What a Crockus

Dan Hodgins coordinates the the child development program at Mott Community College. He seems to have some sound advice to parents about developmental stages of children. What he doesn't seem to do so well is neurophysiology. Which is a worry - as he's using it to prescribe educational interventions based on differences between the brains of the sexes that are, for the most part, of dubious significance, some of which are of dubious reality and in once case, are totally made up.

Dan Hodgins has a theory about the "Crockus" which, Hodgins claims, is four times larger in girls than in boys. Apparently, among other ramifications of the difference in size is that "Girls see the details of experiences" whereas boys see the broad picture. He even provides an unlabeled slide showing the size of the Crockus in girls and the size of the Crockus in boys. Strangely however, his slides don't actually show the Crockus - instead using the pars opercularis and the motor cortex as examples of the scale of this structure.

So where is the Crockus? Apparently - nowhere. No literature search/Google search/"shout out" to the neuroanatomy community has managed to find it. Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Lab had a theory. Maybe Hodgins misheard/misremembered "Broca's" or even "Pars Opercularis" as Crockus? Not wishing to just, y'know, hypothesise baselessly, Liberman emailed Hodgins, who replied:

Thanks for asking....The Crockus was actually just recently named by Dr. Alfred Crockus. It is the detailed section of the brain, a part of the frontal lope. It is the detailed section of the brain. You are right, it is four times larger in females then males from birth. This part of the brain supports the Corpus Callosum (the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemisphere. The larger the crockus the more details are percieved by the two sides of the brain.

For boys, usually they only view and analyze the whole picture, not the sum of its details. Girls brains are wired to look at the details first, which then leads them to the whole picture.

Look at the work by Moir.

You think that Liberman would be happy with that explanation, no? It's in the "frontal lope" [sic] - case closed. Over to persnickity Professor Libermann:

This deepens the mystery, I think, because I can't find any likely-looking Alfred Crockus via Google Scholar or Wikipedia or even general web search. I think that the "Moir" he's referring to is the co-author of Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brainsex, 1992. But Amazon offers its "Search Inside" feature for that work, and a search for "Crockus" in it comes up empty.

I have to say - I did find one kind of Crockus - and I would be quite happy if mine was four times bigger than yours! [SFW]

"Has this complete knob-end saved American democracy? "

The tasering of Andrew Meyer, a participant in a college Q+A session with John Kerry at University of Florida, has me baffled. I don't get Campus Cops. They seem to operate outside of any kind of control, have no accountability and be worse than useless

But this?



At 1'44" the mic is cut and instantly the police are on Meyer. In my previous experience people give up talking out of embarrassment no more than about 30 seconds after a mic is cut, so the instant response seems like bad crowd management.

Around 2'50" you can kear Kerry talking in the background. He says "Let me just say [that?]... because it's a very important question". Evidently Kerry has a) no beef with the question per se, and b) no intention of talking to the "law enforcement" present.

At 3 minutes in, Meyer is on the floor with several police on top of him. He asks what he did, and begs not to be tasered. At this point he is vociferous but not actually moving anywhere. 3 bursts of taser fire can be heard being "discharged" into Meyer.

In all seriousness, I've seen far more obnoxious questioners than Meyer at academic conferences, and political events, before. Never seen any of them end up on the receiving end of a police action, violent or otherwise. Even this egregious overkill was at the hand of rentabrawns. I have to say, the tasered chap was up there for pomposity and pushiness, but that's not the point.

Guardian Unlimited Talk is leaning towards the POV of the taser-happy cops, surprisingly[1]. I think it's more because we brits find pompous windbags insufferable, and not because we think that free, all be it a bit whiny, speech is a taserable offence. Post 118 sums it up best:

"YusufAlBinDoonrapub - 05:27pm Sep 19, 2007 GMT (#188 of 202)

"Has this complete knob-end saved American democracy?"

[link whilst it lasts]

Totally brilliant: that comment sums up the masterly balance/total fence sitting for which Guardian readers are justly famed. Someone else suggests that he should have yelled "Now we see the violence inherent in the system".

UPDATE:

Bartlebooth - 07:54pm Sep 19, 2007 GMT (#264 of 314)
...What did he do that warranted being asked to leave? Dragging someone away for asking Kerry, of all people, a waffly, confused question seems like the acme of dramatic irony.

[1] The Guardian is the left leaning broadsheet in the UK. It's readers are known for being sandal wearing, muesli eating, bike riding liberals[2]. The Guardian Unlimited Talkboard (GUT) is divided into two factions - the Guardianistas, and the right wing reactionaries who hate everything the Guardian stands for. Sometimes, however, an extremely funny one slips through

[2] It may confuse visitors from the USA in particular, that the term "woolly liberal" is not tantamount to the term "baby eating satanist" over here. The Guardian likes to send up its own image and did so with a fantastic wallchart, by the talented Posy Simmons, featuring stereotypical Guardian readers. Done with TFIC, the chart was a straight up parody of the nature wallcharts that they introduced to the UK Newspaper market in 2006. Guardian readers are, usually, secure enough in their liberalism and even sometimes, (whisper it), socialism, to be able to self satirise. One of the many reasons why I find the Guardian very comforting in these insane, taser-ridden times.

5km today, 26.2 miles tomorrow[1]

I completed the Hydroactive Women's 5km in a pretty respactable (for me) 29 minutes dead on. The T-shirt was meant to inspire me by making me think of Lola. Instead, I ended up thinking about Simon Pegg. It did the job though - no need for spatulas - and raised over £300 for Cancer research.

[1]Where "tomorrow" = April 2008, if I get a place... Or April 2009. Or I may come to my senses...

My Kind of Science

From The Onion:
Scientists Isolate Area of Brain That Doesn't Like Poking.

Even The Onion's science stories are better than the guff spewed out by some "real" newspapers.

"I made this" [1]

Happy days...


[1] Mad props to the first person to correctly identify what production company used a small child saying this as their ident, and at the end of which programme it used to be.

Auntie Em is now mobile...

Using Kaywa's Feed2Mobile service, my blog now comes slimmed down for mobiles. The QR code on the right can be captured on a camera phone with Kaywa's QR-Reader or similar. QR codes are fun!

She's rational/he's a flake...

There seems to be a common point of view that women are more susceptible than men when it comes to new age woo-woo (and indeed old age woo-woo: horoscopes, homeopathy and the like). Men are the rational ones, we're more... "intuitive" (read: flakey, gullible, and prone to uncritically accept answers that "just feel right").

I've often wondered if this has any basis in fact. After all - for every Randi there's a Uri, and 66% of the very rich UK fortune tellers I can name, are men: Jonathan Cainer and Russel Grant for the guys, Mystic Meg for the gals. Maybe the "XY = rational, XX = addlebrained" divide is just the way the media plays it. Are all the loopy guys, and rational women, hiding?

Well, my suspicions were further piqued on receiving this email:

I am contacting you from [TV Channel]. We are producing a new programme called [Hopelessly Derivative Programme Name] and I was wondering if you might know someone who would like to take part. The premise of the show is opposites attract. We are looking to match people together who have different viewpoints so there will be interesting discussion and have them spend a long weekend together to see if romance [1] can take place over opposing views.

We are looking for a sceptic man in his 30’s and 40’s to be on the show.

Do you know any sceptical single men who might be interested? ...

Let me know if you need any more information

I look forward to hearing from you

Best wishes

[Researcher doomed to work for terminally unimaginative program execs][2]

Now I may be wrong - they may also be matching a new-agey man with a rational-chick (I'd volunteer but I'm off the market). Maybe they tried it the other way round, but smart women are much prized by smart partners, and we're all off the market by now. Perhaps the dumb bunnies are all that's left. But I have a sneaky feeling that they believe idea of matching, say, one of the Skepchicks with this guy[3] would be too much of a stretch for their viewers.


[1]For some reason I hear "romance" in scare quotes...
[2]My words, not the researchers - though I wonder if in her heart of hearts she wonders if this is what the masters in Elizabethan literature was for...
[3]Or heck, Randi and Uri - I'd Tivo that!

London by Leg

The last few days in London have been blighted by Tube strikes, due to the failure of cowboys PFI contractors Metronet. One of the presenters of Radio 4's Today Program was more than usually snippy about the notion of walking to work in London.

I guess if you have to arrive in time for a 6am broadcast you might never have walked to work - but there's something satisfying, and very pleasant about walking in, even when the Tube is running. It's certainly more fun than the mobile sardine-tin that is the Northern Line at peak hours. DH and I used to walk to and from work, in Bloomsbury, from our home in Elephant and Castle - a journey that more or less spans the whole of Zone One. It gave me time to ponder the day ahead/just gone and included a very pleasant five minutes (yes really, five whole minutes) crossing Waterloo Bridge. Even to this day DH tends to walk to work at Old Street.

It's free exercise, valuable thinking time and saves a lot of carbon compared to car or taxi. The charity Living Streets is trying to make walking as pleasant and easy as possible. As well as their own initiatives, they've linked to this alternative Tube map showing average walking times between Tube stations, created by students from Central Saint Martin's. For point-to-point walking maps, together with time, calories and carbon saving data, Walk It is also excellent.

Did you know?

• King's Cross to Bank - takes from 30 minutes, burns up to 173 calories and saves almost 10 kg of CO₂ a week compared to taxis.
  
• Paddington to Hyde Park Corner - takes from 22 minutes, burns up to 130 calories and 7.4kg CO₂ a week less than a taxi.
  
• Waterloo to Westminster - takes from 12 minutes, burns up to 72 calories and 4.1kg CO₂ a week less than a taxi.
  

The joys of Evo-Psy

At the GECCO debate (audio and video available here, Steve Jones described a little game he plays with his undergrads, in which they have to come up with an evolutionary hypothesis for a facet of human behaviour or biology beginning with every letter of the alphabet. His "hypothesis" for blushing is cleverly designed to make women blush, and his description of the evolutionary benefits of zoophilia would get me thrown out of Aberystwyth University (formerly the University of Wales, Aberystwyth). The point he was making was that these evolutionary fables are diverting and very plausible-sounding, but are ultimately untestable.

It seems that, whilst I was away, the bad science of evo-psy reared its head again, this time on the evolutionary basis of the "preference" for pink vs blue for girls vs boys. Let us turn once again to the acerbic Ben Goldacre who critiques the study. Read the article, and consider the sartorial choices of Alice, Cinders and Bo-Peep.


The Truth is worth more than an iPod.

Unleashing my incompetence

Professor Shinohara of Tohoku University, Japan, has kindly agreed to let me join his group for a long visit. This is exciting, and the opportunity of a lifetime, but it also throws up some uncomfortable facts about how I see myself and the things I do to cope with the limits of my competence.

Coming from a chaotic family background, competence has always been hugely important to me. I've not minimised its importance by choosing to work as a woman in a male dominated discipline. Jorge Cham sums up pretty much how I feel most of the time in this strip:



Ever since school reports I've been described as "dilligent", "studious", "competent" and "enterprising". Solver of problems. Learner of things. Nose in a book, head in the air, feet on the ground.

So working in Japan for a month is going to be a huge challenge for me on a personal as well as a practical level. Regular readers will have noticed that I'm already trying to prepare. I'm learning as much Japanese as I can, downloading street maps, buying city guides and pumping every Japanese person I meet for data.

It's starting to dawn on me that being able to control my environment by knowing everything about it will be impossible. At some point in the next four weeks this has to stop, as it's more than bordering on an obsession.

My drive for competence has - not for the first time - reached its limit. This time, however, I'm going to try something new. I'm going to try letting myself be incompetent. Get in the Onsen the wrong way? Embarrassing sure, but really the end of the world? Use "Taberu" not "Tabemasu"? No-one will be rendered catatonic by my breach of etiquette.

And yet the mere thought of these faux pas is enough to render me clammy handed and weak legged. The thought of being incompetent is bad enough. The though of being the incompetent representative of womankind is enough to give me the screaming abdabs. I'm sent rushing back to Google, the Rough Guide and the friendly waitress in the Japanese restaurant.

I forever miss the moment because I've rehearsed it so many times, in order not to get it wrong. If I could unleash my incompetence, how liberating would it feel?


scientiae-carnival

Learning Japanese: 見せしめ 四

(Miseshime Shi/Lesson Four)

Last night David and I went to Hazuki Japanese restaurant.

I tried とんかつ　(tonkatsu - deep fried beef), which was nice. But my favourite were the (considerably healthier!) nigiri (にぎり). Nigiri sushi are the little "bricks" of vinegared rice with a small fillet of raw fish laid on top.

Our incredibly helpful waitress supplied the Japanese names and the Kanji of the two fish that I ate. She helpfully explained that the names for most of the fish are rarely written out in Kanji, as they all contain the Kanji for fish (魚) and thus get quite complicated quite quickly. Salmon is an exception - the kanji is 鮭, and is said 'sake'.

The two nigiri I particularly enjoyed were the 'horse mackerel' and the 'eel'.

Horse mackerel: Aji - あじ - 鯵
Eel: Unagi - うなぎ　-　鰻

Hazuki's menu helpfully lists all the names of the dishes in katakana/kanki as well as english. I'll be printing this out to take with me - and I may have a few more "practice runs" there before we go. I take my research very seriously you know...

Needles(s) activity

I decided to teach myself how to knit - relying heavily on the people at Knitting Help to find out how to cast on nicely. The reason? Innocent's Big Knit in aid of Age Concern. It's amazing - I've gone from never having touched a pair of knitting needles (or at least not since the jumbo sized ones you're made to play with in infant school "craft" lessons) to knocking up 2 small hats per evening.

Here are a few of my creations so far (now in blurryvision!):



But it's time to move on to bigger projects. I've already knitted myself an i-Pod Nano case in fetching lilac and purple. But David is now asking for something he saw over at Aphra Benn's place:

How to knit a Moebius scarf from the middle to the edge.

I'll start that when I've decided I've done enough hats.

And after that, brains..?

Learning Japanese Part 3

Part 2 of this series of my notes on learning Japanese introduced verbs and the formal and informal present tense inflections. I've also been learning the past tense.

Remember that all uninflected verbs end in a u:
書 to write Kaku (かく)
考 to think Kangaeru (かんげる)
来 to come Kuru (くる)

There are three "forms" of verbs.

1) Irregulars: of which there are only two: 来 and する (suru - to do)
2) All others ending in "ru": 考
3) All the rest: 書

Here's how to make the past participle of these verbs:
1) Formal: 来 becomes 来ました ("kimashita"); する becomes しました
1) Informal: 来 becomes 来た ("kita"); する becomes した ("shita")

2) Formal: -ru, +mashita: 考 becomes 考えました ("kangaemashita")
2) Informal: -ru, +ta: 考 becomes 考えた ("kangaeta")

3) Formal: -u, +imashita: 書 becomes 書きました ("kakimashita")
3) Informal: Now it gets trickier.

3i) if the verb ends in "ku", -ku, +ita (書 becomes 書いた - "kaita")

3ii) if the verb ends in "gu", -gu, +ida :
急 (いそぐ　"isogu", hurry) becomes 急いだ ("isoida")

3iii)if the verb ends in [nu|bu|mu], -[nu,bu,mu], +nda
学 (まなぶ 　”manabu"、learn) becomes 学んだ ("mananda")

3iv) if the verb ends in "su", -su, +shita
試 (ためす　”tamesu”, to experiment) becomes 試した（"tameshita")

3v) all other "u" and "tsu", -[u|tsu], +tta
立っ (たつ "tatsu", stand) becomes 立った ("tatta"). Note that the つ ("tsu")　character in the uninflected verb is not removed - it becomes the first "t" in った ("tta").

These forms are the same for all "persons" - that is, "I have written" is is "kaita" or "kakimashita". But "you have written" is also "kaita" or "kakimashita"

Learning Japanese, I really think so - part 2

Hurrah - it's official. Professor Shinohara of Tohoku University has kindly agreed to let me come for an academic exchange visit in October. I will join is group for a few weeks, which is an exciting, if somewhat terrifying, prospect. Rob seemed to enjoy the perplexity of the whole experience. Learning a little Japanese would, it seems, be essential.

So today let's look at verbs and versions of the present tense. It seems that things are a lot more straightforward than I'd feared.

All uninflected verbs end in a "u":

飲 to drink Nomu (のむ)
食 to eat Taberu (たべる)
来 to come Kuru (くる)

There are three "forms" of verbs.

1) Irregulars: of which there are only two: 来 and する (suru - to do)
2) All others ending in "ru": 食
3) All the rest: 飲

Among "informal' company, the present tense is simply the uninflected form of the verb. In more polite situation, the verb ending changes according to one of the following rules:

Type 1: These become "kimasu" (来ます) and "shimasu" (します) respectively
Type 2: Drop the "ru" and add add "masu": 食ます = tabemasu: I eat - politely ^-^ )
Type 3: Drop the "u" and add "imasu": 飲います = nomimasu: I drink, politely)


Next up - the past tense: in which we learn that there are seven rules for informal speech and only three for formal speech. This leads to a shaky hypothesis about why the Japanese tend to politeness.

Thanks to Amanda (アマンダ) and this webpage by Namiko Abe.

Writing in Japanese fonts on OSX

In an earlier post I talked about the three Japanese character systems. Writing in Hiragana and Katakana is good practice for learning the sounds and vocabulary of Japanese. Here's how to do it on OSX:

• Go to system preferences: international: input menu
  
• Tick the Kotoeri check box, and the "show input menu in menu bar" box
  
• You'll see a little flag or icon in the menu bar - clicking on this brings up the list of available input types
  
• Select "Hiragana" or "Katakana". Each time you type a valid phoneme ("ka", "ta", "e","ni"...) it is automatically changed to the Hiragana or Katakana character.
  

So my name, in Katakana, is: エマ

The Knights who say "Ni" are the Knights who say　ニ

And so on...

With love from アンチエム

Kilometre-stone

I'm measuring my runs in kilometres cause it feels so much, well, more than in miles, and today, after 68 runs, my Nike+ dohickey gave me the following

A pretty 250 KM certificate.

Still time to sponsor my 5k run for Cancer Research. Thanks to fantastic friends and family I'm now at 122% of my target, but the more we can raise for Cancer Research the better, so don't let that put you off.

Learning Japanese - I really think so

I am trying to learn Japanese (there's a reason - I'll explain some other time). I know the "Romaji" (romanised spelling) of some common Japanese words ("konnichiwa", "domo arigato mister roboto", that kind of thing). But a ma-hoosive impediment to getting any further is not understanding any of the several written forms of Japanese. So I'm teaching myself the Hiragana - the phonetic "alphabet" for anything other than common names (which have a different alphabet of their own).

Note that these symbols are not related to the Chinese derived "Kanji", which my reading tells me have, usually, at least two readings - a Chinese derived pronunciation (or pronunciations) called "On'yomi" and a reading derived from the original pronunciation of that word in Japanese called "Kun'yomi". The different readings are given in Hiragana in dictionaries, so knowing Hiragana is a huge advantage to learning what the Kanji mean, or at least how they are said.

Hiragana are also used for the "grammar" of Japanese, so I'm told. So learning these, and some basic vocab, is my first task.

Thankfully there are a small number of Hiragana and each maps to a Japanese phoneme. This is the first bit of good news I've had since deciding to learn some Japanese!

Here are today's words and the relevant Hiragana:

---

ありがとうございます (arigato gozaimasu: "thank you" from this online dictionary)

あ a
り ri
が ga
と to
う u
ご go
ざ za
い i
ま ma
す su

---

こんにちは (konnichiwa - written konnichiha: "hello". Literally means "today is".

こ ko
ん n
に ni
ち chi
は ha

---

ごくろさまでした (gokurosama deshita: "Thank you for your help" (lit: it must have been a toil))

ご go (note the "Daku-ten" accent (looks like a ") that turns "ko" into "go")
く ku
ろ ru
さ sa
ま ma
で de (another daku-ten - changes "te" to "de")
し shi
た ta

ごくろさま (gokurosama = it is a toil)
でした (deshita = past participle)

---

じゃまた (ja mata: see you later (from these useful lessons))

じゃ ja (the Hiragana for ji (じ) - which is in turn a shi (し) and a ", and a little version of the Hiragana for ya (や))
ま ma
た ta

---

せんせい (sensei: teacher or other highly placed professional - literally "one who lived before". From Wiktionary

せ se
ん n
せ se
い i

---

I still don't know how to punctuate or capitalise. Do such things exist? Any help appreciated!

'Til next time, ありがとうございます and じゃまた

"I for one welcome our new robot overlords" *

But Charlie Brooker doesn't.

*

From now on, every post comes with onion rings

At work I keep getting emails about this allegedly amazing new programming language called Ruby. "Try it", they say, "All the cool kids are doing it". But I worry, is it a gateway language? Will I be scripting Perl in a chichi little cybercafe in Hoxton by autumn? Will winter see my slow decline as I'm turning tricks in VB? <shudder>

And then I found The Poignant Guide to Ruby. And I was seduced. To the dark side or to the light I know not - I haven't actually learnt any Ruby yet... but the first three chapters hasve made me laugh out loud a coupla times. More than I can say for, "C++: the Core Language*".

Instead of Hello World we begin with:

"Like when you meet Somebody in college and they look like somebody who used to hit you in the face with paintbrushes when you were a kid. And so, impulsively, you conclude that this new Somebody is likely a non-friend. You wince at their hair. You hang up phones loudly during crucial moments in their anecdotes. You use your pogo stick right there where they are trying to walk!"

(C++ the Core... erm, no wait... The Poignant Guide to Ruby)

Or you could learn LOLCode. That rocks too.

*Srsly - the O'Reilly books rock. Buy them if you want to live.

UK PLC - Your R&D department needs help.

On the day that Alistair Darling proclaims that UK PLC is open for business, the Today program (Real Audio) reports that, for the want of investment that was promised in 2005, the UK lead in stem cell therapies is slipping.

To summarise: the unfavourable political climate in the US has lead to an influx of overseas researchers to the UK. However, the startup investment in this research promised two years ago by the UK government has not been delivered. Meanwhile, US Biotech companies are gearing up to take advantage of the expected softening in the stance on stem cell research in the US that will come after the 2008 presidential elections. It looks like the lucrative technologies resulting from this research will eventually be patented not by UK researchers, but by US private companies. Regardless of one's position on a) stem cell therapies and b) patents, and intellectual property in general, it's poor business practice on the part of UK PLC to surrender its competitive advantage in this field without a fight. Yet short sighted cuts in the science budget show just how little UK PLC values its R&D department.

Little Bro still in one piece...

People who know me probably know that my kid brother is working on the St Pancras renovation. Just spoken to him and he promises me that this was not his fault! AFAHK everyone is fine, and a few people are likely to be in for a bit of double bubble to patch up the mess.

The personality defect test

I saw this over at Dr Joan's. I was feeling a bit smug about my "Personal DNA" profile, so I needed the dash of chilled salt-water in the face that the Personality Defect test provides.

Keep in mind that I have a cold right now. I think that on a less mucus-y day, I think I'd more likely be a haughty intellectual. But until this bug goes away, be warned:

Your Score: Sociopath

You are 100% Rational, 28% Extroverted, 57% Brutal, and 71% Arrogant.

You are the Sociopath! As a result of your cold, calculating rationality, your introversion (and ability to keep quiet), your brutality, and your arrogance, you would make a very cunning serial killer. You are confident and capable of social interaction, but you prefer the silence of dead bodies to the loud, twittering nitwits you normally encounter in your daily life. You care very little for the feelings of others, possibly because you are not a very emotional person. You are also very calculating and intelligent, making you a perfect criminal mastermind. Also, you are a very arrogant person, tending to see yourself as better than others, providing you with a strong ability to perceive others as weak little animals, so tiny and small. You take great pleasure in the misery of others, and there is nothing sweeter to you than the sweet glory of using someone else's shattered failure to project yourself to success. Except sugar. That just may be sweeter. In short, your personality defect is the fact that you could easily be a sociopath, because you are calculating, unemotional, brutal, and arrogant. Please don't kill me for writing mean things about you! I have a 101 mile-long knife! Don't make me use it!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle.

4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Hippie.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Spiteful Loner, the Smartass, and the Capitalist Pig.

*

*

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

The other personality types:

The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

Be sure to take my Sublime Philosophical Crap Test if you are interested in taking a slightly more intellectual test that has just as many insane ramblings as this one does!

About Saint_Gasoline

I am a self-proclaimed pseudo-intellectual who loves dashes. I enjoy science, philosophy, and fart jokes and water balloons, not necessarily in that order. I spend 95% of my time online, and the other 5% of my time in the bathroom, longing to get back on the computer. If, God forbid, you somehow find me amusing instead of crass and annoying, be sure to check out my blog and my webcomic at SaintGasoline.com.

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Expanding Mind, Expanding Horizons

I'm back in the office after last week's stint at GECCO. Trying hard to hold on to the sense of mind-expanding excitement that I got from the talks and the excellent tutorials. I learnt that:

• I really like the theory side of things - seems like my PhD training hasn't entirely left me
  
• That it is possible for robots to learn their body plans and adapt when damaged
  
• That a novel way of evolving Neural Nets, based on Gene Regulatory Networks, leads to an excellent Nothello player
  
• That it is [PDF] possible to evolve cool towers - but that a smaller genome seems to be better when it comes to trying to transfer between environments.
  

It's also time to start looking for new jobs as my the current contract is rapidly drawing to a close. A funding proposal I've been working on alongside, let's call him "possible future boss" (PFB), went in last week. I'm more excited, and less sanguine, than I was even for my Viva.

Just before the proposal was submitted, I was invited to PFB's group meeting: some of the PFB's PhDs and postdocs were also at GECCO and related events, so discussions (and cakes) were in planned. I felt like I was going to an interview, or at least the parts of the interview that everyone claims aren't an interview but you know are really. I have links with someone in the group already, so I thought that it was important to prove that I wasn't just going to play well with my "special friend", that I could actually work with the whole team. As soon as the meeting started I realised that wouldn't be a problem: the group is stuffed with brilliant, argumentative, interesting, insatiably curious people. And I don't think any of them read this blog, so I promise I'm not sucking up.

Afterwards, I had a final proof read of the proposal before submission (my first late night at the office!) and was struck again by the fact that it would be a fantastically exciting project to work on, and that I had just met an excellent group of people that I'd be thrilled to work with. But it's out of our hands until the reviews come in. The committee that will decide my fate don't meet 'til November, so I won't know if the money's ours until January. Waiting is the hardest part[1].

[1] In fairness, getting on top of a new discipline's literature in my spare time was the hardest part - but the waiting is a close second.

Stop. GECCO time.

I'm off to GECCO (and to see the husband) tomorrow. I'll try to bring some highlights of general interest over the next few days - conference fatigue permitting. Your favourite auntie will also be plying one of the mics at the Jones/Dawkings/Wolpert event, but I'll try to stay alert enough to bring some highlights from that too. In the meantime you could satisfy your Prof. Steve Jones requirements with an old post.

She's mad as hell and she's not going to take it any more...

A non-science Heroine of the day:

On the 27th June, the producer of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show decided to lead with the story of a certain celebutante's release from chokey. This on the same day that Republican Senator Richard Lugar decided to defy President Bush on the Iraq war. News anchor Mika Brzezinski does not want:



Mika: "I have an apology as well, and that is for our lead story... I didn't choose it... I hate this story and I don't think it should be our lead ... move the prompter, thank you, alright, to the news now."

and later, as the male anchor (the eponymous "Joe"?) concludes his talking points about the senate and the house of representatives pressuring Bush to scale back the troops in Iraq, Mika begins her news rundown with:

"Well, you'd think we'd be leading with that story."

Go Mika!

"The name of the page has been changed"

Or why the word "quack" seems to have been adjudged to be inflammatory.

The ever bombastic pharmacology Professor David Colquhoun has been running a "quackery" blog for some time. In it he takes on the purveyors of such woo-woo as "blood cleansers" and "magic water". His posts are less readable than the taut prose of Ben Goldacre, and he can get even more frothing than James Randi. What he says about pseudoscientific quackery, a multi-billion pound industry which preys on ignorance and fear, is ill-tempered but well founded.

Recently, the husband of one of these placebo-mongers launched a "kitchen sink" legal action which, according to Colquhoun and UCL provost Malcolm Grant, included: allegations of defamation, malicious falsehood and breach of copyright; enquiries under the FOI and a demand that "a paper [be] circulated to all UCL Council members concerning an alleged misuse of IT resources and possibly office space and secretarial facilities by Professor Colquhoun". UCL, in what must be conceded was a responsible, if ass-covering, move requested Colquhoun's blog be shelved whilst a QC was summoned to give advice.

Long story short - the blog is back. Ben Goldacre covers the public statement released after the advice was given. The joint statement by Colquhoun and Grant concludes:

"UCL... continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies"

The victory was not complete however. In thesis speak, some minor emendations were required. Colquhoun writes:

"The name of the page has been changed from quack.html to improbable.html on [the] advice of lawyers"

Who says lawyers don't have a sense of humour.

Genes for tones

Two "learning outcomes" for this post today: 1) "genes for" cognitive functions appear to be even rarer than is typically thought and 2) getting money to do science requires doing some of the work for free or cheaply here in the UK.

So - on to point one: Pure Pedantry reports on the [PDF] Dediu and Ladd study into genetic correlates of features of language.

No correlates were found for most features (the presence of dialects, phoneme distribution etc). Only one correlation has been found: different alleles of the genes ASPM and Microcephalin are correlated with whether or not language is tonal.

Figure 1 in the PDF paper neatly shows the relationship between haplogroups (specific sets of alleles) and the use of tone in language. Having low frequencies of allele (type) 'D' of the gene ASPM in the population is correlated with tonality. Having high frequencies of Microcephalin allele 'D' is correlated with the absence of tonality. The authors conclude that:

"We assume that any such bias is very small at the individual level and becomes manifest only at the population level through the process of cultural transmission. We also assume that the bias is probabilistic in nature and that many other factors, including language contact and history, also govern the process of language change and affect its outcome. Our findings therefore do not support any racial or deterministic interpretation. Finally, note that this bias could be either for or against tone, but the fact that nontonality is associated with the derived haplogroups (Fig. 1) suggests that tone is phylogenetically older and that the bias favors nontonality."

So the older alleles are correlated with tonality, but there are fewer tonal "phenotypes" than non-tonal ones. It would be tempting extrapolate from this that tonal languages are older than non-tonal languages. But the authors state clearly that they have only found a correlation, not a causal relationship, between certain alleles of ASPM and Microcephalin. That is, there is no evidence that certain alleles of ASPM and Microcephalin "make for" tonality in the brain.

Language Log is pretty sceptical of the meaning and provenance of this correlation. A response by the paper's authors can be found here. The authors' justification for searching for this correlation, whilst ignoring gene function studies at this stage is illuminating, and brings us on to learning outcome 2:

"[W]e knew that ASPM and Microcephalin are involved in brain development. So if it was a hunch, it was a reasonably well-grounded hunch... [O]ur geographical correlations would mean more if they had proceeded from some experimental demonstration of some sort of genetically linked, language-related, cognitive/behavioral/perceptual difference. But given the widespread assumption (rooted in the Boasian tradition, but with a significant contemporary boost from Chomsky) that the human language faculty is absolutely uniform across the species, it's very unlikely that we would have been able to get funding to look for such a difference first. So we started by doing something we could do on our own without such support, namely testing the apparent correlation. Having done that, we hope we are now in a better position to apply for funding for the expensive part of the research. This might seem backwards, but it's a pretty common way of doing genetic mapping studies: start from your phenotype, use correlational studies to identify plausibly associated genetic markers, and then try to understand experimentally what the genetic markers actually do."

(Emphasis mine)

This makes perfect sense. Do the quick and cheap investigation first, especially if the odds appear to be against finding something. Once you have more data, get the money to do the expensive stuff. It does mean that most UK academics end up doing "weekend research" or "slush fund research" just to get to the point where they can actually get the money to do the work that they have in fact already begun. It's one of those pragmatic compromises that is far from perfect but seems to work. Like democracy.

Is this what a lead baloon looks like?

So the London 2012 Olympics logo has garnered more brickbats than bouquets since its unveiling, with the petition against it standing at 43,442 signatures as at 16.35. And now it emerges that the video to launch the logo is in breach of Ofcom guidelines on the use of flashing images and that the version on the website has been pulled after causing seizures in viewers with photosensitive epilepsy. Is this the logo of doom? Or is this an attempt to preempt all the Olympic 'bad karma' that seems to affect host cities?

The BBC website is carrying a poll where readers' designs are pitted against the logo of doom. So far the favourite logo, a neat mash up of the figure 2012 and the word London is 10 times more popular than the official logo. Heigh ho - this could be a long five years.

Putin unveils his defence plans

Missiles aimed at Europe, sure. But I can't wait to see his "gigantic, humanoid robots.

Funnily enough - I didn't find the bit about robots to be the most disturbing part of that inteview.

Carnival time:

Scientiae is up at FemaleCSGradStudent's place. Check out FCSGS's Hierarchy of needs: a Maslow for today's woman in science.

That's what's next 'cause that's all that's left...

Warning - huge studio 60 spoiler. If you're hanging on for the day when More4 screens this in the UK then you may not want to watch this[1]:



If you've seen it, you'll know what the title of this post refers to (see about 2"20-2"55 in the clip). And I can't help thinking about the latest pitch from Channel 4's favourite production company, or Channel 4's latest bid for controversy. How can More4 (4's sister "grown up" channel) show Studio 60 with a straight face?

[1] If the clip is pulled or you can't see it and want to know what I'm referring to (and are not afraid of spoilerage) see the on air tirade.

Talent down the drain

Professor al-Zubaidi is an Iraqi clinical biochemistry professor with 22 years experience. He's just been offered a post at Bangor university. He has a permit under the UK's Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP). So far, so good. But he's now trapped in the bureaucratic minefield that is the UK immigration system.

The "S-series" passport Prof. al-Zubaidi was issued, as one of the first wave of fleeing Iraqis, is not deemed valid to allow him to re-enter the UK if he leaves, but his HSMP permit only becomes valid if he does leave the UK and returns. He's now been told he has to become an asylum seeker, and hence ineligible to work. So he loses the chance to work, and we lose a highly skilled academic. His case is detailed in the Times Higher this week.

Still, Prof. al-Zubaidi is relatively lucky. The Brussels Tribunal has a list of 317 academics and counting that have been assassinated. Now no-one who doesn't have a militia behind them is safe in Iraq right now, but in targeting academics the killers are doing their best to cripple progress and education in Iraq for years to come. This is surely the death of hope.

Professor Issam al-Rawi, Head of the Association of University Professors, was murdered last year. Before his death he said:

Political groups inside and outside the country are seeking to rid Iraq of individuals capable of independent thought. By doing so, the men of violence make it easier to push their own agenda.

The Council for Refugee Academics has an emergency appeal for Iraqi academics"

Your donations will help CARA:

* to provide practical and financial support to Iraqi academics and their dependents
* to identify and support hosting opportunities in UK Universities and scientific institutions
* to raise awareness of the plight and exceptional case of Iraqi academics at this time
* to seek ways to assist academics still in Iraq or who have found temporary refuge in neighbouring countries
* to lobby the UK Government to provide a safe haven for Iraqi academics - Iraq’s future educators.

At the very least, it will help people like Prof. al Zubaidi face the insane Catch 22 that only bureaucracy can create.

Weekend reading: forego the Sunday supplements...

There's never anything in them worth the trees that they're printed on[1]. Instead, for your delight and delectation I direct you to this post from Science Creative Quarterly.

Part book review, part essay, entirely interesting. Well worth a read. It's more likely to change your life than an article on this season's trend for rattan garden furniture[2].

----Notes----
[1]Except Bad Science, but you can get the unexpurgated version of Ben Goldacre's comments online anyway. Take that old media.
[2] I'm not suggesting that there is such a trend - I have the world's most useless balcony (25 foot long, 9 inches wide) so what the heck would I know about garden furniture?

"And all I got was a giant piano player..."

...or the perils of trusting an incompetent genie.

A few weeks ago my attention was brought to the Gender Genie: an online tool for determining whether a text of 500 or more words was written by a man or a woman. Plausible, I thought, if there really is some significant difference in the Zipf distributions of the words that men and women use, or in the order of parts of speech that they prefer. Then I read that the authors claimed 80% accuracy and that has been touted as a serious tool rather than a parlour trick. Hmm - I thought - are they claiming to be able to check whether I get David to write my journal articles?

The authors of the Gender Genie (Koppel and Argamon) used texts from the British National Corpus (listed here). From the [PDF] paper it seems like this is an honest attempt to determine what the differences between male and female writing might be.

However, it's certainly not working for me. When the Gender Genie first came to my attention I was in the middle of writing a conference paper, so I tried it on that. Bad news - on a randomly selected few paragraphs the results were as follows:

Words: 671
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 368
Male Score: 1058

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Ok, fair enough, perhaps a scientific article will throw the Genie off (though the makers don't suggest any such caveat - it is supposed to be a generally applicable tool). Here's what it thinks about my blog post on Jackie Cochrane. It couldn't be more "womany":

Words: 326
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 80
Male Score: 544

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Hmmm. Not according to the Gender Genie then.

What about that über-male, St Paul, and his letter to the Colossians? [1]

Words: 277
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 732
Male Score: 401

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Really? Wow. That's going to require a serious dose of hermeneutics.

I should be clear: I'm not being methodical here, and I'm not attempting a genuine critique of the Gender Genie. I could look more deeply into the methods and work out why both I and St Paul are apparently so hard to place. But just as it takes only one red fleem to disprove the axiom "all fleems are green", my experience calls into question the general applicability of the Gender Genie algorithm.


UPDATE: apparently I (and St Paul) are not the only ones finding that the Gender Genie performs poorly:
Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian reports that all but one of the Guardian's female writers were classified as male. Of 9 journalists, 8 were classified incorrectly. Now if Gender Genie was guessing randomly you'd expect a better hit rate than that.

UPDATE++: The Gender Genie site gives the stats since 2003. It's not impressive, and certainly not up around the 80% mark that the authors claimed in their article.


------------Notes-------------
[1]Colossians 3.12-3.25, NIV. The verses include "Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord".

Monomania - not just boring, but dangerous too

Cognitive Daily reports on a study showing that one person repeatedly reiterating of their point of view is as influential as multiple people giving their opinion separately.

From the comments:

"I was about to point out that a lot of people are saying that in their opinion Islam must be destroyed, but then I realized: I don't know if it really *is* a lot of people, or if it's a few people repeating it over and over until it *seems* like a lot of people, which is exactly the point."

Indeed.

Heroine Den, part 3

May 18th's heroine: Jackie Cochran, who on this day in 1953 became the first women to break the sound barrier.

Most people have heard of Amelia Earhart - the first person (note person not woman) to fly across the atlantic from Honolulu to Oakland.

Jackie Cochran was another pioneering aviator who, as well as holding a bushel of woman's records was also the first ever pilot to acheive an instruments only ("blind") landing. She still holds more records than any pilot, living or dead, male or female.

Inspired by the British pilot Pauline Gower and her "First Eight", Cochran helped run the ATA. She then returned to the States to run the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, a "women's air army". At the same time, pilot Nancy Harkness Love ran a civillian women's auxilliary, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, to ferry bombers between the factories and the front lines.


The sad coda: by the middle of the 20th century, attitudes were once again becoming reactionary. Cochran's WASP program was wound up and her application to join NASA's spaceflight program as an astronaut was blocked on political grounds. She eventually became one of the Mercury 13 - a group of 13 women tested for their aptitude for spaceflight:

In the end, thirteen women passed the same physical examinations that the Lovelace Foundation had developed for NASA’s astronaut selection process (although the original number of male candidates was much larger, fewer men passed the tests).

(Wikipedia)

The attitudes of male astronauts lead to the dropping of the Mercury 13 however: Jerrie Truhill recalls that

The male astronauts referred to the women as "98 pounds of recreational equipment,"

Source.

Two years later, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

Today's heroines are the women pioneers of aviation, who pushed back the barriers of flight as well as the barriers of society. Future heroines: the female space pioneers fighting the same battles half a century on.

scientiae-carnival

B'bye Jerry

Jerry Falwell, the chap who claimed that 9/11 was the fault of:

" the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America,"

Is dead aged 73.

This is the same Jerry who gave us:

"Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men - that's their problem."

I don't hate men, Jerry. You personally turn my stomach, but I'm not ill disposed towards real men[1]. Away from your shrill, playground accusations, I find my attitude towards men (and one man in particular) is this:

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

Anaïs Nin

---

[1]Men who are so free from cowering xenophobia that any difference: sex, sexuality, race, elicits neither a howl of revulsion or tyrannous cant disguised as concern.

It takes a woman, a dainty woman...[1]

To bite the head off the offspring of an immigrating competitor... Where that 'woman' is a female Sonso chimp at least.

The paper is available here if you have a subscription to Current Biology.

If not, both the BBC and the University of St Andrews website cover the story.

This behaviour was first reported by Jane Goodall in the 1970s. From the St Andrews website:

Similar behaviour was described by eminent primatologist Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream National Park in the 1970s but her observations had long been disregarded as inconsistent and pathological.

QSFP[2].

[1] From "Hello Dolly":

The frail young maiden who's constantly there
For washing and blueing and shoeing the mare
And it takes a female for setting the table
And weaving the Guernsey
And cleaning the stable
...
And in the winter she'll shovel the ice
And lovingly set out the traps for the mice
She's a joy and treasure for practically speaking
To whom can you turn when the plumbing is leaking?

[2]Quelle Sur-Fucking-Prise.

Free Will or "free will"?

"Fruit flies demonstrate free will" - such is the reaction to a paper by Maye et al. It's co-author Brembs who's making the most impact in the blogosphere.

The press release on Brembs' own site has a writeup of the research. He states that the work has distinguished between two alternative models of behaviour (the first figure in Brembs' writeup online - also available here). The chaotic behaviour observed requires some sort of internal "initiator" within the fly's mind because:

[L]acking any input, if the flies were input-output devices, their behavior should resemble random noise, similar to a radio tuned between stations.

Is this really true?

• Are the flies lacking any visual input, or do their visual systems create illusory input? (David - I need you to explain Ganzfeld again...)
  
• What other inputs might there be from the fly's internal and external environment (muscle fatigue, air currents created by the fly's own movement...) that might have been creating input?
  
• If we accept that they were receiving "no input" whatsoever, is it still true that this would necessarily result in random (rather than stochastic) behaviour?
  

These are genuine questions - I really don't know and I'm curious to find out. The paper's in PLOSOne - so I suppose the reviewers must have received good answers to these sorts of questions.

But now for the more grandiloquent claim - that the presence of this initiator is evidence of free will. The New Scientist review seems to suggest that the appearance of chaotic patterns in the fly's movement suggest free will.

If this initiator is initiating chaotic behaviour, how is it doing it? Does there have to be an element of "will" about it at all? After all, climate systems exhibit wonderfully complex stochastic behavior and no one (the romantic poets aside) has ever accused the weather of exercising choice.

Brembs quotes himself as saying:

"Our subjective notion of 'Free Will' is essentially an oxymoron: we would not consider it 'will' if it were completely random and we would not consider it 'free' if it were entirely determined."

So far, so soundbite. But the release goes on, at the end of the penultimate paragraph, to say:

Humans may not have free will in the philosophical sense, but even flies have a number of behavioral options they need to decide between. Humans are less determined than flies and possess even more options. With this small reformulation, the topic of free will becomes the new biological research area of studying spontaneous behavior and can thus be discerned from the philosophical question.

Aha! So it's not so much a question of whether or not flies have free will, as whether or not flies have "free will". This seems like a nice bit of semantic footwork. In the cog sci, neurophysiology and psychology fields, "free will" might be shorthand for "apparent free will". But to the rest of us free will means Free Will, in that pesky philosophical sense. In Nature Neuroscience, free will might mean "free will", but in the New Scientist, free will means Free Will.

See, this is why I dislike to science by press release. Without knowledge of the specific meaning of the terminology used in the researcher's community of practice (free will = apparent free will), the reader is left to interpret the news story in a commonsense manner (free will = Free Will). And so, in your newspaper today, expect flies to go from having "free will" to having Free Will. It's a big difference.

The slow climb meets the leaky pipe: women in academia.

The good news: the numbers of academic staff in UK universities increased 2.6% in 2005-2006 - higher than the increase in student numbers (1.4% over the same period).

The bad news: this is the first glimmer of hope after 20 years of declining staff/student ratios.

The good news: the increase in women academics overall increased by 4% in the same period.

The bad news: this increse is still overwhelmingly concentrated on the lower end of the scale. At professorial level, fewer than 1 in 6 academics are female.

(Source).

Is this the leaky pipe, cultural factors? It's not an innate inferiority of female undergrads, that's for sure.

Specialist subject

A new study sheds interesting light on the Stamford Prison Experiment (SPE) in which a group of 'normal' young men were arbitrarily designated to be either 'guards' or 'prisoners' in a fictitious prison setting. In the original experiment, the guards quickly began to brutalise the prisoners in order to maintain discipline. In adition, the prisoners quickly became passive, after initial rebellion.

This new study examines who volunteers to be a subject in this type of experiment. Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland from Western Kentucky University circulated the original advert from the SPE (the original description is available as a PDF here). They also circulated an advert that was identical except that it made no mention of the prison setting. They found that people volunteering for the experiment that explicitly mentioned the prison setting "scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism" than those volunteering for the other study. The authors suggest that this should lead to a rethinking of the 'generality' of the lessons from the SPE.

This raises two questions for me. Firstly, to what extent were those who volunteered for Carnahan and McFarland's study aware of the SPE? Might prior knowledge of the violence that ensued deter less those with less 'abuse related dispositions'? Secondly, if the people in the study don't know, a priori whether they will be guards or prisoners, would the same characteristics that lead to the propensity for abuse also lead to the high levels of complicity and 'victimhood' exhibited by the prisoners in the original experiment? Any ideas, psych geeks?

Answer for Petit

I realised that this would be unreadable as a comment, as it's so darned long! "Petit" asked:

I don't understand how rhetoric is an improvement over evidence based policy. As far as I know this was an attempt to combat rhetoric and policies which were implemented purely for political reasons.

Will have to read the papers but from my limited practical experience I can't see how using rhetoric (argumentation) is any different from old style policy making.

It is also already common to argue for the applicability of ones evidence to a policy.

Hi Petit (Is that Petit Careme? Hello there!),

Good questions. These tend to be the questions that arise in presentations and, to a lesser extent, from reviewers. Arguments in favour of "rhetoric based policy making" tend to exact one of two reactions - either "evidence is good, anything else is just plain wrong" or "what's the problem? Surely nobody believes evidence alone is sufficient to make good policy" I hope the following rather lengthy comment will address both those questions:

First and foremost, I want to make it clear that there is a huge distinction between healthy rhetoric (consisting mainly of argumentation and dialectic) and unhealthy, eristic rhetoric.

The healthy type of rhetoric is desirable because the problems of "evidence based policymaking" are threefold (at least!):

1. Evidence can only tell us which policies are possible, not which ones are desirable.[1]
   
   
2. Knowing what is "the best" policy is impossible - policy making problems are wicked problems by their very nature. If a problem is reducable to a computable decision it wouln't be a policy decision, it would be a technical decision.
   
   
3. Policy makers are of course human beings first and foremost - and to pretend they are not suceptible to the unhealthy rhetoric of cranks an pressure groups is naive, and yet EBPM expects policy makers to behave as automata.
   
   Only by making policymakers aware of the difference between healthy and unhealthy rhetoric can we inocculate policy makers against cranks.
   

Trevor Bench-Capon sums up the need for argumentation (healthy rhetoric) in all practical reasoning:

Argumentation is essential because no completely compelling answer can be given: whereas in matters of belief we should be constrained by what is actually the case, in matters of action no such constraints apply - we can choose what we will attempt to make the case

(Emphasis mine.)

Therefore there is no function from a given set of evidence to a single, provable or probable "best" policy answer. Good rhetoric must include arguing about the applicability of evidence to a policy choice, the laying out of warrantss. But it should go beyond that, and argue over the reasons why a particular policy is desirable. Determining the most desirable policy that "we will attempt to make the case" requires that values and frames of the stakeholders to the policy are taken into acounct. For example, in deciding on a policy to reduce teenage pregnancy:

• We might all accept the premise that reducing teenage pregnancy is a worthwhile goal
  
• We would, I hope, not be at odds over the mechanics of conception
  
• We may still vehemently disagree about the preferred “means of action” taken to prevent teenage pregnancy - eg: abstinence education vs universal acces to contraception
  
• We may both still be behaving reasonably, according to our value systems
  

Even the evidence that one policy reduces teenage prgnancy n% more effectively than the other may not be sufficient to mandate the choice of one policy over another, if other matters of importance ("personal autonomy", "child welfare") are not taken into account. But there is no non-arbitrary way to make all these factors commensurable.

If you choose but one reference, I suggest Majone's Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process. It's pretty widely available and very readable. It certainly makes the case more cogently than I have here.

[1] There is an excellent example of good evidence leading to a totally defective policy (in that it failed to identify the real needs of the policy beneficiaries). This is the case of the "foam hip protectors" (referred by the frustrated users and their carers as "padded knickers") prescribed to elderly residents of an old people's home. The original study is:
Parker, M. J., Gillespie, W. J., & Gillespie, L. D. (2006) "Effectiveness of hip protectors for preventing hip fractures in elderly people: systematic review", BMJ, vol. 332, no. 7541, pp. 571-574.

and Green's review of the detremental effect on the dignity and quality of life of the people made to wear these devices:

Green, J. (2000), "Epistemology, evidence and experience: evidence based health care in the work of Accident Alliances", Sociology of Health and Illness, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 453-476.

Healthy Rhetoric - what is a crank?

I'm about to go and give a talk at a certain institution (let's just say it's in a capital city, and it's an educational institute, and it was traditionally concerned with the science of the flow of money...) The talk is on the subject of my "second string" research: argumentation for policy making. The main thrust of the talk is that policy making at its best occurs where people of good will engage in meaningful discourse.

Aye but there's the rub - there are plenty of special interest groups and, let's face it, cranky individuals that won't play by the rules: creationists, pseudo-medics and pseudo-scientific racists. And these people can have a hugely detremental effect on the policy making process because it's hard to identify when these individuals have strayed from "misguided" to "dangerous loon". At best, they sap the time and energy of those people who are prepared to stick to the niceties of debate. At worst, their screed sounds convincing to the scientifically inexperienced and bad things happen.

So how do you recognise cranks? Sadly this isn't the area of my expertise (formal argumentation frameworks anyone..?). So I was pleased to run across this post from Denialism Blog. The heuristic still seems to be, in the words of Winston Churchill,

A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Now if only I could represent that logically.

In the not too distant future...

This evening, AD... some of my geekiest (therefore best) friends and I will be at the MST3K allnighter.

How can I explain MST3K? Perhaps via the lyrics to the theme song? Or perhaps you'd rather sit and watch. May I introduce Mike Nelson and his robot friends as they endure (as we will tonight) Hobgoblins:

Scouting for glory

I may have been sacked from guides, but I'm now a member of the Science Scouts:




Here are my badges:

The "talking science" badge. Required for all members. Assumes the recipient conducts himself/herself in such a manner as to talk science whenever he/she gets the chance. Not easily fazed by looks of disinterest from friends or the act of "zoning out" by well intentioned loved ones.

The 'I blog about science' badge.
In which the recipient maintains a blog where at least a quarter of the material is about science. Suffice to say, this does not include scientology.

The 'will glady kick sexual harasser's ass' badge.
(And we mean 'ass' in the most holistic of ways). In which the recipient stands up to such miscreants in the work place. Places of science should know better.

The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL II)
In which the recipient has frozen something in dry ice for the sake of scientific curiosity.

(Those who came to our wedding dinner will understand... thanks Jeev and Neil)

The "I'm a scientist who is fundamentally opposed to administrative duties" badge.
Presumably a badge with a consensus even stronger than that seen in the global warming arena.

The "somewhat confused as to what scientific field I actually belong to" badge
Also known as the transdiscplinary, interdiscplinary, or intradisciplinary badge.

Because I moonlight in the social sciences ("argumentation & rhetoric in policymaking" - an occasional change from robots)

The "I build robots" badge (LEVEL III)
In which recipients have built a fully autonomous robot.

Not all alone!.

The "non-explainer" badge (LEVEL I)
Where the recipient can no longer explain what they do to their parents.

The "broken heart for science" badge
In which the recipient's passion for science has led to their significant other leaving.

Okay - so I'm the one that left, and only in a geographical sense. But until we can find a solution to the two-body problem I still think I deserve this.

Being a bat

In 1974, Thomas Nagel wrote a paradigm shaking essay: What is it like to be a bat? in which he argued that consciousness exists wherever there is "the subjective character of experience", that it, there is something that it is like to be that conscious entity. The essay was also a statement against reductionism. Nagel argued as follows:

"Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat...

"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications."

From this position, he argued, there exist things that are unknown, but there also exist things that are unknowable:

"Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend... After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted for ever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type."

(Emphasis mine)

Enter Chris Chatham's post, entitled target=bat2>What It's Like To Be A Bat: Seeing With Sound Via Sensory Substitution. This is an interesting roundup of recent work developing 'sensory substitution' technology. For example, a system exists that transforms camera images into weak electrical signals applied to the tongue; another uses sounds to represent camera images.

Note that Chatham doesn't claim that people using these systems do know what it is like to be a bat. As Nagel said "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. ". Whilst there are now some extra sensory modalities that turn the "imagine" into "experience", the human baggage that is applied to that experience will still mean we can never know what it is like to be a bat.

One thing the human animal is very good at it story telling. For some entertaining imaginings of what it is like to be a bat see chapter 8 of David Lodge's novel Thinks

Elephant and Castle Regeneration: the view from my window

It's a bit noisy working from home at the moment as the building work begins:





How long does it take to build something this size?



Still - we're luckier than these poor folks. No-one hurt, so I hear, but what a mess: