And the terrifying political news continues. Yay.
Via Stephen Phillips.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) agreed to help the Conservatives seize control of all Commons committees – despite losing their majority – when it struck the June deal to prop the Tories up in power. However, that crucial part of the deal, paving the way for ministers to force through up to 1,000 “corrections” to EU law ahead of Brexit, was not mentioned in the so-called “cash-for-votes” agreement.
Instead, control of committees will be secured in a late-night vote next Tuesday, when the DUP will back the Prime Minister – although it has refused to confirm that support publicly.
No 10 was thrown on the defensive, insisting it had a right to majorities on all committees because it had a “majority” in the Commons itself. That argument prompted allegations that Ms May was trying to rewrite the June result, refusing to recognise that the voters had removed her power to govern alone.
Tuesday’s motion will seek to rip up Commons rules so that “the Government shall have a majority” on committees and on the body making nominations to them, despite relying on the DUP deal for power.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-brexit-power-grab-plan-election-lost-majority-parliament-rig-a7937081.html
Saturday, 9 September 2017
Hidden notes of the Hidden Figures
Awesome !
Via Isaac Calder.
More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, women labored in the Harvard College Observatory as “computers” — astronomy’s version of NASA’s “Hidden Figures” mathematicians.
Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars, many of whom made major discoveries. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. In the late 1800s, they were famous: newspapers wrote about them and they published scientific papers under their own names, only to be virtually forgotten during the next century.
“We know there were at least 80 women who worked in this space on these glass plate photographs, which is a pretty amazing number considering women were still trying to get social approval to go to college, let alone work in the sciences,” Smith Zrull said.
In the Plate Stacks at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — the modern version of what was once called the Harvard College Observatory — Smith Zrull oversees a digitization project to make the glass plates available to the world. Since 2005, a custom-built scanner has been making its way through the collection of more than half a million plates from 1885 to 1993. The team scans 400 plates per day — they’re at about the halfway point now — and Smith Zrull estimates about three years of scanning remains.
Last fall Smith Zrull turned her attention to about 30 notebooks in the plate stacks belonging to the women computers. Smith Zrull found 118 boxes, each containing between 20 and 30 books. Inside were more notebooks from the women computers and notebooks from astronomers who predated photography and made hand-drawn sketches of planets and the moon.
“People didn’t know they existed when they were in storage,” Smith Zrull says. “As different curators came and went here, I suppose people forgot they were there. Now that we know they exist, we can make them accessible to the public, they can be cataloged in a library so people can come across them.”
The library has completed transcription of about 200 volumes. Right now, notebooks from two women are listed on the Smithsonian Transcription Center website. There are many more to come — nearly 2,300 out of a total 2,500 books — but the work has begun. Bouquin hopes the public will help transcribe the books, but anticipates it will still be years before everything is readable.
“You’ll be able to do a full-text search of this research,” Bouquin says. “If you search for Williamina Fleming, you’re not going to just find a mention of her in a publication where she wasn’t the author of her work. You’re going to find her work.”
http://www.metafilter.com/169191/people-forgot-they-were-there
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07-27/team-women-are-unearthing-forgotten-legacy-harvard-s-women-computers
Via Isaac Calder.
More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, women labored in the Harvard College Observatory as “computers” — astronomy’s version of NASA’s “Hidden Figures” mathematicians.
Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars, many of whom made major discoveries. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. In the late 1800s, they were famous: newspapers wrote about them and they published scientific papers under their own names, only to be virtually forgotten during the next century.
“We know there were at least 80 women who worked in this space on these glass plate photographs, which is a pretty amazing number considering women were still trying to get social approval to go to college, let alone work in the sciences,” Smith Zrull said.
In the Plate Stacks at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — the modern version of what was once called the Harvard College Observatory — Smith Zrull oversees a digitization project to make the glass plates available to the world. Since 2005, a custom-built scanner has been making its way through the collection of more than half a million plates from 1885 to 1993. The team scans 400 plates per day — they’re at about the halfway point now — and Smith Zrull estimates about three years of scanning remains.
Last fall Smith Zrull turned her attention to about 30 notebooks in the plate stacks belonging to the women computers. Smith Zrull found 118 boxes, each containing between 20 and 30 books. Inside were more notebooks from the women computers and notebooks from astronomers who predated photography and made hand-drawn sketches of planets and the moon.
“People didn’t know they existed when they were in storage,” Smith Zrull says. “As different curators came and went here, I suppose people forgot they were there. Now that we know they exist, we can make them accessible to the public, they can be cataloged in a library so people can come across them.”
The library has completed transcription of about 200 volumes. Right now, notebooks from two women are listed on the Smithsonian Transcription Center website. There are many more to come — nearly 2,300 out of a total 2,500 books — but the work has begun. Bouquin hopes the public will help transcribe the books, but anticipates it will still be years before everything is readable.
“You’ll be able to do a full-text search of this research,” Bouquin says. “If you search for Williamina Fleming, you’re not going to just find a mention of her in a publication where she wasn’t the author of her work. You’re going to find her work.”
http://www.metafilter.com/169191/people-forgot-they-were-there
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07-27/team-women-are-unearthing-forgotten-legacy-harvard-s-women-computers
Republican media is better at persuasion than the Democrats
Terrifying.
“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizeable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.
These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008.
It’s really hard to estimate the effects of media outlets on individuals’ behaviour, as media consumption is a two-way street. Yes, media can change peoples’ opinions and behaviour, but people also choose to consume particular media because it aligns with their opinions and affirms stuff they’re doing already. So figuring out that a given media outlet is changing viewers’ minds, rather than merely reflecting their viewpoints back to them, is tricky. But Martin and Yurukoglu figured out an ingenious way around that problem: channel ordering.
It turns out that more people watch Fox News when it has a lower channel number. Fox News’s average channel number is around 38 to 41 (depending on which of Martin and Yurukoglu’s samples you're looking at) and lowering the channel number to 19 to 23 or thereabouts causes viewers to watch 2.5 more minutes per week of Fox News, on average. In practice, that could translate into no effect on most people and a bigger effect (like, an hour more viewing per week) among a minority of cable subscribers — 2.5 minutes is just the overall figure.
What’s more, it doesn't appear that cable or satellite TV providers make channel position decisions based on local politics; they don't lower Fox News' channel number in conservative towns or countries or raise it in liberal cities. So people in areas where Fox News has a low channel number watch more of the channel for reasons that are basically random, and unrelated to the viewer’s personal politics.
[I haven't ever watched MSNBC, but I have watched Fox and I don't understand why anyone would watch it for more than about 5 minutes at a stretch.]
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/8/16263710/fox-news-presidential-vote-study
“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizeable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.
These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008.
It’s really hard to estimate the effects of media outlets on individuals’ behaviour, as media consumption is a two-way street. Yes, media can change peoples’ opinions and behaviour, but people also choose to consume particular media because it aligns with their opinions and affirms stuff they’re doing already. So figuring out that a given media outlet is changing viewers’ minds, rather than merely reflecting their viewpoints back to them, is tricky. But Martin and Yurukoglu figured out an ingenious way around that problem: channel ordering.
It turns out that more people watch Fox News when it has a lower channel number. Fox News’s average channel number is around 38 to 41 (depending on which of Martin and Yurukoglu’s samples you're looking at) and lowering the channel number to 19 to 23 or thereabouts causes viewers to watch 2.5 more minutes per week of Fox News, on average. In practice, that could translate into no effect on most people and a bigger effect (like, an hour more viewing per week) among a minority of cable subscribers — 2.5 minutes is just the overall figure.
What’s more, it doesn't appear that cable or satellite TV providers make channel position decisions based on local politics; they don't lower Fox News' channel number in conservative towns or countries or raise it in liberal cities. So people in areas where Fox News has a low channel number watch more of the channel for reasons that are basically random, and unrelated to the viewer’s personal politics.
[I haven't ever watched MSNBC, but I have watched Fox and I don't understand why anyone would watch it for more than about 5 minutes at a stretch.]
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/8/16263710/fox-news-presidential-vote-study
Friday, 8 September 2017
Mr Fusion
"We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures - 100 million degrees - are possible in compact, cost-effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades."
ST40 is what's known as a tokamak reactor, which uses high-powered magnetic coils to control a core of scorching plasma in a toroidal shape. The next step is for a full set of those magnetic coils to be installed and tested within ST40, and later this year, Tokamak Energy will use them to aim to generate plasma at temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit).
In 2018, the team hopes to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), and the ultimate goal is to provide clean fusion power to the UK grid by 2030.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-uk-has-just-switch-on-its-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-reactor
ST40 is what's known as a tokamak reactor, which uses high-powered magnetic coils to control a core of scorching plasma in a toroidal shape. The next step is for a full set of those magnetic coils to be installed and tested within ST40, and later this year, Tokamak Energy will use them to aim to generate plasma at temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit).
In 2018, the team hopes to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), and the ultimate goal is to provide clean fusion power to the UK grid by 2030.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-uk-has-just-switch-on-its-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-reactor
Inconvenient truths
Theresa May suppressed up to nine studies that found immigration does not hit the wages or jobs of UK workers, Vince Cable has alleged. The Prime Minister has repeatedly defended plans to impose tough curbs on EU workers after Brexit by arguing they are needed to protect Britons in lower-paid jobs.
But, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “When I was Business Secretary, there were up to nine studies that we looked at that took in all the academic evidence. It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May, because the results were inconvenient.”
I agree with this rant :
Originally shared by Stephen Phillips
*Rant Alert ⚠*
There is so much in this. Okay, we only have the fractured memory of old man Vince as our source... But it's still big.
The idea that the leader of our government has suppressed academic research is equally horrifying and unsurprising.
When it came to Brexit, she chose not to air her views publicly, instead hiding away until the result and suddenly she is dead set against the EU.
Her populist agenda is reminiscent of how Trump chose his agenda to get elected.
That she chose to not just pick and chose supporting information, but that she actively suppressed information that didn't support her, leads us down a dark path where clear and open government is no longer in existence.
She is the most dangerous leader we've ever had.
*Rant over*
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-immigration-studies-suppress-uk-workers-wages-jobs-vince-cable-prime-minister-liberal-a7932001.html
But, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “When I was Business Secretary, there were up to nine studies that we looked at that took in all the academic evidence. It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May, because the results were inconvenient.”
I agree with this rant :
Originally shared by Stephen Phillips
*Rant Alert ⚠*
There is so much in this. Okay, we only have the fractured memory of old man Vince as our source... But it's still big.
The idea that the leader of our government has suppressed academic research is equally horrifying and unsurprising.
When it came to Brexit, she chose not to air her views publicly, instead hiding away until the result and suddenly she is dead set against the EU.
Her populist agenda is reminiscent of how Trump chose his agenda to get elected.
That she chose to not just pick and chose supporting information, but that she actively suppressed information that didn't support her, leads us down a dark path where clear and open government is no longer in existence.
She is the most dangerous leader we've ever had.
*Rant over*
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-immigration-studies-suppress-uk-workers-wages-jobs-vince-cable-prime-minister-liberal-a7932001.html
Phrenology returns as automated gaydar for some reason
Behold the bizarre return of phrenology.
The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women.
Human judges performed much worse than the algorithm, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful – 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Broadly, that means “faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain”, the authors wrote.
It’s easy to imagine spouses using the technology on partners they suspect are closeted, or teenagers using the algorithm on themselves or their peers. More frighteningly, governments that continue to prosecute LGBT people could hypothetically use the technology to out and target populations. That means building this kind of software and publicizing it is itself controversial given concerns that it could encourage harmful applications.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/new-artificial-intelligence-can-tell-whether-youre-gay-or-straight-from-a-photograph
The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women.
Human judges performed much worse than the algorithm, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful – 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Broadly, that means “faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain”, the authors wrote.
It’s easy to imagine spouses using the technology on partners they suspect are closeted, or teenagers using the algorithm on themselves or their peers. More frighteningly, governments that continue to prosecute LGBT people could hypothetically use the technology to out and target populations. That means building this kind of software and publicizing it is itself controversial given concerns that it could encourage harmful applications.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/new-artificial-intelligence-can-tell-whether-youre-gay-or-straight-from-a-photograph
Thursday, 7 September 2017
Food without farms
But seriously, this is really cool :
Researchers in Finland are developing a way to zap that simple recipe with electricity inside a bioreactor to create a powder that's about 50 percent protein and 25 percent carbohydrates.
The edible powder could be mixed into a shake or turned into a tofu-like food for people. It also could be transformed into feed for animals. Because it's processed inside in a bioreactor — similar to how beer and Quorn, a British meat substitute, is made — it doesn't require the tremendous amounts of land, water or other resources necessary for large-scale agriculture and doesn't emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
If solar power is used to produce the electricity, the process is about 10 times more efficient at producing food than conventional agriculture that relies on soil, says Ahola.
For this proof-of-concept endeavor, the bioreactor used was the size of a coffee cup, and the process to produce 1 gram of the protein took about two weeks. Ahola and colleague Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, a principal scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, say they are working on plans to build a larger bioreactor, about 6 liters (1.6 gallons) in size, by early next year. "We think that we would be able to scale it up rather soon now that we have got it working," says Pitkänen.
The first real application could be in the desert, feeding people in Africa," says Pitkänen.
http://trib.al/Za1vI5R
Tuesday, 5 September 2017
The finance-based cult of Brexit
As I've said fifty bajillion times (that's a real number, trust me I'm a scientist) democracy, while itself an imperfect system, isn't at all the same as tyranny by majority. Brexiteers don't want democracy. They just want to whine and whine even though they're getting what they wanted, because they have no friggin' clue what it is they actually want. None. "Our politics is a masterclass in cynicism farce." It was fine for Nigel to say there could have been a second referendum in the event of a narrow loss for Leave, and who begrudged them that ? Exactly no-one at all. But God forbid voters should ever change their mind in the other direction, no no no no no, that's not allowed at all. The Brexit referendum is instead being used as the worst sort of stereotypical religion : the "thou shalt not question" variety, under the guise of sovereignty and freedom which are actually anathema to the goals of Brexiteers.
The real reason why repeated attempts to silence the argument against Brexit are so dangerous is that by claiming democratic authority for their position the Brexiteer faction – for that is what they remain – demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself.They reduce a democratic culture to the status of a transaction. The voters are asked a question; they provide an answer; go, do.
No democrat should entertain this diminished understanding of democracy for a single moment. Real life is lived in real time. Circumstances change; reality changes; opinions change. Democracy is the means by which the ministers who make these decisions are subject to constant challenge, and required to provide day by day explanation and justification for the actions they take in our name.
Far from improving the accountability of decision-makers, the effect of the EU referendum has been to provide ministers with a shield which prevents their decisions being questioned. The democratic question is who makes the decisions and how are they accountable?
The EU answer is that the Single Market, supported by the Customs Union, has allowed us to make these decisions in ways which balance different interests and create an open market across Europe for the resulting goods and services... it has underwritten both continued expansion of the economies of Western Europe, including our own, and the successful development of the economies of central Europe following the collapse of their Russian-inspired communist regimes at the end of the 1980s. It has also underwritten an unprecedented growth of trade between Europe and the rest of the world.
The result has been not merely the creation of the world’s largest free trade area but, much more importantly, the development for the first time in history of open liberal societies across the whole of Europe; and it has allowed Europe as a whole to play a full part in the development of liberal societies across the globe. By any normal political standards this would be regarded as a stunning success.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-eu-voters-must-be-allowed-to-change-their-mind-labour-policy-hammond-national-interest-a7929421.html
The real reason why repeated attempts to silence the argument against Brexit are so dangerous is that by claiming democratic authority for their position the Brexiteer faction – for that is what they remain – demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself.They reduce a democratic culture to the status of a transaction. The voters are asked a question; they provide an answer; go, do.
No democrat should entertain this diminished understanding of democracy for a single moment. Real life is lived in real time. Circumstances change; reality changes; opinions change. Democracy is the means by which the ministers who make these decisions are subject to constant challenge, and required to provide day by day explanation and justification for the actions they take in our name.
Far from improving the accountability of decision-makers, the effect of the EU referendum has been to provide ministers with a shield which prevents their decisions being questioned. The democratic question is who makes the decisions and how are they accountable?
The EU answer is that the Single Market, supported by the Customs Union, has allowed us to make these decisions in ways which balance different interests and create an open market across Europe for the resulting goods and services... it has underwritten both continued expansion of the economies of Western Europe, including our own, and the successful development of the economies of central Europe following the collapse of their Russian-inspired communist regimes at the end of the 1980s. It has also underwritten an unprecedented growth of trade between Europe and the rest of the world.
The result has been not merely the creation of the world’s largest free trade area but, much more importantly, the development for the first time in history of open liberal societies across the whole of Europe; and it has allowed Europe as a whole to play a full part in the development of liberal societies across the globe. By any normal political standards this would be regarded as a stunning success.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-eu-voters-must-be-allowed-to-change-their-mind-labour-policy-hammond-national-interest-a7929421.html
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Friday, 1 September 2017
Turning atmospheric carbon directly into plastic
The sheer quantity of pollutant matter in London is intimidating. In 2014, the most recent year for which figures are available, London released a fairly terrifying 37.8m metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere. That’s to say nothing of the particulates and other gases belching out into our streets.
But while coughing Londoners are busy converting dirty air to dirty tissues, designers and scientists have been finding better things to make from that pollution. They’re part of a revolution in thinking which extends the concept of recycling to the air we breathe – and could turn pollution from a dangerous problem to a desirable commodity.
I particularly like this one :
Californian plastic designers Newlight Technologies decided to reverse the process, pulling in those greenhouse gases to create plastic without the need for fossil fuels. CEO Mark Herrema explains: “On a continuous, large-scale basis, we’re converting greenhouse gases such as carbon and methane dioxide into biodegradable plastic, plastics that require no oil and no food crops”.
Perhaps most extraordinary is that it’s actually cheaper to produce than conventional plastic, thanks to a catalyst the firm has developed that works at nine times the power of previous technologies. The firm has already started making carbon-negative, biodegradable plastic packaging, and last year signed a contract to supply plastics to Ikea. So the cheap furniture your landlord gets you may soon originate from the air outside your window.
Sounds awesome but, silly question, wouldn't it be better if the plastic wasn't biodegradable ? Otherwise this is just carbon neutral rather than negative...
https://modrenscienc.blogspot.com/2017/09/here-are-five-other-things-we-could-do.html
But while coughing Londoners are busy converting dirty air to dirty tissues, designers and scientists have been finding better things to make from that pollution. They’re part of a revolution in thinking which extends the concept of recycling to the air we breathe – and could turn pollution from a dangerous problem to a desirable commodity.
I particularly like this one :
Californian plastic designers Newlight Technologies decided to reverse the process, pulling in those greenhouse gases to create plastic without the need for fossil fuels. CEO Mark Herrema explains: “On a continuous, large-scale basis, we’re converting greenhouse gases such as carbon and methane dioxide into biodegradable plastic, plastics that require no oil and no food crops”.
Perhaps most extraordinary is that it’s actually cheaper to produce than conventional plastic, thanks to a catalyst the firm has developed that works at nine times the power of previous technologies. The firm has already started making carbon-negative, biodegradable plastic packaging, and last year signed a contract to supply plastics to Ikea. So the cheap furniture your landlord gets you may soon originate from the air outside your window.
Sounds awesome but, silly question, wouldn't it be better if the plastic wasn't biodegradable ? Otherwise this is just carbon neutral rather than negative...
https://modrenscienc.blogspot.com/2017/09/here-are-five-other-things-we-could-do.html
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