Arquivo da tag: ciência

Science and religion do mix (Rice University)

Uncategorized, , , ,

9/20/2011 – News & Media Relations

Rice University study reveals only 15 percent of scientists at major research universities see religion and science always in conflict

Throughout history, science and religion have appeared as being in perpetual conflict, but a new study by Rice University suggests that only a minority of scientists at major research universities see religion and science as requiring distinct boundaries.

“When it comes to questions about the meaning of life, ways of understanding reality, origins of Earth and how life developed on it, many have seen religion and science as being at odds and even in irreconcilable conflict,” said Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund. But a majority of scientists interviewed by Ecklund and colleagues viewed both religion and science as “valid avenues of knowledge” that can bring broader understanding to important questions, she said.

Ecklund summarized her findings in “Scientists Negotiate Boundaries Between Religion and Science,” which appears in the September issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Her co-authors were sociologists Jerry Park of Baylor University and Katherine Sorrell, a former postbaccalaureate fellow at Rice and current Ph.D. student at the University of Notre Dame.

They interviewed a scientifically selected sample of 275 participants, pulled from a survey of 2,198 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the natural and social sciences at 21 elite U.S. research universities. Only 15 percent of those surveyed view religion and science as always in conflict. Another 15 percent say the two are never in conflict, and 70 percent believe religion and science are only sometimes in conflict. Approximately half of the original survey population expressed some form of religious identity, whereas the other half did not.

“Much of the public believes that as science becomes more prominent, secularization increases and religion decreases,” Ecklund said. “Findings like these among elite scientists, who many individuals believe are most likely to be secular in their beliefs, definitely call into question ideas about the relationship between secularization and science.”

Many of those surveyed cited issues in the public realm (teaching of creationism versus evolution, stem cell research) as reasons for believing there is conflict between the two. The study showed that these individuals generally have a particular kind of religion in mind (and religious people and institutions) when they say that religion and science are in conflict.

The study identified three strategies of action used by these scientists to manage the religion-science boundaries and the circumstances that the two could overlap.

  • Redefining categories – Scientists manage the science-religion relationship by changing the definition of religion, broadening it to include noninstitutionalized forms of spirituality.
  • Integration models – Scientists deliberately use the views of influential scientists who they believe have successfully integrated their religious and scientific beliefs.
  • Intentional talk – Scientists actively engage in discussions about the boundaries between science and religion.

“The kind of narrow research available on religion and science seems to ask if they are in conflict or not, when it should really ask the conditions under which they are in conflict,” Ecklund said. “Our research has found that even within the same person, there can be differing views. It’s very important to dispel the myth that people believe that religion and science either do or don’t conflict. Our study found that many people have much more nuanced views.”

These nuanced views often find their way into the classroom, according to those interviewed. One biologist, an atheist not part of any religious tradition, admitted that she makes a sincere effort to present science such that “religious students do not need to compromise their own selves.” Although she is not reconsidering her personal views on religion, she seeks out resources to keep her religious students engaged with science.

Other findings:

  • Scientists as a whole are substantially different from the American public in how they view teaching “intelligent design” in public schools. Nearly all of the scientists – religious and nonreligious alike – have a negative impression of the theory of intelligent design.
  • Sixty-eight percent of scientists surveyed consider themselves spiritual to some degree.
  • Scientists who view themselves as spiritual/religious are less likely to see religion and science in conflict.
  • Overall, under some circumstances even the most religious of scientists were described in very positive terms by their nonreligious peers; this suggests that the integration of religion and science is not so distasteful to all scientists.

Ecklund said the study’s findings will go far in improving the public’s perception of science. “I think it would be helpful for the public to see what scientists are actually saying about these topics, rather than just believe stereotypes,” she said. “It would definitely benefit public dialogue about the relationship between science and religion.”

Ecklund is the author of “Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think,” published by Oxford University Press last year.

The study was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and additional funding from Rice University.

Gamers crackeiam código que pode gerar novos tratamentos contra AIDS (Gizmodo Brasil)

Uncategorized, ,
Por Kwame Opam – 15:56 – 19-09-2011

 

Os cientistas passaram uma década tentando — e não conseguindo — mapear a estrutura de uma enzima que pode ajudar a resolver uma parte crucial do quebra-cabeça do vírus da AIDS. Um grupo de gamers precisou de apenas três semanas.

A enzima em questão é a protease do vírus dos macacos de Mason-Pfizer, e pesquisadores vêm buscando formas de desativá-lo para assim descobrir novas formas de desenvolver drogas anti-HIV. Infelizmente, os esforços convencionais de computadores e cientistas foram pouco durante anos.

Eis que entra no jogo a Foldit. a Foldit foi desenvolvida em 2008 como forma para descobrir estrutura de várias proteínas e aminoácidos — algo que computadores não sabem fazer muito bem — ao transformar o problema em um jogo. Ao adicionar as coordenadas experimentais à enzima do vírus do macaco, os gamers — vários deles sem nenhum tipo de conhecimento passado em biologia molelucar — foram capazes de prever a estrutura da proteína, permitindo que os cientistas marcassem localizações precisas e parassem o crescimento do vírus.

O estudo, publicado na Nature Structure & Molecular Biology, detalha quão incrível um passo desse é para o desenvolvimento de terapias mais efetivas para pacientes com AIDS. Trata-se também de um precedente importante que estabelece uma base para que cientistas e pessoas comuns trabalhem juntas para resolver novos problemas e salvar vidas. O que é algo incrível. [Sydney Morning Herald via The Next Web]

Unshakeable stereotypes of science (New Scientist)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

13 September 2011 by Roger Highfield
Magazine issue 2829.

Science has transformed our world, so why does the public have such an old-fashioned view of scientists, asks Quentin Cooper

What is the problem with the public’s image of scientists?
If you ask anyone, they will tell you that science has transformed their world with amazing discoveries. But then if you invite them to draw a scientist, what they depict is precisely what people would have described 50 years ago, back when the anthropologist Margaret Mead came up with what we now call the “draw a scientist” test.

How do people generally depict scientists?
It is uncanny: they draw someone with a hangdog look, frizzy hair and test tube in hand, all in a scene where things are going wrong. There are national variations. In Italy, scientists tend to be scarred and have bolts in their necks, like Frankenstein’s monster. In general, though, they are mostly white, male, bald and wearing a white coat. No wonder we have a problem recruiting scientists.

What do you think of attempts to make scientists cool, like the Studmuffins of Science calendar and GQ’s Rock Stars of Science?
They are doomed because for geek calendars and suchlike to work, they have to bounce off the stereotype. As a result, they reinforce it.

On TV there are plenty of science presenters who defy the stereotype, such as the physicist Brian Cox. Surely that helps?
It is true. They are not all white, male and old. Some have hair. Some, like Brian, arguably have too much! But while people know them and are familiar with their TV programmes, it is surprising what happens when you ask the public about their favourite science presenters. In the UK they usually nominate veterans, such as David Attenborough. In fact, in the last poll I saw, half the people could not name a TV science presenter. They don’t seem to recognise them as scientists because they don’t conform to the stereotype.

And this stereotype also applies to the best known scientist of all time, Einstein?
The image of the old Einstein with tongue out is the one everyone knows – the one taken on his 72nd birthday. But he was a dapper 26-year-old when he had his “annus mirabilis” and wrote the four papers that changed physics.

What do you think about the depiction of scientists in films?
What I find striking is you almost never see scientists on screen unless they are doing science. There are very few characters who happen to be scientists. And those scientists shown tend to be at best eccentric, at worst mad and/or evil.

How can we improve the image of scientists?
Even though the “draw a scientist” test started half a century ago, it was only in the 1980s that someone had the idea of introducing children to a real scientist after they had drawn one, and then asking them to have another go at drawing. One of my favourite examples is of the schoolgirl who initially drew a man with frizzy hair and a white coat, but afterwards depicted a smiling young woman holding a test tube. Above it is the word “me”. I still find myself choking up when I show it.

Profile
Quentin Cooper is a science journalist and presenter of the BBC radio programme Material World. He is hosting the Cabaret of the Elements at the British Science Festival in Bradford on 10 September.

We Need To Do More When It Comes To Having Brief, Panicked Thoughts About Climate Change (The Onion)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

COMMENTARY
BY RHETT STEVENSON
SEPTEMBER 6, 2011 | ISSUE 47•36

The 20 hottest years on record have all taken place in the past quarter century. The resulting floods, wildfires, and heat waves have all had deadly consequences, and if we don’t reduce carbon emissions immediately, humanity faces bleak prospects. We can no longer ignore this issue. Beginning today, we must all do more when it comes to our brief and panicked thoughts about climate change.

Indeed, if there was ever a time when a desperate call to take action against global warming should race through our heads as we lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, that time is now.

Many well-intentioned people will take 20 seconds out of their week to consider the consequences of the lifestyle they’ve chosen, perhaps contemplating how their reliance on fossil fuels has contributed to the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap. But if progress is what we truly want, 20 seconds is simply not enough. Not by a long shot. An issue this critical demands at least 45 seconds to a solid minute of real, concentrated panic.

And I’m not talking about letting the image of a drowning polar bear play out in your mind now and then. If we’re at all serious, we need to let ourselves occasionally be struck with grim visions of coastal cities washing away and people starving as drought-stricken farmlands fail to yield crops—and we need to do this regularly, every couple days or so, before continuing to go about our routines as usual.

This may seem like a lot to ask, but no one ever said making an effort to think about change was easy.

So if you pick up a newspaper and see an article about 10 percent of all living species going extinct by the end of the century, don’t just turn the page. Stop, peruse it for a moment, look at the photos, freak out for a few seconds, and then turn the page.

And the next time you start up your car, stop to think how the exhaust from your vehicle and millions of others like it contributes to air pollution, increasing the likelihood that a child in your neighborhood will develop asthma or other respiratory ailments. Take your time with it. Feel the full, crushing weight of that guilt. Then go ahead and drive wherever it was you wanted to go.

To do anything less is irresponsible.

Suppose you’ve just sat down in a crisply air-conditioned movie theater. Why not take the length of a preview or two to consider the building’s massive carbon footprint? Imagine those greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere, disrupting ecosystems and causing infectious diseases to spread rampantly, particularly in regions of the world where the poorest people live. Visualize massive storm systems cutting widespread swaths of destruction. Think of your children’s children dying horrible, unnecessary deaths.

You might even go so far as to experience actual physical symptoms: shaking, hyperventilation, perhaps even a heart palpitation. These are entirely appropriate responses to have, and the kinds of reactions each of us ought to have briefly before casting such worries aside to enjoy Conan The Barbarian.

Ultimately, however, our personal moments of distress won’t matter much unless our government intervenes with occasional mentions of climate change in important speeches, or by passing nonbinding legislation on the subject. I implore you: Spend a couple minutes each year imagining yourself writing impassioned letters to your elected representatives demanding a federal cap on emissions.

Global warming must be met with immediate, short-lasting feelings of overwhelming dread, or else life as we know it will truly cease—oh, God, there’s nothing we can do, is there? Maybe we’re already too late. What am I supposed to do? Unplug my refrigerator? I recycle, I take shorter showers than I used to, doesn’t that count for something? Devastating famines and brutal wars fought over dwindling resources? Is that my fault? Jesus, holy shit, someone do something! Tell me what to do! For the love of God, what can possibly be done?

There you have it. I’ve done my part. Now it’s your turn.

A Reality Check on Clouds and Climate (N.Y. Times)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

September 6, 2011, 5:44 PM

Dot Earth

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

I am often in awe of clouds, as was the case when I shot this video of a remarkable thunderhead somewhere over the Midwest. But I’m tired of the recent burst of over-interpretation of a couple of papers examining aspects of clouds in the context of a changing climate.

I’ve long pointed out that anyone trumpeting a conclusion about greenhouse-driven climate change on the basis of a single paper should be treated with skepticism or outright suspicion. I trust climate science as an enterprise because — despite its flaws — it is a self-correcting process in which trajectory matters far more than individual steps in the road.

There is always a temptation, particularly for those with an agenda and for media in search of the “front-page thought,” to overemphasize studies that fit some template, no matter how tentative, or flawed.

The flood of celebratory coverage that followed publication of a recent paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell — proposing a big reduction in the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases — was far more about pushing an agenda than providing guidance on the state of climate science. There’s a lot more on this below.

The same goes for the stampede on clouds and climate following publication of an important, but preliminary, laboratory finding from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known by its acronym, CERN) about how cosmic rays can stimulate the formation of atmospheric particles(an ingredient in cloud formation). It’s a long road from that conclusion to an argument that variations in cosmic rays can explain a meaningful portion of recent climate change.

There’s a long history of assertions that clouds can be a substantial driver of climate change, distinct from their clear potential to amplify or blunt(depending on the type of cloud) a change set in motion by some other force. But there’s still scant evidence to back up such assertions.

In weighing the new results on cosmic rays and the atmosphere, I find a lot of merit in Hank Campbell’s conclusion at Science 2.0:

[I]t isn’t evidence that the Sun’s magnetic field is controlling cosmic rays and therefore our temperature far more than mankind and pollution are doing.

It is simply science at work – finally, after a decade and a half of circling the wagons, hypotheses that were dismissed as conspiratorial nonsense by zealots get a chance to live or die by the scientific method and not by aggressive posturing.

A new paper by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University bolsters the established view of clouds’ role as a feedback mechanism — but not driver — in climate dynamics through a decade of observation and analysis of El Nino and La Nina events (periodic warm and cool phases of the Pacific Ocean).

The paper directly challenges conclusions of Spencer and Braswell and anearlier paper positing a role of clouds in driving climate change.

Dessler, setting his findings and other work on clouds and climate in broader context, offered this observation this morning about the polarized, and distorted, public discourse:

To me, the real story here is that, every month, dozens if not hundreds of papers are published that are in agreement with the mainstream theory of climate science.

[ACR: I did a quick Google Scholar search for “CO2 climate change greenhouse” to put a rough upper bound on this and got ~9,000 papers so far in 2011.]

But, every year, one or two skeptical papers get published, and these are then trumpeted by sympathetic media outlets as if they’d discovered the wheel. It therefore appears to the general public that there’s a debate.

Here’s more from Dessler on his new paper:

A separate question has emerged around the Spencer-Braswell paper. Should it have been published in the first place?

As Retraction Watch (a fascinating and worthwhile blog) chronicled last week, the editor of Remote Sensing, the journal in which the paper appeared, emphatically — if after the fact — said no, emphasizing his view by very publicly resigning.

This move was hailed by defenders of the climate status quo in a piece run inThe Daily Climate and Climate Progress. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, remarkably given space in Forbes, called the resignation “staggering news.”

But others, including the folks at Retraction Watch, wondered why the editor at Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner, didn’t simply seek to have the paper retracted?

Roger A. Pielke, Jr., whose focus at the University of Colorado is climate in the context of political science, echoed that question, urging the new team at the journal to initiate retraction proceedings, adding:

If the charges of “error” and “false claims” are upheld the paper should certainly be retracted.  If the charges are not upheld then the authors have every right to have such a judgment announced publicly.

Absent such an adjudication we are left with climate science played out as political theater in the media and on blogs — with each side claiming the righteousness of their views, while everyone else just sees the peer review process in climate science getting another black eye.

Over the weekend, I asked Kerry Emanuel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his thoughts both on the Spencer-Braswell paper and the histrionic resignation by the editor. Here’s Emanuel:

About the paper: I read it when it first came out, and thought that some of their findings were significant and important. Basically, it presented evidence that feedbacks inferred from short-period and/or local climate change observations might not be relevant to long-period global change. I suppose I thought that rather obvious, but not everyone agrees. The one statement in the paper, to the effect that climate models might be overestimating positive feedback, struck me as unsubstantiated, but the authors themselves phrased it as speculative.

But the interesting and unusual thing about this is that that what pundits said about the paper, and indeed what Spencer said about it in press releases, etc., in my view had very little to do with the paper itself. I have seldom seen such a degree of disconnect between the substance of a paper and what has been said about it.

Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate and NASA has posted a thorough and useful dissection of the situation, “Resignations, retractions and the process of science,” that comes to what I see as the right conclusion:

I think (rightly) that people feel that the best way to deal with these papers is within the literature itself, and in this case it is happening this week in GRL (Dessler, 2011) [the Dessler paper discussed above], and in Remote Sensing in a few months. That’s the way it should be, and neither resignations nor retractions are likely to become more dominant – despite the amount of popcorn being passed around.

There’s more useful context and analysis from Keith Kloor, who notes the role played by the Drudge Report in amping up the story (blogging at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media), Mike Lemonick, Judith Curry and many others.

As always happens after such episodes, the one clear finding is that clouds remain a complicating component in efforts to project warming from the building greenhouse effect.

Joni Mitchell’s classic, with a bit of mangling, sums things up well:


They’ve looked at clouds from all sides now, as feedback and forcing, and still somehow, it’s clouds’ illusions most often recalled. More work is needed to know clouds at all.

8:52 p.m. | Postscript |
There’s more coverage of the Spencer-Braswell paper at Knight Science Journalism Tracker and the blogs of Roger Pielke, Sr. and William M. Briggs. Roy Spencer has posted a piece titled “More Thoughts on the War Being Waged Against Us.”

Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science (N.Y. Times)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 15, 2005

Once it was the left who wanted to redefine science.

In the early 1990’s, writers like the Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel and the French philosopher Bruno Latour proclaimed “the end of objectivity.” The laws of science were constructed rather than discovered, some academics said; science was just another way of looking at the world, a servant of corporate and military interests. Everybody had a claim on truth.

The right defended the traditional notion of science back then. Now it is the right that is trying to change it.

On Tuesday, fueled by the popular opposition to the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Kansas State Board of Education stepped into this fraught philosophical territory. In the course of revising the state’s science standards to include criticism of evolution, the board promulgated a new definition of science itself.

The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: “natural explanations.” But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.

The old definition reads in part, “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” The new one calls science “a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Adrian Melott, a physics professor at the University of Kansas who has long been fighting Darwin’s opponents, said, “The only reason to take out ‘natural explanations’ is if you want to open the door to supernatural explanations.”

Gerald Holton, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said removing those two words and the framework they set means “anything goes.”

The authors of these changes say that presuming the laws of science can explain all natural phenomena promotes materialism, secular humanism, atheism and leads to the idea that life is accidental. Indeed, they say in material online at kansasscience2005.com, it may even be unconstitutional to promulgate that attitude in a classroom because it is not ideologically “neutral.”

But many scientists say that characterization is an overstatement of the claims of science. The scientist’s job description, said Steven Weinberg, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the University of Texas, is to search for natural explanations, just as a mechanic looks for mechanical reasons why a car won’t run.

“This doesn’t mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is,” Dr. Weinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God’s will.”

The opposition to evolution, of course, is as old as the theory itself. “This is a very long story,” said Dr. Holton, who attributed its recent prominence to politics and the drive by many religious conservatives to tar science with the brush of materialism.

How long the Kansas changes will last is anyone’s guess. The state board tried to abolish the teaching of evolution and the Big Bang in schools six years ago, only to reverse course in 2001.

As it happened, the Kansas vote last week came on the same day that voters in Dover, Pa., ousted the local school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design.

As Dr. Weinberg noted, scientists and philosophers have been trying to define science, mostly unsuccessfully, for centuries.

When pressed for a definition of what they do, many scientists eventually fall back on the notion of falsifiability propounded by the philosopher Karl Popper. A scientific statement, he said, is one that can be proved wrong, like “the sun always rises in the east” or “light in a vacuum travels 186,000 miles a second.” By Popper’s rules, a law of science can never be proved; it can only be used to make a prediction that can be tested, with the possibility of being proved wrong.

But the rules get fuzzy in practice. For example, what is the role of intuition in analyzing a foggy set of data points? James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Toronto, said in an e-mail message: “It’s the widespread belief that so-called scientific method is a clear, well-understood thing. Not so.” It is learned by doing, he added, and for that good examples and teachers are needed.

One thing scientists agree on, though, is that the requirement of testability excludes supernatural explanations. The supernatural, by definition, does not have to follow any rules or regularities, so it cannot be tested. “The only claim regularly made by the pro-science side is that supernatural explanations are empty,” Dr. Brown said.

The redefinition by the Kansas board will have nothing to do with how science is performed, in Kansas or anywhere else. But Dr. Holton said that if more states changed their standards, it could complicate the lives of science teachers and students around the nation.

He added that Galileo – who started it all, and paid the price – had “a wonderful way” of separating the supernatural from the natural. There are two equally worthy ways to understand the divine, Galileo said. “One was reverent contemplation of the Bible, God’s word,” Dr. Holton said. “The other was through scientific contemplation of the world, which is his creation.

“That is the view that I hope the Kansas school board would have adopted.”

Flânerie bipolar (FSP)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

A melancolia, da excentricidade romântica à patologia farmacêutica

Folha de S.Paulo, Ilustríssima
São Paulo, Domingo, 04 de Setembro de 2011
Por MARIA RITA KEHL

Descrita até a modernidade como um fenômeno da cultura, sinal de excentricidade e reclusão, a melancolia perdeu, com o advento da psicanálise, o caráter criativo. No século 21, se converte em patologia “bipolar”. Publicação de clássico do século 17 e filme de Lars von Trier trazem o melancólico de volta à cena.

O PLANETA MELANCHOLIA não é o Sol negro do poema de Nerval. É uma Lua incansável, cuja órbita desgovernada a aproxima da Terra indefesa até provocar uma colisão devastadora.

O filme de Lars von Trier mistura ficção científica com parábola moral, sofisticada e um tanto ingênua, como convém ao gênero. A destruição do mundo pela melancolia é precedida de um longo comentário sobre a perda de sentido da vida, pelo menos entre os habitantes da sociedade que Trier critica desde “Dançando no Escuro” (2000) e cujo imaginário o cineasta dinamarquês, confiante em seu método paranoico-crítico, conhece pelo cinema sem jamais ter pisado lá: os EUA.

Ao longo do filme, Trier semeia indicações de sua familiaridade com a história da melancolia no Ocidente. O cineasta, que se fez “persona non grata” em Cannes com provocações descabidas em defesa de Hitler, mostrou compreender a posição do melancólico como a de um sujeito em desacordo com o que se considera o Bem, no mundo em que vive. Em “Melancholia”, esta é a posição de Justine (Kirsten Dunst), prestes a se casar com um rapaz tão obsequioso em contentá-la que presenteia a noiva com a foto das macieiras em cuja sombra ela deverá ser feliz.

Feliz? A perspectiva do futuro congelado numa imagem perpétua congela também o desejo de Justine, que se desajusta de seu papel e estraga a festa caríssima organizada pela irmã, cheia de rituais destinados a produzir os efeitos de “happiness” exigidos dos filhos da sociedade da abundância.

SINTOMA SOCIAL Se não tivesse o mérito de desvendar a estupidez da fé contemporânea nos “efeitos de felicidade” como medida de todas as coisas, o filme de Trier já terá valido por reabilitar a figura da melancolia como indicador do sintoma social.

Por mais de dois milênios, as oscilações da sensibilidade melancólica indagaram a cultura ocidental a respeito da fronteira que separa o louco e o gênio. Desde a Antiguidade clássica, o melancólico, incapaz de corresponder à “demanda do Outro”, denunciava o que não ia bem, no laço social.

A crise que leva Justine a arrebentar seu compromisso amoroso, sua festa de casamento e seu emprego numa única noite é conduzida com precisão didática pelo diretor. Uma observação cruel da mãe (representação perfeita da mãe do melancólico freudiano), seguida da indiferença do pai, deflagra em Justine uma verdadeira crise de fé. De repente, a noiva se exclui da cena na qual deveria ser a principal protagonista. Não acredita mais. Despenca da rede imaginária que sustenta o que se costuma chamar de realidade, ficção coletiva capaz de dotar a vida de significado e valor.

Justine, incapaz de olhar o mundo através do véu de fantasia que conforta aos outros, “os tais sãos” (como no verso de Pessoa), enxerga o que a cena encobre. Ela não teme a chegada de Melancholia porque nunca foi capaz de se iludir sobre a finitude de tudo o que existe. Justine “vê coisas”. Árida vida a de quem vê demais porque não sabe fantasiar.

EXCEÇÃO Desde a Antiguidade o melancólico foi entendido, no Ocidente, como aquele que ocupa um lugar de exceção na cultura. O pathos melancólico foi explicado por Hipócrates e Galeno com base na teoria dos quatro humores que regulam o funcionamento do corpo e da alma. As oscilações da bile negra fariam do melancólico um ser inconstante, a um só tempo doentio e genial, impelido a criar para aplacar as oscilações de seu temperamento.

No cerne de sua reflexão “O Homem de Gênio e a Melancolia” (O Problema XXX), Aristóteles já discernira uma questão ética a respeito dos excessos emocionais do melancólico e uma questão estética sobre o gênio criador. Daí o incômodo papel que lhe coube: questionar os significantes que sustentam o imaginário de sua época.

SÉCULO 19 A tradição inaugurada por Aristóteles termina com Baudelaire já no século 19 -o último dos românticos, o primeiro dos modernos, segundo outro melancólico genial, Walter Benjamin. Para suportar os altos e baixos de seu temperamento e dar algum destino à sua excentricidade, alguns melancólicos dedicaram-se a tentar compreender seu mal.

O classicismo inglês produziu o mais completo compêndio sobre a melancolia de que se tem conhecimento, obra da vida inteira do bibliotecário de Oxford Robert Burton (1577-1640).

Sua “A Anatomia da Melancolia”, publicada em 1621 e reeditada várias vezes nas décadas seguintes, é um compêndio de mais de 1.400 páginas contendo tudo o que se podia saber sobre a “doença” de seu autor. A editora da Universidade Federal do Paraná acaba de lançar no Brasil o primeiro volume de “A Anatomia da Melancolia” [trad. Guilherme Gontijo Flores, 265 págs., preço não definido].

É pena que o primeiro volume se limite ao longo introito do autor a seus leitores. Esperamos que em breve a Editora UFPR publique uma seleção dos capítulos do livro, que inicia com as causas da melancolia -“Delírio, frenesi, loucura” […] “Solidão e ócio” […] “A força da imaginação”…- segue com a descrição dos paliativos para aliviar o sofrimento (“alegria, boa companhia, belos objetos…”) para ao final abordar a melancolia amorosa e a melancolia religiosa.

O autor assinou a obra como Demócrito Júnior, a afirmar sua identificação com o filósofo que, segundo a descrição de Hipócrates, afastou-se do convívio com os homens e, diante da vacuidade do mundo, costumava rir de tudo. O riso do melancólico é expressão do escárnio ante as ilusões alheias.

A empreitada de Burton só foi possível em uma época em que a melancolia era entendida não apenas como uma doença, mas como um fenômeno da cultura. O texto seminal de Aristóteles já continha uma reflexão sobre a capacidade criativa do melancólico, atribuída à instabilidade que o impele a expandir sua alma em todas as direções do universo.

FREUD Tal processo de desidentificação encontra-se também no diagnóstico freudiano, ao qual falta, entretanto, a contrapartida da mimesis. Solto da rede imaginária que o enlaça a si mesmo e ao mundo, o melancólico contemporâneo só conta de encarar o Real com a aridez do simbólico.

Algo se passou, na modernidade, para que a inconsistência imaginária do melancólico deixasse de estimulá-lo a reinventar as representações do mundo e ficasse à mercê da Coisa. A receita preparada para Justine tem gosto de cinzas; fios de lã invisíveis impedem suas pernas de andar. Diante desse horror, ela prefere a colisão com Melancholia.

A melancolia deixou de ser entendida como um desajuste referido às normas da vida pública quando Freud arrebatou o significante de seu sentido tradicional a fim de trazer para o campo da psicanálise o diagnóstico psiquiátrico da então chamada psicose maníaco-depressiva -que hoje a medicina retomou sob a designação de transtorno bipolar.

Freud não privatizou a melancolia por acaso: a própria psicanálise deve sua existência ao surgimento do sujeito neurótico gerado nas tramas da família burguesa, fechada sobre si mesma e fundada em compromissos de amor. A psicanálise freudiana é contemporânea ao acabamento da forma subjetiva do indivíduo e à privatização das tarefas de socialização das crianças.

Vem daí que o melancólico freudiano não se pareça em nada com seus colegas pré-modernos: o valente guerreiro exposto à vergonha diante de seus pares (Ajax), o anacoreta em crise de fé (santo Antônio), o pensador renascentista ocupado em restaurar a ordem de um mundo em constante transformação (como na gravura de Dürer). Nem faz lembrar, na aurora modernidade, o “flâneur” a recolher restos de um mundo em ruínas pelas ruas de uma grande cidade (Baudelaire) de modo a compor um monumento poético para fazer face à barbárie.

O melancólico freudiano é o bebê repudiado pela mãe, pobre eu transformado em dejeto sobre o qual caiu a sombra de um objeto mau. O que se perdeu na transição efetuada pela psicanálise foi o valor criativo que se atribuía ao melancólico, da Antiguidade ao romantismo. Perdeu-se o valor do polo maníaco do que hoje a medicina chama de transtorno bipolar.

Onde o melancólico pré-moderno, em seus momentos de euforia, era dado a expansões da imaginação poética, hoje a mania leva os pacientes “bipolares” a torrar dinheiro no cartão de crédito. O consumo é o ato que expressa os atuais clientes da psicofarmacologia, apartados da potência criadora que sua inadaptação ao mundo poderia lhes conferir.

DEPRESSÃO Já não existem melancólicos como os de antigamente? Os neurocientistas que o digam. A psiquiatria e a indústria farmacêutica já escolheram seu substituto no século 21: no lugar do significante melancolia, instala-se a depressão como grande sintoma do mal-estar na civilização do terceiro milênio. Quanto mais se sofistica a oferta de antidepressivos, mais a depressão se anuncia no horizonte como expressão privilegiada do mal-estar, a ameaçar sociedades que se dedicam a ignorar o saber que ela contém.

Tal produção ativa de ignorância a respeito do sentido da melancolia está no centro da parábola de Lars von Trier. John, cunhado de Justine, afirma sua fé no mundo das mercadorias. Abastece a casa com comida, combustível, geradores de energia. Confia na informação científica divulgada pela internet. Verifica no telescópio a aproximação do planeta ameaçador.

Sua defesa é tão frágil que, diante do inevitável, suicida-se com uma overdose das pílulas da esposa. Claire, por sua vez, tem grande fé na encenação da vida. O fracasso do casamento espetacular da irmã não a impede de planejar outro pequeno ritual, na bela varanda da casa, com música e vinho, para esperar a chegada de Melancholia. Excelente final para um melodrama hollywoodiano, que Justine descarta com desprezo.

Justine não tem ilusões a respeito do fim. Mesmo assim, para proteger o sobrinho do horror final, mostra-se capaz de criar a mais onipotente das fantasias. Constrói com ele uma frágil tenda “mágica” sob a qual se abrigam para esperar a explosão de luz trazida pela colisão com Melancholia.

O triângulo formado por três galhos presos na ponta não chega a criar uma ilusão: são como traços de uma escrita, como um significante a demarcar, “in extremis”, um território humano em face do Real.

Climate Cycles Are Driving Wars: When El Nino Warmth Hits, Tropical Conflicts Double (Science Daily)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2011) — In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors.

El Nino drought cycles heavily affecting some 90 countries (red) appear to be helping drive modern civil wars. (Credit: Courtesy Hsiang et al./Nature)

The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

“The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale,” said Solomon M. Hsiang, the study’s lead author, a graduate of the Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in sustainable development. “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’ This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now.”

The cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean. This affects weather patterns across much of Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, and the Americas, where half the world’s people live. During the cool, or La Niña, phase, rain may be relatively plentiful in tropical areas; during the warmer El Niño, land temperatures rise, and rainfall declines in most affected places. Interacting with other factors including wind and temperature cycles over the other oceans, El Niño can vary dramatically in power and length. At its most intense, it brings scorching heat and multi-year droughts. (In higher latitudes, effects weaken, disappear or reverse; La Niña conditions earlier this year helped dry the U.S. Southwest and parts of east Africa.)

The scientists tracked ENSO from 1950 to 2004 and correlated it with onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which each caused more than 1,000 battle-related deaths. For nations whose weather is controlled by ENSO, they found that during La Niña, the chance of civil war breaking out was about 3 percent; during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. Countries not affected by the cycle remained at 2 percent no matter what. Overall, the team calculated that El Niño may have played a role in 21 percent of civil wars worldwide — and nearly 30 percent in those countries affected by El Niño.

Coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the study does not show that weather alone starts wars. “No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall,” he said. “It is not the only factor–you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things.” Cane, a climate modeler, was among the first to elucidate the mechanisms of El Niño, showing in the 1980s that its larger swings can be predicted — knowledge now used by organizations around the world to plan agriculture and relief services.

The authors say they do not know exactly why climate feeds conflict. “But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Hsiang. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a living, he said. Kyle C. Meng, a sustainable-development Ph.D. candidate and the study’s other author, pointed out that social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise, but he said that whether that applies to whole societies is only speculative.

Bad weather does appear to tip poorer countries into chaos more easily; rich Australia, for instance, is controlled by ENSO, but has never seen a civil war. On the other side, Hsiang said at least two countries “jump out of the data.” In 1982, a powerful El Niño struck impoverished highland Peru, destroying crops; that year, simmering guerrilla attacks by the revolutionary Shining Path movement turned into a full-scale 20-year civil war that still sputters today. Separately, forces in southern Sudan were already facing off with the domineering north, when intense warfare broke out in the El Niño year of 1963. The insurrection abated, but flared again in 1976, another El Niño year. Then, 1983 saw a major El Niño–and the cataclysmic outbreak of more than 20 years of fighting that killed 2 million people, arguably the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. It culminated only this summer, when South Sudan became a separate nation; fighting continues in border areas. Hsiang said some other countries where festering conflicts have tended to blow up during El Niños include El Salvador, the Philippines and Uganda (1972); Angola, Haiti and Myanmar (1991); and Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia and Rwanda (1997).

The idea that environment fuels violence has gained currency in the past decade, with popular books by authors like Jared Diamond, Brian Fagan and Mike Davis. Academic studies have drawn links between droughts and social collapses, including the end of the Persian Gulf’s Akkadian empire (the world’s first superpower), 6,000 years ago; the AD 800-900 fall of Mexico’s Maya civilization; centuries-long cycles of warfare within Chinese dynasties; and recent insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, tree-ring specialists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a 1,000-year atlas of El Niño-related droughts; data from this pinpoints droughts coinciding with the downfall of the Angkor civilization of Cambodia around AD 1400, and the later dissolution of kingdoms in China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand.

Some scientists and historians remain unconvinced of connections between climate and violence. “The study fails to improve on our understanding of the causes of armed conflicts, as it makes no attempt to explain the reported association between ENSO cycles and conflict risk,” said Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway who studies the issue. “Correlation without explanation can only lead to speculation.” Another expert, economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, said the authors gave “very convincing evidence” of a connection. But, he said, the question of how overall climate change might play out remains. “People may respond differently to short-run shocks than they do to longer-run changes in average temperature and precipitation,” he said. He called the study “a useful and illuminating basis for future work.”

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Journal Reference:
Solomon M. Hsiang, Kyle C. Meng, Mark A. Cane. Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate. Nature, 2011; 476 (7361): 438 DOI: 10.1038/nature10311

O partido anticiência (JC, O Globo)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

JC e-mail 4333, de 30 de Agosto de 2011.

Artigo de Paul Krugman publicado no O Globo de hoje (30).

John Huntsman Jr., ex-governador de Utah e embaixador na China, não é um forte pré-candidato à indicação do Partido Republicano para concorrer à Presidência. E isto é muito ruim porque o desejo de Huntsman é dizer o indizível sobre o partido – especialmente que ele está se tornando o “partido anticiência”. Isto é algo enormemente importante. E deveria nos aterrorizar.

Para entender o que Huntsman defende, considere declarações recentes dos dois mais fortes pretendentes à indicação republicana: Rick Perry e Mitt Romney.

Perry, governador do Texas, fez manchetes recentemente ao fazer pouco da evolução humana como uma “simples teoria”, que tem “algumas lacunas” – uma observação que soaria como novidade para a vasta maioria dos biólogos. Mas o que mais chamou a atenção foi o que ele disse sobre mudança climática: “Penso que há um número substancial de cientistas que manipulou dados para obter dólares para seus projetos. E penso que estamos vendo, quase toda semana, ou todo dia, cientistas questionando a ideia original de que o aquecimento global provocado pelo homem é a causa da mudança climática.” É uma declaração extraordinária – ou talvez o adjetivo correto seja “vil”.

A segunda parte da declaração de Perry é falsa: o consenso científico sobre a interferência humana no aquecimento global – que inclui 97% a 98% dos pesquisadores de campo, segundo a Academia Nacional de Ciências – está se tornando mais forte à medida que aumentam as evidências sobre a mudança do clima.

De fato, se você acompanha a ciência climática sabe que o principal aspecto nos últimos anos tem sido a preocupação crescente de que as projeções sobre o futuro do clima estejam subestimando o provável aumento da temperatura. Advertências de que poderemos enfrentar mudanças cimáticas capazes de ameaçar a civilização no fim do século, antes consideradas estranhas, partem agora dos principais grupos de pesquisa.

Mas não se preocupe, sugere Perry; os cientistas estão apenas atrás de dinheiro, “manipulando dados” para criar uma falsa ameaça. Em seu livro “Fed Up”, ele despreza a ciência do clima como “uma bagunça falsa e artificial que está se desmanchando”.

Eu poderia dizer que Perry está tirando isso de uma teoria conspiratória verdadeiramente louca, que afirma que milhares de cientistas de todo o mundo estão levando dinheiro, sem que nenhum deseje quebrar o código de silêncio. Poderia apontar que múltiplas investigações em acusações de falsidade intelectual da parte dos cientistas climáticos acabaram com a absolvição dos pesquisadores de todas as acusações. Mas não se preocupe: Perry e os que pensam como ele sabem em que desejam acreditar e sua resposta a qualquer um que os contradiga é iniciar uma caça às bruxas.

Então de que modo Romney, o outro forte concorrente à indicação republicana, respondeu ao desafio de Perry? Correndo dele. No passado, Romney, ex-governador de Massachusetts, endossou fortemente a noção de que a mudança climática provocada pelo homem é uma real preocupação. Mas, na semana passada, ele suavizou isso e disse pensar que o mundo está realmente esquentando, mas “eu não conheço isto” e “não sei se isso é causado principalmente pelo homem”. Que coragem moral!

É claro, sabemos o que está motivando a súbita falta de convicção de Romney. Segundo o Public Policy Polling, somente 21% dos eleitores republicanos de Iowa acreditam no Aquecimento Global (e somente 35% creem na evolução). Dentro do Partido Republicano, ignorância deliberada tornou-se um teste decisivo para os candidatos, no qual Romney está determinado a passar a qualquer custo.

Então, é agora altamente provável que o candidato presidencial de um de nossos dois grandes partidos políticos será ou um homem que acredita no que quer acreditar, ou um homem que finge acreditar em qualquer coisa que ele ache que a base do partido quer que ele acredite.

E o caráter crescentemente anti-intelectual da direita, tanto dentro do Partido Republicano como fora dele, se estende além da questão da mudança climática.

Ultimamente, por exemplo, a seção editorial do “Wall Street Journal” passou da antiga preferência pelas ideias econômicas de “charlatães e maníacos” — pela definição famosa de um dos principais conselheiros econômicos do ex-presidente George W. Bush – para um descrédito geral do pensamento árduo sobre questões econômicas. Não prestem atenção a “teorias fantasiosas” que conflitam com o “senso comum”, diz-nos o “Journal”. Por que deveria alguém imaginar que se precisa mais do que estômago para analisar coisas como crises financeiras e recessões?

Agora, não se sabe quem ganhará a eleição presidencial do próximo ano. Mas há chances de que, mais dia menos dia, a maior nação do mundo será dirigida por um partido que é agressivamente anticiência, mesmo anticonhecimento. E, numa era de grandes desafios – ambiental, econômico e outros – é uma terrível perspectiva.

Paul Krugman é colunista do “New York Times”.

A vida na estação meteorológica (OESP)

Uncategorized, ,

JC e-mail 4321, de 12 de Agosto de 2011.

Saiba como funcionam os dois principais pontos de medição de umidade, vento e temperatura na capital: o Mirante de Santana e o tradicional IAG.

Os trabalhos nas duas principais estações meteorológicas da cidade de São Paulo não param em fins de semana, feriados, dias chuvosos, frios ou secos. Até porque é desses lugares que vem parte das informações que o paulistano usa todos os dias para decidir se pega o casaco ou o guarda-chuva. Tanto na estação do Mirante de Santana, a oficial da cidade, quanto na do Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG) da USP – a mais antiga em atividade na capital, desde 1933 -, os trabalhos estão a cargo de gente apaixonada pelo que faz.

Evocado diariamente nos boletins de clima, o Mirante de Santana dá nome à estação meteorológica usada como parâmetro para os índices históricos da cidade, com o recordes de baixa umidade e temperatura e comparações de índices de chuvas. São três medições diárias, às 9h, 15h e 21h. “Os horários são definidos por padrões internacionais. Atarefa é coletar no abrigo temperaturas, umidade relativa do ar, evaporação e demais variáveis”, explica Marise Basilio Amadei, de 52 anos, que há 33 trabalha como observadora no Mirante.

Após a coleta, tudo é registrado em planilhas, codificado e, por telefone, repassado ao Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (Inmet), órgão ligado ao Ministério da Agricultura. A estação está no mesmo lugar desde 1945. E é fácil chegar lá: o Mirante fica na Praça Vaz Guaçu, no Jardim São Paulo, zona norte da cidade. É uma praça gramada, de onde é possível ter boa vista da capital. No meio da grama, um cercadinho protege a estação meteorológica, onde estão equipamentos convencionais como termômetros, higrômetro – que mede a umidade relativa do ar -, além de pluviógrafo, que registra a chuva, e anemômetro, que mede o vento. Há também uma estação eletrônica, que envia os dados automaticamente -mas não é levada em conta nos números históricos.

No alto da praça, uma construção serve de escritório aos três observadores que atualmente se revezam na estação. “Já houve época sem que fiquei sozinha e fazia todos os horários. Mas sei que faço um serviço de utilidade pública, sempre vesti a camisa”, diz Marise. Já disseram que ela tem um “caso” com o Mirante, tal seu comprometimento – a brincadeira ganha força quando, no meio de uma festa, por exemplo, ela precisa sair para fazer medições.

Pudera. Marise nasceu no Mirante. A casa do pai, o aposentado Mario Basilio Silva, de 83 anos, fica na praça. Quando ele se mudou para o local, em1962, não havia nem asfalto, mas a vista compensava. Aos 18 anos, Marise recebeu em casa o convite de trabalho de uma senhora que fazia a observação na estação. Começou e não parou mais. Eat é o marido acabou envolvido no trabalho – o administrador Luiz Carlos Amadei, de 56 anos, tornou-se companhia diária nas medições. De tanto acompanhar, acabou virando observador no mirante, em 1999, onde permaneceu até 2008.

IAG. Do outro lado da cidade, na Água Funda, zona sul, a estação meteorológica do IAG também tem seu diletomorador. O professor Frederico Luiz Funari, de 74 anos, confere as medições e o funcionamento dos equipamentos de segunda a segunda -mesmo já estando aposentado há 3. Ele mora desde 1971 em uma casa dentro do Parque Ciência e Tecnologia da USP (Cientec), onde fica a estação.

“Já fiquei 40 dias de licença compilando dados meteorológicos. Eu mando bala, não paro no serviço.” Nas férias é a mesma coisa, garante ele, que começou como observador, foi pesquisador, lecionou na universidade e, mesmo aposentado, ingressou no pós-doutorado no ano passado. A estação pertence à USP desde 1947 e o parque foi criado só em 2001. Em 2002, as aulas do IAG foram transferidas para a Cidade Universitária, mas algumas disciplinas ainda são dadas na Água Funda. Quase nada na estação do IAG precisa de energia e os equipamentos pouco mudaram em termos de tecnologia nos últimos tempos. No IAG, entretanto, há medições de temperatura do solo. Além disso, as observações são anotadas de hora em hora, entre 7h e meia-noite. Cinco técnicos se revezam no trabalho.

“Assim, temos mais confiabilidade e precisão. E, se houver problema em algum aparelho, perdemos um intervalo pequeno”, explica a meteorologista Samantha Martins, desde 2009 no local. O professor Mario Festa, desde 1969 por ali e responsável pela estação, explica que o equipamento remonta os primórdios das observações meteorológicas no Estado. Funcionou na Avenida Paulista a partir de 1927 e depois, em 1932, foi para o local onde permanece ainda hoje, vizinho do zoológico. As medições começaram em 1933. Dos mais de dez prédios que compõem o complexo, pelo menos cinco datam dos anos 1940, em estilo art déco. Dois têm cúpula de aço típica de observadores. “A estação é uma instituição dentro do IAG”, explica Festa. “Fazemos
trabalhos de observação, mas também ensino, pesquisa e extensão.”

Museu. Festa reúne equipamentos meteorológicos históricos, além de documentos e móveis da antiga Comissão Geographica e Geológica, de 1886. Ele trabalha há quatro anos na elaboração do projeto do Museu da Meteorologia na estação. “Temos muita coisa e queremos resgatar essa história.” Neste mês, o local vai ganhar um planetário em um dos prédios históricos, que foi reformado.
(O Estado de São Paulo)

Climate Change Sparks Battles in Classroom (Science)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

Science 5 August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 688-689 DOI: 10.1126/science.333.6043.688

SCIENCE EDUCATION
Sara Reardon

The U.S. political debate over climate change is seeping into K-12 science classrooms, and teachers are feeling the heat.

Growth potential. Students gather acorns for a middle school science project. CREDIT: JEFF CASALE/AP IMAGES

This Spring, when the science department of Los Alamitos High School in southern California proposed an advanced class in environmental science, members of the elected school board for the small district in Orange County thought the course was a great idea. Then they read the syllabus and saw a mention of climate change.

The topic, the board decided, is a “controversial issue.” Its next step was a new policy requiring teachers to explain to the school board how they are handling such topics in class in a “balanced” fashion. And the new environmental science course, which starts this fall, will be the first affected.

Local teachers immediately deplored the board’s actions. “It’s very difficult when we, as science teachers, are just trying to present scientific facts,” says Kathryn Currie, head of the high school’s science department. And science educators around the country say such attacks are becoming all too familiar. They see climate science now joining evolution as an inviting target for those who accuse “liberal” teachers of forcing their “beliefs” upon a captive audience of impressionable children.

“Evolution is still the big one, but climate change is catching up,” says Roberta Johnson, executive director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) in Boulder, Colorado. An informal survey this spring of 800 NESTA members (see word cloud) found that climate change was second only to evolution in triggering protests from parents and school administrators. One teacher reported being told by school administrators not to teach climate change after a parent threatened to come to class and make a scene. Online message boards for science teachers tell similar tales.

Hot topic. Teachers can bone up on climate science in workshops and classes. CREDIT: SOURCE: ROBERTA KILLEEN JOHNSON, NATIONAL EARTH SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

Unlike those biology teachers who have borne the brunt of the century-long assault on evolution, however, today’s earth science teachers won’t have the protection of the First Amendment’s language about religion if climate change deniers decide to take their cause to court. But the teachers feel their arguments are equally compelling: Science courses should reflect the best scientific knowledge of the day, and offering opposing views amounts to teaching poor science.

Most science teachers don’t relish having to engage this latest threat to their profession. “They want to teach the science,” says Susan Buhr, education director at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder. “They’re struggling to be on top of the science in the first place.”

CIRES and NESTA offer workshops and online resources for educators seeking more information on climate change. But teachers also say that they resent devoting any of their precious classroom time to a discussion of an alleged “controversy.” And they believe that politics has no place in a science classroom.

Even so, some are being dragged against their will into a conflict they fear could turn ugly. “There seems to be a lynch-mob hate against any teacher trying to teach climate change,” says Andrew Milbauer, an environmental sciences teacher at Conserve School, a private boarding school in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin.

Milbauer felt that wrath after receiving an invitation to participate in a public debate about climate change. The event, put on last year by Tea Party activists, proposed to pit high school teachers against professors and climate change deniers David Legates and Willie Soon in front of students from 200 high schools. Organizers said the format was designed “to expand knowledge of the global warming debate to the youth of our state.” When Milbauer and his colleagues declined to participate, organizer Kim Simac complained to the local papers about their “suspicious” behavior. Milbauer corresponded for a time on the organization’s blog until Simac wrote that Milbauer, “in his role as science teacher, is passing on to our youth this monstrous hoax as being the gospel truth.”

Milbauer regards the episode as an unfortunate but telling example of misguided science and uses it in class discussions. “I explain this is the trap the [other side] is building,” he says.

Some teachers would disagree, however. In comments in the NESTA survey, a handful of teachers called climate change “just a theory like evolution” or said they firmly believed that opposing views should be presented with equal weight.

Sowing confusion

Given the ongoing and noisy national debate over climate change, it’s not surprising that those disagreements are seeping into K-12 schools, too. Science educators are scrambling to figure out how to deliver top-quality instruction without being sucked into the maelstrom. The issue is acute in Louisiana, which enacted a law in 2008 that lists climate change along with evolution as “controversial” subjects that teachers and students alike can challenge in the classroom without fear of reprisal.

A hotter climate? The phrase “climate change” came up often when NESTA asked its teacher members what classroom concepts trigger outside concerns. SOURCE: ROBERTA KILLEEN JOHNSON, NATIONAL EARTH SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

When a state law suggests that established scientific theories are controversial, says Ian Binns, a science education researcher at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, “it tells our students and teachers that there are problems that there aren’t.” That ambiguity, he and others fear, can distort a student’s understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry. “Science is not about providing balance to every viewpoint that’s out there,” says Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, that has begun to monitor controversies regarding climate change in addition to battles over evolution. To Rosenau, staging debates over science in schools or on the floors of Congress “is madness.”

In Los Alamitos, the course will follow the curriculum laid out by the nonprofit College Board for its Advanced Placement (AP) course in environmental science, which presents the scientific evidence for climate change. This curriculum, which prepares students to take an end-of-year test for college credit, is what irritated Jeffrey Barke, a Los Alamitos school board member and physician who led the push to revise the district’s policies after learning about the course. Barke has spoken publicly about his concern that “liberal faculty” members would use the course to present global warming as “dogma.”

Science department head Currie criticizes the board’s new policy and feels that it may confuse students when they answer multiple-choice questions relating to climate change on the final AP exam. “When a kid comes across that on the AP test, what are they supposed to bubble?” she asks. “The fact, or [Barke’s] belief that it’s not a fact?” The school board, however, has said that the new policy is simply a way to prevent political bias from entering the classroom.

Currie and her colleagues are spending the summer working up a lesson plan for the new course, but she isn’t sure what will satisfy the board. “I’m going to fight for scientific facts being presented in the classroom,” she says. “I want to keep politics out.”

Arming for battle

The extent to which politics is affecting geoscience courses around the country is hard to measure, Rosenau says: “Just like with evolution, it’s difficult to know what a given teacher in a given classroom is teaching.”

To improve the quality of that instruction, both CIRES and NESTA are trying to put up-to-date, data-rich climate science materials into the hands of teachers and students to supplement textbooks. They’re not the only ones; even government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spurred by language in the 2007 America COMPETES Act about their role in improving science education, have beefed up their teacher training programs.

But it’s not enough to say that “you just need to teach people more,” Rosenau says. Teachers also have to learn how to defend themselves against parents or administrators wearing “ideological blinders,” he says. CIRES has analyzed the strategies that teachers used in the creationism debates and repurposed them for discussions about climate change. That includes citing state science standards—30 states include climate science in their description of what should be taught—and enlisting the support of administrators before tackling the subject in class.

Those who have taught geoscience or environmental science may feel more confident than colleagues who teach general physical science in managing a classroom discussion. Parents and students trying to poke holes in what they are being taught often “can’t articulate what the opposing view even is,” says Karen Lionberger, director of curriculum and content development for AP Environmental Science in Duluth, Georgia.

Of course, some attacks on climate change come from well-heeled sources. In 2009, the Heartland Institute, which has received significant funding from Exxon-Mobil, expanded its audience beyond teachers and students with a pamphlet, called The Skeptic’s Handbook, mailed to the presidents of the country’s 14,000 public school boards.

Heartland Institute senior fellow James Taylor, who sent out the pamphlet, says the underlying message is that educators need “to understand that there is quite a bit that remains to be learned” about climate change. Taylor also applauds the actions of the Los Alamitos school board, saying that “if the science is unsettled on any topic, of course you should present all points of view.”

The AP course itself doesn’t take a position on the issue, Lionberger says. The handful of multiple-choice questions on the final exam relating to climate change are not “slanted in any way,” she says, and none explicitly asks whether climate change is occurring. But because AP courses can be taken for college credit, she says, “we’re going to follow what colleges and universities are doing” by teaching students about the factors that contribute to climate change and its effects on the planet. Although researchers are always adding to that pool of knowledge, she says “for now, we will fall on the side of consensus science.”

Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space (New Scientist)

Uncategorized, , , ,

08 August 2011 by Amanda Gefter
Magazine issue 2824

A theory of reality beyond Einstein’s universe is taking shape – and a mysterious cosmic signal could soon fill in the blanks

Does some deeper level of reality lurk beneath? (Image: Luke Brookes)

IT WASN’T so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity – space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows,” declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski. “Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

But did Einstein’s revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn’t think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.

If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What’s more, it could set them on the path towards their heart’s desire: a “theory of everything” that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.

Momentum space isn’t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don’t ever observe space or time – instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time.

The same is true of physics experiments. Inside particle smashers, physicists measure the energy and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and momentum of the debris that comes flying out. Likewise, telescopes measure the energy and momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. “If you go by what we observe, we don’t live in space-time,” Smolin says. “We live in momentum space.”

And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space – its three dimensions condensed to one – on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space. In this case energy is on one axis and momentum – which, like space, has three components – is on the other (see diagram).

Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality’s true arena, in which the dramas of the cosmos are played out.

Smolin and his colleagues aren’t the first to wonder whether that is the full story. As far back as 1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

Born’s idea that space-time and momentum space should be interchangeable – a theory now known as “Born reciprocity” – had a remarkable consequence: if space-time can be curved by the masses of stars and galaxies, as Einstein’s theory showed, then it should be possible to curve momentum space too.

At the time it was not clear what kind of physical entity might curve momentum space, and the mathematics necessary to make such an idea work hadn’t even been invented. So Born never fulfilled his dream of putting space-time and momentum space on an equal footing.

That is where Smolin and his colleagues enter the story. Together with Laurent Freidel, also at the Perimeter Institute, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and Giovanni Amelino-Camelia at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Smolin has been investigating the effects of a curvature of momentum space.

The quartet took the standard mathematical rules for translating between momentum space and space-time and applied them to a curved momentum space. What they discovered is shocking: observers living in a curved momentum space will no longer agree on measurements made in a unified space-time. That goes entirely against the grain of Einstein’s relativity. He had shown that while space and time were relative, space-time was the same for everyone. For observers in a curved momentum space, however, even space-time is relative (see diagram).

This mismatch between one observer’s space-time measurements and another’s grows with distance or over time, which means that while space-time in your immediate vicinity will always be sharply defined, objects and events in the far distance become fuzzier. “The further away you are and the more energy is involved, the larger the event seems to spread out in space-time,” says Smolin.

For instance, if you are 10 billion light years from a supernova and the energy of its light is about 10 gigaelectronvolts, then your measurement of its location in space-time would differ from a local observer’s by a light second. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to 300,000 kilometres. Neither of you would be wrong – it’s just that locations in space-time are relative, a phenomenon the researchers have dubbed “relative locality”.

Relative locality would deal a huge blow to our picture of reality. If space-time is no longer an invariant backdrop of the universe on which all observers can agree, in what sense can it be considered the true fabric of reality?

That is a question still to be wrestled with, but relative locality has its benefits, too. For one thing, it could shed light on a stubborn puzzle known as the black hole information-loss paradox. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes radiate away their mass, eventually evaporating and disappearing altogether. That posed an intriguing question: what happens to all the stuff that fell into the black hole in the first place?

Relativity prevents anything that falls into a black hole from escaping, because it would have to travel faster than light to do so – a cosmic speed limit that is strictly enforced. But quantum mechanics enforces its own strict law: things, or more precisely the information that they contain, cannot simply vanish from reality. Black hole evaporation put physicists between a rock and a hard place.

According to Smolin, relative locality saves the day. Let’s say you were patient enough to wait around while a black hole evaporated, a process that could take billions of years. Once it had vanished, you could ask what happened to, say, an elephant that once succumbed to its gravitational grip. But as you look back to the time at which you thought the elephant had fallen in, you would find that locations in space-time had grown so fuzzy and uncertain that there would be no way to tell whether the elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly missed it. The information-loss paradox dissolves.

Big questions still remain. For instance, how can we know if momentum space is really curved? To find the answer, the team has proposed several experiments.

One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma-ray bursts. If momentum space is curved in a particular way that mathematicians refer to as “non-metric”, then a high-energy photon in the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than a lower-energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being emitted at the same time.

Just that phenomenon has already been seen, starting with some unusual observations made by a telescope in the Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The effect has since been confirmed by NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which has been collecting light from cosmic explosions since it launched in 2008. “The Fermi data show that it is an undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between arrival time and energy – high-energy photons arrive later than low-energy photons,” says Amelino-Camelia.

Still, he is not popping the champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to “unknown properties of the explosions themselves”, as Amelino-Camelia puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts idealise the explosions as instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While there is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts occur in such a way that they emit lower-energy photons a second or two before higher-energy photons, which would account for the observed delays.

In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from properties of relative locality, we need a large sample of gamma-ray bursts taking place at various known distances (arxiv.org/abs/1103.5626). If the delay is a property of the explosion, its length will not depend on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it is a sign of relative locality, it will. Amelino-Camelia and the rest of Smolin’s team are now anxiously awaiting more data from Fermi.

The questions don’t end there, however. Even if Fermi’s observations confirm that momentum space is curved, they still won’t tell us what is doing the curving. In general relativity, it is momentum and energy in the form of mass that warp space-time. In a world in which momentum space is fundamental, could space and time somehow be responsible for curving momentum space?

Work by Shahn Majid, a mathematical physicist at Queen Mary University of London, might hold some clues. In the 1990s, he showed that curved momentum space is equivalent to what’s known as a noncommutative space-time. In familiar space-time, coordinates commute – that is, if we want to reach the point with coordinates (x,y), it doesn’t matter whether we take xsteps to the right and then y steps forward, or if we travel y steps forward followed by x steps to the right. But mathematicians can construct space-times in which this order no longer holds, leaving space-time with an inherent fuzziness.

In a sense, such fuzziness is exactly what you might expect once quantum effects take hold. What makes quantum mechanics different from ordinary mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: when you fix a particle’s momentum – by measuring it, for example – then its position becomes completely uncertain, and vice versa. The order in which you measure position and momentum determines their values; in other words, these properties do not commute. This, Majid says, implies that curved momentum space is just quantum space-time in another guise.

What’s more, Majid suspects that this relationship between curvature and quantum uncertainty works two ways: the curvature of space-time – a manifestation of gravity in Einstein’s relativity – implies that momentum space is also quantum. Smolin and colleagues’ model does not yet include gravity, but once it does, Majid says, observers will not agree on measurements in momentum space either. So if both space-time and momentum space are relative, where does objective reality lie? What is the true fabric of reality?

Smolin’s hunch is that we will find ourselves in a place where space-time and momentum space meet: an eight-dimensional phase space that represents all possible values of position, time, energy and momentum. In relativity, what one observer views as space, another views as time and vice versa, because ultimately they are two sides of a single coin – a unified space-time. Likewise, in Smolin’s picture of quantum gravity, what one observer sees as space-time another sees as momentum space, and the two are unified in a higher-dimensional phase space that is absolute and invariant to all observers. With relativity bumped up another level, it will be goodbye to both space-time and momentum space, and hello phase space.

“It has been obvious for a long time that the separation between space-time and energy-momentum is misleading when dealing with quantum gravity,” says physicist João Magueijo of Imperial College London. In ordinary physics, it is easy enough to treat space-time and momentum space as separate things, he explains, “but quantum gravity may require their complete entanglement”. Once we figure out how the puzzle pieces of space-time and momentum space fit together, Born’s dream will finally be realised and the true scaffolding of reality will be revealed.

Bibliography

  1. The principle of relative locality by Giovanni Amelino-Camelia and others (arxiv.org/abs/1101.0931)

Amanda Gefter is a consultant for New Scientist based in Boston

Devagar e sempre (FSP)

Uncategorized, , , ,

JC e-mail 4317, de 08 de Agosto de 2011.

Movimento ‘Slow Science’ defende o direito de cientistas fugirem da corrida pelo grande número de publicações e priorizarem qualidade da pesquisa.

Um movimento que começou na Alemanha está ganhando, aos poucos, os corredores acadêmicos. A causa é nobre: mais tempo para os cientistas fazerem pesquisa. Quem encabeça a ideia é a organização “Slow Science” (http://slow-science.org), criada por cientistas gabaritados da Alemanha.

Aderir ao movimento significa não se render à produção desenfreada de artigos em revistas especializadas, que conta muitos pontos nos sistemas de avaliação de produção científica. Hoje, quem publica em revistas científicas muito lidas e mencionadas por outros cientistas consegue mais recursos para pesquisa.

Por isso, os cientistas acabam centrando seu trabalho nos resultados (publicações). “Somos uma guerrilha de neurocientistas que luta para que o modelo midiático de produção científica seja revisto”, disse à Folha o neurocientista Jonas Obleser, do Instituto Max Planck, um dos criadores do “Slow Science”. O grupo chegou a criar um manifesto, no final do ano passado, em que proclama: “Somos cientistas, não blogamos, não tuitamos, temos nosso tempo”.

“A ciência lenta sempre existiu ao longo de séculos. Agora, precisa de proteção.” O documento está na porta da geladeira do laboratório do médico brasileiro Rachid Karam, que faz pós-doutorado na Universidade da Califórnia em San Diego.

“O manifesto faz sentido. Temos de verificar os dados antes de tirarmos conclusões precipitadas”, analisa. “A ‘Slow Science’ nos daria tempo para analisar uma hipótese em profundidade e tirar conclusões acertadas.”

De acordo com Obleser, o número de cientistas simpatizantes do movimento está crescendo, “especialmente na América Latina”. “Mas não é preciso se filiar formalmente. Basta imprimir o manifesto e montar guarda no seu departamento”, diz.

O Slow Science é um braço do já conhecido “Slow Food”, que defende uma alimentação mais lenta e saudável, tanto no preparo quanto no consumo dos alimentos. Na ciência, a ideia é pregar a pesquisa que não se paute só pelo resultado rápido.

Ceticismo – “É improvável que o ritmo de fazer pesquisa seja diminuído por meio de um acordo mundial em que cada cientista assume o compromisso de desacelerar seus trabalhos”, diz o especialista em cientometria (medição da produtividade científica) Rogério Meneghini. Ele é coordenador científico do Projeto SciELO, que reúne publicações da América Latina com acesso livre.

Para Meneghini, o “Slow Science” é um movimento “anêmico” num contexto em que a rapidez do fluxo de ideias e informações acelera as descobertas. “Parece uma reivindicação de um velho movimento com uma roupagem nova. É certamente a sensação de quem está perdendo as pernas para correr”, conclui.
(Folha de São Paulo)

The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind (N.Y. Times)

Uncategorized, , ,

By JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Published: August 5, 2011

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne introduces Bayes’s theorem in her new book with a remark by John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

Illustration by Shannon May

THE THEORY THAT WOULD NOT DIE. How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy. By Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, 320 pp. Yale University Press. $27.50.

Bayes’s theorem, named after the 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, addresses this selfsame essential task: How should we modify our beliefs in the light of additional information? Do we cling to old assumptions long after they’ve become untenable, or abandon them too readily at the first whisper of doubt? Bayesian reasoning promises to bring our views gradually into line with reality and so has become an invaluable tool for scientists of all sorts and, indeed, for anyone who wants, putting it grandiloquently, to sync up with the universe. If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be.

At its core, Bayes’s theorem depends upon an ingenious turnabout: If you want to assess the strength of your hypothesis given the evidence, you must also assess the strength of the evidence given your hypothesis. In the face of uncertainty, a Bayesian asks three questions: How confident am I in the truth of my initial belief? On the assumption that my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? And whether or not my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? One proto-Bayesian, David Hume, underlined the importance of considering evidentiary probability properly when he questioned the authority of religious hearsay: one shouldn’t trust the supposed evidence for a miracle, he argued, unless it would be even more miraculous if the report were untrue.

The theorem has a long and surprisingly convoluted history, and McGrayne chronicles it in detail. It was Bayes’s friend Richard Price, an amateur mathematician, who developed Bayes’s ideas and probably deserves the glory that would have resulted from a Bayes-Price theorem. After Price, however, Bayes’s theorem lapsed into obscurity until the illustrious French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace extended and applied it in clever, nontrivial ways in the early 19th century. Thereafter it went in and out of fashion, was applied in one field after another only to be later condemned for being vague, subjective or unscientific, and became a bone of contention between rival camps of mathematicians before enjoying a revival in recent years.

The theorem itself can be stated simply. Beginning with a provisional hypothesis about the world (there are, of course, no other kinds), we assign to it an initial probability called the prior probability or simply the prior. After actively collecting or happening upon some potentially relevant evidence, we use Bayes’s theorem to recalculate the probability of the hypothesis in light of the new evidence. This revised probability is called the posterior probability or simply the posterior. Specifically Bayes’s theorem states (trumpets sound here) that the posterior probability of a hypothesis is equal to the product of (a) the prior probability of the hypothesis and (b) the conditional probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, divided by (c) the probability of the new evidence.

Consider a concrete example. Assume that you’re presented with three coins, two of them fair and the other a counterfeit that always lands heads. If you randomly pick one of the three coins, the probability that it’s the counterfeit is 1 in 3. This is the prior probability of the hypothesis that the coin is counterfeit. Now after picking the coin, you flip it three times and observe that it lands heads each time. Seeing this new evidence that your chosen coin has landed heads three times in a row, you want to know the revised posterior probability that it is the counterfeit. The answer to this question, found using Bayes’s theorem (calculation mercifully omitted), is 4 in 5. You thus revise your probability estimate of the coin’s being counterfeit upward from 1 in 3 to 4 in 5.

A serious problem arises, however, when you apply Bayes’s theorem to real life: it’s often unclear what initial probability to assign to a hypothesis. Our intuitions are embedded in countless narratives and arguments, and so new evidence can be filtered and factored into the Bayes probability revision machine in many idiosyncratic and incommensurable ways. The question is how to assign prior probabilities and evaluate evidence in situations much more complicated than the tossing of coins, situations like global warming or autism. In the latter case, for example, some might have assigned a high prior probability to the hypothesis that the thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. But then came new evidence — studies showing that permanent removal of the compound from these vaccines did not lead to a decline in autism. The conditional probability of this evidence given the thimerosal hypothesis is tiny at best and thus a convincing reason to drastically lower the posterior probability of the hypothesis. Of course, people wedded to their priors can always try to rescue them from the evidence by introducing all sorts of dodges. Witness die-hard birthers and truthers, for example.

McGrayne devotes much of her book to Bayes’s theorem’s many remarkable contributions to history: she discusses how it was used to search for nuclear weapons, devise actuarial tables, demonstrate that a document seemingly incriminating Colonel Dreyfus was most likely a forgery, improve low-resolution computer images, judge the authorship of the disputed Federalist papers and determine the false positive rate of mammograms. She also tells the story of Alan Turing and others whose pivotal crypto-analytic work unscrambling German codes may have helped shorten World War II.

Statistics is an imperialist discipline that can be applied to almost any area of science or life, and this litany of applications is intended to be the unifying thread that sews the book into a coherent whole. It does so, but at the cost of giving it a list-like, formulaic feel. More successful are McGrayne’s vivifying sketches of the statisticians who devoted themselves to Bayesian polemics and counterpolemics. As McGrayne amply shows, orthodox Bayesians have long been opposed, sometimes vehemently, by so-called frequentists, who have objected to their tolerance for subjectivity. The nub of the differences between them is that for Bayesians the prior can be a subjective expression of the degree of belief in a hypothesis, even one about a unique event or one that has as yet never occurred. For frequentists the prior must have a more objective foundation; ideally that is the relative frequency of events in repeatable, well-defined experiments. McGrayne’s statisticians exhibit many differences, and she cites the quip that you can nevertheless always tell them apart by their posteriors, a good word on which to end.

John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of several books, including “Innumeracy” and, most recently, “Irreligion.”

Stuff white people like: denying climate change (Grist)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , ,

CLIMATE SKEPTICS

BY DAVID ROBERTS
2 AUG 2011 4:11 PM

There’s a study running soon in the journalGlobal Environmental Change called “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” It analyzes poll and survey data from the last 10 years and finds that … are you sitting down? … conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people.

OK, that’s no surprise to anyone who’s been awake over the last decade. But the paper goes beyond that to put forward some theories aboutwhy conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept climate change. The explanation is some mix of the following, all of which overlap in various ways:

    • First there’s the “white male effect” — generally speaking, white males are less concerned with a variety of risks. This probably has to do with the fact that they are less exposed to risk than other demographics, what with running things and all.
    • Then, as Chris Mooney notes, there’s the “social dominance orientation” of conservatives, who see social life as following the law of the jungle. One’s choice is to dominate or be dominated; that is the natural order of things. Such folk are leery of climate change solutions premised on fairness or egalitarianism.
  • Then there are the well-understood “system-justifying tendencies” of conservatives. The authors explain that conservatives …

    … strongly display tendencies to justify and defend the current social and economic system. Conservatives dislike change and uncertainty and attempt to simplify complexity. Further, conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.

  • Finally, there’s “identity-protective cognition,” a notion borrowed from Dan Kahan at Yale. (See this PDF.) Here’s how Kahan and colleagues sum it up:

    We propose that variance in risk perceptions — across persons generally, and across race and gender in particular — reflects a form of motivated cognition through which people seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested cultural norms.

    “Motivated cognition” refers to reasoning done in service of justifying an already held belief or goal. It helps explain why the CWM who know the most about climate science are the most likely to reject it; they learn about it in order to reject it. See Chris Mooney’s great piece on that. Point being: when facts (or the implications of those facts) threaten people’s social identities, they tend to dismiss the facts rather than the identity.

To all these reasons, I’d add “epistemic closure,” the extraordinary way that the modern right has constructed a self-contained, hermetically sealed media environment in which conservatives can be protected from ever encountering a contrary view. It’s an accelerant to all the tendencies described above.

Anyway, as you can see, the rejection of climate science among CWM is basically overdetermined. Climate change threatens their values, their privileges, and their worldview. They are reacting as one would expect them to react.

TV 10 weather forecasts worse than a crap shoot (City Pulse)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

Media Muckraker
November 12, 2002

The surprise 3.1-inch snowfall last Monday, Dec. 2, resulted in more than 100 Lansing area accidents. Little did I know, as I chugged my car on U.S. 127 that morning, that over 20 of those accidents were taking place at the I-96 exchange just up around the bend. Fortunately, before I arrived at the ice-slick, my instincts got the better of me and I averted a possible accident by turning off I-127 early.

No thanks to the weathermen of WILX-10 (who share double duty as the forecasters for the Lansing State Journal). They had forecast snow, but had never said how much, hinting at just an inch or so.

Then it happened again. On Tuesday, Rockcole, Provenzano and Drummond predicted a low temperature “near 10.” In fact the mercury fell to 18 degrees below zero, the day’s lowest temperature since 1869!

How could the weathermen be so wrong? I decided to do a little weather muckraking.

In Britain, earlier this year, Ben Magoo wondered about the accuracy of the BBC’s weather reporting after the sunny vacation day they predicted for him turned out soggy. “Is the super computer in the [BBC] office accurately modeling the world’s climate, or is it resting its brain and picking out sun and rain symbols at random? We will find the answer!” Magoo developed a computer program to automatically analyze their weather data at 10 sites, including York, the Tower of London and Cambridge. Here’s what he found at Cambridge:

Cambridge, England | Days Monitored: 126
Days Ahead
1
2
3
4
Accuracy
55%
50%
43%
35%

Incredibly, the chance of the next day’s forecast being right was just 55 percent. Note that Magoo ignored the same-day predictions, making “the assumption that predicting today’s weather is dead simple, so the BBC couldn’t possibly get this wrong.” Really now?

Turning to Lansing, I analyzed 14 days of WILX-LSJ forecasts between Nov. 24 and Dec. 7. I determined a forecast to be in error if at least one of the following occurred: 1) the predicted temperature was incorrect by 5 degrees or more (for either the high or low); 2) precipitation did not occur as predicted (e.g… they predicted snow, but there was none, or the converse), or 3) the precipitation prediction was off by 100% or more (e.g.,. they predicted 1 inch of snow, but it snowed 3 inches, a 200 percent difference).

Lansing, MI | Days Monitored: 14
Days Ahead
Same Day
1
2
3
4
Accuracy
50%
38%
50%
55%
20%

Remarkably, my analysis demonstrated that the WILX-LSJ forecasters were unable to predict the day’s weather – for the same day – a full seven of 14 days (50 percent)! The British chap had evidently presumed way too much. Distant predictions tended to be about 50/50, with fifth day a poor 20 percent.

You’d figure that predicting the weather a few hours hence would be a breeze. But they missed 3.1 inches of snow on Dec. 2 and were off by 28 degrees on Dec. 3. On Nov 29, the LSJ predicted that day’s weather would have a high in “the upper 30s,” which was significantly lower than the actual high of 46. And on Dec. 4, the LSJ predicted a low temp in the “low teens,” which was a far cry (for the freezing news carriers delivering the newspaper to your doorstep) from the actual low of 4 degrees below zero.

All tolled, of 60 days forecast, the accuracy rate was just 43 percent. Don’t believe it? Check it out for yourself, the evidence is in the library (the other TV weathermen do not have evidence so accessible). Lansing’s numbers are remarkably close to the Cambridge study, suggesting that this level of miscalculation might be consistent over the entire year.

One moral is to not rely on the forecasts to plan time off work.

At the very least, weathermen should humbly state the truth; there is a 50/50 chance that our forecasts will be wrong in at least one important area.Incompetence? Arrogance? It goes much deeper than that.

In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Jack comments on the weather thus, “Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax.” To which Gwendolen Fairfax replies, “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”

It’s true. Weather forecasts are less about the weather than about cementing social relations – telling you who has authority. While weather seems so bloody innocuous, in fact, culturally speaking, the weather forecast is a covert agent of social control.

It doesn’t matter to the mainstream media bosses that weathermen are wrong most of the time (if they even know it). What’s important is that weathermen exude an aura of certainty (precision numbers) while expressing an undercurrent of fear (of the possible storm). Just like the IRS, the traffic cop or your boss, no matter how wrong, he’s the person in charge – with certainty. There’s no way out. That’s one hidden message.

The good news is that they’re wrong!

Here’s what needs to be done. Lose the “Stormtracker” and hire a muckraker. Don’t circumvent serious issues like the amount of PCBs in the morning’s snowfall, or the amount of soot in a Lansing fog. And tell the viewers/readers where the historic danger spots are (like I-127& I-96) before the next snowstorm.

Here’s my forecast. Under the current corporate structure, they’ll never do it.

Alex Peter Zenger is the pen name for the Media Muckraker. It is inspired by the work of John Peter Zenger, one of the founding fighters for press freedom in the United States.

Let’s Take Back the Sky! (City Pulse)

Uncategorized, , , ,

by Brian McKenna
November 7, 2001

Saturday, Nov. 3, just hours before the planned confrontation with the enemy, our intelligence assessed its radar, consulted U.S. satellite imagery and identified the front. It would be a good day for bombing, “sunny with a high of 58 degrees.”

The U.S. war on Afghanistan?

No, Stormtracker 6’s weather prediction efforts for the Spartan/Wolverine football game, Michigan’s civil war.

Historically, weather forecasting came of age with the D-Day assault on Normandy Beach in 1944. A half-century later weather-work still retains its militant glow.

Consider the language. Channel 10’s “Sky Team” and “Stormtracker 6” punctuate their TV reports with alerts, watches, warnings, outbreaks, damage, hazards and threats. Like the Joint Chiefs, they monitor the scene with satellites, radar, chase vans, web cams and computerized maps. On occasion, they’ll interrupt our TV viewing with dire warnings of impending disaster, using the shrill three-note cry of the Emergency Broadcast System, originally intended for nuclear alerts. Channel 6’s WLNS will even e-mail you the warnings upon request.

The shift in terminology from the innocuous “weather report” to the ominous “Stormtracker 6” serves notice of a perennial threat.

There are rarely serious storm-related casualties in Lansing, yet Channels 6 and 10 have three full-time weathercasters apiece (yet not a single full-time environmental reporter).

What’s going on? According to several media critics, the latent function of the weather forecast is to reassure you that our boys (the “Sky Team”) are patrolling the heavens and carefully tracking any potential invaders. It’s 11 o’clock prayers, a psychological tonic. All is right with the world as you lay your head upon the pillow.

It’s no mistake that TV weather borrows the metaphorical ammunition of football and war. For, at its heart, U.S. culture is awash in fear and aggression. Has been for decades. And the “cultural cops,” be they Marines, Spartans or middle-aged weathermen with video map-clickers, are on guard, making us safe from “The Other.” Be they terrorists, a football rival or a storm.

Weather has become “the discourse of reactionary time,” says Alex Cockburn, social critic. Weather is supposed to be about our ability to “undergo or endure the action of the elements” in the open air. But weather reporters usually restrict analysis of those elements to the “natural” ones like H2O, lightning and tornadoes. Missing is coverage of human-made elements or compounds like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury and hundreds of toxic chemicals spewing from General Motors car assembly plants, the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s coal fired utility or our car exhausts. These airborne elements – totaling hundreds of thousands of tons per year — account for untold levels of Lansing-area disease from cancer, hypertension and asthma.

There is some positive political movement around the edges of weather reporting. The cultural pressure on weathermen to report allergy alerts, ozone action days and high ultraviolet radiation days has highlighted the fact that, like it or not, weathermen are influential educators about nature and the environment.

Ironically, some local weathermen yearn to be seen as environmentalists. Channel 6 meteorologists highlight their relationship with the Ebersole Environmental Center, where once a month they escort a class of Lansing’s public school students for a nature study. Their Web site even has several links to interesting “Science and Astronomy” sites. Sadly, these fact-filled portals into the ecological and astronomical worlds are marginal to the TV show, where a de-politicized rhetoric of temperatures, clouds and the obvious abound.

Let’s imagine that TV weatherfolk really covered “the elements” in all their ecological diversity. Let’s fantasize about weathermen who enlighten, not just put us to sleep. Here are two items that I would have reported on last week:

October 2001 was the fourth wettest on record. It rained 5.69 inches. That equates to 123.5 million gallons of raw sewage that overflowed into the Grand River last month, a record amount for October.

On Thursday, Nov. 1, an environmental group named PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) released the third report that was suppressed by the Ingham County Health Department (the others are on water and food). It found an asthma epidemic among African American youth and particularly high asthma rates in the 48915 area code. (See the report at: http://www.peer.org/michigan/Ingham_air.pdf)

I’d include stories or guest spots by naturewatch folk in every broadcast. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the red salamander had just come out of hibernation that day? Or that the full moon was rising on the “Give Peace a Chance” concert next Saturday night?

http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/archives/011107/health/index.html

Some People’s Climate Beliefs Shift With Weather (Columbia University)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

Study Shows Daily Malleability on a Long-Term Question

2011-04-06
ThermometerPhoto by domediart, Flickr

Social scientists are struggling with a perplexing earth-science question: as the power of evidence showing manmade global warming is rising, why do opinion polls suggest public belief in the findings is wavering? Part of the answer may be that some people are too easily swayed by the easiest, most irrational piece of evidence at hand: their own estimation of the day’s temperature.

In three separate studies, researchers affiliated with Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) surveyed about 1,200 people in the United States and Australia, and found that those who thought the current day was warmer than usual were more likely to believe in and feel concern about global warming than those who thought the day was unusually cold. A new paper describing the studies appears in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

“Global warming is so complex, it appears some people are ready to be persuaded by whether their own day is warmer or cooler than usual, rather than think about whether the entire world is becoming warmer or cooler,” said lead author Ye Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia Business School’s Center for Decision Sciences, which is aligned with CRED. “It is striking that society has spent so much money, time and effort educating people about this issue, yet people are still so easily influenced.”  The study says that “these results join a growing body of work show that irrelevant environmental information, such as the current weather, can affect judgments. … By way of analogy, when asked about the state of the national economy, someone might look at the amount of money in his or her wallet, a factor with only trivial relevance.”

Ongoing studies by other researchers have already provided strong evidence that opinions on climate and other issues can hinge on factors unrelated to scientific observations. Most pointedly, repeated polls have shown that voters identifying themselves as political liberals or Democrats are far more likely to believe in human-influenced climate change than those who identify themselves as conservatives or Republicans. Women believe more than men, and younger people more than older ones. Other, yet-to-be published studies at four other universities have looked at the effects of actual temperature—either the natural one outside, or within a room manipulated by researchers—and show that real-time thermometer readings can affect people’s beliefs as well. These other studies involve researchers at New York University, Temple University, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley.

In the current paper, respondents were fairly good at knowing if it was unusually hot or cold–perceptions correlated with reality three quarters of the time—and that the perception exerted a powerful control on their attitude. As expected, politics, gender and age all had the predicted influences: for instance, on the researchers’ 1-to-4 scale of belief in global warming, Democrats were 1.5 points higher than Republicans. On the whole though, after controlling for the other factors, the researchers found that perceived temperatures still had nearly two-thirds the power as political belief, and six times the power as gender, to push someone one way or the other a notch along the scale. (The coming NYU/Temple study suggests that those with no strong political beliefs and lower education are the most easily swayed.)

In one of the studies described in the paper, the researchers tried to test the earnestness of the responses by seeing how many of those getting paid $8 for the survey were willing to donate to a real-life charity, Clean Air-Cool Planet. The correlation was strong; those who said it was warmer donated an average of about $2; those who felt it was cooler gave an average of 48 cents.

The researchers say the study not only points to how individuals’ beliefs can change literally with the wind. Li says it is possible that weather may have influenced recent large-scale public opinion polls showing declining faith in climate science. Administered at different times, future ones might turn out differently, he said. These polls, he pointed out, include the national elections, which always take place in November, when things are getting chilly and thus may be empowering conservative forces at a time when climate has become a far more contentious issue than in the past. (Some politicians subsequently played up the heavy snows and cold of winter 2009-2010 as showing global warming was a hoax—even though scientists pointed out that such weather was probably controlled by short-term atmospheric mechanisms, and consistent with long-term warming.) “I’m not sure I’d say that people are manipulated by the weather. But for some percentage of people, it’s certainly pushing them around.” said Li.

The other authors are Eric J. Johnson, co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences; and Lisa Zaval, a Columbia graduate student in psychology.

Original link: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2794

The great difficulty with good hypotheses

Uncategorized, , ,

“There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information should shoot a hole in it, one hates to tear it down because it once was beautiful and whole.”

From The Log from the Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck.