Αναδημοσίευση από το in.gr

Η ανακάλυψη του Νεύτωνα ότι το λευκό φως αναλύεται σε επιμέρους χρώματα, και το επικίνδυνο πείραμα του Φραγκλίνου να πετάξει χαρταετό στη διάρκεια μιας καταιγίδας, είναι δύο από τις 60 ιστορικές επιστημονικές εργασίες που δημοσιεύει στο Διαδίκτυο η βρετανική Βασιλική Εταιρεία.

Το παλαιότερο επιστημονικό ίδρυμα του κόσμου προσφέρει στο κοινό πρόσβαση σε κορυφαίες στιγμές της επιστήμης στο πλαίσιο των εορτασμών για τα 350 χρόνια της.

Η Βασιλική Εταιρεία ξεκίνησε ανεπίσημα τη δεκαετία του 1640 ως κολέγιο στοχαστών που συναντώνταν για να συζητήσουν τις ιδέες του επιστήμονα και φιλόσοφου σερ Φράνσις Μπέικον. Ιδρύθηκε επίσημα στις 28 Νοεμβρίου 1660 και έκτοτε τα μέλη της συναντώνται μια φορά την εβδομάδα.

Ο νέος δικτυακός τόπος, με την ονομασία Trailblazing, περιλαμβάνει 60 από τις 60.000 δημοσιεύσεις στην επιθεώρηση της Εταιρείας, το Philosophical Transactions.

Μεταξύ των ιστορικών δημοσιεύσεων:

-Η χρωματική θεωρία του Ισαάκ Νεύτωνα τον 17ο αιώνα που βασίστηκε στην παρατήρηση ότι ένα πρίσμα αναλύει το λευκό φως στα χρώματα του φάσματος.

-Η απόπειρα του Βενιαμίν Φραγκλίνου το 1752 να δείξει ότι οι κεραυνοί είναι ηλεκτρικό φαινόμενο, πετώνας ένα χαρταετό στη διάρκεια καταιγίδας

-Η δημοσίευση του 1770 που δείχνει ότι ο Μότσαρντ ήταν όντως παιδί-θαύμα και όχι ενήλικας με νανισμό (το σκεπτικό: προτιμά να παίζει με τη γάτα του αντί να παίζει το αρπίχορδο).

-Η ανατριχιαστική περιγραφή μιας μετάγγισης αίματος το 17ο αιώνα.

-Μια από τις πρώτες δημοσιεύσεις του Στίβεν Χόκινγκ για τις μαύρες τρύπες το 1970.

«Οι επιστημονικές δημοσιεύσεις του Trailblazing αντανακλούν την ακατάπαυστη αναζήτηση επιστημόνων ανά τους αιώνες, από τους οποίους πολλοί μέλη της Βασιλικής Εταιρείας, να δοκιμάσουν και να επαυξήσουν τη γνώση μιας για την ανθρωπότητα και το Σύμπαν» δήλωσε ο πρόεδρος της εταιρείας λόρδος Μάρτιν Ρις.

Britain’s Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is marking its 350th Anniversary by releasing a library of papers online from such notable scientific figures as Sir Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin.  Its 60 most important historical papers will be available with commentary by modern scientists.  Among the newly released papers is a letter from 1752 by Benjamin Franklin of his famous kite-flying experiment to prove that lightning is electricity, a paper from 1672 by Sir Isaac Newton detailing his discovery that white light is composed of many colors, and a 1891 paper on Francis Galton’s discovery that fingerprints are unique.

A gruesome account of a 1666 blood transfusion and amusing notes about how an 8-year-old Mozart responded to tests of his genius were published on Monday as part of an online history of scientific endeavour. The “Trailblazing” website was created by Britain’s influential science academy the Royal Society, and includes handwritten papers on some of the most important scientific discoveries of the past three and a half centuries. The creators of Trailblazing say it is a “go-at-your-own-pace” virtual journey through science which the Royal Society hopes will inspire members of the public to see science as part of everyday life and culture. The papers, taken from past issues of the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world, Philosophical Transactions, also include documents from 1776 on how Captain James Cook saved his sailors from scurvy with pickled cabbage, lemons and malt – long before ideas about nutrition developed. They also include Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes and Isaac Newton’s 1672 landmark work on the nature of light and colour and 1940 papers on the discovery of penicillin.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5AT17P20091130?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=10174&sp=true

The Royal Society launches a new website today called Trailblazing to celebrate 350 Years of discovery. Essentially an interactive timeline the new site “is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.”

To mark the start of its 350th year, the Royal Society has made 60 historic papers available online in a science timeline on the Trailblazing website. The papers cover such topics as Mr Franklin’s kite flying electricity experiment of 1752 and a paper from 1970 on black holes with authors including Professor Stephen Hawking.

To read the full BBC News article, including comments from Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society, and to view an audio slideshow click here.

On November 28:

1520 Three ships under the command of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Europeans to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

1582 William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway paid a £40 bond for their marriage licence.

1628  John Bunyan, English cleric and author. was born.

1632 Jean-Baptiste Lully, French composer, was born.

1660 12 men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray at Gresham College decided to found what became the Royal Society.

 Mace of the Royal Society, granted by King Charles II.

1757 – William Blake, British poet, was born.

1814  The Times in London was for the first time printed by automatic, steam powered   presses built by the German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer, signaling the beginning of the availability of newspapers to a mass audience.

1820 Friedrich Engels, German philosopher, was born.

1821 Panama separated from Spain and joined Gran Colombia.

1829  Anton Rubinstein, Russian composer, was born.

1843 The Kingdom of Hawaii was officially recognized by the United Kingdom and France as an independent nation.

1893 Women voted in a general election New Zealand for the first time.

1904  Nancy Mitford, British essayist, was born.

1905  Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin as a political party with the main aim of establishing a dual monarchy in Ireland.

1912  Albania declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire.

1919  Lady Astor was elected as a Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. She was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons.  (Countess Markiewicz, the first to be elected, refused to sit).

1933  Hope Lange, American actress, was born.

1948  Beeb Birtles, Dutch-Australian musician/singer-songwriter; co-founding member of Little River Band, was born.

1960  Mauritania became independent of France.

1961 Martin Clunes, British actor, was born.

1962  Matt Cameron, American drummer (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, was born.

1964 NASA launched the Mariner 4 probe toward Mars.

1975 East Timor declared its independence from Portugal.

1977 Greg Somerville, New Zealand rugby union footballer, was born.

1979  Air New Zealand Flight TE901, a DC-10 operated sightseeing flight over Antarctica, crashed into Mount Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.

1987 South African Airways flight 295 crashes into the Indian Ocean, killing all 159 people on-board.

1991  South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia.

2008 An Air NZ Airbus A320 crashed off the coast of France.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.

“Waiter, will you serve me a dish of genetically modified food?”

I don’t see anyone clamouring to eat it.

Genetic modification. Such a mild-sounding term. A bit of modifying here, a bit there – what could be wrong with that?

A lot. Genetic modification is a radical departure from traditional plant breeding.

Genetic modification is about taking a gene from one species and placing it in the gene pool of another species.

And why, pray? To help feed the world, as the GM companies would have us believe?

Um, no. Commercially developed GM crops have been ‘modified’ to survive being sprayed by the GM companies’ pesticides.

GM makes spraying intensive farms easier – just spray the field and what is left standing is your genetically modified plant.

The GM companies claim that their new technology cuts down on pesticide use.

A recent report published in the US has found that growing GM plants is actually increasing pesticide use.

Meanwhile here in old Blighty, the UK’s venerable scientific institution, the Royal Society, wants to invest millions of our taxpayers’ money into researching GM.

Stop this madness! We need to be spending our money on researching systems that DO work, such as organic farming, to find out how to make them even better.

Money invested in low-tech research is pitiful compared to money sunk in magic-bullet technologies – set to make corporations even richer than they are because – here’s the rub, so listen carefully:

Once a corporation genetically modifies a seed, the corporation can patent it. It owns the seed. 

And if that GM seed should land accidentally in a farmer’s field (and seeds do travel, borne by bees, or wind) then the farmer has to pay the GM corporation a licensing fee – viz the terrible case foisted on the 70-year-old farmer, Percy Schmeiser, in Saskatchewan, in Canada. And, according to the Soil Association, hundreds like him…

This week we heard the Food Standards Agency wants another go at persuading the British public that GM is OK.

The Food Standards Agency. That’s the same outfit that published a  flawed report in August stating  the benefits of organic food are “insignificant”. As I thrive on fresh organic food, this  incensed me. My post on the FSA’s report got the most comments ever.

So anyway, as I was saying, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) wants another go at brainwashing the British public.

The FSA is calling it a “dialogue project”.

The way we use words, eh. Obviously ‘dialogue’ was deemed innacurate - suggesting a two-way give-and-receive exchange of views. Which it is not. It’s a project. A dialogue project.

So a steering group of academics has been assembled so consumers “can be helped to make informed choices about the food they eat.”

Only two out of the 11 members of the steering group are known to be critical of GM technology, according to the Telegraph.

In fact one of the members, Professor Bryan Wynne, signed a letter to the paper saying (I paraphrase) the dialogue project was a waste of money anyway.

I like the sound of Prof Wynne.

I remember the government-led public debate on GM, called GM Nation.

The more debaters heard about GM, the more anti-GM feeling grew: “soaring to 90%” said Geoffrey Lean in this week’s Telegraph. Back in 2003 he reported how “Many regarded the debate as “window dressing used to cover secret decisions to go ahead with GM crop development”.”

The more we hear, the less we like.

Following my first post from last week, here are more questions that the Royal Society wanted us Cambridge researchers to discuss during the peparatory Tomorrow’s Giant’s Meeting in Cambridge.

How can – and is it appropriate to – facilitate inter-laboratory dataset comparison?
Great that the question was asked. And the answer is yes of course it is. Not only is it appropriate, it is the vey essence of scientific endeavour. What else could be called science? That said, the fact that the question even had to be asked and that the answer is not self evident is disappointing. What has science/have scientists lost by way of attitude/ethics etc. that makes us even ask that question? Yes admittedly, there may be commercial reasons as to why this sort of comparison is not desirable. One of the participants in the session was at great pains to point out that there is often commercial interest tied up to data which prevents sharing and re-use and that is a fair point. However, over the past couple of years I have sat through far too many presentations where the presenter got up and talked about the development of a proprietary model/machine learning tool using a proprietary dataset and proprietary software. Now that is NOT science – at best it is a piece of local engineering which solves a particular problem for the presenter, but it does not advance human knowledge at all. I,, as a fellow scientist, could not pick up any aspect of this work and build upon it as it is all proprietary. Local engineering at best.

Does the type of data have an impact on the ways it can be shared?
Flippantly speaking: “you betcha”. Again, great that the question was even asked. And the answer is multifaceted because the question can be read in a number of different ways. It could be read as “does the provenance of the data and context in which it was generated have an impact on the ways in which it can be shared?” The question can also be read as “Does the (technical) format the data is in have an impact on the way in which it can be shared? The answer in both cases is yes. Let’s tackle these two in turn. One of the participants of the workshop worked at the faculty of education and her primary research data consisted of a large collection of interviews she had conducted with children over the course of her work. She believes that this data is valuable to other researchers in her field and would dearly love to share – but finds herself in a mire of legal and ethical concerns with respect to, for example, the children’s privacy that effectively prevent her from data sharing. So yes, the context in which data is produced and the type of data that is generated can be an obstacle to sharing. If “type of data” is understood to mean “format” then the answer is also yes. A number of my colleagues have pointed out (see here, for example) the data loss that occurs when documents containing scientific data are converted from the format in which they were produced to pdf (examples are here, here and here). The production of data in vernacular or lossy dataformats obviously also have an impact on data sharing – particularly when the sharing and exchange format is lossy.
However, the fact that the question had to be asked at all and that it went straight over the heads of most scientists who were at the meeting and who do not work in the data business, is intensely disappointing. Laboratory researchers have no appreciation of what they are doing when they convert their Word documents to pdf. Data science and informatics are not part of the standard curriculum in the education of scientists – something that desperately needs to change if data loss due to ignorance in data handling is to be avoided in the future.

Future literatures in the wider sense i.e. not just how findings are published in journals, but how can interim findings be shared and accessed?
That is a great question and one, as it turns out, that many of the people present in the meeting had pondered themselves in one form or another already. Scientists should not only be assessed on the basis of the journal articles they write, but, for example, also on the (raw) data they publish. However, science has, so far, not only not evolved a technical soloution to the data publication problem (of course, there isn’t just one solution – there are many depending on the type of data as well as the specific subject/sub-subject/sub-sub-subject that is producing the data etc.) Interim findings are part of this and systems like Nature Preceedings could point the way (although even Nature Preceedings does not allow us to deal with data). Obviously, one has to be careful that these do not just become dumping grounds for lower quality science. Once we have evolved technical solutions for publishing data, the next step will be to develop an ecosystem of metrics. And those metrics should only extend to things like data quality, trust and data provenance. Data “usefulness” – e.g. things like citation indices etc for data should, I think, not be part of the mix: it is impossible to predict what data will be useful when and under which circumstances (and incidentally it is the same for papers). In that sense, data usefulness can be as flighty as fashion and should not be a criterion.

There were a few more questions – and I will blog about these in a future post.

        Climate change has long-since ceased to be a scientific curiosity, and is no longerjust one of many environmental and regulatory concerns. As the United Nations Secretary General has said, it is the major, overriding environmental issue of our time, and the single greatest challenge facing environmental regulators. It is a growing crisis with economic, health and safety, food production, security, and other dimensions.

        Shifting weather patterns, for example, threaten food production through increased unpredictability of precipitation, rising sea levels contaminate coastal freshwater reserves and increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, and a warming atmosphere aids the pole-ward spread of pests and diseases once limited to the tropics.

        The news to date is bad and getting worse. Ice-loss from glaciers and ice sheets has continued, leading, for example, to the second straight year with an ice-free passage through Canada’s Arctic islands, and accelerating rates of ice-loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Combined with thermal expansion—warm water occupies more volume than cold—the melting of ice sheets and glaciers around the world is contributing to rates and an ultimate extent of sea-level rise that could far outstrip those anticipated in the most recent global scientific assessment.

        There is alarming evidence that important tipping points, leading to irreversible changes in major ecosystems and the planetary climate system, may already have been reached or passed. Ecosystems as diverse as the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic tundra, for example, may be approaching thresholds of dramatic change through warming and drying. Mountain glaciers are in alarming retreat and the downstream effects of reduced water supply in the driest months will have repercussions that transcend generations. Climate feedback systems and environmental cumulative effects are building across Earth systems demonstrating behaviours we cannot anticipate.

        The potential for runaway greenhouse warming is real and has never been more present. The most dangerous climate changes may still be avoided if we transform our hydrocarbon based energy systems and if we initiate rational and adequately financed adaptation programmes to forestall disasters and migrations at unprecedented scales. The tools are available, but they must be applied immediately and aggressively.

        Scientists in the journal Science are now reporting that the contraction of Greenland’s ice sheet is accelerating. Using computer modeling to confirm their satellite data, the team concluded that the ice mass shrank by 273 billion tons a year (or as the Brits like to say…”nearly 300 Lake Windermeres”) during the warm summers from 2006 to 2008.  That’s roughly a 70 percent increase over what had already been a pretty quick shrink of 166 billion tons a year since 2000.

        The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest in the world, behind Antarctica, and could increase sea level by 7 meters in sea level were it to completely melt.

        More than 273 gigatons of water is now pouring into the oceans annually, raising sea levels by nearly a millimetre every year, satellite imaging has shown.

        Such is the change in the vast ice sheet that the loss of weight is actually changing its affect on the earth’s gravitational pull, the study in Science claims.

          One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people in Britain and is the volume of Lake Windermere, the country’s biggest water mass.

        The melting rate has been accelerating over the last decade and has more than tripled since the early 1990s.

        While scientists cannot say that all the melting is caused by climate change, they believe this is “very, very compelling evidence” that man-made global warming is affecting the world’s ice sheets.

It could cause major coastal flooding could happen every five years – instead of every hundred.

        About 1.2 billion people live in coastal areas around the world and they could be “devastated” by the rise in sea levels if the ice cap, which covers 1.71 million kilometres.

        Professor Jonathan Bamber, the lead author at Bristol University, said: “When you put it into context how much ice is melting each year is very alarming. ”One gigaton is the same as a billion tonnes of water. Four of them could provide the domestic water supply for the whole of the UK.

        “What is very worrying is that the speed of melting is increasing. Ice caps are like supertankers. Once they start moving in one direction is takes a lot to stop them.”

    Professor Bamber used satellites to calculate the difference between the amount of inflowing ice – mainly from snowfall- compared the amount of outflowing ice – from surface melt and glacier rivers, to make the calculations.

        He also looked at satellite data on the contribution the huge ice mass has on the earth’s gravitational pull.

        He said both records had shown that the ice sheet had gone from roughly a state of equilibrium in the 1950s and gradually accelerated to its current rate of melting.

        He said at the current rate seas would rise approximately half an inch a decade which could have devastating effects on lowland areas.

        Professor Bamber also said that if the entire 2.5 million gigatons of the Greenland ice cap were to melt then global sea levels would rise by seven metres.

“Flooding that it is currently a once every hundred year even could happen every five years,” he said.

        “This is very, very, strong and compelling evidence that the recent climate change is not normal and is influenced by man-made global warming.”

        BBC viewers were treated last week to the bizarre spectacle of Mr Ban
Ki-moon standing on an Arctic ice-floe making a series of statements so laughable that it was hard to believe such a man can be Secretary-General of the UN. Thanks to global warming, he claimed, “100 billion tons” of polar ice are melting each year, so that within 30 years the Arctic could be “ice-free”. This was supported by a WWF claim that the ice is melting so fast that, by 2100, sea-levels could rise by 1.2 metres (four feet), which would lead to “floods affecting a quarter of the world”.

        Everything about this oft-repeated item was propaganda of the silliest kind. Standing 700 miles from the Pole, as near as the stubbornly present ice would allow his ship to go, Mr Ban seemed unaware that, although some 10 million square kilometres (3.8 million square miles) of sea-ice melts each summer, each September the Arctic starts to freeze again. And the extent of the ice now is 500,000 sq km (190,000 sq m) greater than it was this time last year – which was, in turn, 500,000 sq km more than in September 2007, the lowest point recently recorded (see the Cryosphere Today website). By April, after months of darkness, it will be back up to 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq m) or more.

        Mr Ban seems equally unaware that, even if all that sea-ice were to melt, this would no more raise sea-levels than a cube of ice melting in a gin and tonic increases the volume of liquid in the glass. If he is relying for his “100 billion tons” on land ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, he should note that much of their ice sheets are growing rather than shrinking. His “100 billion tons” is fantasy.

        Similarly worthy of the Booker Prize for fiction was WWF’s claim that sea levels might rise by four feet (twice the most extreme guess by those UN computer models), let alone the ludicrous claim that this would flood “a quarter of the world”. But Mr Ban was indulging in this childish publicity stunt for the same reason the BBC, the Royal Society and others have lately been banging on about various mad schemes for “climate engineering”, such as putting up vast mirrors in space to keep out the sun’s rays or lining our motorways with artificial trees to suck deadly CO2 out of the air, to be taken away and buried in holes in the ground.

        Why are they all going off their heads like this, in emulation of the “projector” that Gulliver met on his travels, in the Academy of Lagado, who had designed a scheme for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers? It is because they are desperately trying to whip up alarm over global warming before December’s planned “climate treaty” in Copenhagen, when all evidence suggests that they are not going to get the successor to the Kyoto Protocol they want.

        The countries of the developing world, led by China, India, Russia and Brazil, continue to insist that, since global warming is all the fault of the already developed countries of the West, it is up to the West to cut its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent, while the rest of the world is allowed to catch up. Some, such as China, are prepared to make token emission cuts, but only so long as they are compensated by the West to the tune of trillions of pounds a year. As some of the gloomier warmists admit, Copenhagen looks to be a dead duck.

        According to Government figures, however, we in Britain are already committed to spending, under the Climate Change Act, £18 billion every year between now and 2050 on this nonsense – daft light bulbs (see below), electricity blackouts and all. In other words, we are only beginning to see some of the nastier consequences of this crazy make-believe, based on nothing more substantial than the kind of gibberish we got last week from Mr “Light Bulb” Ban and the BBC.

 READ THE UNEP REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE 

I recently spent an afternoon at a meeting entitled “Tomorrow’s Giants”, which was jointly organized by the Royal Society and Nature and took place here in Cambridge. The meeting was in preparation for a larger meeting, also entitled “Tomorrow’s Giants” which is to be held on the 1st July 2010 as part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations. The purpose of the larger event will be to bring together scientists and politicians in an effort to gather scientist’s visions for the next 5 decades and to ask questions such as

• What will be required to enable academic achievement in the future?
• What are the main goals and challenges facing science in the future?

In discussing this, funding considerations were to be left to one side. This is interesting, considering that the current fashion and move towards larger and larger platform grants has profound implications for some of the questions the Royal Society and nature wanted to debate.

As part of the preparatory Cambridge meeting, the Royal Society and Nature had singled out four questions they whished us to debate:

• “Database Management”
• “Science Organisation”
• “Metrics”
• “Career Security and Support”

For historical and other reasons, readers of this blog will not be surprised to know that my personal interests are centered on scientific data and I shall therefore spend a few blogposts on the question of scientific data, that we were asked to debate. In this context, “Database Management” was a very unfortunate name for a vastly important topic which had all to do how science handles its data in the future. The questions that were asked were: (a) Managing big data – what is the right infrastructure for data sharing, (b) is “big data more of a concern for some disciplines rather than others (e.g. biologists), (c) how can – and is it appropriate to – facilitate inter-laboratory dataset comparison (d) does the type of data have an impact on the ways it can be shared? (d) future literatures in the wider sense i.e. not just how findings are published in journals, but how can interim findings be shared and accessed? (e) what about the tension between transparency and data protection (f) implications for the growing use of web2.0 as a resource for sharing research findings and (g) how well organised is the current use of web 2.0 and how does this impact accessibility?

These were all wonderful questions which must be asked in order to “future-proof” science and to which we were expected to provide answers in 20 min (!). While I was and am glad that we were to debate these issues, the devil is – as always – in the detail and the undifferentiated nature of asking made might heart sink again.

In this post, I would like to address the first two questions:

Managing big data – what is the right infrastructure for sharing
The Good: What is exciting here is the recognition by the RS that data needs infrastructure. And that infrastructure is both technical as well as sociocultural problem. Some components of that infrastructure (and by far not all) that are direly needed are

• Data Repositories (departmental, university level, subject-specific and transinstitutional
• Open, non-propriatary and standards-based markup (exchange formats)
• Computable Metadata (e.g. ontologies which can be used to give data COMPUTABLE meaning
• University librarians who think that preservation of the data generated by one’s own instritution falls WITHIN the remit of the library
• Scholarly Societies who remember that they were founded in response to a scaling problem – namely the increasing availability of scientific data and the need to distribute it – and who start taking this reason for their existence seriously again rather than trying to lock up data in inaccessible and copyrighted/DRM’ed/pdf’ed publications
• Academics who belive that data science should be a compulsory part of every undergraduate’s course
• Funding agencies who mandate open access publishing and data sharing as a condition of the award of a grant
• The availability and use of appropriate data licences, such as Creative Commons licences or Open Knowledge Foundation Licences

etc etc…..I am sure there are many more things that I should mention here and that I have forgotten. Come to think it: funding bodies and universities – don’t forget about or squeeze out the infrastructure guys. Don’t say to the infrastructure guys that the development of /institutional repositories/markup languages/models/eScience tools is not science but it engineering and has no place in a research university that “does science”. Do you detect bitterness? Yes you do – some of my colleagues – even those that call themselves “chemoinformaticians” tell me just this on a regular basis. Only thing is – without the infrastructure guys and the engineers that develop all of this stuff and develop it in a scientific manner using scientific methods, NO science will get done because there will be no infrastructure to support it. And which buttons will you push then to calculate your transition states, dock your molecules etc.? Yes – data needs infrastructure…now universities, senior academics and funding bodies….put your money and your recongnition where your mouth is.
The Bad:The focus of the question on BIG data perturbs me immensely. Because BIG data is, well, BIG data, one of the first things that people who produce/manage/exchange BIG data have to do – almost by the very nature of the thing – is to worry about infrastructure for BIG data. And while we may not have all the technical answers just yet (e.g. it is sad in a way that the fastest bandwidth we have for shuffling really BIG data, such as produced by astronomers around the world, for example, is to load it onto hard disks and to load these onto trucks and to send the trucks on their way) people who deal in BIG data are very aware that it needs infrastructure and hardly need convincing. It is not BIG data that is the problem. What is the problem, is data that is produced in the “bog-standard” long-tail research group of between 3 and 20 people. It is these guys, who usually DO NOT (unless they happen to be blessed and are biologists) have the infrastructure to make data available in such a way that it can be stored exchanged and re-used. It is the biology/chemistry/physics…PhD student that has slaved for three years to assemble data and keeps it an Excel spreadsheet that we need to worry about – how do we make it possible for him to publish his data and make it reusable? How about the departmental crystallographer who sits on thousands of publication-quality but unpublished crystal structures just because the compound never quite made it into a paper. We need to develop mechanisms and infrastucture for the small “long-tail” laboratory scientists…the big data guys have this figured out anyway.

Is Big Data more of a concern for some disciplines rather than others (e.g. biologists)?
The GoodYes of course it is. High throughput screening/ gene sequencing/radioastrononmy produce huge amount of data. Yes it is a concern for them – but they are thinking about it already.
The Bad Big data again. See above – it is not about Big data…let’s talk about the synthetic organic chemistr and the data associated with the 20 compounds he makes over 3 years too, please.

I’ll continue to address some of the other data related questions in other blog posts.

La mayoría de las mujeres tienen su último hijo antes de los 40 años. ¿Por qué la evolución favorecería este corte, especialmente cuando la mayoría de los mamíferos se reproducen hasta que mueren? Un nuevo estudio, elaborado por el equipo de Leslie Knapp dela Universidad de Cambridge (Reino Unido) y publicado enProceedings of the Royal Society B, viene a apoyar la”hipótesis de la abuela”, la idea de que las mujeres más mayores difunden sus genes con mayor eficacia ayudando a sus hijas a cuidar de los hijos de ésta.

En 1998 Kristen Hawkes (Universidad de Utah; EE.UU.) y sus colegas propusieron que las abuelas prestaban sus habilidades y experiencia al cuidado de sus nietos. Hawkes y otros autores citaban a los Hazda, un grupo de recolectores de Tanzania, en el que las abuelas buscan tubérculos mientras sus hijas daban de mamar a sus bebés. Dado que los tubérculos se piensa que se convirtieron en una base de la alimentación en los primeros días de la evolución humana, puede que en nuestra especie hubiese una ventaja selectiva para “hacer de abuela” en vez de “hacer de madre” por parte de las mujeres mayores.

Durante laúltima década varios investigadores han intentado comprobar la hipótesis centrándose en la relación entre las abuelas y sus nietos. Algunos estudios encontraron una relación entre el hecho de que la abuela viviese cerca de sus nietos y/o viviese más tiempo y las tasas de supervivencia de losnietos. Otros estudios, sin embargo, no encontraron correlación alguna.

Para intentar resolver estas inconsistencias, el equipo de Knapp propuso la”hipótesis de la abuela unida por el X”. Hay varios grados de parentesco entre las abuelas y sus nietos, en particular en lo que concierne al cromosoma X. Así, las abuelas paternas, como todas las mujeres, tienen dos cromosomas X, y pasan uno de ellos a sus hijos que, a su vez, se lo pasan a sus hijas. Por tanto, las abuelas paternas tienen un nivel de parentesco del 50 por ciento con sus nietas, al menos en lo que se refiere al cromosoma X. Pero las abuelas paternas no tienen ningún cromosoma X en común con sus nietos varones, que obtienen su cromosoma X de la madre. Y las abuelas maternas están relacionadas en un 25 por ciento por igual con sus nietas y nietos en sus cromosomas sexuales, ya que cada uno de estos descendientes tiene sólo una probabilidad del 25 por ciento de recibir un cromosoma X concreto de una de sus abuelas.

Knapp y sus colegas se concentraron en la supervivencia de los nietos en siete sociedades (actuales e históricas) para las que existen registros familiares de calidad. Las sociedades analizadas incluyen aldeas de granjeros de Japón, Etiopía, Gambia y Malawi, así como ciudades de Alemania, Inglaterra y Canadá fundadas a partir de 1600. Los datos se obtuvieron de registros eclesiales y civiles. Cuando los datos de las siete poblaciones se combinaron en un meta-análisis, se encontró una correlación altamente significativa entre el grado de parentesco de las abuelas viviendo con o cerca de una familia y la tasa de supervivencia de sus nietos. De esta manera las abuelas paternas eran las más beneficiosas para la supervivencia de sus nietas y las que menos para sus nietos, mientras que las abuelas maternas mostraron unos efectos intermedios.

Queda sin responder, sin embargo, cual es el mecanismo exacto que lleva aparentemente a las abuelas a favorecer a algunos nietos frente a otros. No hay pruebas de que lo hagan a propósito. Un nuevo misterio por resolver.

In June, I commented on this blog how momentum is slowly building behind the second-coming of genetically modified (GM) crops in the UK, almost 20 years after they were rejected in a passionate public debate.

Since then, the movement for their reintroduction has gained significant momentum with three high profile developments: the Royal Society called for funding into developing GM crops; the government’s chief scientific adviser reiterated that GM crops have a ‘major contribution’ to make in global food security; and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) plans a 12-month consultation exercise to gauge public opinion on the issue.

For GM enthusiasts, the opportunity is here: this is your chance to create a benign public environment where consumers choose to buy GM food products.  Such an environment will only be created if those who have the most to gain (and lose) employ a sophisticated, well-resourced and bullish communications strategy.  Central to this will be selling GM as a solution to global problems, not a problem in the making.

This may be going on behind the scenes, but it will need to be communicated confidently in open political debate.  And it’s not solely a task for Monsanto, Syngenta or the Agricultural Biotechnology Council.  It requires consistent, tenacious and positive leadership from across the industry, building a coalition of stakeholders including academics and research institutions, whose expertise and voice in the debate have been marginalised – in part by sophisticated and persistent campaigns from activists.

The biotechnology industry needs to maintain and build the momentum provided by the Royal Society and Professor Beddington.  2010 is likely to be a defining year for GM crops – industry and the developing world can’t afford to wait another two decades for a third attempt.

This post was written by Regester Larkin consultant, Jonathan Howie.

©2009 ~sfumato21

(via Daily What)

As we call off the dogs, we might recall that it was reputedly on this date in 1675 that Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz first used the “long s” as the integral symbol in calculus:

It was understood to be Leibnitz’s co-option of the Latin “summa.”

When Newton and Leibniz first published their versions of calculus (in the late 1680s), there was tremendous controversy over which mathematician (and therefore which country, England or Germany) deserved credit.  Newton derived his results first, but Leibniz published first.  The prickly Newton claimed Leibniz had stolen ideas from Newton’s unpublished notes, which Newton had shared with a few members of the Royal Society; a bitter argument ensued, dividing English-speaking mathematicians from continental mathematicians for many years– much to the detriment of English mathematics.   A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton has convinced scholars that the two arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting with integration; and Newton, with differentiation.  It was the symbolically-gifted Leibniz, however, who gave this new branch of mathematics its name.  Newton called his version of calculus the “the science of fluxions”…  One shudders to imagine that on one’s textbook (or in the mouths of schoolchildren…)

The Royal Society published its long awaited report on the intensification of sustainable agriculture earlier in the week. Much media coverage – some of it a little inaccurate in regard to GM. But the report is a valuable contribution to the food security debate in the UK. There are 12 key recommendations made by the Society.

Recommendations

1. Research Councils UK (RCUK) should develop a cross-council ‘grand challenge’ on global food crop security as a priority. This needs to secure at least £2 billion over 10 years to make a substantial difference. We believe this will require between £50 and £100 million per year of new government money in addition to existing research spending. This long-term UK programme should bring together all research councils, the Technology Strategy
Board and key central government research funders (DFID and DEFRA) and be aligned with comparable international activities in this area. It should be informed by dialogue with farmers, other stakeholders and members of the public. The following recommendations justify allocation of these funds to excellent and relevant research, research training and technology transfer.

2. UK research funders should support public sector crop breeding and genomics programmes to understand,
preserve and enhance the germplasm of priority crops and train the next generation of plant breeders. International
programmes in collaboration with Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres and
others in Africa and India should include millet, sorghum and rice. The top UK priority should be wheat, followed by
barley, oil seed rape, potato, vegetable brassicas and other horticultural crops. Public sector support for breeding
needs to emphasise longer term strategic approaches than can be expected from the private sector and develop
traits from public sector research.

3. RCUK should increase support for ecosystem-based approaches, agronomy and the related sciences that underpin improved crop and soil management.

4. RCUK, and BBSRC in particular, should support long-term high-risk approaches to high-return targets in genetic
improvement of crops. These targets include GM crops with improved photosynthetic effi ciency or nitrogen
fixation. High risk approaches might also produce GM or conventionally bred crops with reduced environmental
impact because they need lower fertiliser input or could be grown as perennials. Research into conventional
breeding and GM approaches to increased yield and resistance to stress and disease should also continue to
be funded.

5. Universities should work with funding bodies to reverse the decline in subjects relevant to a sustainable
intensifi cation of food crop production, such as agronomy, plant physiology, pathology and general botany, soil
science, environmental microbiology, weed science and entomology. We recommend that attempts by universities
and funding bodies to address this skills gap look globally. Studentships and postdoctoral research positions should
provide targeted subsidies to scientists in developing countries to visit the UK and work with UK researchers.

6. In order to sustain research capacity and maximise the potential for research to be utilised, crop science research

funded by BBSRC, DFID and others, together or separately, should have regular calls for proposals rather than oneoff grant rounds. Grants awarded in phases will allow researchers to pursue successful ideas in the fi eld or in new countries.

7. DFID should work with the CGIAR institutes to develop new mechanisms for international research collaborations with emerging scientifi c bases such as in China, Brazil, India and South Africa. Through its support for CGIAR, DFID should work with research funders and UK scientists to strengthen collaborations with international researchers. The UK should work with other partner countries to prioritise global agricultural research within the forthcoming European Commission eighth framework Programme.
8. Research that links UK science with developing countries, funded by DFID, BBSRC and others, should work with
farmers and extension services in target countries to make sure that benefi ts are captured and made accessible to
poor farmers.

9. As part of the RCUK grand challenge there should be support for joint initiatives between the public sector and
industry in which the explicit aim is the translation and application of previously executed basic research.

10. The UK department for Business, Innovation and Skills should review relevant intellectual property systems to
ensure that patenting or varietal protection of new seed varieties does not work against poverty alleviation, farmerled innovation or publicly funded research efforts.
11. UK government should work with EU partner countries over the next fi ve to ten years to develop a system of
regulation for new agricultural processes and products, based on shared principles.

12. DFID and DEFRA should build on the work of the Food Research Partnership to establish an independent food
security advisory function. This would work openly with stakeholders to help the government put future technological options into a broad social and economic context and appraise their benefi ts and uncertainties
alongside alternatives. It would feed into and stimulate similar international efforts at CGIAR and UN level.

So the Royal Society – one of the most respected and oldest scientific research institutions in Britain – today says GM food can feed the world and has appealed to the Government for a £2 billion government injection into the industry.

Wouldn’t a better way to feed the world be to use the billions of kilos of food burned and destroyed every year in the Europe as part of Europe’s ridiculous Common Agricultural Policy?

Well, yes it would but it wouldn’t make huge agribusiness companies billions of pounds would it? Funny that the Royal Society is funded directly by the British government that’s in bed with the very same GM companies that would benefit from the 2 billion subsidy the Royal Society is proposing.

Yet another example of where the British government are completely ignoring the majority of public who don’t want GM good on their supermarket shelves:

In contrast, the British government is comparably more open to the concept of GM foods and related technology than the UK public. However, without positive public perception and support of these products, they are not likely to do well in local areas.

Zachary Baker T
Infowars
20 de octubre 2009

Traducido por chemtrails sevilla

Después de leer un artículo en el Time Magazine donde el alcalde de Moscú  promete un invierno sin nieve, el viernes pasado se hizo evidente para mí que  la pulverización de aerosoles de la atmósfera es real a no ser que usted eliga no creer en ello. Esto puede sonar orwelliano, pero los Estados Unidos, los gobiernos de China y ahora Rusia han admitido que están manipulando el clima. Tomemos un momento para preguntarnos por qué mentes enfermas delirantes todavía creen que son tonterías.

Un artículo titulado Rocket de la NASA para crear nubes fue publicada el martes del mes pasado en space.com donde se informaba sobre un proyecto llamado “Experimento de Liberación de Aerosol Acusado o CARE” con la intención de impulsar la formación de nubes alrededor de las partículas de escape de cohetes. Las nubes artificiales fueron utilizados para simular fenómenos naturales llamadas nubes noctilucentes, que son las nubes más altas de la atmósfera.

Wayne Scales, un científico de la Universidad Tecnológica de Virginia utiliza modelos de computadora para estudiar la física de la nube de polvo artificial, que fue lanzada. Scales espera que el proyecto permita los científicos estudiar diferentes aspectos de la nube de polvo artificial, incluyendo la turbulencia generada dentro de las nubes y la distribución de partículas de polvo. “Nada como esto se ha hecho antes y por eso todo el mundo está muy entusiasmado”, dijo Scales. CARE es un proyecto del Laboratorio de Investigación Naval y el Programa de Prueba en el Espacio del Ministerio de Defensa.

Un artículo del London Guardian titulado Geo-ingeniería: Las ideas radicales para combatir el calentamiento global publicado en agosto de este año,  la idea de usar la geo-ingeniería en el planeta con el fin de controlar el clima ha estado  por más de 50 años, pero se ha mantenido en la “periferia”, como si no se estuviera haciendo ya.

Las referencias a la historia de una edición especial de la revista Philosophical Transactions de la Royal Society, donde científicos del clima e ingenieros recomiendan una evaluación amplia de las técnicas de geo-ingeniería. Ken Caldeira, científico líder con sede en el Instituto Carnegie en Stanford, California, cree que “estamos ahora, o pronto estarán, frente a problemas de como construir un clima que esté más a nuestro gusto.”

Bajo la Ley de Libertad de Información Cybercast News Service obtuvo pruebas que demostraban que científicos del Departamento de Energía (DOE) de los EE.UU  y Savannah River National Laboratory en Aiken, SC estaban llevando a cabo pruebas y desarrollando modelos por ordenador de lo que podría suceder si una gran cantidad de partículas fuera fumigada en la estratosfera. “El objetivo global de esta tarea es comprender y evaluar las implicaciones de la implementación de vasos porosos como agente para reducir el calentamiento global”, según el Departamento de Energía.

En los primeros años 90, Paul Crutzen, premio Nobel y Tom Wigley, un renombrado científico mundial sobre el clima, promovió el concepto de enfriamiento de forma artificial del planeta. Al liberar un cóctel de gases de sulfuro en la atmósfera superior con la capacidad para reflejar los rayos del sol lejos de la tierra causaría un efecto de enfriamiento.

Según una entrevista con AP en abril con el Dr. John Holdren, el actual Director de la Oficina de Política Científica y Tecnológica, los métodos radicales de frenar el calentamiento global como la fumigación de partículas en la atmósfera superior a fin de reflejar los rayos del sol no se descarta. El Dr. Muerte es también conocido por su trabajo como co-autor de Ecoscience, un libro de texto del gobierno donde promociona medidas de control enfermizas de la población tales como la esterilización forzada.

Un artículo de The Telegraph de Londres titulada “La lluvia en Beijing  no caerá en el desfile” publicada en agosto de este año informó Zhang Qiang, el jefe adjunto del ministerio de modificación de la ciudad dijo a tiempo a sus medios de comunicación estatales que los anti-cohetes de lluvia estarán listos para la celebración de el 60 º aniversario del Partido Comunista. Esto no es ninguna sorpresa, especialmente cuando el diario Los Angeles Times publicó un artículo el año anterior titulado China planea poner fin a la lluvia en los Juegos Olímpicos. Se informó que la modificación del tiempo en China manipulando las nubes fue para “mantener el aire libre seco.” The Times comienza a explicar cómo los chinos han estado “jugando con el tiempo desde la década de 1950.”

Guohe Wang, director de la modificación del clima para la Academia China de Meteorología dice que China tiene “el programa más grande del mundo, con un gran número de equipos y  personas implicadas.” El director admite que su programa no es tan avanzado como el de los rusos, que comenzaron con la formación de nubes sofisticados en 1986 para impedir que la lluvia radiactiva del accidente del reactor de Chernóbil llegara a Moscú.

En un artículo titulado El alcalde de Moscú promete un invierno sin nieve se publicó la semana pasada en Time / CNN ’s website. Se afirma que “para unos pocos millones de dólares, la oficina del alcalde va a contratar a la Fuerza Aérea de Rusia para rociar una niebla química fina encima de las nubes antes de que llegue a la capital, forzándo a las nubes  para que descargen la nieve fuera de la ciudad.” Según el artículo el alcalde Yuri Luzhkov dice que su fuerza aérea se  asegurará de que no llueva para el Día de la Victoria y el Día de la Ciudad .

La  única oposición de esta historia es que los suburbios de Moscú tendrán un poco de nieve suplementaria  si logran controlar el clima, es una forma de “jugar a ser Dios”. Todo, si no todas las historias relacionadas con trazos químicos, la geo-ingeniería y terraformación no hace ninguna referencia a los posibles efectos adversos para la salud de los cielos con la fumigación de productos químicos en los seres humanos, animales y vegetación. La modificación del clima puede de hecho tener muchos beneficios para el bienestar de la humanidad. Sin embargo, esta tecnología se vuelve mortal, una vez en manos de una dictadura científica cuyo objetivo final es reducir la población en un 80 por ciento o más.

Estos nihilistas suicidas se ven a sí mismos como intelectualmente / genéticamente superiores a la mayoría de nosotros. Como tales, ver nuestra consternación con la práctica de la siembra de nubes como justificación para actuar en nombre del planeta. Suponiendo que la clonación de seres humanos no sea perjudicial, la cuestión moral quedaría por determinar si las personas deben tener ese poder de jugar a ser Dios. Nuestros maestros mundiales en los Estados Unidos, Rusia y China se han saltado la etapa más importante por el cual la posibilidad de graves problemas de salud con la pulverización de aerosoles en su población se debate en los tribunales y han asumido el papel de nuestros dioses.

Así que antes de todo lo delirante del  ”ala derecha ilusoria”  presentes tanto en el gobierno y la universidad pública recuerda esto, nunca existirá en las mentes de aquellos que optan por no reconocer los hechos. Simplemente pasamos a la siguiente persona que espero no caiga en el estado orwelliano infame de la mente conocido como doblepensar.

Fuentes:

1) http://www.guardian.co.uk / …

2) http://http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11572945/

3) http://http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki / …

4) http://http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news / …

5) http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld / …

6) http://www.time.com/time/world/article / …

Relaciones de Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/haydenkays-photo/3293225642/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisinplymouth/3723545983/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42202789@N02/4028494717/

Lamb, Sir Horace

Birth: November 27, 1849, Stockport, England.  Death: December 4, 1934, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, now amalgamated with isle of Ely.  Mathematician who contributed to the field of mathematical physics.  In 1872 he was made a fellow and assistant tutor of Trinity college, Cambridge, and three years later he became professor of mathematics at Adelaide University, Australia.  He returned to England in 1885 to become professor of mathematics at Victoria University, Lancashire.  The recognized authority on hydrodynamics, he wrote the Mathematical Theory of the Motion of Fluids (1878) and Hydrodynamics (1895); the latter for many years was the standard work on hydrodynamics.  His many papers, principally on applied mathematics, detailed his researches on wave propagation, electrical induction, earthquake tremors, and the theory of tides and waves.

Lamb made valuable studies of airflow over aircraft surfaces for the Aeronautical Research Committee from 1921 to 1927.  He was made a fellow of the Royal society of London in 1884 and was knighted in 1931.  His other publications include Infinitesimal Calculus (1897); Dynamical Theory of Sound (1910); Statics: Including Hydrostatics and Elements of the Theory of Elasticity (1912); Dynamics (1914); and Higher Mechanics (1920).

Visual source:  gap-system

Noviembre es la fecha de la gran cita de la ciencia. La esperada puesta en marcha del LHC, el superacelerador de partículas del CERN de Ginebra, tras sucesivos aplazamientos y el experimento que reproducirá en sus colosales instalaciones subterráneas condiciones energéticas similares al Big Bang que originó el Universo, tienen en vilo a toda la comunidad cientifica.

“Quien piense que el LHC destruirá la Tierra es un tonto”

Brian Cox es físico de partículas, miembro de la Royal Society, profesor de la Universidad de Manchester y presentador de varios programas de ciencia en la BBC. Su participación en el experimento ATLAS en el Laboratorio Europeo de Física de Partículas (CERN) le permite tener un conocimiento exhaustivo de las entrañas del LHC, el acelerador de partículas que se pondrá en funcionamiento nuevamente en noviembre tras la avería sufrida hace unos meses. Cox conoce perfectamente cuáles son los principios físicos que rigen el funcionamiento del LHC. Por eso, le molesta especialmente que aún exista quien asegure que el acelerador puede generar un agujero que se trague el planeta, y que estas teorías sigan publicándose en la prensa, en blogs o en foros digitales.

As carbon dioxide (what you breath out and the trees breath in) continues to rise in our atmosphere global temperatures have not increased, this is from the climate correspondent for BBC News, Paul Hudson. How can this be? Scientist Piers Corbyn says that solar charged particles are almost entirely responsible for global temperatures. Can he be right? Research conducted two years ago by the Royal Society ruled out solar influences, Hudson wrote.

Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University says the oceans and global temperatures are connected. He says the oceans have a 30 year cycle in which they warm and cool and the most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation which is now cooling. Sounds reasonable, right? But the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre says the long term trend in global temperatures is clearly up. Does this refute Easterbrook’s conclusions? Mojib Latif, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we may be in a 10-20 year period of cooling. He believes that this cooling will be temporary and then we’ll go right back to man-made global warming.

This all reminds me of that old television program “Soap” where when it first came on they made a bunch of crazy statements and then said, “Confussed? You won’t be after this episode.” The problem is this ain’t television and with each episode we get more confussed. My question to you is, is this speculation and contradiction worth destroying our way of life and our economy over, or should we wait until we know what the heck we are doing?