mono-layer crisis?

Is the national debate about suicide in South Korea, in spite of economic growth, a symptom of media-promoted single-layer thinking that greater emphasis on the value (and challenge) of niche-network layer-multiplicity might help out with?

data & models paired

Are folks tempted in the quantitative sciences to present too much theory sans observation, reflected e.g. implicitly in this recent article? This counterpoint on poorly designed high school tests suggests a need for more robust content at the high school level as well.

One fix may be to introduce inverse (algorithm-selection) challenges in parallel with the usual forward (algorithmic-reasoning) challenges. In other words, give students data to measure and interpret while they are also learning the models used to predict what's going to happen, so they at least know there's a science of choosing (as well as of using) models in the subject at hand.

This would help close the loop on concreteness, and call into play complementary skills that deserve attention during the crucial period in which students are deciding their major. Our NanoScience Practicals course is example of a cross-disciplinary offering designed to explicitly confront students each week with new data, as well as with topic-specific concepts & models.

This is also consistent with recent requests in the biological sciences for the development of better principle-based as distinct from informal reasoning skills. The importance of principle-based tools for selecting models is perhaps even more obvious in life-science than in physical science areas.

amazing humans

Prairie dog barks about foxes afoot may be a timely reflection of danger, but who would pretend that reality is a pale shadow of their bark?

exciting possibility

Prokaryotic microbes are the ideologues of the cell-biology world, in that they express their amino-acid codes willy-nilly.  The eukaryotic cells of multi-celled organisms, on the other hand, are cell-biology's experts at model-selection, having learned to inform the codes that they express to the traffic in their organism's bloodstream.

Microbes will survive long after our sun makes this planet inhospitable for metazoan life.  However, without the chance to evolve... (i) intra-organism circulatory-systems, (ii) regulated gene-expression and hence (iii) multi-celled life as we know it, the story of planet Earth would (I think) be much less interesting. 

Electronic-communication networks open up the possibility of intra-community idea-expression, i.e. the use of organization-internal ideastreams on the level of pairs, families, communities, & cultures as well as worldwide.  Should we seize this opportunity to become experts at model-selection on the level of idea codes, or shall we follow the example of ideologues who will likely be here long after our electronic ideastreams dry up?

bovine bents

It's easy to imagine that large mammals capable of domestication, in context of their preference for a hierarchical social structure as discussed by Jared Diamond in his book Guns germs and steel (W. W. Norton, 1999), might be preoccupied with royalty (e.g. their selection as savior, or their behavior as distraction) even if that meant ignoring issues that were impacting tens, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of closer community members.

I'm sure glad we don't act like that...

the answer to...

..."What's the most important question?" is often not "How do we answer the obvious?" but rather "In what terms can the problem be most simply addressed?".

In math, this is the challenge of finding the right variable. In science this is the inverse problem of selecting a model given observational data, as distinct from the forward problem of prediction with model in hand.

The forward problem is easier to do and to teach. Moreover ability to solve it has survival value, so it's no surprise that ideologues abound in all walks of life.

As a result we may spend too few neurons implementing (and developing) ways to choose our questions with care. According to Sharon McGrayne's The theory that would not die (Yale University Press, 2011) there is a whole science of model selection for making the most of limited data.

This science, namely Bayesian inference, has a spectacular track-record of practical problem-solving. There is also a long tradition of idealogue disinterest.

Even today methods for idea-selection in a given field oft fall through the cracks of higher ed, in spite of their relevance to everyday life. That's the way things work, so expect it & adapt e.g. with ways to compensate for this tendency.

quality of life tests

News of the day tends to focus on one layer of organization at a time, whether it be e.g. public health, family life, the state of the economy, or cultural beliefs.  When you are only thinking about one layer at at time, it's often easy to cartoonify things in terms e.g. of good guys and bad guys.

Life's quality of course involves simplification, but it also involves subsystem-correlations that look in and out from the physical boundaries of skin, family and culture.  Folks who are greedy on one layer (e.g. in their job) may be acting prudently on another (e.g. for their family).  Hence multi-layer thinking about community health is more likely to be about the balance between different (and sometimes competing) perspectives than it is about good versus bad.

How can we: (i) track what we can know about the health of all six of these correlation layers, and moreover (ii) use that information to optimize quality of life across the board?  This might make for some fun (and constructive) regional competitions in the process.

ideastream science

In addition to perturbing an individual's attention-focus (toward e.g. the buffering of correlations that look in/out from skin, family or culture), unscoped electronic-broadcasts (in any of various forms) can also affect the choice of concepts in terms of which one thinks. Folks unfamiliar with the power of concept-sets to leave blind spots in our awareness (as well as to manipulate neolithic-feelings) may be especially vulnerable to this effect.

Examples of "broadcasts willy-nilly" (i.e. communications to everyone regardless of their mandate) that often do this include:

• xenophobic, fiscal, and/or territorial threat broadcasts, 
• health-risk warnings not accompanied by observational data,
• cartoonifications of individual people as well as lifeform types, etc.

For this reason education in most fields should likely include an explicit discussion of tools for choosing one's concepts and models, as well as the more reliably covered model-based skills of  e.g. informal reasoning and algorithmic implementation.

StL Beacon quote

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer in The North American Review, May 1904

Of course, the means by which ideas travel may have changed a bit between then and now...

ideastream pH

The bloodstream in multicelled animals facilitates asynchronous communication between cells and organ systems.  Even though each end-user can put out, and read in, what it wants from the bloodstream there exist mechanisms to regulate total concentrations of things like hydrogen ions, salt, glucose, etc.

This suggests an interesting way that governments might regulate constructive use of electronic ideastreams without interfering with either consumer choice or freedom of expression.  Look for more on possible specific strategies in this context, here, in the days ahead...

fact free reporting

Does a dispute about topics (e.g. brain cancer caused by cellphones) become newsworthy just because a familiar name brings it up?  Should competent news organizations respect the critical observer in each of their subscribers by referencing relevant observations (e.g. the decline in brain cancer as cell phones proliferate) when technical topics come up in a context whose primary value (for one party or another) may be to pull neolithic strings?

imagination

Can you imagine living with a ton of air sitting on you,
in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
with moving charges that contract enough to levitate,
while you move timeward at nearly the speed of light
relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty
to keep carbon in the sun-powered living crust on your planet
from returning to its early solar-system gaseous CO₂ form?
You may know someone who does...

meltdown math

Does it help to say "the radiation was 1000 times normal" without saying where and for how long, or how it compares to everyday differences e.g. in visiting the mountains, taking a plane ride, or getting an X-ray?

radiation sources

In that context it might be useful to list here some numbers for various kinds of everyday exposure to ionizing radiation in terms of both exposure rate and of total dose, where one equivalent Joule (J) of absorbed energy per kilogram (kg) of target mass is also known as 1 Sievert (Sv) or 100 Röntgen equivalents for man (rem). We might start with total doses of different types of radiation for various events.

Table 1: Various ionizing radiation doses

Activity	Absorbed dose [μJ/kg]	Equivalent Dose [μSv]	Equivalent Dose [rem]
dental X-ray	10	10	0.001
foot/arm X-ray	10	10	0.001
cosmic rays for year		270	0.027
earth bkgd. for year		280	0.028
mammogram	3,000	3,000	0.3
airline crew for year		9,000	0.9
GI X-ray series	14,000	14,000	1.4
nuclear worker for year		20,000	2
poisoning effects		1,000,000	100

radioactive transport

This might be good place for notes on the expected reduction with distance of radiative dose, and of air-borne and water-borne contamination as well. They might help answer questions about how much you should worry about stuff happening down the road, and/or on the other side of the planet.
For instance, radiation from a localized specimen will fall off as one over distance squared (or faster if there are absorbers in the way). Thus if the dose rate is one rem/hour at 1 meter away, at 10 meters away it will be 0.01 rem/hour or less. That means that if the source of radioactivity stays put, distance between you and it will have a very powerful effect.

On the other hand, lateral transport of radioactive materials away from a point e.g. on the earth's surface may at best result in concentrations that fall off as one over distance. If the flow is not radially outward but unidirectional, the fall-off will be greater for those out of the flow path but less for those in that path. Thus if the outflow of radioactive stuff gives a 1% concentration a kilometer away from the source, the average concentration 10 kilometers away should be only down to 0.1%.

effects of radiation

Similarly the risks of ill-affect associated with the various types of exposure might be of interest to folks who want to decide for themselves what is useful information and what is not. Short of the somatic damage caused by very large (e.g. ≈ 1 equivalent J/kg) doses of radiation, radiation might e.g. increase one's chance to get cancer but by how much?

Estimates e.g. for the effect of 1-rem computer tomography (CT) scans might be something like 4 cases of cancer (developing after a decade or more) for every 10,000 scans. Thus the odds of getting cancer from a CT scan may be less than the odds of throwing 11 coins at once and finding that all of them have landed heads up, i.e. less than 1 in 2¹¹ = 2048 times. If you need the scan, that chance may be one you can afford to take but regardless it should probably be your call.

nuclear meltdowns

Fission-energy is a form of ordered-energy from long-dead stars that's found in all atoms much heavier than Iron-58 and Nickel-62. The only way we know to release it is to exploit the neutron-mediated herd-behavior of certain big atoms like Uranium-235.

Fissioning releases that ordered-energy by breaking atoms almost randomly into two fragments with energies that correspond to heat at about 200MeV/(2k_B) ≈ 10¹²K. The resulting motion warms up the atom's surroundings, including any coolant being used to pull the heat out for use running an electric generator.

This is an abundant form of ordered-energy that doesn't create green-house gases. To the extent that we make it safe and sustainable, fission energy is an important part of our future.

One of the two fission fragments usually has an atomic weight between 75 and 105, the other an atomic weight between 150 and 130. One inconvenient truth is that these fragments have a mess of chemical & radioactive properties.

The other problem is that once you get a herd of such atoms to start fissioning, the process may be controlled only by aggressively cooling the herd. Otherwise it melts and allows the release of both heat and fragments to get out of hand.

This is not new, as meltdown of naturally-occurring reactions like this are present in the geological record. If you have ideas for designing reactors so that gravity helps melting to disperse the critical mass, this might come in handy for future reactor construction!

All told, we take our chances with all forms of ordered-energy both because: (a) we need it to survive and because (b) it is fun to waste. If one looks at the numbers, the ratio of benefit to both: (i) cost & (ii) risk for fission-energy is quite good in spite of our media's passion for sensationalizing it.

If it helps with the overall picture of regional land-use, therefore, folks who assume the risk of living near reactors should get a break. That's mainly because space nearby a reactor will most likely be fine, but might accidentally lose its property value and habitability for decades.

idea angiogenesis

Archival limited-access joint-editing spaces can serve as the idea-code bloodstream for communities of all sorts, much as molecule-code bloodstreams serve internal communication between cells in many multicelled organisms. The internet and browsers for the most part already offer to much of the population access to such idea-streams, where and when they have been set up.

Once such joint-editing platforms are made available, however, developing the behavior patterns for access and sharing may take time.  Can mechanisms for the development of molecule flow to and from biological cells via the circulatory system likewise provide inspiration there?

who's your daddy?

One of the reasons that the rocky planets in solar systems with more O than C are made of silicates is that mainly O and Si are left after most of the carbon pairs up with oxygen to form CO₂.

Note that even trees on earth (not to mention animals) are made of carbon temporarily pulled from the gas phase onto a planetary surface. 

This is how our atmosphere, thankfully, reacts with the planet and sunlight to form a living crust.

We get water and nutrients from mother earth, but the ground state for the carbon of which we're made is CO₂. It's a key part of where we came from, and it carries away the carbon weight that we (and organisms which prey on us) metabolize. 

Civilization may produce many gases harmful to the environment that are mere pollutants.  Carbon dioxide is not only that.