Category: Science

BrisScience and BrisReligion

John Quiggin14 Comments

The next in the BrisScience lecture series is on tomorrow (Monday) night, at City Hall, 6pm for 6:30. Continuing to diversify the range of topics, the speaker is Margaret Wertheim, on the topic ” Space and Spirit: Why Science and Religion Together are Driving us Crazy”. As the extract over the page suggests, Wertheim thinks that we have a fundamental pyschological need for a reconcilation of science and religion.

I’m not so sure about this. One of the most striking features of the late 20th century was the collapse of active religious belief in most of the developed world, with the glaring exception of the United States. This didn’t result in any direct sense from scientific discoveries about the universe. And, surprisingly, it didn’t seem to produce any big changes in behavior (there have been changes in sexual mores, but these have been just as noticeable in the US as elsewhere) or any obvious rise in cosmic angst. You can find some statistical differences between believers and non-believers, and between those who regularly attend religious services and those who don’t, but they are a lot smaller than much of the discussion of this topic would suggest.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it, as I’ll be presenting at the IAAE Conference in the Gold Coast so maybe some Brisbane-based reader would like to put in a brief report on proceedings.
Read More »

Adventures in social network analysis

John Quiggin34 Comments

The latest round in the Republican War on Science is a report prepared for US Representative Joe Barton aimed at discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ analysis of global temperatures first undertaken by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, and subsequently supported by many other studies. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, this peripheral issue in the analysis of climate change has attracted disproportionate attention from denialists, most notably Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre. One result was that the US National Academy of Sciences recently reviewed the work, reaching conclusions broadly supportive of MBH.

The report for Barton was prepared by three statisticians, Edward Wegman, David Scott and Yasmin Said , and its only novel contribution is a social network analysis, which is meant to show that the various independent studies aren’t really independent and that peer review has broken down, since the same group of interlinked academics is reviewing each others’ papers.

Kieran Healy and Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber are experts on this stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what they have to say. But in the meantime, I have a couple of observations (feel free to correct errors in my interpretation).
Read More »

Bris Science tonight

John Quiggin2 Comments

BrisScience: THE UNIVERSE FROM BEGINNING TO END – Brian Schmidt

*********** We believe the Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. How Big and Old is the Universe? What is in the Universe, and how will it End? Brian will describe how we have used exploding stars, known as supernovae, to track the expansion of the Universe back some 10 Billion years into the past to answer these and other questions.
***********

Brian Schmidt, an astronomer and Federation Fellow from the Mount Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, uses distant supernovae to study the Universe. He led a group that discovered that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate – a discovery that was named Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 1998.

DATE: Monday, May 29

TIME: 6:30pm to 7:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm); complimentary wine, soft drinks, and nibblies follow

VENUE: Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley; see http://www.jwcoca.qld.gov.au for a map; parking is available on Berwick St next door)
Read More »

Bris Science again

John Quiggin1 Comment

BrisScience: THE UNIVERSE FROM BEGINNING TO END – Brian Schmidt

*********** We believe the Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. How Big and Old is the Universe? What is in the Universe, and how will it End? Brian will describe how we have used exploding stars, known as supernovae, to track the expansion of the Universe back some 10 Billion years into the past to answer these and other questions.
***********

Brian Schmidt, an astronomer and Federation Fellow from the Mount Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, uses distant supernovae to study the Universe. He led a group that discovered that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate – a discovery that was named Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 1998.

DATE: Monday, May 29

TIME: 6:30pm to 7:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm); complimentary wine, soft drinks, and nibblies follow

VENUE: Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley; see http://www.jwcoca.qld.gov.au for a map; parking is available on Berwick St next door)

Read More »

Folding @Home

John Quiggin8 Comments

Among the fun and useful things you can do with your computer, distributed computing (using spare cycles on lots of personal computers do do big jobs) has always interested me, and I’ve now signed up Folding @Home which models the folding process needed for proteins to function. Misfolding contributes to diseases such as Alzheimers.

Folding @Home encourages team efforts and I can see why. After a week, my G4 Powerbook has only managed 18.25 per cent of the first job (the program doesn’t impose any perceptible load on the processor). So I’ve set up a team called “Ozploggers” and I hope some readers or fellow bloggers will join it. The team number is 50303. To join just go the Download page pick a user name, and nominate this team. Feel free to notify me in comments or by email.

UpdateWith a few readers joining in, the pace has picked up noticeably, reaching 29 per cent today. So please, some more volunteers. It’s fun to watch the simulations, you can get a screensaver if you want to, and there’s a pretty good chance that you will help to save lives.

BrisScience plug (again)

John Quiggin1 Comment

For Brisbane readers, tonight’s BrisScience lecture is on THROUGH THE ELECTRON LOOKING GLASS – John Drennan

In this second BrisScience talk, Prof Drennan will cross live to an operating electron microscope to take us on a real-time journey down to the atomic scale, from exploring the minerals that make up the deep earth to understanding biological cells.

Time: 6:30pm to 7:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm); complimentary wine, soft
drinks, and nibblies follow
Venue: Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (420 Brunswick St,
Fortitude Valley)

Contact Jennifer Dodd (0408 796 357, jdodd@physics.uq.edu.au) with
any questions.

Plague and polygraph

John Quiggin16 Comments

Following the Crooked Timber seminar on The Republican War on Science I heard from John Mangels, science writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who pointed me to this series of reports (free registration required) on Dr Thomas Butler, an infectious disease researcher who (apparently mistakenly) reported missing 30 vials of plague bacteria, and ended up being railroaded into prison by an FBI determined to get a conviction even after it became apparent that the events they were supposedly investigating had never occurred.

Read More »

Scale

John Quiggin9 Comments

Following up a post by Kieran at CT quoting Douglas Adams’ line that “You may think it’s a long way down the street to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space” I thought I’d try to work out the scale of comparison that is, in some sense directly available to us and compare it to the scale of the universe. (I’m bound to make a mistake here, but what are comments threads for if not to fix these things).
Read More »

The Republican War on Science: CT Seminar

John QuigginLeave a comment

One of the new ideas in blogging to come out of Crooked Timber, the academic blog of which I’m part, is that of holding seminars on recently released books. The general idea is that a group of CT members and some guests write reviews of or posts about the book, the author responds, and the readers of the blog are invited to comment. As a process, it works a lot better than the traditional print approach, where the reviews appear in a lot of different places, and the author can respond, if at all, only through a letter.

I’ve participated in several of these, and now I’ve run one for the first time, on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science You can see it here