Converging evidence on climate change

This graph thanks to Skeptical Science (Ten temperature records in a single graphic). As the web site says this graph of ten different temperature records provides “a vivid reminder that many independent lines of evidence all tell us the same thing.”

Pretty well underlines the fact that global temperature are rising. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes this conclusion as unequivocal.

As for the cause – it’s worth recalling these figures from the last IPCC repport (I discussed these in Climate change is complex).

eBook “singles” – and the problems

Electronic books, and devices for reading them, are really taking off. In a way, this is reproducing the effect the digital revolution had on music.

One parallel may be with the purchase of music as “singles” rather than albums. The eBook format seems to be ideal for novels and trade books. But it looks like it may be even better for shorter books – the equivalent of music “singles.” Short books can be provided rapidly and cheaply. And they may be more suited to common reading habits than the longer more detailed books.

Amazon thinks so anyway. They recently launched their Kindle Singles selection. Relative short books  each presenting a compelling idea “expressed at its natural length.” And costing no more than a few dollars.

Enter TED Books

Now TED has taken hold of this idea. Many of you are aware of TED - the outfit which describes itself as “a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.” It promotes conferences, events and prizes. These bring together people from Technology, Education and Design. And the ideas are disseminated by videos of the short and stimulating talks given.

You have probably downloaded and watched some of the videos. If not – I recommend you try them out.

TED have just announced the launch of TED books. The publication of short books as eBooks. Effectively taking their videos into a book format. And they are being release through Amazon in the Kindle format.

So TED Books at Kindle Singles is really a book version of TED videos. Their press release announced the first three TED books published as Kindle Singles (The Happiness Manifesto,  Homo Evolutis and Beware Dangerism!)

This is great and I look forward to many more TED Books.  Well, I would if I could only read them on my Sony eBook reader!

My complaints

So here is my bitch. When the hell are book publishers going to get themselves sorted out? When are they going to overcome the problems presented by different formats and digital rights management?

Why can’t I read kindle books on my eBook reader? (It already accepts ePub and pdf).

Why should I have to purchase another reader (a Kindle) which may not be as good as my Sony Reader Touch, or less suitable for my purposes, just because of the format difference?

Of course I could use a Kindle app on an iPad. But why should I be forced to buy an expensive iPad just to do this? (And don’t tell me about iPods. I have one of these and, No, they are not suitable for comfortably reading eBooks. Nor is reading from a PC monitor comfortable).

Why can’t publishers produce their books in multiple formats? Some already do, but why don’t Amazon make available multiple formats (Kindle, ePub and pdf)?

I hope we are in a transitional phase and these problems will soon be resolved. But if they aren’t it will only encourage production of software which eBook buyers can use to convert formats. This will inevitably mean software for removing digital right management from eBooks to enable conversion.

And that will make eBook piracy a dream – something the publishers surely don’t want.

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Marie Curie Lecture Series – 2011

The Year of Chemistry 2011 site is providing information on local activities.

Marie Curie:Credit The Science Channel

The Marie Curie Lecture Series is worth looking forward to. These will run throughout 2011 and will be located around New Zealand. Female chemists will be reflecting on how chemistry affects and improves our lives and our society.

The series will be launched in Wellington with a talk by Professor Margaret Brimble, 2007 L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Laureate:

Title: Exploring Nature’s Medicine Chest

When: Thursday 24 February 2011 at 6pm

Where: The Marae, Te Papa Museum, Wellington

The Year of Chemistry 2011 site describes the talk:

The intricate chemistry of nature has evolved over millions of years and we are in the exciting position to be able to recreate and craft the compounds that already exist in the world, in the laboratory. Professor Margaret Brimble’s research explores such possibilities and how we can best use these discoveries to create new medicines. Her lecture will showcase how natural products derived from microorganisms that live in extreme environments, and natural products produced by algal blooms, can be harnessed to develop novel anticancer, antibacterial and antiviral drugs and drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases.

“Exploring Nature’s Medicine Chest” is also the opening of the Marie Curie Lecture Series, a year- long national tour of talks by female New Zealand chemists in honour of Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her ground-breaking studies in radium and polonium.

Thanks to:  Marie Curie Lecture Series | International Year of Chemistry.

Comparing blog visit statistics

Every month I post a ranking of New Zealand blog sites which make their visit statistics available. Being basically lazy I do this automatically using a Google spreadsheet to import data from the appropriate site meter. The 7 day average visits are automatically updated in the NZ Blog Ranking web page. And the monthly ranking here.

Incidentally, I notice that these ranking tables are often being used by people wishing to browse New Zealand blogs. So it is worth bloggers including their blogs in the rankings just from the point of view of linking and traffic. Of course, it also gives bloggers some idea of how their visit numbers compare with other similar blogs.

There a range of methods for obtaining blog visit stats and they don’t necessarily measure the same thing. There is often confusion between visits by individuals and the number of page views in total. (An individual may visit several page during a single visit.)

Shoddy reporting on “god genes”

Having just read the paper referred to in my last post (The god gene – or is it a meme?) I was rudely distracted from my Sudoku puzzle during the TV news last night. A news report on this research grabbed my attention.

What a waste of time, though. Unfortunately it’s only value was as an example of the shoddy reporting which seems so frequent with science coverage these days.

What was the take home message for the ordinary viewer? – Scientists have discovered a “god gene”! A gene which makes people religious! We even got a shot of the first page of the paper to “prove” it. And other news sources have conveyed the same impressions (see for example Researcher discovers “religion gene”; Scientist: Religion gene spreads the word).

No god gene discovered!

But this is not true. The paper was written by an economist, not a molecular biologist. He developed mathematical models which  assumed a single god gene, or at least “religious predisposition (“religiosity” for short) is determined by a single gene”

It was an assumption for his model. It was not proved. No gene was discovered or identified in this work.

So the person in the street has been left with the impression that science has discovered a “god gene.” Worse, if the person in the street thinks about this and realises how silly it is she will take home the message that some scientists are really stupid.

Having conveyed a completely false message the TV report went on with fillers to rub it is. They interviewed Christians at a church who said they were happy to “believe in Jesus” and that their god created these genes anyway so they must be good. An academic got a brief sound bite – but he was an “expert on religion” not evolution or genetics and clearly didn’t understand this issue.

Ignore research results!

The news report effectively ignored the real findings of this research paper. This was that the model (which also assumed a higher fertility for members of conservative fundamentalist religions) predicted a growing influence of such religious views. Either by simple dominance via fertility or by spreading of a “god gene” via defections.

Now this is worth discussing. Irrespective of genes the higher birth rate for members of conservative fundamentalist relgions is an empirical fact.  There has been some discussion of this in other media. See God’s little rabbits: Religious people out-reproduce secular ones by a landslide in Scientific American; Atheists a dying breed as nature ‘favours faithful’ in Sunday Times; and  Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind and It seems religion is not a neurotic accretion on human nature in The Guardian.

And I am sure viewers would have found such news interesting. Just imagine all the discussion it would have provoked at home around the TV set. Rational and irrational. Thoughtful and racist. But interesting. And better out than in.

Why could that have not been the central point in the TV news item? And I am sure we have capable demographers and evolutionary scientists in New Zealand who could have added to the discussion.

That would have been worth putting my Sudoku aside for.

The god gene – or is it a meme?

Is humanity doomed to a future of religious fundamentalism? Some recent internet articles appear to suggest it is.

The prediction is based on the established fact that the birth rate for members of fundamental religions is much higher than for the non-religious, or the members of the more main line churches. Similarly some Europeans worry about Islamic immigration because Muslims also have a relatively high birth rate. They fear a future involving a majority Islamic religion in their countries.

A recent scientific paper written by economist Robert Rowthorn promoted some of this speculation (Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model. [See full text]). This presented a model based on the assumption of a “religious gene,” or at least a gene which “predisposed humans towards religion.” While they acknowledge that such predisposition is unlikely to  be determined by a single gene this simplification was required to make the analysis possible. And they argue that the general conclusions can be applied to the normally expected multi-gene situation.

Together with the fact that birth rates for many conservative, religious groups are much higher than for the non–religious population this model predicts that the human species will evolve to a situation where conservative, fundamentalist religions predominate.

What a horrible prospect. But is it at all realistic?

Certainty is useless – a scientific concept

Each year John Brockman, the founder EDGE poses a question to a large number of public thinkers. He collects and publishes the answers – firstly on The Edge World Question Center website and then usually in book form. This year the question is:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?
“The term ‘scientific”is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or “in a phrase”) but has broad application to understanding the world.”

It’s a great question – originally posed by Steven Pinker. And the answers from over 150 participants are included. You can read them at your leisure at the question center. Alternatively, download this pdf file, Scientific toolkit, I created (226 pages) to read on your eBook reader.

As an example – here’s a short answer contributed by CARLO ROVELLI, a theoretical physicist and author of “The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy“. It’s very relevant to some of the discussions that go on around here:

The nature of the science-religion conflict?

I think this cartoon really illustrates the differences.

Credit: atheistcartoons.com – where would we be?.

“Other ways of knowing” – some sense at last

There’s been a lot of rubbish written about “other ways of knowing”. So it’s quite refreshing to read Richard Carrier’s classification of methods of knowing. This is from his book Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Well worthy reading by the way.

He starts by pointing out that no method of obtaining knowledge can produce absolute certainty. We can always be wrong, make mistakes. But we can list possible methods in order of reliability:

“What is rational is to assign degrees of conviction to degrees of certainty established by a tried-and-tested method. What is rational is reasonable certainty, not absolute certainty.”

“The methods of logic and mathematics are well-developed and provide the greatest certainty we have yet been able to find regarding anything, other than a present, uninterpreted experience. The next greatest certainty has been found in the application of scientific methods to empirical problems. In third place is our own daily experience, when interpreted with a logical or scientific mindset. Fourth is the application of critical-historical methods to claims about past events. Fifth is the application of the criteria of trust to the claims of experts. Sixth is the untested but logical application of inferential generalizations from incomplete facts—that is, plausible deductions. Such is the scale of methods that we have historically been able to discover and confirm as effective.”

“Experience shows that our degree of certainty will generally be weaker with regard to facts at each stage down this six-rung ladder, though within each category lies its own continuum of certainty and uncertainty, and the ladder itself is a continuum of precision and access to information: the more data we have to ground our conclusions, the farther up the ladder we find ourselves. Thus, mathematics is just perfected science; science, perfected experience; experience, perfected history; and history, perfected attention to experts; while plausible inference is what we are left with when we have none of those things.”

“Lacking any of the above approaches to the truth, we are faced with untrustworthy hearsay and pure speculation, where only the feeblest of certainty can ever be justified, if at all.”

Carrier writes that accurate methods of knowing have the properties of predictive success and convergent accumulation of consistent results.  However, these should be evaluated intelligently. Even the best method may produce faulty knowledge if used incorrectly.

So how do the different methods rate?:

Culture and the scientific renaissance

Book review: Science Is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science + Society Edited by Adam Bly

Price: US$10.87; NZ$26.99
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Original edition (October 12, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061836540
ISBN-13: 978-0061836541

Adam Bly is the founder of Seed Media Group. He created the on-line magazine, Seed, and other web sites to capture the 21^st century scientific renaissance. But at the same time these have had to counter the antiscientific movement which has been trying to prevent this cultural shift.

Bly suggests that despite the obvious success of science and its benefit to humanity this cultural shift has yet to be bedded in “We are on the cusp of this renaissance, not in the midst of it. For all that science has contributed to our lives in the past half-century, it hasn’t yet universally changed the way we think. And it won’t unless we understand and address why.”

Despite widespread denial of a science-religion conflict Bly suggests that this conflict is a reason the scientific renaissance has yet to flourish. “Because science and religion are at war, embroiled in a battle that has not strengthened either side; it has served only to strengthen the bases, not convert the masses. (And the base for religion is a lot bigger than the base for science!). That’s not to say the “culture war” has not been an intellectually useful exercise; it has. But religion will not overturn science and science will not overturn religion; both are too fundamentally rooted in society.”

This book aims at strengthening then appreciation of science, without destroying religious. He suggests we educate children “to embrace the scientific method. . . . . . We should be reminded always that we have the right to question everything – that changing our minds with new evidence is a virtue not a cause for condemnation.” As he sees it “science should precede faith but not seek to overturn it.”