Zombie Science

Hmmm, I wonder if we can find an example of this in climatology ...

Zombie science: A sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest

Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice. In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status. The classic account has it that bogus theories should readily be demolished by sceptical (or jealous) competitor scientists. However, in practice even the most conclusive ‘hatchet jobs’ may fail to kill, or even weaken, phoney hypotheses when they are backed-up with sufficient economic muscle in the form of lavish and sustained funding. And when a branch of science based on phoney theories serves a useful but non-scientific purpose, it may be kept-going indefinitely by continuous transfusions of cash from those whose interests it serves. If this happens, real science expires and a ‘zombie science’ evolves. Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down. It keeps twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with your eyes half-closed) zombie science looks much like the real thing. But in fact the zombie has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant pumping of funds. If zombie science is not scientifically-useable – what is its function? In a nutshell, zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda to be deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion. Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science; and it is precisely the superficial face-plausibility which is the sole and sufficient purpose of zombie science.

c 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd

Finding Cancer in a Drop of Blood

A new test uses microfluidics to diagnose cancer with a single drop of blood at a much reduced cost.

Current testing technology takes several vials of blood and each test costs about $500. The new test needs only one drop of blood, takes ten minutes, and uses a slide costing about five cents per targeted protein.

James Heath at CalTech and Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, have founded Integrated Diagnostics to produce and sell their new blood-drop method.

The new technique uses an "integrated blood bar code chip" designed to separate organ-specific proteins from the blood and pass them through tiny channels coated with strips of DNA bound to antibodies that capture these proteins. The proteins are then coated with a material that lights up under a fluorescent microscope.

Clinical trials are underway.

Zeus, The Army Ray Gun

There has been a lot of research into weapons that use light or atomic particles destructively. But until this century, it was just research. We now know that the US Army deployed a real ray gun in 2003. Zeus, aka the Humvee Laser Ordnance Neutralization System (HLONS,) was one-of-a-kind when it was sent to Afganistan March 18, 2003. After six months it was returned to the US where more powerful versions were under development. Full deployment of Zeus is expected in fiscal year 2009.

The field-tested version of ZEUS had a 0.5 kW laser mounted on the roof of a Humvee. Current versions have more than four times that power and weigh 2,000 pounds less. They have an effective range of more than 300 meters.

During its six-month deployment, Zeus proved its worth exploding 210 explosive devices like old Russian missles and roadside IEDs. It is doubtful that it has ever been used against an enemy combatant because there is a controversy over the legality of such use under International Law.

Zeus was developed by General Dynanics. It is part of a larger DOD program call Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs.) Experimental DEWs have been around since Nickola Tesla worked on his charged-particle "teleforce" weapon in the 1930s.

Barge Cruising in France

For many years, I have dreamed of a barge trip through France, preferably the Burgundy region. Something always got in the way. Finally, with my fingers crossed, GF and I will get our chance in 2009.

We have invited a couple to join us. They have been my friends for almost 50 years. We served together in the Navy in Taiwan when I was a newly minted Ensign. I think I last saw them in the 1970s. Now that we are all retired, it's our big chance to get together again. It's going to be amazing.

The barge we have chosen is the Nilaya ("Heaven" in Indian Sanskrit) and the route will be one of the three choices in and around Burgundy. It's almost impossible to choose between them, but the skipper has asked us to rank our choices one through three.

I think the classic Burgundy Canal looks great. Market day in Dijon or wine tasting in Cote de Nuits! Another difficult choice!

Burgundy & the Petite Saône through the "waterways capital of France," wonderful restaurants, and market day in Port-sur-Saône.

Or maybe Burgundy and the Côte d'Or with a little wine tasting in Beaune?

Better yet, return every year and do them all!

And how did we find this fabulous deal? Surfing the web, of course.

Music Surfing

GF asked about HD Radio the other day. I had not paid attention to it because I'm not accustomed to listening to music on the radio, iPod, CD, or bandstand. It simply never occurs to me to listen, except in the car. But Houston radio stations are, shall we say, not the best.

Anyway, I discovered that HD radio in Houston is scarce, but KUHF (NPR) and KODA broadcast in HD and KODA HD is all jazz, all the time; that's what she wanted to hear.

A quick check of the Internet told me that HD radio receivers were also scarce - and often expensive. The majority seemed to be replacements for car stereos. So I went to the KODA web site and discovered they stream "HD radio" over the Internet. Several tweeks to Firefox later, I was streaming jazz into my Sony sound system. Not bad. GF will be happy, now.

But I didn't care for the KODA DJ and her choice of music, so I surfed the web (imagine that!) and found a plethora of streaming jazz stations. San Diego City College's Jazz88 immediately became my favorite. Amazing. All it takes is high-speed Internet, some free software, a little browser tweaking, and a reasonably good sound system. I may listen to music while web surfing in the future. If it occurs to me.

What does occur to me is that if everyone switched from listening to the radio to listening to streaming music, it would require a lot of Internet band width, not to mention what it takes to watch a music video over the Internet. And with the forthcoming improvements in wireless, you could easily have music all over the house for a relatively minor investment in suitably equipped speakers.

Record labels and the RIAA have been worried about loss of revenue for years. In 2007, Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) of the Library of Congress created a new royalty structure - with rates going from the then current flat rate of $0.0007 per online performance to annually escalating rates increasing to $0.0019 per performance by 2010. But that created a huge burden on amateurs and others who made no money through streaming. More recently, music publishers have agreed that providers of such services can pay a mechanical royalty of 10.5% of revenue after other royalties are calculated. This agreement does not cover merchandise or permanent downloads. A ruling on this proposal by Copyright Royalty Judges is expected by Oct 2, 2008.

The Web never ceases to amaze.

Great Architects

When I was a teen, I wanted to be an architect. That faded, partly because I didn't know any architects and partly because I felt I didn't have the imagination needed. Since then I have met some architects and they all assured me that too much imagination was a bad thing for most architects.

My idol back then was, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright. I especially admired Fallingwater. I've never seen it, in fact I can't recall but one of his designs that I've actually visited; the Phillips Petroleum tower in Bartlesville, OK, which now houses the Price Tower Art Center.

I once drove up the "driveway" of Taliesin West, but chickened out before I reached the main building; they didn't hold tours in those days.

There are actually people who collect Frank Lloyd houses and the FLW Conservancy currently lists 16 such homes that are for sale. Today, my idols would have been Frank Gehry and Richard Meier. Renzo Piano is no match for either of them, though all three have won the Pritzker Prize. Jørn Utzon, another prize winner, is worth remembering, if only for his Sydney Opera House.

Richard Meier is probably best known for his design of the Getty Center and Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

But all architects have their critics. The Prince of Wales is one of them.

Who is your favorite architect?

Fractals

About 30 years ago, Benoît Mandelbrot, working at IBM Research, developed a new branch of mathematics called fractals. Few people realize how much fractals have changed our world.

In addition to the beautiful graphs created with fractal number sets, we have much smaller and more versatile cell phones thanks to fractal antennas. They make it possible for one small antenna to receive the wide variety of frequencies needed to operate in any country of the world and to receive GPS signals at the same time. Fractal mathematics has lead to much stronger concrete, to fractal landscapes in art and films like Star Trek II, and much, much more.

Last month, Nova broadcast an excellent documentary on fractals. Hunting the Hidden Dimension is available for viewing on their web site. I highly recommend it.

Arduino

The electronics hobby is more fun than ever. You can buy some very sophisticated devices to control almost anything you want to build. One of the most interesting is a microcontroller called Arduino, an Italian design.

"Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments."

Open-source? Yup. The design can be freely copied and modified, just like Linux. Strange idea. So how do they make a buck? Well, they manufacture and distribute the board, but apparently their main revenue comes from consulting. Great article on the company in a recent Wired magazine. Wired also did an article on the Arduino board itself earlier this year.

There have been dozens of versions made in Italy and hundreds made by others. The Diecimila (after they made 10,000 Arduinos) and the current version, the Duemilanove, cost about $35.00 in the USA. A third-party version with Bluetooth goes for $150.

One example of a project that several people have tackled is a toy Segway, this one built with Legos. As I recall, the parts for it totaled about $350, so the hobby is not for the faint of pocket. But it's an incredible learning tool for schools and educational cooperatives like Studio Bricolage, the grown-up version of Leonardo's Basement in Minneapolis.

Wow, it's great to be a kid these days!

The New Yankee Stadium Is Geeky

The New York Yankees and Cisco Systems are turning the new Yankee Stadium into a Technogeeks paradise with 1,100 flat-panel HDTV screens all over the place, even in the restrooms, and the technical capability to send different information to each one. The folks in the 51 $600,000+ (per season) luxury suites can order up hot dogs and merchandise on touch screen phones. (No, they didn't mention the iPhone.) The long-range plan is to connect the system to fans in their seats, first in the stadium and later at home. There's a good article on it in today's New York Times. (Registration required.)

Trivia note: Rice University alumnus John Cox ’27 gave his alma mater his ownership of the old Yankee Stadium, including all leasing rights, in 1962. Rice made several million dollars off the gift, leasing the House that Ruth Built to the Yankees for almost a decade. In the winter of 1966, the stadium was painted blue and white, but perhaps that was a coincidence. The city of New York eventually forced Rice to sell Yankee Stadium in 1971 for the meager price of $2.5 million.

Trivia compounded: I was a grad student at Rice in 1962 and the story I remember was that Cox owned the land under the stadium, not the stadium itself. But I found the stadium story in a 2006 copy of the Rice Alumni magazine, then called The Sallyport, so I'll take their word for it.

What's a sallyport? I thought you'd never ask. It's the passageway through Lovett Hall, the administration building at the entry to Rice.

BPL - Broadband Over Power Lines

Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) in the USA may have gotten a much-needed boost from IBM this week. They contracted with International Broadband Electric Communications (IBEC) to install high-speed Internet service to rural electric cooperatives (RECs). The 900+ RECs in America provide electricity to almost half of the nations power grid. IBEC plans to offer the systems to co-ops for no capital expense on their part in order to bring Internet service to rural communities not currently served by cable and often poorly served by the smaller telephone companies. Ars Technica has a good article on the IBEC/IBM arrangement.

BPL should be faster and cheaper than satellite Internet service. Current BPL technology is capable of Internet speeds about the same as low and medium-speed DSL. More advanced versions have been demonstrated at speeds up to one gigabit.

Unfortunately, BPL has a spotty record, so it remains to be seen if IBEC and IBM can really make it happen.

Hybrid Diesel Trucks

UPS recently announced they will test a newly-developed hybrid diesel that uses stored hydraulic pressure rather than a large, expensive battery. No mention of the size of the reservoir nor the pressures involved. In addition to using the braking system to pump hydraulic fluid into a high-pressure reservoir, the drive train is driven hydraulically. The estimated cost of the trucks is 14% to 18% more than standard diesels and they expect a 50% savings in fuel costs. In addition, carbon emissions are cut by 30%.

The EPA funded the research into these vehicles and holds the patents. Eaton manufactured the seven test vehicles that UPS will deploy. There are other folks interested in applying the technology to buses and other start-stop vehicles where the technology yields its greatest efficiency.

A Ford Taurus diesel was actually prototyped by the EPA in 2000 that achieved 80 miles per gallon, but it was never mass produced because of the auto industry slump and funding cuts. The EPA believes that a 100-MPG sedan is possible.

Click the title of this post for a related BusinessWeek article.

TED and TEDTalks

If you are not familiar with TED, I highly recommend you surf their web site. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization that defines its mission as "ideas worth spreading". See the WikiPedia article for an overview.

TEDTalks are by invited speakers at their annual conference. TED posts new talks on their web site at the rate of about five per week. Not surprisingly, you can get an updated list via TED's RSS Feed.

Not all TEDTalks are on science or technology, but when they have one, it's usually a doozie, Al Gore's talk notwithstanding. One example is Paul Rothemund's talk at TED2007, held in February, 2008. The talk title is "The Immense Promise of DNA folding." Watch the video. Watch it twice; Rothemund (CalTech) talks so fast that he is hard to follow. No doubt inspired by the 18-minute limit on TedTalks, though they often run almost to 25 minutes. Or maybe it's my personal aversion to learning through lecture; I much prefer to read it.

Rothemund calls his technique DNA folding or scaffolded DNA origami. Scaffolded because the resulting DNA is a structure composed of individual DNA strands. Like the smiley faces.
Surf TED.COM! Well worth a few hours or even a few hundred hours of your time. For a quick introduction, watch the Top 10 TEDTalks video. Or watch Clifford Stoll On Everything for the sheer joy of it.

Mystery Medical Diagnoses

I'm a big fan of the Learning Channel show "Mystery Diagnosis." Each show follows two cases that went undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) for a significant period of time. Luckily they finally find a doctor who has his/her head screwed on frontwards and are given the proper treatment. Naturally, the ones who die before finding a decent doctor never make it to the show. They are the folks you see on Dr. G, the central Texas coroner; she solves mysterious deaths one at a time. (Her real name, Garavaglia, is virtually unpronounceable.)

"Mystery Diagnosis" has one big flaw. They never tell you the names of the noodnick doctors who screw it up, so the instant they introduce someone by their real name, you know the proper diagnosis is at hand!

My TiVo offered me about six shows tonight and got me to wondering why doctors don't just surf the web to correlate symptoms. Well, presumably they have better search capabilities in some on-line medical dictionary somewhere, but I decided that Google could do almost as well.

One case tonight involved a female college student, early 20s, who developed a cough that wouldn't go away with antibiotics. Well, not for long, anyway. She was constantly fatigued. Her chest X-ray showed what looked like a mild case of pneumonia. She later developed extreme fatigue, itchy skin and night sweats. If you put all of those symptoms into Google, two big possibilities pop out, AIDs and Lymphoma, with the latter being the closest match because AIDS has a lot more symptoms. Sure enough, by the time she was properly diagnosed three years later, she had a football-sized tumor in her right lung.

Makes you wonder about doctors.

Another episode of "Mystery Diagnosis" concerned a very young child whose breathing and heart often stopped. Her mother was taught CPR and she was constantly calling EMS. A few years later, the child developed a harlequin disease where one side of the body flushed red and the other remained normal, accompanied by extreme pain. The child's mother found the diagosis on the web and told her doctor what it was: PEPD, Paroxysmal Extreme Pain Disorder, a genetic mutation known to affect only eight people in the world.

Yet anthor episode got the correct diagnosis from a local doctor. It was Schwannoma. The mother used the Internet to find the best surgeon in the United States to remove the tumor.

Don't forget to surf the web if you feel out of sorts. Having said that, be careful because, in most of the examples above, it took years of searching before the correct answer was found. It's not clear if that resulted from tenacity or the maturation of the web. However, I can say that several years ago, I came down with shingles. The web, in particular an Australian web site that cost a few dollars, was absolutely no help. But a call to my doctor's nurse diagnosed it in a few minutes.

OK, so it's not all web surfing, it's also channel surfing. TV still has a few uses.

Should You Get A Flu Shot?

My gf got a flu shot the other day and has been feeling very punk ever since. No headache or fever, but she feels terrible and has been both sad and irritable. So naturally I had to web surf and check out what happened.

Click on the title of this post for some comments on the Injury Board. The health column in the Washington Post has some interesting comments. Quite a variety of symptoms are reported by people. As usual, there are some kooky comments, too, but the possibility of getting a shot that doesn't contain the preservative Thimeserol is worth investigating. The fact that the new vaccines use dead virus is encouraging.

The CDC publishes a map showing where flu is most prevalent in the US. Looks like states that voted for Obama have the most flu cases at the moment. :-)

I have never had a flu shot and don't plan to get one. I've never had the flu, either. Nor do I find myself in crowds very often except when I travel. My theory has been that since my immune system is working well, I don't want to give it something else to tackle.

Reading about it on the web, I discovered that the vaccine isn't very effective on people over 70, so that about cinches the deal; no flu shots for me. Of course, the vaccine may not be effective because the immune system in older folks tends to be weaker. So I may yet wind up with the flu some day.

And yes, some of my other physical capacities are in decline, too. Have you noticed the large type font I use here? :-)

PS: Google has unveiled a new service called Flu Trends. They discovered that there is a close correlation between people searching for words related to the flu and cases of the flu in their area. At the moment (11/11), Texas and Nevada are the only states reported with "minimal" flu.

LED Lamps Are Better Than Ever

The bright ones are still expensive, but two recent announcements made headlines. Lighting Science Group has a 600 to 800 lumens floodlight (roughly the same as a 50-60 Watt incandescent) that uses only 15 Watts and has a projected life span of 50,000 hours. It's $145 (oops). The 300 to 400 lumen version draws 6 Watts and costs $80.00.

And they both look really cool with their built-in heat sinks. The Journée Lighting track lights are even sexier.

And how about a projector that you can put in your pocket? Take a look at the Optoma Pico Projector available before Christmas in Europe and Asia, next year in the USA at a projected (pun intended) $430 list price. It’s only 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, and weighs 4.2 ounces. The trick is using an LED light source. It only produces nine lumens, but that's enough for two people to watch the same movie projected on an airplane seat back or a 65" display 8.5 feet away (in a dark room.) See the reviews by David Pogue, Engadget, and Gizmodo.


Given time, LED prices will come down. Even if efficiencies don't improve, they offer a significant reduction in energy use. One quarter of the energy we use in the USA is for lighting.

Favorite Web Sites

Lots of web sites are interesting, but I find myself returning to a small number of them quite often. Wired magazine is one of them. I confess I am letting my print subscription expire because I prefer to read it on line. Their print edition uses extremely small fonts and they have the nasty habit of using black pages with white text, an abomination that should be outlawed both in print and on the web.

The science and technology section of The Economist has stuff you can't find elsewhere. And, unlike Scientific American magazine, they are apolitical.

A periodic look at World Architecture News is fun. They picture and describe virtually every new important architectural design in the world. I gather that the design firms themselves provide the material. They also review architectural prizes. The Australian Institute of Architects gave their 2008 prize to an Australian firm for the Watercube National Swimming Centre at the Beijing Olympics.

Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, better than Google for many purposes. Contributing to Wikipedia is a bit of fun, too. I got some small pleasure this morning in updating the article on Raymond Lowey to note that his daughter Laurence died in October. I added the "mandatory" pointer to her obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of course.

WikiDashboard is an interesting recent appendage to Wikipedia. It's a project at PARC, the folks who brought you the mouse, the GUI, Ethernet, and laser printing. WikiDashboard indexes changes to Wikipedia in real time so you can see who modified an article and when, or you can see a list of mods made by a particular individual.

Then there's the lesser-known Wiktionary, the free dictionary. It includes etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations, as well as a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, and phrase books. Given time, it could rival the OED and Roget's. Worth checking daily just for the 'word of the day.' Today it's nychthemeron. Unfortunately, not a very useful word - unless you are Greek.

Another favorite, though little needed web site is the WaybackMachine. This site, unbelievable as it may seem, makes a copy of every page of every known web site and saves it. You can retrieve the list of snapshots as well as the snapshot itself if you know the old URL. Talk about archiving!

I often use Google for a spell checker. It loads faster than Word.

Least favorite sites? Digg.com and similar (too messy.)

Of course the blogs of friends and family and the pictures of my granddaughter are always surfed.

Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) crossed my mind this morning. They were big news a few years back. Whatever happened to them?

Turns out they are alive and well, but not the blessing that some thought them to be in stock trading.

Here are some notes from a blog by hassam.

"ANNs are widely used in a number of fields like finance, industry, agriculture, business, physics, statistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, weather forecasting, computer science and engineering, spatial analysis and geography. Some banks have found that the failure rate on loans approved by neural networks is lower than those approved by some of their best traditional methods. Some credit card companies are also using neural networks in their application screening process.

"One of the major areas, where a large part of ANN research is focused, is pattern matching. ... ANNs are extensively deployed for this task for they are capable of finding patterns in auditory data, analysing handwriting, comparing fingerprints, processing written and oral language and translating languages."

Lots of free ANN software is available. There's a list in Part 5 of the Usenet neural-nets FAQ.

Expanding their use is somewhat limited by the speed and size of available computers. Increasing the number of neurons simulated exponentially increases the computer power needed.

Plasmonics and Plasmonic Applications

You can do your own web research to expand on plasmonics, the science surrounding plasmons. There was a good summary in Scientific American by Harry Atwater in 2007. The article is titled "The Promise of Plasmonics."

There are an amazing number of applications; miniature transistors (plasmonsters), cancer treatment, and hazardous material detection, among others. There is even a plasmonic laser, a SPASER, that is theoretically possible, with resolutions 100 times smaller than visible-light lasers. Who knows what else? How many of the current applications of lasers were foreseen when it was first invented?

The downside? Design and manufacture. It will be a while before we see computer chips running at terahertz. However, UC Berkeley reported in Technology Review that they have made some recent progress assembling cheap nanoscale photonic and plasmonic crystals.

Why blog?

Now that blogging is "out" and Twitter is "in," I decided to start a blog. Maybe nobody will notice.

More to the point, I didn't think I had anything to say. I much prefer to learn from others, especially through web surfing. It's amazing what you can learn in just a few hours of research. Basically, I am a perennial student, especially of science and technology. It doesn't pay much, but it's great fun.

Then, this morning, while trying to find out what the heck is a plasmon, it occurred to me that 1) I probably wouldn't remember unless I wrote it down, and 2) there might be other people out there who are also weird and want to be introduced to the same question. Hey, that's called a blog!

Higher aspirations are always good. Maybe I can become a little-known version of David Pogue.