Category Archives: Politics

The Modern Soylent Green: The People are the Product

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By now we’re pretty used to being the product, as many of us participate in online activities like Facebook or Twitter, and/or photo-sharing sites, where we provide the content. (On some of those sites, what we post actually becomes the property of the host. Read carefully!) Here’s another example of being the product:

Award-winning footstep energy to help power shopping centre
and
Pavegen. Renewable energy from footsteps.

Each tile has a capacity of 6 watts, but in order to use the tile’s full capacity, there needs to be a constant flow of about 50 steps / minute.

The reality is that the tiles are seeing about 5 steps / minute, and on a good day, the kinetic sidewalk will generate about 75 watt-hours of electricity. This is equivalent to powering an old 60-watt incandescent lightbulb for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Let’s start with the obvious: one could take the view that this is stealing. Someone is taking work you (the actual physics definition of work, at that) and using it without paying you. It’s also being advertised as being green and self-sustainable. It also needs to be cost-effective. Is it?

Let’s run the numbers. The pad flexes ~5mm when you step on it, so that’s about 5 Joules of work for a mass of 100 kg, so that’s roughly in agreement with the 50 steps/min giving 6 Watts, assuming high efficiency. 75 W-h is 270 kJ of energy. At an electricity rate of $0.12 per kWh, this represents a penny of electricity.

A penny.

The device has to be less than 100% efficient and your body’s conversion of food into the energy being harvested certainly isn’t (I’ll assume around 25%), so at 4.18 kJ per Calorie, the people providing this energy collectively burned about 270 Calories, which came from the food they ate. The cost of that food can vary widely, but it’s going to be on order of a dollar, making this system’s cost efficiency about 1%. (This won’t change at higher power production, either) And here’s where (and why) the claims of “green energy” fall apart. Touting human power as green is dubious, because you don’t know where the food came from, but odds are it’s not all that “green”, and to tout this as a replacement — at 1% efficiency — means that the people providing the energy need to have 1/100 of the carbon footprint of the raw electricity. Transporting the food, preparing it, etc. has to be greener than the energy it replaces by a factor of 100, and there’s no way it is. This is a misdirection, moving the carbon footprint issue out of immediate sight, asking us to pay no attention to the carbon footprint behind the curtain. Human power is not green — the only time it works is if you are harnessing energy that would otherwise be wasted, similar to regenerative braking on electric cars.

Is it cost-effective? I couldn’t find a credible price anywhere, save for a promised target of $50 per tile once production ramps up. Installation is probably the largest cost, along with some infrastructure of wiring, batteries and an inverter. At the target traffic load giving an output of 6 Watts, even if the traffic were present all day long, that’s 1 kWh per week per tile. At $0.12 per kWh saved, that’s just barely $6 a year in electricity savings. The tiles were installed at a tube station at the Olympics and generated just 20 kWh from 12 tiles. The olympics ran 16 days (the story says two weeks); it’s ballpark agreement either way. 20 kWh is $2.40 of electricity.

Unless I’m missing something, there’s no way this is cost-effective. You can pay for it out of your advertising budget, raising awareness of, well, something, since it’s not green, which means it’s just a gimmick.

This Just In: Bearing False Witness No Longer a Sin

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Apparently, anyway.

How American fundamentalist schools are using Nessie to disprove evolution

Jonny Scaramanga, 27, who went through the ACE programme as a child, but now campaigns against Christian fundamentalism, said the Nessie claim was presented as “evidence that evolution couldn’t have happened. The reason for that is they’re saying if Noah’s flood only happened 4000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.

“If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That’s their logic. It’s a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters.”

Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by state Governor Bobby Jindal.

A Royale with Cheese

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Fed up with imperial

I gained a niece and a nephew in the last few weeks. They were about the normal size for babies, which is about 8 pounds plus a few shillings. I know this is roughly what babies often weigh. But I do not know why we weigh babies in currency.
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What really grates is that I can’t get some imperial measures out of my head. Like the baby thing. What does an average baby weigh in kilogrammes? (About three and a half, but I had to look it up, even though one of my kids was born in Germany.)

The US gets a lot of flack for not having gone metric, but it seems that places that have gone metric still haven’t fully gone metric.

The pub is a mile (about 19,296 yards, or three times as many feet) down the road and they are served beer in pints (about 78 and three eighths fluid ounces). It’s just not fair.

Not sure of the reference here. A mile is 1760 yards on this side of the pond.

Schmientist Shortage

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What Scientist Shortage?

But what “we all know,” as Senator Cornyn put it, turns out not to be true—and the perpetuation of this myth is discouraging Americans from pursuing scientific careers. Leading experts on the STEM workforce, including Richard Freeman of Harvard, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Paula Stephan of Georgia State University, Hal Salzman of Rutgers, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown, and Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.

One of the answers, from later in the article,

The public perception of a dearth of homegrown talent has shaped national policy, permitting companies and universities to import tens of thousands of foreign scientists and IT workers who toil for artificially low wages.

I think it’s important to properly define what we’re talking about. Are we talking about a shortage of domestic STEM workers? Because that could still be the case, and we’ve simply saturated the market with imported workers.

The subtitle of the article is “The Johnny-can’t-do-science myth damages US research”, which seems to be much more about scientific literacy than science as a career, which seems to me to be a distinct issue and makes arguments somewhat muddled right off the bat. Acceptance of science such as evolution and climate change are abysmal, and I think science literacy levels reflect that. Even if one were to accept that we don’t need more scientists, that does not mean we need less science education.

The author cites Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, but doesn’t give any specific citation for the claim for the 3X too many STEM graduates.

I find this tidbit in the highlights for chapter 3

Between 1980 and 2000, the total number of S&E degrees earned grew at an average annual rate of 1.5%, which was faster than labor force growth, but less than the 4.2% growth of S&E occupations. The loose fit between degrees and occupations and the immigration of S&E workers helped to account for the different rates of degree and occupation growth.

which supports the idea that we have a shortage.

There’s also this, from the “Labor Market Conditions for Recent S&E Graduates” section

At the bachelor’s degree level, across all S&E fields, the IOF [in other field] rate was 11.5%, but ranged from 3.6% for recent engineering bachelor’s graduates to 15.7% in the social sciences. In all fields of degree, the IOF rate decreases with level of education, reaching 2.9% for recent doctorate recipients.

Nothing close to 2/3 of STEM recipients working outside of their field, according to these numbers. (I wonder if this is merely the “the only acceptable job for a PhD is to be a professor” canard.)

However, I wonder if that even matters. Is a Literature major a failure if s/he does not get a job involving reading all day? Colleges are not vocational schools.

American college students have for decades shown strong and consistent interest in STEM; year after year, just under a third of all college students in this country earn degrees in those subjects. But, ironically, dismal career prospects drive many of the best of those students to more promising professions, such as medicine, law, or finance.

I think this is just a gross misrepresentation of reality. Anyone who aspires to a career in medicine or law goes to a school requiring an undergraduate degree. For those who drop out of pre-med, many of them don’t stay in the science field, so it’s not fair to characterize medical students as disillusioned scientists — they wanted to be doctors, which says nothing about how they arrived at that decision. Which raises the question about lawyers who majored in science — perhaps patent law was their goal all along. The reporter didn’t ask, so we don’t know.

The author also cites testimony from Ronil Hira, during a Senate hearing

Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….Loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers with ordinary skills…to directly substitute for, rather than complement, American workers. The programs are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.

I agree with the effect, but no numbers are cited. STEM unemployment is usually lower than for the general public, so having 2-3x the rate when the general population is also having a similar (or larger) increase in their unemployment rate is not exactly a smoking gun for having a glut of scientists.

Beyond all this, there was a recent set of discussions about employment life in Phd-land. Comrade Physioprof says “Overproduction of PhDs” Is Demonstrably False. Mike the Mad Biologist and Chemjobber disagree, citing a flat salary curve. Once again, I have to say that the problem hasn’t been properly phrased. The flat salary points to saturation, but when you have more than one source — domestic and foreign — you can’t trace this back to domestic overproduction. It’s one equation with two unknowns. Consider, however, this note from the “highlights” section of the Science and Engineering Indicators 2008:

About half of S&E doctorate holders in U.S. postdoc positions may have earned their doctorates outside of the United States.

About half! I would argue from this that the domestic supply of scientists is indeed short of the mark, if we have to bring this many in from abroad. I’m sure that academia and industry like the salary competition from this, but it would seem that any oversupply that we have is not because we are producing too many at our own universities.

More About the Non-Race of Technology Adoption

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I wish I’d seen this before the Boom-Box adoption story, because it ties in: The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph, though the overlap of the technologies under discussion isn’t complete.

You can see the effects I previously mentioned, namely cost, infrastructure and quality of the new product — most adoption that requires infrastructure to be developed alongside sees a change in slope once you reach critical mass.

Some tidbits I find interesting: The depression and WWII dips, from the economic pressure of high unemployment and then “we’re building tanks, not cars/washing machines”, but that refrigerators and radio did not experience the same effect. Refrigerator penetration was low during the depression, so the well-off could still afford to adopt the technology and it does see a slightly slower increase during WWII but doesn’t drop. It was just that important of a technology. Radio was a source of cheap entertainment and got its start enough before the depression to be unduly hampered by it.

Another is the double-kink timeline of the computer. The first being around 1982, which would coincide with the first Macintosh computer, probably along with adoption of word processing machines in the business world. The second looks to be 1995, which is probably driven by Windows 95 being introduced.

The article also discusses the notion of what it means to be poor. I know there are those with the attitude that if you own a few gadgets, you can’t be considered poor, but I disagree. Having some disposable income at a few interval of your life, or being able to save a few dollars up to eventually buy something, does not move you from those ranks. Because of the way your surroundings develop, what was once considered a luxury becomes a necessity. Once upon a time cars were a luxury, then one car was middle class and having two was being well-off. But as having a car became the norm in most places, that economic reality helped drive things like the rise of strip malls, and suburban sprawl. The ubiquity of cars meant the ability to skimp on public transportation. The result is that cars are much more of a necessity, and the divide is now not simply owning a car or not, but whether/how often you can buy a new one, or whether you have to make do with an old beater of a car, and all the problems inherent in owning a less-than-reliable vehicle. Refrigeration is another example. At some point the adoption of electric refrigerators meant that selling blocks of ice was no longer viable and those businesses closed, which meant that iceboxes had to be replaced with refrigerators. It’s no longer a choice between the two, with one for the middle class and above and the other for the less fortunate.

Stephen Colbert Johnson was RIGHT

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Stephen Colbert, Scientific Pioneer

Since it was first coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, the term has taken on a massive life of its own–coming to mean, in its broadest sense, the problem of people making up their own reality, one just “truthy” enough that they actually believe it.

Frankly, though, most of us only have a “truthy” sense of what “truthiness” actually meant in its original formulation.

That’s why, when I went back and re-watched the original Colbert truthiness segment, I was so stunned. After a year spent researching the psychology of the right for my book The Republican Brain, Colbert’s words took on dramatic new meaning for me. Frankly, it now seems to me that in some ways, Colbert was ahead of the science on this matter–anticipating much of what we are only now coming to know.

…

What does this mean? Simply put, Colbert may have been much more right than he knew in 2005.

More right than he knew? I think Colbert would insist that he was exactly as right as he thought he was.

Do You Have My Back?

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This tweet by @johnroderick is funny but also something I find to be antagonistic, especially when taken in the context of several tweets along the same lines. (Could be it’s the wrong time of day, I need food, or my caffeine levels are wrong, or just that the snark is strong in this one, but…)

Look, nerds, I appreciate you like Star Wars and everything, but WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT GRAVITY IS! #GoBackToDoingScience

Or maybe it’s really just the time of the season, what with all of the politics in the air, and most of it smelling rather foul to me, because of the anti-science taint to it. Science just doesn’t seem to sit well with those on the far right, but this rejection of science is without much thought or true conviction. If one were to really distrust science, one would not be using GPS, which relies on relativity. Or go get a flu shot, as the recurring danger from the flu is a product of evolution. Or get any prescription medications and its oh-so-sciency double-blind testing. Or take advantage a whole host of other improvements that science has afforded us. (The fact that @johnroderick is interested in the nature of gravity probably mean he’s not in that group, but still … Sending us nerds of to do science for him?)

So this whole “get back to doing science” kind of hits me where I live. I’ve seen budgetary fallout from recent events, and I know I’m not alone in that regard. But I also know that a tweet is not a substitute for actual action or activism. I’m a scientist. So I want to know: Do you have my back?

Are you going to fund me? That is, do you recognize the value of research so that you won’t complain that some fraction of a penny from your tax dollar goes to funding science? And that scientists — not politicians, nor religious leaders, nor fat, lying and/or bald pundits, nor even the general public — decide what constitutes good science? You won’t sulk if the results aren’t what you or your ideology want them to be? You won’t pout when the bulk of basic research doesn’t pan out, because investigating the unknown means you — by definition — don’t know what you will find?

If you really want nerds to get back to doing science, provide us with the atmosphere for doing science. Throw those bums who make it unduly difficult to do science out of office. The ones who raise decidedly non-scientific (or unscientific) objections to science. Who wouldn’t know science if it bit them on the ass and said, “I’m science!” The ones in the pocket of anti-science industries. The ones that muffle scientists whose results are inconvenient. Throw them out.

If you want us nerds to do science, you have to let us do science. Otherwise, go do it yourself.

Everything Old is New Again

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Get the lead out: Have we already forgotten this lesson?

[R]egardless, the analysis has been done; lead remediation is still a screamingly good deal. Lead remains one of the most common and harmful pollutants in the country; it’s often present in old paint and settles into soil, particularly in urban areas. One comprehensive study concluded that “each dollar invested in lead paint hazard control results in a return of $17–$221.” And that study focused on current, laborious methods of lead remediation. As it happens, scientists have developed a new, cheaper method — mixing fish bones into soil (!) — to absorb lead and render it nontoxic. Pretty cool stuff. Imagine what more research and funding could do.

Instead, federal funding for lead-poisoning prevention programs has been brutally slashed

I’m hoping the anti-spending reflex can be excised from our politics and replaced by the recognition that investment is a good idea. When the return on the spending exceeds the spending, it is a wise thing to do.

The elimination of lead from gasoline is a paradigmatic triumph of American environmentalism. A danger to health was discovered by scientists. Public-health advocates and greens pushed and pushed for decades, often futilely, to get the government to take action. When EPA finally cranked up efforts to do something about it, the agency was viciously attacked. Industry shills said it was an agenda to control Americans’ lives, driven by scientists who wanted research money and a cabal of extreme environmentalists. They said there were no viable alternatives to lead and the regulations would raise gas prices and destroy the economy. They paid their own scientists to produce counter-evidence. They flooded politicians with money.

Gosh, sound familiar? The EPA prevailed, but these tactics no doubt delayed the result and increased the damage done.