Tessellatin' Rhythm and Fractal City Maps

Portland - The Fractal (Click to enlarge)One of the craziest art efforts out there is the geospatial art of Nikolas Schiller. Schiller takes satellite photos of cityscapes and melds them into quilts, morphs them onto spherical surfaces, and, basically anything else he can think of. The net result is a set of amazing images of familiar cities looking as if viewed through kaleidoscopes. Many of the images remind me of Escher, only with buildings and landscape features serving as the interlocking escher-figures, receding to infinity at the edges.

Maybe more insane is Schiller's pace: a new map every few days for several years now, all posted on his Daily Render blog, subtitled A Digital Scrapbook for Past, Present, and Future.

Schiller also works with old maps, e.g. combining 16th century maps with current images.

The fractal connection is an obvious one, and Schilling has a special section devoted to images that are more fractal-like. (See the Dupont Circle tessellation, e.g.)

Schiller's motivation is artistic and political. As described in a Washington Post article by D. Montgomery,

Click to read more ...

Who Judges Science?

As more technologically complex issues that are based on current scientific research end up in the courts, it has become increasingly apparent that judges now need to have an almost-impossible mix of scientific acumen in addition to juridical expertise.

In When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth has Many Faces, NYT writer Cornelia Dean presents a detailed look at the changing face of scientific cases over the past century. Including a history of morphing rules for the legal includability of scientific evidence and outside experts, the article is a stark warning about the dangers of scientific cases being judged by those least able to judge the science. (This is not an argument for knowing science content, but rather the process of science, from data to theory and acceptance.) In some cases, bad science rules the day in court because some judges don't know enough about the scientific process to direct juries appropriately.

As Dean quotes at the end of her piece:

Click to read more ...

Bad News Polar Bears with Business Intelligence

Bad News: Walter Matthau and BearModeling can't exist as an urgent, necessary, and successful activity without some agreement about the data that is used to verify the model. Monitoring the loss of Arctic sea ice is a relatively unambiguous measurement: take some pictures and measure what you see over a stretch of time, looking for a trend.

For anyone not themselves lost in the Arctic for the past year or so, the sight of polar bears hopelessly afloat on shrinking bergs is an iconic image that is a powerful image of the immediate consequences of global warming.

A natural question needs to be asked - if the arctic ice is shrinking, does that mean that each polar bear has less ice as the arctic approaches the population density of New Jersey, or does the number of polar bears decrease to match the decrease in ice?

Counting bears is much more ambiguous - and dangerous - than measuring photos of ice. What's needed is a protocol that doesn't miss any old bears, and new bears, and especially the lack of bears that brings bad news.

Click to read more ...

There's Danger in Them Thar Equations

A very interesting piece by Howard Wainer in the latest American Scientist (May-June 2007) concerns dangerous equations, which he describes as falling into two classes:

• equations that are dangerous because we know them - they "may pose danger because the secrets within its bounds open doors behind which lies terrible peril," with E=mc² the most obvious candidate
• equations that are dangerous because we don't know them - mot because there is no theory that has yet yielded these equations, but rather because they are not known by those who need to know them. This is especially true for policy makers that base their decision on mathematical models, and specifically statistical models.

Wainer's top choice for most dangerous statistical equation is due to Abraham de Moivre, who showed in 1730 that the standard error of the mean of a sample is the standard error of the mean of the population divided by the square root of the sample size. A significant prediction of this equation is that small sample sizes lead to large fluctuations in sample means. It is this simple statement:

small samples → large fluctuations in sample means,

that provides the biggest danger when not used, or not understood, by both policy makers and the average citizen.

Click to read more ...

The Two Einsteins

A lot has been written about the latest Isaacson bio of Einstein, and it's now on all US best-seller lists.  Remarkably, there is another Einstein bio just released by Jüurgen Neffe (actually released 2 years ago in Germany and then most of  Europe where it has been a best-seller equivalent to Isaacson) .

I was lucky enough to get the Inquirer assignment for both of them. See the full review. (Because the Inquirer piece was restricted to 850 words, I will have much more to say about both of these books shortly.)

They're both amazing books, with Neffe's maybe the more interesting... If you have the time, read them both!

Ida Hoos - On The Perils of Mathematical Modeling and Public Policy

The need for careful analysis of all assumptions that go into a mathematical model, and a corresponding willingness to investigate the predicted output of a model vs. what is actually observed, is sine qua non for all mathematics modelers.

I mention this because I just heard of the death of Ida Hoos - someone whom I was unfamiliar with, but who published frequently on the potential problems with mathematical modeling in the social sciences.

From the 5/5/2007 NYTimes obit by Katie Hafner:

...Dr. Hoos, a sociologist, was widely recognized as an outspoken critic of systems analysis, which came to prominence after World War II. The approach used mathematical models to perform cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments on complex technologies like radar systems and military aircraft.

With the concept strengthening in the 1950s and ’60s, when the use of computers to assess technology grew more popular, she wrote widely on a need to balance it with other considerations like effects on the work force.

“A kind of quantomania prevails in the assessment of technologies,” Dr. Hoos wrote in 1979 in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. “What cannot be counted simply doesn't count, and so we systematically ignore large and important areas of concern.”

Dr. Hoos urged national decision makers to take such assessments “with a large measure of skepticism lest they lead us to regrettable, if not disastrous, conclusions.”

Click to read more ...

One Degree of Separation - Global Hot Air

Sterling Hot-Air Engine. Click to enlarge.The world, and especially all of blogville has exploded with the release of the IPCC's executive summary of its 2007 Climate Change: The Physical Basis. A web search for anything to do with global warming seems to yield just as many blogs that talk about the "myths" of global warming (e.g. see JunkScience) as there are "myths about myths" about global warming (e.g. see The Environmental Defense Fund site). How can anyone navigate through this stream of flotsam/jetsam? How do these blogs do anything but attract those who already believe in that point of view, or are leaning heavily that way?

Not even political persuasion is a good predictor of what you'll find out there. For example, read Facts and Myths about Global Warming: A Conservative Perspective at the The Green Elephant site. Green Elephant being the Republicans for Environmental Protection, of course.

Then there is the godfather of the anti-warming crowd - none other than the king of science fact/fiction media success - Michael Crichton (see my previous post on Crichton's role in the GW debate). His recent lecture The Impossibility of Prediction is a good example of why Crichton is listened-to and often quoted, especially by members of the Bush administration who,

Click to read more ...

Breaking the Ice Shelf - Why Hide the Crack?

The ice shelf breaks away. Click to enlarge.

In December 2006 it was widely reported that the 25.5-square-mile Ayles ice-shelf broke free from Ellesmere island, some 500 miles south of the North Pole. (See the National Geographic report for more details.)

This event actually occurred in 2005 when it had been observed by satellite images (click here for animations of the event), but, according to Luke Copeland of the University of Ottawa Global Laboratory for Cryospheric Research, the information was not released until the reasons for the split could be determined.

Not surprisingly, Copeland and colleagues found that the event, which was sizeable enough to register on earthquake monitors 155 miles away, is consistent with global warming.

I understand that scientists should be as deliberate as possible in doing their research, and circumspect (or silent) about their work until all of the essential methodology of good scientific research prior to publishing are carried out.

But I find it incredibly surprising that the news of the ice-shelf breaking off was held back from publication for almost one-and-a-half years! After all, the ice-shelf cracking is incontrovertible data that is not in question. More important, it is essential data for all inhabitants of this planet.

Why was the news withheld?

Click to read more ...

A Jolting Message: Hemingway's Snow and Climate Change

Kilimanjaro, then and now. Click to enlarge.I have remarked before on the ever-increasing media coverage given to global warming. As more and more scientific evidence comes in about the effects of global warming (see my recent post On the Increase in Greenland Ice Loss), the facts, interpretations, scientific theories, and political reactions to climate change are incredibly varied in the face of almost overwhelming evidence. Making sense of what is really happening, and how we should react, calls for insightful commentary from expert sources.

One such source is an article by Doug Macdougall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography titled Jolting Messages on Climate Change. (The Chronicle, April 2006). In addition to his clear enunciation of global climate change facts and a strong call for "jolting messages" that will move "politicians and the public into effective action," Macdougall reviews five books about climate change published in 2005 and 2006:

• Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What it Means for our Future, by John D. Cox
• Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy by William Sweet
• The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, by Tim Flannery
• The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, by Eugene Linden

According to Macdougall, each of these books have strong points. I encourage you to read Macdougall's reviews, which are very even-handed. Some of the authors are more pessimistic than the others in terms of what can be done (via science, engineering, politics), but all agree on the scope of the problem. Most of the books do take on the sudden climate changes that were first observed in studies of the Greenland ice sheet.

Click to read more ...

It's No Fluke: When Mandates Meet Models

In today's news, NJ & NY fishermen are understandably upset because the allowed number of fluke permitted to be caught in the upcoming season has been reduced by 28%.  Just as the number of deer is regulated, with certain numbers of permits issued during deer season, several fish species, and spawning and feeding areas are tightly controlled.  Both of these "game" species are subject to three often irreconcilable forces: scientific predictions in the form of regulatory commissions, local needs of those relying on the game for a livelihood, and the contingencies of politics.

The amount of any species permitted to be caught ("harvested" in the parlance of population minders and modelers) is chosen with one of two possible goals:

1. to keep the overall population in a steady state, i.e. the harvesting rate is basically the net birth rate  (absolute birth rate - death rate)
2. to increase the overall population - i.e. the harvesting rate is greater than the net birth rate 

Presumably the 3rd option - harvesting faster than the series can regenerate, is not a consideration in game or food species, or there soon would be no species left.

Click to read more ...