I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which are more didactic emerge through reader feedback (often via email).

Edmund Yong has rebooted the “Who are you?” meme. I’ll quote him:

So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

I will try and be a little less…abrasive…on this thread in relation to comments, so feel free to let your hair down and “de-lurk”

That being said, I do take surveys of my readership periodically, so here are some of the demographic breakdowns which I have from a survey I took last winter….

-20% of the readership responded that they’d been reading GNXP for more than 4 years

-50% have at least a master’s degree (22% have doctorates, 11% professional advanced degrees)

-Nearly 50% of university degree holders who read GNXP have a background in science & engineering (science = natural science + mathematics)

-78% are atheists & agnostics

-60% have no religious identity

-70% live in the United States of America

-80% are of European ancestry

-86% are male

-35% are on the political Left, 30% on the Right, and 25% Libertarian

-60% have no children

-12% are virgins

-82% have taken calculus

The above includes both GNXP weblogs. The sample size is north of 600 (the omission rates varied by question).

In 2000 and 2001, two 27ft telescopes, located in Hawaii and Chili, began scientific operations as the Gemini Observatories.  Named for the constellation Gemini, the twins, the optical/infrared telescopes are among the largest and most advanced available to astronomers.  Named Gemini North (Hawaii) and Gemini South (Chili) when discussing the individual observatories, Gemini is usually referred to in the singular, with no distinction.

Gemini South - Image shamelessly lifted from the Gemini Website

Built and operated jointly by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chili, any astronomer from these countries can apply for observatory time on Gemini.  What’s really cool is a scientist doesn’t have to be physically present at the observatory to operate the telescope; Gemini is designed to be remotely operated.  This saves astronomers valuable time (and expense, of course), and makes Gemini extremely responsive to unexpected celestial events; like this image of Jupiter getting hit by an asteroid:

Being a land-based observatory, Gemini must deal with distortions from the Earth’s atmosphere (something for which space telescopes like the Hubble don’t have to compensate).  In order to compensate for the distortion, the telescopes operate with a system of “adaptive optics”.  In effect, Gemini is wearing glasses.

Since beginning its scientific work, Gemini has been responsible for some ground-breaking discoveries.  Imaging the Milky Way’s galactic core, Gemini’s combined optical/infrared images returned images clearer and more detailed than has ever before been possible.  Most recently, Gemini confirmed the imaging of a planet around a distant star (read Tom’s post here).  That’s just the most recent in a long line of Gemini-based discoveries.  If you have a minute, take a look at these links from the Gemini website.  It would take a whole ‘nother post to talk about these discoveries, but it’s well-worth your time to take a look.

Gemini weighs in as the “next generation” in telescope optics, and it’s a heavy hitter.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Anyone currently following the World Cup, Wimbledon, or any of the many sporting events around the world will know the emotional highs and lows that they can produce. But these events wield even more power than we think. According to Andrew Healy­ from Loyola Marymount University, sports results can even swing the outcome of an election.

In the US, if a local college football team wins a match in the ten days before a Senate, gubernatiorial or even presidential election, the incumbent candidate tends to get a slightly higher proportion of the vote. This advantage is particularly potent if the team has a strong fan-base and if they were the underdogs. Healy’s study provides yet more evidence that voting decisions aren’t just based on objective and well-reasoned analysis, despite their importance in democratic societies. They can be influenced by completely irrelevant events, putting the fate of politicians into the hands (or feet) of sportsmen.

Healy says that a victory by a local team puts sports fans in a generally positive frame of mind. If they approach the ballot box in this way, they’re more likely to think well of the incumbent party, to interpret their past record more positively, and to be more content with the status quo. The same effect, where emotions cross the boundaries between different judgments, has been seen countless times before in laboratory studies.

When we’re in a good mood, we overestimate the frequency of happy events in our lives, we interpret things around us more favourably, and we spend more time thinking about the positive sides of the things we’re judging. These trends hold true even for things that have nothing to do with whatever made us happy. As an example, people think that their cars or televisions perform better if they received a free gift beforehand. And this applies to politicians too.

Healy looked at the results of local college football games between 1964 and 2008, for all counties with teams in the Bowl Championship Series. He compared these results to those of American presidential, gubernatorial and senate elections within the same counties. The numbers showed that if the local team won in the 10 days before the election, the incumbent’s share of the vote went up by 0.8 percentage points – a small but statistically significant change. This effect became even bigger after Healy adjusted the results for how strong and consistent the teams were, or the wealth, education and ethnic diversity of the counties.

If Healy’s explanation about positive moods is correct, you would expect football games to have a stronger influence in conditions where they engender stronger emotions. And that’s exactly what happens. If the local underdog team won against expectations (as measured by looking at the odds given by betting offices), the incumbent’s vote share went up by 1.61 percentage points. In counties where more people turn up to matches, or where the local team has a track record of championship wins, a local victory boosted the incumbent’s vote share by between 2.30 and 2.42 percentage points.

These stats support Healy’s idea that it’s all about emotions. The buzz of seeing the local team win can translate to a feel-good factor for the current government, particularly if the victory was unexpected or if you’re in an area that’s football-mad. And in all these cases, games played after Election Day had no bearing on the incumbent’s prospects.

Healy found the same effect in another sport and at an individual level, by showing that the performance of local teams in a basketball tournament affected people’s approval of President Obama.

During the 2009 NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, Healy asked over 3,000 people to name their favourite team and found that for every win the team achieved above the bookies’ predictions, their approval rating for Obama went up by 2.3 percentage points. Again, the effect was strongest among the biggest fans. Victories garnered an extra 5 percentage points of support for the President among people closely following the tournament, but just 1.1 points among more casual supporters.

And this time, Healy embedded an experiment in his study. After asking the volunteers to name their team, he told half of them about the scores in recent games in great detail. Doing so completely nullified the effect of these games on Obama’s approval ratings. That’s critically important for it suggests that the link between sporting success, mood and voting decisions is a unconscious one. It also tells us that moving these considerations to the front of our minds can strip them of any influence.

Healy’s work is just the latest of a long line of psychological studies that show us the irrational nature of voting. People make child-like judgments about a candidate’s competence based on second-long glances at their faces, and they can predict the winner of an election with reasonable accuracy based on such short looks. The subliminal sight of a national flag can shift people’s voting choices. And even undecided people have often secretly made their minds up, even if they have no clue that they’ve done so.

Now we see that events well beyond a politician’s control can also affect their fates. Sports are an ideal avenue for exploring this effect. You wouldn’t expect governments to respond to the outcomes of games, nor voters to hold governments responsible for such outcomes. And whether a school is privately or publicly funded had no bearing on the link between sporting and election results. And yet, sporting outcomes do seem to trigger small shifts at the ballots.

Imagine then the even greater influence of other events that could be reasonably tied to government performance, such as the health of the economy or the outcome of a natural disaster. As Healy says, “A voter who is presented with negative information about the local economy may perceive a separate news story about the president’s foreign policy in a less positive light.”

If that seems dangerous, the study also provides a silver lining – this effect is a fragile one. If you can make people aware of the reasons for their state of mind, the influence of irrelevant events becomes weaker – all the more reason to do research like this in the first place.

Reference: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1007420107 If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Images by Rama and Mike Kaplan

More on the psychology of voting and political attitudes:

• Undecided voters aren’t really undecided – the hidden side of decision-making
• Voters use child-like judgments when judging political candidates
• Subliminal flag shifts political views and voting choices
• How light or dark is Barack Obama’s skin? Depends on your political stance…
• Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes

The European Space Agency just released the first all-sky survey taken by their Planck orbiting observatory, and it’s a beauty!

[Click to entelescopinate.]

Planck observes the sky from the far infrared all the way out to near radio frequencies, detecting cold gas and dust, star forming regions, and even the subtle and cooling glow of the background fire from the Big Bang itself. In this image, infrared is blue, and the longer wavelengths (out toward the radio part of the spectrum) are progressively more red. It shows the whole sky, which is why the image is an oval; that keeps the map from getting too distorted (like how maps of the Earth are distorted near the edges).

The line running horizontally across the image is the Milky Way galaxy itself. The galaxy is a flat disk, and we’re inside it, so it looks like a line. Think of it this way: imagine you are inside a vast fog-filled room, five hundred meters on a side, but only five meters high. When you look across the room you see lots of fog, but when you look up you only see a little bit — the amount of fog depends on how far into the room you look. The Milky Way is the same way; we’re halfway to the edge of a huge, flat disk filled with dust. When we look into the disk we see it edge-on, and we can see all that dust. Look up or down (toward the top and bottom of the image) and we don’t see as much.

This map is in galactic coordinates, meaning the center of the Milky Way is the center of the map. That makes it a little confusing for people used to using coordinates based on the Earth (celestial latitude and longitude), but much easier for astronomers mapping the galaxy and the objects beyond it. That’s what this map was made for, and that’s why it uses a galactic reference.

The wispy material in the image is dust blown up out of the disk by the fierce combined winds of thousands of young massive stars when they are born, and also when they die and explode (a close up from an earlier Planck image can be seen on the left). The reddish glow you can see near the poles of the picture is from the Cosmic Microwave Background, the fading glow of the Big Bang. You can find out more about that in a post I wrote about it a little while back. To many astronomers, that glow is the most important thing in this image, but to get at it they’ll have to digitally remove all the foreground glow of the Milky Way; it’s like looking out a bedroom window at night at a faint object when your light is on. You have too much local glow swamping your view. Removing that foreground light from the Milky Way is extremely difficult and will take astronomers long time, possibly years. But when they do, they’ll have the best ever view of it, and will learn a huge amount about how the Universe itself formed.

The ESA put up a helpful map indicating where some more familiar objects are. For example, Orion is almost all the way to the right, and the big puffy pink circle halfway to the left is the star-forming region in Cygnus, the Swan.

If you want to explore this image more, I suggest heading over to Chromoscope, an interactive map that lets you switch between different wavelengths of light, from radio up to gamma rays. It’s a nifty tool to show you how the sky changes when you observe it in different light.

The Planck data is truly amazing, and I’m very glad to see it released. I know a lot of astronomers who will be hunkering down and spending the next several years of their lives poring over it. They’ll tease out subtle hints about the Universe: how it formed, how it has evolved, and how, eventually, it may die. This is what we are now able to do, we big-brained apes. I have to disagree with Alexander Pope: the proper study of mankind is the Universe, and everything in it.

Credits: ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia