The Mr Science Show

Who do you trust to build your synchrotron?

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:16:30 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) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:50:22 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, 05 Jul 2009 01:31:13 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, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:07 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) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:03:36 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.

Ep 107: Ranking Cricketers

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:00:34 PDT

Cricket is one of the world's most statistical sports, and mathematicians in cricket-loving nations love nothing more than delving into the minutiae of the numbers and diving into averages, strike-rates and custom-made measures of batting and bowling effectiveness.

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, a cricket-loving mathematician from the UK, and originator of the official International Cricket Council cricket-ratings which rank not only teams, but players within each team. In this week's podcast, I chat to Rob about how you mathematically rank cricketers.

Listen to this podcast here - note a few audio issues, see below:

Ranking individual batsmen and bowlers is no small task. A common method of comparing batsmen is their average, which is the average score the batsman compiles each time he comes in to bat. This method, however, has a number of issues as it does not take into consideration the opposition, playing conditions and how recently the runs were scored. How can you compare a score of 60 against a world-class opponent on a dodgy pitch with a score of 150 against a lowly rated team in easy batting conditions? This is what Eastaway's ranking system attempts to do - and the maths is quite difficult (far more difficult, in Rob's words, than the Duckworth-Lewis method of determining the winner in a rain-effected game!) As well as taking into consideration the strength of the opposition and playing conditions, the ranking system places a greater emphasis on recent performances. The overall system has a number of feed-back loops - the individual player ratings contribute to a team's rating, which effects how many rating points an opposition player can earn against that team - remember, a score of 50 against tough opposition will be worth more than 50 against low-class opponents. Similarly, how each player in a match performs influences how many points are on offer. For example, a score of 45 out of an overall team score of 100 will be more highly valued than a score of 45 out of 450. As such, large amounts of historical data are used to come up with the final numbers. Limited overs cricket has the additional dimension of strike-rate - a batsman who scores his runs quickly will be rated more highly than a slow scorer.

The system was first developed in 1987 by Eastaway with former English cricketer Ted Dexter and colleague Gordon Vince, and at first the system was greeted with scepticism by many cricket lovers. Nowadays, however, it has gained credibility and has even been used by international cricketers to help negotiate their contracts - for example, Michael Bevan was for a long time rated number one in the One Day International version of the rankings and used this in contract negotiations, however he could not secure a Test spot. Known originally as the Deloittes Ratings and in later years the PwC Ratings, the system was officially adopted by the International Cricket Council in January 2005.

With a background in Operations Research and a love of cricket, Eastaway is essentially my idol! You can read more about the maths of his system in his article Howzat in Plus Magazine.

As many of the equations used in this system are now copyrighted, you can't find the exact algorithms published anywhere. However, if you are a big nerd like me, you might like the book Deloitte Ratings: The Complete Guide to Test Cricket in the Eighties by Marcus Berkmann. The book details the ratings changes after each Test series in the 80s, and the appendix contains many of the equations which underpin the system. I was given this book when I was 10 and didn't much understand it back then, but I was very happy to find it in storage when I returned from the UK, and I now find it a maths-cricket-nerd's delight!

I'm fascinated to know if they come up with something for Twenty 20. The ultra-shortened form of the game brings in loads more complexities, not least of which is that unless you are an opening batsman, you may not even get a bat! Here's hoping Australia can win the World Twenty20 - oh and The Ashes! If only I was in the UK this summer!

I hope you enjoy this podcast - however, please note there are some audio issues. I had a great chat with Rob in a cafe in London, however my recording equipment was set on the wrong setting and so captured a lot more background noise than I had hoped! So please hang in there - this was one of my very favourite interviews. Rob is a fascinating person and had some really interesting observations on maths and sport. I really shouldn't have gone to The Chemical Brothers the night before, I probably would have had the microphone on the right setting!

Listen to this podcast here:

Biometrics - Securing the Border

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:51:45 PDT

Back in 2007 I interviewed Associate Professor Stephanie Schuckers from Clarkson University for the Spoofing Biometric Security Systems article and podcast. Last week I attended the 2009 Border Security Conference in Melbourne and one of the major topics discussed was the role of biometrics in securing the border. It reminded me that I never actually published my full article on biometrics on Mr Science, so without further ado, here is an intro to biometrics, the role it plays in border security, and some of the controversies associated with it.

Can you control everything that is carried through an airport or onto a plane? Most of us are familiar with metal detectors, and the long queues that accompany checking-in. But new technologies are hoping to not only decrease the time you wait before jetting off on holiday, but also more tightly control what, and who, is taken onboard.

However, whilst this sounds like a marvellous plan, appealing to every world-weary explorer, business traveller or family with screaming kids, there is a certain amount of debate associated with the technologies at the core of the strategy.

The approach is founded on the evolving concept of biometrics, the study of methods for identifying people based upon their physical or behavioural traits. The concern is that, to be identified by these means, there must somewhere be a database of our personal traits. The technology could potentially allow us to be identified out of a crowd without our consent. Is this storage of information a breach of our civil liberties? Should we always be being watched? Or is this technology simply too crucial for law enforcement not to pursue?

Old and New Technology:

The word biometrics comes from the Greek words bio and metric, meaning “life measurement”. It is the study of methods for identifying people based on their behavioural or physical characteristics and includes well-known methods such as fingerprint analysis, which is used on every visitor entering the US, as well as retinal and iris scans, facial and voice recognition techniques, and behavioural recognition procedures that can identify you by your walk.

Airports have always been very concerned about their security. Let's have a look at some of the technologies currently being used, and investigate the progression from old-fashioned x-ray machines, to modern biometric tools.

Metal Detectors and X-Rays:

On checking in, every traveller in every airport around the world walks through a metal detector. Metal detectors work by electromagnetic induction – changing magnetic fields cause changing electric fields in metals, and vice versa. When a piece of metal is near the changing magnetic field being produced by the detector, electrical currents are induced in the metal, which then produces an alternating magnetic field of its own. This new magnetic field can then be detected and is why you need to remove metal objects like your belt when you walk through airport security.

Whilst you are walking through the metal detector, your bags are passing through an X-ray machine. As they move along the conveyor belt, X-rays, which are electromagnetic waves like light but much more energetic, are shone on the luggage. Many of the X-rays pass through unblocked by your suitcase and its contents, and detectors on the other side of your luggage measure how many of these X-rays make it through. By knowing that different things absorb different energy X-rays, a picture of your bag’s contents can be built up.

Explosives and Drug Detection:

Dogs have been used to sniff for explosives and drugs for many years, but it was only in 2003 that Explosive trace detection was introduced at Sydney airport. This system employs Ion Mobility Spectrometry. Firstly, a sample is taken by wiping a swab on your luggage or clothes. The swab is placed in the detector, and the sample is ionised – converted from its molecular form into its ionic (charged) form. The ions are separated by an electric field – different mass ions move at different speeds towards the detector, and so the time taken to arrive at the detector tells us if the telltale explosive, or drug, signature is present.

Another new method of explosive detection is terahertz spectroscopy. This technique uses radiation with a frequency between microwave and infrared, and can be more useful that X-rays as, although both X-rays and terahertz radiation can see through material, terahertz rays are non-ionising and so harmless to humans. They can also probe for chemical information, rather than just physical shape information, as many molecular excitations are within the terahertz frequency band.

Andrew Burnett, terahertz spectroscopy expert at the University of Leeds, says that the information obtained from terahertz spectroscopy is more sensitive than other radiation:

“This information is very specific, even allowing us to differentiate between different forms of the same drug… The aim is to eventually produce a system that gives us chemical specific information through clothing.”

Fingerprint analysis:

Fingerprint analysis is the oldest form of biometric identification, and is still regarded as one of the most reliable. Every visitor to the US has his or her fingerprint read on entry through an airport.

A fingerprint is an impression of the raised areas of epidermis – called friction ridges – on your finger, and everyone’s fingerprints are unique. You leave your fingerprints behind on things you touch by depositing the natural secretions – mainly water – from the eccrine glands in the friction ridge skin. These are called latent, which means hidden, fingerprints. If contaminants on the skin are also left behind, such as dirt, then they are called patent fingerprints. Patent fingerprints are easily seen by the human eye and so can be photographed and then identified as they are. Latent fingerprints are made visible by electronic, chemical and physical processing techniques such as “dusting” a crime scene.

Fingerprint analysis was traditionally completed manually by comparing the fingerprint with ink fingerprints on paper. As you can imagine, this was a very time consuming task. Modern day techniques are able to match fingerprints by using computerised databases.

An interesting fact is that the koala is one the few mammals that also has fingerprints.

Iris and Retina Recognition:

Iris scans look for patterns based on high-resolution camera images of the iris, whose intricate structure is unique to the person. Identification is unambiguous and as long as you do not damage your eye during your life, your iris scan will not change. The technology has been employed at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands since 2001 to allow passport-free travel. The United Arab Emirates has such systems at all 17 air, land and seas ports.

Retinal recognition is slightly different, as the scan maps the capillaries feeding blood to the retina. These blood vessels absorb light more readily than the surrounding tissue, and when a ray of low-energy infrared light is shone into the eye, the reflection of the light, which depends on the capillaries, is measured. Even identical twins have different retinal scans, and like iris recognition, your retinal scan will stay the same throughout your life.

Facial Recognition:

Facial Recognition is a relatively new technology that compares facial features in the live image with those in a database. The Australian Customs Service’s SmartGate system compares the face of the examined with their image on their ePassport microchip, and replaced manual passport checks for Qantas staff in 2003.

Facial recognition is the way forward for the aviation industry, with the International Civil Aviation Organisation issuing a resolution endorsing the use of face recognition as the:

“globally interoperable biometric for machine assisted identity confirmation with machine-readable travel documents.”

Voice Recognition:

These days, it seems every time you call up your phone company or book a cab, you talk to a machine. These systems are based around voice recognition technology.

Clive Summerfield, biometrics and voice recognition expert, and CEO of Three S Holdings Pty Ltd in Canberra, thinks that over the next five years, voice biometrics will eclipse iris and facial scans and become second only in market share to fingerprinting systems.

“Voice recognition, when configured correctly, is 10 times more accurate that face, 2-3 time more accurate than fingerprint and approaching the performance of iris.”

Passports:

A new Australian passport, the biometric ePassport, was introduced in 2005 and has an embedded microchip that stores the holder’s photograph, name, gender, date of birth, nationality, passport number, and expiry date. European countries are currently issuing passports that have the owner’s photograph and fingerprints on the chip. The US passport has a chip that is big enough to store additional biometric information such as facial recognition and retinal scan information.

Will biometrics really shorten airport queues?

Even if these new technologies work perfectly inside the airport, they will not shorten check-in queues if the public does not like them or cannot use them. M. Angela Sasse, Professor of Human-Centred Technology at University College London, researches the usability of security systems and concludes that even if a system works well, it will not gain approval if it is not easy to use or looks unpleasant. A recent iris scan trial at Heathrow airport, in which participants could not adjust the height of the scanners, and a recent US airport trial, in which dirty fingerprint readers were used, are examples of poorly designed systems.

“You should design all the processes the traveller encounters to be as easy and pleasant as possible … Make sure the system is clean and pleasant to use.”

The ethics and future of biometrics:

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world, and estimates have valued identity-related crime as a $2 trillion problem. Biometrics is seen as a potent weapon in the fight against identity theft, however the concern surrounding biometrics is that there must somewhere be a database of your traits. Could someone steal this information? The common fear is that once your fingerprint or retinal information is stolen, it is compromised for life, as these patterns never change.

What differentiates biometrics from other forms of security is that there must be a match between the “live” biometric scan, and the “stored” information. Unless an identity-stealer has recreated your facial expressions or other biometric information to the minutest detail, they will not be able to pass through security.

Mathew James, Managing Director of UK Biometrics Ltd., says that the fingerprinting technology used by UK Biometrics is ethically sound as a biometric thief is likely to just end up with a bunch of useless numbers:

“We do not store fingerprints and it is impossible to recreate a fingerprint from the data we store. Our scanners register up to 17 minutiae points on a fingerprint, convert these into data which is then encrypted for future comparison. Even if this data were stolen, the thief would have a lot of meaningless numbers, useless without the scanner and its attendant technology.”

Whilst biometric technologies may tightly safeguard information, desperate thieves can, however, always find a way. In 2005, Malaysian car thieves cut off the finger of a Mercedes-Benz S-Class owner when attempting to steal his car so that they could use his fingerprints to start the vehicle. And the popular television show MythBusters broke into a secured building with a photocopied fingerprint.

Stephanie Schuckers, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University, conducts research into how to prevent fingerprinting systems from being spoofed by creating fake fingerprints out of such materials as Play-Doh, and thinks that biometric security systems are an improvement on traditional methods, even if there may be some vulnerabilities.

“I try to caution people to ask, what is your security question and what is your solution now, and does biometrics improve this in terms of whatever your goals may be – convenience, improved security. Just because there is a vulnerability – well all security systems have a vulnerability – it doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily a technology that might (not) be useful.”

Schuckers raises the example of a passport, and says that by adding a biometric element, you take a step forward to improved security.

“The current state of passports is a photo that may be 10 years old and a guy looking at you to see if it matches. Would adding a fingerprint improve the security at the borders? I would argue that that would be a step above the present technology. Can someone somehow slip a thin fake finger over their hand? Sure. That’s the state of the technology now, but you’ve made steps to improved technology.”

She believes that whilst there may be some vulnerability in biometric systems, they can be overcome by a combination of systems that would make it extremely difficult for the identity stealer to be successful.

“You can make it more difficult for someone to spoof the system by combining say a fingerprint, a card, and a PIN. So now your potential identity stealer would have to have all of those items to access the bank account… There are very simple steps that you can take now with commercially available devises that would minimise the risks”

Whether or not identity theft is likely or even possible, biometric systems are more and more being within society, with facial recognition software used in Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) all over the UK. Is this a breach of our privacy? Should Big Brother track our every move?

Schuckers believes that these are serious questions that need to be addressed by society, but that they also open up research areas to maintain the security of your personal information.

“I think those are reasonable questions that we need to ask as a society. What applications are meaningful that you would take the trade-off between privacy and the extra security you might get using the biometrics? I also see it as a research avenue. There are a lot of people researching ways to use biometric information in such a way that doesn’t actually give up your private information.”

Clive Summerfield sees the issue as a legal one, revolving around privacy and storage of sensitive personal information, as opposed to the technical challenge of safeguarding the information.

“At the end of the day, I think this will become a legal issue, where the privacy, protection and confidentiality of such information becomes legislated and that senior executives of organisations collecting, using, communicating and storing biometric information will become legally responsible for any breaches, along with biometric systems developers, implementers and vendors, who will be required to certify that their system implements the functions necessary to protect the biometric information.”

He draws a parallel with the postal service, in which stealing a letter is a federal crime, and thus protects the confidentiality of the contents of letters. There is a similar law regarding eavesdropping on telephone conversations, and these systems are widely accepted by society, despite the fact that there is little or no technological protection of information conveyed in these ways.

“Similar legal protection needs to be in place for biometrics for the mainstream of society to start to access biometrics… Anyway, I’m no legal expert – so how you go about implementing such laws, I’ll need to leave to the legal experts!”

Another concern is the storage of personal information on a single chip in your passport. Data on the chip can theoretically be stolen using wireless technology, and even if the information is encrypted, experiments in the Netherlands showed that the Dutch passport encryption could be cracked within two hours. Whilst you would never be able to set up the sensitive equipment to steal the information in our ever-more secure airports, the same could not be said about hotels and other places where you need your passport.

Mathew James thinks that in any situation in which there is a need to make sure of a person’s identity, there is a future for biometrics:

“Think of the number of keys, swipe cards, prox fobs and PINs that keep a modern airport secure. They can all be replaced by the one key which cannot be lost, stolen, forged or hacked – the human fingerprint. People can be added to, or deleted from, the system in seconds. Security staff can ‘access all areas’ without carrying a bunch of keys and passengers need only ever register once.”

As for biometric passports?

“We see a future where the only passport you will ever need will be your fingerprint, registered once in your home country.”

Correlation of the Week: Zombies, Vampires, Democrats and Republicans

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:57:36 PDT

A friend of mine recently pointed me in the direction of an article in signonsandiego.com called With Obama election comes the return of the vampire. This article puts forward the theory that more vampire movies come out when Democrats are elected to the US Presidency, and more zombie movies come out when the Republicans are in office.

Recent evidence of this is the new Twilight vampire flick - coinciding with the election of Democrat Obama - and the spate of zombie films during George W. Bush's presidency - for example 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later and Dawn of the Dead. The original article looks back in time at various presidencies and it makes compelling reading.

What is the reason behind this (if there really is one)? One argument put forward is that the movies depict what we fear at the time. Democrats, who believe in redistributing wealth among the people, fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry. Vampires, such as Dracula, represent the aristocracy. Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and disenfranchised, and as such fear zombies.

But, is there any truth to this argument? Let's turn to the data. The easiest way to determine the number of vampire and zombie films which have come out over the last 50 years is to look at The Internet Movie Database. Using its power search, I was able to find the number of movies (not TV-movies , TV-shows or direct-to-video movies, but only big screen movies - imagine trying to quantify every TV-show ever made, not even imdb is that complete) made each year in the US since 1953 (a seemingly good point to start this analysis as there is plenty of data about the movies made in this time - it's also the presidency of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower), as well as the number of movies tagged "vampire" and "zombie". You can see this data in the following table, where the year is the starting year of the presidency:

We've plotted the number of zombie and vampire films produced as a percentage of all films produced that presidential term in the US:

A stand out result is the large number of zombie films made in the 1980s under Reagan. It seems clear that zombie films peak in Republican years, but it is less clear whether vampire films have similar peaks under Democrats.

Indeed, the average percentage of movies that are zombie-themed produced during a Democratic presidency is 0.372%, whilst under the Republicans it is 0.571% - this is a large difference. The average percentage of movies that are vampire-themed produced during a Democratic presidency is 0.544%, whilst under the Republicans it is 0.491% - the percentage moves in the direction of our theory, but not by much.

Using a single-tailed Student's t-test (named after its inventor William Sealy Gosset, whose nom de plume was Student - I thought at school that it was named this because it was used by students, anyway...) to test between the null-hypothesis that the governing party makes no difference to the types of movies made and the theories that zombie movies go up under Republicans and vampire movies under Democrats, we find the t-statistic for the zombie case to be -1.69 which gives a p-value 5.7%. What this means is that there is a 5.7% chance that there is no significant difference between the zombie results under Democrats and Republicans. This is very close to the 5% level most statisticians accept for significance, and as such is a very intriguing result.

For the vampire case, our p-value is 33% and so there is little chance of significance. Both tests could be improved with more data (what every statistician needs!)

In summary, there just might be something in this (for the zombies anyway.) There is an almost significant difference between the percentage of zombie movies made under Democrats and Republicans. To predict the next election, it could well be worth looking at how many zombie movies are planned for the inauguration year and the 3 years after it. As most movies are planned more than a year ahead of time, this could be an interesting election predictor.

I guess we now know where George W. Bush's brains went! Brains.....

Ep 106: The Global Financial Crisis - The Mathematical Causes

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:55:13 PDT

This week on the podcast we are tackling something dear to all our hearts, money.

The Global Financial Crisis has hit many people hard, with the resultant economic recession causing job losses, stock market crashes and company failures. But what started it all? Why are we in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

I spoke to Nick Davis from the World Economic Forum to answer some of these questions and to toss up ideas on how we might emerge from the crisis. The World Economic Forum is an independent international organisation committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Nick is based in Geneva, Switzerland and is Associate Director and a Global Leadership Fellow within the World Economic Forum Scenario Planning Team. The team examines possible world scenarios that could arise in the future. The scenarios are not attempts to predict the future; rather, they aim to sketch the boundaries of the plausible. They explore the possibly diverse eventualities of how the world might look if the most uncertain and important drivers unfold in different ways. Some of the scenarios they have looked at include the world's ageing population, the future of engineering and construction and what the world's economic systems might look like post-crisis.

Nick has worked extensively in understanding the causes of the global economic crisis and chatted to me down the phone from Geneva. It should be noted that the opinions he expressed are his and not necessarily those of the World Economic Forum.

Listen to this podcast here:

We noted a number of causes of the crisis, including the fact that the world financial system was metastable - that is, before the crisis it was at a delicate equilibrium and susceptible to collapse. The factors that built this metastability included:

A worldwide expansion of credit since 1980 - money became cheap as international monetary policy kept interest rates low. Essentially, you could borrow heaps of money from within your own country and outside of it, and lots of people were giving out loans;
The subprime mortgage crisis - a large percentage of housing buyers in the US could not securely finance their property loans;
The false assumption that housing prices always go up and the notion that we should all become homeowners - this created a housing bubble;
Globalisation - more and deeper connections between institutions were created. This meant that when one company went down, it would trigger a collapse like a house of cards;
Securitisation of home loans to make them tradeable. This meant the inherent risk that banks take on when they give out a loan was spread across many financial instruments, all across the world. This obscured the level of risk people were holding. Even rating agencies got the risk levels wrong. Here is where the maths comes in - and we got it wrong.

So what we did we get wrong with the mathematical models? For a start, they assumed a high level of liquidity, which means that it was assumed that whenever you wanted to trade, you could find someone to trade with . But this was not true - companies were unable to trade their securitised mortgages due to a loss of investor confidence, and so they were stuck with assets with falling value. Homeowners also found this when the bubble burst.

The models also used normal distributions of stock market movements. What's wrong with this, you may ask. Well, the world of finance unfortunately doesn't work this way. It is worth here noting the distinction between risk, which is something we can model, and uncertainty, which is more difficult. You can fit a probability curve to risk based on past experience - for example, you toss a coin, bet on tails but heads come up. You took a quantifiable risk. Uncertainty refers however to things you can't even predict.

Nick used the examples of Mediocristan and Extremistan to illustrate the difference between risk and uncertainty. In Mediocristan, everything fits nicely under a bell curve. Extreme events are so rare that we can essentially ignore them. For example, if you surveyed 1000 people and plotted their weights, you would come up with something like a normal distribution. If you then found the heaviest person on Earth, he would be to the far right of our curve, but not so much that the normal distribution fit would become inappropriate. Finance, however, does not work this way. Imagine you surveyed the incomes of 1000 people. This may also look like a normal distribution - but then take the richest man on Earth and look at what it does to the distribution. Bill Gates would probably earn more than everyone you sampled put together. This is Extremistan. The worlds were the inventions of Nassim Nicholas Taleb who came up with the idea of the Black Swan. The name comes from the idea that before black swans were discovered, everyone thought swans were white - they had no reason to think otherwise. This is an example of uncertainty as you can not quantify the probability of finding a black swan when you don't even know they exist.

It's very difficult to deal with black swan events - like in Extremistan when we discovered someone a million times richer than anyone we have ever seen. The mathematical models dealing with securitised mortgages attempted to model risk in a far too simple way and did not take into account the uncertainty of the entire housing market collapsing (many defaulting on their loans at once - our black swan). The fact that uncertainty is so difficult to model is why we have the World Economic Forum Scenario Planning Team!

Listen to this podcast here:

And for all the Nick Davis fans out there, check out his blog Managing Uncertainty and watch the following video of Nick in action for the World Economic Forum. Thanks again Nick!

There is more from the World Economic Forum and the Global Financial Crisis on youtube here.

The Muppets are responsible!

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:34:30 PDT

Having spent the night browsing around youtube, it seems to me that The Muppets might have some explaining to do re bird flu and swine flu.

Bird flu, or more specifically Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, is considered a significant pandemic threat. It is passed between birds in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces, and past outbreaks in humans have started in crowded conditions, where humans and chickens live in close quarters. In these conditions the virus is more likely to mutate into a form that can infect humans. It is thought that some of the humans who have died from bird flu were cock fighters who sucked the mucus from the bird's beak before a fight. There are some suspected cases of human-to-human transfer.

Keeping this in mind, check out what the Swedish Chef is doing to this poor turkey. He is not only kissing it, but prodding it rather inappropriately with his skewer and exposing himself to the turkey's body fluids...

Swine flu is a new strain of Influenza A virus subtype H1N1. H1N1 is the most common cause of influenza (flu) in humans. The new strain seems to be a new mix of the genetic material of the human influenza, swine influenza and avian influenza viruses. One of the reasons why this new flu is considered a significant threat is that it is now being spread human to human. This contrasts bird flu which was almost entirely animal to human. As the strain is new, we have no natural immunity, nor are we vaccinated against it, so there is a considerable threat of a pandemic. Currently we are not sure if the virus originated in pigs, humans or birds. Check out this video of Miss Piggy, she does sneeze and spread her flu around a lot - I think she might have been the source!

So essentially the major flu outbreaks of the 20th Century are due to The Muppets. Not to mention the rats they have running all over the place, I'm sure they had something to do with the Plague...

How to get your dose of The Mr Science Show

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:46:18 PDT

Facebook and twitter are the online social networks of choice at the moment, so who are we to buck the trend? If you are a member of Facebook, you can now "become a fan" of The Mr Science Show. Visit our page on Facebook by clicking here. Here we will update the Facebook world of The Mr Science Show news, views and events. Looking forward to seeing you there!

You can also find us on twitter, the micro-blogging phenomenon, under the username @marcwestius - although you'll get all my personal musings too! If you'd just like the site RSS updates through twitter, you can do that also here.

And remember, you can grab the show through itunes here and via email here. Or if you don't want any of that fancy-stuff and have your own favourite feed/podcast reader, simply subscribe to the RSS site feed.

The Clean Industrial Revolution by Ben McNeil - book launch

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:22:34 PDT

Last night I attended the launch of Ben McNeil's new book, The Clean Industrial Revolution. I spoke to Ben a little while back in Episode 103 about climate change science and policy. Ben's background is in the science of climate change, and over the last few years he has moved from what he describes as the "diagnosis" of climate change into the "cure". The book is about how a new clean industrial revolution will not only go a long way to solving our climate change problems, but also boost economic prosperity.

Ben's argument is that economic opportunities will open up if Australia leads the clean industrial revolution, as investing in, commercialising and exporting new fuels, materials and technologies will secure Australia’s economic future. This road will make money as well as securing environmental sustainability.

Naturally enough I haven't had the chance to read the book yet, as it only came out last night, but Ben did sign it for me!

The book was launched by the former Liberal party leader and economist John Hewson. Hewson made a really interesting speech about the economic opportunities that could await were Australia to embrace clean forms of energy. He argued that although some jobs in old-fashioned carbon-burning industries may disappear, the market opened up by clean energy will create more jobs than those lost. What I found really interesting was that Hewson, a former conservative politician, was finding fault with the current Labor Government's Emmisions Trading Scheme (which IMHO is weak), but this Labor policy is stronger than the policy of his own former party. Hewson advocates a 40% reduction in carbon output by 2020 with the aim of a 90% reduction by 2050 - I can not imagine if Hewson was still in politics that he would have this opinion, unless he jumped from the Libs, passed Labor and joined the Greens! He made many comments about the powerful "pollution lobby" - those industries that are heavy polluters, such as aluminium smelting - and how they can apply a lot of pressure to governments, however if Hewson were in government, I'm sure he would have to face the political reality of his conservative party, many of whose members are climate change deniers. I think Hewson has done the opposite to Peter Garrett, former President of the Australian Conservation Foundation who is now Minister for the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Despite being one of Australia's most vocal environmental activists throughout the 1980s and 90s, these days he can not seem to take a stand on any environmental issue. He entered main-stream politics to make more of a difference but nowadays must really feel shackled by party politics!

You can read Hewson's position in his article A Carbon Economy, and The Clean Industrial Revolution is published by Allen and Unwin. Hopefully we'll get Ben on the show again and chat about his book - unfortunately last time the book was still embargoed. Ben described that interview as "his favourite to date", which is very cool!

Ep 105: Music and Intelligence

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:27:00 PDT

This week's podcast is about a recent study that correlated intelligence with music choice - it won our new regular prize Correlation of the Week!

You can read more about this study in the original Mr Science post on the topic put out in March 2009 - Correlation of the Week: Intelligence and Music Preference

Listen to his podcast here:

Mr Science over at the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:20:01 PDT

A little while back in our 99th episode, we discussed the 6 unknown mysteries of our solar system. This show has recently been played in the 365 days of astronomy podcast, which is a project that publishes one astronomy-themed podcast per day for all 365 days of 2009. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, which is described as a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.

Two-up - an ANZAC Tradition

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:44:04 PDT

It's an Australian tradition on ANZAC Day to take yourself down to your local pub and play Two-up - an Aussie gambling game in which you toss two coins in the air and bet on the outcome.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that even though I am only a month away from turning 30, this year was the first time I've ever actually gambled on two-up.

It's not a game that is played very often, despite being iconically Australian - according to the GAMBLING (TWO-UP) ACT 1998, outside of casinos it is only legal to play two-up on commemorative days like ANZAC Day (unless you're in Broken Hill, where the local council can legally arrange a two-up game any day of the year).

The rules of two-up are pretty simple. The Spinner places two coins (traditionally pennies) on a small piece of wood (the kip) and tosses the coins into the air. In the version of two-up we played at the pub, the gambling was very simple. Players standing around the Spinner either gambled on HEADS - which is where both coins come up heads - or TAILS - which is where both coins come up tails. If a head and a tail come up, the coins are tossed again and no one wins or loses. To bet, you find someone else willing to gamble the same amount but opposite to you, and then you have a one-on-one contest. If you want to bet $10 on HEADS, then you find someone willing to bet $10 on TAILS, and if you win you get their $10 - if you lose, you hand over $10. It's very simple and I love its inbuilt honour system.

The probabilities involved are simple too - you have a 50% chance of winning each time you bet. At the start of our ANZAC day down in Balmain, most people were betting $5. By the end of the day, as more beers were consumed, many were betting $50 and $100. Gambler's Ruin also started to show it's head - many people think that by doubling your bet after you lose you can get yourself back into the game. This doesn't work in this form of two-up for a couple of reasons. The first is that you need to find someone willing to bet the same amount as you, which is increasingly unlikely the larger you want to bet. And secondly, unless you have unlimited funds (or strictly speaking, more than everyone else you could bet against - or the casino if you are gambling there), it is highly unlikely that you could continually bet without going out backwards.

Two-up is also played in casinos and other gambling houses, and not just on ANZAC day. The rules, as you would expect from such institutions, are not so simple. In this expanded form of the game, there are a number of ways to bet. The South Australian Government has a good guide to two-up play, but simply put:

Players can bet in the following ways:

1) HEADS - odds of 1/1 ($1 bet pays $2, including your original $1);
2) TAILS - odds of 1/1;
3) 5 consecutive ODDS - odds of 25/1 ($1 bet pays $26).

The Spinner can bet in the following ways:

1) 3 HEADS are thrown before TAILS is thrown and before 5 consecutive ODDS are thrown - odds of 7.5/1 ($1 bet pays $8.50);
2) 3 TAILS are thrown before HEADS is thrown and before 5 consecutive ODDS are thrown - odds of 7.5/1.

This makes the game a little bit more interesting. The Wizard of Odds website for two-up sets out the probabilities for each of these outcomes - let's derive where they come from. At each toss of the kip, for this analysis it is best to think of there being 3 possible outcomes - HEADS, TAILS or 5 consecutive ODDS. We think of it this way because if a single ODDS is thrown, it is re-thrown and only makes a difference if it is one of five in a row.

Player Odds:

As you can see, the House is paying out as if the odds are better than they actually are. It's not much, but this is how they make their money.

Spinner Odds:

Again we can see, the House is not paying enough for a win - the odds should be 7.8 to 1, rather than 7.5 to 1. However, were you to back HEADS on each throw rather than as the group of three, the house would offer you odds of 7 to 1 (this is left as an exercise for the reader...), so the spinner's bet is better.

As it turns out, I came out even at the end of the day! There's some more maths to be had here - sometime soon we might take a look at some of these pay-out distributions.

Ep 104: Invasion Genetics

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:15:00 PDT

Dr Katarina Mikac works in an area of science with a fantastic name - Invasion Genetics.

Invasion Genetics is an area of molecular ecology. Molecular ecology is the study of how organisms interact with their environment from a molecular point of view - that is, it examines the roles of DNA and genetics in how species adapt to their environments. It's also part of the larger field of evolutionary biology which looks at the origins of species and how they evolve over time.

Specifically, invasion genetics tracks the movements of invasive species using their DNA - you can't put tracking devices on insects!

One of Katarina's research areas is the Khapra bettle - the world's most destructive seed-eating pest. The beetle feeds on grain and seed kernels, and can decimate storage systems. In fact, heavy infestations can destroy thousands of kilos of stored grain in a matter of weeks. However, it is not present in Australia and this is where Katarina comes in. Australia plays host to the khapra's sister species, from which it is virtually indistinguishable, but by using DNA fingerprinting, Katarina is aiming to develop a species identification test which could identify the beetle at airports and stop it from coming into the country. Another aim is to investigate the sister beetle's genetic diversity and gene flow in order to understand its distribution and movement patterns. This will lead to better understanding of the consequences of the inadvertent introduction of the khapra beetle.

Katarina's current work is on the population genetics of the invasive Western Corn Rootworm which destroys corn if left untreated. In the United States, it is estimated that 30 million acres of corn (out of 80 million grown) are infested andvthat Corn Rootworms cause $1 billion in lost revenue each year.

In 2007, Katarina won the 2007 Science and Innovation Award for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for her work on the Khapra bettle and is just about to leave our shores for a series of conferences in Germany and Croatia on the Western Corn Rootworm - good luck Kata!

Listen to his podcast here:

The Hand of God

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:51:00 PDT

With Easter coming up and all sorts of religiosity going on, here are a couple of heavenly photos from space. The first, looking spookily like a hand, comes from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. At the centre of this image is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing out energy to create the shapes we see in this photo, including the one that resembles a large blue hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic are blue. The pulsar is only around 20 kilometres in diameter but the nebula spans 150 light years. For more amazing photos from Chandra, check out their flickr gallery. This image came out on April 3 2009.

The second is one you may have seen before - perhaps in a spam email. It has been dubbed The Eye of God and was featured on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day in 2003. It is the Helix Nebula, which is a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. Gasses are expelled into space to make it look like we are looking down a helix. The remaining core glows so much so that it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. It seems God has blue eyes and a lot of redness around the outside, suggesting he stayed out a little too long the previous night.

One of these days someone should put together all these images so we can finally find out what He looks like. Looking forward to someone spotting the beard in space one day...

Ep 103: Climate Science and Policy

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:26:51 PDT

In last week's show on Earth Hour, we had a quick chat to Dr. Ben McNeil, a Senior Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre in the University of New South Wales, about the current state of knowledge on climate change and some of the policies that Australia and the world could implement to tackle the problem. This week I am putting up the longer, more wide-ranging interview I had with Ben on all things climate change. Ben is a very impressive young scientist and one of Australia's renowned climate experts, so tune in to hear about the latest climate change science as well as the current thinking and policy development going into the issue.

After completing his PhD in 2001, Ben worked as a research fellow at Princeton University before taking up his post at UNSW. In 2007, he was chosen as an expert reviewer for the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change and briefed his work to the Prime Minister. He was also recently elected to represent young scientists in the Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies.

Ben's first book, The Clean Industrial Revolution, will be published in May 2009. In this book he discusses the particular challenges Australia faces regarding climate change. Per capita, Australia is one of the most carbon obese countries in the developed world. Our economy is highly dependent upon carbon exports as well as high rates of energy consumption. But Australia is also environmentally fragile - the soils are poor and the rainfall uncertain. If the world starts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Australia will be caught in a trap - our exports will not be acceptable on the international market, and our agriculture will decline due to the effects of climate change. We couldn't talk too much about the book due to an embargo by the publishers, so stay tuned, we'll have another chat later on in the year!

Listen to his podcast here:

Ep 102: Earth Hour

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:50:50 PDT

Earth Hour is a WWF initiative where individuals, businesses and governments turn off their lights for one hour to show their support for action on climate change. It is a symbolic event designed to engage people in the climate change discussion in order to send a strong message to political leaders that we want them to take meaningful action on climate change. It claims to be the largest climate event in history and it is hoped that one billion people around the world will participate - not bad for an event that started quite small in Sydney a few years back!

The focus of Earth Hour 2009 is the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in December in Copenhagen. This conference will create a post-Kyoto Protocol international agreement to tackle climate change. This year, Earth Hour takes place on Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 8:30 pm-local time. Just like New Years Eve, Earth Hour will travel from time zone to time zone starting at 8:30pm in New Zealand.

This week on the podcast I chat to the Mayor of Willoughby City Council in Sydney, Councillor Pat Reilly, about the Earth Hour activities his council is putting on and how Willoughby is combating climate change. Interesting points include:

The Council is launching its ClimateClever campaign at the festival;
Willoughby is committed to assisting its community to reduce its carbon footprint by at least 15% from 2006 levels by the end of 2015 - far better than the Australian federal government targets of a reduction of 5% by 2020;
The Council itself is aiming to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 1999 levels by the end of 2010.

In the second half of the podcast, I talk to Dr Ben McNeil, a Senior Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre in the University of New South Wales. This interview is a cut-down version of a longer one I will put out in the coming weeks. Ben is a highly impressive young scientist who, after completing his PhD in 2001, worked as a research fellow at Princeton University before taking up his post at UNSW. In 2007, he was chosen as an expert reviewer for the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change and briefed his work to the Prime Minister. Ben and I chatted climate change science, policy and energy.

Listen to his podcast here:

I'd also like to make a comment about an opinion piece that came out today in The Australian newspaper Hour of no power increases emissions by Bjørn Lomborg, who is the director of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre. Lomborg is a controversial bloke - check out his wikipedia page - who opposes the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argues that we should adapt to short-term temperature rises and spend money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions.

He said in the article:

"Unfortunately, this event - as with many public proposals on climate change - is an entirely symbolic gesture that creates the mistaken impression that there are easy, quick fixes to climate change.... Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China's emissions for six short seconds.... The campaign doesn't ask anybody to do anything difficult, such as coping without heating, airconditioning, telephones, the internet, hot food or cold drinks."

Well, he is correct in a practical sense, but for me he misses the point of the whole exercise. Of course Earth Hour in itself doesn't much reduce emissions. But by the same token, the 40-Hour Famine doesn't in itself save people living in poverty and starving. Both these exercises are mainly about raising awareness and showing politicians we care about the topic (and to raise some money too). There may be no quick-fix to climate change, but unless we pressure them, politicians and industry representatives won't take the steps needed to develop any solutions at all. In case you haven't noticed, many governments around the world are using the current financial crisis as an excuse not to do anything about climate change. The problem is however, that even if we go into a economic depression for 10 years, climate change is going to be around for hundreds. Governments are so short-sighted and various parts of the community so scared of change that no one is willing to take the plunge to do anything real about climate change. I agree with Lomborg that there are no easy solutions and we must look at longer-term fixes, but unless we get the entire community on-board, then governments have shown that they won't do much - just look at our own Australian government's weak emission targets. Market forces will not solve our climate change problems in time, which is why we need to pressure governments to implement measures such as a carbon-tax and to fund renewable energy projects so that we can make the market work for us, not against us. And we need to convince industry it's nothing to be scared of - various industries were worried that the introduction of OH&S laws in the 1980s would be bad for productivity without seeing that a safe work-place is better for growth as well as staff. Anyway, Earth Hour is about raising awareness and making it impossible for governments and industry to do nothing. End rant.

Correlation of the Week: Intelligence and Music Preference

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:52:07 PDT

The other day I heard loud distorted music approaching from a hotted-up 1986 Holden Calais with mag-wheels and a ridiculously loud sub-woofer and thought:

I wonder what this guy is compensating for, and;
His music taste probably says a lot about his intelligence.

Well, the study has been done. Before we jump into it, it's worth saying that the author of this study, Virgil Griffith from California Tech, makes no claims about correlation equalling causation. He just presents his results and allows us draw our own conclusions. His method of correlating music with intelligence involved:

Find the ten most frequent "favourite music" descriptions at every US college via that college's Network Statistics page on Facebook;
Download the average SAT/ACT score from CollegeBoard for students attending those colleges;
Correlate the Facebook music results with SAT/ACT results and draw your own conclusions on music taste and intelligence.

The artist associated with the highest intelligence, by a clear margin, is Beethoven, whilst some rapper by the name of Lil Wayne seems to be loved by those less blessed in their mental faculties. The study also showed that Counting Crows, Sufjan Stevens, Radiohead and Ben Folds Five appealed to big brains whilst very disappointingly, for me anyway, Beyonce is at the other end of the scale. According to the data, people who listen to "indie" music are the smartest, and the genres come out:

Soca < Gospel < Jazz < Hip Hop < Pop < Oldies < Reggae < Alternative < Classical < R&B < Rap < Rock < Country < Classic Rock < Techno < Indie

It's tempting to think that intelligence has a direct impact on music choice, but this is probably not true - I know plenty of research scientists into Britney Spears. And the reverse - that music-choice influences your intelligence - doesn't make sense either, even though you may be occasionally tempted to think that listening to mindless dance-music makes you stupid. Could there be some drivers that influence both intelligence and music choice? Possibly. You can imagine that socio-economic factors and what you are exposed to whilst growing-up would influence the music you like and how well you do at school. Your parents would be a big influence too - I just can't shake Wet Wet Wet... There are countless possibilities that are best mulled over at the pub.

Whatever the case, I'm heartened by the results! We've already done a story on visualising music tastes using Last.fm, and most of my favourite artists are in the top half of the table with indie my favourite genre. For more on science and music taste, check out the podcast we put out in 2006 - one of the very first Mr Science Show episodes down the phone to China Radio International - called Can Scientists Predict Your Music Taste which looks at how web applications such as Last.fm and Pandora recommend songs to you based on your listening habits.

Griffith's study on music and intelligence comes on the heels of his "books and intelligence" study, in which he correlated book tastes with intelligence again using Facebook data. Harry Potter is the most popular book with The Bible second (for some reason, The Bible and The Holy Bible are different books). Some of the results include:

Lolita is the smartest book;
The Zane series of books are the dumbest - check them out, they seem funny and erotic...
The smartest religious book is The Book of Mormon whilst the dumbest religious book is The Holy Bible;
The dumbest philosophy book is The Five People You Meet In Heaven with the smartest philosophy book Atlas Shrugged.

For more on the book study, check out booksthatmakeyoudumb. And for more on the music study, see musicthatmakesyoudumb. The following picture is one of the ways Griffith visualised his results. See where your favourite artists lie.

So congratulations to Virgil Griffith and your study on music tastes and intelligence, you have won Correlation of the Week - the Flying Spaghetti Monster would be proud!

Ep 101: Molecular Design

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:30:11 PDT

Dr. Luke Hunter is an organic chemist whose chemistry career has been based around molecular design - that is, designing organic molecules through experiment.

I grabbed Luke over a few cocktails and chatted organic chemistry, molecular synthesis and design, and the Hollywood lifestyle that organic chemists lead. This podcast also has our first Correlation of the Week. Listen to his podcast here.

Organic chemistry is a part of chemistry looking at compounds that contain carbon. The original definition of organic chemistry was "the chemistry of life" as it was thought all organic compounds had something to do with life - these days we know that there are many organic processes that have nothing to do with life, as well as many inorganic compounds that are essential for life.

One of Luke's research areas in the School of Chemistry at the University of NSW is to design molecules that can bind with DNA. By designing molecules in this way, it is hoped that drugs which can target particular genetic sequences in DNA can be developed. This could lead to advances in genetics research which could allow us to turn certain genes off and on, and could eventually lead to cures for genetic disorders such as infertility. To do this, Luke goes fishing! Luke dangles a strand of DNA into a soup of organic compounds to see which ones stick. Those that stick have the right shape to bind to DNA and so can then be further investigated. Different strands of DNA can be dangled into the soup - that is, different fishing lines can be used - and in this way, molecules that selectively bind to only one section of DNA can be found.

Luke's other area of interest is Fluorine Chemistry - he worked in this area whilst studying at the University of St Andrews. Again his work was in designing molecules with particular shapes. Knowing the shape of a molecule and how it behaves is very important for designing drugs to fit receptors in the body - when a receptor is bound by a molecule (for example, a drug), biological activity is generated (for example, nerve impulses send a message to your brain). Luke often works with Hydrofluroric acid, a strongly corrosive acid that is so dangerous you need to carry an antidote for it at all times when working with it - this antidote is calcium gluconate. HF burns may not initially be painful but as HF penetrates the skin, it can etch and weaken bones without damaging the skin. It can also be absorbed into blood and react with blood calcium, causing cardiac arrest. This is why calcium gluconate is used - it is a source of Ca²⁺ that sequesters the fluoride ions. If left untreated, amputation may be required.

Luke's PhD was in the total synthesis of a fungus that could be used to kill cancer cells. Total synthesis is the complete chemical synthesis of complex organic molecules from simpler pieces. Synthesising the molecule to selectively target cancerous cells is very difficult and one of the reasons why chemotherapy drugs have such terrible side-effects - they affect not only the cancer cells but other healthy cells.

Whilst it may seem that Luke leads the Hollywood lifestyle, carrying around antidotes to dangerous chemicals and all, Luke is perfectly happy with the relaxed lifestyle of an organic chemist in a white lab-coat:

"Day-to-day I'm wearing a white coat and safety glasses and I'm mixing together different compounds in round bottom flasks - it's not especially glamorous but I enjoy it anyway."

Luke is about to commence a post-doc at the University of Sydney.

The second part of this podcast is our new segment Correlation of the Week - dedicated to bad and funny correlations that make the news. You can read more about this week's correlation in our article from a few days back Correlation of the Week - Shark Attacks and the Global Financial Crisis

Listen to his podcast here:

The Open Laboratory 2008

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:40:26 PST

The 2008 anthology of the best 50 science blog-posts from the year, The Open Laboratory 2008, is now available.

It is the 3rd annual anthology of science blogs with this year's considerably better as it includes one by me! This was quite a nice surprise - I heard about Open Labs at the London Science Blogging Conference and quite a few of the bloggers in attendance were hoping to get in, so I'm quite chuffed - thanks!

There were around 830 submissions narrowed down to 50 essays, one poem and one cartoon. If you missed them first time around, you can still buy the 2006 and the 2007 anthologies. Both of those, as well as the new one, are available in paperback or as a PDF download at lulu.

You can buy the book from lulu - no profits come to me, but go to funding the Science Online science blogging conference.

For what it's worth, my post that made it was one 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 the mainly US audience this book will attract!

The article starts:

It is one of my favourite times of year, and I'm not even European.

The Eurovision Song Contest to Australians is a strange mix of bad 80s music, songs about "joy", "love" and "unity", amazingly good-looking hosts, scantily dressed Eastern Europeans and reality TV winners from Western Europe.

But another reason I love it is because it is about politics and maths. For the first time in my life, living in the UK, I get a chance to vote for the winner and watch it live instead of having to ignore radio reports (of course it's all over the news) till the Sydney Sunday evening replay.

I guess this year I'll be avoiding the news all day so as not to ruin the delayed Sydney SBS coverage! Get over to Plus and read the original article, or even better, buy the book as a PDF or paperback from lulu.

Counting down to Geek Pop

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:39:56 PST

In less than one day now, the Geek Pop 09 Music Festival will kick off.

Geek Pop is a free online music festival that brings together science-inspired artists from around the globe in a gleeful celebration of geek culture. The festivities kick off on the 6th March (UK time) and runs until the 15th as part of National Science and Engineering Week in the UK.

What is great for us geeks who don't reside in the UK is that it is a virtual festival - it is completely online. Sometime later on today the Geek Pop site will be transformed and we’ll have access to geeky music from all over the world, as well as interviews, lyrics for every song and geek chic festival merchandise. There will also be a festival highlights podcast.

To find out a little bit more about Geek Pop, check out the Episode 94 of my podcast, in which I spoke to festival organiser Hayley Birch about the festival, where the idea came from and what type of music we can look forward to.

And check out this youtube advertisement for Geek Pop by molehillmedia - very amusing...

See you there, virtually that is...

A Month of Maths

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:48:07 PST

It must be the geekiest month of the year. March plays host to three days dedicated to mathematics.

At this very moment, parties are raging around the world in celebration of Square Root Day - 03/03/09 (3 being the square root of 9). Square Root Day only occurs 9 times a century - the last time was 02/02/04 and the next time will be 04/04/16. As it's 7 years till the next one, make sure you celebrate hard! There is even a facebook group you can join to connect with fellow square-root fans.

And maths fans are likely to keep their parties going, as the following day, March 4th, is World Maths Day. World Maths Day takes place each year on the first Wednesday in March and is one of the world’s largest educational events. Its aim is to lift numeracy standards and is free of charge for both schools and students. Check out the World Maths Day website for ways to get involved.

Maths fans then get a few days rest before starting up the celebrations again for Pi Day. Pi Day is observed on March 14th (03/14 in the American date format), as

π

is roughly equal to 3.14. Pi Minute is celebrated on March 14 at 1:59 am and Pi Second at March 14 at 1:59:26 am (

π

to seven decimal places is 3.1415926) .

So, before you complain to the police about the loud music coming from your neighbour's place after midnight this month, take a moment to consider that it's probably from a maths party - let them have their fun. We mathematicians don't get invited to many parties...

Ep 100: Your Top 10 Science Stories from 2008

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:46:25 PDT

With 2008 done and dusted, it is now time to look back and reflect on the science year that was. It is also our 100th podcast episode, so I would like to say thanks very much to all my subscribers, whether you get your Mr Science fix via the podcast, email, in an RSS reader, however you do it, thanks! If you have, by some chance, listened to all 100 episodes, then I'd love to hear from you as not even my parents have listened to them all....

The winner of our 2008 year in science competition is... Dr Steven Farrell from Cork in Ireland. Congratulations Steven! Steven won the random draw for suggesting the Large Hadron Collider as his favourite science story from 2008. Thanks to everyone who entered the competition and suggested stories - each story listed below was entered by at least one person. Steven has won the book The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2008 - the book will be published very shortly and will feature one blog by me - I'll put out a post about this when the book comes out, but in the meantime, check out the 2007 version.

Listen to his podcast here - includes short snippets from the music of 2008, plus a couple of shout-outs from friends of the show (thanks Brains Matter and Jacqui Hayes from Diffusion):

Now to the countdown....

10. Weird Animals

2008 was a year for weird science emanating out of Europe:

By analysing 308 pastures on Google Earth, German scientists found that cows have an inner compass and align themselves according to the earth’s magnetic field. Red deer and cows orient themselves on a North-South axis, but it is not known why. The researches hypothesise that it may have something to do with health, milk production or with preparation in case the animals are forced to migrate.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology went to French researchers who discovered that fleas living on a dog can jump higher than fleas living on a cat.

9. Weird Research (impacting our sex lives...)

Two bits of weird science that made the news in 2008 will have quite an impact on our sex lives:

The news that beer goggles are real and that people do look more attractive when we’re drunk really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise;

But the researchers from California who confirmed that the humble roll of sticky tape is a source of x-rays should perhaps concern us. The researchers admit that Soviet scientists had found something along these lines in the 1960's, but still don't know how it works. We should all think twice about wrapping Christmas presents with the tape dispenser close to our nether regions...

8. The Kakeya conjecture

And now for some difficult science, and the work of Zeev Dvir and Australia’s own Terence Tao on the Kakeya conjecture is mind-blowing, if you understand it.

The Kakeya conjecture is part of geometric measure theory and stems from the Kakeya needle problem posed in 1917:

What is the least area in the plane required to continuously rotate a needle of unit length and zero thickness around completely (i.e. by 360 degrees)

For instance, you can rotate a unit needle inside a unit disk, which has area π/4. By using a deltoid one requires only π/8 area. See here for an animation of that rotation.

In 1928, a bloke by the name of Besicovitch showed that in fact you can rotate this needle in an arbitrarily small amount of area – that is, essentially zero area. This seems unintuitive, but is not too difficult to picture. Imagine you have a needle and you slide it along the direction it points for some distance (which costs zero area - remember the needle has zero width). Then turn the needle slightly, which costs a small amount of area, slide it back and turn it slightly again. Then slide up, turn, slide back, turn etc. At each turn you rotate in the opposite direction to the last. If you keep doing this until the needle has completed 360 degrees, the amount of area that has actually been used to turn the needle gets smaller and smaller for smaller and smaller turns at the end of each needle slide. Check out this animation to see this idea in action.

The Kakeya conjecture concerns the fact that you can make this needle turn through arbitrarily small amounts of area, and takes it into higher dimensions (that is, not simply 2 dimensions). Zeev Dvir, who according to Terence Tao produced a “beautifully simple argument”, proved a special case of the conjecture, the finite field Kakeya conjecture.

Perhaps this should have made my mathematics highlights of 2008…

7. The creation of artificial bacteria by Craig Venter

Scientists have discovered a more efficient way of building a synthetic genome that could one day enable them to create artificial life. The method is already being used to help develop next generation biofuels and biochemicals in the labs of controversial US scientist Craig Venter.

Venter has hailed artificial life forms as a potential remedy to illness and global warming, but the prospect is highly controversial and arouses heated debate over its potential ramifications and the ethics of engineering artificial life. The J. Craig Venter Institute succeeded in synthetically reproducing the DNA of a simple bacteria last year.

6. Chandrayaan moon landing by India

India became the first country outside the US and the old USSR to land a spacecraft on the moon. Its lunar orbiting spacecraft Chandrayaan 1 released the Moon Impact Probe, which reached the surface of the Moon on Nov 14 2008. This date was chosen to commemorate the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister who initiated India's space program. Developed in India by the Indian Space Research Organisation, the MIP had the Indian flag painted on its exterior. Although Japan and Europe had previously commanded their orbiters Hiten and SMART-1 to crash on the Moon's surface at the end of their lifetimes, India's MIP was the first probe designed specifically for a trip to the lunar surface since the Soviet lander Luna 24 in 1976.

The Indian MIP-1 probe did not include braking rockets and was destroyed upon impacting the lunar surface at its planned speed of 3,100 miles per hour.

5. Stem Cell Fraud

One of the less savoury aspects of science is fraud. In 2006, South Korean Hwang Woo-suk fabricated stem-cell results in two academic papers, and in 2008, stem-cell fraud again hit the headlines.

Morayma Reyes, a former member of one of the highest-profile teams in stem-cell biology, was found to have falsified results. In 2007, the work of Catherine Verfaillie and researchers from the University of Minnesota became mired in controversy, after magazine New Scientist pointed to irregularities in their published results. An expert panel was examined and it was found that PhD student Morayma Reyes had falsified data.

The fraud is significant as in 2002, the team published a paper in Nature suggesting that a rare type of adult stem cell from bone marrow could give rise to all of the body's tissues. Such versatility had previously been seen only in embryonic stem cells. This was an astounding result and opened the door to creating cell-lines in a more “ethical” manner than using embryos.

4. The Story of HM

The most moving science story from 2008, and certainly some of the best science writing, comes from the New York Times and concerns the life and death of Henry Gustav Molaison, known as HM.

HM knew his name, that his father’s family came from Louisiana and his mother’s from Ireland. He knew of the 1929 stock market crash and World War II, but not much more. He could not remember anything of his life before 1953, when he underwent an experimental brain operation to correct an epileptic seizure disorder. He emerged from the operation with profound amnesia and had lost the ability to form any new memories.

For the next 55 years of his life to 2008, everything he did, from meeting someone, to going for a walk, eating dinner and watching TV, in his mind, it was the first time he had ever done it. And throughout those 55 years, he was recognised as the most important patient in the history of brain science. He took part in hundreds of studies and contributed immensely to our understanding of learning, memory and what it means to be human. HM died in 2008.

3. Discovery of water ice on Mars

I love the fact that it was a Mars Phoenix twitter status update that confirmed what many of us had always hoped, that there is water ice on Mars.

Water-ice has been found in vast quantities just below the surface across great swathes Mars. Some people are now arguing that NASA should now commit itself to a manned landing within 20 years. The discovery was made by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and now seems to answer a long-unanswered puzzle, where did all the water on Mars go? We’ve known for a while from valleys on Mars that water once flowed and we used to ask whether all the water evaporated into space because of the lack of atmospheric pressure on the surface. Now it seems it all froze underground. If it all melted, Mars would be completely covered in a planet-wide ocean!

Incidentally, the Mars Phoenix Lander won a Shorty award for twitter its efforts.

2. Climate Change

Climate change will feature in every top 10 of science from now until the year 3000, if we’re still here and writing blogs and recording podcasts - and it's making its third appearance on this blog after topping the 2006 list and coming in 9th in 2007. The hole the in ozone layer was the second largest in history, the Arctic experienced its second smallest cover of ice, and after remaining flat for a decade, methane levels started to rise again.

The Australian government let nearly everyone down with its soft carbon targets, and concerns have mounted over the global production of biofuels which have been grown in place of food crops.

Watch this space, I’m sure climate change will feature again in 2009.

1. The Large Hadron Collider

In the words of Dr Steven Farrell, our competition winner...

I loved the LHC for a couple of great reasons. Firstly, growing up in the age of Bond villains who were intent on gigantic technological pieces capable of destroying the earth, I loved the idea that the collider might possibly generate a black hole and consume the earth thus destroying all evidence of human existence. Awesome. I don't care if any number of physics associations came out and said it wouldn't happen. They couldn't be 100% sure that it wouldn't. Fantastic. And the second reason is obviously that this rather expensive piece of technology that took a fair bit of time to put together broke. And pretty darn quick too. So yeah, that's my highlight.

It cost approximately US$10 billion to build, and almost 20 years to complete, got everyone excited, then it broke. For about week, everyone was an expert on the Higgs boson and fearful that the LHC might create a mini-black hole, which would not only swallow the Earth, but the whole Universe! After a few tests and no black holes, a small fault in one of the magnets caused the LHC to be shutdown. Watch this space in 2009.

......................

So there you have it, the top 10 science stories from 2008 as contributed by Mr Science Show lovers. Thanks to all who contributed and we'll do it all again next year! Please let me know of any stories you would have liked to have seen - and please write and say hi if you're a long-time listener of the show!

Listen to his podcast here:

Correlation of the week: Shark attacks and the Global Financial Crisis

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:51:54 PDT

We've looked in the past at poor correlations - for instance, it wasn't too difficult to show a relationship between the performance of the Australian cricket team and the price of oil - whilst it looks intriguing, it would be wrong to read anything into it. In this vein, I thought we'd introduce a new recurring award, that of the venerable Correlation of the Week! (Although it probably won't come out weekly...)

This award is dedicated to work proclaiming a cause-and-effect relationship when one probably doesn't exist. Often it's not the fault of the scientists involved - scientists are wont to musing upon possible reasons for their results. No, it's generally the media playing up the story for effect.

A quick reminder of our 3 reasons correlations can occur:

There is a direct cause and effect relationship between the two data sets;
There is an underlying reason for the two data sets to move together, as opposed to one causing the other;
There is no cause and effect and no underlying reason for the correlation - it's simply a coincidence or the work of a devious statistician.

Correlation of the Week deals with the 3rd reason - that is, when there is no cause and effect at all. And the inaugural prize goes to....

Shark Attacks Drop Due to Global Financial Crisis

Reuters recently reported that the number of fatal shark attacks in 2008 dropped from the 2007 result of 71 to 59, and placed the blame (if that's the right term) at the feet of the GFC.

George Burgess, who directs the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, said:

"I can't help but think that contributing to that reduction may have been the reticence of some people to take holidays and go to the beach for economic reasons."

This is rather tenuous speculation. There are quite a number of issues involved here:

Is the data accurate? Have they captured every fatal shark-attack across the whole world over the last year?
Is the decrease simply noise? What about other years? Two data points don't tell us much.
What other factors are involved? Fishing, oceanography, where the attacks occurred, availability of medical resources, the list goes on. Surely more than economics.

Indeed, the ISAF states many of these things in it's initial report on the topic - which incidentally is a nice summary of the issue. Indeed, they state:

"Year-to-year variability in local economic, social, meteorological and oceanographic conditions also significantly influences the local abundance of sharks and humans in the water and, therefore, the odds of encountering one another. As a result, short-term trends in the number of shark attacks - up or down - must be viewed with caution."

The ISAF prefers to look at the data on a larger time-frame, and when doing that, the data suggests that shark attacks are going up because humans are spending more time in the ocean (a fair conclusion to draw), despite the fact shark numbers are getting smaller.

"Even with the recent levelling trend, the number of unprovoked shark attacks has grown at a steady pace over the past century. Overall, the 1990's had the highest attack total of any decade and the first decade of the 21st century will exceed that total."

The ISAF also notes that it's data could have errors in it, suggesting that the difference between 2007 and 2008 could be noise or data inaccuracy:

"The ISAF's efficiency in discovering and investigating attacks has increased greatly over the past decade, leading to further increases in attack number. Transfer of the ISAF to the Florida Museum of Natural History in 1988 resulted in greatly expanded international coverage of attack incidents and a consequent jump in the number of documented attacks.... Fundamental advances in electronic communication, a greatly expanded network of global ISAF scientific observers, and a rise in interest in sharks throughout the world, spawned in part by increased media attention given to sharks, have promoted more complete documentation of attack incidents in recent years.... Our strong web presence regularly results in the receipt of unsolicited documentation of shark attacks. Many of these attacks likely would have been missed in the past."

So congratulations to the first recipients of Correlation of the Week! The award is brought to you by the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, which blames global warming on the fact that pirate numbers are reducing (and therefore offending TFSM).

So I say to you Reuters and those correlating shark attacks with the economy:

"What would the Flying Spaghetti Monster Do?"

The words of 2008

mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:39:28 PST

I recently stumbled across this wonderful visualisation tool called Wordle.

Using Wordle, I have created this image of the most popular words on The Mr Science Show blog throughout 2008 (not including common words like "the" and "and".)

It's nice to see that science is number one on the list! The image is quite a nice reflection of my interests in 2008, with maths and mathematical words such as distribution, stats and one featuring. We have sporting words such as cricket, league and sport, a few words artistic words such as music and dance, and some that need no explanation - sex and condoms....

I've started to become a little addicted to Wordle, so here is our DSTO Operations Research Code of Best Practice document - looks like a new funky ad campaign for studying mathematics!