Addicted to the 'Net? You're not alone

Ever feel that you have to publish something as often as possible on the Internet? Crazy to see your name on the screen, in Google listings or on Yahoo!? If so, you're not alone.

Hello, my name is Richard and I am an egosurfer. The habit began about five years ago, and now I need help. Like most journalists, I can't deny that one of my private joys is seeing my byline in print. Now the internet is allowing me to feed this vanity to an ever greater extent, and the occasional sneaky web search has grown into a full-blown obsession with how high up Google's ranking my articles appear when I put my name into the search box. When I last looked, my best effort was a rather humiliating 47th place. You know you have a problem when you find yourself competing for ranking with a retired basketball player from the 1970s.

Not that I'm alone in suffering from a dysfunctional techno-habit. New technologies have revealed a whole raft of hitherto unsuspected personality problems: think crackberry, powerpointlessness or cheesepodding (see "Modern maladies", bottom). Most of us are familiar with sending an email to a colleague sitting a couple of feet away instead of talking to them. Some go onto the web to snoop on old friends, colleagues or even first dates. More of us than ever reveal highly personal information on blogs or MySpace entries. A few will even use internet anonymity to fool others into believing they are someone else altogether. So are these web syndromes and technological tics new versions of old afflictions, or are we developing fresh mind bugs?

Developing a bad habit is easier than many might think.

No argument here.

Phase change memory

A team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in computer memory technology that heralded more sophisticated and reliable MP3 players, digital cameras and other devices.

Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power.

"You can do a lot of things with this phase-change memory that you can't do with flash," IBM senior manager of nanoscale science Spike Narayan told AFP.

"You can replace disks, do instant-on computers, or carry your own fancy computer application in your hand. It would complement smaller technology if manufacturers wanted to conjure things up."

Technical details of the research were to be presented to engineers gathered at the 2006 International Electronic Devices Meeting in San Francisco.

Interesting and exciting. The quest for better memory devices never ceases, and never ceases to amaze me.

(hat tip: Ilachina)

The Three-Body Problem: Book Review

The following review was posted to the Mathematical Association of America's website.

The Three-Body Problem by Mauri Valtonen and Hannu Karttunen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (2006)
Details: 345 pages, Hardcover

Price: $80.00
ISBN: 0521852242

Category: Monograph
Topics: Mathematical Physics, Dynamical Systems, Classical Mechanics, Celestial Mechanics

MAA Review

[Reviewed by David Mazel, on 12/20/2006]

An undergraduate, having taken calculus and some physics, comes across the two-body problem. Specifically, what is the motion of two bodies in space acting under their mutual gravitational attraction? She quickly finds that she can solve the equations, and for given initial conditions, the solutions are conic sections. Then, the natural question to ask is: What is the solution if we now expand the system to three bodies? Here the problem is not so easy. In fact, it is impossible to solve in closed form.

This book begins by recounting what the student would have learned in that physics class and then goes into specifics of the three-body problem. Not only is the problem unsolvable in closed form; the solution, in general, involves chaotic dynamics. Nonetheless, there is much that can be learned by studying various forms of the problem under differing conditions. This book goes a long way to exploring these forms and explaining how the different scenarios can be approached.

The authors begin with a presentation of Newtonian mechanics and the solution of the two-body problem. The authors use physics to motivate the mathematics and derive the equations of motion — here, and throughout the book. Thus, the discussions are complete and present the ideas from the view of mathematical physics.

After discussion of the two-body problem we are introduced to Hamiltonian mechanics and some restricted three-body problems such as satellite orbits, and scatterings of bodies from a binary orbit. Other topics include escapes, three body scattering, and capture. The final topics deal with perturbations and various astrophysical problems such as black holes and the evolution of comet orbits.

Throughout the book the authors present diagrams to illustrate their points but these diagrams are limited in their utility. The authors could have presented more illustrative diagrams and figures to better qualify the text.

When I started reading I thought the book would discuss chaos and its relationship to the three body problem. After all, that's the first thought that comes to mind today. There is mention of this phenomenon, but very little, and no attention given to simulating orbits of three-body motion. For me, this was a disappointment.

Finally, the spirit of the book is mathematical physics; consequently, the authors often leave it to the reader to sort through the mathematics. I often found, for example, that I had to review earlier parts of the text and search for the equations — always present somewhere in the text but not explicitly noted nor cited — needed to follow the derivations and fill in many of the steps.

In short, this is a good text on the mathematical physics of the problem for the experienced practitioner. Everyone else, I'm afraid, will find it a challenge to read and follow the mathematics.

Mathematics in the court room

Ivars Peterson writes of two cases where mathematics comes to light in court.

Robots as Transformers

Remember as a kid how you could take a robot and with a few twist and changes make the robot into something else? The robot wasn't actually a robot and while it didn't move by itself, you had a pretty good idea of how, if you had the technology, that robot could move. A little imagination and your play robot was the real thing. Then, if you had a little sadistic bent to yourself, you could pull off a limb of your robot. Now, could you imagine how to make this deformed robot move? I bet you could.

Fast forward to the present and meet Victor Zykov from Cornell University. He and he colleagues have built a robot that, when it loses a limb, is able to visualize itself (not as seen by a child playing with the robot) and determine how to move with the limbs it has left.

So, this robot can remake itself in terms of mobility when it's damaged.

Read the article, it's fascinating and is a leap forward in robotics.

Wireless power: No more extension cords?

1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper 2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of 6.4MHz, emitting electromagnetic waves 3) 'Tails' of energy from antenna 'tunnel' up to 5m (16.4ft) 4) Electricity picked up by laptop's antenna, which must also be resonating at 6.4MHz. Energy used to re-charge device 5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4MHz

It's not the end of extension cords, but it is the beginning of looking at how we might use the concept of resonance to delivery electricity to electronic devices.

The answer the team came up with was "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.

"When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic told the BBC News website.

Resonance can be seen in musical instruments for example.

"When you play a tune on one, then another instrument with the same acoustic resonance will pick up that tune, it will visibly vibrate," he said.

Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays.

hat tip: Ilachina

Images by Neutrinos

This a photo of the sun. Not taken with the usual medium for viewing the sun (photons), but taken with neutrinos. Partly at night. Through the earth. It was photographed by the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan with 503.8 days and nights of exposure.

More on neutrios here.

Earth from Space: Smithsonian Institution

These sand dunes in Yemen are part of Earth's largest expanse of desert, which covers much of southern Saudi Arabia as well. Data from two satellites were combined to produce this image's vivid colors: blue indicates the rocky composition of the land surface and contrasts sharply with the highly reflective sand dunes in yellow.

Here's a wonderful site that lets you view our planet Earth from space. Unlike Google Earth that lets you move through imagery of the planet, this site allows you to view our planet based on ecology and social topics.
(hat tip: ilachina)

Understanding Black Holes

This is clever and instructive site that explains black holes in an interactive manner.

Quantum computers: Pure fantasy

QUANTUM computing will never work. At least, that's the view of one physicist who thinks that unavoidable noise will always stand in its way.

So says Michael Dyakonov of the University of Montpellier in France. The link has a short article about the noise corrections needed will make quantum computers for any reasonable size (in bits) impossible due to noise.

Radioactive isotopes for sale

I can't make this stuff up.

Hat tip: Atlas Shrugs.

Self-Reference: How much is too much?

This paper has the first author cited 28 times in the references.

Hat tip: Mini-AIR

Open source science: Model for Innovation

In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.

Sharing helps everyone to do better; if you don't believe it, ask a grade schooler. This turns out to be true in business as well. There was study not long ago (I don't have a link) that found the people who cooperate with others do better at work than people who keep their work private.

Images of the brain and universe

These aren't particularly new but I don't remember posting them. The first picture is a slice of tissue of the brain of a mouse. Note the fractal structure. Mark Miller from Brandeis did this.

The second picture is of a simulation of the beginning of the universe showing large cluster of galaxies surrounded by stars, galaxies and dark matter. Pretty amazing similarity, huh?

Bruce Schneier: Wrong on this one

I often read Bruce Schneier's blog because he covers topics in security and cryptography. His security ideas are often on target but miss the point. (He's concerned with the security devices and often fails to account for psychology and why people do what they do. More on that another time.) His posts on cyptography are another story. These are usually excellent and insightful. You should read these, but skip the security posts.

Tonight, I saw the following:

The Inherent Inaccuracy of Voting

In a New York Times op-ed, New York University sociology professor Dalton Conley points out that vote counting is inherently inaccurate:

The rub in these cases is that we could count and recount, we could examine every ballot four times over and we'd get -- you guessed it -- four different results. That's the nature of large numbers -- there is inherent measurement error. We'd like to think that there is a "true" answer out there, even if that answer is decided by a single vote. We so desire the certainty of thinking that there is an objective truth in elections and that a fair process will reveal it.

But even in an absolutely clean recount, there is not always a sure answer. Ever count out a large jar of pennies? And then do it again? And then have a friend do it? Do you always converge on a single number? Or do you usually just average the various results you come to? If you are like me, you probably settle on an average. The underlying notion is that each election, like those recounts of the penny jar, is more like a poll of some underlying voting population.

He's right, but it's more complicated than that.

That's a quote from Schneier's blog. I was mortified to see that Schneier agreed with Conley who obviously has no idea what he's talking about. If you have a jar of pennies you can count them exactly. The fact that the one counting may make mistakes is a fault of the process. To correct that, you need a better process.

Here's how one person put it in the comments:

I don't think that Dalton Conley has ever counted a large jar of pennies.

If your count doesn't converge on a single number, then you aren't doing it correctly. Clear a large flat surface. Create stacks of 10 pennies. Group the stacks of 10 by 10s. Collect the groups of 100 by 10. Check the stacks, check the groups, check the collections. Check again. Have your friend repeat the checks. Resolve any discrepancies.

This is accounting, not quantum physics. The pennies are all on the table in front of you and if you can't get an accurate accounting, you aren't trying hard enough.

This fellow, Ray, made me smile.

Astonomy Picture of the Day

I go to this site just about everyday. I don't always post their pictures, but oftentimes the pictures are too beautiful not to post. Here's one that I like:


From the site:

Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. In fact, the features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system. The term planetary nebula, used to describe this general class of objects, is misleading. Although these objects may appear round and planet-like in small telescopes, high resolution images reveal them to be stars surrounded by cocoons of gas blown off in the late stages of stellar evolution.

You've got to admit, this is simply gorgeous. Ah, nature, where beauty is ever-present and ever delightful.

Heads UP!

What do you see? If you're my pal Andy you probably see an asteroid heading straight for planet Earth. Kiss yourself good-bye!

If you're not him, then maybe you see Janus, one of the moons of Saturn.

Janus orbits Saturn and sometimes trades places with its sister moon Epimetheus. Janus has a largest diameter of about 190 kilometers and while covered with large craters lacks small craters. One possible reason for this is a fine dust that might cover the small moon, a surface also hypothesized for Pandora and Telesto. Pictured above, Janus was captured in front of the cloud tops of Saturn in late September.

If you're like my pal though, you needn't worry. I'm sure we'll find a way to disrupt our lives without need for celestial malfeasance.

Experience at the Apple Store

My IPOD shuffle would not be recognized when I plugged it into a USB port on any computer I tried; I tried at least three times.

So, I finally took it to the Apple store yesterday in Bethesda, Maryland. The store is open and we walk in. It's a small store, most space is for product display. I walk to the back and see a fellow behind a counter and a line in front. I start to wait but see a screen with names. I infer there is some sort of sign up computer in the front. I wonder around and find a woman, in her fifties, with an apple shirt and she looks like an employee.

She: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, my ipod won't charge or be recognized when I plug it in.
She: Yes, I've seen that before.
Me: Can you fix it?
She: How long have you had it?
Me: I got it around Jan or Feb.
She: Oh, then it's still under warranty.

Me: Can you look at it and tell me if you can fix it?
She: Do you have an appointment?
Me: Well, no, do I need an appointment?
She: Yes, you do.
Me: Can't I just drop it off and whenever it's ready I can come back. I am already here, in person. It's not working so leaving it is fine with me.
She: No, you have to have an appointment.
Me: I can't drop it off?
She: No. You need an appointment and we're filled for today. It's like getting your car fixed, you have to have an appointment.

Me: Well, no I don't. There's a key drop and I can just drop my car off for repairs. Can't I do that here?
She: You must know the mechanic.

Me: pause....
She: Would you like me to help you make an appointment?
Me: Sure, that would be great.
She: Here. (She hands me a card.) Go to this website and you can make an appointment there.
Me: This is nuts. (I walk out.)

How Things Work Home Page

I stumbled across this link while using "Stumble Upon" when I was on the phone a few minutes ago. Here's a sample of the questions, you'll have to visit the site to get the answers.

1547. If I were to heat up a brownie and a white piece of cake, would the brownie heat up faster by radiation transfer because of its darker color? — B

1546. How can light "travel" through a vacuum when there were no "particles" in the vacuum on which it could "transmit" its charge? — DC

For my industrial design project, I am redesigning the microwave oven and adding some extra functions. Is it possible for microwaves to somehow measure food properties such as calories, sugar, salt, vitamins, and fat content? How can I translate those readings onto an LCD display so that the user can see them, and can they also be transferred to a computer via Bluetooth? — IB

1544. If something is coasting or moving at a steady pace, is it experiencing a net force of zero? — NP

1543. Can/should a microwave be disposed with the normal trash, what if any are the environmental impacts of the magnetron or other parts sitting in a landfill? — DNR

1542. Why do deep water wells need a pump at the bottom rather than one at the top? — LG, Vancouver

Hubble is saved!

NASA's most famous observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, will get a much anticipated life extension after all. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced on Tuesday that a space shuttle will be sent to upgrade Hubble and add a few years to the lifetime of the venerable queen of the sky.

"We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle's manifest to be flown before it retires [in 2010]," Griffin said to applause at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

The move, though not unexpected, still had astronomers on the edge of their seats. The telescope is enormously popular and has brought back a wealth of data since its launch aboard a space shuttle in 1990.

"The Hubble Space Telescope has been the greatest telescope since Galileo invented the first one," said US Senator Barbara Mikulski, who pushed NASA to reconsider a final servicing mission.

Now we can find out ever so more about the cosmos. Kudos to NASA for a good decision.

Sexsomniac

THE first time it happened, Lisa Mahoney woke up to her boyfriend trying to have sex with her. "What are you doing?" she said, pushing him off.

"You started it," he said.

A few years later, a friend of hers crashed in her bed one night. The next morning he told her that she had made sexual advances toward him in her sleep.

Now, eight years after the first incident, Mahoney has a different boyfriend. She attacks him nearly every night they share a bed, aggressively trying to initiate sex - and remembers none of it in the morning.

This is strange but I'm sure it's quite true.

If you have ugly children, you're beautiful

Sexy males sire dowdy daughters and attractive females bear insipid sons – in fruit flies, at least.

This perverse pattern of inheritance may be one reason why not all individuals are highly attractive. It may even help explain why many of the showiest sexual displays are found in birds and butterflies, rather than other organisms.

The paradox arises because many of the traits that enhance a male's reproductive success are detrimental to female success, and vice versa. For example, female flies that devote a lot of time to feeding may have more energy to put into egg-laying, whereas males may do better spending more of their time mating instead.

So, let's hope the converse isn't true: If you have beautiful offspring, does that mean you're ugly?
I have three beautiful children, I guess I know why now.

Birth control: IUDs better than the Pill?

IT'S a tricky question for women in stable relationships. Do you stay on the pill, even though prolonged use slightly raises the risk of heart disease and other conditions, or do you switch to a less effective contraceptive? Now it seems there is an alternative.

Anneli Pouta at the University of Oulu, Finland, and colleagues studied 2814 women, all aged 31, taking the combined pill, no hormonal contraceptive or fitted with an intrauterine device (IUD) that releases small doses of progesterone into the womb.

Women on the combined pill had higher blood pressure, cholesterol and insulin levels than those who were not. Women fitted with IUDs, which are more than 99 per cent effective at preventing pregnancy, had none of these problems, probably because hormones are released locally rather than into the general circulation, Pouta says.

So, for young women the pill is fine. After the age of 40 the IUD seems the better choice.

Mars Rover: Getting moving

The Mars rover is starting to move again after spending the Martian winter hunkered down. Above is a panaromic picture of the red planet.

Printing on water

I forgot to post this. The link is from an email and I found that email tonight while sorting out my folder.

Just looking at this, a letter on the surface of water, gives me chills. Do you remember the movie The Abyss? Remember the scene where the deep sea creatures manipulate water, "at the molecular level" to quote one character?

Carl Sagan Videos

Click the link to start to view Carl Sagan's Cosmos series television shows.

Enjoy!

(hat tip: Ilachina)

Science: Professionals only?

Here's an article from Slate magazine where a sociologist, Harry Collins, was able to answer questions on gravitational waves as well as researchers in the field.

In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn't tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can't conduct experiments in it.

The article (weakly) argues that maybe non-scientist can participate in scientific debates and understand science. This idea though is very misleading.

To begin, the idea that non-scientists cannot debate with scientists is true. To truly debate the merits of a theory (not a theorem that is true or is not true, and please don't post about Godel!) each debater needs to know the theorem and have an insight into the field.

But, and here's the point, if the so-called non-scientist knows enough to debate other scientists, then he's not a non-scientist at all. He's a scientist, pure and simple. One need not have a degree to be a scientist. What's more, one doesn't have to know mathematics to be a scientist either.

(Hat tip: Ilachina)

Meteor Shower

Another beautiful picture from Astonomy Picture of the Day.

New word: Aleatory

Last week, October 16--20, I attended a conference on security technology where I presented a paper. At the end of the week there was a talk on the Evaluation of Risk from Acts of Terrorism. Interesting topic.

The author used the word "aleatory" and that was new one for me. Here's what it means:

1.	Law. depending on a contingent event: an aleatory contract.

2.	of or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance; unpredictable: an aleatory element.

3.	Music. employing the element of chance in the choice of tones, rests, durations, rhythms, dynamics, etc.

(From Dictionary.com Click here for the definition.)

Makes sense, and I thought I'd pass along my new vocabulary word.

Pamphlets for publishing

I ran across this site, or publisher really, from checking out a political blog that linked to a what I thought would be a book. The book, that really is a pamphlet of some sort, costs $10.00. Pretty cheap today so I looked a little closer. The publisher is "The New Pahphleteer" and a Yahoo! search led me to this site (see link above).

The site is for people to get ideas out in a short pamphlet instead of, or in supplement to, a long book. It's a great idea because I think people will read a pamphlet, take away an idea or two, and them move on to the next topic. We're so busy today, so bombarded with talk, television, pundits (some of whom are not even close to experts) that we have little time to read and digest ideas.

A pamphlet is a good way to stay informed within the short time we have to read.

New Blogger

Google has a new beta version for blogs. I just switched to it and am trying it out.

Worthless feat

A Japanese man recites pi to 100,000 digits. Is this not a totally worthless feat?

I'll tell you what would have been impressive: If he had calculated the digits instead of reciting them from memory. Now that would have been something, but again, not much.

New Scientist: Is your pet in pain?

Animals are being misdiagnosed for pain. Don't believe it, well, there's a questionairre to complete so you can see:

Wiseman-Orr and Reid have designed a simple one-page questionnaire that can be used to evaluate whether a dog is in pain, an approach they say can be used to objectively evaluate the welfare of any animal in any setting.

You know, if my pet is in pain then I take it to my vet to be put down. That's the way to handle it. It's cold but it's the right thing to do.

Sex Selection: It's available now (and has been)

More people are choosing to choose the sex of their baby than have before. It's still a small percentage, but the trend is clear. With in-vitro fertilization becoming ever more common, couples can easily choose the gender of their future child, and couples are doing so.

For the most part, couples are screening embryos for the right reasons - to avoid passing on dreadful diseases, said Dr. William Gibbons, who runs a fertility clinic in Baton Rouge, La., and is president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which assisted with the survey.

"There are thousands of babies born now that we know are going to be free of lethal and/or devastating genetic diseases. That's a good thing," he said.

However, the survey findings also confirm many ethicists' fears that Americans increasingly are seeking "designer babies" not just free of medical defects but also possessing certain desirable traits.

I don't know how to take this, exactly. On the one hand, the ideal way to conceive a child is nature's intended way (that has evolved over MANY years) with natural sex. On the other hand, if couples must have in-vitro fertilization (and I have no sympathy for those who do it who don't have to) why not pick what you want? Afterall, most of the fertilized embroyos will not be kept, so pick the ones you want. Still, it a terribly slippery slope and one that's being greased everyday.

Sunshine makes me happy

While hard to see in this reduced photograph, the two black spots against the shining sun at the International Space station (on the right) and the shuttle Atlantis (on the left). Atlantis has just undocked and moved approximately 200-meters from the space station. This photo was taken near Mamers, Normandy.

Women in Science Report

This article from the New York Times is so biased as to be unbelievable. It's about a study from the National Academy of Sciences that concludes there's too much bias in the scientific community for women to succeed. Now if that isn't hogwash, I don't know what is.

I won't comment on the fact that all but one person on the 18-member panel (that's 18, mind you) were women. Imagine such a panel of men finding that the scientific community is biased against men, you'd hear howling of prejudice claims from all corners. No, I won't comment about that.

I will comment that while I was in undergraduate school and then graduate school for 6-1/2 years (Master's and Ph. D.) women got special attention. They were held to lower standards than the men, not always, but sometimes. Plus, when it came time to look for a job, colleges heavily recruited every woman but didn't recruit men much at all. If there was bias, it was directly against men and in favor of women.

And here's more, women who go into academia are then gagainst iven special grants and financial support exclusively for women. How is that bias against women?

The truth is that science is difficult. It's difficult work, difficult to find funding, difficult to balance the demands of a job with a family, and difficult to keep at it, year after year. If the Nataional Academy of Sciences wants to know why more women aren't in science, they should look at social demands, not the environment of the scientific community.

Capacitors for Super Batteries

"Nanotube filaments on the battery's electrodes" from the link above.

Researchers at MIT at trying to make batteries that can be very quickly charged and be useful for laptops or cell phones. The key, they believe, is to fabricate capacitors with extremely large surface areas. Capacitors store electricity as an electric field between the plates of the capacitor. In order to increase the energy, the researchers are adding nanoscale fibers to the plates. These fibers increase the surface area and thereby increase the amount of electric charge that a capacitor can store.

That's a clever idea, but I wouldn't throw away the batteries you have just yet. These sorts of ideas seem terrific but in practice something usually (but not always!) happens to make the invention less than stellar. Keep your lithium rechargeables around; they'll still plenty useful.

On Perelmand and Yau about who proved the Poincare Conjecture

This article (see the link above) tells a great story of some of the personalities of the mathematicians involved in proving the Poincare Conjecture. It's worth the time to read it all.

The Math Was Complex, the Intentions, Strikingly Simple

George Johnson writes in the New York Times:

[M]athematics has been infused with the legend of the mad genius cut off from the physical world and dwelling in a separate realm of numbers. In ancient times, there was Pythagoras, guru of a cult of geometers, and Archimedes, so distracted by an equation he was scratching in the sand that he was slain by a Roman soldier. Pascal and Newton in the 17th century, Gödel in the 20th — each reinforced the image of the mathematician as ascetic, forgoing a regular life to pursue truths too rarefied for the rest of us to understand.

Last week, a reclusive Russian topologist named Grigory Perelman seemed to be playing to type, or stereotype, when he refused to accept the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for work pointing toward the solution of Poincaré’s conjecture, a longstanding hypothesis involving the deep structure of three-dimensional objects. He left open the possibility that he would also spurn a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Unlike Brando turning down an Academy Award or Sartre a Nobel Prize, Dr. Perelman didn’t appear to be making a political statement or trying to draw more attention to himself. It was not so much a medal that he was rejecting but the idea that in the search for nature’s secrets the discoverer is more important than the discovery.

“I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest,” he told a London newspaper, The Telegraph, instantly making himself more interesting. “I know that self-promotion happens a lot and if people want to do that, good luck to them, but I do not regard it as a positive thing.”

Johnson goes on to give a half-baked, half hearted attempt to describe Perelman's refusal to accept the Fields Medal for his solution to the Poincare Conjecture. Unfortunately, Johnson really misses the point. Here is a man who just wants to think about mathematics and study nature with his own intellect. It is a state of being few of us will ever reach yet we ought to be in awe of anyone who can do this.

In a society steeped in self-promotion for the slightest contribution to any field, we find a man who contributed to the Poincare-conjecture, proved it, and wants to leave that knowledge to others without interference. This is perhaps the most noble gesture we are likely to ever find.

The only person I know who comes close to this but misses by much is Richard Feynman who wanted to turn down the Nobel prize in physics because it would interfere with his work. Feynman accepted the prize, bought a second house with the money, and continued to work.

Perelman is not interested in a second house, wants to live where he is, and be left alone. Is there anything wrong with that?

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The International Astronomical Assocication demoted Pluto to a Dwarf Planet. So, our soloar system has only eight planets now.

In truth, who really cares? The idea that A is a planet and B is not a planet is semantics. A is some object in the solar system and it has a mass, location, orbit, etc. B is some other object in the solar system with its own mass, location, orbit, etc. The fact that A is more massive than B is relevant to how we calculate its effects and parameters. There are still these objects in space, regardless of how anyone classifies them.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

This cloud is from flares ejected from a C-17 plane. The pattern, that looks like an owl, results from the air flow over the wings, called wingtip vortices.

Pizza Fraud

A fraudster contacts an AT&T service rep and says he works at a pizza parlor and that the phone is having trouble. Until things get fixed, he requests that all incoming calls be forwarded to another number, which he provides.

Pizza orders are thus routed by AT&T to the fraudster's line. When a call comes in, the fraudster pretends to take the customer's order but says payment must be made in advance by credit card.

The unsuspecting customer gives his or her card number and expiration date, and before you can say "extra cheese," the fraudster is ready to go on an Internet shopping spree using someone else's money.

John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, confirmed the contents of the memo and said two separate instances of the call-forwarding scam have been reported so far in Southern California.

This came from Bruce Schneier's blog.

Poincare conjecture: Solved?

"Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.

As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought."

Dr. Grigory Perelman has proved the Poincare conjecture. While I don't begin to understand the conjecture, at least in a fundamental sense, much less its implications, this is great news for mathematics as well as science in general.

Every step to solving one of the truly remarkable problems of our time, for example, Fermat's Last Theorem, is another step to improving human thought and human experiences.

String Theory: All theory, no substance

Time Magazine has a short article about two books that question string theory:

[D]espite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn't been embraced by everyone--and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some of the doubters are becoming more vocal. Skeptical bloggers have become increasingly critical of the theory, and next month two books will be hitting the shelves to make the point in greater detail. Not Even Wrong, by Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit, and The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., both argue that string theory (or superstring theory, as it is also known) is largely a fad propped up by practitioners who tend to be arrogantly dismissive of anyone who dare suggest that the emperor has no clothes.

So, it's a fad that has shown absolutely nothing! No predictions that can be tested anyway.

That lack of specificity hasn't slowed down the string folks. Maybe, they've argued, there really are an infinite number of universes--an idea that's currently in vogue among some astronomers as well--and some version of the theory describes each of them. That means any prediction, however outlandish, has a chance of being valid for at least one universe, and no prediction, however sensible, might be valid for all of them.

That sort of reasoning drives critics up the wall. It was bad enough, they say, when string theorists treated nonbelievers as though they were a little slow-witted. Now, it seems, at least some superstring advocates are ready to abandon the essential definition of science itself on the basis that string theory is too important to be hampered by old-fashioned notions of experimental proof.

This is called being wedded to an idea no matter what. It's bad in general and terribly awful for science.

And it is that absence of proof that is perhaps most damning. Physicists have a tolerance for theory; indeed, unless you were there to witness a phenomenon yourself--the Big Bang, say--it will always be, at some level, hypothetical. But the slow accretion of data and evidence eventually eliminates reasonable doubt. Not so--or at least not yet--with strings.

"It's fine to propose speculative ideas," says Woit, "but if they can't be tested, they're not science." To borrow the withering dismissal coined by the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, they don't even rise to the level of being wrong. That, says Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago, who has worked on strings, is unfortunate. "I wish string theorists would take the goal of connecting to experiment more seriously," he says. "It's true that nobody has any good idea of how to test string theory, but who's to say someone won't wake up tomorrow morning and think of one? The reason so many people keep working on it is that, whatever its flaws, the theory is still more promising than any other approach we have."

In the end, scientists should accept string theory because it's the best physics has. I guess that's right up there with believing the sun revolves around the earth. It's a good theory and was at one time the best around, why should anyone have ever questioned it. And that theory had something string theory doesn't: At least you could see the sun and the earth.

It's all how you see it

I read this today on the link above and thought it worth reading for others:

A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?" Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a disaster?" Their household was richer by a fine horse, which the son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?"
A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiermen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.

From Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies, compiled by Moss Roberts, 1979, Pantheon Books

Cartoon for fun

Statistics: How they helped win World War II

This is quite amazing:

By 1941-42, the allies knew that US and even British tanks had been technically superior to German Panzer tanks in combat, but they were worried about the capabilities of the new marks IV and V. More troubling, they had really very little idea of how many tanks the enemy was capable of producing in a year. Without this information, they were unsure whether any invasion of the continent on the western front could succeed.

The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had been produced up to any given moment.

The basic idea was that the highest serial number among the captured tanks could be used to calculate the overall total. The German tanks were numbered as follows: 1, 2, 3 ... N, where N was the desired total number of tanks produced. Imagine that they had captured five tanks, with serial numbers 20, 31, 43, 78 and 92. They now had a sample of five, with a maximum serial number of 92. Call the sample size S and the maximum serial number M. After some experimentation with other series, the statisticians reckoned that a good estimator of the number of tanks would probably be provided by the simple equation (M-1)(S+1)/S. In the example given, this translates to (92-1)(5+1)/5, which is equal to 109.2. Therefore the estimate of tanks produced at that time would be 109

By using this formula, statisticians reportedly estimated that the Germans produced 246 tanks per month between June 1940 and September 1942. At that time, standard intelligence estimates had believed the number was far, far higher, at around 1,400. After the war, the allies captured German production records, showing that the true number of tanks produced in those three years was 245 per month, almost exactly what the statisticians had calculated, and less than one fifth of what standard intelligence had thought likely.

Emboldened, the allies attacked the western front in 1944 and overcame the Panzers on their way to Berlin. And so it was that statisticians won the war - in their own estimation, at any rate.

This is a lesson for today: Intelligence over estimated the number by a factor of 5. What does that say about the intell world now?

Preditors Prefer Dimwitted Prey

I think this is true in the human world, too.

Tricks to play on your wireless free loaders

Here's a cute solution to a common problem.

Suppose you have a wireless router that people are free loading on. You could encrypt your wireless connection, which is what I do anyway, and probably most people should do, or you can play with the surfers.

This person added software to either redirect the freeloaders to another site, kittenwar, or he did something particularly clever. He forced the images to be turned upside down on whatever sites they visited. Take a look. (Hat tip: Schneier blog.)

Book Review: Essential Mathematics and Statistics for Science

Here isa book review I wrote for the Mathematical Association of America's website:

What is a good way to learn and compute statistics? Is it to pick-up one book, read it, and apply the algorithms to one's problem? Should one have a single book for his/her work or many books? How much theory should one know? Lastly, how can one use the world-wide web with a text book?

Drs. Currell and Dowman have written a statistics textbook for students and researchers. Their book provides brief discussions, formulas, worked examples, and exercises (with short answers in the back) to illustrate topics and usage. In addition to the text itself, there is a well-organized and useful web site for the book (http://eu.wiley.com//legacy/wileychi/currellmaths/ or http://www.wileyeurope.com/go/currellmaths). The web site provides supplementary help, in-depth solutions, and study resources, among other topics. The text and web site complement one another and are excellent at giving the reader a workable grasp of the material.

The text begins with a gentle discussion of statistics, data, and numbers. It discusses units, conversion between units, and then measurements. The discussion and topics are a solid introduction for the beginning student. The book then guides the reader through manipulation of equations, relationships between variables (such as linear, quadratic and exponential) and discusses probability distributions such as normal, binomial, and Poisson. In the final chapters the book discusses statistical tests: F-test, t-test, Chi squared, and non-parametric tests. All these topics are highly relevant to researchers, well presented, and easy to follow. The multitude of examples clarifies the text.

The authors state in the first sentence that the book is for "biological, environmental, chemical, forensic, and sport sciences." This is important because the book, which presents the material at that level, is not the most appropriate for mathematicians, physicists or engineers—anyone with a deeper mathematical background or interest. I was, in fact, struck by the oftentimes cook-book nature of the discussion.

I would have liked more discussion of the mathematics behind the ideas. For example, the method of linear fit is given without any theory such as derivatives. The text shows how to find the parameters with Excel but not what the Excel routines do. Many readers probably have Excel and for those who just want the answer, that may be all they need. (One note: While Excel is popular I urge authors to look at OpenOffice software, www.openoffice.org, in the future. It is free, easy to use, and not proprietary.)

What about using the world-wide web? The authors employ the web for detailed solutions and supplementary help for the reader. This is indeed a plus. Obviously, other web sites can provide details on any topic one desires. But, I believe that having a text book with the web site is the better way to use the web. The reader sees a consistent presentation of each topic both on his paper page and his screen page. The textbook gives the researcher an easy to navigate source of topic, explanation, example, without having to load pages, or search multiple sites for details. Thus this book with its companion web site are all the better.

New addition to my family

Please help me welcome our new dog, Bailey, to the family. Bailey is a pure bred golden retriever and was born on April 7, 2006. We brought her home this past Sunday and she has taken to our family very well. She's playful, active, and sweet; everything a golden is supposed to be. Plus, she retrieves!

Sleep alone, improve your brain power

Both men and women do better mentally when they sleep alone. The effect is more pronounced for men though.

Smells by computer

A Japanese invention can sense a smell and then replicate it. Pretty cool idea.

If you couple this invention with the fact that smells trigger memories, this could be a great memory aid device. If that's done, this would be really cool.

Pair up, it could save your life

The risks of heart attacks for people living alone is double that of people living with a partner. Seems company does make you healthier.

My child's poop smells better than your child's

A study shows that mom's prefer the smell their own child's poop to that of other children's poop. One theory is that moms evolved to this so that they will care for their children.

Frankly, as a father, I knew that I had to change my child's diaper but I didn't have to do so for another person. My daughters babysit and they change diapers without complaint. But this isn't quite the same. It's one thing to change a diaper, it's another to smell different diapers (without having to change them) and prefer one smell over another.

A mystery?

Circumcision may stop millions of HIV deaths

I've written about this before. Circumcised men have a much lower chance of contracting AIDS than do uncircumcised men. So, not only do they not get AIDS as easily as others, but the chances of a circumcised man then passing it on is lower. (He can't pass it on if he doesn't get it.)

Of course, as the article notes at the end, it's not a cure and will not stop the disease. Still, lowering the risk of contracting the disease is a very, very good thing.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

This is spiral galaxy M81 that is in teh northern part of the Ursa Major constellation. The second brightest super nova is here. Note the bright yellow nucleus and blue spiral arms.

Go here to see more.

Interesting links

How our body's defences aid computers in distress

Did humans and chimps once interbreed?

Extrasolar-planet hunters find triple-Neptune system

Programmer speeds search for gravitational waves

These are from the current issue of New Scientist. I don't have time now to post them separately but they're interesting to read in their own right.

Our world, in perspective

Click the link for more images and comparisons of our home planet to others in the solar system. It puts us in perspective.

(Hat tip: Ilachina, and thanks!)

Bird flu in China: It's been there a long time

China has downplayed the presence of bird flu and kept the world at large in the dark. A death from the flu was never reported to the World Health Organization. This means the flu has had even more time to mutate to a human infection then originally believed.

A man died of H5N1 flu in Beijing in November 2003 - two full years before China admitted any human cases of H5N1. The death of the 24-year-old from bird flu came months before China even admitted H5N1 was circulating in its poultry. The man was tested for respiratory illness because of concern in the wake of the SARS epidemic.

It is not clear when the Chinese scientists who reported the finding discovered this, but they tried to withdraw their paper from the New England Journal of Medicine at the last minute on Wednesday. It was too late to prevent publication.

The case suggests that, as has long been suspected, many more people have caught H5N1 flu in China than have been reported, and for a longer time. The more human cases there are, the more chances the virus has to evolve into a human pandemic strain of flu.

"It's a very important issue that needs to be clarified urgently,'' Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said on Thursday in Beijing. "It raises questions as to how many other cases may not have been found at the time or may have been found retrospectively in testing."

What's up at the North Pole?

Click the link in the title for images of a webcam at the North Pole. .

Get the hottest pics from a cool place. (I couldn't resist.)

Genesis Spacecraft Crash: Bad testing

The spacecraft Genesis collected start dust samples from space and then sent its finding back to Earth. Only the delivery system failed (the picture shows the result of that failure):

Genesis spent 27 months in space, collecting solar wind ions thought to reflect the composition of the early solar system. But on 8 September 2004, a capsule containing the precious ions failed to release its parachutes and crashed into the Utah desert, destroying much of its contents.

How did this happen?

[I]n a detailed report released on Tuesday, the board has confirmed the backwards design as the main cause of the crash. The problem originally stemmed from the fact that the sensor design was copied from NASA's comet-dust collecting Stardust mission, which began development about a year ahead of work on Genesis, says board chair Michael Ryschkewitsch, director of NASA's Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate.

But Genesis used additional electronic components, so it was forced to use two electronics boxes rather than the single one used by Stardust. In the process of making that change, "the person doing the packaging lost track of the [sensor] orientation", Ryschkewitsch told New Scientist.

So, the engineer installed the sensors but did so backwards. Well, that happens, but what about testing the systems? Surely, tests would find this error.

The mistake was never caught because the sensors were never put into a centrifuge and tested, as originally planned. Instead, an electrical engineer – not trained in reviewing complex mechanical drawings – compared drawings of the Stardust and Genesis sensors, and incorrectly concluded the designs were the same.

That's the test. Some engineer, out of his field of expertise, simply compared drawings. Not exactly a test to believe, is it?

I spent years at the Navy's Operational Test and Evaluation Force and we had a mantra: End to end testing in the operational environment. Now, the truth is that that rarely happened. Frequently, testing was the last step in the devlopment of a system and by that time there was little money to pay for testing. So, like what happened here, the Navy did a similar thing. This episode with NASA shows what can happen when testing is short changed. Not a pretty site.

More information is here.

Noisy Classroom? Avoid Sound-amplification Systems, Acoustical Society Says

The headline is borders the rediculous. Of course, you shouldn't have amplifiers in noisy classrooms. They'll just amplify the noise making more noise, duh!

The article says that classrooms should be better designed for acoustics so that amplifiers are not needed. Somehow the title misses the point.

Happy 11th Birthday: Astronomy Picture of the Day

Astronomy Picture of the Day celebrates its 11th birthday today.

Happy Birthday and thank for the great pictures. We hope to see many more and enjoy them for years to come.

Y-shaped strings and sound

This is called a "Tritare" instrument. Look closely and you'll see that while it looks like a guitar, the strings are not lines, but rather form a "Y-shap." This shape gives the instrument a different sort of sound. Click on the link and scroll down to download some sounds and see what you think.

I haven't seen any discussion on just how to understand the sounds analytically and mathematically, but I'm sure that's coming.

Here's a link about this from Science News, too.

Face to face: The way to learn

A study of medical students shows that they learn best and like their work when the learning is face to face. This isn't news to most of us, afterall, we're human. Humans are social creatures and we need others and their company.

Let's remember this when someone tells us that tele-commuting, email, and phone calls are all one needs to work or learn. Not so, but some of us knew that all along.

Computer vision and understanding

From ScienceDaily:

Now [...] researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science have found a way to help computers understand the geometric context of outdoor scenes and thus better comprehend what they see. The discovery promises to revive an area of computer vision research all but abandoned two decades ago because it seemed insoluble. It may ultimately find application in vision systems used to guide robotic vehicles, monitor security cameras and archive photos.

Using machine learning techniques, Robotics Institute researchers Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have taught computers how to spot the visual cues that differentiate between vertical surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image.

This is a tremendous advance. On the surface, no pun intended, this reads like a small step in computers somehow telling if edges run vertically or horizontally. In actuality, as I see this (pun intended) , it is a way for a computer to interpret what it sees in a very human-like way.

Let me explain.

When we see something, we don't just see it as a computer might see an image. When a computer sees an image, it merely computes the picture samples (called pixels) within its field of view. Pixels are just numbers put in a certain order, like a rectangle. That's all.

When humans see a scene or image, we see the pixels with our eyes and we also understand what we see to interpret the image in a familiar context. It is this last part that is vital to humans and now to computers. To see what I'm talking about, recall that you can tell the distance to a building simply by looking. In truth, there's no real way for you to know that distance. You can't actually tell because usually you don't know the height of the building.

The way you intuit the distance is through your understanding and early knowledge of the usual sizes of buildings (say, by the number of rows of windows that tell you how many floors there are). From this information you get an idea for the distance to that building. That is, your mind allows you to tell distance based on image appreciation from earlier experiences.

This step with computers being capable of similar reasoning and learning is truly amazing and one more step to computers seeing as we see.

Simpson's Math

Erica Klarreich writes about the math on The Simpson's. The entire article is worth your time.

I didn't know that so many of the show's writers are scientists. No wonder the humor is smart, fast, and incredibly fresh with each episode.

This was one of my personal favorites:

"The Simpsons writers often play on mathematical cultural stereotypes, extracting humor by exaggerating both the mathematical illiteracy of the U.S. public and the nerdiness and self-aggrandizement of the mathematically gifted. In a characteristic exchange, in the third-dimension episode, mad scientist Professor Frink tries to explain to Police Chief Wiggum the nature of the three-dimensional space through which Homer Simpson is wandering.

Prof. Frink - Discoverer of the Frinkahedron, or cube. Fox Broadcasting Company

Frink: It should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology that Homer Simpson has stumbled into the third dimension. . . . (drawing on a blackboard) Here is an ordinary square.

Wiggum: Whoa, whoa—slow down, egghead!

Frink: But suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe, along the hypothetical z-axis, there. This forms a three-dimensional object known as a "cube," or "Frinkahedron" in honor of its discoverer.

"One of the themes we've harped on is Professor Frink trying to seize credit for something," Keeler says. "That should be very familiar to people in academia."

Just terrific.

Here's a link for the anwer to final question in the Science News article.

More from New Scientist

Article one:

"Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University, both in Berlin, have used underwater electrical discharges to generate luminous plasma clouds resembling ball lightning that last for nearly half a second and are up to 20 centimetres across.

They hope that these artificial entities will help them understand the bizarre phenomenon and perhaps even provide insights into the hot plasmas needed for fusion power plants.

You can watch a super-slow-motion video of the ball lightning here (3.7MB AVI)."

Article two:
"What happened to Titan's craters? NASA's Cassini mission should have seen hundreds of impact craters on Saturn's giant moon, but so far it has only spotted a handful.

The latest clues in the mystery of the missing craters suggest a conspiracy between volcanoes, rain and settling soot - perhaps aided by an eggshell-thin crust.

Cassini has aimed its radar at Titan five times, mapping five narrow strips of terrain. In a paper published in Nature, the radar team analyse the second strip in detail."

Personals are not so personal: Government is looking

"New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

People are signing up to social networking sites like myspace.com because they think it's cool to tell total strangers something about themselves. Sure, I guess I can see that, I mean, the guy in Iowa is dying to know more about my likes and dislikes, so why not tell him and whoever else is interested.

Well, the National Security Agency is interested but it's not because they want to be friends. They can use the very data people post to connect people and discover patterns that you yourself may not see. Ordinarily, this isn't really a problem because most of what people post is harmless, more is absolutely meaningless. But, here's the problem: it may be meaningless to you and most people, but if someone knew another item of information that item could be used to infer something about you that, whether true or not, could be problematic.

For example, suppose you post pictures of children and talk about how much you like kids. Harmless, even laudatory. But now suppose someone who is "close" to you, say, similar name or lives near you, or goes to your school, posts something about pediophilia. Well, one can posting could be connected to another and, viola, you are a pediophile. (The usual problem especially for the NSA, revolves around terrorism, but the idea is identical.)

Of course, you're innocent but now you have to prove that. Proof of innocence is very difficult not to mention the time and effort you have to go through.

In short, social network sites are attractive, even fun. But there's a downside that you may not see. Start to look for it and stop posting personal information.

MInd control: it's here

This is an interesting article on how Peter Brunner, wearing a skull cap with electrodes, can think, and only think, of what he wants to type. As it by magic his thoughts are transfered to the computer screen. He is typing without fingers. He is typing with thought.

As wonderful as this is, I just can't help thinking it's a hoax. Now, I'm sure it's real but this somehow seems like one of those demonstrations that look great. But we find out years later it was really just a magic act like when a magician makes a dove apprear from an empty hat.

Hopefully, this is real and that it is continually developed so that the handicapped can use it for communication. How wonderful that would be.

How are Science Journals Like Google?

The answer: They, like pages cited by Google, try to improve their ranking by increasing the number of papers that cite that journal.

Dr. West, the Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Physiology at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, is one of the world's leading authorities on respiratory physiology and was a member of Sir Edmund Hillary's 1960 expedition to the Himalayas. After he submitted a paper on the design of the human lung to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an editor emailed him that the paper was basically fine. There was just one thing: Dr. West should cite more studies that had appeared in the respiratory journal.

If that seems like a surprising request, in the world of scientific publishing it no longer is. Scientists and editors say scientific journals increasingly are manipulating rankings -- called "impact factors" -- that are based on how often papers they publish are cited by other researchers.

"I was appalled," says Dr. West of the request. "This was a clear abuse of the system because they were trying to rig their impact factor."

Just as television shows have Nielsen ratings and colleges have the U.S. News rankings, science journals have impact factors. Now there is mounting concern that attempts to manipulate impact factors are harming scientific research.

So, here's a journal that wants to up its score; the editor tells the author to cite more references from that journal. That's the same as increasing a page rank from Google by having more links in the page. Granted the comparison is a little weak because Google increases the score for a page based on pages that point to that page. Nonetheless, it's not too much of a stretch to make the comparison.

Why do this? From the article:

Impact factors are calculated annually for some 5,900 science journals by Thomson Scientific, part of the Thomson Corp., of Stamford, Conn. Numbers less than 2 are considered low. Top journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, score in the double digits. Researchers and editors say manipulating the score is more common among smaller, newer journals, which struggle for visibility against more established rivals.

Thomson Scientific is set to release the latest impact factors this month. Thomson has long advocated that journal editors respect the integrity of the rankings. "The energy that's put into efforts to game the system would be better spent publishing excellent papers," says Jim Testa, director of editorial development at the company.

Impact factors matter to publishers' bottom lines because librarians rely on them to make purchasing decisions. Annual subscriptions to some journals can cost upwards of $10,000.

The result, says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals, is that "we have become whores to the impact factor." He adds that his society doesn't engage in these practices.

What's the impact and future of these "impact factors?"

Scientists and publishers worry that the cult of the impact factor is skewing the direction of research. One concern, says Mary Ann Liebert, president and chief executive of her publishing company, is that scientists may jump on research bandwagons, because journals prefer popular, mainstream topics, and eschew less-popular approaches for fear that only a lesser-tier journal will take their papers. When scientists are discouraged from pursuing unpopular ideas, finding the correct explanation of a phenomenon or a disease takes longer.

"If you look at journals that have a high impact factor, they tend to be trendy," says immunologist David Woodland of the nonprofit Trudeau Institute, of Saranac Lake, N.Y., and the incoming editor of Viral Immunology. He recalls one journal that accepted immunology papers only if they focused on the development of thymus cells, a once-hot topic. "It's hard to get into them if you're ahead of the curve."

As examples of that, Ms. Liebert cites early research on AIDS, gene therapy and psychopharmacology, all of which had trouble finding homes in established journals. "How much that relates to impact factor is hard to know," she says. "But editors and publishers both know that papers related to cutting-edge and perhaps obscure research are not going to be highly cited."

Another concern is that impact factors, since they measure only how many times other scientists cite a paper, say nothing about whether journals publish studies that lead to something useful. As a result, there is pressure to publish studies that appeal to an academic audience oriented toward basic research.

Journals' "questionable" steps to raise their impact factors "affect the public," Ms. Liebert says. "Ultimately, funding is allocated to scientists and topics perceived to be of the greatest importance. If impact factor is being manipulated, then scientists and studies that seem important will be funded perhaps at the expense of those that seem less important."

This makes me wonder just how much science and research is done for publicity and for simple ratings. Like television shows that pander to ratings and show audience what sells but not nececsarily what's important, journals now look at what's popular and not what's needed. This is one more data point showing how science is degrading itself and doing no one any favors.

More beauty in the cosmos

I can't resist the constant lure of beauty outside our planet. I go to the Astronomy Picture of the Day just about everyday, if only to admire what can't be seen with the naked eye. Yet, just overhead is a beauty, stars, comets, planets, that while out of reach are "out of sight."

Wow!

Cloaking: Not just in Startrek

Some physicists have worked out what it would take to make a cloaking device. The device would effect light to make it bend around an object so that you wouldn't be able to see the object. At present this is only possible for wavelengths longer than visible light. But, wait a few years and the bugs may get worked out.

Physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible.

Light normally bounces off an object's surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.

Metamaterials are exotic composites made of electronic components such as wires and inductors that can be engineered to precisely control the way light travels through them.

Penile growth

In a “landmark development” researchers have created an “artificial penis” that has allowed rabbits with damaged penises to successfully mate. The urologists say that the procedure might one day help treat men with severe erectile dysfunction.

The technique involves a new method of tissue-engineering which enabled the team to use the animals' own cells to build the spongy tissue structure that makes up the bulk of the penis.

The functioning penises were the latest achievement of Anthony Atala and colleagues at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US. This is the same team that hit the headlines in April with the first bio-engineered human bladders which were successfully implanted into patients.

This is one more significant step along the way to helping people even more. This same group was able to grow human bladders and now penile tissue. As these developments advance, I think we should keep in mind just how important animal experimentation is and how much that helps people.

Global warming: Not what the alarmists think

Pete DuPont writes in an op-ed on the Wall Street Journal opinion site about global warming:

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

When it comes to visible environmental improvements, America is also making substantial progress:

• The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

Environmentally speaking, America has had a very good third of a century; the economy has grown and pollutants and their impacts upon society are substantially down.

Read the rest and rest easy.

Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications: Expository Mathematics in the Digital Age

This article makes excellent points in how we should go about publishing articles on the web. Much of what it recommends applies to non-mathematical articles and math writings. Below is what I submitted in comment. Take a minute to read the article and then my comments.

The article presents some excellent points for authors such as staying away from propietary products like Word or Excel. Also, it makes the point that while the author may lay out an article in a certain format the is no way to know how the reader will see that article. Hence authors should be careful with reliance on formatting and instead concentrate on content.

Who can say how, for example, Firefox will display compared to Opera?

All good points and worth saying. I must, however, disagree with the articles reliance on MathML. I've not seen any software that make MathML easy to use. Furthermore, it is only beginning to see support so readers can't count on their browser supporting it.

If you're writing an article with equations how do you go about doing so easily? I don't see MathML as a solution because there's no software that I found that allows authors to use this easily. Easy is the key, especially for equations.

I suggest authors write their work in whatever software they want but post the article in pdf format. Sure, pdf is Adobe's format but the reader software is free and compatible with most operating systems. The reader will see the text and equations as intended by the author. I don't know how it will display on a PDA but I don't think you can get everything anyway. We just can't get universal article presentation on any device in any format.

Also, I would like to point out that Octave is an open source product (free) that is very close to Matlab. It is easy to download, install, and use. If authors would use it for their programming, readers could use Octave to run the scripts without needing costly software like Matlab, Mathematica or Maple.