The Mr Science Show

Ep 117: The Science of Superheroes - Mystique (X-men)

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:59:20 PDT

Ever wondered whether it is scientifically possible to become a superhero?

In a new series of podcasts, Dr Christopher Pettigrew (aka Dr Boob*) and I are going to tackle this question. Chris is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Biochemistry in University College Cork, and in these podcast episodes - which we will publish more than a few times a year - we will uncover whether it is possible now to possess the powers of superheroes, and if we can't, whether in the near future we could engineer ourselves to become superheroes.

The first superhero we are tackling is Mystique from X-Men. X-men get their powers from an "X gene" that normal humans do not possess, and Mystique is a shapeshifter who naturally looks blue. Actress Rebecca Romijn portrayed Mystique in the X-Men films - I know I clearly remember the blue body-paint...

Mystique has a number of powers including:

The ability to change skin colour;
The ability to shape-shift - that is, change form;
She can impersonate other voices;
She can rapidly grow her hair.

Within nature, chameleons are able to change their skin colour to match their environment. There are also technologies under current development, such as metamaterials, that can be used to make something look invisible. Through a combination of genetic manipulation to activate melanocytes (and possibly chromatophores), and the use of surface coatings, it is not unforeseeable that we could develop human chameleons. The difficulty here lies in whether we can make a skin colour change a conscious decision - how can you wire up the body such that skin colour responds your thoughts?

The challenge of being able to impersonate another person's voice should be easy enough to conquer in the near future through a combination of electronics and simple mimicry. It is also possible to foresee rapid hair growth - this could be accomplished by rapid protein synthesis, such as in spider webs.

The biggest difficulty comes with the shape-shifting - how can one change their 3D shape?

Tune in to the podcast here (or press play below) to discover what scientific techniques we came up with to tackle the problem of scientifically engineering Mystique:

A few extra notes to explain some of the random comments in the show:

Iva Davies is the front man of Australian band Icehouse;
Shane Warne, Greg Matthews and Graham Gooch are all cricketers who advertised the hair-loss company Advanced Hair;

Let us know your thoughts on how we could scientifically engineer Mystique. We rated this a 7.5 out of 10 possibly for the next 200 years - if someone really wanted to, notwithstanding the ethical concerns along the way.

Also let us know which superheroes you would be interested in us tackling.

* From here on in, Chris will be referred to as Dr Boob - this nickname stems from the fact that Chris's PhD and some of his post-doctoral work has been into the study of breast cancer - yes, someone who is actually changing the world!

Ep 116: Terence Tao and Prime Numbers

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:05:23 PDT

Terence Tao is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics, UCLA and one of Australia's most acclaimed mathematicians. Indeed, he is arguably the world's greatest living mathematician. In 2006, he was awarded a Fields Medal, which is the top prize a mathematician can win, and at 24 became the youngest ever full professor at UCLA.

I recently went to Tao's Clay–Mahler Lecturer at UNSW, which was a fascinating look at prime numbers. I managed to grab Terence for a quick chat. Listen to this podcast here:

Primes are integers that can only be divided by themselves and one. For example, the number 10 can be divided by 1, 2, 5 and 10 - whilst the number 11 can only be divided 1 and 11. The first few primes are:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53 ....

One of the interesting things about the primes is that there is no known formula yielding all of them - you can't simply plug a few numbers into a formula to generate a list of the primes. However, on a large scale, their distribution can be modelled. The primes behave as if they are distributed pseudorandomly - see the picture on the right. Each dot in this Ulam spiral represents a prime number - you start in the middle, and wind outwards like a spiral - each dot is a prime, whilst empty space is a non-prime. Whilst you can see various patterns, nothing is predictable.

The prime number theorem says that the probability of a given number n being prime is inversely proportional to its logarithm. Euclid proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers way back in 300BC - see Euclid's Theorem for more. The current largest known prime was discovered in 2008 by the distributed computing project Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search and has 12,978,189 digits:

2^43,112,609 − 1.

Primes are very important for public-key cryptography - that is, the way your credit card numbers are encrypted in online transactions. The cryptography makes use of the fact that is difficult to factorise large numbers into their prime factors, whilst it is comparatively easy to multiply two large primes together. No efficient integer factorisation algorithm is currently known - in 2005 a 193-digit number was factorised, but it took 5 months.

Terence Tao, along with Ben Green, proved that the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions - this is the Green-Tao theorem. What this means is that for any number k, there is an arithmetic progression of primes k long. An arithmetic progression is one in which the difference between two numbers in the progression is the same. For example, the series 2, 4, 6, 8, 10... is an arithmetic progression with common difference 2. Green and Tao proved that such sequences exist within the primes for any length of series you want. For example, the series 3, 7, 11 is a prime sequence of length 3 with common difference 4. The series 3, 5, 7 is length 3 with common difference 2. The current record is a series of 25 primes.

I have just finished reading the excellent book The Music of the Primes by British author Marcus du Sautoy - I highly recommend it. It details the story of the Riemann hypothesis which is considered by many to be the most important unresolved problem in mathematics. A solution to the Riemann hypothesis could make an immense contribution to our understanding of the distribution of prime numbers. You certainly don't need to be a maths geek to understand this book - it is a great historical tale. You can buy the book from Amazon by clicking on the cover on below.

I chatted to Terence briefly after his talk, but being the amateur journalist I am, my recorder ran out of batteries! Not to fear, I have added an interview Terence did with Australia radio station Triple J's current affair program Hack - this interview has been reproduced with the permission of the executive producer, best brother James West - it's nice to have a proper professional journo in the family! The interviewer is Kate O'Toole. Listen to this podcast here:

God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers - Paul Erdos

Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:39:04 PDT

October 15 is Blog Action Day 2009 and this year's topic is Climate Change. The idea is to raise awareness of the topic, so I thought I'd get in on the act - it is still October 15 in some parts of the world...

Climate Change is arguably our most pressing human concern. If you are interested in what it is, who’s responsible and why we should care, then an easy way to enter the debate is to have a listen to our 2007 Beer Drinking Scientists episode on the topic. Grab the mp3 here, or listen below:

We recorded this in 2007 over a beer or three, and so some of the more recent discoveries and insights are not included. In the Australian context, John Howard was the Prime Minister and we hadn't signed the Kyoto Protocol. The other Beer Drinking Scientist is the irrepressible Darren Osborne. We took a break from these podcasts when I went overseas and Darren started to breed, but we have plans for the future, stay tuned...

We have talked about climate change a number of times on this blog and on the podcast. To see all our climate change articles, check out the climate change tag. Interesting articles include:

How Iceland is tackling the problem,
The battle for an ice-free North Pole,
The use of biofuels,
What policies we should use to tackle climate change.

The importance of climate change to humans and to Earth can not be underestimated. Climate Change also featured in our top 10 science stories of 2006, 2007 and 2008. If you have any thoughts on the topic, feel free to share them or participate in Blog Action Day.

Name your 2009 Science Highlights, and win!

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:20:47 PDT

Somehow we are already near the end of 2009, and therefore it's time to start reflecting on the year that was. Each year we run a competition in which you, dear readers and listeners, can write in and let us know what science events turned you on throughout the year. If you are an Aussie, was it the news that Australian Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for medicine? Was it the ever-increasing scientific body of evidence behind human-induced climate change? Or was it perhaps the 2009 science dance contest?

Whatever it was, let us know, and you will go into the draw for an assortment of sciencey goodness. I have a number of science magazines and other scientific literature and paraphernalia to give away - just ask Dr Steven Farrell from Cork in Ireland, who won the 2008 competition - his prize included the 2008 Open Laboratory, the collection of the best science writing on blogs throughout 2008. This year's prize will be finalised soon (if you want to contribute something, let me know) but it's already shaping up to be a top prize!

The draw will be random and conducted in early 2010 when all the entries have been collated. Your votes will go into a blog post and podcast on the top 10 topics nominated - the podcast will include interviews will relevant experts.

To get you in the mood, check out the lists from 2006, 2007 and 2008, as well as my interview with ABC Science Online editor Darren Osborne on the year that was 2008 - and also if you fancy, my mathematical highlights of 2008.

Simply fill in the form below, or follow this link:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://mrscienceshow.wufoo.com/forms/q7x4a9/" title="What are your scientific highlights from 2009?" rel="nofollow"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Fill out my Wufoo form!&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

2009 Podcast Awards

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:21:07 PDT

The 2009 Podcast Awards are now open for nominations. If you would like to nominate The Mr Science Show in the science and technology section, then that would be lovely! Check out the rules - essentially, don't be dodgy or game the system. And make sure you vote in the other sections too. Get over to the Podcast Awards website to nominate - cheers!

Ep 115 (Enhanced): Dust storms in Sydney

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:58:38 PDT

The dust is finally starting to clear from Sydney, leaving a ruddy orange layer of muck all over the city. This podcast goes with our previous article Red Sydney, and as well as being a description of the science involved, is a video slide show of photos of the dust-storm. All the photos in this enhanced podcast come from flickr and are available to use under Creative Commons licences.

Watch the following youtube video, or download the wmv or mp4 versions - mp4 will play on your ipod, wmv is slightly higher quality:

The photos come from the following flickr users (click to see the original photo):

And after you've checked out the above podcast and photo links, have a look at this - this is a video of a couple driving into a dust storm in Broken Hill, NSW. Amazing!

Red Sydney

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:29:39 PDT

Waking this morning was a very eerie experience. Blood-red light peaked through the sides of my blinds, and given I was half asleep at the time, I thought the four horsemen of the apocalypse had come to Earth.

When I shook the haziness from my head and peaked outside, the view was astonishing. Not surprisingly, Twitter had loads of comments and on-the-fly photos, and the TV and radio news broadcasts were full of dust-storm stories.

Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia - indeed, central and eastern Australia are a major global source of atmospheric dust, and this particular storm, estimated to be 600 km long and dumping 75000 tonnes of dust into the Tasman Sea every hour, could be headed to the New Zealand ski-slopes (that'll teach you to beat us at rugby). Dust can travel a very long way in the atmosphere, with dust from Chinese storms found in the French Alps.

The storm has its origins in the Indian and Southern Oceans, where low pressure storms create severe cold fronts. Low pressure air sinks to the ground, forcing hotter, higher pressure air upwards. This can cause thunderstorms, and on Monday, winds of more than 100 km per hour formed in South Australia. As inland Australia is in drought, the winds picked up dust not fixed to the ground by vegetation. The dust likely came from the Lake Ayre Basin, according to ABC Science Online, and has caused the worst pollution ever seen in NSW.

The reddish colour of the sky is an interesting phenomenon. Normally during the day, the sky is blue. This is because of Rayleigh scattering. Shorter wavelength light from the Sun (blue) is scattered by the air in all directions to a greater degree than longer wavelength light (red). The amount of scattering is related to the fourth power of the wavelength - blue light with a wavelength of ~400 nm is scattered about 10 times more efficiently than red light (~ 700 nm). The scattering in this case is mainly due to oxygen and nitrogen molecules smaller than the wavelength of the light.

Due to the scattering of blue, when you look directly at the Sun, you see more of the longer wavelength light, which is why it appears yellow. The rest of the sky is lit by the diffuse scattered blue light. At dawn and dusk, the Sun's light has to travel through more of the atmosphere to get to your eyes as it comes in at a tangent to the Earth (go on, draw it...). This means even more blue is scattered and a larger piece of the sky looks a even deeper red.

Dust particles are quite large compared with oxygen and nitrogen, and so do not scatter light in the same way. Some dust absorbs light more effectively at blue wavelengths than at red wavelengths, meaning that light shone through it will appear more red. Dust also scatters sunlight, but as the particles are large, this scattering is independent of wavelength. This means that the dust particles act something like tiny mirrors, diffusing the light throughout the sky. This is why the red colour was so intense at dawn - as the light that hit the dust was already red due to Rayleigh scattering, it was then scattered throughout the whole sky. Normally at sunrise, the red colour is confined to only a small part of the sky. The presence of dust (and pollution for that matter) can cause beautiful effects. As the sun climbed higher in the sky today, the red colour softened. Eventually the sky just looked a dirty orange - the colour of the iron-rich dirt.

Here are some of my favourite pics from today - the above zombie was found through @ozdj. I received the following Godzilla pic in an email and found it on flickr, but I don't know who the originator is. It is brilliant. None of these images have been manipulated - yes, it was back to the 60s with sepia Sydney today!

From MarchingAnts on flickr:

From TomHide on flickr:

Also see the Red Dust Collection and The Red Sydney Project. More dust storms are predicted for this week, so stay tuned.

A sorry saga - the crumbling cookie

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:42:03 PDT

This week saw the publication of a story that "more than half of all Britons have been injured by biscuits."

The story received plenty of coverage in the British national press, and if true, is surely one of the UK’s most pressing Occupational Health and Safety concerns.

Australian’s are culturally similar to Britons, so I asked around the office and found that no one around here had ever been injured by a biscuit. So I thought back to my 18 months in the UK and to my recollection I was never injured by a cookie, and I certainly don’t remember a horribly outrageous and dangerous biscuit-eating culture.

Is biscuit-eating really an extreme sport in the UK?

It's quite hard to know where to start with this article, but it is almost the perfect example of "how not to report science in the newspaper."

We’ll start with the actual reporting before dealing with the science behind the story. The early claim that "more than half of all Britons have been injured by biscuits" is diluted a little in the following paragraphs, in which it becomes "an estimated 25 million adults have been injured while eating during a tea or coffee." Injured while eating during a coffee break covers a lot more than being injured simply by eating a biscuit. But a quick look at the original "scientific report" (see later) mentions nothing about 25 million adults in the UK (roughly half the population) being injured in such a way, nor is it possible that anything in the report could be extrapolated to such a number. The company that conducted this research, Mindlab International, states that their study says nothing about the proportion of people being injured in this way and that they have no idea where the number came from.

The article then goes on to say that "at least 500" people have been hospitalised because of their injuries. This is a slight difference to 25 million, and indeed 500 out of 64 million people in the UK is such a small number that it is hardly worth reporting. You can see where the number 500 comes from by looking at The Home Accident Surveillance System 2002 report.

The next thing to do is look at what constitutes a biscuit-related injury. My favourite hidden biscuit dangers, according to The Telegraph, are:

flying fragments,
people poking themselves in the eye with a biscuit,
falling off a chair reaching for the tin,
"one man even ended up stuck in wet concrete after wading in to pick up a stray biscuit,"
choking on crumbs,
being bitten by a pet or 'other wild animal' whilst trying to get their biscuit.

Heavy hitting stuff!

The article then goes on to rate the dangerous biscuits, using the Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation Index (BITE Index, get it??). Of course there is no explanation of how these numbers were obtained and what exactly they mean:

Custard Cream 5.64
Cookie 4.34
Choc Biscuit Bar (eg: Rocky) 4.12
Wafer 3.74
Rich Tea 3.45
etc. etc.

It’s at this point you start to wonder why any of this was reported at all. Well, the study was commissioned by Rocky, a type of biscuit made by Fox’s. You’ll note how they are the only example of a biscuit given in the above list – all the rest are generic biscuit types.

What we have here is a perfect example of a company trying to get some publicity by commissioning a pseudo-science study and putting out a press release. Because "science" and "maths" are used in the article, an impression of credibility is given to the story. This is precisely why people say things like "you can prove anything with statistics" and think anyone with an interest in science is either mad, a boffin or has no connection to the real world. It’s ludicrous that this kind of story can make it into the UK national press, and it’s dangerous because it not only gives people the wrong impression of science, but some people might actually believe it! And whatever happened to fact-checking journalists? Are we so short on news that this gets reported as such?

Ben Goldacre has a nice article on how companies use "news" like this to get around advertising rules. It makes me sad that advertising, which at least most of the time we know is advertising, has rules against misinformation but that news articles don’t.

Now to take a look at the actual science behind the story, and it’s about as good as the reporting. Needless to say that the survey data used to create the mathematical BITE formula is not publicly available, but this is no surprise. It should not surprise anyone that the report is not peer reviewed or published anywhere credible, but let’s not set our hopes too high here. You can find the report on the Rocky site. Let’s also ignore the bit that says the research is independent, and skip to the fact that:

"The study, supervised by Mindlab International Ltd scientists, involved ten students aged 16 -18 to investigate the physical properties of biscuits."

So this report was done by high-school students?

Here is the final BITE equation:

Pretty isn’t it? Looks complicated, it must be correct. One of the weird things about this report is that every equation looks to have been scanned in from somewhere else – not that this influences how we analyse it, but it doesn’t look very professional.

There are two parts to this equation: biscuit dependent and consumer dependent factors. Biscuit dependent means the factors that are derived from biscuit behaviour, and consumer dependent means the factors found through survey data – these are not given or explained.

Six possible injuries from biscuit-eating have been named:

Eye/ear/trachea irritation caused by crumbs.
Scalding – due to splashes caused when a piece of dunked biscuit falls into hot liquid.
Back Injury, hernia, muscular problems from picking up dropped biscuit pieces.
TMJ (temporomandiular joint) syndrome to jaw by frequent biscuit chewing.
Workplace injury due to being distracted by the sound of biscuits being broken.
Dental Damage due to biting on a hard biscuit or something within the biscuit, such as a nut or piece of hard chocolate.

Have a read over them again… TMJ (temporomandiular joint) syndrome to jaw by frequent biscuit chewing....

Going on a bear hunt does an excellent review of the whole sorry saga, including a look at the role of Mindlab International – the blog lists its "favourite plausible fudge factors, false assumptions and downright crazinesses" - check them out for a good laugh.

These are my favourite two:

A breaking biscuit has a noise level of between 5 - 15dB. This is apparently loud enough to cause injury through distraction in the workplace. A typical whisper is 20dB - rustling leaves are around 10dB. I would estimate that my generally quiet workplace operates with about 35dB of background noise, and if I have my ipod on, then that's probably about 60dB (louder when I turn on angry music and read reports like this one).
The report models a crumb getting in your ear as equally likely as getting in your eye. This seems a bit like the famous Seinfeld spitting incident – the crumb would have to rise upwards from where the biscuit is broken, then curve back around into the ear. That’s one magic ~~luggie~~ crumb.

I love their statement:

For obvious safety reasons, laboratory work did not involve trials in which vulnerable body parts were repeatedly impacted by biscuit crumbs!

Careful of those deadly crumbs!

Private funding of scientific research is very important – plenty of good, independent science is done this way. But this particular example is just ridiculous! Mindlab is part of the Sussex University Innovation Centre and so presumably should be above this kind of nonsense. They say:

Our unique research methodology combines hard neuroscience and sophisticated mathematical analysis to provide reliable and timely answers of immediate practical benefit.

Given that the survey data was given to them by the company that commissioned them to produce the research, that rather spurious analysis was done by high school students, and that there is absolutely no practical importance in this work, I think they pretty much failed their own mission statement.

This kind of thing is fine for generating an interactive tool for a biscuit website – indeed it is fun – but let’s not dress this up as science or news.

Ep 114: The Science of Coffee

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:09:16 PDT

Following on the heels of our Science of Cocktails podcast, we have an episode for the morning after – The Science of Coffee.

At the recent Science of Coffee event at Lushbucket Cafe as part of The Ultimo Science Festival, I spoke to Rafael Bartkowski from Campos Coffee about the scientific method of making coffee, the most important steps in the process, how to decaffeinate coffee and where in the world you can find the best cup.

Listen to this podcast here:

To go with the podcast, here is a quick description of how Campos Coffee decaffeinates their coffee.

Swiss Water Decaffeination
Campos uses the Swiss Water Process. This method does not use organic solvents, and so is claimed to be better for you. To perform the decaffeination, the first step is to soak green coffee beans in hot water. This releases the caffeine, as well as other soluble compounds within the beans. These other compounds contribute strongly to the taste of coffee – let’s call them “flavour compounds” - and so these particular beans must be discarded. The water solution now contains caffeine and flavour compounds. Caffeine is then stripped from this solution by means of activated carbon filters (see below for a brief description of this process).

With the caffeine now stripped from the water solution, we are left with a solution of flavour compounds – this solution becomes “flavour-charged” (the company’s description, not mine!) A new batch of green beans is then soaked in the flavour-charged solution, releasing caffeine but less of its flavour-compounds, as the solution is becoming saturated. This solution is again decaffeinated by a carbon filter, and new beans are added. This process is repeated until the flavour-charged solution is saturated with flavour-compounds, but crucially not caffeine as the caffeine is stripped from the solution after each soaking. After a number of repeats, no flavour-compounds are released by the green beans - only caffeine is released. This leaves us with (almost) decaffeinated beans that can be roasted to make coffee. It is impossible to completely decaffeinate the coffee.

Given that the world’s only Swiss Water decaffeination facility is based in Canada and so therefore the beans must be transported large distances – especially when bringing them to Australia – the process does not seem very energy efficient. Presumably, a lot of water is also used. There are various online debates as to whether this is the most sustainable process for coffee decaffeination.

Read here and here for more on decaffeination.

Carbon Filtering
Carbon filtering uses activated carbon, which is a form of carbon (usually derived from charcoal) that is extremely porous. This gives it a very large surface area, which can adsorb contaminants in the water. Note that adsorption is different to absorption. Adsorption is the bonding of material onto the surface of another material by intermolecular forces – that is, it gets stuck on the surface. Absorption is the incorporation of one substance into another – that is, one substance penetrates the interior of the other.

One gram of activated carbon has a surface area around 500 m², and this incredible surface area means that a large amount of contaminant material can accumulate on the surface. Carbon filters are good at pulling organic compounds like caffeine out of water. As the flavour-compounds are also organic, the carbon filters used here need to be caffeine specific. To do this, the carbon filter is coated in a caffeine-specific solvent layer. According to patent 4324840, this coating could consist of petroleum oils, triglycerides, fatty acids, fatty alcohols and other water-immiscible materials. This is dissolved up in hexane, which is then piped through the carbon-filter. The hexane, being volatile, then evaporates away leaving the filter coated in a caffeine-specific adsorption layer. When you think about it, it's hardly chemical free!

Ep 113: The science of cocktails

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:22:26 PDT

Manuel Terron is a celebrity chef with the Lifestyle Channel program Mixing with the Best - he is described as a Mixologist, writer and bar consultant, and has been working in the bar/cocktail industry for 17 years. He's also described as sultry and I know my better half certainly had an eye on him....

Manuel ran an event called The Science of Cocktails during the Ultimo Science Festival. It was a fantastic event, and apart from learning how to make margaritas and martinis, Manuel took us on the cocktail making journey, explaining why making cocktails has far more to do with the scientific method than it does a random artistic process. He also explained why some drinks pick you up (tequila), others make you angry (rum), and some can clear the mind (absinthe) - as well as the science of mixology - why some alcohols mix well and other's don't. This is largely due to the interplay of the various tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salt, umami) and the smell of the drink. And what exactly is a molecular cocktail?

To find out more, have a listen to my chat with Manuel after the event. A couple of cocktails makes for a very smooth interview! Listen to this podcast here:

Read more on the event over at 10daysofscience.

Stats in the media

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:58:34 PDT

I love to see statistics in the media. This week there were a couple of stories that caught my eye:

Town hall bans staff from using Facebook after they each waste 572 hours in ONE month.

I found this article courtesy of the excellent science blog, The Lay Scientist. On first reading that headline from The UK's The Daily Mail, it would seem that 572 hours is an extremely large amount of time for one person to spend on Facebook in one month. The article says that over the last year, the 4500 employees of Portsmouth City Council have spent on average 413 hours a month on Facebook while at work, peaking at 572. If we assume there are 30 working days a month (that is, the employees are very keen and work weekends), this means on average they spend almost 14 hours a day on Facebook. Each!

If we look a little more carefully and assume a 40-hour week and a 22-working-day month, this comes to 180 working hours, well below the 413 Facebook average! The problem of course is the word EACH in the title, and The Daily Mail has since removed it from the online story. If we remove the offending word, as The Lay Scientist has done, we can see that the average employee with Portsmouth City Council staff spends 20.8 seconds using Facebook each day. If anything I think the council should be commended!

This would be an example of some bad stats (or more to the point, bad arithmetic).

League's bad boys might just be acting their age, statistics suggest

The Sydney Morning Hearld published an interesting article on the recent spate of off-field incidents by Australian Rugby League players. 2009 has been a horror year for League, with new players seemingly in trouble with the law every week. The article used data from NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research to compare the rate at which players are charged with assault, with the prevailing rate for all males aged 18 to 34 in NSW. They found that across the state, young men are charged with assault at a rate of about 700 per 100,000 each year - you can look this up yourself on the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research website, although I couldn't find it split by age. In the 12 months to March 31, out of the 400 players who play in the NRL, only three were charged with assault. The article then suggests that this rate of 750 per 100,000 is only slightly above the NSW figure and so therefore League players really aren't that bad.

The biggest problem with this statistic is sample size, which the article itself concedes. You can't draw too many conclusions when the addition of only a couple more assaults would double the NRL assault rate - to prove a significant difference between two data sets, you need to have a large sample size. With a small sample size and a very low assault rate, even if the assault rates look similar, you can't conclusively say very much.

The other problems include the fact that the data doesn't look at the year post March 31 - which has been the NRL's annus horribilis - except for a passing reference that it looks like it could be a bad year for the NRL given that three players have already been charged with assault and there are seven months left till next March. The data also does not take into account that many of the crimes NRL players have committed are not assault but fall into other categories.

However, the article concedes all this - so why was it published? Despite the fact that the word "statistics" has been used in the headline to add weight to the argument, the correct interpretation of these particular statistics is to say that very little has been proven. If you sampled your local gaol or down-town Johannesburg, a sample size of 400 for a crime that usually has a very low rate might prove significant, but that's not the case here. Perhaps we have proven that the NRL is better than a bunch of criminals - I guess that's something!

The issue here is that people remember the headline. Even though the article was entirely correct in what it said - it mentioned all the statistical concessions we've listed here, and even put the word "might" in the headline - readers will remember that "statistics showed" that League players are just like you and I. I posted about a similar topic a couple of years back when The Independent on Sunday presented a graph of the oil price between 2000 and 2008, and on the same chart plotted the Nasdaq technology index between 1992 and 2000. The two plots showed a startling similarity, even though they are completely unrelated and even though the article conceded this point very early. However, at first glance you are mislead, and this is what people remember - I somewhat cheekily plotted the performance of the Australian cricket team on the same chart to make this point - it was an even better correlation!

You can draw your own conclusions on the behaviour of League players. Of course, wikipedia has a list of off-field incidents involving league players for you to peruse!

Edit: I thought it worth taking a look at some of the stats - using a 2-tailed t test, with a sample size of 400, if 9 players committed assault in a year, then you could say that NRL players are more likely to commit assault than the general public. This corresponds to a rate of 2250 per 100,000 - three times what we had before. This could essentially be a big night out for NRL players at the end of the season! What this suggests is that a small difference can make a big result, and this is why we can't draw too many conclusions about League behaviour from this data. If there were a pool of 4000 NRL players, you could start to draw conclusions on NRL behaviour if 40 committed assault - this is a rate of 1000 per 100,000 - considerably less than the case for a pool of 400. It is dangerous to quote "rates" when you don't have much data.

The other point is that failing to show that two data sets are significantly different - that is, that NRL players are no different to the state as a whole - doesn't mean that they are the same. As we have seen, when only a few more assaults would make a very large difference, the system is not very stable.

Flying Spaghetti Monster appearance in Tonga

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:44:23 PDT

Here at The Mr Science Show, we are devotees of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if for no other reason than His brilliant insight that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct result of the shrinking number of Pirates since the 1800s. We are proud to dedicate our regular Correlation of the week to this observation, and on my recent trip to Tonga, He showed me that He is pleased with our work.

On walking through a cemetery in the Tongan capital Nuku'alofa, I spotted the following dedication to His Noodliness. Whilst Christianity is by far the major religion in Tonga, there seems to be evidence that the FSM church is working with both Christianity and the traditional culture, and growing in the South Pacific - the very place that global warming and rising sea-levels will have the biggest effect, and therefore the greatest need for pirates.

Then during the night I awoke and managed to snap this quick photo as He appeared to me from our fale roof. You can clearly see His glory shining through.

I like to think He is happy with our spreading of His word through Correlation of the week.

Ep 112: Jon Lomberg, the Voyager Gold Record, and the movie Contact

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:54 PDT

Jon Lomberg is one of the world's most distinguished space-artists. Lomberg was Carl Sagan's principal artistic collaborator for more than twenty years and in 1998, the International Astronomical Union officially named Asteroid Lomberg in his honour.

In 1972, Sagan asked Lomberg to illustrate The Cosmic Connection, after which they worked on NASA's interstellar Voyager Golden Record, a record included in the two 1977 Voyager spacecraft. It contains sounds and images that portray the various life forms and cultures on Earth. The record is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that may find it. It also contains information about our mathematics and science, as well as a way of decoding the record. As aliens may not see colours as we do, if they see at all, a method of decoding the information was included in the spacecraft, as well as an explanation of mathematics from its most simplistic level - one dot means the number one, two dots mean two, etc. From this point you can denote addition, multiplication and so on. The Voyager spacecraft are not heading towards any particular star, and Lomberg thinks that as the craft are unlikely to crash into a planet, if they are spotted, it will be by alien life that has mastered interstellar travel.

Lomberg also designed the original cover art for Sagan's novel Contact, and the opening sequence for the Contact film. Lomberg gave a talk at the Ultimo Science Festival and I was lucky enough to grab him for a chat afterwards. Listen to this podcast here:

For some more information on Jon, check out his website and have a read of the 10daysofscience story of his recent meeting with 1999 Young Australian of the Year, astronomer Professor Bryan Gaensler. This is a lovely story - Gaensler just happened to be sitting next to Lomberg at the Eureka Awards, and also had a tutorial scheduled for the next day on the challenges of portraying science and astronomy in film, using Contact as his primary example. Naturally, Gaensler asked Lomberg, “What are you doing at noon tomorrow?” See the 10daysofscience story for more information and videos from the tutorial.

To get you in the mood, here is the opening sequence for the movie Contact (on youtube here if you can't see the embed). It takes the journey of a spacecraft starting at Earth and hearing the sounds that Earth is currently pumping out into the Universe in the form of radio waves. As we pan out from Earth and journey further and further away, we hear older and older sounds to represent the idea that the sounds broadcast by the first radios are still travelling through the Universe - the further away we go, the older the music sounds, until we have left the solar system, and then the galaxy.

Ep 111: The Ultimo Science Festival, and sending text messages to aliens

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:54 PDT

This week's podcast celebrates the start of the Ultimo Science Festival - ten days and nights of science fun for families, schools, and people of all ages. The festival is presented by the Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The University of Technology Sydney and TAFE NSW. It runs mainly in the Ultimo precinct near Central Station and Harris St - see the map on Google maps here. Most events are free and held from Friday August 21 through to Sunday August 30, 2009.

In this show, I chat to Festival Director Tilly Boleyn about how the festival started, what to expect, and what fun can be had. Some of the events we chatted about include Why the mind matters, The Dark Side of Science, Mathematics and Sex, The Science of Cocktails, and The Science of Coffee. I also chat to Jacqui Hayes from Cosmos Magazine about the Hello From Earth project. The project collects text messages on its website to send to Gliese 581d which is an exoplanet, or extrasolar planet, which means it is in orbit around a star other than the Sun. The Gliese 581 system is thought to be one of the best candidates for life outside our Solar System of the more than 350 systems with exoplanets so far discovered.

Listen to this podcast here:

After message collection closes on Monday 24 August 2009 - hurry!! - all the messages will be collected as a text file and sent to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where it will be encoded into binary code. This system of beeps and pauses will be sent back to the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, near Canberra. The signal will reach the solar system of Gliese 581 around December 2029 having travelled 20.3 light-years (192 trillion km). The soonest we could hope to receive an answer is in 42 years time in 2051. For more on the technical details, check out the Hello From Earth homepage. And check out the following youtube video:

To read more on National Science Week and the Ultimo Science Festival, see our recent blog post on the topic. Hope to see you at the Festival!

The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2009 - Nominations Open

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:04:41 PDT

Nominations for the 2009 anthology of the best writing on science blogs, The Open Laboratory 2009, are now open. Last year there were around 830 submissions narrowed down to 50 essays, one poem and one cartoon. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com.

If you would like to nominate blogs for this year's edition (and please feel free to nominate posts from this blog, please.....), use this submission form to submit original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays and blog posts.

Last year I was lucky enough to make the cut with a post I wrote for Plus Magazine called United Kingdom - Nil Points about the maths of the Eurovision Song Contest. Amusingly, as the title is a bit of an in-joke for Eurovision fans, the name of the article was changed to Political Music for US audiences!

And please remember to only nominate articles that would look good in a book - don't nominate podcasts, posts with embedded video etc. There are other awards for these types of things. Follow A Blog Around the Clock for more.

National Science Week Australia

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:54:13 PDT

National Science Week is Australia’s largest festival, celebrating science, innovation, mathematics, engineering and technology. Held annually in August, and now in its twelfth year, National Science Week welcomes an audience of over a million and hosts more than 800 events across the nation. According to a Newspoll survey, more than half the Australian population is familiar with the festival. (I am a little sceptical about this fact, although as it is such a wonderful occasion for science communicators, I'll let it slide!)

This year the festival runs from 15 to 23 August. Events take place in every Australian State and Territory, with the majority free and open to the public, offering an opportunity for all Australians to get involved.

There is also the very funky sounding National Tour. With events held in every State and Territory, the Tour guests help to inspire and motivate Australians about science and raise the profile of science within the community. This year, the National Tour will be joined by NASA Astronaut Marsha Ivins; environmentalist Tanya Ha; theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; and palaeontologist Scott Sampson.

If you'd like to find out what's going on in your neck of the woods, check out the National Science Week website.

If you are in Sydney, then you'll want to be getting over to the Ultimo Science Festival, which runs from Friday 21st August to Sunday 30th August. I will blog and podcast more about this event very soon - I have interviewed the organisers, now to edit it all into a show... In the meantime, check out their website and look out for me at the festival. There are loads of events, but the ones I plan to go to include:

Ultimo Big Night of Science (Opening Night)
Why the mind matters – dinner and talk
The Dark Side of Science – Flesh (Adults only)
Mathematics and Sex with Clio Cresswell
The Science of Cocktails
The Science of Coffee
The Science of Cosmetics WORKSHOP
SCINEMA (Science film festival)
Questacon Science Squad - you can hear more from the Science Squad in this Mr Science Show podcast from 2007

So, with any luck, I'll be dosed up on caffeine, cocktails and sex. Good times ahead!

And if blogs are more your thing, then check out the 10daysofscience site as they blog their way through the festival. I'm sure I will be twittering throughout so stay tuned for more blogs, podcasts and tweets.

This makes me want to count!

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:54:13 PDT

If it were possible that Feist could get any cuter, here it is. In this clip, she sings her song 1234 with the cast of Sesame Street. Brilliant - surely this will get the next generation into mathematics!

Oh why not, here's one more! This is Sesame Street's take on Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run - in this case, Born to Add!

Ep 110: Coral, the Stone Henge of the Pacific, and more of the sights, sounds and science of Tonga

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:54 PDT

This week's podcast takes us back across the ocean to discover more of the sights, sounds and science of Tonga - see our previous episode for more on Tongan blowholes and whales.

On location in Tonga, we tackle the topics of:

Haʻamonga ʻa Maui - otherwise known as The Stone Henge of the Pacific. This is an ancient 12-tonne stone trilithon whose purpose is not exactly known, much like that other Stone Henge in the UK. A previous King of Tonga, Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV, once claimed it had an astronomical significance as it can determine the position of sunrise at solstices and equinoxes. As it was said by the King, it is the accepted explanation for what is an odd stone construction, at least in Tonga anyway.
How did people get to Tonga in the first place? The generally accepted history is that the Lapita people came down through Papua New Guinea into Melanesia and Polynesia. However, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl had other ideas based on the fact that the sweet potato (kumera) is found in both South America and Polynesia. To prove that it was at least possible that Tongans came from South America, in 1947 he sailed the Kon-Tiki raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Tuamotus. Heyerdahl showed that, by using only the materials and technologies available at the time, there were no technical issues that prevented South Americans coming to Polynesia. Whilst the evidence suggests that people came through South East Asia and Papua New Guinea to reach the Pacific, one school of thought suggests that Polynesians may indeed have travelled to South America and picked up the kumera from there.

Back here in Australia, I spoke to Lachlan Whatmore about coral - what is it, how does it form, and what life does it support. Lachlan is a diving enthusiast and the golden tonsils of Australian community radio - as well as a qualified Marine Biologist. In short, coral is an Anthozoan marine organism that lives in colonies of polyps. Corals build reefs in tropical oceans - the reefs are made up of their calcium carbonate skeletons. Listen in for more.

And tacked onto the end of this show, we have a Correlation of the Week - this week discussing the relationship between eclipses and the stock market - see our previous story on the topic for more.

Listen to this podcast here:

Stay tuned for our final edition on Tonga in a few weeks.

Nano Teddy!

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:23:46 PDT

1stplaceHeliaJalili
Originally uploaded by rodolfobernal

I love this pic from flickr. It is a scanning electron microscope image of Zinc Oxide (ZnO) nanostructures (that is, really small ZnO structures) on indium oxide coated glass.

I'm not sure if it is a chance photo, or one deliberately created, but either way it is cool!

Scanning electron microscopes create images by scanning a surface with a beam of high-energy electrons. The electrons interact with the atoms that make up the sample, and this interaction produces various signals from which a sample's surface topography can be recreated. The interactions between the electron beam and the sample can give off x-rays or light, it can also cause the electron beam to be scattered, and small currents can be generated in the sample. These signals can be read by sensitive equipment which can then reconstruct what the surface looks like.

See this "Science as Art" competition for more funky science photos!

Distracted Driving and Cut-throat Capitalism

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:36:14 PDT

Here are a few games that are fun and sciencey to keep you sane at work.

Driving whilst Distracted

The New York Times recently published a Distracted Driver game to gauge your distraction while you're texting on the road. The game puts you driving on a road having to negotiate a number of toll booths along the way. The game tests your ability to drive through the correct gates without any distractions, and then it makes you write a couple of text messages whilst still having to negotiate the booths.

After you finish the game, you get a comparison of your result with everyone else who has played. I improved the second time I played, my first results are below. I didn't see a grey lady either time!

The science of mobile phone use whilst driving is a developing field, with most of the research suggesting that you are just as impaired, or more so, if texting or using a hand-held mobile as you are if you are drunk. A couple of great resources if you are interested are:

The Dutch national road safety research institute (SWOV). Their publication SWOV Fact sheet: Use of mobile phone while driving was published in 2008 and contains a great deal of up-to-date research. Their conclusion is that the negative effects of mobile phone use whilst driving are caused by both physical and cognitive distraction. Although physical distraction can be reduced through the use of such aids as handsfree phones and speed dialling, cognitive distraction remains the crucial problem. They conclude that handsfree phones do not have significant safety advantages over handheld phones. They also point towards research suggesting that talking on a mobile phone is associated with cognitive distraction that may undermine pedestrian safety.
Applied Cognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Utah - David Strayer has published a wealth of research on the impact of using in-car technologies on driving performance and traffic safety. It is well worth a browse of their published articles.

Cut-throat Capitalism

Piracy has a romantic history often associated with walking-the-plank, peg-legs and saying Arrrrr a lot - there is even an international talk like a pirate day on the 19th of September each year. However, modern piracy in Somalia is a deadly game and nothing like the stereotype. Nevertheless, Wired Magazine has had some fun with this and brings us Cut-throat Capitalism in which you are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors, and your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

The game is addictive and highly strategic. Initially I kept alienating my crew by being nice in my negotiations, so they eventually deposed me as captain. Then when I was too tough on my hostages, the Navy was called in. Eventually, I was successful in negotiating a $3 million ransom.

Piracy off the Somalian coast is seen as a business by those who conduct it, and as such it can be analysed by economists (who, in general, love to think that the world revolves on an economic axis). Wired has taken a look at the economics of piracy and found that the typical payoff for piracy in Somalia today is 100 times what it was in 2005. One of the reasons why it is flourishing today is because it exploits the incentives that drive international maritime trade. Shippers, insurance companies, private security contractors, and national navies stand to lose less by tolerating it rather than attempting to stop it - insurance covers the ransom, ships and goods are not lost and no one dies. The pirates know that they can keep escalating the situation to see just how much the "market" can bear. The negotiation process also involves risk/reward calculations.

Correlation of the Week: Eclipses and the economy

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:47:16 PDT

In the paper Dark Omens in the Sky: Do Superstitious Beliefs Affect Investment Decisions?, Gabriele Lepori from Copenhagen Business School has correlated the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses with four American stock indices: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, the New York Stock Exchange Composite, and the Dow Jones Composite Average.

This is possibly the most fun, and most mathematically rigorous, Correlation of the Week we have had. I love it!

Lepori's idea was to test whether superstitious practises could be picked up in the stock-market. His theory was that individuals are more likely to resort to superstitious practices when operating in environments dominated by uncertainty and high stakes. The stock market is therefore an ideal place to test this theory.

Eclipses are regarded as "unlucky" in many Western and Asian societies, and as they are worldwide events occurring over a short period of time, the effects of such unlucky events should be seen in stock trading - if there is an effect, that is.

Lepori took the dates of all 362 lunar and solar eclipses that had been visible anywhere in the world between 1928 and 2008, and computed the four stock indicies on the day of the eclipse. The results suggest that in the three days around the date of an eclipse, three of the four stock indices exhibited statistically significant lower-than-average returns. If an eclipse took place on a weekday (when the stockmarkets were open), its effect was larger than if it occurred on a weekend. And the greater the magnitude of the eclipse, the more likely it would influence stock returns!

On the days following the eclipse, Lepori showed that markets reverse the eclipse-related dip, suggesting that the market realised the drop was irrational. Here is a perfect opportunity for astute investors to make some money - buy stocks at the eclipse maximum and sell a few days later! Or sell a few days before the eclipse and buy back at its maximum. This is known as arbitrage. Indeed, Lepori found that an investor who had bought the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of 1928 would have multiplied their money 37 times by now. However, one who sold before each eclipse and bought back straight after would have multiplied their money by 55.

Lepori's theory is consistent with the idea that at the time of an eclipse, there is less buying pressure coming from the superstitious. Trading volume also decreases. These patterns are inconsistent with Efficient Market Theory, which states that traded assets reflect all known information, and instantly change to reflect new information. This means that it is impossible to consistently outperform the market by using any information that the market already knows - eclipses are perfectly predictable events and so even if they did influence stock prices, this should already be built into the price.

I recommend a read of the original paper - check out the mathematical rigour and the lengths to which Lepori went to control for other variables such as day of the week, media coverage of the eclipse and even the weather! Fantastic stuff!

I'm not sure whether this gives me a more positive or negative opinion of the stock market. On one hand, it shows how complex the market is and why we must employ smart people (and pay them loads) to understand it. On the other hand, this study shows that completely irrational beliefs and behaviours can influence how we price things. This surely undermines the system. In the modern globalised world, everything is governed by finance, and allowing irrational thought to influence world affairs scares me! But maybe that shouldn't surprise me - wars are started over personal disagreements, politics is dominated by petty arguments and some people still doubt evolution - I guess the world just ain't rational!

Ep 109: Tongan blowholes and whales

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:54 PDT

The Kingdom of Tonga is an archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean comprising 169 islands stretching over a distance of about 800 kilometres. It is the only sovereign monarchy in the Pacific and takes pride in its claim that it was never colonised.

I recently spent a wonderful two weeks in Tonga - the islands completely live up to their billing as the Friendly Islands - Captain Cook gave Tonga this moniker after his first visit in 1773 when he was treated to various festivals. It was only later that it was revealed local chiefs wanted to kill Cook but could not agree whether to attack by day or night.

This is the first in a series of podcasts about Tonga that include my own recordings from Tonga and also interviews with experts in the scientific areas we tackle. In this show, we look at:

The Mapu a Vaea blowholes - these blowholes are created by the ocean pounding into the coastal rock and moving through natural tunnels creating a fountain;
Tongan singing - not much science here, but it's beautiful!
Whale behaviour and migration - I chat to Scott Portelli, an award winning photographer and diver who runs whale-watching tours in Tonga. Scott recently won the prestigious Scuba Diver AustralAsia - Through the Lens Underwater Photography Competition with an outstanding photo from Tonga - see more of Scott's photos on his webpage. Scott runs Swimming with Gentle Giants, a company which conducts whale diving tours each year between August and October off the islands of Vava'u in northern Tonga. I chat to Scott about:

his experiences swimming with whales,
when to swim with whales,
whale behaviour and migration patterns,
the oceanic animals of Tonga,
a little bit of whaling politics,
the threats to whales, including whaling, global warming and pollution, and
the fact that I once ate whale...

There are very few places left so get booking if you would like to swim with whales this year.

Stay tuned for more on Tonga in upcoming podcasts, in which we will talk about, and experience, the intoxicating drink Kava, the Stone-Henge of the South Pacific, the effects of global warming and rising sea-levels on Tonga, the local animals and more on whaling science and politics.

Listen to this podcast here:

And see below for some very cool traditional dance (also here if you can't see the video):

Who do you trust to build your synchrotron?

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:05:05 PDT

I love this clip of former Australian cricket Damien Fleming on the comedy show Thank God You're Here, the Australian theatre-sports style show which essentially aims to embarrass celebrities. In this challenge, as Australian sportsmen tend to talk a lot about things they don't know, Fleming was set the challenge of marketing the Australian Synchrotron. His opening line, "choosing the right sub-atomic particle analysis facility is a little bit like medium pace bowling" is brilliant. Check it out below or on the youtube video:

Science survival guide for The Ashes

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:57:02 PDT

Ashes backyard cricket
Originally uploaded by westius.

The sporting highlight of 2009 is only hours away. The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England will mean little sleep for cricket-obsessed Aussies, and little work done by the English.

Here is our science survival guide to the Ashes:

Ashes success and El Nino

Manoj Joshi

El Nino Southern Oscillation

The Ashes

Could El Niño Southern Oscillation affect the results of the Ashes series in Australia?

Weather

How to rank cricketers

For many people, including me, cricket isn't just a sport, it is a way of life.

These words could easily have come from me, but are actually the words of

Rob Eastaway

International Cricket Council

cricket-ratings

Science, Psychology and Cricket

TV coverage of cricket becomes more spectacular and technological

The curse of the duck

Science, Cricket, Fitness and Psychology

from the School of Human Movement at Charles Sturt University who has found that indeed you really do not need to be as physically fit to play cricket as you do other sports such as football. We also chat to

Dr Allistair McRobert from Liverpool John Moores University whose work has shown that the best batsmen can predict to some extent where a bowler will bowl. This work encompasses a look into the subconscious mental game of cricket and how the most successful players are more mentally prepared for the top level than lesser players. More on this topic can also be found in our article The Science of Cricket.

Sex before Sport?

It is the virile sports-person's eternal question - should one abstain from a little bit of nookie before a big sporting event? If I was Michael Clarke and engaged to Lara Bingle, I wouldn't be...

Economists, oil, cricket and correlation

Can we predict cricket results using the price of oil? Or is this just bad stats. Also see our article Poor correlations, or why it's not the fault of Aussie cricketers.

Good luck to all and come on you Aussies!

Ep 108: Correlations of the week - vampires and zombies vs. presidents, cricket vs. the weather

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:54 PDT

This week on the podcast we tackle two Correlations of the week published recently here on The Mr Science Show:

Listen to this podcast here:

Correlation of the Week: Ashes success and El Nino

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:28:09 PDT

As we have shown on this blog a number of times (see here, here and here for starters), cricket fans love their maths. So it should come as no surprise that another cricket/maths story has recently come out, this time from the University of Reading linking cricket success with the weather! I only blog my maths/cricket geekiness, these guys have research funding!

Manoj Joshi has shown that the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon has a significant effect on the results of The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England when the series is held in Australia. The Australian Cricket team is more likely to succeed after El Nino years, while the English cricket team does better following La Nina years (the opposite phase). Their study, Could El Niño Southern Oscillation affect the results of the Ashes series in Australia? was published in the journal Weather.

I didn't quite believe this at first, so I took their data, redid the maths, and it turns out that they are correct! However, the media interpretations of these results are not surprisingly a little over the top. Whilst there is a significant correlation between the state of El Nino in the year before the Ashes series and the result, the correlation itself is weak. This is an important point to keep in mind with any correlation - strength and significance are two different things - even sciencedaily got this wrong in its reporting on the topic. There is a nice explanation of these ideas here.

Strength refers to how well the data sets move with each other, significance refers to how likely it is the correlation occurred by chance. For example, you can easily get a strong correlation between two data sets if you have only a small amount of data. But as you lack data, it is unlikely that the relationship will actually be significant. In our case however, the correlation is quite weak, but the relationship is significant. The conclusion to this study should be that ENSO plays a very small role in determining the results of Ashes series in Australia, but that other factors are likely to be more important, and that simple noise and randomness will probably have more of an effect than the phase of ENSO. It is only over time that this correlation can be teased out. The study does admit this, with Joshi saying:

"There are of course many different factors governing the outcome of any given sporting contest, which would act as noise in this analysis."

But I think his statement that "the study could even influence whether the England touring team should include more fast bowlers or more 'swing' bowlers" is probably a little bold (and to his credit he does admit this)!

So, how does this all work?

There are two phases of ENSO - during El Nino, the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean warms by about 1 degree. For Australia this means low rainfall and high temperatures. La Nina is a reverse, with more rain and a drop in temperature. The study analysed the results of all Ashes matches held in Australia from 1882-2007 and found that during El Nino years, the Australian team won 13 out of 17 series (76%), but only five out of the 13 played in La Nina years (38%). England has only won one Ashes series in the last 100 years following an El Nino event - the Bodyline series in 1932/33. The author speculates that cricket pitch conditions can affect the outcome of a match with the drier pitches of El Nino favouring fast Australian bowlers with the English slower swing bowlers enjoying La Nina.

Now to the maths. I have reproduced the results from the paper in our chart as you can see here. On the y-axis is the series result (English wins minus Australian wins). On the x-axis is the Nino 3 index, which is the mean monthly temperature anomaly in the eastern tropical Pacific: 5S-5N; 150W-90W. Of course, all the dots should be on integer values of y - some were shifted in the original paper for ease of viewing. The correlation is still correct.

What we can see here is a very weak correlation - the R² value is only 0.1. R² is the coefficient of determination and gives some information about goodness of fit. A value this low is generally accepted as suggesting no correlation at all. One interpretation is to say that about 10% of the correlation can be explained by the Nino 3 index. The paper itself quotes R (=-0.31) as opposed to R², but to determine whether a relationship is strong or not, you need R².

To test for significance, Joshi generated 10000 sets of randomly generated numbers to represent the Nino 3 index - each set had 32 members (the same number as the number of Ashes series) and a normal distribution with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 0.8, similar to ENSO observations. They found that the chance of R being more negative than -0.31 was 5%, which is the level generally accepted as being significant.

There is, however, an easier way to do this - you can use t-tests (as we used in our earlier Correlation of the Week on vampire and zombie movies). To generate your t-statistic, you use the formula:

where N is the number of sample points (32). When you do this, you get a t value of -1.78. This means that if our null-hypothesis is r=0 (that is, there is no correlation), when you look this t-value up in a t-distribution table, you find that it is more negative than the critical value of -1.70 in a one-tailed test, which means it is significant. What all this means is that there is a very weak significant correlation very close to zero. I wouldn't put any money on either team based on this result! In any case, Australia is going to win....

Beauty and the Geek comes to Australia

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:27:48 PDT

Ever seen the American show Beauty and the Geek, produced by twitterer, actor and producer Ashton Kutcher? The show takes a bunch of horribly awkward, socially inept, level-23 dragon overlords - sorry, Dungeons and Dragons aficionados - and puts them in a house with a group of stunning looking, but generally slow-on-the-uptake, girls to see what happens. Each geek is teamed up with a beauty and they live together in a room throughout the show, with challenges in each episode being used to eliminate the couples. The challenges test what the contestants are bad at - the beauties are tested in academic topics (the geeks are supposed to tutor them) and the geeks are tested with social questions (the beauties are likewise supposed to teach them about the real world). At the end of the show, one couple wins a swag of money and there is a very American resolution with the contestants saying how much they've learnt and grown.

So yes, it's ridiculous and patronising - but it's compelling viewing and coming to Australia!

If you want to apply to be a contestant on the show, download the application forms on the Channel 7 Beauty and the Geek website.

Awesome Illusion

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:57:16 PDT

This illusion has been doing the rounds this week (see Bad Astronomy and Richard Wiseman for a couple of science blogs I like that picked it up), but it's so good I thought it needed to be posted here also.

Look carefully at the image below. Do you see a couple of spirals, one blue and one green? Well, take a closer look - in actual fact, the blue and green are actually the same colour!

Don't believe me? Copy the image and open it up in PhotoShop or Paint and take a closer look....

You will notice that the orange curves move through the "green" spirals, but not the blue. And the purple curves don't move through the green.

If we blow this picture up even more, we can see that the colours are becoming more and more similar.

The blue and green appear to be different colours because our brain works out colours by comparing them to other surrounding colours and it does a bit of mixing. When we look at the "blue" spiral, we also take in the purple curves moving through it. This makes it look more blue. When we look at the "green" spiral, we take in the orange curves, which makes it look more green.

I know that's not a great explanation, so I'd be happy to hear a better one!

Edit by westius 2/7/09: If you doubt this illusion, check out this image - I've replaced some of the colours - you can clearly see now that the 'blue' and 'green' are the same:

Furthering your science communication education

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:54:13 PDT

Interested in science communication? Love travelling? Then joining the 2010 Shell Questacon Science Circus might be for you. Their slogan this year is "Got your science degree, now get your backpack!"

If you are a recent science or technology graduate and enjoy science communication, then you can earn a prestigious Graduate Diploma from ANU, work with Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, and travel Australia communicating science in cities, towns, outback stations, indigenous communities, schools, nursing homes, just about everywhere. As far as I can tell, there aren't any science communication courses like this anywhere in the world.

Your fees are paid for, and you also receive an additional scholarship. You are trained in science communication from top scientists, journos, radio presenters and performers.

I did the course in 2001 and it was fantastic. To get in, you'll need to be as good looking as these folk and this lot. Not only have I now seen places in Australia that barely anyone gets to see, but I had a ball and made contacts in science communication fields. Plus, you are on tour much of the year and believe it or not, when you aren't, Canberra is a pretty good place to live.

Applications close 31 August - see the circus website for more information.

For my reflections on the 2001 year, see my Science Circus flickr photo set (I really should scan some more photos and put them up - ah, a time before digital cameras were popular...) and this ridiculous story and podcast - if you're game, listen to the podcast of that episode to hear me sing... I have improved my sound recording since then, but not my singing.

If you happen to be at the other end of your science communication post-grad education, the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network is collecting information about PhD theses completed since 2000 on topics in science communication and closely related areas. This
information, with a classification by topic area and country, will be published on their web site and a review will be presented at PCST11 conference in 2010.

This exercise is intended to provide an overview of current and recent research in the growing field of science communication that will support those starting in the field. It is also intended to promote networking between researchers in science communication.

Information is sought on doctoral theses that addressed mainly or exclusively topics such as science in media, public communication by scientists and scientific institutions, history of popularisation, science museums and science centres, science festivals and events, public consultation in science-related policy, risk communication on science-related issues, and so on.

For each thesis, they seek the following details:

Title;
author;
affiliation (university or similar);
date of completion;
supervisor(s);
examiner(s);
abstract (approx 250 words);
where accessible (online or print).

Brian Trench of Dublin City University and and Maarten van der Sanden of Delft University of Technology are leading this project. Summaries of theses should be sent by 1 October to M.C.A.vanderSanden@tudelft.nl

And if you do have a science communication PhD, make sure you dance it!

Sumo vs Chess - how their ranking systems work

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:54:00 PDT

At the very heart of sport is a fierce battle in which the combatants strive to outwit and outplay each other. Each thrust is matched by a parry and in the end, there can only be one winner. The rules of each sport dictate how that winner is determined, and, whether it is football, tennis, golf or chess, it is those who perform best on the day who take home the glory.

But it's not easy to get to the all-important final. True sporting supremacy cannot be decided in a one-off winner-takes-all event. Indeed, many championships are specifically designed such that the ultimate winners are not decided by the results of single events but rather by accumulated results over time. It is easy to rank teams within structured leagues like the English Premiere League, as each team plays all opponents, so that eventually the best teams rise to the top. But it is not always that easy — indeed, more often than not, it is very difficult. Keeping with the football example, how can we compare international football teams such as Australia and England who very rarely play each other? International football sides do not play as often as club teams, so we can't have the same confidence that the team with the most wins over a year, or even the highest percentage of wins, is the best team in the world. And how can we determine which wins are the most important?

Different sports have developed their own way of dealing with the subtleties of ranking their players and teams, and this article is the first of a series looking at these ranking systems. In future instalments we'll be looking at rugby, football, cricket, tennis and golf, but to start off, we explore the ranking systems of two very different sports: chess and sumo wrestling.

Chess

It should not surprise anyone that, of all sports, chess has the most mathematically elegant ranking system — it is, of course, a very cerebral pursuit. The ranking system, called the ELO system, was developed by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor and chess guru.

Unlike in other sports such as tennis, where rating points can be awarded subjectively — for example, an important tennis tournament might be worth ten times more than another — Elo's idea was to mathematically estimate, based on observation, actual player ability.

Elo's original assumption was that a player's performance varies from game to game in a way that can be described by the normal distribution: if you measure a player's skill numerically and then plot the number of times he or she has achieved at each skill value against the possible skill values, you will get a bell-shaped curve as shown in figure 1. The peak of the curve is the mean of the distribution and represents the player's true skill, while the tails represent untypically good or bad performances. So while a player can have very good and very bad days, on average they perform somewhere near their mean value. The aim of the ELO system is to estimate the mean value for each player by looking at how often they win, lose and draw against other players with different abilities — this gives you their rating. We can use the player ratings to predict the probability of one player beating another, and the smaller your chance of winning, the more rating points you get if you do win.

Elo's original model used normal distributions of player ability, however observations have shown that chess performance is probably not normally distributed — weaker players actually have a greater winning chance than Elo's original model predicted. Therefore, the modern ELO system is based on the logistic distribution which gives the lower rated player a greater, and more accurate, chance of winning.

To see how this system works in practice, let's have a closer look at the maths. Each player's ability is modelled as having a standard deviation of 200 rating points. The standard deviation is a measure of the spread of the data around the mean. In our case a low standard deviation would mean that the player's performance never strays far off the mean, while a high standard deviation means that he or she occasionally has pretty drastic off-days, both in the negative and positive sense. Traditionally in chess, ability categories like grand master, master and so on, spanned 200 rating points each, and this may be the reason why the value 200 was chosen for the standard deviation.

Based on these assumptions it's possible to work out the expected scores of a player playing against player . If player has a rating of and player has a rating of , the exact formula for the expected score of player is

Similarly, the expected score for player is

The following chart shows the probabilities involved in a game of chess based on Elo's original normal distribution, and the modified version employing the logistic model. The horizontal axis measures the difference between the rating of player A and player B and the vertical axis gives the chance of a win for player A. There is little difference between the two curves except in the tails, where the logistic curve gives the lower rated player a greater chance of winning.

Player ratings are updated at the end of each tournament. Imagine you are a player with rating 1784. In a tournament you play 5 games with the following results:

Win against player rated 2314;
Lose against player rated 1700;
Draw against player rated 1302;
Win against player rated 1492;
Lose against player rated 1927.

As you had two wins and a draw, you scored 2.5. However, your expected score, as calculated from the above formula, was 0.045 + 0.619 + 0.941 + 0.843 + 0.306 = 2.754. Therefore you didn't do as well as was expected.

When a player’s tournament score is better than the expected score, the ELO system adjusts the player’s ranking upward. Similarly when a player’s tournament scores is less than the expected score, the rating is adjusted downward. Supposing player was expected to score points but actually scored points, their new rating is

where is a constant which causes much debate in the chess world. Some chess tournaments use for masters players and for weaker players. This means that unusually good or bad performances weigh more heavily for weak players than they do for masters.

For our player with rating 1784, the new rating becomes

As with all ranking systems, there are controversies surrounding the ELO system. These include

Mixing: Like all ranking systems, the ELO system works best when players play often against many different people. Imagine a chess club whose members generally play among themselves. Their ratings therefore reflect how good each member is compared to their club's other members. But if that club then plays against a second club in a tournament, there is every chance that one of the clubs is considerably stronger than the other. This however will not be reflected in the ratings before competition. Only after some time will the ratings reflect player ability across both clubs rather than just within each club.
Initial score: How should a new player be ranked, and how credible is that rank?
The constant K: What is the right value of K? If K is too low, it is harder to win points, but if K is too high the system becomes too sensitive.
Selective play: In order to maintain their rankings, players may selectively play weaker players.
Time: How should a player who is not playing anymore, or plays infrequently, be ranked?

Sumo

Sumo masters are decided in a way that's hard to quantify.

The ranking method of sumo wrestling is almost the complete opposite of chess — much like the sports themselves! Whilst some mathematics feeds into the ranking formulation, much of what determines a sumo's rank, especially in the upper ranks, cannot be quantified.

There are six divisions in sumo wrestling — makuuchi, juryo, makushita, sandanme, jonidan and jonokuchi. The top division, makuuchi, is very popular in Japan and has a complex inner ranking system, with yokozuna the ultimate rank. The following figure shows the breakdown of sumo ranks, with the numbers in brackets representing the number of wrestlers at that level.

Sumo wrestlers fight in tournaments called basho. These tournaments run to 15 days and depending on the division consist of seven or 15 bouts. Grand Sumo tournaments, known as honbasho, determine sumo rankings and there are six throughout the year. In these tournaments, the wrestlers fight within their divisions — sekitori fight 15 matches whilst the lower divisions fight seven. As there are more wrestlers than there are matches, sumo elders called oyakata determine the match-ups the day before.

In general, rising to sekiwake, the third level of the highest division, requires that you win more bouts than you lose in tournaments. If you have a positive winning record in a tournament, you will move up, and vice versa. If your winning record is 13-2, you will climb higher than someone with an 8-7 record.

The jump from the third division, makushita, to the second division, juryo, is perhaps the most important rank distinction in sumo. Juryo is the first rank of sekitori, and the ultimate aim of most wrestlers. Wrestlers lower than this rank have to do chores for their superiors and are essentially sumo slaves. Non-sekitori wrestlers become tsukebito (personal valets) for the higher ranked wrestlers. Those at the very top of the table, yokozuna, typically have four tsukebito while everyone else in the sekitori class normally has two or three depending on prestige and seniority. There is probably no other sport in which the difference between ranks is so important — tsukebito need to accompany their superiors wherever they go, and while sekitori can relax and hang out with their fan clubs at the end of the day, or go home to their apartments, the junior wrestlers must clean the sumo stables and live in communal dormitories. The difference in salary is also huge — juryo rank receives a base salary of ¥1,036,000 (around £7,000) plus considerable add-ons and bonuses, while there is no salary below this rank.

Given this massive discrepancy, you can see why maintaining a rank of sekitori is very important for a sumo wrestler. Indeed, the ancient sport has recently been tainted by a match fixing controversy. A study by Steven Levitt and Mark Duggan in the book Freakonomics showed that 80% of wrestlers with 7-7 records win their matches at the end of tournaments, when you would expect this percentage to be closer to 50%. The authors conclude that those who already have 8 wins collude with those who are 7-7 and let them win, since they have already secured their ranking.

The rank of yokozuna is the highest and most venerable position in the sumo world. The yokozuna is the Grand Champion. Ozeki are also held in very high regard, and there are always at least two ozeki — there is no minimum on the number of yokozuna at any one time, however there may be none. There are currently two yokozuna.

To achieve these ranks, you must do more than have a positive honbasho record. By the time a wrestler reaches the rank of sekiwake, he has been able to maintain a positive honbasho record for some time. If a sekiwake starts to accumulate 10-5 or better records and occasionally upsets a yokozuna, the sumo administrative board (called the sumo kyokai) will consider a promotion to ozeki. One of the benefits of ozeki is that there is no automatic demotion based on match results — to be demoted back to sekiwake requires two consecutive losing streaks.

If an ozeki starts winning honbasho, he may be judged by the promotion council (the yokozuna shingi iinkai) for possible further promotion. And here is where the real mysteries of sumo ranking come in. The promotion council can recommend the ozeki to the riji-kai (board of directors) of the sumo kyokai. The first thing they consider are the previous three honbasho. Out of those 45 bouts, 38 is the minimum number of wins needed to be considered and the ozeki should have won two consecutive tournaments — but this is not all! The wrestlers must show respect for the sumo kyokai's rule and tradition, and towards past wrestlers, and also possess a character and attitude appropriate for a yokozuna. They must have hinkaku (dignity and grace) and have mastered basic sumo techniques such as shiko (the way a sumo holds his foot aloft before pounded it into the ground) and suri-ashi (the technique of keeping the bottom of each foot always touching the ground while moving). Once the riji-kai approves the promotion, it needs to be finally decided by the banzuke hensei kaigi (ranking arranging committee).

Famously in 1991, Hawaiian-born Samoan wrestler Konishiki, the heaviest wrestler ever in top-flight sumo, was denied yokozuna even though he had won two championships in a row. The chairman of the promotion council said, "We wanted to make doubly sure that Konishiki is worthy to be a grand champion. Therefore, we decided to wait for another tournament." It was speculated at the time that a foreign-born sumo wrestler could never make yokozuna as they could not possess the required cultural understanding. Since then however, there have been foreign-born yokozuna.

A yokozuna cannot be demoted and is expected to retire if his performance starts to dip.

As you can see, mathematics hardly comes into sumo, rather the rankings are based on trust and veneration for those in charge. Most other sports, however, do require a more objective evaluation of their stars, and we'll have a look at some of them in future articles of this series.

For more, see Plus Magazine. For more on chess, see Chess rankings, ChessBase and Knowledgerush, and for Sumo see the Sumo FAQ.