Silicon Valley: Not Enough Of A Good Thing:

The right questions to be asking aren’t “why does Silicon Valley create so few jobs;” it’s “why doesn’t everyone move to the Bay Area” (the rent is too damn high) or “how come there’s only one high-tech cluster.” After all, if industrial age capitalism had just created the prosperity of the Detroit area in its heyday, we’d look on it as a huge bust. But we had lots of industrial production clusters, of which the Detroit automobile industry was just the most famous.

I think there’s a standard geographical reason why capital intensive production of material goods exhibits polycentrism: the cost of transport matters. Many of the early industrial nuclei were located relatively close to the inputs for manufacturing. Additionally, once the goods were produced they had to be distributed as cheaply as possible, so location was another essential fixed parameter. Big eastern industrial centers loom large in the public imagination, but the same logic applies in other regions of the nation. Cheap electricity and abundant clean water is why many tech-oriented manufacturers are based out of the Pacific Northwest. It isn’t as if you could just relocate the Columbia river.

Information has never been easier to find or record. Within seconds, the Internet lets us find answers to questions that would have remained elusive just a few decades ago. We don’t even have to remember the answers – we can just look them up again.

Now, three psychologists have shown how our memories might react to this omnipresent store of information. They have found that when American students expect to have access to information in the future, they remember that information less well. But there’s a positive flipside: they’re also better at remembering where to find the information again.

The study lends some solid experimental weight to a game of speculative ping-pong that has bounced along for years. In 2008, Nicholas Carr asked if Google was making us stupid in a provocative Atlantic article that raised the prospect of weakening memories, among other potential ills. In his later book, The Shallows, Carr wrote, “The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.”

Critics ...

I’ve seen a lot of lunar eclipses, and they are usually really lovely (as the pictures I’ve been posting attest to), but they’re very slow, lasting for hours. It’s fun to look for a minute, go do something else for a few, then look again and see how the lighting on the Moon has changed. You don’t really get a sense of motion, just change over time.

But what if you could smoothly speed it up? What would it look like then?

Magic.

This time lapse video was taken by Jean-Luc Dauvergne in Tajikstan (as an aside, the capitol city of Dushanbe is my hometown Boulder’s sister city). It spans 5 hours, and you can see just how the very bright full Moon plunges into darkness as it enters the shadow of the Earth.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, the Moon was near the galactic center in the sky, so you can see the Milky Way hanging dramatically next to the red Moon, festooned with various star-forming gas clouds as indicated in the video.

This is a stunning view of the eclipse like I’ve never seen before. The reflection on the lake is ...

In March I wrote about two studies that raised the tantalizing possibility that the tree of life, which till now has appeared to have three main branches, turns out to have a fourth.

Some of the evidence for the fourth branch (or “domain,” as taxonomists would call it) came from a newly discovered and very strange group of viruses. They’re known as giant viruses, because they’re about a hundred times bigger than typical viruses and can have over a thousand genes. If there was indeed a fourth domain , it meant that giant viruses were part of one of the oldest lineages on Earth. By studying them we might learn about the earliest stages in life’s evolution.

Since then, there have been a couple developments that merit a follow-up. In April, Didier Raoult of Mediterranean University in Marseille and his colleagues published a new study on another species of giant virus. Their previous studies on the fourth domain involved giant viruses that were first discovered in the water in air conditioners, infecting amoebae called Acanthamoeba. But now scientists are finding giant viruses all over the world, in lots of ...

The spacecraft Dawn is now just one day away from entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the second-largest in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. On July 9th, it snapped this photo of the rock, from just over 40,000 km (24,000 miles) away:

As far as I can tell, this is the highest resolution image of Vesta ever taken! Vesta is a slightly flattened mildly-lumpy spheroid with a diameter of about 530 km (260 miles), and you can see it’s peppered with impact craters, as expected. It may just be the lighting, but they look shallower than I would’ve thought. Sometimes that happens when the impacted body is soft, like ice or loosely packed material — though we know the surface is rocky. Maybe it’s powdery, like the Moon’s surface? There are grooves, too, possibly cracks in the surface. Stress fractures from an impact?

It’s too early for me to speculate much, and I’m no expert, but this certainly whets my appetite to see what happens when Dawn slips into orbit and starts taking high-res images of the surface!

That will happen tomorrow, when I am at The ...

What’s the News: We’ve all probably heard the myth, made popular by Disney’s Dumbo, that elephants are afraid of mice. While that idea may not be exactly true (video), elephants do make sure to avoid another tiny critter: bees. Knowing this, zoologists from the University of Oxford loaded fences in Kenya with beehives, in hopes of deterring roaming African elephants from eating or trampling farmers’ crops. Now, two years later, the researchers are reporting in the African Journal of Ecology that the novel barriers are working wondrously and could be a viable option for protecting African croplands.

What’s the Context:

Oxford zoologist Lucy King first learned in 2007 that honeybees—and even just the recorded sound of their buzzing—can scare off African elephants. Although a bee stinger cannot penetrate an elephant’s thick skin, elephants learn to avoid bees because the little insects gravitate toward their eyes and the insides of their trunks. Elephants will even sound a low-frequency alarm call when they encounter bees, causing other ...

Well, at least Anthony Watts apologizes for calling me a kid–kind of:

I will apologize to Chris Mooney though for calling him a “kid blogger” based on that youthful photo he uses. It just seemed so much more cuddly (he looks amiable and likable in it) than calling him a schill blogger.

That’s verging on kind, until the end. The photo is from last year.

Anyway, Watts does not apologize for suggesting that the authors of the astroturfing study (which is getting a heck of a lot of free PR!) committed some sort of ethical breach in their research design, which they didn’t. Instead, he’s off on a new critique of the study (I told you it would be disconfirmation bias without end), which he has read this time.

“Why wouldn’t they mention that the study was conducted on a private Intranet and not on the World Wide Web?” Watts asks. Maybe because it’s obvious? Or at least it is to me, in that I know something about this kind of research, and I read the paper, and never even got the remote impression that this was a live study on the real live web. I mean, how would you control such a thing? How would you know who your subjects were? How would you know how the websites affected them? Etc etc etc.

But Watts continues:

Well I don’t know about you, but if you want to learn about something in the wild, you generally study it the in wild. What we have here are manufactured, “fake” websites, running on an Intranet (apparently, according to Mooney’s query of the authors). And generally, when I hear about a study on websites as applied to real websites viewed on the world wide web, I expect the study would be about real world websites, not one limited to a lab fishbowl.

As I see it, this would be like doing Jane Goodall like studies of wild chimpanzees based on chimp-robots made to look like chimpanzees, confined in the lab, and studying how they interact with students who are told they aren’t actual chimpanzees, but disguised as marketing salesmen.

Can you follow that? I’m having trouble, but then, I’m just a kid.

Let me just make the obvious point that, in order to do a social scientific study, the design has to be practical and manageable enough for you to be able to get enough participants, and learn enough about them, to actually find some strong results. This, of course, is why so many of these studies are done on undergraduates who volunteer (or get paid some small amount) and come into a campus lab. The design surely has limitations (what design doesn’t?) but it is a time honored one.

In any case, here’s the bottom line on the astroturfing study (discussed in more detail here). Astroturfing is real, it affects the climate issue, and astroturf websites and organizations make scientific claims about climate that are misleading. They’re not the only ones doing so–nobody has suggested that Watts’ blog is an astroturf site, for instance–and those involved probably believe they’re good and honest people who are just following the evidence, in the same way that almost everybody thinks of themselves.

But nevertheless, what this study shows is that for most people, if you visit a website that contains these sorts of dubious claims, it misleads you. It makes you doubt. Perhaps this was obvious anyway, but the study captures it.

Now, I think you would probably find the same thing if you didn’t call it “astroturf” and just called it “climate skeptic websites” or “climate denial websites.” But the point remains: Misinformation works. Not a surprising thing–but definitely a depressing one.

Several years ago, researchers in (you guessed it) Japan put together a reasonable facsimile of the human vocal apparatus in an attempt to help hearing-impairing people learn to better modulate their voices. The details of how this process works can be perused here, but we’d just like to treat you to a trailer of this creepy little puppy in action, moaning the nursery rhyme “Kagome, Kagome,” before some major film studio options it for a B-grade horror flick. Titles, anyone?

(via PopSci)

I really love the fact that I live in the early 21st century for a host of reasons. That being said, one aspect that’s certainly true is that when it comes to charismatic natural variety and geography there are very few “blank spots” on the map. You can get a sense of what I’m talking about if you browse National Geographic from the early 20th century. Most of the map had been filled in, but there were still nooks and crannies waiting to be illuminated. So I always find stories like this interesting, because they capture a sliver of the wonder that once was so commonplace, Snow Leopard Population Discovered in Afghanistan:

The Wildlife Conservation Society has discovered a surprisingly healthy population of rare snow leopards living in the mountainous reaches of northeastern Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, according to a new study.

The paper is in the International Journal of Environmental Studies, Saving threatened species in Afghanistan: snow leopards in the Wakhan Corridor:

The Wakhan Corridor in northeast Afghanistan is an area known for relatively abundant wildlife and it appears to represent Afghanistan’s most important snow leopard landscape. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been working in Wakhan since 2006. ...

One of the most aggravating things about having a representative government is dealing with the consequences of the choices they make.

We don’t get a direct vote on how money is spent, but we vote for the people who do. And sometimes they don’t make the best choices. Shocking I know, but just how bad these choices can be sometimes doesn’t hit home until those consequences come home to roost.

In a week, one of those choices is literally coming home: on July 21st, Atlantis will land for the last time, and the choices made for us over the past few years mean that we have no rocket system to take its place.

I’ll iterate once again that the Shuttle was canceled by Bush, and the followup rocket system, Constellation, was canceled by Obama when it was clearly over budget and behind schedule, and given the circumstances it was also very unclear it would perform as promised. I think both these decisions were correct.

Right now, the House of Representatives is making decisions about the future of NASA, and it’s looking like a 9% cut is in ...

The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch through the genomes of half a dozen individuals to make sweeping inferences about the history of the human species over the past few hundred thousand years.

Since the integration of evolution and genetics in the early years of the 20th century there have been several revolutions in our ability to perceive the underlying variation which is the raw material and result of evolutionary genetics. The understanding that DNA was the concrete substrate of Mendelian genetics, and the rise to prominence of molecular genetic techniques in understanding evolution the 1970s and 1980s, was one key transition. No longer were geneticists simply tracking the coat colors of mice or the visible mutations of fruit flies. In the 1990s the uniparental loci, the maternal and paternal lineages as inferred from the mtDNA and Y chromosomes, came into their own. Finally, the 2000s saw the post-genomic era, and researchers routinely began analyzing ...

It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!

“We describe the off-label use of a recreational device (the Super Soaker Max-D 5000) in the alleviation of a socially emergent ear condition.

A 45-year-old male complained of a profound reduction in his left ear acuity while staying at an island cottage in rural Ontario. His hearing loss was reducing his ability to hear his newborn son cry in the middle of the night, requiring his wife to carry out all late-night child care. As a result, correction of the problem was considered urgent.

The patient had been swimming multiple times a day for 6 days. He had had several ear infections as a child but was otherwise well. He admitted having used a Q-tip in his ear “once or twice” recently in the affected ear.

An otoscope being available, examination of the external ears was conducted. The nature of his problem was revealed as bilaterally impacted cement-like ear cerumen.

Neither a formal ear syringe, nor a syringe of any kind was available on the island. The day was very ...

Joseph K. Pickrell has a provocative post over at Genomes Unzipped, Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?:

The recent announcement of a new journal sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust generated a bit of discussion about the issues in the scientific publishing process it is designed to address—arbitrary editorial decisions, slow and unhelpful peer review, and so on. Left unanswered, however, is a more fundamental question: why do we publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals to begin with? What value does the existence of these journals add? In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a “killer app”.

[emphasis in the original]

This reminds of the discussion between Melody Dye and Jason Goldman on bloggingheads.tv. After reading Mr. Pickrell’s case, and generally slouching toward a more “open science” stance overall since that diavlog, I think I am now moving toward Melody’s position of “end it,” rather than Jason’s position of “mend it.”

The action in the Genomes Unzipped post is ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., a research scientist and policy wonk, who encourages the scientific community to get engaged in the policy-making process

People wonder why the public is skeptical of climate change. I would argue that it is partly the fault of those on the left who for better or worse get the science wrong when arguing their case. When people go out on a limb to claim that extreme weather is occurring due to climate change without any scientific support, they clearly open themselves up to criticism when cold weather events like “snowmageddon” hit us. Similarly, when the impact of oil spills is exaggerated or endangered species protections are misused, there is a natural backlash, especially when the science says something different. There are metaphors and allegories that relate; chicken little, the boy who cried wolf, Harold Camping, etc.

Indeed, there are cases where the science justifies the outcry. And in those cases, if activists want to win support for their causes, they should ensure they are using accurate arguments. Stay true to the facts. And, if they make a scientific claim, show the evidence that supports that claim. When I say evidence, I mean real, tried and true, peer-reviewed scientific evidence, not a story about your cousin who claimed his toilet water caught fire because it was contaminated with methane gas. There could be other explanations for that.

A hotly contested issue that is popping up in all sorts of places is whether fracking, a process of extracting natural gas, is too risky an operation for Americans to welcome into “their backyards.” The debate is multi-faceted but largely focuses on whether toxic chemicals used in the process are contaminating drinking water in areas close to the drilling. A second issue is whether the fracking process causes natural gas to leak into wells and aquifers. Lisa Jackson, Head Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, recently stated in response to a question from the U.S. House Oversight Committee,

“I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing.”

And yet, opponents of fracking continue to mistakenly claim the opposite is true. Why is the misinformation lingering out there? Without doubt, it’s because many people are motivated for various reasons to oppose any form of fossil fuel use. I can appreciate that. There’s also a problem when community leaders and other activists promote unscientific arguments.

This happened in a recent episode of The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert made a fracking mistake. During that episode, he committed more than 5 minutes to the issue. And, in some cases, he ran with material that isn’t supported by the science. In one particular instance, he used a clip from CNN that makes the following unsupported claim,

“The chemicals which are very dangerous, neurotoxins and carcinogens and the gas itself migrate into the aquifers and then you get this kind of situation where people can all of a sudden light their water on fire…”:

That’s just not based on the facts, according to the Head of the EPA. Because Colbert gets it right most of the time, I have to wonder whether this was a genuine mistake or if he has allowed himself to be duped by the anti-fracking voices. Either way, the impact is that millions of well-intentioned viewers are now empowered with false information.

You have to agree, though, the shtick about the coloring book is fracking hilarious!

If we are to take the moral high ground on this issue, we have to wait for the evidence. We should get that evidence from the results of the EPA’s scientific study.

In the meantime, there are issues regarding fracking that merit scrutiny, like where and how do they dispose of the contaminated water leftover from the process and what happens when they have a blowout or a spill. Perhaps, these issues are worthy of opposing fracking all-together. But, it should be our goal to accurately report the science.

Follow Jamie Vernon on Twitter or read occasional posts at his personal blog, “American SciCo.”

Screenshot of Civilization IV, a later version
of the game that MIT’s computer played.

What’s the News: Many video gamers scoff at the idea of actually reading the instruction manual for a game. But a manual can not only teach you how to play a game, it can also give you the basics of language—that is, if you’re a machine-learning computer. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have now designed a computer system that can learn the meaning of certain words by playing complex games like Civilization II and comparing on-screen information to the game’s instruction manual.

How the Heck:

The researchers, lead by computer scientist Regina Barzilay, began by giving their machine-learning system very basic knowledge about Civilization II, such as the various actions it can take (moving the cursor, clicking, etc.). The computer also had access to the words and other information that popped up on-screen—though it didn’t understand what the text and objects meant—and it knew when it won or lost ...

This picture of Atlantis approaching the International Space Station made me laugh:

That is all.

[UPDATE: OK, maybe that isn't all. A lot of people don't get why this picture made me laugh; I thought it looked funny because it overflows the frame and is upside-down compared to how we usually see it. It's cute. As for the title, how do bats sleep?]

Credit: NASA

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you don’t get dizzy easily and if you have a hangover you might want to wait 

Source

I’ve written about Brian Malow before; he’s a comedian who does science-based stand-up, and he also makes short videos for Time Magazine. His latest is on his love affair with space:

Both Brian and Tara are friends, so congrats to them both! On seeing the launch of Discovery, I mean. That’s a memory to last a lifetime… together.

Related posts:

- Science can be funny
- Space travel isn’t funny. Well, OK, maybe it is a little.
- Endeavour sets wheel to Earth one last time
- Touchdown (Discovery’s last landing)

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen several media stories profiling the rise of Google+ by noting that hoopla also greeted Google Wave and Google Buzz before their expiration as “It” technologies. This caveat was probably more true for Google Wave, which heralded the revolution which no one seemed anxious for (“what if we designed email now?!?!?!”). Buzz was a public relations disaster from its inception. When I first posted on Google+ I asserted that it was not in the same category as Wave or Buzz, and that was in a good way. By that, I meant that taking Google+ for a test drive I thought I’d stick around for at least a bit. I didn’t get that sense with Wave, and proactively shut down Buzz in my Gmail account. But that’s an N of 1, me. Over the past few weeks though friends have been joining Google+, and real conversations have been starting. I’ve consciously avoided adding anyone to my Google+ circle proactively, rather I have been reciprocally adding them. I’m at 300+ now. Right now the people in my circles are much closer in profile to my twitter account than my Facebook. That’s probably not ...

SOLVED by Dwight at 12: 32 CDT.

Here we are again, another week passed.  Are you ready to relax and turn your mind to more trivial pursuits?  Excellent!

You’ll find today’s riddle subject in the real world, and since you’re kicked back, relaxed, and ready to play, we’ll jump right in:

You’ll find today’s answer wandering through our own backyard.

So near, yet so far away… this was not known to early man.

The more we know about this, the more complex and interesting it becomes.

In modern use, this has become a figure of speech.

This was a first for mathematics.

You’ll find today’s answer hanging out with 13 friends.

Yum!

Modern references to today’s subject show up in music, literature, and philosophy.

Modern observation suggest today’s subject goes through seasonal variations.

We may be seeing Saturn’s future when we look at today’s answer.

And that’s that.  A quick, fun riddle for your amusement… I doubt it takes you long to solve.  I’ll be hanging out in the comments as usual, so come keep me company.  If you try to email your answer to me, I may not get it.  I’m having trouble with my email today.

Good luck!

Mama Mia!