Month: August 2010

I was scanning journal tables of contents as usual this week and it occurred to me that there must be a better way to find relevant and timely research information that would be of interest to Sciencebase readers…and, of course, out pops the following title:

Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck

Sounded, perfect…kind of…but what’s the semantic web, why’s there a bottleneck and what can be done to lube the tube?

Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the semantic web was that information would be just as readable (and understandable) to a person or to a machine. Digital objects, whether web page, image, video, or some other file, would have embedded within them meta data that would provide context to the content and allow software to extract meaning from the file.

Some software currently has a limited understanding of simple meta data, although any SEO will tell you that Google largely ignores web page meta data these days. That point aside, there is so much that might be done if the web were effectively self-aware (not talking notions of the singularity here, just making it all more useful and easier to use). So, I asked the paper’s author, Nikolaos Konstantinou, for a few examples of how the semantic web, often referred to as Web 3.0 (although you might call it Web 2.1 or Web 2.0++), might benefit us. The first benefit would be more intelligent searches he told me, either across the web or in large-scale data repositories where intelligence is referred to in contrast to the conventional keyword-based search methods employed by the search engines.

“For instance, performing a search in Google for e.g. ‘renaissance paintings’ you will notice that among the first pages of the results returned, the vast majority contains the keywords ‘renaissance paintings’ in the respective page text (or image HTML image ‘alt’ tag),” he says. “That is because the search engine does not process the content available semantically and therefore, the results although they will be accurate, will be far from being complete. This will cause an arts student, for instance, to spend too much time finding relevant content. She would probably have to visit certain museum pages and collect the results on her own.”

This is where the semantic web would come into play, Konstantinou adds. “The vision is to get a list of what you asked for even in the case when your keyword does not exist in the web page. In the example above, a page with Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings will not be considered relevant if the words ‘renaissance paintings’ do not exist in the page. In the semantic web world the system would ‘know’ that Leonardo da Vinci is an artist of the Renaissance and therefore his works would be returned to the user performing the query.”

A second benefit would be knowledge inferred by the existing one. A system built using semantic web technologies, with the support of reasoning procedures could logically deduce information, explains Konstantinou.

“The most classic example about inference is that from the statements ‘all men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’, we can deduce that ‘socrates is mortal’. This property (transitive property) in combination with a wider set of properties can augment the knowledge inserted in a system, without requiring human insertion of each and every fact, which avoids errors and reduces the workload.”

Simply, by stating 5 facts to a system, using an ontology (a glossary) and a reasoner, the system will be able to deduce 15 facts by applying logic rules (reasoning). This is in fact what allows the intelligent queries mentioned in the Renaissance example. Such a system, when asked “is socrates mortal”? will return a YES, while without reasoning the answer would be NO (or UNKNOWN in other cases). Similarly, socrates would be included in a search like “tell me all the mortals in the system”. “This is, in fact, what is meant by ‘machine understandable’ information, the ability for a machine to process information,” adds Konstantinou.

Now…how do I apply that logic to scanning tables of contents for worthy news items?

Nikolaos Konstantinou, Dimitrios-Emmanuel Spanos, Periklis Stavrou, & Nikolas Mitrou (2010). Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck Int. J. Web Engineering and Technology, 6 (1), 83-111

Emissions trading is an economic workaround, a fudge if you will, to reducing one’s pollution levels by buying off the emissions credits of others who are polluting less.

Emissions trading (also known as cap and trade) is a market-based approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.

The conventional approach as first suggested back in the 1960s is that a regulator sets a cap on the level of pollution allowed. Companies then buy permits representing their allowable emissions of any given pollutant. Critically, the total amount of pollution covered by the permits cannot exceed the cap, which supposedly then limits the total emissions across an industry. Companies who anticipate exceeding their permits can then purchase credits from other companies who are not exceeding theirs with an added option that credits might also be obtained by offsetting emissions against work done elsewhere to reduce the emissions released by others.

It always sounded like papering over the cracks or sweeping the dust under the carpet to me. It was always going to show up sooner or later. Nevertheless, it was first suggested as a real alternative to industry actually cleaning up its act in 1990 for sulfur dioxide emissions and was first implemented for this noxious gas, which causes all kinds of environmental and ecological problems, not least acid rain, as it belched into the atmosphere from power stations burning fossil fuels.

The economic success of the SO₂ trade led the Clinton Administration to ensure that trading in carbon (carbon dioxide, CO₂, specifically) was embedded in the Kyoto Protocol for supposedly reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, balancing the emissions books, is like any other economic nonsense an entirely black art with a whole industry, akin to merchant banking and futures trading, debt managers, emerging in recent years as intermediaries became essential players in the papering of cracks and the sweeping of dust. We all know just how well such intermediaries as Fanny and Freddy and others can play their games and ruin economies and lives while all the while feathering their own nests with fat cat bonuses, to mix yet more metaphors.

Indeed, the USA apparently took the attitude under Clinton that they had found an effective tool for “controlling” emissions that could work on a global scale and preclude any industry from actually solving the problem of pollution. It fascinated me that the USA somehow thought it morally and ethically credible to buy up the emissions credits of the former Soviet Union on the basis that after the collapse of communism industry there had almost ground to a halt for many years and so emissions were well below what they would otherwise have been…

Some observers claim that emissions trading has had an impact on pollution and greenhouse gas output. It seems unlikely. Indeed, economist Carolyn Currie of Public Private Sector Partnerships, in Sydney, Australia, in discussing the enormous but all-but ignored impact of agriculture on climate, points out that the “total failure to consider the side effects of a cap and trade system with permits – that is that derivatives and insurance that would grow out of the system – could generate a second global financial crisis as trades on trades generate 40 times the original primary transaction.” But with those kinds of profit margins to lust after, can we expect the money people not to push for emissions trading to grow?

Currie points out that despite years of evidence accruing regarding the impact of intensive agricultural practices on soil erosion, desertification, carbon emissions and water loss, it was only in 2009 that farmers were at long last added to the equation. But even then it seems that only fossil fuel usage rather than these other factors was considered. In a paper published recently in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, Currie puts forward a proposal that could help Australia rescue its water and land resources as well as reduce carbon emissions that doesn’t involve profit-rich trading schemes. The very same proposal might equally be adapted to other regions where agriculture inevitably represents a much bigger share of emissions problems than is usually recognised. It really is time to stop papering and sweeping and dig into the underlying problems of climate change.

Currie, C. (2010). The biggest hole in Australia’s version of the solution to climate change – what is wrong with its carbon reduction trading scheme Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, 11 (1) DOI: 10.1504/IER.2010.034604

These are my recent science picks, including my latest contributions to spectroscopyNOW.com

• Drug testing – A simple analytical approach to identifying drugs of abuse would be a boon to forensic scientists and law enforcement agencies. A collaboration between researchers in the US and Europe demonstrates how an assessment of different methods using chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry reveals that multivariate selectivity can take into account the degree of resolution between nominally unresolved peaks due to the presence of various drugs in a forensic sample and so allow quicker identification.
• Solar fullerenes – Sheffield's David Lidzey working with Athene Donald of the University of Cambridge and experts from Cardiff University and Nick Terrill at the Diamond Light Source, the UK's synchrotron facility in Didcot, have investigated the structure of solar cell materials to help them improve photovoltaic efficiencies. The research into understanding the structure of plastics used in new-types of low-cost solar cell based on fullerenes could improve their efficiency significantly.
• Fungal inspection – Two strains of fungi isolated from soil and a commercial white-rot fungus have been tested for the biodegradation of untreated, UV-, and heat-treated bisphenol A polycarbonate (PC) to see whether BPA release can be reduced. NMR and FTIR spectroscopy showed the formation of methyl groups due to the pre-treatment process, while EDAX analysis revealed surface oxidation of the PC.
• Attosecond atoms – Atoms reacting on the attosecond timescale can now be observed with unprecedented detail using a new laser spectroscopy technique reported recently in Nature.
• Chemistry news round up – Electrochemistry could be used in a new approach to detecting the spread of tumor cells in cancer patients, The Alchemist learns this week, while important clues about the impact of forest fires on the nitrogen cycle emerge from studies of charcoal and bacterial. In materials science, a bullet-proof material that behaves like a solid form of cornstarch and non-drip gloss paint emerges from Singapore research while electron transfer revealed by X-rays could explain solvent effects in the behavior of some proteins. News from the Gulf of Mexico turns out to be quite oily despite claims of clear waters. Finally, the American Chemical Society names almost 200 Fellows for 2010.
• Organic chemistry, naturally – The Reaction – entertainment and engagement with chemistry – The Daily Mail recently highlighted the RSC's £1m bounty for "chemical-free" products, Jon Edwards looked through the weird and wonderful things people sent him to claim the prize.
• Chemicalize.org – Chemicalize is a public web resource developed by ChemAxon which uses ChemAxon's Name to structure parsing and structure based predictions to identify chemical structures from web pages and other text and provide predicted data related to each structure.

The social impact of science and knowledge evolution – New research that analyses 500 years of scientific history comes to the perhaps obvious conclusion that those nations that support science and the evolution of knowledge through education, infrastructure and funding, produce stronger societies the members of which have a better standard of living and are healthier.

Luiz Miranda of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais of the São José dos Campos and Carlos Lima of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, in São Paulo, Brazil, have looked at five centuries of scientific discoveries and 125 years of patent publications to reveal the evolutionary nature of science and technology and their social impact.

The ability to understand Nature (science) and partially dominate it (technology) and of transmitting and improving acquired knowledge in a continuous feedback process is certainly among the most important achievement that made our species unique among all others in the planet.

As PubMed publishes its 20-millionth literature abstract at a time of major economic strife on a global scale it is quite timely that the Brazilian team’s statistical analysis should show that scientific discovery seems to be modulated by economic cycles that last from 15 to 25 years. The implication is that, changes and investment in infrastructure are essential driving factors for scientific development. Among the various factors involved, it is knowledge evolution, the team says, that emerges as the major force overall to catalyse social development.

Studies of the impact of science, technology and innovation on the development of human society are hardly rare and a vast scientific literature exists for just this one niche subject. Similarly, investigations of the social construction of technological systems, including the changes in social habits that they catalysed is also well covered in the literature. More recent studies have looked at the emerging disciplines of technology intelligence and knowledge management as powerful tools for evaluating, elaborating and implementing the decision-making process.

Miranda and Lima have pulled together these three distinct research threads in their current paper and present a quantitative analysis of the evolution of the scientific discoveries and technological inventions from the 16th century onwards. In the process, they have made important observations about the impact of scientific discoveries and technological inventions in shaping modern society.

Of course, in taking the cusp of the so-called Western “Enlightenment”, one might argue that they ignore the incredible achievements of Islamic and Eastern science that were already taking place over the preceding centuries and even the major discoveries of yet older civilisations. Nevertheless, the overwhelming conclusion they draw from their statistical survey of science is that, “Knowledge evolution, technological intelligence and innovation join together into a feedback system that influences decision-making towards socio-economic policies that enhanced human welfare evolution throughout the centuries,” the team says.

They conclude with a global mission statement: Public policies decision-makers would profit, they say, from availing themselves with the best tools for knowledge management and the latest advances in technology intelligence planning to help them in mapping crucial bottlenecks in social infrastructures and public investment that, once implemented, should bring those countries that lag behind into the same group as those that perform best in contributing to, and benefiting from, the global evolution of science and technology.

Luiz C.M. Miranda, & Carlos A.S. Lima (2010). On trends and rhythms in scientific and technological knowledge evolution: a quantitative analysis Int. J. Technology Intelligence and Planning, 6 (1), 76-109

Scientific timelines

http://carnegieinstitution.org – ‘The 100 Greatest Discoveries’ (2009)
http://www.timelinescience.org – Timeline Science
http://www.timelineindex.com – Timeline Index
http://inventors.about.com/library – Inventors
http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en – World Intellectual Property Organisation

Arachnophobics the world over have often turned to a folk tale that suggests placing conkers along one’s skirting boards or at the edges of doorways might somehow deter spiders from entering a building. The modern scientific brain might wonder whether it is some odour chemical released by the fruit of the horse chestnut tree that sends the arachnids scuttling back to whence they came or perhaps the waxy glossiness of the kids favourite autumnal twine-suspended weapon…

The truth is far worse and not good news for those with arachnophobia. Apparently, RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry), not to be confused with the far less dramatic RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) ran a schools competition to get to the nub of the mystery – are spiders repelled by conkers or not?

Well, a great victory for British science education and scientific nous reveals the answer in the following video: