Month: July 2010

UPDATE: 26th June 2011 My old Spotlight column, resurrected as an archive on https://sciencespot.co.uk and also acting as host to media releases by yours truly for Inderscience Publishers.

These are the last physical sciences news headlines I’ll publish for the Intute (previously PSIgate) site. I’ve written for the organisation on a pretty much monthly basis for the last decade, first as PSIgate Spotlight, then as Hot Topics on Intute. But, July 2010 is the last issues as Intute goes into statis for a year as of next month because of funding cuts instigated last year. My Spotlight column of physical science news is now archived on ScienceSpot.co.uk

I will, of course, continue to provide cutting-edge science news for a wide range of other outlets including SpectroscopyNOW, Materials Today, the recently launched ChemistryViews, etc and on the Sciencebase site and social media itself:

• Nitrogen-fixing aliens – Scientists hope that Titan, a moon of Saturn, with its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, could act as a model system for terrestrial chemistry before life began on our planet. Now, another step towards that goal has emerged as researchers at the University of Arizona have incorporated atmospheric nitrogen into organic macromolecules under conditions resembling those on Titan.
• How low can you go? – We’re repeatedly advised to switch off electrical devices, like TVs and DVD players at the mains outlet rather than leaving them in standby mode, to turn to compact fluorescent bulbs and to turn them off when illumination is no longer necessary, to do our laundry at lower temperatures, to run the dishwasher only when it’s full, and to avoid using energy-hungry power showers. All those kilowatts add up to a lot of power wasted if we don’t.
• Energy, all at sea – Floating wind turbines could capture the energy of higher wind speeds further out to see and address some of the noise and unsightliness complained about by those with turbines closer to home.
• Antioxidants and ageing – Want to slow the ageing process? New research suggests that will take a lot more than popping a few antioxidants each day. Am I surprised by this finding? No, aren’t natural oxidising agents the first line of defence against pathogens? Why would trying to reduce levels of those agents be beneficial in the long run? Our cells have myriad repair mechanisms to cope with the oxidants that are produced through normal metabolism.
• Mars Close to Earth (Again) – In August, the Red Planet, Mars, will not come so close to the Earth that it will appear as big as the moon in the night sky. This urban legend has been around for almost a decade and seemingly has its origins in the actual “close encounter” we had in August 2003 when the planet was a “mere” 56 million kilometres away, the closest it had been for 60000 years.

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. This book by the psychologists who ran the famous Gorillas in our midst experiment tell us that they found that half the people asked to count passes among one team missed seeing a person in a gorilla suit stride into the centre of the court, beat their chest, and walk off again. Their theory, backed up with lots of other anecdotes about football players in motorcycle accidents and submarine captains smashing fishing boats in two, is that although we might stare at something, we don’t necessarily perceive it.

Well, there are two problems I can see with the gorilla video experiment (that don’t perhaps explain the other anecdotes, but they’re just anecdotes, not controlled experiments). First, is that it’s a video and we do behave very differently when hunched over a computer screen or watching a TV to how we would respond in real-life if you were actually at a basketball game and someone wandered on to the court dressed as a gorilla. Screen refresh rates aside, there are just so many conditioned factors associated with on-screen activities as opposed to the real world.

But, secondly and most importantly. The missing gorilla might be explained by a trick of memory rather than perception. The experiment’s subjects were asked to concentrate on counting passes, now in a fast-paced game like basketball that would be quite taxing if one assumed one had to count accurately. So, couldn’t it be that the subjects’ short-term memory simply doesn’t record its presence because the brain is so focused on the task in hand. After all, there’s no need to retain that information whereas the pass count is all important? It’s not that the subjects don’t see it, it’s just that they don’t remember seeing it.

There are several other scenarios in the book, which could have other obvious explanations rather than being due to a perception deficiency. The virtuoso violinist on a Washington DC street corner being ignored, for instance. That story assumes that the average DCite responds to classical violin music and isn’t tuned out with their personal music player and myriad other musical styles. Anyway, that’s just one book, it’s worth a read, but I suspect you will find yourself arguing with their conclusions as I did. Nevertheless, you can buy it on Amazon.

More invisible gorillas

• Book Review – The Invisible Gorilla
• The Future of Our Illusions
• Internet Not Rewiring Brains After All
• Hands-free cellphones not solution to distracted driving

Everyone knows that Google and the other search engines between them crawl, spider, and slurp up the whole internet, right? Wrong! The millions of websites that are obviously available on the internet are readily searchable, Google Bing, Yahoo, and their ilk have seen to that, we can usually find documents, pages, digital images, videos, music, and public scientific datasets at low cost, rapidly and accurately. But, that’s just the surface, there are countless resources that are simply inaccessible to search engine bots, not least emails, FTP sites, IRC, and IM.

Then there is the Invisible Web, something about which I first wrote way back in the mid-1990s. The Invisible Web is the term used to describe the contents of publicly accessible databases that are revealed on a per-user basis on demand and mostly off-limits to search engines, with a few exceptions.

Definitely off-limits to all public search engines and all members of the public for that matter are private databases, corporate and institutional sites that are locked behind firewalls, passwords, and protective scripts.

However, some owners of chunks of the private web might be amenable to letting trusted users access their private parts, it’s just that the users don’t know the private data is there and the owners don’t know who to trust. Now, Peter Mork and colleagues at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Virginia, have come up with a way to bring the two parties together. They have developed a way to publicize the existence of private web resources that draws on various summarization strategies and demonstrates a way to create a database summary, which they call a digest, that then becomes part of the announcement. They have then looked at the trade-off between the data owners’ desires to minimize disclosure of sensitive information and the searchers’ desires to maximize the accuracy of their searches.

As an example of the kind of private web Mork and colleagues are alluding to. Imagine a specialist in the spread of flu during an epidemic hoping to trawl medical records to figure out how many people might become infected, these are strictly off-limits to the general public and to most researchers for that matter? Or, what about an economist hoping to spot trends in stock market dealings to help warn of another credit crunch well before it happens? Again private deals, are…private, so they will have no access to that information. On the other, anonymized data might be available to help the specialist find data sources relevant to current research. Similarly, summarized data can point the economist to data relevant to his inquiry. But, these data can only be utilized if they can be found.

Mork and colleagues’ digest approach allows data owners to publish less sensitive versions of their data so that searchers can determine with which data owners they should negotiate access. In this way, the private web maintains its privacy, while becoming a little more searchable, thereby allowing researchers to spend more time doing research and less time struggling to find data.

Peter Mork, Ken Smith, Barbara Blaustein, Christopher Wolf, Ken Samuel, Keri Sarver, & Irina Vayndiner (2010). Facilitating discovery on the private web using dataset digests International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 5 (3), 170-183