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Mary Somerville: the new face on Royal Bank of Scotland’s ten-pound note is worthy of international recognition

From 2017, ten-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland will feature a new face; that of the great nineteenth-century science communicator Mary Somerville. Her book on mathematical astronomy, Mechanism of the Heavens – published in 1831, when she was fifty years old – was used as an advanced textbook at Cambridge for a hundred years. This is a phenomenal achievement for a woman who taught herself science and mathematics. It is also a poignant irony that such a scholarly textbook – it was said that no more than five men in Britain were capable of writing it – had been written by a woman, but was used at a time when most universities in the world (including Cambridge) did not admit female students.

In celebrating the good news that Somerville is the people’s choice for the new gig, we could do worse than listen to the accolade given to her writing by one of the men she defeated in the public poll: James Clerk Maxwell. Father of the wireless electromagnetic era, he no doubt studied Mechanism of the Heavens as a student at Cambridge – and he certainly knew of Somerville’s second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. This was popular science rather than an advanced textbook, but Maxwell described it as “one of those suggestive books, which put into definite, intelligible, and communicable form the guiding ideas that are already working in the minds of men of science… but which they cannot yet shape into a definite statement.” This is high praise indeed.

If Maxwell’s ‘men of science’ sounds sexist in hindsight, it is doubly important to remember that women were not allowed to join the academic academies – not even the Royal Society, whose aim was not so much the doing of science as promoting it. In other words, ‘men of science’ was fact, not opinion. Which makes Mary Somerville all the more remarkable. She went on to write two more science books – and a delightful memoir completed when she was 91 – but she was also a scientist in her own right. In 1826 she published a paper in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, based on her experiments on a possible connection between violet light and electromagnetism. Although her results were ultimately proved incorrect, initially such famous scientists as her friends John Herschel and William Wollaston, had regarded her experiment as authoritative. Her friend Michael Faraday would find the first correct experimental connection between light and electromagnetism, and then Maxwell would complete the puzzle with his magnificent electromagnetic theory of light. But he had such respect for Somerville that nearly fifty years after her experiment, he took the trouble to analyse its underlying flaw, in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Image credit: Mary Somerville by Popular Science Monthly Volume 25. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Somerville corresponded with Faraday during her next series of experiments, in 1835. These involved testing the effects of different coloured light on photographic paper (photography was a new and fledgling invention at the time), and her paper was published by the French Academy of Sciences. The results of her third set of experiments – on the effect of different coloured light on organic matter – were published by the Royal Society in 1845.

In her book Connexions, she had also conjectured that observed discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus – which had been discovered by another friend of hers, William Herschel, father of John – might be due to the effects of another body as yet unseen. After John Couch Adams and Urbain Leverrier independently discovered the existence of Neptune in 1846, Adams told Somerville’s husband, William Somerville, that his search for the planet had been inspired by that passage in Connexions.

When Mary Somerville died in 1872, just before her 92nd birthday, she was widely acknowledged as the nineteenth century’s ‘Queen of Science.’ The day before she died, she had been studying cutting edge mathematics (‘quaternions’, which Maxwell was also studying, as it happens – he discussed their application to electromagnetism in his Treatise of the following year). But what makes Mary Somerville’s story timeless is her monumental struggle to understand the mysteries of science in the first place. It might be tempting to think she owed her success to the support of all her famous friends – and indeed, they did support her. But she had gained entry to the society of ‘men of science’ in a most extraordinary way.

As a child in Burntisland, a village across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, Mary Fairfax had grown up ‘a wild creature’, as she put it. While her brothers were sent to school, she had been left free to roam along the seashore. Her mother had taught her enough literacy to read the Bible, and later she was taught some basic arithmetic. But everything changed when a friend showed fifteen-year-old Mary the needlework patterns in a women’s magazine. Leafing through it, Mary was mesmerized not by exquisite needlework but by a collection of x’s and y’s in strange, alluring patterns. Her friend knew only that “they call it algebra” (it was a worked solution to one of the magazine’s mathematical puzzles). Tantalized, Mary began studying mathematics in secret, reading under the covers at night. When the household stock of candles ran low too quickly, Mary’s secret was discovered and her candles confiscated – her father accepted the prevailing belief that intellectual study would send a girl mad or make her seriously ill.

Mary persevered for decades, teaching herself mathematics, Latin, and French. Eventually, she was able to read and understand both Newton’s Principia in Latin, and Newton’s disciple Pierre Laplace in French. She did it all alone, just for the love of knowledge. But when Britain’s ‘men of science’ and their wives finally discovered her learning, they were stunned. They quickly embraced her, but her public success was also possible because of the support of her three surviving children (three had died in childhood), and especially her medical doctor husband.

At 91, while studying quaternions, she revealed one of the secrets of her success: whenever she encountered a difficulty, she remained calm, never giving up, because “if I do not succeed today, I will attack [the problem] again on the morrow.” It is a great aphorism to remember her by, as we celebrate the accolades that are still coming her way: Oxford’s Somerville College was named in her honour soon after her death, and now RBS’s ten-pound note.

Featured image credit: Somerville College by Philip Allfrey. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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10 reasons to love the flute

This month’s spotlight instrument is particularly important to me; I played the flute for ten years as an adolescent and continue to have a soft spot for it. From long practices at high school band camp to dressy solo performances at the Colburn School in Los Angeles where I studied on weekends, the flute was a dear and constant companion. Here are a few reasons I’ll always prefer it.

It has a global presence. Flutes of various types are found in nearly every part of the world.
It has an inclusive name. The word “flute” is a generic term that covers a variety of instruments with hollow bodies and a tubular air column. If it produces what is called an “edge tone”, meaning the player breathes against the edge of an opening, not into it, it can theoretically be called a flute.
For such a small instrument, it takes a lot of power to play. A firm core and powerful lungs are two of the most valuable assets to have as a flute player!
It has a long history. Because there are so many different instruments and objects that can be called “flutes”, and they can be made of a plethora of materials, variations of the flute are found not only all over the world but all over history as well. In palaeolithic Europe, whistles made of bone were popular, although it is likely that cane and reed flutes existed as well.
It works in a variety of genres. Robert Dick, who won the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Flute Association, taught developing flutists that the flute works not only in classical and jazz but in rock and roll and other “contemporary” genres.
OUP has close, internal ties with the flute. Vice President and Executive Editor for history Nancy Toff, author of Monarch of the Flute: The Life of Georges Barrère and The Flute Book , regularly plays and writes about the flute. She also serves as the archivist/historian for the National Flute Association and the New York Flute Club.
It can be full of surprises. According to Grove Music Online, “some open-ended flutes have no holes at all.” The player opens and closes the far end in varying degrees to produce melodies. These types of flutes are especially prevalent in Papua New Guinea.
Sometimes you’ll even need to use your nose. Some flutes in Oceania and Southeast Asia are played by blowing with the nose, as it is considered to contain breath that is closer to the soul (rather than the mouth, which is used for eating and speaking).
It comes in a variety of sizes and shapes. Flutes can be played horizontally or vertically. They can include a single tube, as with a concert flute or recorder, or multiple tubes, as with an aulos or panpipe. The fingers can press keys or cover open holes or even just the end of the bore. There is variety even within the relatively narrow collection of keyed instruments in a symphony orchestra. There is the concert flute in C major, the piccolo, which plays an octave higher, the alto flute, which plays in G, and the bass flute, an octave below the concert. The first is certainly the most compact, as opposed to the latter, which is much heavier than its cousins with a narrow bore and curved head.
It’s the instrument of a king. Frederick the Great of Prussia loved the flute so much that he took his hand to composing music for it, and commissioned other composers (the likes of J.S. Bach, included) to write solo pieces for him to perform to friends and family.

The above are only ten facts from the extensive entries in Grove Music Online. What do you love about the flute?

Featured image: Bach – Flute concert in a minor. Photo by Zoltán Vörös. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Scholarly misconduct and the integrity crisis

Retractions in scholarly journals have reached record levels. Doctorates have been removed from politicians and others for plagiarism, there has been tasteless denigration of academic colleagues under cover of academic freedom, researchers have been jailed for fraud, and conflicts of interest involving private industry’s role at universities have generated notoriety. Sex for marks practices have been exposed.

However, whilst scandals within the research environment occur regularly, rarely are they viewed en masse to identify what lessons can be learned. Where possible, such matters are resolved collegiately and quietly, with apologies and resignations; thereby embarrassments are minimized. Protocols and codes of ethics are written and rewritten. Articles are withdrawn. Too often the legal system is manipulated to thwart effective investigations and the ultimate resolution of allegations degenerates into lengthy and bitter disputation. An example of this was the saga that enveloped Christopher Gillberg’s data destruction – litigation made its way interminably through the Swedish courts, and then even the European Court of Human Rights.

Miscreants are denounced by whistleblowers, and findings are made one way or the other, often legalistically and belatedly, by internal inquiries, ombudsmen, corruption investigations, external reviews, and courts on appeal. In the end scholarship self-corrects and research entitlements may be withdrawn for a time.  Proven malefactors move away from their employing institution sometimes to resurface elsewhere or, like the psychologist Diederik Stapel, in autobiographies.

However, what has been occurring is more than a series of rotten apples in the scholarly barrel. It is a crisis for the culture of scholarship leading to an attenuation of the trust and respect which should be its hallmarks. And the misconduct has come at a very human cost for patients, fellow researchers, and supervisors, as well as to the detriment of trajectories of research, institutions, and funders.

The case of Haruko Obokata is illustrative. Dr Obokata was a medical scientist at a lucratively government-funded Japanese research institution. She claimed to have made a breakthrough in stem cell research and became a household name in her country. Her scholarship was published in Nature. Research funds poured in. Her lifestyle became more akin to that of a rock star. However, doubts grew about the reliability of her work – others were unable to replicate her results. Ultimately a tragedy played out in the glare of the media and the shadow of potential criminal prosecution. It emerged that her research was false and that her doctorate was flawed; after an inquiry it was withdrawn. Major articles were retracted. Her supervisor committed suicide. Research funds for her institution were slashed and in 2015 she was obliged to leave her employment, disgraced, and discredited.

As there are many forms of unethical conduct in research, conflicts of interest in the scholarly environment can take diverse forms. One is researchers persisting in trials in spite of the risk of adverse consequences. An instance of this occurred when the New Zealand National Women’s Hospital continued trials involving women with a diagnosed cervical cancer precursor without providing treatment when this was the acknowledged proper clinical response. A report by Judge Cartwright castigated the ethics of the research project.

what has been occurring is more than a series of rotten apples in the scholarly barrel.

At the Institute for Human Gene Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania researchers conducted a gene therapy trial, involving Jesse Gelsinger, but failed to make a range of disclosures to participants. After Gelsinger’s death, the University agreed to pay substantial fines and preclusions were placed on a number of researchers’ clinical research entitlements in relation to human subjects.

The issue again came to prominence when one man died and four others fell seriously ill during a French drug safety study in early 2016.  A trial volunteer started to complain of headaches and blurry vision. He was taken to hospital but the trial was continued with others becoming ill during the day before the volunteer died, rather than informing the remaining participants and enabling them to decide whether they wished to continue. This was in spite of a consent form that promised: “You will be informed about any new significant information that could affect your willingness to continue the trial.” A preliminary report published in January 2016 by the Inspection Générale des Affaires Sociales was highly critical of defects in the process.

The difficulty is that instances of research fraud and conflict of interest continue to occur in spite of even the criminal law entering the domain. In 2015, for example, Dr Dong-Pyou Han, a member of an Iowa State University team which received over $US19 million in government funding for HIV research, was sentenced to 57 months’ imprisonment after his published research outcomes were shown to have been based on outright fabrication.

Such examples, together with scandals in which academics have engaged in sexualised relationships with postgraduate students, including Professors Ezio Camerino in Italy and Colin McGinn in the United States, highlight the need for clear scholarly protocols to clarify obligations, entitlements and expectations. Whether it is necessary to go as far as some United States zero tolerance policies on staff-student sexual relationships, or a proscription upon sexual harassment and conflicts of interest suffices, remains a controversial issue.

Important steps are required in order to regain trust in the integrity of the scholarly environment, as well as in the fruits of scholarship. They need to include appropriate and consistent protocols and standards, as well as the imposition of robust deterrent penalties. There need to be fair, prompt, and rigorous investigative and adjudicative procedures. This is an area in which the law and improved models of investigation and decision-making have a role to play. Whistleblowers must be valued and protected through actions, not just words, but the innocent must also be safeguarded. The culture of contemporary scholarship has to be reframed so that importance is reasserted in the originality of findings, both positive and negative, transparency of data, and so that incentives for publishing methodologically flawed and superficial work are removed. This has repercussions for criteria for academic advancement, for journals’ editors and publishers, and for scholarly endeavours generally, so that scholarly values and the checks and balances of ethics committees, supervision, and peer reviewing can be harnessed more effectively.

Featured image credit: I tend to scribble a lot, by Nic McPhee. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Cancer is no moonshot

A tired old elephant hunched in the room as President Obama announced the launch of a new moonshot against cancer during his State of the Union address a month ago. We’ve heard that promise before. On 23 December 1971, when President Nixon first declared a national war on cancer, he also based his conviction on the successfully completed moonwalk. In truth, what it will take to reduce the burden of cancer in our lives has little to do with what it took to land a man on the moon. That stellar accomplishment came about by spending money on existing technologies. In fact, for more than fifty years we have known a lot about how to prevent cancer, yet we remain focused on finding and treating the disease. In 1971, one in six Americans developed cancer. Today the toll is far greater, affecting one in every two men and one in every three women during their lifetimes.

As the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports, the modest decline in overall cancer deaths after more than $100 billion has been spent is largely due to declines in smoking and improvements in treating childhood and screening related cancers. There’s been little real advance in treating the most deadly adult cancers. Tobacco, alcohol, diet, daily exposures from the environments at work, home, school, viruses, exercise, and radiation are understood to trigger the disease in nearly nine out of ten cases – as the president’s cancer panel reminded us in 2010. A detailed analysis by expert statisticians explains that “The decline in overall cancer mortality in the United States (US) chiefly reflects successful efforts to discourage smoking and advances in screening and treatment for breast, cervical, prostate, and colorectal cancers.”

Much of the past war on cancer has focused on the wrong enemies, with the wrong weapons. No matter how impressive the gains we may make from immunotherapies, we must figure out how to keep the disease from happening in the first place. While we focus on the genome within, we are ignoring the “exposome” – all that we breathe, drink, eat and absorb through our skin. Cancer prevention requires controlling and reducing agents known to increase the chance that cancer will develop with major support to responsible agencies and incentives to companies to use and produce less toxic products.

Studies of identical twins tell us that most cases of cancer do not arise because of inherited defects. The NCI notes that only one in ten women who develop breast cancer is born with defective genes. This means that most cases come about because of ways that our healthy genes interact with the world around us. Women who work at night—like nurses or those who work in electronics—have lower levels of melatonin and higher rates of breast cancer. CDC finds that men who work with chemicals or electromagnetic fields have higher rates of brain cancer and leukemia. Those who work with wood dust and formaldehyde have higher rates of nasal cancer. The list of workplace causes of cancer provides a litany of mostly under-regulated and unrecognized factors.

The history of American efforts to regulate chemicals makes it clear, it can take three weeks to approve a new chemical and more than thirty years to remove it from the market.

Cancer is not the business of NIH alone, but arises from policies on energy, buildings, food, and manufacturing. Fossil fuel emissions are not only climate changing greenhouse gases, they also include a soup of toxic agents and engine exhausts. A true moonshot on cancer would mean altering purchasing and investment decisions across the board and enhancing environmental protection to prevent cancer from occurring, as well as seeking novel approaches to treatment through immunotherapies.

If we want to win the battle against cancer, we can start with what we’ve known for half a century, to tackle those things known to cause cancer. Ask yourself this: When should we have acted against tobacco? Why did we wait until nearly 40 years after tobacco was understood to cause cancer and other diseases before mounting a major effort to curtail tobacco production and use? What took us so long to reduce the amount of benzene in gasoline or toxic flame retardants in our waters, food, furniture, bedding, and fabrics? The answers have less to do with science than to do with the power of highly profitable industries that rely on public relations to counteract scientific reports of risks.

We can lead with a concerted effort to tackle the 1000 physical and chemical agents evaluated as possible, probable, or known human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization. These include engine exhausts, pesticides, many synthetic chemicals and hormones, and cell phone and wireless radiation. If the president wants to take a presidential step here, he should appoint an inter-agency cabinet level task force empowered to take concrete steps to reduce the production, consumption, and disposal of agents known or suspected to cause cancer. The Office of Management and Budget should change their existing purchasing guidelines just as they did for energy efficiency, requiring an investment in the infrastructure for green energy. The Departments of Defense, Commerce, and all government agencies need to alter their procurement policies to avoid and reduce (to the extent possible) exposures to toxic agents and seek safer substitutes as part of an overall sustainable purchasing effort.

Vice President Biden has tragically lost his adult son, Beau, to brain cancer. He is not alone. Cell phone radiation is taking a growing toll on young adults like Beau who are regular, heavy users at work and at home. Brain cancer patients have a right to know that those with their disease who continue using their cellphones or cordless phones next to their heads live half as long as those who do not.

To reduce the burden of cancer, we must prevent it from arising in the first place, and we have to keep the millions of cancer survivors from relapsing by encouraging them to avoid exposures to known or suspected cancer-causing agents in their homes and workplaces. Improving cancer therapies and delivery are important goals, but we have to tackle those things that cause the disease to occur or recur. I believe that if we had acted on what has long been known about the industrial and environmental causes of cancer when this so-called war first began, millions of lives could have been spared – a huge number of casualties for which those who have managed the war on cancer must answer.

Featured image credit: Power station by stevepb. CC0 public domain via Pixabay. 

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Preventing financial exploitation of older adults

Financial entitlement is one domain of financial exploitation. In 2010, Conrad and colleagues defined financial entitlement as: “a belief held primarily by adult children that they can take their older parent(s)’ money to spend on themselves without permission. Although some adult children argue that the money is their inheritance and thus already earmarked for them, using an older person’s money without permission is exploitation.”

In my experience there is a chilling effect of financial entitlement. When older adults are asked if they discuss their financial arrangements or plans with their adult children, the majority tell me “no, if I raise the issue of money, my children may want it.” Money thus becomes a difficult conversation for older adults and their adult children to have and yet, now more than ever, older adults and their adult children need to discuss finances and make plans for safeguarding the older adult’s money. Indeed, the conversation should often focus on the plans older adults make with their financial services industry professional.

Despite research showing that financial exploitation (including thefts and scams, abuse of trust, and coercion) of older adults has been increasing dramatically – a 22% increase over four years – very few professionals believe they should involve themselves in the older adults’ financial affairs. Even when they suspect exploitation is occurring.

We are urging banks, financial planners, CPAs, and attorneys, among others, to begin a proactive planning process with all of their older clients in order that the proper support from family members and/or professionals can be activated when needed. Financial services industry personnel are increasingly being trained to recognize cognitive impairment or psychological vulnerability, but those skills must be paired with a good planning process before a crisis exists so that the older adult can choose who to involve should their financial capacity deteriorate. This is why we created and tested a new tool to help industry professionals screen for financial decision making abilities and/or deficits.

Using decision making abilities framework described first by Appelabuam and Grisso nearly three decades ago, our screening tool requires the older adult to be able to communicate the financial decision/transaction they wish to make; to demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of that decision and the nature and effect of the decision (appreciation); as well as describe their reasoning for the decision. This 10 item multiple choice rating scale also assesses whether the decision is an autonomous one, and makes use of the interviewing professional’s knowledge and expertise. To date, over 225 screening scales have been administered by professionals and the data regarding reliability and validity have been impressive.

Enhancing communication and planning around older adults’ finances will remain a chief priority as the greatest wealth transfer in our nation’s history continues to evolve. Proper planning and detection of financial decision making deficits will go a long way to preventing some of the worst financial exploitation we are currently witnessing.

Featured Image Credit: Newspaper read inform park by htraue. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Victims and victimhood in Afghanistan

As a researcher of transitional justice since 2008, focusing on Afghanistan, I have remained engaged with victims at close proximity. The concept of victimhood is particularly complex in Afghanistan, considering that, over decades, one brutal and repressive regime has led to another, afflicting millions of lives. Many have been victimized under all regimes; some have been perpetrators under one and victims under another. In other words, various narratives of victimhood exist in the country, which does not necessarily lead to acknowledgement of the “other”. Therefore, no matter what legal definitions we may ascribe to the term, “victimhood” is a socially constructed notion, heavily influenced by our objective and subjective realities.

A rarely addressed dilemma in transitional justice (TJ) discourse and practice, victimhood is embedded in a country’s cultural, economic and social norms and realities, which makes it a complex and subjective term, particularly in multilayered political contexts. Objectivity is contingent upon political, socioeconomic, cultural and historical contexts within which we live in and within which victimhood is constructed. Subjectivity, on the other hand, conveys perceptions, a much more difficult phenomenon to determine and measure empirically. However, this does not happen in isolation; there is a constant reciprocal dialogue between the subjective and objective aspects of understanding victimhood, thus giving rise to multiple interpretations of the concept.

This means that response mechanisms are necessarily diverse as well. What may satisfy the need of one victim might seem a luxury to another. Individual suffering is very personal, especially when it concerns the loss of a loved one or immediate basic needs, such as safety, food, shelter and healthcare. In these situations, there is little time for reflection, for considering others’ harm, let alone a genuine understanding of others’ needs. Typically, basic immediate requirements shape the worldview through which people perceive themselves and others. Victims of war, particularly in underdeveloped contexts, suffer from the loss of civil, political and socioeconomic rights. While the interdependency of these rights has long been established, the fact remains that if one’s stomach is empty, if one does not have shelter or access to medical care when needed, the right to truth and accountability, among other civil and political rights, may seem a luxury. Basic physiological human needs trump moral and ethical issues, including care and consideration towards others.

The issue then is whether to look at ‘victims’ as passive individuals of inaction or as active agents of change. Can a rights-based approach play an important role in transitional justice discourse and practice in relation to victims?

A Rights-Based Approach (RBA) framework includes participation, accountability, nondiscrimination, empowerment and human rights norms. Above all, this approach accentuates the notion of local people’s agency, with an emphasis on the importance of advocacy and mobilization in turning people into active citizens and agents for political change.  Active participation through empowerment and agency can thus become transformative. In my work with local organizations, I have seen the impact of raising awareness among ordinary people and the important role it plays in turning people into active citizens.

RBA principles, therefore, can potentially respond to some of the challenges discussed above. For example, the principle of participation can allow victims/survivors to contribute to how they and their demands should be conceptualized and turned into legal and political language. By bringing their perceptions into the discourse, the gap between objective and subjective measures is bridged as well. Significantly, victims/survivors should also be included in the implementation stage. Experience has shown that when people are directly involved in a process, they feel more empowered, which in turn can lead to more desirable outcomes, such as in the case of Colombia.

Similarly, accountability, another central element of a rights-based approach as well as transitional justice, is critical in relation to victims/survivors. To overcome the challenges of political manipulation and to address corruption, it is crucial that ordinary people are aware of their positions as rights-holders who can demand accountability, transparency and responsibility from duty bearers and those in power.

Finally, the notion of empowerment as a central component or, some argue, the end goal of RBA, can play a key role regarding the function of victims/survivors during the TJ process. Empowerment through RBA can offer victims a sense of recognition as individuals with claims and entitlements, not just as the “poor victims”. Recognizing oneself and others as rights bearers can be a way for people not to ascribe everything to ‘destiny,’ but rather to their own power to challenge and change.

Headline image credit: Children in Afghanistan by WikiImages. CC0 via Pixabay

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Enslaved ants and cuckoo bees

Many of us know that some birds trick other host parents from a different species into rearing their young. Best known is the common cuckoo in the UK and much of mainland Europe, However, this type of deception is not only the forte of birds – many insects ‘brood parasites’ too, especially ants, wasps, and bees.

If you have a garden with a lawn, you may be lucky enough this spring and summer to find small mounds of earth in little groupings over its surface. While these might seem like miniature ant hills or worm casts, they are often actually the work of solitary bees. One such species is Lasioglossum calceatum, with individuals living alone in their burrows, often seen bringing back pollen to provision their young. Unfortunately for these endearing little bees, they attract an unwelcome visitor – a cuckoo bee called Sphecodes monilicornis. This species looks rather different from the dull brown of its host, mostly black with a vivid red abdomen. The female cuckoo bee lurks in the vicinity of the host nests, entering the burrow when the resident is away and laying an egg of her own. She needs to be secretive because many solitary bees that are targeted by cuckoo species violently fight them off if they catch an intruder in the act. If the cuckoo is successful, her egg will hatch, kill off the host’s own developing young, and devour the pollen stores for itself. Needless to say, this isn’t good news for the host parent because it just wasted a lot of time and energy to provision young that did not survive.

Many bees are ‘cuckoo’ species, laying their eggs in the nests of other species and exploiting their resources. Here, the solitary bee Lasioglossum calceatum (top) is being used by the cuckoo bee Sphecodes monilicornis (bottom). The cuckoo visits the burrows of the host while they are away. Photograph by Martin Stevens. Do not use this image without permission.

Each solitary bee is often targeted by one or more species of cuckoo bee. In many cases, the key to the cuckoo’s success is not just in being secretive, but deceptive too. Owing to the fact that many hosts evolve defences to repel intruders, the cuckoos have in turn evolved methods of attack that circumvent these – a sort of evolutionary arms race. They are often well defended with thick body cuticle and powerful stings to survive physical violence, and many cuckoo species mimic the smell of their hosts. In fact, research has shown that in some species, hosts are less aggressive towards cuckoos whose mimicry is better. All in all, probably 15% or more of bee species are cuckoos, though much of their biology and parasitic behaviour is little known.

While cuckoo bees have a fascinating way of reproduction, some insects are more extreme. Chief among these are the slave-maker ants, which use workers of other species to raise their young and perform tasks in and outside of the nest. Colonies of slave-maker ants arise when a queen ant invades an existing nest of another species, ousting or killing the resident queen and workers (such as is the case with the European slave-maker ant Harpagoxenus sublaevis). She’s left with the developing brood, which as they develop imprint on the chemical profile of their new queen, and later become the workers. Once the enslaved ants have matured into workers, the queen can set about laying eggs of her own offspring, which are reared by the enslaved workers. These slave-maker young have one sole job – to raid the nests of other species (sometimes several different species) to steal more young.

The act of raiding other ant nests by slave-makers is equally remarkable. Scouts initially find a suitable nest to attack, after which the raiding ants invade on mass. The under attack hosts have two options: turn and flee or fight. The former inevitably means that some brood are captured, but with low casualties, whereas the latter often involves considerable loss of life on both sides. In such cases, raiding is dangerous for the slave-makers too. However, their specialisation for this task enabled them to evolve an arsenal of tools for success. First, they often possess strong mandibles that can literally snip the heads off the host workers. Second, like cuckoo bees, slave-maker ants have a special chemical-producing gland (Dufour’s gland). Its products can somehow calm the aggression of the hosts, or mimic the alarm pheromones of the hosts, causing them to ‘panic’ and flee, or even manipulate the host workers to turn on and attack each other.

Cuckoos, cuckoo bees, and slave-maker ants highlight how far many species will go to avoid paying the costs of rearing their own young. The puzzle is that the strategy of tricking others to rear young of another species is common in these groups, but virtually unknown elsewhere – why? Unfortunately, we don’t know. In mammals, internal gestation means that brood parasitism is not an option, but plenty of other species lay eggs. It may be that we just haven’t detected it in other taxa yet, or that there is something in the ants, bees, and wasps and the birds that facilitated its evolution. Charles Darwin suggested in On the Origin of Species that slave-maker ants have evolved from predatory ants who then brought brood back to the host nest. It’s a plausible idea, though would not seem to apply to cuckoo bees or avian parasites. One thing is for sure – we have lots left to understand about how this strategy works and how hosts can fight back.

Featured image credit: Polyergus lucidus returning from raid on Formica incerta by Martin Stevens. Do not use this image without permission.

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#OscarsSoWhite: new branding for an old problem

In 1996, decades before the trending hashtag, Reverend Jesse Jackson led a boycott protesting the lack of diversity at the Oscars. Having encouraged attendees to wear a rainbow ribbon in support of the issue, he was ridiculed for his efforts.

Twenty years later, #OscarsSoWhite has led the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take action by implementing a “series of substantive changes designed to make the Academy’s membership, its governing bodies, and its voting members significantly more diverse.” Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first African American president of the Academy, recognizes the problem is not exclusive to her organization or the awards show. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg supports the need to diversify Academy membership but takes issue with the current approach, as it is possible that some of the Academy’s changes may inadvertently lead to more exclusion. Spielberg is concerned the new ten year voting status and renewal process may take votes away from those who have paid their dues but are now retired. It is actually more likely to negatively affect women and people of color who are hired less consistently for qualifying projects than their white male peers.

Still, the Academy’s actions expose other areas of the industry that have failed to act. As USC professor Stacy L. Smith explains, “We don’t have a diversity problem. We have an inclusion crisis.” Unlike Reverend Jackson, Isaacs and allies in the effort to overhaul the industry have the momentum of the Black Lives Matter Movement and collective protests against institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. This is the perfect time to capitalize on the moment to make wholesale changes that will fundamentally alter the film industry in front of and behind the camera, in a way that more accurately reflects the demographics of the nation.

Historical patterns of exclusion are generally well known as indicated by public frustration expressed on Twitter and other social media outlets that were not yet available twenty years ago. The problem is systemic, embedded in industry practices and attitudes exposed in last year’s Sony email leak. The leak confirmed what many of us already knew: racism and sexism are so deeply embedded in industry practices the invisibility of people of color and women has become the norm. For this reason, many people of color do not watch the Oscars anyway.

Through the Academy, Isaacs has determined to lead the industry in fixing the system that is primarily responsible for the all white acting, directing, and best picture nominations. As Whoopi Goldberg says, “You can’t vote for what’s not on the screen.” I’m less inclined to agree with Goldberg’s assessment that the Academy “can’t be too racist” because she won the award. Such a limited perspective does not consider the ways systemic racism works, allowing limited access to an exceptional few who serve as evidence of progress even as the system continues to perpetuate the same race and gender ideology in casting, funding, marketing, and distribution. In their responses to the controversy, producer Will Packer and filmmakers Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg have drawn attention to the racial and gender disparities in these areas. Filmmaker Ava Duvernay has also called for the use of new terms to even discuss the matter, as the word “diversity” has become a “medicinal word that has no emotional resonance, and this is a really emotional issue…for artists who are women and people of color to have less value placed on our worldview.”

No one lives or dies on the basis of an Academy Award, but the outcome of this controversy still matters. In many ways, it shows how a mainstream institution holding itself accountable for charges of racism and sexism exposes its own systemic insidiousness. Historically, Hollywood has not implemented long-term changes to combat such issues, which is one of the reasons independent film has been a critical necessity.

What began as a trending hashtag has become a call to action that should draw more attention to independent filmmakers and alternative marketing and distribution strategies that do not rely on Hollywood to change its ideologies and practices. Jada Pinkett Smith, in an online video, commented that “the Academy has the right to acknowledge whomever they choose, to invite whomever they choose. and now I think that it’s our responsibility, now, to make the change. Maybe it is time that we pull back our resources and we put them back into our communities, into our programs and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit that are just as good as the so-called ‘mainstream’ is.” Whether she realizes it or not, people of color and women have been taking responsibility to develop programs for these under-served communities.

Black independent filmmakers in particular have been hustling outside of Hollywood since the days of early filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Regardless of criticism of Tyler Perry’s aesthetics, he has managed to develop a business model that circumvents Hollywood’s traditional path to economic success, using an approach that allowed him to compete with industry insiders like Spike Lee in terms of the quantity of films produced in a shorter time span.

In addition to the Oscars, there are award shows celebrating the work of people of color, such as the NAACP Image Awards, BET Awards, and now the American Black Film Festival Awards founded by Jeff Friday. Unfortunately, nominations and wins for these awards have not yielded the same professional rewards as an Academy nod. The system is designed to maintain the status quo and the attitudes of industry insiders who buy into this value system do not help the cause. Major stars like the Smiths, who have enjoyed access and accumulated wealth within the industry, can now use the star power and resources they have amassed to support the countless artists working tirelessly to tell stories that matter to those who have been excluded in the Hollywood mainstream.

The trending #OscarsSoWhite hashtag is reinvigorating conversations about the possibilities of creating a broader range of work that truly reflects the depths of humanity and ranges of cultures throughout our nation and around the world. While some suggest the Smiths are speaking up now because Will Smith was not nominated for an Academy Award for Concussion (2015), it does not really matter. Will Smith may not have worn a rainbow ribbon in support of Jesse Jackson’s 1996 Oscar boycott, but he was one of several artists who boycotted the Grammy Awards in 1989 when the show refused to air the rap category during its live broadcast. There is some precedent for his taking a stand. But this is bigger than the Smiths, Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Lupita N’yongo, Michael Moore, Reese Witherspoon, Viola Davis, and others who have been speaking out. This year’s host, comedian Chris Rock, has remained mostly silent in the press on the lack of diversity and calls for him to step down in support of the protest. Rock’s commentary will air live during the broadcast, which should be quite informative considering his biting criticism of Hollywood in his 2014 essay in the Hollywood Reporter.

This controversy has the potential to spark the revolution I call for in Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers by encouraging black stars to use their star power to circumvent Hollywood and continue to create work by and for people of color and women across multiple platforms. Time will tell if anything will truly change. Ongoing collective action from every area of the industry, including audiences, is the only way to ensure we are not trending the same hashtag, or whatever will be the equivalent, 20 years from now.

Image Credit: “Crowd lining street under the marquee of the Pantages Theater at the 31st Academy Awards in 1959” by Los Angeles Times. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Earth’s climate: a complex system with mysteries abound

We are living with a climate system undergoing significant changes. Scientists have established a critical mass of facts and have quantified them to a degree sufficient to support international action to mitigate against drastic change, and adapt to committed climate shifts. The primary example being the relation between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and the extent of warming in the future. But the climate system in its entirety is a highly complex system, and mysteries abound as to how its internal mechanisms work and interact with each other.

The climate has evolved through massive changes to where we are today. It continues to evolve on long time scales but is also impacted by two factors acting on human time scales. First, there is the ongoing internal variability resulting from a plethora of natural cycles. El Niño is an exemplar, but variability occurs at all levels of the system—in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, biosphere, and through their connectedness—and spans a wide range of time scales from weeks to centuries. Moreover, modes of variability can conspire together to produce unanticipated and seemingly unrelated effects. Secondly, there are changes in radiative forcing, recently dominated by anthropogenic emissions, but also affected by other factors including land use, ocean carbon uptake, solar variability, and feedbacks such as impacts on albedo from melting ice and changing cloud patterns. It is this complex mixture in a dynamically evolving system that the scientific community is striving to unravel.

Climate science is in an unusual situation in that it is an experimental science but one in which the experiments are not restricted to a traditional laboratory. Because experiments cannot be carried out on the full climate system, mathematical replicas of the Earth have been developed in order to test scientific hypotheses about how the planet will react in different circumstances. These are the climate models hosted at around 30 or so climate centres around the world that provide the main source of predictive information in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. They are each highly complex entities in themselves involving massive computational codes. The upkeep and development of these codes raises significant mathematical issues, but the involvement of the mathematical sciences in the study of climate goes far beyond these operational tasks.

The complementary view to the climate as a deterministic dynamical system involves compiling information from observational data. These observations, both from the modern instrumental systems and from the distant past using palaeoclimate proxies, are uncertain, which means that we need to use sophisticated statistical methodology to estimate and map properties of the Earth’s climate system. The two viewpoints come together as significant uncertainty accompanies any model projection and so their output is also properly regarded as statistical.

The mathematical sciences are playing a growing role in climate studies at all levels. Models of more modest dimension than the models residing at climate centres are gaining prominence. These conceptual models can help us see the relations between different internal mechanisms that can be hidden in the full model. Key processes can often be studied in isolation and their modelling brings considerable insight into the overall climate. Such processes include biogeochemical cycles, melting of sea and land ice and land use changes. The internal structure of such processes and their impact on other aspects of the climate are revealed by mathematical and statistical analyses. Such analysis is also critical in the proper inclusion of these processes through parameterization.

Ultimately, both understanding and prediction of the climate depend equally on models, that encode physical laws, and observations, that bring direct insight into the real world. Melding these together to tease out the optimal information is an extraordinary mathematical challenge that demands a blend of statistical and dynamical thinking, in both cases at the frontiers of these areas.

A version of this article originally appeared as an editorial in Dynamics and Statistics of the Climate System: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6th January 2016.

 Featured image credit: Windräder  by fill. Public Domain via pixabay.

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Shakespeare and Asia

When a weary Egeon laments in the first scene of The Comedy of Errors that in quest of his lost son he has spent five years “Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia,” Shakespeare is characteristically using the word only in its classical sense, to indicate the Roman province of Asia Minor, a territory roughly equivalent to that of modern Turkey. Shakespeare’s sense of the geography of the rather larger area we now call Asia, like that of many fellow Elizabethans, is more vague. Although he had apparently seen Emmineux Molineux’s world map of 1599 “with the augmentation of the Indies” (Twelfth Night, 3.2.75), and although Falstaff hopes to make Mistresses Page and Ford his “East and West Indies” (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.3.64), Shakespeare (unlike his colleague Fletcher) never set a play in Indonesia, and he makes no reference to either Japan or China, getting only as near as the legendary neighbouring realm of Cathay (and then only when Sir Toby Belch and Pistol each use the slang term “Cathayan” as an insult in the same two plays). In that Shakespeare’s works — taught, translated, adapted and performed — have long since roamed clean through the bounds of modern Asia, however, this deficiency in the Shakespeare canon has been thoroughly rectified, and even within the British performance tradition his works have been widely inflected by Asian techniques, conventions, and perspectives.

The one part of Asia which Shakespeare did mention with more insistence – India, where Titania and her pregnant mortal votaress gossiped together “in the spicèd Indian air, by night” before the birth of the little changeling boy who, though he remains offstage, motivates so much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – has appropriately been the one with the longest and richest history of engagement with the Shakespeare canon, admittedly because it once endured the longest and most fraught history of engagement with British colonialism. Although the incorporation of examinations about Shakespeare into the process of recruiting Indians into the running of the colonial civil service in the nineteenth century was intended to foster cultural deference, Shakespeare’s works soon escaped this framework, becoming the basis for popular hybridized dramas in Indian languages – Bhanumati Chittavilasa, for instance, a Bengali Merchant of Venice (1852).

During the twentieth century, especially after independence, the emergent Bollywood cinema industry took up Shakespeare (the supplanting by film of an older colonial tradition of touring the plays in English is simultaneously lamented and enacted by the first Merchant-Ivory film, Shakespeare Wallah, 1965), and recent years have seen high-profile Indian Shakespeare films achieve worldwide acclaim. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy provides only the most conspicuous example: Maqbool (based on Macbeth, 2003), Omkara (Othello, 2006), and Haider (Hamlet, 2014). The growing presence of Indian diaspora personnel in the arts in Britain has over the same decade produced significant Indian-inspired and Indian-inflected work in the mainstream Shakespearean theatre, including Tim Supple’s Dash Arts/RSC A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2006), and Iqbal Khan’s 2012 RSC Much Ado About Nothing, with Meera Syal and Paul Bhattacharjee, set in a version of Messina based on present-day Delhi.

Those territories Shakespeare omitted to mention, however, Japan and China, have been equally remarkable in their continuing dialogue with Shakespeare’s plays. Opened to Western influence only in the 1850s, Japan soon learned to assimilate Shakespearean drama to native theatre forms dating from roughly Shakespeare’s period: by 1885 there was a Kabuki version of The Merchant of Venice, called Sakura-doki Zeni no Yononaka (literally, ‘Cherry Blossom Time and Money Makes The World Go Around). It was not until the 1960s, however, that actors from the stylized, traditional dramatic forms of kabuki and Noh would appear in Shakespearean productions alongside performers associated with the Western-style realist drama known as ‘shingeki’, but since then Japanese directors of Shakespeare have excelled at hybridizing elements of older Japanese theatre with elements of post-modern popular culture. The most famous remains Yukio Ninagawa, whose acclaimed productions have toured internationally, from Romeo and Juliet (1974) to Cymbeline (his contribution to the World Shakespeare Festival in London in 2012) and beyond. Elements of traditional Japanese theatre, admired by early twentieth-century modernists such as Yeats, have been emulated or at least in effect quoted by a number of Western directors of Shakespeare, including Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, though their efforts in this direction have sometimes been accused of mere touristic orientalism.

China’s engagement with Shakespeare was drastically interrupted by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, but in recent years the interest in translating, adapting, and performing Shakespeare first glimpsed in the early twentieth century has revived. A Shakespeare Society of China was founded in 1984, and since then Shakespeare’s works have been revived by Chinese companies in styles comparable to those favoured by post-modern directors worldwide. The Beijing People’s Arts Theatre, for instance, took a Coriolanus on international tour in 2013 which, directed by Lin Zhaohua, featured imperial-period costumes but also two on-stage heavy metal bands. The growing international influence of the People’s Republic, meanwhile, is being felt even in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Royal Shakespeare Company has not only embarked on a project to commission and oversee a new actor-friendly translation of the Complete Plays into Mandarin and to bring productions to Beijing and Shanghai, but has undertaken to perform its own English-language versions of classic Chinese plays.  Shakespeare may have said comparatively little about Asia, but with major theatre and film industries now flourishing in Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia — as well as India, Japan, and China — Asia has more and more to say about Shakespeare.

Featured image credit: Opéra de Pékin – voler l’herbe de longue vie: Serpent Blanc by Caroline Léna Becker, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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