August 2008 – Page 2 – David Bradley

Climate Change Debunked

climate-change So, how’s that for a blog post title? Catchier even than last Saturday’s New Harry Potter Trailer, right? So, is it just another spurious headline designed to grab attention or is there something in it? Well, you will no doubt have read about the recent APS debacle over the paper from Lord Monckton in which he stands up the anthropogenic climate change straw man and, pardon the pun, burns it down.

If you’re in the UK, or have figured out the BBC iPlayer hack to let you use that tool outside the UK, you may have seen the recent global-warming-coming-oil-crisis-we’re-all-doomed drama Burn Up. You probably also heard about a little fella called Al Gore and his inconvenient movie and the Channel 4 documentary that attempted to shred it, perhaps a little conveniently ignoring some key facts as it did so.

Meanwhile, power companies report massive profits and price rises for gas and electricity. They simultaneously pump up prices from well to wheel as the oil price bounces like a proverbial vulcanised rubber ball and everyone is looking to save gas.

I’ve published several items about alternative energy sources recently and still stand by the didact: waste not, want not. It’s important that we cut pollution and it’s important that we reduce the amount of energy we waste. We should be looking at what we are planning for the world, especially in light of madcap schemes like adding lime to the oceans, before it’s too late.

Joined Up Fuels

cars in snow The green morals of UK motorists are currently being held to ransom by the government. The government hopes to increase vehicle taxes based on how much pollution a car produces – it’s a green tax, a carbon tax, call it what you will. Some drivers will end up paying twice as much each year to keep their car on the roads. The bigger the car, the theory goes, the more fuel it will use and so the more polluting it will be in terms of pumping out carbon dioxide and so the more vehicle tax you, the driver, must pay.

Apparently, big cars (4x4s, MPVs, big estates, and anything over 2.1 litre engine capacity, built before 2001, will be exempt from the approximate doubling of vehicle road tax that is imminent. And, that’s certainly a good thing. Not least because our family seven-seater has a 2.3 litre engine and was made in 1998. It all seems to make sense, at first glance. Who could argue with that? Such a tax increase will force drivers of big gas guzzlers to swap their Kensington Tractors for something a little more environment friendly.

But, it is not as if CO₂ were the only pollutant, it’s not as if global warming were the only issue, and it’s not as if actually building new cars is a green process in itself. All those old-ish MPVs, are going to be sold on and new smaller cars bought, this drives the market, of course, and with an alleged recession pending, that might be a good thing in terms of economies. But, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation will show that building a new car to replace that suddenly unwanted Kenny Tractor will expend far more energy and waste far more resources than continuing to drive it guzzling gas or not.

It seems to me that there is very little joined-up thinking when it comes to environmental issues. No one ever sits back and says, hold on a moment, when plans to potentially scrap millions of potentially serviceable vehicles for the sake of a tax saving comes up in discussion.

More to the point, the school-run of supersized vehicles, queuing up and belching out fumes while darling Jocasta and Joshua are delivered obesely to school without having to walk, is to some extend a tabloid a stereotype. Some people rely on the extra seats and space afforded them by the bigger car. One car transporting six or seven people, at an albeit lower mpg, is surely better than two cars wearing out the tarmac even at 10-20% lower total fuel consumption. Hummers and sports utes excepted, of course, but you don’t see many of those on British streets.

Karl Hillman and Björn Sandén of the Department of Energy and Environment, at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, seem to recognise this need for complete Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) including so-called Well-to-Wheel studies as they apply to the transport sector in general.

They have investigated how well decisions are being made as we strive to reduce pollution and to meet climate-change targets. They suggest that rarely are time and scale related factors given any attention, which I read to coincide with my points about swapping big vehicles for small at least in terms of energy wasted in the process and the splitting of transportation into ever smaller units.

Writing in the International Journal of Alternative Propulsion, the Chalmers team discusses how road transportation is currently responsible for 20-25% of world carbon dioxide emissions and is almost entirely (99%) dependent on fossil oil, despite the occasional hybrid siting.

To reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions, different policies are now being implemented to increase the share of motor fuels based on renewable energy. In the short term, the European Union directive on the promotion of the use of biofuels or other renewable fuels for transport forces the member states to set targets for the minimum use of renewable fuels.

Perhaps the UK government plans to use the extra tax it raises from gas guzzlers to develop renewables for transport so that it can meet EU and international targets more effectively. Somehow I doubt it, with deficits on every table, state-adopted banks heavily in the red, and a media-inspired recession just round the corner, I suspect every last penny will have been accounted for before you could say rapeseed methyl ester.

Hillman, K.M., Sanden, B.A. (2008). Time and scale in Life Cycle Assessment: the case of fuel choice in the transport sector. International Journal of Alternative Propulsion, 2(1), 1. DOI: 10.1504/IJAP.2008.019689

Sunbathing, Frozen Fleas, and Heavy Metal

I’ve got a whole new clutch of science news in my latest column on spectroscopy NOW for you this week:

Magnetic insights – A new MRI technique has been developed to allow physicists to see deep within tiny magnets. The technique could improve our understanding of magnetism at the fundamental level and lead to better computer hard drives and perhaps even new small-scale MRI instruments.

Salty solution to desalination – NMR spectroscopy has been used to assist in the development of chlorine-resistant membranes for use in water desalination plants. The new membrane materials could avoid degradation by chlorine disinfectants and reduce operating costs and inefficiencies and so make desalination a more viable prospect on a larger scale in the developing world. I asked the team leader Benny Goodman about the prospects for this system. “We anticipate a 3-5 year timespan to commercialization,” he told me, “The remaining obstacles are to demonstrate large-scale, continuous membrane production and to further tune the chemistry of the materials to be highly rejecting for seawater purification applications.” He added that, “Our current vision is that these membranes would be made in such a way that they could be used to swap out existing membranes.”

Summer screen – Wear sunscreen! It has been the advice of the medical profession, governments, and parents everywhere for several years, and is a topic I’ve touched on in how to sunbathe safely, on Sciencebase. Now, a report published this summer by the Environmental Working Group suggests that many popular sun protection products are at best ineffective, and at worst hazardous to health.

Reflecting on frozen fleas – US scientists have synthesised an antifreeze protein from the Canadian snow flea. The X-ray structure of this, and a synthetic enantiomeric form, could lead to an improved understanding of how this protein inhibits ice crystal formation and could have implications for transplant surgery.

Ordure, ordure! – A new study of soil fertilised with bovine manure reveals that soil quality can be improved significantly compared to that possible with modern “inorganic” farming methods. The study suggests that even poor quality land can be farmed for crops such as maize using manure as a soil improver.

Absorbing work on heavy metal – Chemical analysis and a powerful microscopy technique have been used to work out how toxic heavy metals, such as hexavalent chromium of Erin Brokovitch fame, can be adsorbed on to magnetic nanoparticles. The work could help in the development of a novel remediation technique for water contaminated with the carcinogenic hexavalen chromium.

New Harry Potter Trailer

My son used to be sooooo into Harry Potter and I’m sure he’ll go to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when it shows in the UK, in fact when I mentioned this post he was only too keen to see the trailer. Of course, sadly, long gone are the days when all go to the cinema together as a family, so I’m going to have to content my self with a cinematic surprise for Saturday, at least until it makes it to DVD (just in time for Christmas). So here’s the Harry Potter teaser, trailer, trail, what you will, complete with young Voldemort (played by Ralph Fiennes nephew, no less, thanks Zath)

So, what you may ask, is the science connection with today’s post? Well, there is none. It’s Saturday, it should be a day of fun. Of course, if you want to a connection between science, technology and magic, then you only have to turn to the inimitable Arthur C Clarke book of quotes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

This quote was turned on its head by science fiction author and astrophysicist Gregory Benford:

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced

And, to quote Robert Persig from one of my favourite books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), in which the word technology might be switched for magic to bring us full circle in today’s Harry Potter theme:

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology – the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn’t any good

And, with that in mind why not check out Harry Potter and the Terrorist Threat

Finding Experts

Finding experts One of the main tasks in my day-to-day work as a science writer is tracking down experts. The web makes this much easier than it ever was for journalists in decades since. There are times when a contact in a highly specialist area does not surface quickly but there are also times when I know for a fact that I’ve already been in touch with an expert in a particular area but for whatever reason cannot bring their name to mind. Google Desktop Search, with its ability to trawl my Thunderbird email archives for any given keyword is a boon in finally “remembering” the contact.

However, finding just a handful of contacts from web searches, email archives and the good-old-fashioned address book pales into insignificance when compared to the kind of industrial data mining companies and organisations require of their “knowledge workers”.

According to Sharman Lichtenstein of the School of Information Systems at Deakin University, in Burwood, Australia, and Sara Tedmori and Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK: “In today’s highly competitive globalised business environment, knowledge workers frequently lack sufficient expertise to perform their work effectively.” The same concern might be applied to those working in any organisation handling vast amounts of data. “Corporate trends such as regular restructures, retirement of the baby boomer generation and high employee mobility have contributed to the displacement and obfuscation of internal expertise,” the researchers explain.

The team explains how knowledge is increasingly distributed across firms and that when staff need to seek out additional expertise they often seek an internal expert to acquire the missing expertise. Indeed, previous studies have shown that employees prefer to ask other people for advice rather than searching documents or databases. Finding an expert quickly can boost company performance and as such locating experts has become a part of the formal Knowledge Management strategy of many organisations.

Such strategies do not necessarily help knowledge workers themselves lacking the search expertise and time required to find the right person for the job, however. So, Jackson developed an initial expertise locator system, later further developed with Tedmori, to address this issue in an automated way. The researchers discuss an automated key-phrase search system that can identify experts from the archives of the organisation’s email system.

Immediately on hearing such an intention, the civil liberties radar pings! There are sociological and ethical issues associated with such easy access and searchability of an email system, surely? More than that, an expert system for finding experts could become wide open to misuse – finding the wrong expert – and abuse – employees and employers unearthing the peculiar personal interests of colleagues for instance.

The first generation of systems designed to find experts used helpdesks as the formal sources of knowledge, and comprised simply of knowledge directories and expert databases. Microsoft’s SPUD project, Hewlett-Packard’s CONNEX KM system, and the SAGE expert finder are key examples of this genre, the researchers point out. Such systems are akin to Yellow Pages and are essentially electronic directories of experts that must be maintained on a continual basis. They allow anyone with access to tap into expertise, but unless the experts keep their profiles up to date, they can quickly lose relevancy and accuracy.

Overall, when large numbers of employees are registered and profiles are inaccurate, credibility is rapidly lost in such systems which are increasingly ignored by knowledge seekers.

Second generation expertise locators were based on organisations offering their staff a personal web space within which they could advertise their expertise internally or externally. Convenient for those searching but again relying on the experts in question to keep their web pages up to date. Moreover, simple keyword matching when searching for an expert would not necessarily find the best expert because the search results would depend on how well the expert had set up their web pages and whether and how well they had included keywords in those pages. In addition, keyword searching can produce lots of hits that must then be scanned manually, which takes time.

The third generation of expert searching relies on secondary sources, such as tracking the browsing patterns and activities of employees to identify individual experts. Such an approach raises massive privacy concerns, even for companies with a strict web access policy. Activity on forums, bulletin boards, and social networks falls into this third generation approach.

The fourth generation approach mashes the first three and perhaps adds natural language searching again with various efficiency and privacy concerns. Again, it does not necessarily find the best expert, but often just the person whose data, profile, and web pages are optimised (deliberately or by chance) to reach the top slot in the search results.

An approach based on key-phrase identification in e-mail messages could, however, address all requirements but throws up a new wave of privacy concerns, which Lichtenstein and colleagues discuss.

There are several features of email that make it popular and valuable for organisational knowledge work, and relevant to to finding an expert:

It attracts worker attention
It is integrated with everyday work
It provides a context for sense-making about ideas, projects and other types of business knowledge
It enables the referencing of work objects (such as digital documents), and provides a history via quoted messages
It has high levels of personalised messages which are appealing, meaningful and easily understood
It encourages commitment and accountability by automatically documenting exchanges
It can be archived, so providing valuable individual, collective and organisational memories that may be mined
It facilitates the resolution of multiple conflicting perspectives which can stimulate an idea for a new or improved process, product or service.

All these factors mean that email could become a very useful tool for finding experts. Already many people use their personal email archives to seek out knowledge and experts, but widen that to the organisational level and the possibilities become enormous.

The researchers have developed an Email Knowledge Extraction (EKE) system that utilises a Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK) employed to build a key-phrase extraction “engine”. The system is applied in two stages, the first of which “teaches” the system how to tag the speech parts of an email, so that headers and other extraneous information become non-searched “stop words” within the email repository. The second stage extracts key-phrases from the searchable sections of an email once it is sent. This extraction process is transparent to the sender and takes just milliseconds to operate on each email. A final stage involves the sender being asked to rank each identified key-phrase to indicate their level of expertise in that key-phrase area. A database of experts and their areas of expertise is gradually developed by this approach. Later, employees searching for experts can simply consult this database.

The EKE system has been implemented at Loughborough University and at AstraZeneca in trials and found to be able to capture employee knowledge of their own expertise and to allow knowledge workers to correctly identify suitable experts given specific requirements. The researchers, however, highlights the social and ethical issues that arise with the use of such as system:

Employee justice and rights and how these might conflict with employer rights.
Privacy and monitoring, as there is more than a small element of “Big Brother” inherent in such a system
Motivational issues for sharing knowledge, as not all those with expertise may wish to be data mined in this way, having enough work of their own to fill their 9-to-5 for instance
Relationships, as not everyone will be able to work well together regardless of expertise
Ethical implications of expert or non-expert classification, as the system could ultimately flag as experts those employees with little or no expertise.
Deliberate misclassification of experts, as all systems are open to abuse and malpractice.
Expert database disclosure, as such a comprehensive database if accessed illicitly by an organisation’s rivals could wreak havoc in terms of stealing competitive advantage, headhunting or other related activities.

Lichtenstein, S., Tedmori, S., Jackson, T. (2008). Socio-ethical issues for expertise location from electronic mail. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 4(1), 58. DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2008.019737

Sexy Worms

Some people would pay anything for a quickfix pill for their sex lives or to slow the inevitable aging process. Now, US scientists have found a new class of small molecule in the molecular biologist’s favorite nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, a blend of which apparently not only attract mates but also slow the development of larvae for months.

The soil-dwelling nematode is used as a model organism for lots of human diseases and in aging research because despite the apparent differences between ourselves and the nematode, we share much of our underlying biology with the worm.

Writing in Nature, Frank Schroeder, of Cornell University, Jagan Srinivasan, of California Institute of Technology, and colleagues describe the new compounds, ascarosides, and reveal data that show how they extend lifespan in C. elegans as well as acting as sex pheromones for the wriggly critter. The work essentially ties together at the molecular level two superficially disparate life processes – sex and death.

So, are we likely to see a human version of the ascarosides for attracting a sex partner and warding off old age. Short answer is no. Although we share some of the molecular biology of this nematode, there are a few too many differences to make such a pill even remotely possible…at any price.

Srinivasan, J., Kaplan, F., Ajredini, R., Zachariah, C., Alborn, H.T., Teal, P.E., Malik, R.U., Edison, A.S., Sternberg, P.W., Schroeder, F.C. (2008). A blend of small molecules regulates both mating and development in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature07168