The Sun: What a sight

I can't get enough of these:

Explanation: Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night can keep the space-based SOlar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) from watching the Sun. In fact, from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers sunward of planet Earth, SOHO's cameras can always monitor the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. But only during a total solar eclipse can earth-based observers see the lovely coronal streamers and structures - when the Moon briefly blocks the overwhelmingly bright solar surface. In this composite view, SOHO's uninterrupted view of the solar corona above the solar photosphere (center) and corona far beyond the Sun's disk, are shown in orange hues. The middle, donut-shaped region is the corona as recorded by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition to Kastelorizo Island, Greece during the March 29th total solar eclipse. Merging ground and space-based views allows astronomers to trace features in the corona that reach from just above the Sun's surface into the solar wind.

Are you boring your friends?

There is now a device that lets users know if they are boring the people they're talking to.

A DEVICE that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them."

While developed for people with autism, I have to believe that many folks I know could use this as well.

Seriously, the device is quite interesting in that in uses a tiny camera to recognize facial features in listeners. Score one more for technology!

Ask: Try it!

Walt Mossberg, in his column with the Wall Street Journal, writes:

[T]he overhaul has been far more than just marketing. Ads have been cut back to just three at the top and five at the bottom of each page, and they run on a colored background so you know they're not real search results. Instead of running ads down the right side of the page, as Google does, Ask uses that space to help the user refine search results.

In general, Ask's search-results pages are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads.

Ask.com has its search engine, but it also has news, maps, weather, encyclopeida, blogs and other interesting things. Give it a try. You'll be surprised how good it is.

Editorial: Books today

I wish to take a moment to reflect on some of the books I see today. In particular, let me begin by asking: What is the purpose to a book? Is it to be read? Is it for reference? Is it for enjoyment?

I was reading The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose last night before going to sleep. Yes, I know, that's not usual bedtime reading but that's what I like, usually. This book tries to be all things to all readers. It has equations and claims to be a sole-source for the known physics of today. A kind of repository to nature's laws. That's fine, but Penrose goes about this by trying to write to the educated reader, one who has a substantial mathematics background.

He then tries to write to the layperson and to do that he explains the mundane. That is, if you know what a complex number is, for example, you certainly don't need him to explain it. If you don't know what a complex number is, well, I don't see how you can read the rest of the book, no matter how much you see that definition. Some minimal background is required to read a book that like this. Trying to please both types of audiences, and everyone in between I should add, simple makes the book unreadable.

What's more, the book is extremely thick: 1136 pages. That's over one-thousand pages bound in a single text! It weighs a few pounds---Amazon says the shipping weight is 3.4 pounds. What does this mean? It means that a person is hardpressed to hold the book and read the pages. The physical structure and weight of a single volume this big makes it impossible.

So, perhaps this book is a reference? Well, no, it's not that because it's clear not organized nor is it indexed to be a useful reference.

In short, the book fails to be much of anything other than a lot of some things but not enough of one thing to be good.

This sounds, and it is, a severe critique of what I am sure Penrose considers an impressive work. The problem is that it's not limited to his work. His book is but an example of a trend.

Nowadays I am seeing more and more books with similar problems. The books don't know who their audience is so they try to be all things to all people. That's a failure. More, books are getting to be extremely long, well in excess of 500-pages at a time. That makes them difficult to read, physically, as I noted above, and difficult to want to finish. You have to have substantial mental stamina simply to stay with the book.

And here's one more point, although Penrose's book does not do this: Books are getting very expensive. I found this book entitled: From Eudoxus to Einstein : A History of Mathematical Astronomy by C. M. Linton that was reviewed on the Mathematical Association of American website. (Here's the review.) The book looks great and I would love to buy it. It costs $79.00 at Amazon, even more if you pay full-price. That's pretty steep. When I look in the book (Thank You, Amazon, for that!) I see that book is good probably great but it's not worth the price.

So, what should be done? First, every author should decide to write books for a particular audience and once decided, leave it at that. If it's a popular book, then fine. If not, then make it a technical book worthy of an educated reader. Next, books are for reading so make them short, to the point, and easy to take with you. A book should be carried around, read at one's convenience. Somehow, I think authors can't help themselves and say much more than they should. Heavens, if an author has a lot to say, make the book a multiple volume set.

Lastly, book prices should be set so that one can buy many different books and not spend so much money on a single copy to the detriment of buying other books. Would that be so hard?

Note to readers: Ordinarily I don't rant like this, but the trend with books is clear and it's not good. I hope authors and publishers will correct their course, and soon.

Astronomy: Pic of the day

From the site:

Green and Black Aurora Over Norway
Credit & Copyright: Frank Andreassen (nettfoto.no)

Explanation: What causes gaps between aurora curtains? These unusual gaps can make Research using data from four Cluster spacecraft orbiting the Earth has likely found the secret: auroral gaps, sometimes knows as black auroras, are actually anti-auroras. In normal auroras, electrons and/or predominantly negatively charged particles fall toward Earth along surfaces of constant magnetic field. They ionize the Earth's atmosphere on impact, causing the bright glows. In auroral gaps, however, negatively charged particles may be sucked out from the Earth's ionosphere along adjoining magnetic field lines. These dark anti-auroras can climb to over 20,000 kilometers and last for several minutes. Pictured above, a series of well-defined auroral gaps is seen dividing green aurora curtains high above Harstad, Norway, earlier this month.

This is another beautiful photo for your enjoyment.

Ghost diagrams: Tilings of the plane

This site takes a given pattern and tries to find a way to tile the plane with that pattern. From the site itself:

Ghost Diagrams is a program that takes sets of tiles and tries to find patterns into which they may be formed. The patterns it finds when given randomly chosen tiles are often surprising.

It turns out that tiling patterns are a form of computation of equal power to Turing machines, lambda calculus, and cellular automata. For example, here is a tileset implementing "Rule 110", a cellular automaton known to be capable of universal computation. Considerations similar to the halting problem and Godel's theorem apply. There is no upper limit to their capacity to surprise us. Furthermore, tiles have an intuitive quality that other forms of computation lack. You can see how they fit together.

An organism is more than the sum of its organs. When the organs are fitted together, the organism becomes something more. This surprising something more we call "spirit" or "ghost". Ghost Diagrams finds the ghosts implicit in simple sets of tiles.

See this draft chapter from my thesis for further details and pretty pictures.

These are quite beautiful. Enjoy.

(Hat tip: Ilachina, a frequent and respected contributor.)

Astronomy photo of the day

Explanation: Not all roses are red of course, but they can still be very pretty. Likewise, the beautiful Rosette Nebula and other star forming regions are often shown in astronomical images with a predominately red hue - in part because the dominant emission in the nebula is from hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen's strongest optical emission line, known as H-alpha, is in the red region of the spectrum, but the beauty of an emission nebula need not be appreciated in red light alone. Other atoms in the nebula are also excited by energetic starlight and produce narrow emission lines as well. In this gorgeous view of the Rosette's central regions, narrow band images are combined to show emission from sulfur atoms in red, hydrogen in blue, and oxygen in green. In fact, the scheme of mapping these narrow atomic emission lines into broader colors is adopted in many Hubble images of stellar nurseries. This image spans about 50 light-years in the constellation Monoceros, at the 3,000 light-year estimated distance of the Rosette Nebula.

These pictures are terrific and I like posting them. I don't plan to make this a daily posting, but for now they're worth looking at. Enjoy.

Astronomy: Picture of the Day and caption

Explanation: The Universe is expanding gradually now. But its initial expansion was almost impossibly rapid as it likely grew from quantum scale fluctuations in a trillionth of a second. In fact, this cosmological scenario, known as Inflation, is now reported to be further quantified by an analysis of three years of data from the WMAP spacecraft. WMAP's instruments detect the cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow light from the early Universe. WMAP's amazing success in exploring the first trillionth of a second and favoring specific inflationary scenarios lies in its ability to make unprecedented, precise measurements of the properties of the microwave background. The subtle properties are distilled from conditions in the early Universe and related to its first moments of existence. Schematically, this diagram traces the 13.7 billion year (plus a trillionth of a second ...) history of the Universe from the quantum scale to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and WMAP.

I got this link today from Andy Ilachinski, who has a blog on photography that I recommend. Here's what Andy, a physicist, had to say:

It's that *last* part that's interesting to me. I've always been mistyfied by assertions regarding cosmic events using "human-scaled macroscopic" (intuitive) variables/labels such as "time". In this case, since it is the expansion of the entire *universe*, i.e., the entire space-time edifice! exactly what is the reference frame in which this
"trillionth of a second" has any meaning? If its the "conventional" one,

(a) there is *no* universal frame (that's the essence of Einstein's
great insight: no GLOBAL time), and

(b) even if there *were* a global reference frame, the only thing that could be is a component of the rapidly expanding space-tiome continuum...a parameter that is doing the expanding is being used to qualify the expansion?

So, exactly how can we understand in our own minds the idea of the entire universe at this microscopic (whatever that means?) scales. I don't understand it one bit. If you do, please help me out.

Catching photons for space communications

MIT scientists say they can catch individual photons to make space communications quicker and better. The link here didn't provide many details but it looks rather interesting.

Complexity: Will it ever amount to anything?

Here's a paper that says complexity research and work will never go very far.

Complexity research will never become a single, encompassing theory-of-everything, or an independent discipline. It will thrive at the border between disciplines and in particular by interacting with engineering (thus approaching the 'science of the artificial' that Herbert Simon was promoting) and it will surely create several seed technologies.

The authors say that we may see applications come from it, and if we do, now is that time. It will only exist along the boundaries of various disciplines:



I think the authors are too pessimistic. Complexity has been around a while, that's true. Has it delivered on its promises? Probably not. But then, the promises were too grand. (Nowadays, to get any funding the promises are always grand and overblown. It's the times we live in.)

Complexity is a new idea that still needs work. What's more, it's a new idea that needs development of the a mathematical framework so that it can be studied. The idea of studying local rules that create emergent behavior is so new that we don't have the mathematics to explain it. That's where complexity needs to go: to math and from there to applications.

Chemistry at Columbia University: Irreproducible results

A Columbia University chemistry professor has retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal after experiments performed by a graduate student could not be reproduced.

The senior author of all three papers, which were published in 2004 and 2005 in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, was Prof. Dalibor Sames; the graduate student, listed as an author on each, was Bengu Sezen, who left the university after getting her doctorate last year.

The article goes on to explain that because other scientists tried to reproduce the results and couldn't, this is an example of science correcting itself.

I've written about this before and used the stem cell faked data "from South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk" as an example. When scientists go about their work, and part of that is trying to reproduce the results of others, they provide perfect checks and balances to one another. it's a good system, but it's not good enough.

What's disappointing here is the graduate student probably faked her work and got (not earned!) her degree, a Ph. D., no less. The university needs to do a full investigation and if these results were faked (not just wrong, but deliberately falsified) to rescind her degree. If not, what message does this send to other would-be liars? Well, just fake it, no one will find out, at least not until it's too late. And, then so what? You already have your degree and can go on anyway.

Next, the school should discipline the faculty advisor. After all, it's the advisor's responsibility to supervise and review all the work of the graduate student. He or she has the authority to approve or disapprove what goes on in his or her lab. If faulty work goes out, it is the advisor who is ultimately responsible. Yes, advisors are busy. Sure, they can be duped. They are vulnerable to self-duping, because they have a vested interest in seeing work published. Their name is part of the work and they garner credit for tenure and promotion with each publication. Moreover, they obtain funding based on past work. Considered together, that's all the more reason that the advisor has responsibility.

Finally, the school itself is cast in a bad light. It would do Columbia well to investigate this cheating further, discipline each participant properly, and enact rules and policies so that it doesn't happen again.

Chemistry at Columbia University: Unreproducible results

A Columbia University chemistry professor has retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal after experiments performed by a graduate student could not be reproduced.

The senior author of all three papers, which were published in 2004 and 2005 in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, was Prof. Dalibor Sames; the graduate student, listed as an author on each, was Bengu Sezen, who left the university after getting her doctorate last year.

The article goes on to explain that because other scientists tried to reproduce the results and couldn't this is an example of science correcting itself.

I've written about this before and used the stem cell faked data "from South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk" as an example. When scientist go about their work, and part of that is trying to reproduce the results of others, they provide perfect checks and balances to one another. it's a good system, but it's not good enough.

What's disappointing here is the graduate student probably faked her work and got (not earned!) her degree, a Ph. D., no less. The university needs to do a full investigation and if these results were faked (not just wrong, but deliberately falsified) to rescind her degree. If not, what message does this send to other would-be liars? Well, just fake it, no one will find out, at least not until it's too late. And, then so what? You already have your degree and can go on anyway.

Next, the school should discipline the faculty advisor. Afterall, it's the advisor's responsibility to supervise and review all the work of the graduate student. He or she has the authority to approve or disapprove what goes on in his or her lab. If faulty work goes out, it is the advisor who is ultimately responsible. Yes, advisors are busy. Sure, they can be duped. They are vulnerable to self-duping, because they have a vested interest in seeing work published. Their name is part of the work and they garner credit for tenure and promotion with each publication. Moreover, they obtain funding based on past work. Considered together, that's all the more reason that the advisor has responsiblitly.

Finally, the school itself is cast in a bad light. It would do Columbia well to investigate this cheating futher, discipline each participant properly, and enact rules and policies so that it doesn't happen again.

Mathworld goes Wikipiedia

When looking for some more links on billiards in math, I came across this entry. What's interesting is that the topic is one I like. But more than that is that the page asks for the reader to add to it.

This makes mathworld look like Wikipedia which is something I didn't know before.

Computer model of a virus

Researchers announced on Tuesday that they created a computer simulation of a virus, claiming to have built the first complete model of any entire life-form.

Although the notion of a “computer virus” usually conjures up concerns about data security, the scientists say their development will contribute to improvements in public health as well as the development of technologies such as artificial nanomachines.

Details of the work by crystallographers at the University of California at Irvine and computational biologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be published in the March issue of the science journal Structure.

This is pretty darn cool. A virus modeled with a computer simulation. I look forward to reading more about it.

Planet Mars Odyssey Mission

More maps and images of mars. Worth time exploring.

Quantum Mechanics and New Age Nonsense

The New York Times has a good essay about the misuse and misapplication of quantum mechanics to new age thought. The essay is about movies:

These films and the quantum mysticism industry behind them raise a disturbing question about the muddled intersection between science and culture. Do we have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?

And then:

When I first heard that Marlee Matlin had made a movie about quantum theory, I was excited. (Total disclosure: Ms. Matlin once bought an option on the film rights to an essay of mine about Albert Einstein and his wife.) What could be more deserving of wide-screen cinematic treatment than the weirdness and mystery of the laws that sculpture our space-time adventures?

But hours and hours spent watching the two films and navigating their splashy Web site have tempered my enthusiasm. These films and the quantum mysticism industry behind them raise a disturbing question about the muddled intersection between science and culture. Do we have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?

The essay goes on to tell how physicists have abandoned Wigner's idea that quantum mechanics relates to consciousness and have gone on to other studies. Yet, bad physics continues.

Read the entire essay.

Visit Mars Via Google

Google has maps (well, sort of) of the red planet Mars. Take a peek.

Sun activity: Get ready for it

Sun spot activity is set to increase from what is now a low point. This article from Science News indicates that one model predicts this flurry of activity to be in 2008, a year later than originally thought. Other models predict the activity to begin sooner than that.

Even at its quietest, the sun about once a week belches out a billion-ton cloud of charged particles and magnetic fields. When those eruptions are directed toward Earth, they can irradiate astronauts, disable satellites, and knock out power grids on the planet.

No matter when it comes, you can expect troubles with communications, and other earthly activities.

Exams: How to pass them and a peek at what's wrong with scientists

The scientists, from Washington University in St Louis, found that students understood and retained information more readily when subjected to frequent tests and quizzes while studying than students who simply read material over and over again.

"Our study indicates that testing can be used as a powerful means for improving learning, not just assessing it," said Prof Henry Roediger of the university's psychology department.

So, it's the year 2006 and scientists are just getting around to studying how to teach? I thought teachers knew this already and when I was in school, I had lots of short quizes and then tests and exams. I even remember an algebra class that started everyday with a 5-minute quiz.

When scientist are doing this type of work, and this is how it's reported, I can see why the public at large doesn't support much of what scientists do. It gives the rest of us a bad reputation. Sorry to say that, but it's true.

(Tip: Best of the Web OpinionJournal)

Predictive models: How well do they work?

"Prediction is very hard, especially about the future." -Dirac

From the Wall Street Journal, the Numbers Guy:

Ahead of the Oscars, an economics professor, at the request of Weekend Journal, processed data about this year's films nominated for best picture through his statistical model and predicted with 97.4% certainty that "Brokeback Mountain" would win. Oops. Last year, the professor tuned his model until it correctly predicted 18 of the previous 20 best-picture awards; then it predicted that "The Aviator" would win; "Million Dollar Baby" won instead. Sometimes models tuned to prior results don't have great predictive powers.

As I read to the end of the column, this extra bit was there.

There is always lots of discussion among decisionmakers of models and whether models that represent given data can be used to predict future events. Usually, like this paragraph finds, the models can't.

The underlying problem with most models is that we (scientists, that is) don't know the underlying physical processes and mathematical equations that govern events. If we know what they are, then we can (usually!) do a good job representing the phenomena that lead to the events we want to predict. Often, though, we simply don't know what the correct model is. So, we pick something we like, and that's usually driven by personal prejudice.

Few scientists admit to that prejudice, but it's there nonetheless. Ask a chaologist about models and he'll tell you why a chaotic model is best and how the world is governed by non-linear equations. Ask a cellular automatist and he'll extol the virtues of cellular automata as capturing the very thoughts of God exactly and therefore the perfect model of any of God's creations.

These models all have their place, it's just that place is usually not one for prediction.

Here's another example from MATLAB. It's part of their demo for the software.

This figure is a curve fit (cubic, that is, a third power polynomial) to census data from 1900 to 1990.

The predicted value for 2000 is 280 million people. A cubic does a pretty good job of fitting the data. A higher order polynomial would fit the data even better.


This plot is what happens for an 8th-order polynomial fit. It fits the given data well, only it "predicts" the population for the year 2000 at -70 million. That's negative 70 million.

Need I say more?

Executives and their mathematical statements

From the Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal Online:

Google Inc. reads, indexes and searches through billions of Web pages. On any given day, eBay Inc.'s more than 100 million members are listing millions of items for sale. Yet when it comes to the law of large numbers, executives at both tech powerhouses have committed statistical misdemeanors.

The law of large numbers says that the more times you measure something, the truer your results, and less they are affected by random variation. Flip a coin a million times, and you're likely to get heads half of the time (or very close to it). But flip that coin five times, and you might get heads four times, twice, or never.

But in corporate-speak, the "law of large numbers" has been misused as a catch-all explanation for slowing growth as companies mature: It's harder to maintain high growth rates from a larger base. Last week, Google finance chief George Reyes told a Merrill Lynch & Co. investor conference that the company is "getting to a point where the law of large numbers starts to take root." (The Online Journal's MarketBeat column pointed out that Mr. Reyes meant the law of diminishing returns.) And in a January appearance on CNBC, eBay chief executive Meg Whitman said, "Now, our businesses are getting larger and we will obviously face the law of large numbers, but we have actually changed the trajectory of the growth curve in our two largest businesses over the last three quarters." (She used the term correctly in a 1999 appearance on CNBC.) Several other executives have misused the term.

Misstating a statistics law isn't a federal offense, and lots of analysts make the same mistake when posing questions about disappointing earnings, in effect providing companies with an excuse for slow growth (reporters, including those at The Wall Street Journal, have also used the term incorrectly).

An eBay spokesman told me the term is "common corporate vernacular." Google declined to comment.

I found this part of his weekly column worth repeating, so I am.

The column, by the way, is only available via an on-line subscription and the column is not printed in the paper version of the Wall Street Journal. Carl Bialik's (the author) comment are always on point, well written and provide ever more evidence of how we, (the royal "we") often misuse numbers in our daily lives.

Water on Saturn's moon Enceladus

LOS ANGELES - The Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of liquid water spewing from geysers on one of Saturn's icy moons, raising the tantalizing possibility that the celestial object harbors life.

The surprising discovery excited some scientists, who say the Saturn moon, Enceladus, should be added to the short list of places within the solar system most likely to have extraterrestrial life.

Recent high-resolution images snapped by the orbiting Cassini confirmed the eruption of icy jets and giant water vapor plumes from geysers resembling frozen Old Faithfuls at Enceladus' south pole.

"We have the smoking gun" that proves the existence of water, said Carolyn Porco, a Cassini imaging scientist from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

If Enceladus does harbor life, it probably consists of microbes or other primitive organisms capable of living in extreme conditions, scientists say.

The findings were published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

This could be the start of finding life on a planet other than earth. Exciting news.

(Tip: Ilachina)

LyX Document Processor

A friend of mine recommended LyX document processor for writing. He told me that this allows you to simply write and it will worry about formatting what you write. It's compatible, and uses, LaTeX which is a good thing. I am playing with it tonight, in fact, and playing with another super program, EINSTein, but that's for another post.

Extr-terrestial cells: They're here

Here's an exciting article about red cells over India. The cells, if we may use that term loosely, fell from the sky and could be the result of a meteor. Under an optical microscope they appear like biological cells yet they do not contain DNA.

What are these mysterious particles? Beats me, but the paper and articles are interesting to read.

Here is the scientist who discovered this and here is a paper he wrote.



(Hat tip: Ilachina)

Science news: Omega and the limits of mathematics

Gregory Chaitin is getting more attention on his idea the algorithmic complexity can be used to show the limits of mathematics.

I don't have time just now to comment, but I plan to do so soon. I find something wrong with his thinking and while I can't articulate it yet, I think there's something odd going on.

Patents for the Absurd

I ran across this site when I was doing a web search on radar. Take a minute to browse the patent abstracts and see what silliness the patent office gives patents to. It'll surprise you.

Here's one example:

Doggie poop freeze wand, Patent number 6883462

The invention discloses a device and vehicle for decomposition and discard of animal waste. It's an elongated hollow tubular housing made of aluminum or PVC, a detachable cylinder filled with a compressed freezing chemical or refrigerant, or compressed liquid enzymes, which is inserted into the hollow housing, an operation button exposed for use, empty space at the handle end for the placement of plastic trash bags, and a threaded top on the end of the housing encapsulating the empty space. The decomposition device is aimed at the animal waste to be removed, and the operation button is pressed, which in turn manipulates the pressurized freezing chemical or enzymes, forcing the contents out of the opposite end, to freeze or breakdown the animal waste, dependent upon the choice of cylinder.

Heavy Drinker: How you can tell

I thought this was a joke, and it really was meant to be. From the Mini-AIR, Journal of Improbable Results newsletter:

2006-03-14 MAY WE RECOMMEND: Tipple, Hatch, and Court

MATHEMATICS OF INSTABILITY
"An Improved Method for Predicting Which Heavy Drinkers Become
Intoxicated," Ernest L. Abel and Michael Kruger, Psychological
Reports, vol. 94 , no 3, 2004, pp. 1343-8.

Here is the abstract for this article:

Not all heavy drinkers become intoxicated. We sought to improve predictability of intoxication of heavy drinkers. Based on criteria for heavy drinking in the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), we identified characteristics related to heavy drinking. We then created a dichotomous heavy drinker typology variable (yes/no) and determined how well we were able to identify drinkers who be- came intoxicated at least twice a month. Of those who fit this heavy drinking profile, 54% drank regularly to the point of intoxication, the same percent as those who become intoxicated in the self-reported heavy drinking group. However, 77% of those who fit both the profile and were self-described heavy drinkers, drank regularly to intoxication. We concluded that a demographic typology combined with self-reported drinking improves predictability of intoxication in heavy drinkers, and is a promising direction for research.

So, here you have it: Ask a drunk if he's a drunk and that'll improve the chances that you can identify him as a drunk. Wow! Someone wrote a paper to tell you that.