Things I don’t understand >

Thursday link post #1

Posted on July, 1 at 2:44 pm

Articles which I don’t have time to blog about in full, but which should interest my reader:

The (astronomical) costs of the Waxman-Markey bill by Robert Zubrin

On June 25, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate stabilization act, which would institute a cap-and-trade system to restrict Americans’ carbon emissions. While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: how it takes free markets to make a toaster. The accompanying website explains:

I’m Thomas Thwaites and I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.

After some research I have determined that I will need the following materials to make a toaster. Copper, to make the pins of the electric plug, the cord, and internal wires. Iron to make the steel grilling apparatus, and the spring to pop up the toast. Nickel to make the heating element. Mica (a mineral a bit like slate) around which the heating element is wound, and of course plastic for the plug and cord insulation, and for the all important sleek looking casing. The first four of these materials are dug out of the ground, and plastic is derived from oil, which is generally sucked up through a hole.

Part of the project consists of finding the places where it’s possible to dig up these raw materials. Mining no longer happens in the UK, but the country is dotted with abandoned mines, some having been worked since before the ‘UK’ existed, but all currently uneconomical.

Finding ways to process the raw materials on a domestic scale is also an issue. For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hair-dryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century – this is about the level of technology we can manage when we’re acting alone. I failed to get pure enough iron in this way, though if I’d tried a few more times and refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would’ve managed in the end. Instead I found a 2001 patent about industrial smelting of Iron ores using microwave energy.

Microwaves, as we all know, are just so much more convenient - and so I tried to replicate the industrial process outlined in the patent using a domestic microwave. After some not-so-careful experimentation which necessitated another microwave, followed by some careful experimentation, I got the timing and ingredients right and made a blob of iron about as big as a 10p coin.

The practical aspects of the project are rather a lot of fun. They also serve as a vehicle through which theoretical issues can be raised and investigated. Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the domestic toaster.

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A demonstration that graphs don’t have to be boring

Posted on June, 28 at 10:17 pm

I should be ashamed of myself for mentioning this website.

But I’m not.

So there.

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Does democratically elected mean you can ignore the Constitution?

Posted on June, 28 at 1:31 pm

Maybe there’s something I’ve missed about this story.

A new president has been sworn into office in Honduras, hours after the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya.

Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti will serve as interim president until polls are held, Congress said.

The removal of Mr Zelaya by the army came amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.

Mr Zelaya, who had been in power since 2006, wanted to hold a referendum that could have led to an extension of his non-renewable four-year term.

Polls for the referendum had been due to open early on Sunday - but troops instead took him from the presidential palace and flew him to Costa Rica.

Now hold on a second. Here’s the timeline.

2006 - Manuel Zalaya is elected President for a four year term, which under the Honduras constitution is for one term only.

2009 Zalaya announces that he wishes to have a vote amending the Constitution to allow him to run for a second term.

2009 The Congress (including large parts of Mr Zelaya’s party) rejects the proposed vote as does the Supreme Court which says that the proposed vote is unconstitutional.

2009 June 25 The Chief of Honduras’ armed forces rejects overtures by the President and reaffirms the constitution, the Congress and the Supreme Court’s position. He is sacked by the President.

The Honduran president has sacked the armed forces chief after he refused to give logistical support for a referendum on constitutional change.

President Manual Zelaya wants to hold a vote on a new constitution that could allow him to seek a second term.

A decision in Congress this week seemed to have halted the referendum, which the courts have also deemed unlawful.

But Mr Zelaya has indicated that the process of consultation will begin on Sunday as planned.

“I have decided to remove the head of the joint chiefs, General Romeo Vazquez Velasquez,” President Zelaya said in a televised address on Wednesday.

He said he had also accepted the resignation of his defence minister, Edmundo Orellana.

Mr Zelaya said his decision stemmed from “a crisis caused by some sectors that have promoted destabilisation and chaos”.

2009 June 29 Having instructed the civil service to continue preparations for the unconstitutional plebiscite, the Army removes the President from the Presidential Palace and flies him to Costa Rica. The President’s deputy is sworn in as interim president before the new elections next January.

So what is the problem? Yes, Honduras has a history of coups by the Army but the Army last ruled Honduras in 1981.

Does a democratic election allow someone to subvert the Constitution of a republic? Did I miss something?

Update:

It appears that the Honduran people similarly have a dim view of their President’s attempt to subvert the constitution. Read their comments on the BBC News Forum here

so, i live in Tegucigalpa Honduras and we feel a peace sensation, we can´t agree about to the president feels to be over the law, it was not a coup, it was a legally sustitution, and the people who live in other countries have to read our constitution to Understand the recently events.

Militaries did act, because The Supreme Court give an order about it

so now we are a little afraid about an extranger invasion to our country trying to Give to Mel Zelaya the power Again

Nelson, Tegucigalpa

and

I am a honduran and am not from a privileged class, I work hard to get ahead and I support the decision that our congress took, mel zelaya was trying to convert Honduras into another venezuela, we are peace loving people, and we love democracy, HE broke the law and he is a traitor to my country… please use all the power that you have to spread the news about the happiness that our country feels now that he is no here and help us protect our way of life, we love freedom…

Luis Castillo, La Ceiba

So it appears that they too do not agree that this was a coup d’etat or anything of the sort. It appears that the Army action was authorized by the Supreme Court and the Congress.

Of course these are dangerous times for Honduras and instability must be the fear of the people and politicians. Perhaps the feeling was that arresting and holding Zelaya might make him a martyr and provoke a reaction from the desperate poor that Zelaya claimed to represent.

In my view, Congress should have impeached the President - perhaps they still will do so.

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The endless dilemma of every new blogger

Posted on June, 27 at 10:43 pm

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EPA suppression of skeptical report on CO2 confirmed

Posted on June, 25 at 11:08 am

I’m just adding my lone voice to the rising clamour about the apparent suppression of a key report written by an EPA analyst, which had questioned the EPA’s own beliefs about the threat of carbon dioxide rise to global warming.

The Smoking Gun:

Anthony Watts is right in the eye of the political storm, and the San Francisco Examiner appears to have removed the columns written by Thomas Fuller which had examined the claim of suppression and found it to be true. Maybe they’re having a traffic problem, who knows?

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The Iranian Election: The numbers tell the real story

Posted on June, 23 at 11:31 am

In the wake of the disputed Iranian Presidential Election, here is an analysis of the electoral returns indicating strongly that the ballots were stuffed with large numbers of extra votes for Ahmadinejad.

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory in Iran’s presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran — where he is thought to be highly unpopular — and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi’s native East Azarbaijan province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad’s vote share across Iran’s provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

But that’s all circumstantial. The real question is whether the electoral returns show evidence of tampering. But how?

We’ll concentrate on vote counts — the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces — and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi’s actual vote count in Isfahan), we’ll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don’t change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don’t tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that’s exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

And that’s the key to the question: manipulation of results by humans would show a deviation from random results because humans are poor at producing random sequences and very good at producing patterns, which is how Benford’s Law is often used by financial auditors suspicious of accounting returns that seem suspicious.

In this case, rather than looking at the first digit, the authors are looking at the last two digits, which should be IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) rather like numbers produced by a fair lottery game.

So what can we make of Iran’s election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran’s government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates — Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai — is reported to have received in each of the provinces — a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

Here is another point - it is possible that the returns could be genuine results, but a statistical fluke. But its very unlikely.

Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran’s vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test — variation in last-digit frequencies — suggests that Rezai’s vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.

Need I add that the number of votes cast in the election is greater than the number of eligible voters?

h/t to the Freakonomics blog for bringing the article to my attention

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Fusion Power, Climate Change and Pascal’s Wager

Posted on June, 16 at 9:42 pm

This post may seem a little schizophrenic, but bear with me.

The BBC website, also known as the media arm of Environmental Panic Inc., produced a fascinating article on the struggle to fund the next experimental setup to produce fusion power.

An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges.

Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled.

Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away.

At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.

As long as I’ve been alive, fusion power has been 100 years away, so no change there. What is interesting are the reasons for the funding crisis - the costs have soared:

Iter was formally launched in 2006 as collaboration between the European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, China, India and South Korea. The plan was to build the world’s most advanced fusion experiment within 10 years for a budget of $6bn (£3.6bn).

But the grand scheme has been dogged by soaring costs caused by more expensive raw materials and increases in staff numbers. Emails seen by the BBC indicate that the total price of constructing the experiment is now expected to be in excess of $16bn (£10bn).

Professor Sebastien Balibar is research director for the French national research laboratory in Paris. He says that if the rising price of Iter is met by cutting back other research programmes that would be a disaster for science.

“If Iter is built on money having to do with energy or oil, that is perfectly good, I hope it works and in one hundred years I hope we know how to control a fusion reaction. But if it is taken from the public support of research in physics or biology then I would be very upset,” says Professor Balibar.

But hold on a second! $16 billion is a lot of money for you and I, but this is spread over the entire project over many years, and represents a fraction of the money being spent on climate change with economic vices being talked about to curtail the future use of fossil fuels, something that will cost trillions of dollars (and no, I’m not exaggerating on that at all).

Shouldn’t fusion power be at least as high a priority as carbon caps and other techological “fixes” to the non-problem of climate change? Here at least is a source of power that no environmentalist can claim is affecting anything - other than the fundamentalist greens who reify the Hunter-Gatherer existence and who insist that people should coerced into single child families or even no families at all, for the benefit of the “environment”. People like:

Sir David Attenborough CVO CBE,   Naturalist, broadcaster and trustee of the British Museum and Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew; and a former controller of BBC Two.
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta,   Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge
Professor Paul Ehrlich,   Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University
Jane Goodall PhD DBE,   Founder, Jane Goodall Institute, and UN Messenger of Peace.
Susan Hampshire OBE,   Actress and population campaigner
Professor John Guillebaud Former Co-chair of OPT, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, University College, London. Former Medical Director, Margaret Pyke Centre for Family Planning.
Professor Aubrey Manning OBE,   President of the Wildlife Trusts and Emeritus Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh
Professor Norman Myers CMG,   Visiting Fellow, Green College, Oxford University, and at Universities of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, California, Michigan and Texas
Sara Parkin OBE,    Founder Director and Trustee of Forum for the Future and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and Head Teachers into Industry.
Jonathon Porritt CBE,   Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO,   Chancellor of Kent University, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute, and former UK Permanent Representative on the United Nations Security Council

…in other words, wealthy people with no experience of grinding poverty, famine or high infant mortality - or any shame or self-regard.

But back to the article. There are scientists who believe that the experiment won’t produce any useful power or insight because of technical issues with the design of reactor.

MIT professor Bruno Coppi has been working on fusion research in Italy and the United States for many decades. He believes that Iter is the wrong experiment; it is too costly, will take too long and may not deliver fusion. He says we should be looking at other options.

“We are pressed for time, the climate situation is worse. I think we should go with a faster line of experiments. Iter should admit its limitations and it will give a limited contribution to fusion, but to get to ignition you need to follow a different road,” he says.

Another huge hurdle is how to contain gases that are 10 times hotter than the Sun. The materials required simply haven’t been invented yet.

Professor Balibar explained: “The most difficult problem is the problem of materials. Some time ago I declared that fusion is like trying to put the Sun in a box - but we don’t know how to make the box.

“The walls of the box, which need to be leak tight, are bombarded by these neutrons which can make stainless steel boil. Some people say it is just a question of inventing a stainless steel which is porous to let these particles through; personally I would have started by inventing this material.”

Quite. There are serious issues that need to be dealt with before you build very expensive experiment which is guaranteed to fail. But then there are the pseudoscientific arguments for why ITER should not be built:

Dr Holtkamp says the view that the project is to be scaled down is wrong.

“Fusion is not going to be the alternative in the next 20, 30 or 40 years, that is correct. But there needs to a long term plan; 40 years is little more than a generation. We need to think about the next generation and the many after that.”

Professor Balibar says that the end result of the ballooning costs and increasing technical challenges will be a further slowing of the path to fusion.

“The consequence of all these difficulties is that it’s not going to be tomorrow that one succeeds with fusion. But the energy problem and the climate problem are urgent,” he says.

“The global warming is now - one needs to find a solution immediately, one cannot wait 100 years. The solution to the climate and energy problem is not Iter, (it) is not fusion.”

Those of us who live in the real world must still be wondering where the global warming has gone - nor why this should be an argument against a potential technology which will help prevent this dread climatic misadventure.

And then I found myself thinking about Pascal’s Wager again. Blaise Pascal was a brilliant thinker until he had what I can only term a religiously inspired nervous breakdown and never produced anything useful again.

But his Wager was a simple binary bet on whether G-d exists or not. He averred that it is better to believe in G-d than not, because the reward for being a believer if the proposition is true far outweigh the negative impact of disbelief, especially if G-d did not exist, the result would be the same.

The fact that Pascal could produce such transparent claptrap and think it a valid argument, is testimony to how desperate some people are to win an argument - especially when evidence is not on their side.

But the larger point about Pascal’s Wager is about whether it is better to believe in something that is most likely to be false, just in case it might come true, has me thinking about the whole idea of Fusion power in the first place.

Here we have a situation where the massive funding is for an unproven technology with obvious technological obstacles that no-one knows how to fix, with the faith that sometime in the future we will be able to harness limitless energy without producing any nasty waste.

And it is faith that is really driving the dream of fusion power - not evidence that fusion power can be controlled safely. Its a Utopian dream wrapped in a fallacious argument of unlimited return for relatively small cost of willful suspension of disbelief.

I don’t know which is worse: the spending of vast amounts of money to address a non-problem or the spending of massive amounts of money to pursue a very unlikely outcome. Its as if science and politics have joined together in unholy matrimony to produce a compulsive gambler betting his food money on a ticket on the National Lottery to save himself from being attacked by a Yeti.

Posted in BBC, Religion, Skepticism, Uncategorized, Viewpoint, WeatherAction, Webcomics, climate science, environmentalism | No Comments »

The debate within science, heretics and scientific consensus

Posted on June, 12 at 1:06 pm

There will be quite a few posts in the near future on the subject of the scientific process, but the recent article from the Scientific Alliance on how scientific consensuses form and how they can impede scientific progress for years is a good primer:

The scientific method is a valuable way to advance objective knowledge. By testing a hypothesis against observation, it can either be falsified or supported. Not proved, of course, but nevertheless over time sufficient evidence can accumulate for a hypothesis to be generally accepted as the best available explanation. It is then known as a theory. Hence, although the vast majority of scientists and citizens (at least in Europe) accept Darwin’s description of evolution, this is still regarded as a theory rather than fact. This is important, because as our understanding develops, apparently satisfactory theories may be replaced by others.

For simple things such as the effect of the Earth’s gravity on objects we are familiar with, collecting the evidence is straightforward and no experiments have been done which contradict the theory of gravity. But over the last century, it has been accepted that classical Newtonian mechanics is actually only valid at a certain scale (which encompasses everything in our normal Earthbound existence). At the atomic scale, we enter the abstruse realm of quantum mechanics, and on a cosmic scale Einstein’s theory of relativity is currently the best description of what goes on across the observable universe.

The most interesting thing and the cause of much excitement in physics is the really large problem that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible with each other even though in their realm of measurement (the cosmological scale for Relativity, the atomic scale for QM) the ability of those theories to predict phenomena is one of the most battle-tested areas of scientific knowledge.

The SA article mentions a fairly recent example of a scientific consensus which was destroyed by the work of two Australian scientists:

A classic recent example which is often quoted is of the cause of stomach and duodenal ulcers. Many readers will remember that stress and spicy foods were considered the primary causes of peptic ulcers, until the Australian scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall discovered the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in 1982 and proposed that colonisation by this micro-organism was the main factor. Warren took the rather extreme step of deliberately infecting himself (and inducing symptoms of gastritis) and publishing the results before the theory began to gain acceptance.

In this case, doctors and scientists “knew” that stress and diet were the main causative factors for ulcers because that was what they had been taught and that was the basis on which patients were treated. It is human nature to accept facts rather than continually question them: indeed, society would probably not function if we did not behave like this. To overturn received wisdom requires either unexplained observation (as for the behaviour of the universe) or one or more awkward individuals who are sufficiently motivated to do their own experiments.

So non-evidenced based beliefs can be just as pernicious amongst scientists as other forms of faith-based reasoning amongst the general population.

Oh and by the way, Warren and Marshall won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005 for their consensus-busting evidence-based theory on gastric disorders.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas. By using technologies generally available (fibre endoscopy, silver staining of histological sections and culture techniques for microaerophilic bacteria), they made an irrefutable case that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is causing disease. By culturing the bacteria they made them amenable to scientific study.

In 1982, when this bacterium was discovered by Marshall and Warren, stress and lifestyle were considered the major causes of peptic ulcer disease. It is now firmly established that Helicobacter pylori causes more than 90% of duodenal ulcers and up to 80% of gastric ulcers. The link between Helicobacter pylori infection and subsequent gastritis and peptic ulcer disease has been established through studies of human volunteers, antibiotic treatment studies and epidemiological studies.

But at the time, Warren and Marshall were villified by specialists in the field of gastric disorders who believed these Australians were crazy.

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, for example, are contemporary former heretics — we say “former” not because they recanted their beliefs but because they provided evidence to prove their strange hypothesis correct. In the 1970s, the medical consensus was that stomach ulcers were caused by excess acid, stress or a poor diet. Marshall and Warren, however, had a different idea: they thought that the condition might be triggered by bacteria.

At first, their hypothesis met with ridicule because it flew in the face of many years of medical insight. The origins of ulcers, it was argued, were well understood; besides, the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to survive. Warren’s claim to have observed bacteria was dismissed as a delusion. “When I said they were there, no one believed it,” he said.

And so the pair gathered observation after observation, fact after fact. When Warren identified curved bacteria in the stomach biopsies of patients with peptic ulcers, he knew that a handful of intriguing observations would be insufficient to carry the day. He and Marshall examined hundreds of biopsies and established that when a duodenal or stomach ulcer was present, so, too, was an organism called Helicobacter pylori.

This correlation, however, was not sufficient to prove causation: the ulcers and the infections could have been the result of a third factor. Marshall decided an unorthodox experiment was needed. He drank a flask of the bacteria and was rewarded with an ulcer. He promptly cured himself with antibiotics, a cure that would be effective only if the bacteria was indeed the culprit. Before long, the Helicobacter heresy had won the day.

So what happened to the original consensus? It died. Alone.

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The “PhD Effect” and scientific prediction

Posted on May, 29 at 11:14 pm

Randi’s Theory of PhDs

One of my personal inspirations to look at the Universe through scientific eyes is not a scientist at all, but a conjurer, escape artist and illusionist called James “The Amazing” Randi.

Randi (as he is frequently called) is now semi-retired from show business, but is fully engaged in making speeches and writing books on the paranormal, upon hucksters and scam–artists, on fake psychics like Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne and all sorts of flim-flam that causes gullible people to be separated from their money. He does this through his own charitable Foundation, the James Randi Educational Foundation, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Now many people are beguiled into thinking that Randi is some mere conjurer. He most certainly is much more than that. Randi is a genius of first rank and a highly original thinker whose persistence has infuriated many counsels of the “great and the good” including that most precious of elites, the PhD scientists of academe.

It’s not that Randi is against PhDs or the people that have PhDs. He is a blessed and trusted friend to many people who possess those qualifications and more. He was a great friend of Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Its simply that in his long observation of PhD scientists that some of them are peculiarly blind to their own deficiencies as observers, thinkers or even experimenters, and can be fooled by simple trickery or deluded by chance or human error into believing the most preposterous of nonsenses.

Randi has his own theory as to why PhDs are more credulous than they would admit. He refers to it as the “PhD Effect” and whimsically relates that he notices at the PhD ceremony the Presiding Professor always wears gloves to handle the PhD certificates and wonders why this should be - and then Randi proffers the suggestion that it must be because the certificates contain a substance that transfers itself instantaneously to the new PhD holder through the skin, one of whose results is that the newly minted PhD cannot utter either of the following two phrases “I was wrong” and “I don’t know”.

NOAA predicts the next Solar Cycle…again

With that in mind, let us turn our attention to the Sun, and in particular to predictions about the future size and timing of the next solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24, made by a panel of PhD solar scientists led by NOAA, as seen at this link

May 29, 2009: An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

“If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

It is tempting to describe such a cycle as “weak” or “mild,” but that could give the wrong impression.

“Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather,” points out Biesecker. “The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013.”

That sounds authoritative. But what about the last time the panel made a prediction?

The latest forecast revises an earlier prediction issued in 2007. At that time, a sharply divided panel believed solar minimum would come in March 2008 followed by either a strong solar maximum in 2011 or a weak solar maximum in 2012. Competing models gave different answers, and researchers were eager for the sun to reveal which was correct.

This is yet another blow to the notion of “consensus science”. Last time (only two years ago) the panel was divided as to the strength of the maximum and the start of the next solar cycle, based on a lot of competing models which “predicted” the next solar cycle.

But here’s the kicker: all of them were wrong. No “ensemble” forecast, combining all of the models, would have saved them. They were all wrong.

Now let us return to Randi’s forbidden phrases of PhDs when reading the next paragraph:

“It turns out that none of our models were totally correct,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s lead representative on the panel. “The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way.”

Let the power of Randi translate that for you:

“We were wrong” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s lead representative on the panel. “We don’t know what’s going on“

That, I submit, would have been far more accurate and informative a statement than what was actually offered by the NOAA panel, which continues to give false assurances as to its predictive performance which are at odds with its recent history. But will those phrases actually be passed through any of their lips? I don’t think so, somehow.

On my other blog “Solar Science” I’m going to review the dismal failure of anyone and everyone to predict the deep solar minimum we are now in.

But the take home message from me is that predicting the future of chaotic systems is a continuing delusion of human society, and the people who will not be believed will be those who fail to embrace those predictions nor give unjustified credence or recognition to the people who make them.

Eventually someone will be proven right by Solar Cycle 24, but there are so many predictions extant that it could easily be by chance.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Zombie Science

Posted on May, 2 at 10:43 pm

No, this isn’t the “science of zombies”.

The following is taken from a wonderful essay [PDF] by Bruce Charlton on the real problems of publically funded science, and how scientific consensuses can kill real progress in any number of scientific disciplines.

The summary kicks off with this:

Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice.

In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas for so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status.

The classic account has it that bogus theories should readily be demolished by sceptical (or jealous) competitor scientists. However, in practice even the most conclusive ‘hatchet jobs’ may fail to kill, or even weaken, phoney hypotheses when they are backed-up with sufficient economic muscle in the form of lavish and sustained funding. And when a branch of science based on phoney theories serves a useful but non-scientific purpose, it may be kept-going indefinitely by continuous transfusions of cash from those whose interests it serves. If this happens, real science expires and a ‘zombie science’ evolves.

Now this is from an editor primarily focussed on medical science, but as far as I can see, there are no branches of the scientific enterprise where these phenomena do not happen.

How do bogus theories survive?

While it is simply human nature to respond to
immediate incentives, this phenomenon does imply
that theories may become popular or even dominant
purely because of their association with
immediate incentives – and despite their scientific
weaknesses.

In terms of the classical theory of science; bogus
theories should be readily demolished by sceptical
(or jealous) competitor scientists, who will denounce
the weaknesses of merely-fashionable theories
in conferences and in print. However, in
practice it seems that even the most conclusive
‘hatchet jobs’ done on phoney theories will fail
to kill, or even weaken, them when the phoney
theories are backed-up with sufficient economic
muscle in the form of funding. Scientists will – at
the margin – gravitate to where the money is;
and the paraphernalia of specialist conferences
(to present results at) journals (to publish in) and
academic jobs (to work in) will follow as day follows
night; so long as the funding stream is sufficiently
deep and sustained.

Classical theory has it that a bogus hypothesis
will be rejected when it fails to predict ‘reality’
as determined by controlled observations and
experiments. But such a catastrophe can be deferred
almost indefinitely by the elaboration of
secondary hypotheses to explain why not fitting
the facts is not – after all – fatal to the theory;
but instead merely implies the need for a more
complex theory – which then requires further testing
(and generates more work for the bogus
believers).

Furthermore, since the new version of the bogus
theory, with its many auxiliary secondary hypotheses,
is so complex – this complexity makes it that
much harder to test: further putting-off the time
when the bogus theory needs to be abandoned.

(Meanwhile, a much simpler rival theory – i.e.
that the first theory is phoney, and always was phoney,
and this is why it so singularly fails to predict
reality – is regarded as simplistic, crass, merely a
sign of lack of sophistication . . .)

And anyway, there are massive ‘sunk costs’ associated
with the phoney theory including the reputations
of numerous scientists who are now
successful and powerful on the back of the phoney
theory, and who by-now control the peer review
process (including allocation of grants, publications
and jobs) so there is a powerful disincentive
against upsetting the apple cart.

Apparently the fun and games now being experienced in climate science are part of a much wider malaise. Scientists are clearly incentivized by economic signals such as grants to support hypotheses that should, in the normal run of events, die for want of experimental confirmation.

So, zombie science is not useable by applied science.
What, then, is its function? In a nutshell,
zombie science is supported because it is useful
propaganda. Zombie science is deployed in arenas
such as political rhetoric, public administration,
management, public relations, marketing and the
mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs
taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt
to shape mass opinion.

Indeed, zombie science often comes across in
the mass media as being more plausible than real
science; and it is precisely the superficial faceplausibility
which in actuality is the sole and sufficient
purpose of zombie science.

So it looks and feels just like science, and more popular than real science because it gets favoured by the mainstream media, and hence gets more attention by funding agencies.

Zombie science can be seen as the ultimate consequence
of the practice of scientists evaluating theories
in terms of their propensity to enhance
scientific careers in the short- to medium-term –
when this propensity is unconstrained by the
imperative to use science in applied technology.
Immediate personal careerist benefits seem easily
able to overwhelm the more theoretical and abstract
scientific benefits of trying to establish and
adhere to the ‘real world’ truth.

There’s much more to chew on in the paper, but I’ve whetted your appetite so bon appetit

Tags: zombiescience, charlton

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