Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

(Warning, scattershot blogging echo-chamber post follows.)

Last week I went to the Science Blogging Talkfest sponsored by the Biochemical Society and led by Alice Bell from Imperial’s excellent Science Communication program.

Partially because the event was mostly attended by science bloggers themselves, there was a bit of a preaching-to-the-converted sense to the proceedings. (I tried to engage in some good-natured tweaking, pointing out that probably the greatest influence of [supposedly] science blogging has been in absurdly dragged-out climategate saga, but I couldn’t get a rise out of the audience.) But it was heartening to see just how mainstream science blogging has become.

“Only” five years ago (scare-quotes denoting an eternity of internet-time), the academic-blogosphere chattered on about an anonymous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which contended that bloggers were essentially unsuitable to be hired as faculty members, and a couple of years after that several of my colleagues felt the need to seriously restrict their blogging while searching for permanent positions. I was heartened to see that the question of whether blogging could actually hurt someone’s career seems to be less worrying. Although Petra Boynton said that one of her previous departments were less than enthusiastic about it, most of the panelists have found that, with an increased in impact and communication in general, blogging has taken its position as an effective way to engage with the public.

One of the more novel (to me) things going on at this meeting was the Twitter backchannel: the organizers projected a running stream of tweets marked with the #talkfest tag. It was a decent mix of jokes and apposite comments, especially including erstwhile MP Dr Evan Harris’ provocative comments about whether scientists should be forced to do public engagement at all. It’s certainly good that blogging and communication don’t hurt your career — but should they be requirements for scientific advancement? Not all scientists’ talents lie in that direction, and we shouldn’t expect them to. There was also a twitter discussion of the gender makeup of the panel, which was dishearteningly 1/6 female despite an audience of at least 50% women.

When science blogging started out as its own sub-genre in the middle of the decade, no one was quite sure what it would be for. Would it be used within science as an online lab notebook, or as a substitute or adjunct to papers? That doesn’t seem to have panned out — even in the post-’net open world, the structure of science encourages secrecy, at least until the work can be packaged into what are still more or less old-fashioned papers in what are still more or less old-fashioned journals (albeit with the important twist of pre-publication posting on the arXiv in many fields). Within collaborations, however, wikis, rather than blogs, have become ubiquitous as an easy way to communicate amongst scientists who are already expert — the easy ability to add small chunks of information is exactly what is needed. (Within the Planck Satellite collaboration, we actually use a wiki as a sort of blog — we keep a reverse-chronological list of “posts” discussing our latest results.)

Instead, blogs seem to be used almost exclusively as a window into the life, methods and results of scientists, directed at a knowledgeable but lay public. Indeed, it was suggested at the talkfest that someone could make a very useful living textbook from the scattered blog posts on a given subject. I’m not so sure — one of the advantages of a proper textbook is a single voice and, more prosaically, a single notation starting from scratch— but it’s probably worth trying if someone’s got the wherewithal to do the bit-work involved.

It was especially nice to meet several of my fellow Imperial College bloggers, including biophysicist Stephen Curry (whose own post on the Talkfest also has a list of other reactions to it), whom I was somewhat embarrassed to discover actually works in the same building as I do. As always at these sorts of events, much of the amusement was during the inevitable pub visit afterwards and especially the pre-panel milling about — thanks to the organizers for the excellent combination of cupcakes and beer.

My colleagues and I spend what is probably an inordinate amount of time complaining about the occasional lapses of the basic skills of our students, their inability to take notes, their obsession with marks and what’s going to be on the exams. Because, like everyone else, we like to complain.

But pretty often I get the chance to see them at their best. In the Physics department at Imperial, we interview students who are on the boundaries between final “degree classifications”, the British system of awarding degrees as First Class, 2.1, 2.2, etc. Last week, I was on the panel for this year’s cohort. And it was a pleasure to sit in front of a few of our students and watch them, in real time, thinking like physicists. Of course this means making the occasional mistake, but it also means that delicious “aha!” moment when they figure something out and (this is the best part) they know that they have, whether it’s finding a sign error in their derivation of the motion of a pendulum, or a thought experiment explaining why Einstein’s relativity makes sense.

For the interviews, I was paired with one of our external examiners, UCL particle physicist and fellow-blogger Jon Butterworth. On the same day as our interview, the Guardian published Simon Jenkins’ latest in a series of risible anti-science screeds, and Jon decided to take him to task neither with reasoned argumentation nor with a counter-polemic, but with parody. As with many great ideas on the internet, this one got picked up and built upon, so that the Guardian, to its credit, eventually gave Jon his own space to reply. Jenkins likely thinks we’re producing too many scientists (Imperial only trains scientists, doctors, and engineers, after all!) but I hope that Jon was pleased with the ones he saw.

So my congratulations to this year’s graduating students, and the best of luck to them whatever they go on to do. Pace Jenkins, the world needs more well-trained scientists like them, not fewer.

A couple of my friends have got into a bit of a spat on the internet. Megan McArdle, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote “The Freeloaders”, arguing that file sharing, as practiced by today’s 20-something young adults, is destroying the music industry.

Marc Weidenbaum, who writes the wonderful disquiet blog, first first answered in prose. Marc argues, mostly correctly I think, that Megan’s argument conflates the major-label recording industry with the music industry as a whole. Despite the illegality (and let’s not be coy about it, there is plenty of theft involved), the more general ethos of free culture has spawned plenty of great art that flourishes outside of the stranglehold of that same recording industry.

He then realized a better rejoinder would be in the great tradition of answer records: he invited some musicians to comment, musically, on the article (and its accompanying illustration): the result is Despite The Downturn, freely available (free as in beer and as in freedom), mostly electronica, an amazing turnaround of just a couple of days from thought to expression. So at least something good has come out of this disagreement.

(See below for an update.)

In one of the more bizarre meta-experiments that have come out of the latter-day social web, Trieste astrophysicist Paolo Salucci is trying to use Facebook to spread some astrophysics, not to the public, but within the astronomical community.

Specifically, he’s trying to “eliminate the deep-routed [sic] wrong misconception [sic] of Flat Rotation Curves of Spiral Galaxies”. A little scientific background: rotation curves are simply a measurement of how fast the stars are moving around the center of their host galaxies (plotted as a function of distance from the center to make a curve). If gravity is responsible for the motion of the stars, we can use the curve to determine the amount of mass in the galaxy. And when we do this, we find that there appears to be much more mass than the luminous matter — the stars — is responsible for. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for dark matter.

Salucci has a fairly specific axe to grind: the evidence is often caricatured as “flat rotation curves”. However, when considered in detail, the rotation curves are not completely flat, but do indeed seem to rise and (in the rare cases we can measure far enough out from the center) fall. More specifically, galaxy rotation curves do appear to take a very simple form, each of them being one of a very limited family of possibilities. This is much less variation than might have been naively surmised, but does seem to be borne out by massive numerical simulations of the Universe (including dark matter) as well as the observations.

Nonetheless, I think Salucci misses the point (or perhaps I miss his): indeed we do say “galaxies have flat rotation curves” but this meme (let’s not call it a “wrong misconception”) isn’t about the detailed shape of the rotation curves — rather, it is shorthand for “galaxies are dominated by dark matter”. Yes, we probably should be more precise in our language, but I don’t think we are spreading quite as gross a misconception as Salucci (who works directly in this field and so is admittedly more attuned to it than I) worries.

Of course the real interest in this experiment may just be the attempt to use a consumer social network to foster real discussion (or right thinking) within a specialized and technical community. Sarah Kendrew has an excellent dissection of the methodological side of Salucci’s attempt: can we actually measure how big a problem this “wrong misconception” is? How quickly should we expect Facebook to solve this problem? Would this be a good or a bad thing, outside of the usual professional channels of peer-review and conferences? I completely agree with Sarah that this experiment per se may not teach us much, but that the broader presence of professional astronomers, and scientists more generally, in the world of the web has already begun to prove itself useful as a tool for communication to the public and within the professional community.

Update: I had a very nice telephone discussion with Paolo Salucci today. I just want to re-emphasize the point that he is, indeed, right about the facts of the case: rotation curves are not flat (hence the name of the group), and moreover (and more subtly, which is the rub) it is exactly the rising and falling shape of these curves that makes the standard cosmological explanation of dark matter more compelling (and a just plain better fit to the data) than, say, alternative gravity theories such as MOND and its more theoretically coherent variants like TeVeS.

I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July. So: thanks for your attention for over 400 posts on cosmology, astrophysics, Bayesian probability and probably too much politics and religion.

Today is also a much more important date: the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope. Even Google is celebrating.

Right now, I’m at a meeting in Cambridge discussing Primordial Gravitational Waves — ripples in space and time that have been propagating since the first instants after the big bang. Despite my training as a theoretical physicist, I’m here to discuss the current state of the art of experiments measuring those waves using the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, which probes the effect of those gravitational waves on the constituents of the Universe about 400,000 years after the big bang. Better go finish writing my talk.

Thanks to The Telegraph’s digital chief, Ian Douglas, for his pointer to me as one of “Five Great Physics Blogs”. Despite its usually, erm, detestable politics, The Telegraph has usually had excellent science and technology coverage, and I’m happy to be picked in such good company: the four other blogs are Peter Coles’ In the Dark, Seed Magazine’s group ScienceBlogs, the anonymous Female Science Professor, and The Physics ArXiv Blog which discusses the latest physics preprints from the ArXiv.

A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology — relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in the Universe) and quantities derived from that like the distortions in the shapes of galaxies due to gravitational lensing, when the path of light from galaxies is perturbed by intervening mass in the Universe. Combined with good documentation and tutorials (and downloadable source), it makes a good companion to sites such as LAMBDA’s CMB toolbox, which provides similar services targeted specifically at Cosmic Microwave Background science. iCosmo looks like it will be useful for researchers in the field as well as students, so thanks and congratulations to its creators (I’d like to point directly at the page listing them, but that doesn’t seem to be possible… instead, there’s a discussion forum at CosmoCoffee.).

Welcome to anyone one led here from Physics World’s Blog life column. This is a blog — so comments are encouraged (or you could click on the advertisements)!

There’s a new Google-competing search engine called Cuil (which I guess is meant to be pronounced as slacker-speak “kewl” or something). If I search for myself on it, my Imperial homepage comes up first, but for some reason accompanied by this picture. I promise that’s not me. Just as strange, a picture that is of me comes up next to a blurb for a book written by another Andrew Jaffe who happens to be the director of the Clio Awards for advertising (there are a few of us Andrew Jaffes out there, but I’m egotistically happy to tell you that I’m top in most search engines). But I’m happiest about the cover shot from Muscle Magazine (not me either).

Over the last few weeks, I’ve managed to get hold of invitations to a few semi-private (semi-public?) beta versions of interesting bits of software. OK, they’re not for Royal Ascot or even a posh dinner party, but I have to take what I can get. So be prepared for some serious geekery — sorry.

Evernote wants to be your “offline brain” — a place where you can store all of the interesting detritus of your life that you might want to recall later: this “place” is on the internet, in “the cloud” as people are starting to say, accessible from your desktop, your mobile phone, etc. The further cleverness comes that this isn’t just a place to store files, but a whole lot of so-called metadata besides. So Evernote knows the type of files that you give it, when they were uploaded, and any “tags” or descriptions you care to attach. But the cleverest bit of all is that it can generate its own metadata: it can read text in your files. Well, that’s the idea. I know the camera on my iPhone isn’t very good, but it’s a surprising that it can’t read “Moro” on the left, although it gets “Against” on the right (note that the stored versions are better than these tiny reproductions):

Right now, the software is a web-based service (including one specialized for mobile devices like the iPhone), and offline clients for Mac OSX and Windows. Eventually, they claim it will move beyond character recognition to faces, video, and anything else that can be automatically parsed. Well, someday.

Still, even if they haven’t quite got it working yet, the visionary ideas behind Evernote are best described in this interview with Evernote CEO (?) Phil Libin by John Udell (whose excellent ongoing podcast series “Interviews with Innovators” treads an interesting path between the web and academia).

I’ve also managed to get an account on the Microsoft Mesh “tech preview”, discussed all over the web last week, and, in particular, touted at length on this Gillmor Gang podcast (which is how I got my invitation). I admit, I don’t quite get it — or at least it’s pretty clear that we’re in very early days here. Apparently, the Mesh will be a repository for “all” of your data, translated as needed to different formats and synchronized with different devices, with granular control of who gets to see it and use it. I guess the point is that this becomes the basis for a net-based operating system (perhaps more so when combined with something like MS’s Silverlight to handle the user interface—these all Steve Gillmor’s ideas, not my own).

But at present it’s not an improvement over (say) Apple’s .Mac service, which lets me have an “iDisk” which I can access from anywhere and which shows up on my OSX desktop as a local disk, and which furthermore automatically synchronizes my calendar, contacts, etc. But I’ll wait until the Mac and iPhone clients come around before I pass judgement. And of course there’s an opening for it to be combined with the intelligence of a system like Evernote.

Apparently, I’ve got 10 invitations for the Evernote beta-test and five for Mesh: get in touch if you’re interested. I can, of course, be bribed with, say, co-authorships (I’m an academic, after all).