Monthly Archives: February 2009

Nothing Fair About It

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A number of articles about a new bill bent on destroying public access to government-funded research

The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act is a lot of things, but fair ain’t one of them

Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, issued a statement in which he had the gall to say that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles—publishers do.”

That’s just not true. The NIH spends over $28 billion in taxpayer money annually to fund research. Researchers write articles about their findings, and their peers review those articles, without compensation from publishers. Without the research, there would be nothing to publish. Largely due to historical accident, publishers manage the peer review process, helping journal editors to badger referees into reviewing articles, generally for no pay. The value of the scientific expertise that goes into refereeing dwarfs that of the office expenses incurred by publishers in managing the process. The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers. Basically, we have a system in which the public pays for the research, the universities pay for the refereeing, the publishers pay for office work to coordinate the refereeing, and also for some useful editing. Then the publishers turn around and sell the results back to the universities and to the public who bore almost all of the costs in the first place.

Congress Hears Debate Over Bill That Would Forbid NIH-like Public Access

Open Access: The Time to Act is Now

Please contact your Representative no later than February 28, 2009 to express your support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and ask that he or she oppose H.R.801. Contact your Representative directly using the contact information and draft letter below, or via the ALA legislative action center [link forthcoming 2/11]. As always, kindly let us know what action you’re able to take, via email to stacie [at] arl [dot] org.

Click the link for more.

H/t to D H.

A Little Morality Play

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Imagine you are a teacher, giving tests over the course of several years. Even though you mention other behavior that is forbidden, for a long time you never tell your students that copying from a crib sheet, or another student, is wrong. It’s never listed as being against the rules. You leave the room when giving an exam, and you grade on a curve. What do you suppose will happen? If a C student does better, and in doing so starts outperforming others, forcing their grades down, will all of them chose integrity over better grades? Of course not.

You ask the students if they cheated. What answer will you get?

Phelps gets suspended, A-Rod gets … nothing

Yeah, Michael Phelps got suspended. Why? Because if he smoked pot, he broke the rules. Baseball, on the other hand, had no punishment for steroid use for the time in question. Steroids, specifically, were not “banned” until 2002, and that’s not even right, because there was no punishment for their use until 2004. So yeah, A-Rod did something commonly accepted as cheating in almost every sport, but up until baseball tested for them and had punishment, there was nothing to distinguish steroid use from vitamin supplements and eating your spinach (other than steroids needing a prescription, but that doesn’t seem to be the objection) except public perception, and public perception doesn’t sign the paycheck. So A-Rod will get some well-deserved derision and maybe lose some sponsorship money, too, but the organization that is Major League Baseball shouldn’t get free pass here, and nor should the players’ union — they resisted the implementation of these rules. Anyone discussing this? I don’t know — I’ve tried to avoid these stories. Too many sanctimonious sports pundits abound. (Personally, I think all modern electronic devices are performance-enhancing, so they’re all hypocrites if they use a word processor or cellphone to get their job done)

(Oh, and one could substitute law enforcement people not giving other law enforcement people e.g. parking tickets as another example of this, to name another example completely at random. Do they start parking illegally? You betcha.)

Crockpot, not Crackpot

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I bought a crockpot last fall, partly because I got tired of not being able to do any stovetop cooking below a certain temperature, owing to the nature of my gas stove. I kept looking for inserts to boost the pot up higher, but never found any (though I did find a tip to just wad up aluminum foil in a fat toroid; predictably, this “D’oh” moment was after I got the crock pot). My recipe repertoire isn’t that extensive. This being the internet, what are the odds that someone in the blogohedron has devoted time to crockpot cooking? Pretty good. There’s a blogger who devoted all of last year to crockpot cooking.

A Year of Crockpotting

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2007

A CrockPot Resolution
I will use my crockpot everyday in 2008.

And I will post the recipes and pictures.

Everyday.

seriously.

stop laughing.

This is huge for me, because I usually give up my New Year’s Resolutions on about the 4th. But, I’ve started working for these people and so I’m thinking that I best be making a blog.

So here it is.

2008. The Year of the CrockPot.

it’s actually the year of the rat.

AFAICT, the fact that it was the year of the rat did not figure into things any more than this, though I haven’t gone through all of the journal. Guinea Pigs (or are they gerbils?) though — that’s another story.

via

I Started a Joke …

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I finally died
Which started the whole world living

Carl Safina blames the term “Darwinism” for holding up science, and I think he’s wrong.

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live

Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

As I’ll get to below, I don’t think it’s the scientists you have to worry about here.

Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?

What’s the other evolution? We discuss time evolution of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Evolution is used generically as a term to mean change over time in many non-biological systems. So while Darwinian evolution may not be the best term, there are non-biological kinds.

And Darwinian selection is synonymous with natural selection, at least as far as I understand the terminology. The other kind? How about artificial selection?

Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.

Maybe I just hang out with the wrong crowd, but it’s been my experience that the worst offenders in this category are the cdesign proponentsists, not the scientists. I’d argue that anyone who regularly uses Darwinism to describe evolution should fail the biology portion of any scientific literacy test. In other words, it’s the ones who don’t understand evolution, even at a superficial level, who are turning it into an -ism. I strongly suspect that it’s either intentional, for the purpose of casting it as an ideological belief system rather than science, or stems from the almost complete cluelessness of someone parroting arguments they don’t understand. And removing Darwin isn’t really going to stop this, even if you could, because in my younger days hanging out on talk.origins I saw many uses of evolutionism. They are going to portray this as ideology no matter what. They have to. It’s one of the fallacious arguments they try and use to tear down evolution. To place the blame on Darwin’s name is to not understand the argument — it’s a symptom, not the disease itself.

The second half of the article is fine, in documenting things that happened after Darwin framed the theory. I just think that it makes almost no difference to the problem — the ones doing the most to promote the objectionable terminology are the ones least likely to care about getting these facts right. The truth is their enemy in this fight, so they have nothing to gain. To expect them to stop churning out straw-man arguments and start discussing the real theory of evolution is highly optimistic.

Public Domain

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Walden, and 99 other Free Online Books Every Student of Humanity Should Read

The beauty of the public domain is that after an author’s death, his or her works eventually become freely available to the public. This allows websites like Project Guttenberg to index countless classic texts for people to read online or download.

This is an opportunity no enterprising mind can neglect. To help you find the best of the best, we’ve compiled a list of books that seek to uncover the nature of humanity. Happy reading!

I have not cross-referenced exactly how many are on the Big Read list, but there are several.

Testing Einstein

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We’re coming up on the golden anniversary of some very important experiments that were milestones in confirming relativity and were enabled by a breakthrough in nuclear physics, the Mossbauer effect. Mossbauer’s discovery (published in 1958) of the Mossbauer effect (what were the odds of that happening?) was that nuclei in a lattice had essentially no recoil when emitting gammas, since effectively they shared the mass of the entire sample. Normally, the conservation of momentum from the recoil of a nucleus shifted the gamma’s energy out of resonance, meaning that the gamma would not be reabsorbed by an identical nucleus; even though the recoil from the emission of a 100 keV gamma would only cause a shift of a few thousandths of a eV in the gamma’s energy, this is significantly larger than the width of the transition. However, effectively increasing the mass of the emitter by even a small fraction of Avogadro’s number — which you can do with just a speck of material — all but eliminates that energy shift, and the ground-state nucleus will absorb the photons emitted by the excited state.

This incredible new tool set the stage for several experiments in General and Special Relativity. One is the famous Pound-Rebka experiment that took place at the Jefferson Lab tower at Harvard. The premise of the experiment was that a photon climbing or falling in a potential well would be red- or blueshifted, and this could be compensated for by moving the source; when the Doppler shift canceled the gravitational effect, the photons would be on resonance and be absorbed by the target, but at other speeds would not be absorbed. This would cause a variation in the number of photons striking a detector. The gravitational redshift is small, \(gh/c^2 = 2.45 x10^-15 \) and the Doppler shift necessary to compensate is just \(7 x 10^-7 m/s\) . This sensitivity is doubled by reversing the experiment and looking for the blueshift of a falling photon. The source, Fe-57 (from a decay in Co-57) has a transition at 14.4 keV, and is narrow (about 10^-8 eV) owing to a ~100 ns lifetime.

The simplicity of the basic experiment masks some subtleties of device. The source and absorber needed to be specially prepared; the Co was diffused into a thin Fe sheet so that the source was in a very thin layer near the surface, and for the target a thin layer of Fe was electroplated onto a Be disc. These were vertically separated by 22.5 meters, and to reduce absorption by air, this space was taken by a mylar bag filled with Helium. The source was put on a transducer, i.e. a speaker cone, and oscillated at low frequency. To eliminate thermal effects, since the difference in thermal motion between the source and target materials could shift the nuclei out of resonance, they were stabilized to the same temperature.

The second order Doppler shift resulting from
lattice vibrations required that the temperature
difference between the source and absorber be
controlled or monitored. A difference of 1ºC
would produce a shift as large as that sought, so
the potential difference of a thermocouple with
one junction at the source and the other at the
main absorber was recorded. An identical system
was provided for the monitor channel.

The results agreed to about 10%, and a later experiment by Pound and Snider agreed to 1%

But it doesn’t end there. A lesser-know cousin to this experiment was carried out to observe the frequency shift in a rotating system. Once again using the Mossbauer spectroscopy of Fe-57, the source and target were mounted on the axle and rim of a cylinder, which was then rotated at some speed. In this case, one can look at the effect either by viewing this as a pseudo-gravitational potential or as a kinematic time dilation effect (both approaches, not surprisingly, yield the same answer), with the fractional frequency shift of \(v^2/2c^2 \) . The cylinder was rotated at different speeds and the increase in the counting rate was observed, as the target moved out of resonance with the source due to the frequency shift of the target.

Gravitational Red-Shift in Nuclear Resonance
Phys. Rev. Lett. 3, 439 – 441 (1959)
R. V. Pound and G. A. Rebka, Jr.
(Theory)

Apparent Weight of Photons
Phys. Rev. Lett. 4, 337 – 341 (1960)
R. V. Pound and G. A. Rebka, Jr.
(Experiment)

Measurement of the red shift in an accelerated system using the Mossbauer effect in Fe-57
Phys. Rev. Letters. 4, 165 (1960)
H. J. Hay, J. P. Schiffer, T. E. Cranshaw, and P. A. Egelstaff

Measurement of Relativistic Time Dilatation using the Mössbauer Effect
Nature 198, 1186 – 1187 (22 June 1963)
D. C. Champeney, G. R. Isaak and A. M. Khan

Say, "Cheese!"

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Congress gets bill to make cell phone cameras go click

One year after the passage of the Alert Act, all mobiles with cameras made in the United States must emit a “tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone.” And the legislation would forbid manufacturers to program an option that would allow consumers to disable the noise.

How many of these devices are made in the US? Does this mean the NSA/CIA/FBI surveillance cameras must do so as well? What about video?

An unrelated bill will require everyone to go “Beep … beep … beep” whenever you step backwards, to reduce the mayhem of bumping into people.