Big Science

Here’s a link to an interesting article by Aaron Hirsch in the New York Times. He discusses the idea of Big Science, and mentions how much of the scientific community now relies on large institutions for processing or collection of data (i.e. genome sequencing centers or the Large Hadron Collider). I’ll leave it to you to read the article more fully, but I’d like to add to Hirsch’s concern about the future of Big Science.

As a scientist, it is scary to me that it is becoming so expensive to do science. Many of the results that appear in the high impact journals (like Science or Nature) require lots of resources and people. I doubt that science, especially biology, will soon be a garage experience, though there are people who believe in do-it-yourself biotech (like the DIYbio organization, the Biobricks foundation, and some Synthetic Biologists). Still, I pause when I think about how much of science has been centralized and is “owned” and commercialized by large institutions (see the Ventner Institute, for example).

Fortunately, there are movements to make science more accessible and welcoming to lay-people, like MIT’s Open Course Ware, where MIT has posted access to nearly every class taught at the Institute. As scientists, we’ll need to continue to work to make science accessible and open so that the public is not left standing outside staring at the “urban high-rise” (as Hirsch calls it), wondering what happens in there and how one gets inside.

Useless but cool

John Hart from Ann Arbor, MI made these nanobama images from carbon nanotubes before the election as a way of demonstrating his support for Obama. They’re totally useless, but are still fascinating. Each one is 1/2 of a millimeter wide. For more information, check out this link.

Each face is made of approximately 150 million tiny carbon nanotubes; that's about how many Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election.

How screwed are we?

I was watching “The Week with George Stephanopolous” this weekend and was struck by a comment made by Paul Krugman (recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics).  He said, “Hardly a day goes by that I don’t fire up my browser and start my morning with an expletive.” He was referring to the daily barrage of bad economic data that we have been experiencing recently.

I know things are bad, but when one of the top economists puts it that way, it makes me even more pessimistic.

More science in our policy making, please

Olivia Judson has a nice Op-Ed piece in the NYT today.  She references a book called “Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration” by Seth Shulman that I’d like to read.  She also makes a couple of great points.  Many scientists have been dismayed by the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress the role that science plays in public policy (especially, for me, regarding climate science).  However, I’ve never been able to articulate succinctly why science and the scientific method are so valuable.  Judson does this as well as I’ve ever seen:

In schools, science is often taught as a body of knowledge — a set of facts and equations. But all that is just a consequence of scientific activity.

Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible. It is an attitude, a stance towards measuring, evaluating and describing the world that is based on skepticism, investigation and evidence. The hallmark is curiosity; the aim, to see the world as it is. This is not an attitude restricted to scientists, but it is, I think, more common among them. And it is not something taught so much as acquired during a training in research or by keeping company with scientists.

Now, I don’t want to idealize this. To claim that scientists are free of bias, ambition or desires would be ridiculous. Everyone has pet ideas that they hope are right; and scientists are not famous for humility… Moreover, to downplay evidence that doesn’t fit your ideas, and to place more weight on evidence that does — this is something that human brains just seem to do. Worse, such biases become stronger under certain circumstances.

However, the beauty of the scientific approach is that even when individuals do succumb to bias or partiality, others can correct them using a framework of evidence that everyone broadly agrees on.

Time and the Art of Living, Part II

“Our common image of experience is about as accurate as a still photograph of a man riding a bicycle. Project this image back into reality, and the man will fall off his bicycle.”

Robert Grudin
Time and the Art of Living

Telenovelas are the New Baywatch

In the LA Times this morning, there is an article in the business section about Intel’s new Viiv multimedia technology. The gist of the article is that Intel wants to sell more PC’s built around its Viiv home entertainment technology, but, in order to do so, Intel is working with studios, networks, and internet portals to use the Intel technology to deliver programming through computers around the world.

That’s not what interested me, though. Rather, near the end of the article, the author discusses some of the specific examples of connections between content providers and content watchers that Intel thinks they might be able to enable. According to the article, there’s “an enormous appetite worldwide for dramas via broadband connections” and “Mexican soap operas seem to address the demand for content quite nicely.” The article continues by saying that “Asian TV viewers eat up the melodramas, which are full of the visceral passion and tragedy that characterizes home grown shows.”

The “Carrusel” cast members love their Korean fans!

A 23-year old South Korean who is interviewed for the article says that she still remembers how much she loved “Carrusel” a Mexican novela that was dubbed into Korean that she watched when she was in elementary school. “The characters were all foreign so it was new to Korean children, and that made it interesting. But we didn’t know it was a Mexican TV show. We just knew it was a foreign program,” she says. And now, a remake of “Carrusel”, renamed “Vivian los Niños” has captivated a new generation of Koreans.

Apparently the Mexican media companies are well-aware of the appeal of their products, because Televisa, the largest Mexican media company (and also the company that made “Carrusel” and “Vivian los Niños”) produces more shows than it can broadcast domestically. The LA times article claims that Televisa “puts out 50,000 hours of programming a year, much more than American networks” and that the “shows are translated into 15 languages with dubbing or subtitles and broadcast in 70 countries.”

I’ve always been kind of interested in the Mexican soap operas that seem to be constantly running on the Spanish-language channels on my TV, but I never realized how popular they are around the world. I don’t know if any single telenovela will ever reach the same level of popularity as a show like Baywatch, which was syndicated in 148 countries, but it’s obvious that Televisa has found a formula that works for them. If the future of the home media progresses as many people think that it will (i.e. toward one portal/computer that delivers all of our radio, internet, television, and movie content), then the business model of generating a lot of content and letting the consumer decide which trashy novela to watch will continue to be successful, and Intel is smart to try to be in the middle of it all.

The internet is a series of tubes

I’m pretty sure we all know what Senator Ted Stevens said a couple of weeks ago about the internet when he was debating some net neutrality language should be included in a telecommunications bill (if not, click this link). Since Stevens, the longest-serving Republican Senator, said “The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes!” and “An Internet [sic] was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially,” I have come across quite a few parodies of Stevens’ idiocy on my series of tubes. A friend pointed me to this one, which happens to be my favorite so far. If you know of any others that are worth watching, please let me know. Just don’t send them all to me at once, because my tubes are pretty clogged and I haven’t had the internet man come by for maintenance in a while.

Don’t put those papers on the tubes that run into your computer, or they might smash them and block the flow.

Time and the Art of Living, Part 1

At the risk of being accused of possessing no imagination or creativity on my blog, over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of my favorite thoughts from a book that I read last year – “Time and the Art of Living” by Robert Grudin. It’s a set of short writings that the author wrote during a year-long sabbatical from his job as a Professor of English at the University of Oregon in the early 1980’s. I read this book during my last bout of unemployment, and found that it really provided some perspective on my life, the world, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. I am using it again during my current unemployment because I liked the way it made me feel before. I am digressing, though. Rather than preach about philosophy, I’ll just get on to the first passage. Enjoy:

“A foolish person is not only oblivious to the necessities of the future but unfriendly to his own past. His manifold and miscellaneous blunders are expunged from memory, attributed to external circumstance, or otherwise laundered clean of blame; failing this, he may repudiate his own past, like some locust skin, as something he had transcended or outgrown. He habitually seeks the new, regarding each superficial change as a means to final success and tranquility, unaware that the same error can be made in a thousand different ways. He is so shallow in time, so oblivious to continuity, that the present itself, no matter how hackneyed or repetitious it may be, has always a glimmering newness for him, a promise of unprecendented and undeserved freedom. Each embrace of this promise is a rejection of true freedom, which is born of self-awareness and partakes as much of recollection as it does of planning. And contempt for one’s past is a deadly form of self-contempt, an involuntary avowal of worthlessness which poisons every enterprise.”

Robert Grudin

Finally, someone using a robot the way a robot should be used

First off, sorry about the delay in blogging. I was busy quitting my job and got distracted from the more important things (like sharing worthless information with total strangers on the internet).

Anyway, on to the sharing…

I saw this article the other day about a Japanese researcher, named Hiroshi Ishiguro, who had created an android version of himself. It’s not really that exciting that someone has made a robot that looks like a human, because, in my opinion, we’re technologically deadened by the cool new gadgets that come out literally every week. Well, that and the fact that the free world has been run by an android for the last 6 and 1/2 years:

A couple of things about the Japanese android and his creator struck me as cool and interesting. First, the guy actually sends to robot to do his work – fullfilling the dreams of every kid who has had to mow the lawn, of every college student too hung over to go to the early morning lecture, and of every corporate employee who would rather be sitting at the beach instead of sitting in the weekly “customer service and support” meeting.

Ishiguro has set up the android to be able to mimic his voice, posture, and lip movements. It has a built in microphone and speaker system so that he Ishiguro can plug in his laptop from anywhere in the world and literally be the robot. So cool.

The second thing about the Ishiguro and his android that struck me is how they kind of look like the Japanese version of Christopher Reeve.

A man and his robot – I’m pretty sure that’s the robot on the left, giving the “Blue Steel” look.

The Sports Guy Picks an EPL Team

In my opinion, one of the best sport’s writers out there right now is Bill Simmons. He’s writes for page 2 on ESPN.com and I really enjoy reading his stuff. I like his work because he goes beyond the normal sports writing and offers interesting critiques and comments about current sporting events. Anyway, as a result of the recent World Cup, he has decided to pick an English club soccer team to follow for the upcoming year. He writes about it in his most recent column (actually, two columns because, as he says, “the whole process was more enjoyable than I thought it would be”). If you’ve ever been a fan of English soccer, or just think that the Brits are funny in a weird, depressing way, you’ll like his article. I loved it, and I hope to see lots more about soccer on Page 2 in the coming years.