Watt Were They Thinking?

Or rather, what in the world goes on when a writer for almost any type of publication - whether mainstream or not - writes about anything that remotely touches on science?

Often times what comes out instead is "science," a stream of misapplied, poorly understood concepts. Maybe it's writing for deadlines, or maybe it's just the overall scientific illiteracy that grips many, but there is no doubt that the world needs more reporters that know the very basic scientific ideas. Otherwise we are all faced with an every growing body of articles and blog posts that will only reinforce the already shaky scientific foundation that many apparently have. (I have already noted recent media errors in articles on friction and gravity.)

My latest gripe? The May 12, 2008 issue of Newsweek contains a very positive article about students at MIT trying to lower energy costs wherever "energy hogs" exist, with a major hog - your typical vending machine - one of the main targets of their energy-waster-busters attention. Unfortunately, the amount of energy consumed by an average vending machine is incorrectly stated. According to Newsweek "The average soda dispenser consumes 3,500 kilowatts a year." As anyone who actually pays utilities should know, a kilowatt is a rate of energy use (it's 1000's of joules/sec). The actual unit of energy used is then found by multiplying the Rate of energy use x running time, i.e. the kilowatt-hour (kW-hr). One kW-hr is the amount of energy used by a device running at a rate of 1 kW for 1 hour. This energy amount is typically how your electric bill is determined by the electric company that services your home. The price per kw-hr will vary depending on the area of the country, the source of the electric company's energy, and time of year. Current rates for my area are approximately 17cents/kw-hr.

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Saharan Sand & Hurricane Prediction

I have written before about modeling earthquakes and hurricanes - two phenomena are often not covered in homeowners insurance because they are Acts of God. There is still a long way to go before these are understood to the satisfaction of a predominance of scientists.

But what about prediction? With hurricane season about to start in earnest in the Atlantic, it has been pretty quiet. How are hurricanes predicted, and how good are these predictions?

El Niño events and hurricanes are highly correlated, and hence the Niño is part of every hurricane forecasters toolkit/ There has been a lot of publicity of late indicating a strong correlation between Saharan sand storms and hurricane activity, suggesting that sand activity would complement El Nino as a predictor.

While no one would dispute the value of another correlate for hurricane activity, I did notice the typical media confusion between understanding what was going on, and what was purely a prediction based on a correlation. I was just about to write one of my typical rants when I came across a blog that already took the media to task back in 2006. Written by Daniel Collins from UW-Madison on his Down To Earth blog, the post title says it all:

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Unplugging Plug and Chug

Yo - Memorize This!In a disturbing coincidence, the stomach-turning "Plug and Chug" phrase cropped up in 2 situations this week.  In physics class on Wednesday, a student made a comment about "plugging and chugging" to get a solution. I stopped him at that point and did my typical rant against that type of approach to doing physics. (Note - he was NOT advocating it!)

In short, there's nothing more revolting to me as a physics teacher, and a physicist than the thought that somehow physics can be taught, and learned, by memorizing formulas and simply plugging in numbers and calculating.

How then to explain a quote by Erika Gebel in the Aug, 3, 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer? In an article titled "Masters of 'spring' theory: Physics Teachers embrace a new method", Gebel is describing exciting new changes to the way that physics is taught in high school. Citing the approach known as modeling physics , which had just been taught to local physics instructors in a faculty-development workshop in the Philadelphia area, Gebel reports that

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How to read a REAL Climate Modeling article

Diagram of General Circulatin ModelBolstered by the anti-climate-modeling stance of Michael Crichton, there are many out there who claim that climate modeling that predicts global warming is somehow "bad science." I'm not sure many of these folks have ever read a real climate modeling paper (or any who believe that climate change is occurring, for that matter)

It is instructive to try to wade through a serious paper that points out the difficulties of modeling on the one hand, but also presents very confident predictions of the model described in the paper..

By chance I recently came across a paper written almost 2 years ago by Jian Yuan, Qiang Fu (Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington) and Norman McFarlane (Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, Victoria, British Columbia). The name of the article is forbidding: Tests and improvements of GCM cloud parameterizations using the CCCMA SCM with the SHEBA data set.

(Note: GCM is General Circulation Model, or Global Climate Model - the bellwether of climate modeling)

The article describes the wide variability of different models of the Arctic, and how the authors re-formulated cloud interactions, yielding a model whose output is much closer to actual recorded data.

For the uninitiated, trying to read this type of paper seems impossible. You can get a lot from it, though, by reading the abstract, intro, and conclusion. (This is something I do in the Chaos and Fractals course - i.e. have students read and dense papers in areas outside of their majors - an essential activity for all scientists).

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This Just In - Media Mistake Rate Doubles!

It's been 8 months since news broke of the US population reaching the 300 million mark, only 39 years after the population reached 200 million in 1967. At the time many news reports claimed that the US growth rate was accelerating.  The reason? It had taken 52 years for the US population to double from 100 to 200 million, but only 39 years to go from 200 to 300 million.  Hence the accelerated growth rate.

This is  totally incorrect reasoning!

Using the Rule of 70 (Growth Rate x Doubling Time ≈ 70),; a 52-year doubling time implies a growth rate of approximately 1.3%. However, the 39-year-span in going from 200 to 300 million is not a doubling time - this is only an increase of 50%. Therefore, the growth rate over the last 39 years (since 1967) is approximately 1.04%, i.e. the US growth rate has declined.

So a lot of media totally botched the message - not unusual given the rampant innumeracy (a wonderful word, and terribly debilitating problem for citizenry as described so well by John Allen Paulos in his book of the same title) in this country.

Is the growth rate still diminishing? This is probably a good bet. Population growth rates in the US dropped for most of the 20 century (see the Historical National Population Estimates for a listing of yearly grown rates form 1900-1999), starting at a value of approximately 2% in 1900. (Not surprisingly, there was a slight blip upwards post-World War II)

But there is every evidence to suggest that innumeracy, at least among the media, is staying level - and maybe growing.

College Programs in Science Writing

I am always interested in university programs that combine science and writing. The Stevens Institute of Technology has a very unique program titled the Center for Science Writings, which was created in 2005 to "emphasize the vital importance of writing and other forms of communication to science."

With award-winning author and journalist John Horgan as Director, the CSW sponsors a number of exciting and important activities. Two of particular interest to me are a blog that "explore(s) the boundaries between science and the media", and a list of the greatest science books of the 20th century. So far there are 50 books listed, and readers are encouraged to comment and suggest other books. The CSW criteria are that the books "stand out because of their subject matter, their rhetorical style and their impact on science and the rest of culture."

The blog contains a number of interesting posts that are motivated by press reports - something that I occasionally post about here. There are also a few posts written by students, although it is not clear whether these are class assignments. I will be teaching Chaos and Fractals again in Fall 2007, and all students will soon be posting here - most likely in a separate journal on this site. The CSW blog has already given me some a source of interesting readings for my upcoming class and a possible assignment - having my students respond to some of the CSW posts.

The book list is fascinating. Along with standards that all would expect - Einsteins' The Meaning of Relativity, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Dawkins' Selfish Gene,  Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, Watson/Crick's Double Helix, etc.. - I am really glad to see that Gleick's Chaos made the list as well as Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature. Then there other books that I probably would never have come up with, but am glad that someone did: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, Dianne Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses...even Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So be sure to check out the list, and make a suggestion or two. (Don't Panic - I see that someone has recommended Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe!)

If there are any readers out there who know of other interesting science & writing programs, please post a comment with a link.

Hot Baseball News - Say Hey to Global Warming?

Whether or not baseball is still America's Game has been debated for a long time.  For some, its often-glacial pace can't compete with the speed and physical intensity of the other major sports.

But for others the glacial pace is both comforting and a description of their rate of acceptance of the reality of climate change.

Recently, Sports Illustrated devoted a sizeable part of an issue to the effects of global warming on sports. From Golf courses to ski slopes, the article was a thorough summary of potential changes to sports because of the possible loss of outdoor venues. (See Going, Going Green by Alexander Wolff). A lot of doomsday scenarios to be sure - but some chilling images nonetheless. None more so than a sidebar on The Catch - Willie Mays' famous steal of Vic Wertz's shot to center field in the 1954 World Series between the NY Giants and Cleveland.

The story is that with global warming, average temperatures have risen just enough to make Mays' catch much harder, and quite possibly impossible, even for Willie. This is because the higher temperatures produce air that is less dense, allowing the ball to travel just a little bit farther then it would have otherwise. Compared to average temps of 76° in 1954, today's average temp of slightly more than 77° would give Wertz's fly ball an extra two inches of loft. Would Mays still get the ball, or would it hit the tip of the glove's webbing and bounce off? Would the Giants go on to sweep the Indians?

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In Praise of Friction The Media Slips Again

I recently posted a complaint about physics misconceptions promulgated by the media. To be fair, I need to report a good job describing the physics of a situation when it appears.

In an article posted on Dec. 27, 2006 by the op/ed staff of the North County Times (near San Diego), and titled A Physics Lesson, the authors do a very nice job of describing the role of friction in driving:

Your tires rely on friction to speed up, turn or stop. On a dry day, there's usually plenty of friction when the rubber hits the road. When it rains, the weight of your car must push water out of the way for the tires to reach the road.

The faster you drive, the greater amount of water your tires must push aside. If that water gets trapped between the asphalt and the tires, you'll lose control of your car -- you'll be hydroplaning. The lesson here is that when the roads are wet, you can't drive as fast as you would on a normal day. Even if the rain is light, slow down at least five to 10 mph.

When I teach a first-semester course in Physics, I typically begin the first day trying to get students to identify forces acting on them as they do basic things. My favorite example is on walking. I ask the following question: if you go from standing still to walking at a steady pace, you accelerated. According to Newton there must be an unbalanced force acting on you in the direction of your acceleration. What is this force?

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Frisbees in Space: Gettin' Funky With Gravity

This is a cautionary tale of frisbees in space, and those in the media who report about them...

Probably the main issue in all of physics education is how to help students learn in the face of their often serious misconceptions about the nature of forces in the world. Most carry with them an Aristotelian view of physics, in which forces are needed for motion. This view is in direct contrast with Newton's Laws (specifically the First Law). According to Newton, forces are needed to change motion, i.e. accelerate an object.

The Aristotelian view leads to totally incorrect views of everyday situations, views that are repeated continually because they have become so ingrained in our thinking and reactions. For example,when a driver moves to the left when making a sharp-right-hand turn, the common statement is that there is a "centrifugal force" pushing leftward. There is no such force: the driver is moving straight while the car moves to the right. The driver then feels the door on the left - the inclination is then to assume that a force "pushed" the driver into the door. There are many other situations where we instinctively believe that a force is acting when in fact it isn't. (See Aristotelian Physics and Why We Hate It by R.G. Brown of Duke U.)

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Fish with Feet: Media's Missing Links

Shawn Gould, ©National Geographic SocietyIt was just a month ago that the world's media outlets fell over themselves proclaiming the fossil findings of a half-fish - half vertebrate as the Missing Link -the Smoking Gun of fossil evidence that finally starts to fill in those notorious "gaps" in the fossil evidence so gleefully pounced on by creationists and intelligent designists.

For the most part, the scientific community is far more reticent about the Missing Link claim for the Tiktaalik - the name given to the species whose fossils were discovered on Ellesmere Island - preferring the more sobering "transitional" (See Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers at Scientific American News.)

How could the media resist - Tiktaalik is already a star, with a wikipedia page, and its own web site at the University of Chicago?

While the Tiktaalik find does provide a tantalizing clue on how and when the fish/tetrapod transition occurred, it is always true that plugging a gap introduces two more gaps between the existing fossils and the "Missing Link." Is it a shock then that creationists and ID'ers aren't impressed? Doubling the gaps will always work to their advantage.

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