Chris Boese's Weblog

Fortran: one of those events that deserves to be marked

I think it is safe to say that to some extent, we all stand on the backs of the work of John W. Backus. It helps we got the silicon chip from the alien spaceships and all... but hey, humans can talk to the chips now, and they don't have to use machine code.

On the other hand, the difficulty of Fortran was one reason I DID NOT go into computer science in college, where my dormmates who did had to study Fortran, and, unfortunately, deal with stacks and stacks of punch cards. Nope, that was not a field that even remotely interested me. I'd played with the punch cards a bit in high school, enough to do "Hello World," and that was enough for me.

I'm only here thanks to the grace of Steve Jobs, but I am glad of it anyway, and glad for those friends from college who got way better jobs than I did, for all their Fortran knowledge.

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times.

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

By STEVE LOHR

Published: March 20, 2007

I.B.M.

John W. Backus in the late 1990s. Fortran was released in 1957.

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

[...]

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand.

In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”

[...]

In the Fortran project, Mr. Backus tackled two fundamental problems in computing — how to make programming easier for humans, and how to structure the underlying code to make that possible. Mr. Backus continued to work on those challenges for much of his career, and he encouraged others as well.

[...]

Mr. Backus was a bit of a maverick even as a teenager. He grew up in an affluent family in Wilmington, Del., the son of a stockbroker. He had a complicated, difficult relationship with his family, and he was a wayward student.

In a series of interviews in 2000 and 2001 in San Francisco, where he lived at the time, Mr. Backus recalled that his family had sent him to an exclusive private high school, the Hill School in Pennsylvania.

“The delight of that place was all the rules you could break,” he recalled.

After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.

After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master’s degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”

Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to “software” as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958.

In 1953, frustrated by his experience of “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. “I figured there had to be a better way,” he said.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

“They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills — bridge players, chess players, even women,” Lois Haibt, the Vassar graduate, recalled in an interview in 2000.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

[...]

 

 

Yellowstone gets a hot throbbing bulge, and the Grand Tetons need a support bra

Live action at Yellowstone (over the past 20 years, just a blink of an eye in volcano years), which is starting to do the supervolcano version of heavy breathing, leaving the poor Tetons acting like over-50 heaving bosoms after reading a torrid romance novel!

Someone needs to blow some cold air over those Tetons, a good Arctic blast, to get them to perk up!

Woo woo!

Link: Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano - LiveScience - MSNBC.com.

Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano

Caldera bulged and deflated significantly during study period

Wyoming's Teton Range looms behind a Global Positioning System antenna in Jackson Hole.

View related photos

Jamie Farrell, University of Utah

By Sara Goudarzi

Staff Writer

Updated: 2 hours, 6 minutes ago

One of the largest supervolcanoes in the world lies beneath Yellowstone National Park and scientists say activity there is increasing.

Though the Yellowstone system, which spans parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is active and expected to eventually blow its top, scientists don’t think it will erupt any time soon. Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent.

Yet significant activity continues beneath the surface. And the activity has been increasing lately, scientists have discovered. In addition, the nearby Teton Range, in a total surprise, is getting shorter.

[...]

For the past 17 years, researchers used GPS satellites to monitor the horizontal and vertical motion of the Yellowstone caldera — a huge volcanic crater formed by a super-eruption more than 600,000 years ago.

[...]

The 45-by-30-mile caldera bulged and deflated significantly during the study period.

“We think it’s a combination of magma being intruded under the caldera and hot water released from the magma being pressurized because it’s trapped,” said lead study author Robert Smith from the University of Utah. “I don’t believe this is evidence for an impending volcanic eruption, but it would be prudent to keep monitoring the volcano.”

[...]

Data shows that the caldera floor sank 4.4 inches from 1987 until 1995. From 1995 until 2000, the northwest rim of the caldera rose about 3 inches, followed by another 1.4-inch rise until 2003. Then between 2000 and 2003, the caldera floor sank a little more than an inch.

And then from 2004 to 2006 the central caldera floor rose faster than ever, springing up nearly 7 inches during the three-year span.

“The rate is unprecedented, at least in terms of what scientists have been able to observe in Yellowstone,” Smith said.

[...]

Typically, when a big earthquake takes place on a normal fault such as Teton, the ground is pulled apart. This kind of extension or stretching causes valleys to drop downward and mountains to rise upwards. Thousands of earthquakes over millions of years built the mountains that comprise the Teton Range today.

But recent measurements showed a different trend. Researchers found that just the opposite is happening with Jackson Hole — the valley below the Teton. The valley is rising up slowly and the mountains are dropping down.

[...]

What the researchers think is happening, on a short-term basis at least, is that the bulging Yellowstone hotspot north of the Tetons is pushing against the north edge of Jackson Hole and jamming it against the mountains. (This is also causing the southwest part of the Yellowstone plateau, under the hotspot, to slide downhill at a rate of one-sixth of an inch each year.).

“The textbook model for a normal fault is not what’s happening at the Teton fault,” Smith said. “The mountains are going down relative to the valley going up. That’s a total surprise.”

[...]

So let me see if I get this right... Yellowstone's bulging hotspot is going down on Jackson Hole... but in the meantime, it's jamming itself against those not-so-perky Tetons...

Sounds to me like there are some geographic fixtures with a little too much pent-up primal earthy energy, in need of some release!

Whose fault do you think this is, anyway?!

Human Subjects Review Boards gone mad?

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

I ran into this kind of ridiculousness in grad school as well. The thing is, my study was massively attentive to research ethics, and I went far beyond whatever ethical requirements a review board might make, because the theoretical frame of my study took a strong position against the exploitation that comes with colonialist thinking, even with scholarly "territories."

But even so, I ducked out on the Human Subjects review with one quick trick. It may not have been the best solution, and, as the absurd issues pointed up in the article below highlight, the Review Board probably could have still taken an insanity pill and come after me.

Basically, even though I was technically conducting an ethnography in cyberspace, I chose to ONLY collect texts that would have otherwise existed in the public domain, a linguistic fiction that worked because communication in cyberspace domains is a hybrid of both published texts and live interaction.

The article below accurately points out, such restrictions certainly limit the kinds of findings that can come from any research. To my end, I still did "informal" research, and just removed it from any connection to my formal data-gathering process, through forming personal and private relationships in the group I was studying, but keeping them out of the study. But they surely did inform my larger breadth of knowledge on my subject.

Another reason why this is just nuts occurred to me when working back in the field of journalism the last five years.

Since the journalistic enterprise is not constructed as formal "research," journalists can do many more things to gather information from human subjects than academic researchers can. How does this affect how knowledge is made, how truths are constructed, when academic censorship becomes a major influence in the social construction of that knowledge?

Journalists operate with a Jeffersonian epistemology of sorts, where the supposedly free flow of ideas helps them arrive at the best-guess contingent truths. Yet, by default, because academics stay in their disciplinary walled gardens and rarely participate in public knowledge-making as public intellectuals, the journalistic research methods construct more of our common truths than anything else, simply because academics have ceded the Commons to them.

Meanwhile, Human Subjects Review Boards seem to have morphed into Cotton Mather and the good folk of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, seeing evil lurking in every nuance and human interaction, every specter, every hint of a specter.

And do you know why? It's because I've been coming into their homes in the night, during their dreams, and pinching them, over and over. Pinch, pinch.

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 28, 2007

Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone. 

Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Bernadette McCauley, a historian who was temporarily banned by an ethics panel from doing any research.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands.

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.

Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.”

Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process.

[...]

But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research.

According to a stack of reports, symposiums and studies by academic associations and scholars, the system’s “mission creep” is having a pernicious and widespread effect on humanities and social science research. Legal scholars also argue the boards violate the First Amendment.

The growing number of complaints in recent years apparently stems from an overall crackdown after a series of medical-research blunders beginning with the death of an 18-year-old in a gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

[...]

In the past year, discussions about what some call the “I.R.B. wars” have sprung up in specialty publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, conferences, scholarly journals and blogs. Although research proposals are rarely rejected, scholars argue that the requested changes in the wording of questions and consent forms can alter the nature of the study and scare off participants.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

[...]

Ms. Dougherty, an associate professor of communications at Missouri, said review boards were needed because “historically, social science has done things abhorrent to human subjects.” Unfortunately the current process “obliterates a lot of research,” she said, because untenured faculty and graduate students on a timetable cannot afford to spend months waiting for approval. So, for example, “instead of talking to people who are victims of violence, you might look at newspaper articles,” she said, echoing a common complaint that the requirements cause academics to steer clear of controversial topics. Research decisions “should be guided by science,” she said, “not whether or not it’s going to get through the board.”

Ms. Dougherty said she was willing to speak openly, unlike many graduate students and faculty, because she had tenure.

[...]

Mr. Schwetz said there was no chance that some subjects like oral history and journalism would be altogether excluded from review, as some academic organizations have urged. “If we were just to say, ‘Assume you don’t have to take them before an I.R.B.,’ I think we would regret that,” he said. But he said the new guidelines “will give a lot of examples and will give more guidance on how to make the decision on what is research and what is not.”

Some critics fault the universities, placing blame either with overzealous panels or with university administrations that have not done enough to differentiate between research that receives federal money and research that does not.

Mr. Freeman of City University said that within the humanities “most faculty members don’t know these rules exist.” He added, “If they in fact followed these rules, the whole I.R.B. system would grind to a halt.”

 

Oh no! Hendrix College is going URBAN?!

What is the world coming to?! I spent four of the most utopian summers of my life teaching at Arkansas Governor's School on the Hendrix campus in Conway, Arkansas. This photo below is the track right next to the faculty dorm. I suppose the focus on school is just too intense for hyperstimulated kids these days, but for me, the beautiful campus was heaven on earth, even with the intense summer heat in central Arkansas (hey, that's what the air conditioned faculty lounge was for!)

What will they do next? Will Massachusetts institutions Amherst College and Williams College start putting up bland cement high-rises? Hendrix College was just such a perfect place...

In the world of the mega-church, with fast food joints replacing church basement coffee and the out-of-tune piano, turning campus villages into generica malls can only be next, right about the time the rest of the world is abandoning malls for being so bland and look-alike.

I should talk. I taught at Clemson, SC, a "town" far smaller than the university that dominates it, and the "Death Valley" football stadium that triples the population of the university on game day. The "town" consists entirely of one of those fake "main streets" that is really just a college strip.

Link: Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize - New York Times.

Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize

Stephen B. Thornton for The New York Times

At Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., ball fields and woods that the college owns near the main campus will be replaced by an urban-style village.

By ALAN FINDER

Published: February 7, 2007

CONWAY, Ark. — Across from the red-brick Collegiate Gothic campus of Hendrix College in central Arkansas lie a few beat-up ball fields, tennis courts and an expanse of woods. Downtown Conway is only a half-dozen blocks away, but it is “not overflowing with amenities,” as Frank H. Cox, a member of the Hendrix board of trustees, diplomatically put it.

For decades, colleges like Hendrix in rural areas of the country embraced a pastoral ideal, presenting themselves as oases of scholarship surrounded by nothing more distracting than lush farmland and rolling hills. But many officials at such institutions have decided that students today want something completely different: urban buzz. “You can’t market yourself as bucolic,” J. Timothy Cloyd, the Hendrix president, said.

At the same time, officials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.

At Hendrix, construction will begin this year on a large urban-style village on the 130 acres of ball fields and woods that the college owns across the street from the main campus, with stores, restaurants and offices. Soon, officials hope, will come nearly 200 single-family houses, many with rental apartments above the garage; 400 town houses, apartments and loft-style condominiums; and a charter school with the college as a participant.

On the corner of the property, a large student fitness center is already being built, which will be available to the owners of houses and condominiums and to the apartment dwellers, probably for a fee, as will many of the college’s other cultural and educational facilities.

Similar projects are under way at about a dozen other institutions nationwide, including the University of Connecticut in Storrs; the University of Notre Dame; Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where a retirement community on campus is being planned; and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where construction will begin soon on 120 condominium apartments on campus for working people and retirees.

“It’s part of a pattern of colleges and universities realizing that they have elements that are appealing to a population far broader than 18- to 25-year-olds,” said Ralph J. Hexter, president of Hampshire College. “It’s often said of a college education, ‘It’s a shame it’s wasted on the young.’ ”The distinctive marks of many of these campuses are shops, restaurants, offices and housing that, together, create a destination. The idea is to produce street life and to promote social interaction.

Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies.

Students graduating from high school these days seem particularly attracted to urban settings, said Dr. Cloyd, the Hendrix president. Many come from the suburbs, he said.

“I think students crave the kind of vitality you have in an urban space,” Dr. Cloyd said. “The images that reveal an active social life are urban-based.”

[...]

      

The End is near?

Link: Doomsday Clock ticks up 2 minutes, to 11:55 | Chicago Tribune.

I have a special interest in the ticking of The Doomsday Clock, a symbol set by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. An unusual interest. That's because at the time I was born, doomsday  was as close as it has ever been, with the tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists didn't move fast enough to change it at that time, up from two minutes to midnight in 1953, but in 1962, still sitting at five minutes to midnight from a 1960 adjustment.

I used to tell my students the story about how Kennedy and Kruschev were each sitting there, poised with their fingers on the button that could start a nuclear conflagration that would end the world as we know it. Then I was born, and the two world leaders backed down, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

I mean, what kind of karma would make a person want to incarnate on Earth right at one of the major forks in the road in human history? I know, I probably had nothing to do with saving the world. Actually, aliens had been swooping around leading up to this time, I'm told by those who say they've been abducted, because the aliens knew it had to be prevented from happening, somehow. You know, those aliens can see the timeline of human history the same way we can look at a long stretch of a river from the air, right?

And we know now, from old Soviet records, what we didn't know for sure then: those missiles in Cuba were armed with nuclear warheads. We were even closer to doom than most of us even suspected.

Doomsday Clock ticks up 2 minutes, to 11:55

By Elizabeth Williamson
The Washington Post
Published January 18, 2007 

WASHINGTON -- The Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' ticking nudge to the world's conscience, moved two minutes closer to nuclear midnight Wednesday, the closest to doomsday it has been since the Cold War.

 North Korea's nuclear bomb test, Iranian nuclear plans and atomic energy projects posed as an answer to climate change prompted the Chicago-based scientific journal to move the hands of its iconic clock on its cover to 11:55. Midnight represents doomsday on the clock, for six decades a symbolic indicator of the threat posed by nuclear proliferation.[...]

Decisions to change the clock come from the Bulletin's board of sponsors, a group of scientists and policymakers that includes 18 Nobel laureates.

The group unveiled the new clock and a statement at a joint news conference in Washington and London Wednesday. "Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices," the statement declared.This is the 18th time the clock's hands have moved since it was created in 1947. In 1991, after the Soviet Union and U.S. signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the clock moved the furthest from doomsday it's ever been, to 11:43."Bush the father's policy decisions produced the biggest one-time move away from midnight the clock ever experienced and Bush the son's policy decisions have pushed the clock almost as close to midnight as it's ever been," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, and a former member of the Atomic Scientists board that sets the clock.

Wednesday's announcement was attended by scientists and policymakers including Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge mathematics professor and author, Royal Society President Martin Rees, and Leon Lederman, former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

[...]

I like Stephen Hawking's take on the matter too, and it's worth quoting.

Link: ABC News: Hawking: Climate Change Worse Than Terror.

Hawking: Climate Change Worse Than Terror

Hawking Says Climate Change Poses Greater Threat to Humanity Than Terrorism

The Associated Press

LONDON - Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.

Hawking made the remarks as other prominent scientists prepared to push the giant hand of its Doomsday Clock a symbol of the risk of atomic cataclysm closer to midnight. The move will mark the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward and Hawking warned that "as citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day."

Storming the gates to get women in science and engineering

Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times

I just love reading articles like these, and given that so many are having amnesia about the 1970s and the feminist movement, I'm SO GLAD conferences like these below are being held.

Storm the gates, indeed. Replace sexist gatekeepers! Make visible the invisible extra criteria women have to meet, the extra arses they have to kiss, and the glass ceilings. Women are excelling at university like no other time, outnumbering men as male students fall behind with the general falling literacy levels and anti-intellectualism of our current times.

It feels like dark ages, to see the overall decline in critical and creative and analytic skills not just at university, but across the board. So WHAT DOES IT MEAN if society is losing its marbles wholesale, while women are excelling academically at their highest rate ever, YET WOMEN STILL CANNOT COMPETE in spite of the declining intellectual standards?

It tells me that a reverse merit system has become the norm, an old boys network that isn't just smarmy and clubby, but one which overtly rejects merit on principle across the board, but especially if there's a female gender attached to it.

In other words, women will still get promoted, but they will be carefully chosen women, chosen for how well they level DOWN to the current standards, how well they learn the suck-up system, how well they carefully reveal only a lack of cleverness that won't threaten a promotion system based on de-merit.

Both women and men will have to stand up for scientific standards in these times, times when grants mean results that favor the grant-giver, when government studies have to get their results cleared through the White House before they're announced, when it seems that interested parties not only want their interests conveyed through the lens of corrupted scientific methods, the rich patrons also want to keep their own private alchemists from publishing any results that might advance science, in the name of keeping them "proprietary," patentable, trademarked, and OUT of the public domain.

Which throws verification of results out the window. Not that there's a whole lot of that going around anyway. Can't get the hot grant your university or institute demands to plow the same field someone else already went over.

So this is about women in science and engineering, to be sure, but it's also about the integrity of the intellectual products of our century, and, dare I say it? It's even about Enlightenment values, because those values recognize proven merit, instead of smarmy clubs and insider scams. The value of weighing and proving things, just as one might weigh qualifications and prove a woman might be the best person to get a grant or be promoted.

When contracts go to insiders with no-bid contracts, tunnels collapse, people take kick-backs, the science of our construction doesn't work. When science is corrupted by creeping standards of private alchemy, by the government dictating results as if it were the Inquisition, it means the power of analysis has been overthrown, proof discarded, measurement meaningless.

In that world, the proof of one's qualifications and credentials mean far far less than what you did to buy your favors behind the scenes.

I think it's one step away from one of the more notorious aspects of the Dark Ages, when those who held the greatest power, many princes and rulers, could not read or write themselves, and didn't need to. Every court had a scribe to do it for him, and it wasn't that important a position anyway. The language of power did not speak with the written word.

Contrast that to the time of the Greek democracy at Athens, where the teachers of speaking and writing, the Sophists, were among the highest paid folks around, and they got filthy rich selling their services, because a participatory democracy demanded it.

Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times.

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: December 19, 2006

HOUSTON — Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.

Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.

For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, “and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits,” an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.

So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it. The Association for Women in Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council are among the groups tackling these issues. In just the past two months, conferences have been held at Columbia University and the City University of New York graduate center. Harvard has a yearlong lecture series on “Women, Science and Society.”

This fall, female  scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science.

“The reality is there are barriers that women face,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meeting’s opening dinner. “There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.”

Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.

Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good — that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.

They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.

And they obsess about what they call “the two body problem,” the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family — especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.

Just having a chance to talk about these issues with others who face them lifts some of the burden, said Marla Geha, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who attended the Rice meeting. “It’s even just knowing there’s someone else out there going through the same things.”

[...]

One issue is negotiating skills, said Daniel R. Ames, a psychologist who teaches at Columbia University’s business school and who spoke last month at a university-sponsored symposium, “The Science of Diversity.” Dr. Ames said that when he asks people what worries them about navigating the workplace, men and women give the same answer: How hard should I push? How aggressive should I be? Too little seems ineffective, but too much comes across as brash or unpleasant.

Answering the aggressiveness question correctly can be a key to obtaining the financial resources (like laboratory space or stipends for graduate students) and the social capital (like collaboration and sharing) that are essential for success in science, he said. But, he told his mostly female audience, “the band of acceptable behavior for women is narrower than it is for men.”

Women who assert themselves “may be derogated,” he said, and, possibly as a result, women are less likely to recognize negotiating opportunities, and may beapprehensive about negotiating for resources when opportunities arise. That is a problem, he said, because even small differences in resources can “accumulate over a career to lead to significant differences in outcomes.”

For example, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said.

[...]

And because science is still widely viewed as “a male arena,” she said, a woman who succeeds may be viewed as “selfish, manipulative, bitter, untrustworthy, conniving and cold.”

“Women in science are in a double bind,” Dr. Heilman said. “When not clearly successful, they are presumed to be incompetent. When they are successful, they are not liked.”

Women do better, she said, in environments where they are judged on grants obtained, prizes won, findings cited by other experts, or other explicit criteria, rather than on whether they are, say, “cutting edge.” “There has to be very little room for ambiguity,” Dr. Heilman said. “Otherwise, expectations swoop in to fill the vacuum.”

[...]

A computer from 658 BC?

Is this cool or what? An ancient astronomical computer. And we think we're so special.

Link: Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited.

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

Mechanism hailed as more valuable than Mona Lisa
Device with gear wheels tracked sun and moon

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday  November  30, 2006
The Guardian


A reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.

The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.

The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials, clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek inscriptions.

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods.

[...]

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.

[...]

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years.

[...]

The research, which appears in the journal Nature today, was carried out with scientists at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens where the mechanism is held and the universities of Athens and Thessaloniki.

Happy Mole Day Yesterday!

It's after 6:02 pm on 10-23-06! What did YOU do to celebrate National Mole Day?!

I got fired up on it this year by the odd coincidence that I even noticed National Mole Day. A week earlier, I'd been talking with a colleague at work about how difficult I found chemistry to be, which was why I didn't pursue it beyond that one required class in high school.

My friend said she'd liked chemistry in high school, and did all right in it. I said the equations were what made me just crazy. She said, "Oh, I found those equations easier than math equations."

I said, "The moles were the worst part! I never could wrap my head around all that." (remembering my mediocre grade as well) She looked at me, puzzled, like she didn't know what I was talking about. "What's a mole?" she says.

OK, so what's wrong with this picture? Here's somebody who excelled school, who did well in chemistry, and 20 years later, doesn't even remember that the equations HINGED COMPLETELY around moles. And I performed poorly in chemistry, but I remember greatly my humiliation at not being able to master equations with moles (and it's more than 25 years later, for me).

Maybe it goes back to my dyslexia. I couldn't just learn something, or do some equation assignment the teacher gave us, without being able to visualize it and know why I was doing it. It REALLY made me crazy. I couldn't figure out why we cared about moles, why mole equations worked the way they did, and MOST of all, there were WAY TOO MANY NUMBERS to ever visualize in my mind's eye, which was the only way I really did anything. I am perfectly capable of performing abstract tasks, but I need to be able to visualize what I'm doing. And I needed a larger context in which to place it, just to be able to understand the task at all. I bailed in frustration long before I ever got to that point.

Now if they had done something so clever as to pin it to a date, like 10-23 for a mole is 6.02 times ten to the 23rd, I'd probably have done better, you think? Probably not.

               

Elephants: A great big canary in the coal mine?

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

It appears that wild elephants around the world are going ballistic, worse than the attack of "must" written about in George Orwell's classic "Shooting an Elephant."

I can't read the New York Times story below without thinking once more of Orwell's prescience, and how much the story, this time of wild, not tame, elephants, echos Orwell's symbolic warning of the dangers of a slowly dying but deeply exploitive Empire, the British Empire as the slowly dying elephant.

The article cites stress and habitat reduction as possible causes for elephant craziness (male elephants raping rhinos?!), but these are large and highly sensitive mammals who, like whales, communicate by subaudible sounds (to humans) over long distances. I'm wondering if some of the stress on the elephants might not also be from the air-transmitted equivalent of Navy sonar on whales, sounds we don't hear that mess with the elephants' finely-tuned hearing. You know, like what would happen to you if you had a stuck and constantly buzzing doorbell in your home.

But mainly I just wanted an excuse to quote two of my favorite passages from "Shooting an Elephant." This essay is just too profound for words to explain.

"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell

[...]

For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically, and secretly, of course, I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos, all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

[...]

In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time, it might have been five seconds, I dare say, he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

[...]

I have to add one godawful Orwell quotation at the end of the Times excerpts. I don't know why I have to, because the Charles Siebert piece is excellent and very well-written, and it moves me greatly. But it just seemed appropriate to give Orwell the last word.

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

An Elephant Crackup?

By CHARLES SIEBERT

Published: October 8, 2006

[...]

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in “a number of reserves” in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.”

The planet will always be Xena to me

I'm starting a protest movement! I even sent a letter to Mountain Astrologer magazine. If we refuse to call Planet Xena by the utterly bogus name "Eris," eventually the fight over the planet will start an even bigger feud than the Trojan War!

After all, there was a Xena episode where she rescued Helen from Troy and helped her become an uber-proto-feminist. That is surely a bigger deal than when Eris set off the discord among MEN that led to the Trojan War. The difference is a myth that has women at its center, vs. a myth that has men at its center. As in, it may be a post-modern planet named after a goddess, but the patriarchy is still around to demand the world revolve around it.

Link: A Dwarf Planet Gets a Name: Eris - New York Times.

A Dwarf Planet Gets a Name: Eris

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: September 14, 2006

The dwarf planet formerly known as Xena received a new name today, while Pluto was given a number to reflect the loss of its status as a planet.

Dr. Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology who discovered the distant ball of ice and rock that he nicknamed Xena, chose the name Eris, after the goddess of discord and strife in Greek mythology. The International Astronomical Union made the name official today.

“It is absolutely the perfect name,” Dr. Brown said, given the continuing discord among astronomers and the public over whether Pluto should have retained its planetary status.

In mythology, Eris ignited discord that led to the Trojan War.

“She causes strife by causing arguments among men, by making them think their opinions are right and everyone else’s is wrong,” Dr. Brown said. “It really is just perfect.”

[that is such a total rationalization! And it adopts a mythos right up there with Hera as a bitch-goddesss, the classic male interpretation of strong women, that the only way they can be strong is if they are utter bitches making men's lives miserable. I think Xena has a can of wup-ass to open on this fellow, even if he is a famous astronomer]

[...]

Pluto, now that it is no longer a planet, has been assigned the number 134340 in the catalog of minor planets.

[I suspect there are some Scorpios around the world plotting some revenge for this demotion that is far worse than one of Xena's cans of wup-ass.]

[...]

The discovery last year of Eris, which is slightly larger than Pluto and had been regarded by some as the solar system’s 10th planet, led to the demotion and minor planet number.

Dr. Brown had nicknamed the object Xena after the title character in the television series “Xena: Warrior Princess” and partly as a nod to Planet X, a massive planet long theorized to exist in the outer solar system. Eris now has the catalog number 136199.

When Dr. Brown later discovered a moon around Xena, he nicknamed it Gabrielle, after Xena’s sidekick on the television series. The moon is now officially named Dysnomia, after Eris’ daughter, a demon spirit of lawlessness. That name is also, in part, a nod to Xena fans. Xena was played by Lucy Lawless.

[...]