Brian Clegg's Blog, page 108

Physiological Facts Concerning the Female Pheromone

Time for another guest post. Robin Walker was born in Worcestershire, and after reading Classics at Cambridge, he emigrated to the then Rhodesia with my family. A few years later, he joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a cadet, retiring as a District Commissioner in 1980, by which time Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe. His book, Last Orders at the Changamire Arms, was published last month by Mark Lloyd of Pillar International Publishing. It's a humorous account of his last years in the ministry, and the great people he was privileged to meet and work with. He has written a novel, also laced with humour, on the life of the Greek hero, Herakles, probably better known as Hercules. Apart from that, he is engaged in beating his head against traditional academic walls with his fresh approach to the similes of Homer's Iliad.

GUEST POST

American research has come up with an interesting angle on fishing. It has brought to light an idea I have been hooked on for some while, and that is that women anglers catch more fish than men (nice little ambiguity). Apparently, when a woman plunges her hand into the tin wherein she keeps her bait she passes on the scent of her female pheromones to its contents, so that when she skewers her worm to the hook and casts it into the water, the poor creature so reeks of the stuff that he passes it on to his immediate surroundings. Now, if, while the worm is lighting up a cigarette to while away the time, a fish swims into the vicinity, it finds the scent of the worm so mind-bending it goes into a frenzy and gobbles up everything in sight, hook, line and sinker. Worm and cigarette.

There's nothing fishy about all this. It's true.

Even worms fall under the spell of these phenomenal, female pheromones and will fight each other to the death just for the privilege of first place on the hook. Indeed, I once saw a worm so overcome by the scent of a lady angler that it whipped off its coat, being careful to fold it up before laying it on the grass, dived into the river, and emerged moments later, swimming furiously towards the bank and trailing in its wake one of the biggest wahoos I've ever seen. Or was it a golden orfe?

You can find out more about Robin's book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

I ought to say in a spirit of scientific balance, that I couldn't find any proper research to support the female pheromone fishing theory (it may be out there, but I haven't seen it), so this story needs to be taken with a fairly hefty pinch of ground bait. BC

A curate's novel

Every now and then I'm sent a review request for a novel that catches my eye, and this was the case with Kiss Me, Hadley by Nick Macfie. Featuring a news agency reporter who goes undercover in an illegal casino in Hong Kong, but with a comic twist, it sounded rather intriguing. I was a bit disappointed when the book came as it has the look and feel of print on demand (though the layout and editing is fine), which never feels quite like a 'real' book, but I managed to ignore this.

The reality of reading Kiss Me, Hadley was entirely curate's egg. Let's do the good bit first. Macfie is great at the setting, really getting us into the sleazy casino world and particularly making Hong Kong come alive. The action scenes, especially those set in a casino, are engaging and pull the reader along effortlessly. These parts of the book are great, and if somehow they could be extracted and interlaced with better dialogue and modified in the ending, this could be a brilliant read.
However. I don't know if it's because the author is trying too hard to be funny, but the dialogue is a disaster. Almost always when two characters converse their conversation meanders all over the place, is full of non sequiturs and simply doesn't make any sense. It doesn't read like a conversation at all. It is just very strange and spoiled the book for me.
As for the rest, leaving aside the totally bizarre involvement of the Conservative Party (don't ask), the ending doesn't tie things up well enough, leaving the very dramatic and puzzling final game at the casino totally unexplained. Macfie sets up lots of things that need explaining and then doesn't bother to do so, which is frustrating.
When it's going well, Macfie reminds me of the best of Leslie Thomas without the sex scenes. That might be what Thomas was best known for, but he was very good at putting a tragicomic main character in dangerous and/or exotic circumstances and making it a cracking good tale. Macfie can do this too - but without serious surgery on that dialogue, the book just doesn't hold up.
You can see more about Kiss Me Hadley at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Bob who?

I know I am going to infuriate some musical tastes here, but I really don't get the appeal of Bob Dylan.

Part of the problem is likely to be that, musically speaking, I am a child of the 70s rather than the 60s. I didn't buy my first album until 1970 (admittedly that was the Beatles, but it was late Beatles), so I never felt any of the emotional attachment that many do to the whole ethos of the 60s - but what that means is that I listen to Dylan as music per se, and to my mind he comes up wanting.

My modernised folk (I think folk rock is too heavy a term) heroes would be Simon & Garfunkel and Al Stewart (who I saw perform last Saturday - at age 68, he is still going strong, unlike certain croaky elderly types, naming no names). For me they are streets ahead of Dylan. Now don't start moaning to me how my choices are much too light and fluffy, and not meaningful enough. I'm talking about their merits as songwriters, not as revolutionaries. Don't be an intellectual snob.

Why don't I like Dylan? Well, it doesn't help that I can't stand the harmonica, but basically I have three problems. He can hardly sing, there's just a sort of blaring croak that makes the present day Paul McCartney sound musical. (Oops, named that name.) Secondly I can only understand one word in three. There's no point being deep and meaningful if you can't enunciate. And finally his 'tunes' are monotonous, often literally. It's like listening to a goat trying to sing.

Now don't complain if Dylan's your musical hero. There is no objectivity in music appreciation. Just as I managed to wind up a lot of people by pointing out what a load of rubbish opera is, similarly I'm sure this will hit a tender spot with some. But this is my subjective opinion, which when it comes to music is all you can possibly do, and is just as valid as any other.

If you haven't heard Al Stewart, or only know Year of the Cat, one of the reasons I like him is he does a lot of songs with historical content. I wanted to include one of my all time favourites, Josephine Baker, as it is so simple yet evocative, but it doesn't appear to be on YouTube, so I am instead popping in one of his more engineered numbers, Antarctica, in part to share something he said at the concert, which was that despite apparently being about the attempts to get to the South Pole, this is a really a song about a woman who didn't find him attractive.



One more, to show a more straightforward history song, Lord Grenville, but also one that's interesting to demonstrate Stewart's humour, as I hadn't spotted into recently that musically it's a tribute to Space Oddity, but once you realize that, it's pretty obvious.



Image from Wikipedia

Artists, scientists and stretching things

I'm going to be running a series of guest blogs over the next few weeks and the first is from Sue Guiney. According to Sue: 'I'm a writer of fiction, poetry, plays. I'm a teacher of fiction, poetry, plays. Born and raised in New York, I've made my life in London with my husband and two sons. I'm grateful for it all.' I had the pleasure of doing a science/literature event with Sue a couple of years ago and loved her book Tangled Roots.


It seems to be festival season around here. Bankside, London, is in the midst of the Merge Festival, which is the local immersive arts festival. Its aim is to provide a series of events which showcase and draw on the rich heritage and contemporary culture of this area of London's south bank.

Last night I went along to a demonstration and networking evening where artists and scientists came together to chat, drink wine, amaze each other with the incredible ideas we all have, and especially to watch a demonstration of the Kirkaldy Testing Machine. I can not begin to tell you how incredibly cool this was.

The Kirkaldy testing works is a purpose-built Victorian era building which was built specifically around this enormous industrial age hydraulic masterpiece in 1874. Proudly declaring above the door

Facts not Opinions

the first experiments took place here on iron and steel to determine their breaking point.



Thanks to the Kirkaldy Museum for this
photo of David KirkaldySo, imagine a large, Victorian brick building with its ground floor housing an enormous labyrinth of pipes and wheels and weights and counterweights and pulleys and levers, stray pieces of metal lying around the floor, weird things hanging from the ceiling, anvils and hammers and then, once it got started, all manner of clanks and grinds and screeches. Magnificent. Last night, they were testing a piece of sculpture created by James Capper, an artist who creates kinetic sculptures based on industrial machinery, inventing new forms and functions for these machines while he's at it.

I was in heaven. This appealed to all my knee-jerk "Gee Mr Wizard" impulses. A room full of weird stuff with a roomful of quirky people all trying to explain and reimagine it. It's interesting to me how I do rather quietly nurture this weird side of my personality. I know I talk a lot about Cambodia and music and teaching, but various aspects of science are continually cropping up in my work. There was my recent contribution to the anthology of science-fiction poetry, Where Rockets Burn Through . There was my first novel, Tangled Roots , with its lost cosmological physicist. And the medical sciences are lurking everywhere in both A Clash of Innocents , and the soon-to-be-released, Out of the Ruins .

Clearly, I love science. But what I love just as much is the magic that happens when science meets art and when scientists meet artists. I think we find each other both funny and fascinating and are equally in awe of what we do and how we think. I love being part of this dialogue between two groups which, when I was growing up, kept themselves separate and were kept at a silly distance.

Question:  What do you get when you lock a group of artists and a group of scientists in a room?
Answer:    

Wash your brain to avoid spreading false ideria

I hate the term 'meme', because I think there is a very poor parallel between genes and ideas (and it's a cringe-making word), but it can be quite handy when referring to a phenomenon that is very common online. It used to mostly happen through emails, but these days it is more likely to be a Facebook 'share' because it is easier to do.

Typically you get a message from a friend that either warns you of something dire ('Don't open a message like this! It's a computer virus!' or 'Don't use this product, people have been killed by it'), or says 'like this picture and something amazing will happen' (it won't), or tells you something outrageous that really underlines your suspicions about someone in the public eye (most recently that Michele Bachmann wants to ban Halloween).
By all means pass this kind of thing on if it's true - but just as it's a good idea to wash your hands to avoid spreading nasty bugs, so it's a good idea to 'wash your brain' by doing a quick check before passing on these nasty messages.
I'd suggest three quick checks, which can be done in a few seconds. This can a) prevent a red face when you discover you were duped later and b) avoid these silly messages clogging up the e-waves. So:Do a quick search on Snopes. This long-running urban legend site is particularly good on the kind of message about viruses and evil products that do the rounds.Also do a quick search on Waffles at Noon. Though not as comprehensive as Snopes, this site is often better on picking up the latest silliness that is spreading via social networks. Here's Waffles on that Bachmann story.Do a quick Google search. If it is a hoax, there will probably be a clear reference to this on the first page. I did a Google search on 'Michelle Bachmann halloween' and apart from the delight of finding out you can get a Bachmann halloween costume, it was rapidly clear that this was a hoax. (You may wonder how there can be a video of her speech (the bottom item on the picture below) - this is because it's a video showing a still picture with a man reading 'her' words.)
We all get caught out occasionally, but by using these simple checks you can minimize the embarrassment.
Incidentally, as 'memes' are clearly more like viruses or bacteria than like genes, perhaps we should call them miruses or ideria. Just a thought...

Putting sport into perspective

More important than gamesThere was a lot of fuss in some sections of the news recently about runner Mo Farah having problems because someone pushing a child's buggy in the park where Mo was trying to train wouldn't get off the path to keep out of Mo's way.

Now I'm sure Mo is a nice guy, and was very polite, and there certainly shouldn't have been the fight that ensued. But I also am sure that the media outrage that poor old Mo had to suffer so much by not having the path to himself because of this unreasonable father was ridiculous.

Let's get the picture in perspective. Mo is very good at a game, the playground game of 'Who can run fastest?' He's one of the best people in the world at this particular game, and that's lovely for him. But compared with keeping a baby or toddler safe, it is a totally worthless activity. It's fine in its place. If he had been training on a running track and the father and started pushing his pushchair round the track, then of course Mo would have had every right to ask him to get out of the way. But this was a public park, paid for by public money so the public could enjoy using it for, say, pushing prams - not a sports training facility. And for that matter, feet are much better at getting along on grass off the path than buggies are. If anyone was going to get out of the way, it should have been Mo.
When our twins were young we had a double buggy and quite often it would be difficult to get along the footpath because some idiot had parked on the pavement far enough in that there was quite a narrow gap between the car and a wall or a hedge. Well, I'm sorry, again the children came first. Rather than go into the road, I would happily scrape my buggy along the side of their car, bash into their wing mirror and generally be as vigorous as possible, because I was in the right place and the car wasn't, and because babies matter more than cars.
So don't ask me to have any sympathy for Mo. He did not have priority because he was the 'big I am' sportsperson. In the right place - and this was the right place - children should always come first.

The honourable physicist

CERN's Alpha Project mentioned below - image courtesy of CERNI had a very interesting exchange with a physicist the other day which I think really helps underline the difficulties of getting science right.

I had asked this person 'do you have any personal expectations (or even hope!)' about the outcome of an experiment. His response was 'As an experimentalist, I must be completely unprejudiced about
the outcome of our experiments. So I don't have any expectations.'

Now, in answering one part of my question he was entirely correct and proper. But as far as the other part goes, assuming he is a human being and I wasn't communicating with a robot, he is fibbing. The right and proper part is having no expectations. We now recognize that it is very important that an experimental scientist does not prejudge the issue and expect an experiment to come out a particular way. This is because there is plenty of evidence of the 'experimenter effect' where an individual's expectations colour their interpretation of the data.

The archetypal experiment designed to demonstrate this kind of unconscious experimenter bias was a trial undertaken in 1963 involving albino rats and, more importantly, young scientists who believed they were experimenting on the rats, but in truth were themselves the experimental subjects.

Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode of Harvard University set up an experiment where twelve psychology students were given five rats each to test on a simple T-shaped maze. All the rats were from the same stock, but one group of the students was told that they had especially bright rats, naturally suited to solving mazes, while the other group was told that their rats were of a less able strain that struggled with maze solving. Those with the bright rats were instructed that their animals would show clear learning during the first day of running the maze and after that their performance would improve rapidly. The subjects with the “dull” rats were told that their experimental subjects would provide little evidence of learning.

Both “types” of rat (bear in mind that all the rats were identical in ability) did prove to have performances that improved over time, but every day over the five day trial the “bright” rats were recorded as performing better than their peers, achieving successful runs up to twice as frequently as the “dull” rats, and getting to a successful conclusion significantly quicker than their supposedly slow counterparts.

When dealing with bright rats, experimenters could have encouraged them more, given them more positive handling, which could have influenced actual performance. This is unlikely to be a problem with a physics experiment. However - and this applies to all kinds of experiment - true improved performances were not necessary as the experimenters could easily have biased the results, even though they could be totally unaware that they were distorting the data.

One possible approach that would shift the results to match the experimenters’ expectations would be if they counted borderline runs as successful with bright rats, but not with dull ones. They might also have decided to be selective about which results to record because of some apparently sensible reason (perhaps the rat was distracted by a loud noise), cherry picking positive results. And there are other, more subtle ways available for experimenters to fool themselves.

So even though some of the greatest scientists in history have had a tendency to ignore adverse results because they knew their theory was right (Newton is a good example), it is isn't an appropriate thing for a modern scientist to do. The physicist I was emailing was absolutely right to have no expectations.

However, the reason I suspect my contact of fibbing is that it's one thing not to have expectations and it's another not to have hopes. The only kind of scientist who could be totally devoid of hope and simply carry out an experiment as a wholly neutral observer has lost his or her humanity. You might think they shouldn't care about the outcome, that all outcomes should be equally interesting, but the fact is that all outcomes aren't equally interesting - at least this is true in many cases. And to pretend otherwise is a subtle form of deceit.

Take, for instance, the Alpha experiment at CERN. If everything goes to plan, phase 2 of this may well tell us in the next few years, the answer to a question that has fascinated physicists for a long time. Under the influence of gravity, does antimatter act the same as ordinary matter, or does it feel an opposing force? Would it float up rather than fall to Earth? We just don't know, because we've never had enough antimatter to measure the very weak pull of gravity.

Now, the emotionless robot scientist, the hypothetical textbook scientist, doesn't care which outcome we get. Each has exactly the same reward value - it is a result, tick, move on. But I don't think any human can honestly say they wouldn't get a thrill if antimatter acts as if it was experiencing antigravity and is repelled by massive objects. That would be just so much more exciting than if it acted like ordinary matter.

That being the case, while I can only commend the scientist I was emailing for his lack of expectations, I am very sad if he truly was without hope.

Is it time to get rid of faith schools?

There has been a lot in the news about the dire failure of the Al-Madinah free school in Derby, mostly debating whether this shows that the Conservative free school policy is flawed, or whether this is merely a blip, because more free schools are outstanding/good than are traditional schools. However there are some aspects of the problems there -  limited curriculum, segregation and inequality of treatment of boys and girls (and female teachers) - that could just as easily be put down to this being a faith school.

I really wonder if the time has come to ask if we should allow religious groups to dictate what goes on in a school at all. It's not that I oppose religious freedom, but I do wonder if it is appropriate for religions to be indoctrinating children at school, at the age when they are most likely to take religious instruction as fact, rather than question it and decide if it is appropriate for them as adults would do. If parents want to encourage their children into their faith themselves, that's one thing, but coming from an 'official' source like a school is very different.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that there aren't many excellent religious schools. We've all heard about parents turning up at church with the sole intention of getting little Hermione into the local faith school because the education there is so excellent. But I am not sure that this is a good enough reason to keep this strange religious/educational crossover going.

I haven't experienced this directly. I didn't go to a faith school, and neither did my children, but I have known people who have and certainly did receive something of an indoctrination while attending. This seems to be less of a problem with C of E schools in my indirect experience - but it certainly often seems to be the case with, for instance, Catholic and muslim schools.

Faith schools simply don't fit with modern British society, any more than we would expect to be looked after by nuns in a hospital. The trouble, I suspect, is that Labour and the Liberal Democrats don't want to change things to avoid offending ethnic minorities, while the Conservatives are worried about upsetting Jemima and Oliver's parents. But perhaps it is time that these anachronistic establishments were done away with.

Hanging on by fingernails

One of the big benefits of Netflix has been bringing to me some excellent US series that I haven't tried before. Although a little hokey, and suffering from the 'Charlie Hungerford syndrome*', I have very much been enjoying watching Fringe, and recently got to the finale of episode 2, which has a whopping great cliffhanger. I would like to respectfully ask makers of US TV shows not to do this.

Here's the thing. I absolutely love shows with a story arc - ones where as well as the specific story of the episode there is a building theme that runs through the whole season. The show that most springs to mind for bringing this to my awareness is Buffy, though I faintly remember being captivated by The Fugitive and The Invaders as a child, both of which I think had arcs.

But here's the thing. As we all know, TV scheduling is a ferocious, dog-eat-dog business that rarely deals fairly with its viewers. I mean, come on, they cancelled Firefly, one of the best shows I've ever seen. So any show might not come back after the end of the season. Which means if you leave us on a cliffhanger, we could be frustrated and bitter for the rest of our lives. Joss Whedon was able to deliver some satisfaction with the movie Serenity closing off Firefly, but this is a rare opportunity. If Fringe had ended forever with Olivia in the mess she's in at the end of season 2, I don't think I could ever have forgiven the makers.

So be kind, show producers. By all means leave lots open and available for future seasons, but don't leave the main characters in peril in the finale. It's just not cricket, or even baseball.


* The Charlie Hungerford syndrome refers to a UK TV series called Bergerac in which one secondary character seems to be involved some way or other in practically every crime investigated by the eponymous main character. In Fringe, Walter seems responsible for practically every new invention (in any science or technology) known to man, something that seems to be parodied in the 'storytelling' episode in season 2.

Nature news

Not this NatureNo, when I refer to Nature I don't mean that estimable scientific journal - this is the real thing. According to a report by a charity only '21% of children aged 8-12 are "connected to nature".' This study has to be one of the worst ever made of this sort of subject, so much so that I would suggest it has the potential to get some of its findings totally back to front (though this doesn't prevent the BBC reporting it with a totally straight face).

I have two big issues with this study. One is sample selection, the other is criteria.

But first let's see what the shocking headline results were. That 21% value was based on having 'realistic and achievable' connection with wildlife and the natural world. Apparently 27% of girls were at or above this target, but only 16% of boys. There were also regional variations. Wales did worst, while London was best in England. Urban children had a slightly higher connection than those living in rural areas. Immediately that rings some alarm bells. I have lived both in towns and in a country village, and I can tell you for certain that the country village children had a much more immediate connection with nature - so what's going on?

Okay, first sample selection. We are given no information how the main sample was made up. The only information on selection given is that that 'realistic and achievable' target was based on the average scores of children visiting RSPB sites or who are junior members of the RSPB. But if that example of selection is anything to go by for the whole, there is an issue. Because children visiting RSPB sites etc. are a very particular subset, with a very particular approach to nature that would be very different, I suspect to a much more connected farmer's son who enjoy shooting a few pigeons for fun. Their selection of the control sample is likely to be hugely biassed towards middle class urban tree huggers.

The other problem I have is the definition of a natural connection, which apparently included:


Empathy for creaturesHaving a sense of oneness with natureHaving a sense of responsibility for the environmentEnjoyment of natureI really struggle with some of these. 'Having a oneness with nature'? Pass the sick bag. Anyone who thinks they 'have a oneness with nature' hasn't a clue about the natural world which has just as much unpleasantness as it has fluffy bunniness. (Those bunnies probably have myxomatosis, after all.) Let me suggest some alternative criteria that might come up with a different urban/rural split:Walks to school through a fieldHas seen an animal dieUnderstands the importance of pest controlKnows the impact of the seasonsetc.It's so arbitrary. 
Don't get me wrong, I do think not enough children are really exposed to nature. When I was six my mother was doing teacher training to be a biology teacher and we used to spend our weekends searching for pond life and tracking down wild rabbits. It was a great introduction to the natural world. I also had a friend who had a sheep farm (old fashioned enough not to have running hot water) and saw the raw side of nature that way. For that matter, we played out in nature every day, largely unsupervised by adults, a great way to learn. Far too many of today's youngsters spend too long in front of the TV and games console - or playing team games in artificial environments - or indulging in other urban pastimes. But I think visiting RSPB sanctuaries and establishing a 'sense of oneness with nature' is not what it's about and won't generate the next generation of naturalists and nature lovers.