How important is talent?

Increasingly more often, I get emails from graduate students sending their CV and research interests, explaining they are looking for somebody to work with. Most of these emails seem to come from India or China. Usually, the student explains their interest in a topic that with high probability I have never worked on, and their inquiries inevitably start with "Dear Sir". 

The first couple of times this happened, I took the time to write back they should please apply through the website like everybody else and good luck. These days I just delete such emails. I am trying to understand the situation these students must be in, writing to complete strangers in the hope to become part of the international research community, but still I have little sympathy for such mass emails. Why should I take the time to read somebody's CV if that somebody didn't even take enough time to figure I'm not a Sir.

Another type of emails I seem to receive more often the longer I managed to stick around are questions for advice. Usually high school students, and more often from Germany than not, they will ask what studying physics is like in reality, what it takes to become a physicist, what their chances are. I try my best to be answer their questions, but I honestly don't think I can give meaningful advice to people I don't even know. 

Last week, I got an email from somebody explaining his talent seems to be more in the languages, but his interest more in physics, and what I think how relevant talent is for success in physics. I replied without hesitation that interest and the ability for self-motivation is more important than talent, because the latter can be replaced to a large extend by hard work, whereas the former is a prerequisite for everything. It occurred to me later though that this reply comes from somebody who never really had to work much for maths and physics at school, so that's easy to say for me. I have also met the occasional case of somebody who has been dedicated to physics and invested a lot of time and effort into learning, but just didn't get the most basic things straight.

However, I believe many people are actually pretty bad in knowing where their talents are, especially while still in their teenage years, and school performance in particular isn't very predictive. Doing research simply is a completely different story. You won't find out until you have tried, and if physics is where your interests are, you definitely should try.

I for my part was never very good in English. But then, how excited can you get about endless  interpretations of George Orwell's 1984 and essays about the capital punishment in the USA. Ten years later, friends and relatives abuse me as a living English-German dictionary.

Women in Physics

For several years, I have avoided to write about The Issue of women in physics on this blog. Frankly speaking, I have the impression it's sufficiently talked about elsewhere and that fruitlessly already, so why add to the noise. But besides this, despite being one of these women in physics, and despite finding the lack of women in the field depressing, it's not a topic I am tremendously interested in discussing. Given a choice, I'd rather talk physics.

As things are however, I was invited to the upcoming APS meeting in Denver to speak in a session on "Women and Minorities in Gravity: Science and Career Paths." And since I have somewhat of a bad conscience for never having been at never any APS meeting, not to mention never having been of any use for The Issue, I thought I should go. Now that the meeting is coming closer, I wonder what I know about women and minorities in physics (not sure what "in gravity" is supposed to mean). And their career paths. Or absence thereof. And as if that wasn't enough already, I further learned that the purpose of this session is to bring together three speakers from different types of institutions: research university, teaching-oriented institution, and pure research institution. So I am afraid I'll be representing the pure research institutions.

Now I do of course have a personal perspective on The Issue, but I am always afraid I don't represent very well one of the standard positions, even less so that of pure research institutions specifically. People seem to assume if you're a women in science you need to have an opinion. I have however never found it a big deal spending my worklife mostly among men. I like men. I get along with them quite well. They seem to get along with me. Maybe having three brothers has helped in this regard. I liked climbing on trees. I prefer sneakers over high heels. Maybe I'm just not the girly type. Who knows. 

It is somewhat of a mystery to me why there are still people in this world discussing something like a "scientific ability" of women, as if that was a term that could be defined in any sensible way, or if it was defined, be of any relevance for scientific progress. It seems redundant to say in the 21st century but I feel like I have to spell it out explicitly: women are as capable as men are of being scientists. 

That is not to say women, on the average, do work and think like men.  There's little doubt we're different, for social, cultural, biological and genetic reasons. And truth be spoken, I am glad we are, for wouldn't the world be utterly boring without these differences? But fact is, nobody has a recipe for how science works best, what mode of thinking is preferable, or what attitude towards research is the one and only right one. Thus, job-related diversity is generally favourable to keep all doors open, whereas any sort of artificial monoculture is likely to be an obstacle to progress by missing points of view. (On job-related diversity, see also my post: Diversity in Science.)

It might well be that women and men have an evolutionary developed predisposition to be interested in different topics which also reflects in their job preferences. And since that might be the case, I don't see why the composition should be fifty-fifty, neither for physicists, nor nannies, truck-drivers, or secretaries. But there are many reasons to believe that the present female to male ratio in physics doesn't even remotely represent where the natural ratio would be, there are too few women. And though there are many factors that play into this, two of them are most relevant. 

The first is a chicken and egg problem. If there are few women, few will follow. This has less to do with the often called-upon lack of "role models" for girls, but more with the awkwardness of being the odd one out. Even after all these years, coming into a room with some dozen men as the only one wearing a dress strikes me as a completely unnatural situation. If I laugh, I hear my voice fluttering an octave higher than everybody elses. It's not so much that it bothers me, it just feels like a relic of medieval times.

The second point is the hostility of the work environment for family planning. Nowadays, even if you are lucky and eventually make it onto a permanent position, chances are you'll be in your late thirties already. Until then, you will have to jump from one short-term contract to the next and move around the world. And while this isn't a great situation for anybody, I believe women are (on average, always on average!) less inclined to take crap for such a long time and draw consequences earlier. The price to pay is just simply too high. As a result, the longer it takes, the less women will remain.

There are lots of other points one could raise. The most often discussed one is certainly prejudices against women. But luckily, the men who grew up with these are simply dying out, at least in the Western Civilizations, so I am confident this problem will resolve by itself. The only prejudices I had to face myself were, ironically, based on support I obtained through programs specifically meant for women in science and engineering. That probably explains why I am not usually overenthusiastic about many initiatives to help alleviate The Issue for they can blacklash. Remains to say catching childrens' interest in early times makes a big difference, so I believe this is one of the most important points to tackle. And if you are a women and considering to become a physicist, let no one tell you what you're supposed to be interested in but find out yourself. 

I guess I could summarize my opinion on The Issue as: Embrace the differences.

PS: I used to think the registration fee for the meetings of the German Physical Society was quite high. They want € 60 per day - and that's already the reduced fee for members. The APS wants a stunning $235 for a single day. 

Physics of Socio-Economic Systems: Soccer

In old textbooks, physics is often described as “the science of inanimate nature,” and according to a more recent definition, it is “the science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe.” So it sounds like an oxymoron to talk of the physics of socio-economic systems. (And oxymorons btw have nothing to do with morons. If you learn anything from this blog it's that Stefan likes Greek.)

However, during the last decades, methods developed in condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics have been applied successfully to financial, economic and social systems, from the analysis of financial data and nonlinear market dynamics to the emergence of traffic jams and the outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals (a phenomenon you can witness on every physics workshop. The disease is in many instances short-lived and victims recover quickly when back in their home office). Thus, at the Spring Meeting of the German Physical Society (DPG)  that we visited some weeks ago in Dresden was discussed, alongside more traditional topics such as semiconductor physics and vacuum science (pumps, is all I say, pumps!), the physics of socio-economic systems.

As the DPG spring meetings are traditionally well attended by young students, dominantly those carrying a Y-chromosome, the lecture hall was completely crowded when Andreas Heuer presented the results of a study on the “identification of the different ingredients governing the outcome of a soccer match.” 

Heuer et al's work* shows that during a whole season of the Bundesliga the quality of a team can be characterized by a single fitness value that can be estimated from the league table. They then examined the question how important fluctuations of the team fitness around its average value are. Surprisingly, the effect of fitness fluctuations is very small. Another question that comes to mind is given the average outcome of a match, what is the probability for a specific result? In contrast to a previously suggested interpretations, Heuer et al find the number of goals per team in a match can be extremely well described by a simple Poisson process (for up to 8 goals).  Altogether, soccer turns out to be a surprisingly simple match with respect to its statistical properties.

Entering the building in Dresden where the conference was held, it was impossible not to notice the lack of women. Men, men, men, everywhere - except behind the registration desk obviously. And while women are typically underrepresented at almost all conferences in physics, we had the impression condensed matter is a particularly severe case (data, anybody?). Maybe that explains the attendants' fascination with soccer. Anyway, Bee's talk was in the same session, so we profited from the audience the earlier talks had attracted. 

For a German report on this talk see Jan Lublinski's article Mythen und Zufälle.

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* Andreas Heuer, Oliver Rubner: Fitness, chance, and myths: an objective view on soccer results (arXiv:0803.0614v4 [physics.data-an]).

Moving on

“Must leave Canada by 31 Aug 2009” - is what it says in my work permit. Fellow readers of this blog know I have thus been looking for a new job. I am happy to tell you today that the search is over - beginning September, I will start my new position as an assistant professor at NORDITA in Stockholm. I would like to thank all of you who have expressed their support and encouragement in many comments, emails and messages during the last months. Happy Easter to all of you :-)

Howard Burton: First Principles

Last weekend, I read Howard Burton's just published book "First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science". Howard Burton was the founding executive director of Perimeter Institute. He left in May 2007 under somewhat mysterious circumstances, according to the press release to "seek new challenges". He was replaced after a period of general confusion by our 'Interim Director' Robert Myers. Last year in May, the search for a new director was completed. As you know, Neil Turok is now director of Perimeter Institute. 

The book tells the story of the first years of Perimeter Institute. From Mike Lazaridis' donation, over the search for a name, for a mission, for a location, the joy of building constructions, the hiring of the first faculty members, the establishment of PI's public outreach program, and the successful acquisition of governmental funding, to Howard's departure.

It is very entertainingly written and quite informative in addition, though I admittedly had hoped for more gossip stories about the research and the researchers. The chapter about who talked to whom when and where to pull the strings for governmental support is somewhat lengthy and tiresome, but provides interesting inside views. The book also has an amusing chapter titled "The Trouble with Physicists" about the difficulties in saving scientists from administrating themselves into dysfunctionality. I'm very tempted to quote the funniest paragraphs, but I think you should read the book yourself. It comes with some characterizations of well-known physicists that are quite to the point indeed.

The book is probably more interesting if you know some of the people involved, but besides this it conveys authentically and passionately the fascination, joy and importance of theoretical physics. Overall recommendable. If this was an Amazon review, I'd give 5 stars.

Speaking of Amazon, their website just informed me that customers who bought related items also bought "Lethal Legacy: A Novel by Linda Fairstein."

PS: I messed up my order and accidentally bought two copies.  You can have the second one for $10 + postage, US/Canada only, send email to sabine[at]perimeterinstitute.ca, it's a brand new copy.
PPS: The book is gone.

Springtime in Waterloo!

Pictures taken 2 hours ago in the PI parking lot.

This and That

• Physicsworld has an interesting article "In search of the black swans" by Mark Buchanan who ponders the question whether the current research environment for scientists is optimal for knowledge discovery. It quotes Geoffrey West (currently president of the Santa Fe Institute) in praise of interdisciplinarity, Eric Weinstein (who attended our last year's conference on Science in the 21st Century, talk at PIRSA: 08090036) suggesting that scientists should put their money where their mouth is, and Lee Smolin who explains tirelessly that science needs more valley crossers and more risk-taking.  
  
  As I have argued many times - on this blog (eg here, here and here) and elsewhere - all of these suggestions are almost certain to fail. They sound nice and are meant well, but though today we might call for more interdisciplinarity or more risk-taking, tomorrow we'll have to much of it. Who is going to decide how much is enough? The only way to solve the problem is to allow the system to dynamically reach a balance. I am thus quite sympathetic to Eric's idea which wouldn't fix any percentages but allow some sort of self-organization, just that I don't think monetary incentives are a cure for every problem, and in particular in academia are more likely to cause additional problems.
  
  
• PI's former director Howard Burton published his book on The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science. I haven't read it, so don't ask.


• Interactions.org is re-launching the quantum diaries. The original quantum diaries were launched in celebration of the 2005 year of physics and are basically a group blog documenting the lives of physicists. I find the design of the website very well done, and to my eyes' relief it's entirely ad-free.


• PBS will be airing "400 years of the Telescope" on April 10 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. More information on the program here, and photos here.

Quantum Gravity in GRB 080916C ?

The Fermi Collaboration has an interesting article in recent issue of Science

Fermi Observations of High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emission from GRB 080916C
Science 27 March 2009, Vol. 323. no. 5922, pp. 1688 - 1693

Abstract: Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are highly energetic explosions signaling the death of massive stars in distant galaxies. The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor and Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi Observatory together record GRBs over a broad energy range spanning about 7 decades of gammaray energy. In September 2008, Fermi observed the exceptionally luminous GRB 080916C, with the largest apparent energy release yet measured. The high-energy gamma rays are observed to start later and persist longer than the lower energy photons. A simple spectral form fits the entire GRB spectrum, providing strong constraints on emission models. The known distance of the burst enables placing lower limits on the bulk Lorentz factor of the outflow and on the quantum gravity mass.

The article presents details about the gamma ray burst 080916C observed on Sep 16 2008 with the recently launched Fermi satellite (formerly GLAST). Follow-up x-ray and optical observations measured a redshift of z approx 4.35. They have estimated an enormous energy release of ~4.9 times the solar mass, suggesting that the outflow was directed and occurred only into a narrow jet. The burst covered many orders of magnitude in energy, with the highest detected photon being at approx 13 GeV.

The interesting thing is that the higher energetic photons seem to be arriving later, with the MeV band peaking some seconds after the keV band, and the 13 GeV photon arriving approx 16.5 seconds after the onset of the burst. The article discusses various astrophysical reasons for this delay, such as spatially distinct regions of origin, a delay of high energetic photons through not well understood opacity properties of the source, or additional time needed to accelerate protons or ions sufficiently.

An alternative explanation they investigate is that the delay is due to an energy dependent speed of light caused by Planck-scale corrections to the dispersion relation, which could be a signature for quantum gravitational effects. With the assumption that the delay is entirely explained by astrophysical effects, they obtain a lower limit on the scale of quantum gravity, that is M_QG > 1.3 x 10¹⁸GeV. Note that this is about one order of magnitude smaller than the Planck scale.

I would have found it more useful to think about it the other way round: if the delay is not caused by astrophysical effects but entirely by quantum gravitational effects, the scale must be below this limit to reproduce the observed delay. Since the scale is one order of magnitude below what one would have expected and thus the effect quite strong, I would then be concerned should this effect be due to a modified dispersion of photons it should already have been observed previously, for example in MAGIC's observation of a gamma ray flare in 2007.

In addition to this one has to keep in mind that one photon doesn't make a particularly great statistic. This gamma ray burst seems to be quite unusual in its luminosity anyway and an astrophysical origin of the delay is a more conservative explanation. To make a case for quantum gravity, much more data would be needed, in particular one would need to establish a dependence of the delay on the distance. If it is a quantum gravitational effect, the delay should increase with increasing distance. If the delay is of astrophysical origin, the delay should be independent of the distance.

Giovanni Amelino-Camelia gave a seminar at PI last week (I could not attend since I was in Stockholm as you know), in the first half he talks about the above discussed observation of GRB 080916C, see PIRSA: 09030039. (He then talks about the "mystery noise" in the GEO600 gravitational wave interferometer, previously discussed here.)

Science News

• Today on the arXiv: Steven Goldman from the University of New Pressburg, WI, proposes in his groundbreaking paper "iBranes in P-disks" that our universe may be a memory chip in a higher-dimensional iPod. One observable consequence would be a fundamental limit to the amount of information in our world. He concludes it is thus highly recommendable to break down information-heavy communication into tweets, and - as Sean Carroll extrapolated - prepare to upgrade from Twitter to Bitter.



• Slashpot.com reports that climate scientists have found the average human body temperature has increased by 0.4 °C since the fall of the Soviet Union and we should all cool down to avoid further glacier melting.



• The island of Maui is now offering the ultimate Lisi-Cruise, including a three-day crash course on how to surf like a theoretical physicist and a visit of all the roots of E8.

Visit at Nordita in Stockholm

Last week I was in Stockholm, Sweden, where I was visiting Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, and gave a seminar on Phenomenological Quantum Gravity.

Nordita is an interesting place. The building is located right next to the Department of Physics, at Stockholm University that I had visited before. Nordita was founded in 1957 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was relocated to Stockholm in January 2007. Their building is shown in the photo above. If you have been there before, the entry to the AlbaNova University Center is to the left. You can find some more photos of the building here.

Nordita's main mission is to strengthen the collaboration in theoretical physics between the five nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In their logo, shown to the left, each triangle stands for one of these countries. Nordita's research areas cover quite a quite diverse range of topics in theoretical physics: astrophysics and astrobiology, condensed matter, statistical and biological physics and high energy and nuclear physics. Compared to Perimeter Institute, it is a somewhat smaller institution. Though the faculty is of similar size, they have considerably fewer postdocs and students. Nordita further has a very active scientific program which brings together groups of leading experts to work on specific topics for extended periods, similarly eg to the programs at the KITP.

If you have not visited Stockholm before, let me add it is on my list with the most beautiful cities I've been to (together with Cape Town, Vienna and San Francisco). I don't speak Swedish but it is remarkable that literally everybody in Stockholm seems to speak English (and isn't funny about using it either as eg the French are). If you know German and English you can guess a lot of Swedish words though. Altogether a very interesting and enjoyable stay. Minus the snow.

Quick, don't think: What's typically American?

Weekend quick poll: name five things you think are typical for the US of A. No names, no places. Will update the following list. Have a good start into the weekend, and our readers in Europe should not forget to spring forward on Sunday.

Burgers, Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers: 5
Political Correctness: 4
SUV's, Big Cars: 4
Christian Fundamentalism, Creationism: 4
Teeth Whitening: 3
Baseball: 3
Wastefulness: 3
Stars and Stripes/Patriotism: 3
Space Exploration, NASA, Spaceshuttle: 3
Obesity: 2
Filmindustry: 2
Guns: 2
Intense competitiveness, Winner/looser: 2
Drive Thrus, No Sidewalks, Driving everywhere, Long commutes
Consumerism, Shopping Malls, Shopping network channels, Strip Malls
Small Talk, Forthright openness, "Friendliness", Helpfulness, Politeness
Brownies, Peanut butter
Fast Food Chains, Supersized portions
Writing checks
Refusing to use the metric system
Shaved pubic hair
Air conditioning run amock (walk-in fridges)
Democracy
Exceptionalism, National Interest, Nabelschau (navel gazing), Pride, Absence of International News
Great Landscapes
Reality Shows
Democrazy
Believe in own propaganda
Daylight saving time
Country Music, Jazz, Hip-Hop
Religious tolerance
Fast and cheap but with low quality
Anti-intellectualism, Math phobia
Terrorism, War, Nuclear Weapons, Military
Ivy League
QED
Native Americans
Iced tea with sugar
Root beer floats
Freedom
Simplicity
Ingenuity
Stubbornness
Puritanism
Rugged individualism
Love of family
Distrust of bigshots
Extreme need for privacy
Wheat
Ipods
Size (Big, Bigger, American), Big cups, Big screen TVs
Starbucks
Bailout
"Oh my God!" screams
College/University T-shirts
Satire
Scientology
Televangelists

PS: You don't have to come up with items that are not already on the list. I count how many times they were named, I just didn't want to use a standard poll because this way you can suggest items yourself.

Science and the Economic Crisis

The previously mentioned conference “The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics,” to take place at PI May 1-4, meanwhile has a list of invited speakers to offer. It includes Nouriel Roubini, a Prof. for Economics at NYU, who you might know from his blog, Brian Arthur from the Santa Fe Institute and PARC, and Eric Weinstein who smiles at you from a photo in Dennis Overbye's recent NYT article “They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street.”

For a somewhat different take on the economic crisis and its implications for science: The NYT recently featured an article “Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times” and reported

“Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.”

The Globe and Mail today offers a similarly depressing piece “Black days for those dreaming of the ivory tower - Graduate students hoping for tenure-track positions face bleak prospects as universities cut budgets and freeze hiring” which cites Mr. Burgoyne, president of McGill's postgraduate student society with saying “People are very worried. People are scared. Jobs, they are just disappearing.”

Meanwhile, the APS is conducting a survey How is the economic downturn affecting your organization?, that I encourage you to fill out if you are a physicist presently working in the USA.

DPG meeting Dresden

The Semperoper in Dresden

Despite this posted under Stefan's name, it's your all-time favourite Bee writing here, cursing her husband's German kezboard, if zou know what I mean. We are currently in Dresden for a meeting of the DGP (German Physical Society), and we are LATE, as Stefan keeps pointing out. Therefore I'll just wish you a good start into the week, more from the conference later.

Hello from Germany

Every time I arrive at the airport in Frankfurt and go through passport control under the EU circle of stars it strikes me how GERMAN the border officials look. Maybe it's just that the uniforms are green instead of blue, or maybe it's because noticeably more of them are blond and blue-eyed than South-, East-, and Westward of here, but without that intimidating Viking chill you find further North. And if you arrive from North-America it's impossible not to notice how silent they are. They might just give my passport an uninterested look, hand it back, and nod over my shoulder to the next person. The guy on Wednesday was comparably chatty and mumbled “Schön Tach noch” (about: have a nice day).

And as usual, Germany looks different from the inside than from the outside. The only thing I seem to read in newspapers and magazines overseas about Germany is the chancellor Angela Merkel's hesitation to throw more of taxpayer's money out of the window, which drowns these day in a vast sea of articles about layoffs, commentaries on The Great Recession, declines in consumer spending, rises in unemployment and other over-interpreted statistics. Browsing through a German newspaper however, reporting on the financial crisis remains in the business sector. Unlike six years ago, so far nobody of my friends or relatives has lost his job, and I haven't noticed any unusually large amount of closing sales either. Instead, Frankfurt has just "added a new dimension to shopping" with a recently opened 8 floor storehouse on Frankfurt's main shopping street Zeil, named in best Germenglish “MyZeil.” I have the best intention to visit the place and to support the German economy with my new credit card (in case Stefan recalls where he put the respective letter from the bank, cough).

Instead of global or national hiccups in the financial systems, the topics of the month are apparently the upcoming NATO summit in April in Kehl, and the country is still collectively in shock about the recent school shooting where a nutcase of a teenager killed 15 people.

Besides this, Germany has a federal election upcoming this year in September, meaning the election campaigns are slowly starting. As a consequence everybody is criticizing everybody else. Dirk Kurbjuweit (a well-known journalist) just published a book “Angela Merkel: Die Kanzlerin für alle?” (Chancellor for Everybody?) portraying her as too eager to please everybody and having lost direction. And Daniel Friedrich Sturm wrote a book “Wohin geht die SPD?” (Where does the Social Democratic Party go?). That's a good question indeed, maybe somebody should have asked it like 20 years ago. But what's really new about this is that, guess what, the guy has a blog.

Speaking of books, Lee Smolin's book “The Trouble with Physics” will be published in German on April 14th under the title “Die Zukunft der Physik: Probleme der String-Theorie und wie es weiter geht” (The Future of Physics: Problems of String-theory and how it will go on), according to the blurb “ein erfrischend provozierenden Buch” - a “refreshingly provocative book.”

CERNland

Do you recognize the place?



It's the lawn in front of the CERN Cafeteria!

This lovely scene is the backdrop of a picture puzzle, and just one small part of CERNland, a cute interactive site for young kids to explore a bit about CERN, the place, the people working there, the experiments, and the physics background.

Thanks for the link, Sabine, it's really great (... OK, the sound is a bit tedious, to my ears at least, but that's what the volume control is good for).

Enjoy!

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Interna

Folks, I will be away the next weeks to expand my physical horizon. Expect blogging to be spotty and photo-heavy.

PS: Unless our visit counter breaks down again today, we should cross the 1 million mark in a couple of hours.

Political Ideologies

I just came across these interesting survey results on “The State of American Political Ideology, 2009,” which documents the findings of a study by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress about political values and beliefs in America.

According to their tastefully red-white-blue website decorated with stars and stripes, the Center for American Progress is “a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.” They have hijacked the words “progress” and “innovation” and explain their “work builds upon progressive ideals put forth by such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King,” and “draw from the great social movements of the 20th century—from labor rights and worker safety, to civil rights and women's suffrage” to “translate those values into new ideas and action firmly rooted in the economic and political realities of the 21st century.” That's just so you know what page we are on.

The results in the report are based on 1,400 interviews with adults 18 years or older. They have put political ideologies on a sliding scale from 0 to 400 with 0 being the most conservative position on the continuum and 400 being the most progressive (according to their report “an innovative categorization of ideology”), and calculated the score from responses to 40 statements about government and society.

They find a mean ideological score of 209.5. Interestingly, Americans are apparently most progressive about the role of government and least progressive on cultural and social values. Ideas about economics and international affairs fall in-between. Less surprisingly for what is essentially a two-party system in which every party is trying to adapt to the popular opinion of the day, they find there really is no “far right” or “far left,” but rather “far center-right” and “far center-left.” Do I need to add that a one-dimensional sliding scale with a pre-chosen notion of “progressive” for political, economical as well as social questions doesn't quite accommodate plurality either?

As a PS to my recent post on The American Dream, let me quote these replies in regard to the present economic situation

“The economic recession is clearly affecting many Americans. A full two-thirds of Americans (67%) report that their family’s income is falling behind the cost of living, with 23% saying their income is staying even and only 6% saying it is going up faster than the cost of living. The belief that family income is failing to keep pace with rising costs is uniformly held across ideological, partisan, race, and income lines.

Despite the harsh climate, many Americans continue to believe that they have achieved or will achieve their own understanding of the American Dream in their lifetime. More than one-third of Americans (34 %) say they have already achieved the American Dream and another 41 %believe that they will achieve it in their lifetime. Roughly one-fifth of Americans (18 %) say they will not achieve the American Dream in their lifetime.”

You can read the full report here, and find out your own score here. Readers of this blog won't be surprised that apparently I'm “extremely progressive”




Humor me and leave your score in the comments.

GLOBE at Night

I've learned a new expression: Citizen Science. This means that interested people do contribute to a research project, either by collecting data, or by allocating computing time of their PCs to contribute to the analysis of huge sets of raw data - SETI@Home is an example of the latter kind of Citizen Science. Sabine and I talked about this some days ago, and just then, I came across a wonderful example of the former kind of Citizen Science: GLOBE at Night.

The idea of this project is to establish a map of "light pollution", the illumination of the night sky caused by artificial light sources on the ground. Light pollution is nuisance to everyone who wants to marvel at the stars, and it can be harmful to the biology and ecology of animals in the wild.

To map the extent of light pollution over the planet, participants of GLOBE at night are just asked to look at the constellation of Orion and report what they see. Yesterday night, what I could see from the patio was something like this:


which means visibility of stars corresponding to a Magnitude 3 Chart. But then, this result may have been skewed a bit, as there was a huge natural source of light pollution - the nearly full moon. To avoid this interference by the moonlight, the actual observation period is scheduled towards the next New Moon, between March 16 and March 28.

So, we all can become "Citizen Scientists", by reporting our view of Orion to the GLOBE at night! I just hope my view will soon be better again than tonight:

Cloudy Sky.

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Tags: Astronomy, Light Pollution, Citizen Science

Obamania Contd.

I don't usually dump every nonsense I come across on this blog - in that case I wouldn't be doing anything else (for the smaller updates, see my Twitter status in the sidebar or my shared items on Google reader). But this you just have to see: German frozen food company introduces the "Obama Fingers" - fried chicken with a curry dip



[Via Spiegel Online]

Notice Stars and Stripes and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. I couldn't quite decide whether it's a joke, but either way, enjoy.

The And of the World as We Know It

The other day I got an email asking for permission to reprint a figure from one of my papers on black hole evaporation for a forthcoming popular science book on “Endings”.

Endings have been fashionable for more than a decade now. We all know that we are allegedly approaching The End of Science, The End of History, The End of Faith and have reached The End of Theory, or generally The End of the World as We Know It. The Internet too has an end - been there, done that, what's next?

So let me share with you an ancient German proverb: Everything has an end, only the sausage has two*. Or to put it differently, what all these folks proclaim as an end is actually a sign of beginning.

I read yesterday in Kevin Kelly's Speculations on the Future of Science: “This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn.”

Well, I totally disagree with him. This won't be the century of biology, it will be the century of the social sciences or there won't be no next century. Our social systems, political systems, economic systems have reached a level of so high complexity we are constantly faced with emergent phenomena that are beyond our individual understanding. Unfortunately, they are also beyond the understanding of current scientific research. This is pretty much disastrous. We either figure out how to deal with that, or we won't be able to keep up this high level of complexity and tumble back down towards a lower level.

As Homer-Dixon masterfully argued out in his book The Ingenuity Gap, we need two types of ingenuity: Technical ingenuity to find new scientific insights and develop applications. But that alone is not sufficient. We also need the social ingenuity to not only implement these insights in a practical and timely manner, but also to foster an environment that is supportive to their development to begin with.

It is important to realize these both types of ingenuity are not only necessary for improvement. They are necessary to simply to remain on the level where we are, for we constantly cause new problems that we have to solve. When we fall behind in either category, we will eventually be overrun by problems. Thus, it is about time we finish the scientific revolution, and realize that for sustainable progress we need insights from both the natural AND the social sciences.

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* It is in fact a seasonably popular song by Steffen Remmler Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei that is dusted off annually for Carnival and ranks in the same category as Klaus und Klaus' An der Nordseeküste and the unavoidable, ugh, Polonäse Blankenese (don't get scared when the audience jumps at him, that's the point). So much about German “culture” ;-p