Science – Page 28 – artdiamondblog.com

Rather than Debate Global Warming Skeptics, Some Label them “Denialists” to “Link Them to Holocaust Denial”

(p. D2) The contrarian scientists like to present these upbeat scenarios as the only plausible outcomes from runaway emissions growth. Mainstream scientists see them as being the low end of a range of possible outcomes that includes an alarming high end, and they say the only way to reduce the risks is to reduce emissions.
The dissenting scientists have been called “lukewarmers” by some, for their view that Earth will warm only a little. That is a term Dr. Michaels embraces. “I think it’s wonderful!” he said. He is working on a book, “The Lukewarmers’ Manifesto.”
When they publish in scientific journals, presenting data and arguments to support their views, these contrarians are practicing science, and perhaps the “skeptic” label is applicable. But not all of them are eager to embrace it.
“As far as I can tell, skepticism involves doubts about a plausible proposition,” another of these scientists, Richard S. Lindzen, told an audience a few years ago. “I think current global warming alarm does not represent a plausible proposition.”
. . .
It is perhaps no surprise that many environmentalists have started to call them deniers.
The scientific dissenters object to that word, claiming it is a deliberate attempt to link them to Holocaust denial. Some academics sharply dispute having any such intention, but others have started using the slightly softer word “denialist” to make the same point without stirring complaints about evoking the Holocaust.

For the full commentary, see:
Justin Gillis. “BY DEGREES; Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 17, 2015): D1-D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 12 (sic), 2015.)

“Big Data” Does Not Tell Us What to Measure, and Ignores What Cannot Be Measured

(p. 6) BIG data will save the world. How often have we heard that over the past couple of years? We’re pretty sure both of us have said something similar dozens of times in the past few months.
If you’re trying to build a self-driving car or detect whether a picture has a cat in it, big data is amazing. But here’s a secret: If you’re trying to make important decisions about your health, wealth or happiness, big data is not enough.
The problem is this: The things we can measure are never exactly what we care about. Just trying to get a single, easy-to-measure number higher and higher (or lower and lower) doesn’t actually help us make the right choice. For this reason, the key question isn’t “What did I measure?” but “What did I miss?”
. . .
So what can big data do to help us make big decisions? One of us, Alex, is a data scientist at Facebook. The other, Seth, is a former data scientist at Google. There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data.
Facebook has tons of data on how people use its site. It’s easy to see whether a particular news feed story was liked, clicked, commented on or shared. But not one of these is a perfect proxy for more important questions: What was the experience like? Did the story connect you with your friends? Did it inform you about the world? Did it make you laugh?
(p. 7) To get to these measures, Facebook has to take an old-fashioned approach: asking. Every day, hundreds of individuals load their news feed and answer questions about the stories they see there. Big data (likes, clicks, comments) is supplemented by small data (“Do you want to see this post in your News Feed?”) and contextualized (“Why?”).
Big data in the form of behaviors and small data in the form of surveys complement each other and produce insights rather than simple metrics.
. . .
Because of this need for small data, Facebook’s data teams look different than you would guess. Facebook employs social psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists precisely to find what simple measures miss.
And it’s not just Silicon Valley firms that employ the power of small data. Baseball is often used as the quintessential story of data geeks, crunching huge data sets, replacing fallible human experts, like scouts. This story was made famous in both the book and the movie “Moneyball.”
But the true story is not that simple. For one thing, many teams ended up going overboard on data. It was easy to measure offense and pitching, so some organizations ended up underestimating the importance of defense, which is harder to measure. In fact, in his book “The Signal and the Noise,” Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com estimates that the Oakland A’s were giving up 8 to 10 wins per year in the mid-1990s because of their lousy defense.
. . .
Human experts can also help data analysts figure out what to look for. For decades, scouts have judged catchers based on their ability to frame pitches — to make the pitch appear more like a strike to a watching umpire. Thanks to improved data on pitch location, analysts have recently checked this hypothesis and confirmed that catchers differ significantly in this skill.

For the full commentary, see:
ALEX PEYSAKHOVICH and SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ. “How Not to Drown in Numbers.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 3, 2015): 6-7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 2, 2015.)

Babies “Have a Positive Hunger for the Unexpected”

(p. C2) In an amazingly clever new paper in the journal Science, Aimee Stahl and Lisa Feigenson at Johns Hopkins University show systematically that 11-month-old babies, like scientists, pay special attention when their predictions are violated, learn especially well as a result, and even do experiments to figure out just what happened.
They took off from some classic research showing that babies will look at something longer when it is unexpected. The babies in the new study either saw impossible events, like the apparent passage of a ball through a solid brick wall, or straightforward events, like the same ball simply moving through an empty space.
. . .
The babies explored objects more when they behaved unexpectedly. They also explored them differently depending on just how they behaved unexpectedly. If the ball had vanished through the wall, the babies banged the ball against a surface; if it had hovered in thin air, they dropped it. It was as if they were testing to see if the ball really was solid, or really did defy gravity, much like Georgie testing the fake eggs in the Easter basket.
In fact, these experiments suggest that babies may be even better scientists than grown-ups often are. Adults suffer from “confirmation bias”–we pay attention to the events that fit what we already know and ignore things that might shake up our preconceptions. Charles Darwin famously kept a special list of all the facts that were at odds with his theory, because he knew he’d otherwise be tempted to ignore or forget them.
Babies, on the other hand, seem to have a positive hunger for the unexpected. Like the ideal scientists proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, babies are always on the lookout for a fact that falsifies their theories.

For the full commentary, see:
ALISON GOPNIK. “MIND AND MATTER; How 1-Year-Olds Figure Out the World.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 15, 2015): C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 15, 2015, and has the title “MIND AND MATTER; How 1-Year-Olds Figure Out the World.”)

The scientific article mentioned in the passages quoted, is:
Stahl, Aimee E., and Lisa Feigenson. “Observing the Unexpected Enhances Infants’ Learning and Exploration.” Science 348, no. 6230 (April 3, 2015): 91-94.

We Often “See” What We Expect to See

(p. 9) The Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon.
Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so.
But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings. It’s called “affective realism”: the tendency of your feelings to influence what you see — not what you think you see, but the actual content of your perceptual experience.
. . .
The brain is a predictive organ. A majority of your brain activity consists of predictions about the world — thousands of them at a time — based on your past experience. These predictions are not deliberate prognostications like “the Red Sox will win the World Series,” but unconscious anticipations of every sight, sound and other sensation you might encounter in every instant. These neural “guesses” largely shape what you see, hear and otherwise perceive.
. . .
. . . , our lab at Northeastern University has conducted experiments to document affective realism. For example, in one study we showed an affectively neutral face to our test subjects, and using special equipment, we secretly accompanied it with a smiling or scowling face that the subjects could not consciously see. (The technique is called “continuous flash suppression.”) We found that the unseen faces influenced the subjects’ bodily activity (e.g., how fast their hearts beat) and their feelings. These in turn influenced their perceptions: In the presence of an unseen scowling face, our subjects felt unpleasant and perceived the neutral face as less likable, less trustworthy, less competent, less attractive and more likely to commit a crime than when we paired it with an unseen smiling face.
These weren’t just impressions; they were actual visual changes. The test subjects saw the neutral faces as having a more furrowed brow, a more surly mouth and so on. (Some of these findings were published in Emotion in 2012.)
. . .
. . . the brain is wired for prediction, and you predict most of the sights, sounds and other sensations in your life. You are, in large measure, the architect of your own experience.

For the full commentary, see:
Feldman Barrett, Lisa, and Jolie Wormwood. “When a Gun Is Not a Gun.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., April 19, 2015): 9.
(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is APRIL 17, 2015.)

The academic article mentioned in the passage quoted above, is:
Anderson, Eric, Erika Siegel, Dominique White, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. “Out of Sight but Not out of Mind: Unseen Affective Faces Influence Evaluations and Social Impressions.” Emotion 12, no. 6 (Dec. 2012): 1210-21.

NOAA New Estimates Show Increase Since 1880 of Only 1.65 Degrees Fahrenheit

(p. A10) Scientists have long labored to explain what appeared to be a slowdown in global warming that began at the start of this century as, at the same time, heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.
Now, new research suggests the whole thing may have been based on incorrect data.
When adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agency said.
. . .
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that is critical of climate science, issued a statement condemning the changes and questioning the agency’s methodology.
“The main claim by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious,” said the statement, attributed to three contrarian climate scientists: Richard S. Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger.
However, Russell S. Vose, chief of the climate science division at NOAA’s Asheville center, pointed out in an interview that while the corrections do eliminate the recent warming slowdown, the overall effect of the agency’s adjustments has long been to raise the reported global temperatures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a substantial margin. That makes the temperature increase of the past century appear less severe than it does in the raw data.
“If you just wanted to release to the American public our uncorrected data set, it would say that the world has warmed up about 2.071 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880,” Dr. Vose said. “Our corrected data set says things have warmed up about 1.65 degrees Fahrenheit. Our corrections lower the rate of warming on a global scale.”

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN GILLIS. “Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Challenged by NOAA Research.” The New York Times (Fri., JUNE 5, 2015): A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 4, 2015.)

The scientific article mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
Karl, Thomas R., Anthony Arguez, Boyin Huang, Jay H. Lawrimore, James R. McMahon, Matthew J. Menne, Thomas C. Peterson, Russell S. Vose, and Zhang Huai-Min. “Possible Artifacts of Data Biases in the Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus.” Science 348, no. 6242 (June 26, 2015): 1469-72.

Chimps Are Willing to Delay Gratification in Order to Receive Cooked Food

This is a big deal because cooking food allows us humans to spend a lot less energy digesting our food, which allows a lot more energy to be used by the brain. So one theory is that the cooking technology allowed humans to eventually develop cognitive abilities superior to other primates.

(p. A3) . . . scientists from Harvard and Yale found that chimps have the patience and foresight to resist eating raw food and to place it in a device meant to appear, at least to the chimps, to cook it.
. . .
But they found that chimps would give up a raw slice of sweet potato in the hand for the prospect of a cooked slice of sweet potato a bit later. That kind of foresight and self-control is something any cook who has eaten too much raw cookie dough can admire.
The research grew out of the idea that cooking itself may have driven changes in human evolution, a hypothesis put forth by Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard and several colleagues about 15 years ago in an article in Current Anthropology, and more recently in his book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”
He argued that cooking may have begun something like two million years ago, even though hard evidence only dates back about one million years. For that to be true, some early ancestors, perhaps not much more advanced than chimps, had to grasp the whole concept of transforming the raw into the cooked.
Felix Warneken at Harvard and Alexandra G. Rosati, who is about to move from Yale to Harvard, both of whom study cognition, wanted to see if chimpanzees, which often serve as stand-ins for human ancestors, had the cognitive foundation that would prepare them to cook.
. . .
Dr. Rosati said the experiments showed not only that chimps had the patience for cooking, but that they had the “minimal causal understanding they would need” to make the leap to cooking.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “Chimpanzees Would Cook if Given Chance, Research Says.” The New York Times (Weds., JUNE 3, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is JUNE 2, 2015, and has the title “Chimpanzees Would Cook if Given the Chance, Research Says.”)

The academic article discussed in the passages quoted above, is:
Warneken, Felix, and Alexandra G. Rosati. “Cognitive Capacities for Cooking in Chimpanzees.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 282, no. 1809 (June 22, 2015).

Plant Breeders Use Old Sloppy “Natural” Process to Avoid Regulatory Stasis

(p. A11) What’s in a name?
A lot, if the name is genetically modified organism, or G.M.O., which many people are dead set against. But what if scientists used the precise techniques of today’s molecular biology to give back to plants genes that had long ago been bred out of them? And what if that process were called “rewilding?”
That is the idea being floated by a group at the University of Copenhagen, which is proposing the name for the process that would result if scientists took a gene or two from an ancient plant variety and melded it with more modern species to promote greater resistant to drought, for example.
“I consider this something worth discussing,” said Michael B. Palmgren, a plant biologist at the Danish university who headed a group, including scientists, ethicists and lawyers, that is funded by the university and the Danish National Research Foundation.
They pondered the problem of fragile plants in organic farming, came up with the rewilding idea, and published their proposal Thursday in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
. . .
The idea of restoring long-lost genes to plants is not new, said Julian I. Schroeder, a plant researcher at the University of California, Davis. But, wary of the taint of genetic engineering, scientists have used traditional breeding methods to cross modern plants with ancient ones until they have the gene they want in a crop plant that needs it. The tedious process inevitably drags other genes along with the one that is targeted. But the older process is “natural,” Dr. Schroeder said.
. . .
Researchers have previously crossbred wheat plants with traits found in ancient varieties, noted Maarten Van Ginkel, who headed such a program in Mexico at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
“We selected for disease resistance, drought tolerance,” he said. “This method works but it has drawbacks. You prefer to move only the genes you want.”
When Dr. Van Ginkel crossbred for traits, he did not look for the specific genes conferring those traits. But with the flood-resistant rice plants, researchers knew exactly which gene they wanted. Nonetheless, they crossbred and did not use precision breeding to alter the plants.
Asked why not, Dr. Schroeder had a simple answer — a complex maze of regulations governing genetically engineered crops. With crossbreeding, he said, “the first varieties hit the fields in a couple of years.”
And if the researchers had used precision breeding to get the gene into the rice?
“They would still be stuck in the regulatory process,” Dr. Schroeder said.

For the full story, see:
GINA KOLATA. “A Proposal to Modify Plants Gives G.M.O. Debate New Life.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 28, 2015.)

A Critical Mass Need to Be Motivated by the Telos of a Practice

(p. 227) The fact that some people are led into a practice in pursuit of goals that are external to the practice– money, fame, or what have you– need pose no threat to the integrity of the practice itself. So long as those goals do not penetrate the practice at all levels, those in pursuit of external goals will eventually drop out or be left behind or change their goals or be discredited by those in pursuit of a practice’s proper goals. However, if external goals do penetrate the practice at all levels, it becomes vulnerable to corruption. Practices are always developing and changing, and the direction that development takes will be determined by participants in the practice. Good practices encourage wise practitioners who in turn will care for the future of the practice.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Physicists Accepting Theories Based on Elegance Rather than Evidence

(p. 5) Do physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?
. . .
A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”
Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM FRANK and MARCELO GLEISER. “Gray Matter; A Crisis at the Edge of Physics.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JUNE 7, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is JUNE 5, 2015, and has the title “A Crisis at the Edge of Physics.”)

The controversial Nature article, mentioned above, is:
Ellis, George, and Joe Silk. “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” Nature 516, no. 7531 (Dec. 18, 2014): 321-23.

Mathematician Says Mathematical Models Failed

The author of the commentary quoted below is a professor of mathematics at the Baltimore County campus of the University of Maryland.

(p. 4) . . . , in a fishery, the maximum proportion of a population earmarked each year for harvest must be set so that the population remains sustainable.

The math behind these formulas may be elegant, but applying them is more complicated. This is especially true for the Chesapeake blue crabs, which have mostly been in the doldrums for the past two decades. Harvest restrictions, even when scientifically calculated, are often vociferously opposed by fishermen. Fecundity and survival rates — so innocuous as algebraic symbols — can be difficult to estimate. For instance, it was long believed that a blue crab’s maximum life expectancy was eight years. This estimate was used, indirectly, to calculate crab mortality from fishing. Derided by watermen, the life expectancy turned out to be much too high; this had resulted in too many crab deaths being attributed to harvesting, thereby supporting charges of overfishing.
In fact, no aspect of the model is sacrosanct — tweaking its parameters is an essential part of the process. Dr. Thomas Miller, director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, did just that. He found that the most important factor for raising sustainability was the survival rate of pre-reproductive-age females. This was one reason, in 2008, after years of failed measures to increase the crab population, regulatory agencies switched to imposing restrictions primarily on the harvest of females. . . .
The results were encouraging: The estimated population rose to 396 million in 2009, from 293 million in 2008. By 2012, the population had jumped to 765 million, and the figure was announced at a popular crab house by Maryland’s former governor, Martin O’Malley, himself.
Unfortunately, the triumph was short-lived — the numbers plunged to 300 million the next year and then hit 297 million in 2014. Some blamed a fish called red drum for eating young crabs; others ascribed the crash to unusual weather patterns, or the loss of eel grass habitat. Although a definitive cause has yet to be identified, one thing is clear: Mathematical models failed to predict it.

For the full commentary, see:
Manil Suri. “Mathematicians and Blue Crabs.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 3, 2015): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is MAY 2, 2015.)

Hamburger Grown in Lab from Cow Stem Cells

(p. D5) A hamburger made from cow muscle grown in a laboratory was fried, served and eaten in London on Monday in an odd demonstration of one view of the future of food.
. . .
The two-year project to make the one burger, plus extra tissue for testing, cost $325,000. On Monday it was revealed that Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, paid for the project. Dr. Post said Mr. Brin got involved because “he basically shares the same concerns about the sustainability of meat production and animal welfare.”
The meat was produced using stem cells — basic cells that can turn into tissue-specific cells — from cow shoulder muscle from a slaughterhouse. The cells were multiplied in a nutrient solution and put into small petri dishes, where they became muscle cells and formed tiny strips of muscle fiber. About 20,000 strips were used to make the five-ounce burger, which contained breadcrumbs, salt, and some natural colorings as well.

For the full story, see:
Fountain, Henry. “Frying up a Lab-Grown Hamburger.” The New York Times (Tues., Aug. 6, 2013): D5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 5, 2013, and has the title “A Lab-Grown Burger Gets a Taste Test.”)