jelly-like vitreous humour. Then, the retina is stuck back in its place by cauterizing it with targeted laser heating. Then the eye is stitched in place and closed. Within few weeks, bodily fluids ooze into the region between the retina and lens to replace the original hardened vitreous humour that was scooped off. Hopefully, when the eye patch is taken off, the vision should be minus those black spots and become normal. These things went on fine and let us say my father regained his normal vision.

But all of this is only background information for a short story that took off in between, which (obviously?) involves me and my research.

Tin Pest, etc.

Let's start with a video of tin pest:

From the Wikipedia entry on tin pest:

At 13.2 degrees Celsius (about 56 degrees Fahrenheit) and below, pure tin transforms from the silvery, ductile metallic allotrope of β-form white tin to brittle, nonmetallic, α-form grey tin with a diamond structure. The transformation is slow to initiate due to a high activation energy but the presence of germanium (or crystal structures of similar form and size) or very low temperatures ~-30 degrees Celsius aids the initiation. There is also a large volume increase of about 27% associated with the phase change. Eventually the α-form decomposes into powder, hence the name tin pest.

Tin pest plays a central role in the urban legend that Napoleon's disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia was a disaster because his soldiers' buttons, which were made of tin, turned to grey powder under the harsh, cold temperatures of Russian winter. Yale's Ainissa Ramirez calls it "the world's greatest wardrobe malfunction" in this video. [Update: See also Joe Knight's article in Slate: Napoleon Wasn’t Defeated by the Russians. According to Knight, the real reason is an infectious disease spread by lice.]

The utter calamity of the French invasion of Russia, and the subsequent retreat, is captured so well in Charles Joseph Minard's graphic map, that Edward Tufte calls "the best statistical graphic ever drawn". [see this map for a broader perspective that presents Minard's map with present-day national borders.]

For the Russians, Napoleon's retreat has been a source of intense national pride -- celebrated in major works of art including the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky:

* * *

What's the point of all this? Nothing, really; we just happened to be discussing all this in a recent class on the lead-tin phase diagram in my course on materials thermodynamics. Also, I've always wanted to link to Minard's map, the 1812 overture, and the lead-tin phase diagram ;-)

Links

1. India's Physics Rebels -- a Physics World podcast, accompanying the magazine's special report on physics education and research in India. On page 13, the report features an interview with Prof. Shobhana Narasimhan.

2. It appears that the US Postal Service is going through some seriously tough times. The New Yorker has a slide show of some of its cartoons on postmen. The first and the last are especially fabulous!

3. Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal: What the Dalai Lama can teach us about temperatures below absolute zero.

Links

1. An eternity of infinities: the power and beauty of mathematics by Ashutosh Jogalekar in the Scientific American blog Curious Wavefunction.

2. Science blogging, anonymity, and “being yourself” by Rahul Siddharthan at E's flat, ah's flat too.

3. Male Scientists More Prone to Misconduct, Study Concludes by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science Insider.

IITM Research Highlights

In an inspired move, IIT Madras website now carries a separate section on their research highlights. This is an idea proposed by Prof. S. K. Das, our current Dean - Academic Research; and was executed by Dr. Phanikumar and his team.

The main page would show a catchy image that leads to a short write-up about the research intended for the general reader. A separate link can be provided there for more technical details. Each 'research highlight' would stay on the main page for about two weeks, before going into an archive, subsequently ready for recycle in a future time.

Now for the shameless plug part (you saw it coming miles ahead, didn't you?): One of my recent research project happens to hog the main page for these two weeks.

Check it out.