The future of computational science—in 1977

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Charles Day

In the spring of 1977, Queen Elizabeth II toured New Zealand to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her reign, astronomers using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory discovered the rings of Uranus, and—of more significance to the 14-year-old me—the punk band the Clash released its eponymous first album.

That same spring, Philip Abelson, the last physicist to serve as Science’s editor in chief, devoted an entire issue of the magazine to what he called the electronics revolution. The issue’s timing was apt. Three of the earliest and most successful personal computers—the Apple II, Commodore International’s Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), and Tandy’s TRS-80—made their debuts in 1977. As Abelson recognized, advances in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits were propelling a revolution in the availability and capability of computers.

If you scan the table of contents of that issue, you’ll find a total of 27 articles. They covered such diverse topics as electronic mail, satellite communications, computing in banking and marketing, the future of integrated circuits, and software engineering. One article presciently addressed the use of electronic media in education.

Computational science was included, too. Seven members of the technical staff at Bell Labs wrote an article entitled “Computers and research.” When I read the article for the first time this week, I was struck by how much William Baker and his coauthors got right. Not knowing how computational power would evolve, they took a broad, imaginative view of how computers would benefit research—and not just in crunching numbers.

The Bell Labs group predicted the positive impact of computers on scientific publishing. They also recognized the importance of computer science in its theoretical aspect (to elucidate the scope of what problems can be solved computationally) and in its practical aspect (to develop new computer languages).

But what most impressed me about the article was the observation that computers would change the ideas that scientists would come up with:

Broadly, these are now more complex ideas about more complex matters. But a complicated idea is worthless unless something can be done about it. What has changed is the usable level of idea complexity. Computers have significantly expanded the domain of tractable complexity.

By tractable complexity, Baker and his coauthors didn’t simply mean a bigger calculation with more mathematical terms. Rather, they anticipated the use of computers in such messily intricate fields as ecology, psychology, and economics. Now, the frontiers of tractable complexity include topics such as climate change, strongly correlated electron systems, and cell metabolism.

Besides bringing evermore complex problems into the realm of the tractable, where does the future of computers and research lie? Given the increasing sophistication of 3D printing, I foresee that computers will be used not only to design and analyze experiments, as they are today, but also to direct experiments’ assembly and performance.

To see what I mean, imagine a spacecraft touching down on the surface of an icy extrasolar planet that lies far beyond the range of practical back-and-forth telecommunication. Once the spacecraft’s drill has broken through the ice, sensor-equipped tentacles unfurl in the water below to evaluate the conditions. Based on the sensor data, the onboard computer equips its fleet of robot submarines with the appropriate mix of sensors designed to maximize the success of its mission: finding life.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 104 of the May/June 2012 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society:

The optimism and ambition of this year’s Gates scholars

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Charles Day

I did my PhD at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy. As a US-based alumnus of the university, I receive the quarterly newsletter Cambridge in America. Most of the newsletter is taken up with bulletins from each of the university’s 31 colleges. The latest issue had a bonus, at least for me: short biographies of the 50 US-based students who belong the 12th contingent of Gates Cambridge Scholars.

As you might guess, the scholarships were established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The endowment of $210 million pays for 90 students from any country outside the UK to undertake postgraduate studies at Cambridge University. For the duration of their courses, Gates scholars receive an annual stipend of £13 300 ($20 500) and have their tuition fees covered. They also receive a return airplane ticket.

Competition for the generous scholarships is fierce. The selection process includes an interview, which may be conducted via Skype. For the 50 places open to US-based applicants, the acceptance rate is 1 in 20. For the 40 places open to the rest of the world, it’s 1 in 80.

Rutgers University graduates Devinn Lambert and Kelvin Mei belong to this year's incoming class of Gates Cambridge Scholars. Lambert wants to conduct research related to renewable energy. Mei wants to build hardware for the next particle collider. CREDIT: Nick Romanenko

The article about the scholars in Cambridge in America listed their names, hometowns, undergraduate institutions and the courses they intend to take at Cambridge. It also included one or two sentences written by each scholar that stated what he or she hoped to achieve.

The statements make interesting reading. They’re also inspirational. Lindsey Murray of Warsaw, Missouri, graduated from Michigan State University. Like her fellow Gates scholars, she’ll arrive in Cambridge in October, when she’ll start a master’s degree in criminology. Here’s how she describes her goal:

I would like to concentrate on NATO’s training of Afghan police and security forces, the rise of their forensic capabilities, and sustaining them once NATO support departs.

Elijah Fook Keat Mak of Singapore, who graduated from the University of Buffalo, will be doing a PhD in psychiatry. His statement reads:

While administering neuropsychological assessments for dementia patients, I became fascinated by the global challenge to halt the disease. I decided that fighting against neurodegenerative disorders would be my life endeavor.

There are physicists among this year’s Gates scholars. Kelvin Mei of Flemington, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University. He wants to build hardware for the next particle physics collider. Jason Tabachnik of Beachwood, Ohio, graduated from Case Western Reserve. He wants to become a condensed-matter physicist who focuses on the development of new materials.

Out of curiosity, I typed “astronomy” into the search box that appears on the alumni page of the Gates Cambridge Scholars website. Eleven names appeared, including one that I recognized, Erin Kara. A friend of mine heard her give a talk about her thesis research at this past April’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s high-energy astrophysics division. He was impressed.

Taken together, the statements give a favorable impression of the top students who graduate from US universities. The ambitions they set themselves are high and altruistic. To use IBM’s current slogan, they want to build a better planet.

Scenes from Married Life: A novel by a physicist about a physicist

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Charles Day

I’ve just finished reading two novels by William Cooper, the pen name of Harry Hoff. Born in Northern England in 1910, Cooper studied physics at Cambridge University, where his academic adviser was physicist, novelist, and bureaucrat C. P. Snow.

Cooper’s first job after earning his bachelor’s degree was as a high school physics teacher in Leicester, a modestly sized city in England’s East Midlands. His 1950 novel Scenes from Provincial Life is set in such a city just before World War II and follows the life of Joe Lunn, a physics teacher who aspires to be a successful novelist.

Although it’s not well known, Scenes from Provincial Life was the first of several novels of the 1950s whose protagonists’ ordinary lives illuminated with wry humor the smug, dreary conventions of contemporary Britain. John Wain’s Hurry On Down (1953), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) were among the novel’s progeny.

Cooper doesn’t name the city in which Scenes from Provincial Life takes place, but his description of an ornate clock tower strongly suggests Leicester, the city where he taught physics in the 1930s.

Cooper’s novel attracted me not just because of its literary importance. I was also intrigued to see if his background as a physicist was manifest in the novel’s characters, plot, or themes. It wasn’t. Besides one brief episode in which Lunn tells his senior class to look for Newton’s rings, little of physics or physicists makes an appearance. Lunn, perhaps like Cooper himself, was more preoccupied with writing and sex.

The edition I bought paired Scenes from Provincial Life with one of its sequels, Scenes from Married Life. Set in London in 1950 and published in 1961, the novel continues to follow Lunn, who still writes novels, but who is now a civil servant tasked with ensuring that Britain’s research enterprise has the scientific staff it needs to flourish.

Cooper’s mentor, Snow, appears in the novel as Lunn’s boss, Robert (we never learn his surname). Together, the two physicists engage in office politics and pursue their respective literary careers. They also each meet and marry teachers.

As in the earlier novel, physics remains in the background. But there are at least two episodes in which Cooper’s inner physicist speaks out. The first is rather brief. Shopping for rings with Robert, Lunn is shocked to discover that wedding rings are much cheaper than engagement rings. “I had no idea the wedding rings were to be had for units of pounds,” he writes as any physicist might.

The second episode is longer and launches one of the novel’s subplots. Lunn is assigned to interview organic chemists for temporary jobs at one of Britain’s explosives research establishments. Evidently, Lunn (and presumably his creator too) held a low opinion of organic chemists, as you can tell from the following extract:

Organic chemists had come to be my bêtes noires—they seemed to me to be characterized by a peculiar combination of narrowness and complacency, having changed neither their techniques nor their opinion of themselves since the days of World War I. Organic chemistry had seen some truly glorious days at the beginning of the century, and the 1914–18 war, with everybody thinking mostly about explosives and poison gas, had been a chemists’ war. But after that had come the glorious days of atomic physics; and World War II, with everybody thinking about first radar and then atomic bombs, was a physicists’ war. To the sort of young men I had to see the point had not gone home. On they went, sticking together parts of molecules, by their crossword-puzzley techniques, to make big molecules: then, by more crossword-puzzley techniques, they verified that they had made what they thought they had made: and then started all over again.

When asked if they used techniques nowadays invented and used by physicists, they said to me rebukefully:

“I rely on classical methods.”

And when invited to discuss the way their parts of molecules behaved in terms of electronic structure, they said very rebukefully indeed:

“I’m afraid I’m not a theoretician.”

Some of them, it seemed to me when I got particularly desperate, might never have heard the electron had been discovered.

(In fairness I have to say that since then—I am writing about 1951 and it is now 1960—my opinion has changed. Young organic chemists have changed, to the extent of whipping at least one “modern technique,” nuclear magnetic resonance, smartly out of the hands of physicists.)

Parenthetical caveat aside, the typical—even stereotypical—haughtiness of physicists with regard to the practitioners of other sciences shines out of the extract. In the novel, Lunn’s attitude to one organic chemist in particular leads to an incident that almost ends his career. I won’t say more, lest you want to read the novel for yourself.

As for Cooper, managing scientific workforces became his specialty. He worked at the UK Atomic Energy Authority to stem Britain’s brain drain and served as a personnel consultant to the European Commission. Like Lunn, he continued to publish books, although only Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married Life remain in print today.

Cooper died in 2002.

The celebrity physicist

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Charles Day

My wife and I have just returned from a vacation in my native Britain, where we indulged, as usual, in one of our guilty pleasures: buying the celebrity magazine Hello.

Unlike People, US Weekly, and some other celebrity magazines, Hello treats celebrities—especially royals—with respect and reverence. The approach pays off. Celebrities willingly grant the magazine’s writers and photographers access to their homes, weddings, vacations, and other aspects of their lives.

A typical issue of Hello contains about 150 glossy pages. Filling them each week with fresh news about (mostly) British celebrities might seem challenging. But in 21st-century Britain, celebrity status is conferred not just on famous actors, flamboyant millionaires, and victorious athletes. Participants in reality TV, wives or girlfriends of soccer players, and comedians whose heydays are long past also merit Hello‘s editorial attention.

Indeed, part of what fascinates me about Hello is that, somewhat incongruously, even celebrities whose achievements are modest are subject to lavish photo spreads and detailed, irony-free writeups. The 27 May issue devoted four photo-packed pages to Nell Andrew, whom Hello describes as “a model and exercise guru” and “former I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here! star.

Physicist Brian Cox and Doctor Who actress Jenna-Louise Coleman posed for the cameras at this year’s Arqiva British Academy Television Awards.

That same issue happened to coincide with the magazine’s 25th anniversary. One of the articles documented the celebratory party that was held at the Wallace Collection, an art museum in London. Rod Stewart, John Cleese, Joan Collins, and Sarah, Duchess of York, were among the guests. And so, too, was the physicist, popularizer of science, and rock musician Brian Cox.

Although I was surprised to see Cox in the pages of Hello, I shouldn’t have been. Besides being a member of the ATLAS team at the Large Hadron Collider, Cox is also an engaging and prolific broadcaster. His clear, direct style and enthusiasm for physics comes across on radio and TV. He’s even been credited for a dramatic increase in the number of British students who want to study physics.

I don’t know whether Cox seeks celebrity and enjoys its perks or whether he puts up with it in the name of science. But it doesn’t matter. Even though celebrities are hardly normal citizens, the fact that the readers of Hello see a physicist in the company of supermodels, boxing champions, and other mainstream celebrities helps—paradoxically—to make physics seem less arcane and more attractive.

Cox’s success makes me wonder if any of America’s gifted popularizers of physics should follow his example and embrace celebrity—for the good of science, if not for the parties.

“Supercomputers are awesome and why I love what I do!!!”

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Charles Day

My title comes from a comment made on Physics Today‘s Facebook page by Fernanda Foertter, a physicist who programs high-performance computers for a biotechnology company.

Although Foertter’s computational science background lies mostly in molecular dynamics simulations of polymers, her comment was about this post I wrote on colliding galaxies:

Here’s a great example of using computer simulation to help interpret observations. Jennifer Lotz of Space Telescope Science Institute and her colleagues modeled pairs of galaxies merging into each other. Stills from her movies were then compared with Hubble images of galaxies that looked as though they had just merged or were about to merge. The comparison yielded a new, more accurate estimate of the galaxy merger rate.

Until I encountered Foertter’s enthusiastic outburst, I hadn’t thought of supercomputers as being inspirational. As a science writer, I’ve seen plenty of stunning simulations of exploding supernovae, wiggling proteins, and other phenomena. I’ve written about climate calculations that gobbled up weeks of supercomputer time. Several Nobel Prizes, I know, have been awarded for work that required the services of high-performance computers.

But now I’ve come to realize that supercomputers are not just useful, they’re glamorous, too. What’s more, their awesome power could be used to encourage schoolchildren to think about careers in computational science.

To see what I mean, consider what is perhaps the most ambitious, most glamorous field of physics: particle physics. When I was in high school, I read Nigel Calder’s The Key to the Universe: A Report on the New Physics (Viking Press, 1977), which I found in my local library. There within its pages, in accessible prose accompanied by photos and diagrams, was the quest to discover the ultimate constituents of matter and the laws that govern their behavior.

Back in 1977, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was Fermilab’s Main Ring, whose circumference and maximum collision energy were 6.4 km and 400 gigaelectronvolts. The current record holder, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, is 27 km in circumference and is designed to reach 7 teraelectronvolts. When the LHC ended its latest science run in October, it had smashed together 7 × 10¹⁴ protons and antiprotons.

To me, supercomputing—or high-performance computing, if you prefer—is the particle physics of computational science. The world’s fastest computer, K, consumes 10 megawatts of electricity to carry out 8 × 10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second. The problems that K and other supercomputers are programmed to tackle are among the toughest and most important in all of science, such as understanding Earth’s changing climate and figuring out how 10¹¹ interconnected neurons form a thinking human brain.

As I write this column, Supercomputing 2011 is being held at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. I was glad to see that the meeting’s education track has 19 talks altogether, including one entitled “Parallel: HPC Overview” by Charlie Peck and his colleagues.

Attending a lecture or class is still work to a student, no matter how interesting the topic. But reading a captivating book is play, and therefore more likely to fire a student’s imagination. I’ve just looked on Amazon for an inspiring book on supercomputing. I couldn’t find one.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the January/February 2012 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society:

The importance of clarity

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Charles Day

Two recent newspaper articles reminded me of the importance of clarity when writing about complex topics. In “Our feel-good war on breast cancer,” which was the cover article of last week’s New York Times magazine, Peggy Orenstein tackled the question of whether campaigns to raise awareness of breast cancer and urge women to have mammograms do more harm than good.

Orenstein’s reporting of the question’s medical, social, and economic aspects is impressive, as are her fluid narrative and engaging style. She also succeeds in clearly conveying the tricky topic of how risk is assessed and described. Five-year survival rate, I learned, is a potentially misleading statistic.

But to me, what makes her article admirably distinctive is her account of her own experiences with breast cancer. Even though she benefited from the early detection of a tumor, she does not advocate universal early screening. Quite the opposite. Her final paragraph reads:

It has been four decades since the former first lady Betty Ford went public with her breast-cancer diagnosis, shattering the stigma of the disease. It has been three decades since the founding of Komen. Two decades since the introduction of the pink ribbon. Yet all that well-meaning awareness has ultimately made women less conscious of the facts: obscuring the limits of screening, conflating risk with disease, compromising our decisions about health care, celebrating “cancer survivors” who may have never required treating. And ultimately, it has come at the expense of those whose lives are most at risk.

The other reminder of clarity’s importance came in the form of an editorial in Tuesday’s Washington Post. Under the title, “EPA speaks on how much radiation is too much,” the newspaper’s editorial board opined on a proposal, released on 15 April by the US Environmental Protection Agency, to update the agency’s guide to emergency services in the event of a nuclear accident or attack.

The Post‘s editorial board duly weighed activists’ objections to the proposal, yet found in favor of the EPA—but with this sting in the tail:

The activists are right, though, about one thing: The document is a confusing bore. If the EPA wants city, county and state officials to pay attention—if it wants to make the case for practicality over the activists’ hyperbole—the agency ought to rewrite the guidelines in plain English.

My first encounter with the controversy surrounding radiation protection guidelines arose when I was assigned to edit Zbigniew Jaworowski’s article “Radiation risk and ethics,” which appeared in Physics Today‘s September 1999 issue. The article amounted to a long, multifaceted argument against the assumption that any radiation dose, no matter how small, could cause cancer.

The article was easy to edit. Jaworowski had organized the article deftly and made his points directly and with well-chosen evidence to support them. I was gratified to see that it spawned 12 letters to the editor, which were split between the April and May 2000 issues. Whether they agreed with Jaworowski or not, the letter writers had evidently understood his arguments.

Of course, scientists should strive to be clear even when they’re not engaged in controversy. And they should be especially clear when they propose a revolutionary new theory or experimental result.

One of my favorite examples of a clear, bold proposal is the paper that launched the field of chaos theory: Edward Lorenz’s “Deterministic nonperiodic flow,” which appeared in the March 1963 issue of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. Here’s a sample of Lorenz’s style from the paper’s introduction:

Lack of periodicity is very common in natural systems, and is one of the distinguishing features of turbulent flow. Because instantaneous turbulent flow patterns are so irregular, attention is often confined to the statistics of turbulence, which, in contrast to the details of turbulence, often behave in a regular well-organized manner. The short-range weather forecaster, however, is forced willy-nilly to predict the details of the large-scale turbulent eddies—the cyclones and anticyclones—which continually arrange themselves into new patterns. Thus there are occasions when more than the statistics of irregular flow are of very real concern.

Although you might get bogged down in the main, technical section of the paper, the entire introduction is accessible. And if that extract has whetted your appetite for more clarity about chaos, I recommend Adilson Motter and David Campbell’s May 2013 Physics Today article, “Chaos at fifty,” which celebrates the half century of research that Lorenz’s paper begat.

Monte Carlo, colloids, and public health

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Charles Day

My first professional encounter with the Monte Carlo method came not during my long-abandoned career as an astronomer when I might have used the computational technique, but years later when I ran Physics Today‘s Search and Discovery department.

In 2004, I faced the task of describing a new Monte Carlo algorithm. Devised by Erik Luijten (while taking a shower, he told me), the new algorithm could do what the standard one, the Metropolis algorithm, couldn’t: efficiently simulate a colloid whose suspended particles had widely different sizes.

Suspecting that some of my readers might be unfamiliar with Metropolis, I included a short tutorial. I pointed out that using an alternative, more direct simulation method—molecular dynamics (MD)—was impractical: It’s possible to calculate the forces acting on all the colloid’s particles, but only for a modest number of consecutive time steps. The movie-like simulation that MD produces would be too brief to provide physical insight.

But the Metropolis algorithm, I told my readers, doesn’t follow every particle all the time. Rather, it calculates snapshots of the system and uses statistical mechanics to combine them. Comparing the two methods, I wrote:

So, if MD is like a movie, the Metropolis algorithm is like a sparse set of shuffled snapshots. If you simulated a cocktail party with the Metropolis algorithm, you wouldn’t see dynamical events, such as guests arriving and departing, or rare events, such as a waiter refilling a punchbowl. But, taken together, the Metropolis snapshots would fairly represent the party in full swing. From them, you could deduce whether, on average, people had enjoyed themselves.

My latest brush with Monte Carlo happened last week. Looking for research to write about, I came across a paper by Luis Zamora and his colleagues entitled “A Monte Carlo tool to study the mortality reduction due to breast screening programs.”

Screening for breast cancer is difficult and controversial. It’s difficult because the principal method, x-ray mammography, cannot by itself determine whether a lesion is malignant. Because of that limitation, follow-up biopsies are essential, but most lesions—roughly 4 in 5—turn out to be benign.

Controversy surrounds the question of when to start screening. Not only is the disease harder to detect in young women, it’s also less prevalent. Definitive evidence in favor of screening women aged between 40 and 49 years is lacking. Yet doctors—who treat individuals, not populations—are reluctant to tell patients under 49 that they don’t need a mammogram yet. Why take even a small risk?

The tool that Zamora and his colleagues have built simulates the fate of a population of women who enter a screening program. You can adjust the program’s age range and participation rate. Clinically derived parameters, such as the probability of detecting a tumor, are incorporated into the tool.

Zamora and his colleagues present their results in graphs and tables, which are hard to summarize in a short column. They predict, for example, that breast cancer mortality can be reduced by 29% if 100% of women aged 50–70 are screened every two years.

But they did discover what appears to be a critical parameter. For a screening program to be effective, its participation rate must be at least 50%. In the US, where 16.3% of the population lacks health insurance, that target is unfortunately ambitious.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the March/April 2013 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

Let the public name exoplanets

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Charles Day

The names of the five stars closest to the Sun exemplify how confusing (or historically rich) astronomical nomenclature can be.

Proxima Centauri is the closest star. The second and third closest form a binary and are known collectively as α Centauri (or Rigel Kentaurus) and individually as α Centauri A and α Centauri B. The fourth closest is Barnard’s Star. The fifth is WISE 1049−5319, which is also known as Luhman 16.

The brown dwarf binary WISE 1049−5319 appears as a yellow disk in the center of this mid-wavelength IR image. CREDIT: NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive

Just how the five stars got their names depends, in part, on when they were first observed. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star in the night sky. As such, it has been named by several cultures. Its Chinese name, 南門 (Nán Mén), means “Southern Gate.” Arab astronomers called it جل القنطورس (Rijl Qanṭūris), “Centaur’s Foot.”

The name α Centauri originates in the first systematic stellar naming convention, which was devised in 1603 by the Bavarian astronomer Johann Bayer. “Centauri” (“of Centaurus”) indicates the constellation that the star belongs to; the Greek letter indicates the star’s brightness rank in the constellation.

The other stars in the top five are not visible to the naked eye and weren’t, therefore, cataloged by Bayer, whose naming convention predated the invention of the telescope by eight years. Proxima Centauri and Barnard’s Star are both red dwarfs. Proxima was named by the astronomer who discovered it in 1915, Robert Innes. Barnard’s Star was named after Edward Barnard, who was the first to measure the star’s velocity across the sky in 1916.

Remarkably, the discovery of WISE 1049−5319 was published on arXiv just last month. Kevin Luhman of Penn State University and his collaborators identified the star—which is, in fact, a brown dwarf binary—in observations made by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft. The numbers after the spacecraft’s abbreviated name are the binary’s celestial coordinates.

Names like WISE 1049−5319 are now the norm in astronomy. Space-based and ground-based observatories whose sensitivity exceeds their predecessors tend to find many new objects. Although you can’t tell from its name that WISE 1049−5319 is a brown dwarf binary, you can presume from the WISE part of the name that it’s an IR source and that it’s faint (because if it were bright, it would have been discovered and named earlier). Using the coordinates to identify sources might seem long-winded compared to a serial number, but the coordinates are astronomically meaningful, whereas a serial number wouldn’t be.

Rakhat, α Centauri Bb, or both?

I was reminded of the quirkiness of astronomical names earlier this week, when I read a news story in New Scientist entitled “Closest exoplanet sparks international naming fight.”

The dispute pits Uwingu, a startup company whose mission is to fund projects that inform the public about space science, against the International Astronomical Union, the world’s official arbiter of astronomical naming conventions and planetary nomenclature for planetary bodies.

By IAU-sanctioned convention, exoplanets are named after the the stars they orbit, with the addition of a lower-case letter: “a” designates the star; “b,” the first planet discovered; “c,” the second; and so on. Officially, the closest exoplanet to the Sun is called α Centauri Bb, but if you paid Uwingu $4.99, you could suggest a name. And if you paid $0.99, you could vote on the suggestions. Currently, the leading name for α Centauri Bb is Rakhat, which is what Mary Doria Russell called a planet that orbits the star in her 1996 science fiction novel, The Sparrow.

I think it’s great that a real planet is named after a fictional one. Granted, Rakhat conveys less astronomical information than α Centauri Bb does, but I don’t see why the two names can’t coexist. I doubt anyone would be confused.

What’s more, the IAU’s exoplanet naming convention, though simple and straightforward, does not necessarily yield neat, rational names. That’s because the stars that harbor exoplanets, like the five stars closest to the Sun, follow a mix of naming conventions. Exoplanet examples include 51 Pegasi b (the first one discovered), KIC 12557548b (the evaporating exoplanet), and HD 85512 b (a super-Earth).

Despite astronomy’s modest technological payoffs, the general public continues to fund astronomical research—thanks, in part, to the time and energy astronomers devote to engaging the public. By giving people the opportunity to name exoplanets, Uwingu is making them partners in a scientific enterprise. The IAU should support, not fight, such deep public engagement.

Using statistics to catch cheats and criminals

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Charles Day

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment,” Ernest Rutherford once declared. But when you work at the frontier of detection, as astronomers and particle physicists often do, you rely on statistical analysis to extract results. Indeed, if your experiment doesn’t need statistics, then you might be too far from the frontier to make an important discovery.

Despite such statistical triumphs as last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson, Rutherford’s disdain for—or at least suspicion of—statistics remains widespread. A recent statistical analysis demonstrated that visiting your doctor every year for a checkup doesn’t significantly prolong life. Of course, the practice doesn’t harm any individual patient, but its prevalence in the US raises the total cost of medical care, which harms society. Will the study make a difference? I doubt it.

Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and his coworkers discovered the atomic nucleus and the proton. They also performed the first experiments that transmuted one element into another. To learn more about Rutherford, visit the online exhibition Rutherford’s Nuclear World, which is hosted by AIP’s Center for the History of Physics. CREDIT: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (gift of Otto Hahn and Lawrence Badash)

I’m not sure what evidence would convince physicians to refrain from insisting on annual checkups, but they and anyone else who is skeptical of statistical analysis might be persuaded by a simmering scandal that boiled over recently in Atlanta, Georgia.

On 29 March the superintendent of the Atlanta school district, Beverly Hall, and 34 other educators were indicted in what a New York Times news story characterized as “the most widespread public school cheating scandal in memory.”

According to the indictment, the 35 educators conspired to raise students test scores by altering the tests after the students had taken them. Meeting in secret and wearing gloves to avoid leaving incriminating fingerprints, groups of teachers at various schools rubbed out wrong answers and replaced them with the correct ones.

Besides acclaim for appearing to fix badly performing schools, the conspirators also received cash bonuses. Hall’s totaled $500 000, according to the Times. One school, Parks Middle School, “improved” so much that it forfeited $750 000 in state and federal aid.

To gather evidence of a conspiracy that might convince a jury, Georgia state investigator, Richard Hyde, persuaded one of the teachers who was allegedly part of the scheme to wear a secret recording device. But evidence of a different kind had come to light five years earlier. In December 2008, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution drew attention to what seemed like suspiciously large and abrupt jumps in test scores. That initial investigation expanded into a five-year project in which three reporters and two database specialists gathered and analyzed test scores from 69 000 schools in 14 743 districts in 49 states.

The scores from Atlanta and few other districts stuck out as anomalous. As reported last June, some of those school districts are taking advantage of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution study to identify cheating educators.

Organized crime and electoral fraud

Similar statistical investigations can be found on the arXiv e-print server. Last month two physicists, Salvatore Catanese and Giacomo Fiumara and mathematician Emilio Ferrara, all from the University of Messina in Sicily, demonstrated that they could pick out organized criminal activity from cell phone records by looking for statistically anomalous behavior.

My favorite example—because it’s so similar to the Atlanta cheating scandal—was the study posted last year by Dmitry Kobak of the electrical and electronic engineering department of Imperial College London and two unaffiliated coauthors, Sergey Shpilkin and Maxim Pshenichnikov. Here’s the abstract:

Here we perform a statistical analysis of the official data from recent Russian parliamentary and presidential elections (held on December 4th, 2011 and March 4th, 2012, respectively). A number of anomalies are identified that persistently skew the results in favour of the pro-government party, United Russia (UR), and its leader Vladimir Putin. The main irregularities are: (i) remarkably high correlation between turnout and voting results; (ii) a large number of polling stations where the UR/Putin results are given by a round number of percent; (iii) constituencies showing improbably low or (iv) anomalously high dispersion of results across polling stations; (v) substantial difference between results at paper-based and electronic polling stations. These anomalies, albeit less prominent in the presidential elections, hardly conform to the assumptions of fair and free voting. The approaches proposed here can be readily extended to quantify fingerprints of electoral fraud in any other problematic elections.

As for Rutherford, I remain puzzled by his attitude toward statistics. The famous experiment that Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden performed in 1909 at the University of Manchester under his direction revealed the existence of the atomic nucleus—after Geiger and Marsden had laboriously tallied the rare backward reflections of alpha particles from gold foil.

Does it matter that ScienceDaily republishes press releases?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Charles Day

ScienceDaily is aptly named. The popular website has been posting copious news about science since its foundation 18 years ago. And I do mean “copious.” On 2 April, for instance, I counted 95 news items!

Given that ScienceDaily‘s staff page lists just two people, founder Dan Hogan and his wife Michele Hogan, the productivity seems remarkable—until you realize that all those stories, at least the ones I checked, are repackaged press releases from elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, the repackaging is minimal. Earlier this week, I posted a link on Physics Today‘s Facebook page to a Fraunhofer press release about a truck-mounted laser that can scan roads while the truck drives at highway speeds. The ScienceDaily version lacks the original’s figure, but the text is identical.

Further evidence of ScienceDaily‘s light editorial touch comes from a search for the British spellings “metre” and “litre.” As an American news outlet, ScienceDaily can be expected to swap the spellings for the American variants—if it did more than simply cut and paste the original British English press releases, that is.

ScienceDaily does not hide what it does. At the end of each story you’ll find a short description of the source, a note about editing, advice on citing the story, and a disclaimer. Here’s what’s appended to the piece about the truck-mounted laser scanner:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:

APA

MLA Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (2013, April 2). Surveying roads at 100 km/h. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 3, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2013/04/130402091250.htm

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Whether ScienceDaily‘s behavior is unethical is not clear-cut. On the one hand, the website links to the original press release and to the institution that issued it. On the other hand, disclaiming the views in the article while recommending that ScienceDaily‘s version of the story be cited rather than the original comes across as a bid for the benefits of publication without the concomitant editorial responsibility.

But does it matter that ScienceDaily reproduces press releases? Could the practice even be good for the promotion of science?

Most, if not all, the science press releases I encounter are well-written and accurate. And although some of them sound overly enthusiastic, they tend not to exaggerate or misrepresent the implications of the research. Some press releases are better than the stories they prompt, perhaps because the people who write them spend more talking to researchers to get the science right than some reporters might.

There’s another reason to tolerate, if not welcome, what ScienceDaily and similar websites do. To quote the website’s advertising page,

ScienceDaily‘s Web site traffic averages about 45,000 daily visits, generating in excess of 150,000 page views a day, or a total of roughly 1.3 million visits / 4.5 million page views a month.

That’s a lot of people reading informative, professionally produced content about science.

The Dayside

THE DAYSIDE is the blog of Charles Day, Physics Today’s online editor. His short essays range all over the physics landscape and beyond.

Author Archives: Charles Day