Brian Clegg's Blog, page 132

The Rise and Rise of Linked-in

I was a member of Linked-in, sometimes described as Facebook for business, before I'd even heard the term social networking, but for years did nothing with it. In fact, if someone asked me to be added as a contact, I used to reply 'Yes, but I rarely use it.' Now something has changed.

I have started taking Linked-In seriously. What tipped me over the edge was an email conversation with a publicist at a publisher. I had asked said publicist if she knew what had happened to an editor at a magazine I had written for in the past, as the email address was bouncing. Oh, yes, said the publicist, according to Linked-in she (the editor) has moved to work here (a different company). And within seconds I was back in contact with said editor.

The light bulb went on. I finally saw the point.

So since then I have been working on expanding my Linked-in connections and making myself more visible in the environment. It genuinely is a valuable tool for keeping in touch on the business side - much more reliably so than Facebook or Twitter. I won't drop either of those as they have a different, if overlapping, world of people - but I am now treating Linked-in with respect.

Apart from anything else, I absolutely love going on Linked-in and scrolling through the 'People you may know' page. This is a list of contacts of contacts and it's fascinating, because it takes me back to previous workplaces with all sorts of names that bring back memories, and it takes me off into new interesting new areas, particularly with new science communication contacts. Brilliant. It's contact porn.

If I pull it up now I have in front of me the Head of Planning at British Airways, freelance writers, editor of Science Radio at the BBC, a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, an administrator at Swansea Met University, a New Scientist editor, the Chief Executive at World Book Night, the Web Development Manager for Tesco... it is truly awesome.

Are you on Linked-in yet?

Public key, private key banking

Money, made easyI was standing in the queue to pay at M&S food yesterday and noticed a leaflet for their new current account. 'The only trouble with switching current accounts is,' I thought, 'it's a pain.' And despite all supposed efforts to make it easier, particularly for business, this remains the case. All the more so now most of our payments are done electronically, so a change of account means getting the finance department of every client/customer to change their systems. And we know how good finance departments are at making changes.

Yet we can switch mobile phone company, transfer our number and zingo! Calls still keep coming in. As long as you have your own URL, the same goes for email address - I've changed ISP twice, but my email address hasn't altered since 1994. So why can't bank accounts be like this?

What we need is to model bank account access on the public key, private key encryption mechanism. In this clever security system, you have a public key that you merrily give to anyone and everyone freely that enables encryption - but you need a separate key that only you know to do the decryption.

My bank equivalent would be that you have a public account number that stays with you for life and that you can let everyone and anyone know. You can stick it in large letters on your website. And that is all that is needed to pay into your bank account. It is bank independent - it's just for you. So when you move banks, anyone paying you still pays to the same public account number and it reaches your new bank. Simples.

Paying out is a different matter. In my scheme you would have a private key to enable money to go out of your account, and that key would only be shared with one individual - the payee. You would have a different key for each relationship between you and a payee (you wouldn't need to see this, it could all be covered by the software, just as the public key/private key is online). If it was a one-off payment you could include the amount in the key - if it's a direct debit or equivalent it would specify the duration. No one else could use it.

With these in place you have two things. The ability to switch bank accounts without informing everyone of a change of details, and much better security. What's not to like? Would the banks do it? I doubt it. But I can dream...

Musical metaphors

With the exception of a post about a dubious advertising campaign that I had to take down in response to a cease and desist order, my blog post that has generated the most comments (and certainly the most ire) is one about my dislike for opera. I like to revisit it occasionally, if only to add accelerant to the flames.

On Sunday I was driving back to sunny Swindon from darkest Southampton and happened to have Classic FM's chart show on, which featured a couple of operatic numbers and it struck me that there was a very useful metaphor to be had for the nature of operating singing when compared with my own favourite singing form, Tudor/Elizabethan/20th Century church music, in the manner of ice cream desserts.
Operatic singing, I would say, is like a visit to Pizza Hut's Ice Cream Factory (R). As well the gooey, sweet icecream, you can pile on the hundreds and thousands and marshmallows and Smarties and sauce to make something that is over-the-top, dramatic and altogether remarkable, if a little predictable. Listening to a piece by Byrd or Palestrina by comparison is like taking on a Heston Blumenthal ice cream. It's a sophisticated taste, and frankly a lot of people probably won't get it. Not only is it subtle but it can shock you by putting things you would never expect together (musically speaking).
The important thing here is that both are, in there own way, appealing. Neither will work for everyone, though more people are likely to get the Ice Cream Factory approach. I'm not saying I'm a convert. But I think I understand the appeal better now. And life would be boring (and not like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates) if we all like the same things.

Stand up science

Last Friday at Oxford I had my first experience of contributing to a sort of stand up science - and it was great fun.

The event, in the hallowed halls of Oxford's Mathematical Institute was, in effect, part of a book tour for Ig Nobel Prize founder Marc Abrahams' new book This is Improbable. As this is a series of short articles it is quite difficult to do a talk about, so Abrahams has hit on a brilliant way of covering the topic. His book describes a whole host of the sort of whacky papers that make you laugh and then think - the kind of thing that typify the Ig Nobel prizes. And what Abrahams does is brings along a pile of the original papers, gives them out to guest speakers like me and then each of us is given 2 minutes to read snippets from the paper as a dramatic rendition.

It works surprisingly well - though some readers were better than others at what was a fairly frantic bit of preparation to make snippets from an academic paper seem entertaining. To add to the fun, after each reading the audience had the opportunity to question the reader about the details of a paper that they'd never seen before.

I chose a paper that studied the effects of wearing socks over your shoes on an icy pavement in New Zealand, a paper that luckily had a number of priceless phrases to quote. (I knew I'd do okay when the audience burst into laughter at the revelation that the experimenters had issued their test subjects with different coloured socks.) Others, I think, found the experience a little wearing. Marc Abrahams was standing alongside us and frequently had to prompt readers to stop breaking the rules by commenting on a paper rather than simply quoting it.

There was one heartstopping moment when one of the other readers, another science writer, who was presenting a paper about racial preference in choosing colour of cheese, was asked a question from the audience about whether the study covered people of mixed race. The science writer turned to the timekeeper on the stage and said something like 'You're mixed race, what do you think?' It felt horribly like one of those moments when someone says 'I didn't know you were pregnant,' to get the reply 'I'm not.'

Overall, though, brilliant fun. Click here for a review of the book/links to Amazon.

Re-cover-y

I am delighted to announce that my latest book, Gravity is now available in the UK as well as the US. My first encounter with it was a bit of a shock, when I turned up at my talk in Lichfield last Sunday and there it was for sale - but I now have my own copies, so it seem real.

There was one other surprise, though. I was expecting a white cover featuring Harold Lloyd hanging off a huge clock face, clearly being seriously influenced by gravity and fitting the new tag line dreamed up by UK publisher Duckworth 'What goes up, must come down.' At the time of writing, the Harold Lloyd cover is still on Amazon. But instead we have the cover shown here - about as different as you can get.

I rather like the new cover. It has gravitas, which is rather appropriate. The earlier cover suffered, perhaps, from too much levity. (Gravity and levity were in ancient Greek times simple opposing tendencies. Heavy objects had an urge, a desire even, to head towards the centre of the universe, i.e. the Earth. This urge was gravity. Light objects had an urge to move away from the centre of the universe - levity.) It's rather handsome too with that subtle blend of the apple and the Moon having nice Newtonian connotations.

But a little part of me misses Harold Lloyd...

Physics lessens (sic)

The book is for teachers, but primary
children need to get why physics is funThere has been much talk in the news of late, thanks to an IoP report showing how few girls are taking physics at A level. The fuss arises because we are in serious need of more physics graduates for science, engineering and business alike. This seems to be the prime driver per se. As one of my daughters pointed out, you don't hear much moaning about how few boys take textiles at A level, so it's more about utility than equality. (Which is fair enough.)

However, I think if we want more people doing physics A levels and degrees (and we do!) we need to address the rot much earlier. I've just reviewed a physics book for primary school children. As a book it's fine, but the content, driven by the curriculum, is rubbish.

The first problem is that it is pure Victorian science. We teach primary school children the basics as they were understood well over a hundred years ago. There are two problems with this. You don't teach them English by giving seven-year-olds classic texts, you use modern catchy stuff - but we still get the dull old droning stuff about friction and mechanics and such. Mechanics is important stuff, of course, just as Shakespeare is in English - but why not start with the weird and wonderful stuff to grab their attention? The other problem is that you want to get the fundamentals in place. What the curriculum fails to recognise is that all the fundamentals of physics changed in the twentieth century.

The second problem (in part because of that Victorian viewpoint) is that what we do teach often verges on being wrong. So, for instance, electricity and magnetism are treated totally separately. Light is often just considered as 'rays', but after that purely as waves. Mirrors, we are told, flip left and right. No they don't. And so on.

Those who justify the current crappy curriculum have two arguments. One is that the children can't understand complicated stuff like relativity and quantum theory and modern cosmology and particle physics. This is just, to use the technical teaching term, bollocks. I don't often resort to bad language, but I have to here, because the premise is so offensive, condescending and ridiculous. I regularly expose primary children to all these areas and they lap it up. It's where all the exciting stuff is, after all. It is perfectly possible to teach relativity, for example, in a way that eight-year-olds can totally get it.

The second argument is that the teachers in primary school don't understand complicated stuff like relativity and quantum theory and modern cosmology and particle physics. This is certainly the biggest barrier to effective teaching of physics in primary schools. Most primary teachers do not have a science background. They are more comfortable with potato prints than Large Hadron Colliders. They will certainly need some handholding to get them past their own blockages until they too realize this stuff isn't complicated and scary at the level they will be presenting it.

The first step, I would suggest, then, is to change the primary school science curriculum and to re-educate primary teachers so they can do physics justice. I have a rather nice little book, Getting Science which gives primary school teachers the basics they need - but without that curriculum change we haven't a hope because most won't bother. It's not what they are supposed to teach.

Let's be clear about this. At the moment, primary school children, who could be fired up with excitement about physics are taught that it is mostly rather dull stuff about materials and friction and forces, with an uninspiring bit of light, sound, electricity and magnetism thrown in. If instead they were taught it was the most amazing, mind-boggling stuff, full of particles that can be in two places at once, and time travel, and big bangs creating a universe that is 94% missing... maybe, just maybe, fewer children would drop the subject as soon as they could.

The spam fairy

Blogs traditionally suffer from a fair number of spam comments, which try (feebly) to look like real comments, but are really just there to include a link to their own website. I didn't realize just how much this happened until I changed the www.popularscience.co.uk website into a format that allowed comments on each page and got absolutely inundated - probably at least 10 spam comments a day.

So I signed up to a spam blocking service that's well-integrated with the WordPress environment I now use for that website. For months, all those comments were slammed into a holding area by the blocking service and I could see them building up more and more. But then they just stopped coming. For weeks now there hasn't been a single one. Somehow, the spam fairy is catching them before the blocker gets its hands on them.

I thought initially that this was down to a change of approach by the blocker, simply trashing the spam rather than displaying its trophies. But now I'm not so sure.

The thing is, I subscribe to the comments on this blog as an RSS feed, meaning I get alerted whenever someone makes a comment, so I can come back with a snide (sorry, supportive) reply. What is really weird is that I am still getting the spam posts here (the spam blocker isn't on this site) - they turn up in the RSS feed - but the spam fairy is deleting them before I get to the actual blog to do anything about them. They have just disappeared.

I really have no idea what is happening and where this beneficial help is coming from. Can I stop paying for the spam blocking service, thanks to the spam fairy? I really don't know!

Just to show you the kind of thing I receive, particularly because I love the wording of this one, here is the latest spam comment for this blog, as seen in my RSS reader, but which simply isn't there when I go to the blog. Don't you just love that sentence? Eat your heart out, James Joyce.

Magnetic moment

Taken in a break on my visit to LichfieldI very much enjoyed appearing at the Lichfield festival on Sunday to speak about Build Your Own Time Machine. At the end of the talk, I opened things up to questions, as usual offering to discuss not only the subject of my talk, but any aspect of physics or science communication. And I came a bit of a cropper.

I'm generally able to answer the typical questions that arise on abstruse topics like relativity or quantum theory. I cope, on the whole, with the latest news stories - I've lost count of queries about the LHC and Higgs bosons or, a little while ago, faster than light neutrinos (remember them?). But the ones that tend to catch me out have a habit of being questions that rely more on the kind of basic physics I've not had to think about for a long time. And the one that tripped me up on Sunday was just such a question. It was about magnetism.

The questioner asked why is that a (permanent) magnet doesn't run out of energy. After all, it seems to be able to hold a piece of metal up against the force of gravity indefinitely.

I could answer part of the question. If you think of the magnet attracting a piece of metal up off the ground, then keeping it in the air, it only takes energy to move the metal. Keeping it in place takes no energy. It can be useful to think of what happens with gravity, as it's something we're more familiar with than magnetism. If I lift a ball off the floor and put it on a table, I do work (use energy) to lift the ball against the pull of gravity. But once the ball is on the table there is no energy being used to keep it there. How could there be? Where would it be coming from? Out of the table? Then surely the table would some how drain away?

We tend to be fooled into thinking there is an exertion of energy required just to hold something up because if we imagine holding a heavy object up for a long time ourselves, our arms would begin to ache more and more and eventually we would have to drop it - but this is all about human physiology, not physics.

That leaves us with the energy needed for the magnet to lift the piece of metal in the first place. Where did that come from? This is what threw me at the time, and I was only able to prevaricate. It's tempting to think that somehow the energy is coming out of the magnet, so if it lifted things often enough it would run out. But that's wrong. Once again this is a case where thinking of the case of gravity can be helpful.

If I lift something off the Earth, then let go, there is energy required to move that object. I put the energy into the system when I lift it, the energy is then 'released' when I let go to propel it back to Earth. Potential energy from its position in the gravitational field is translated into kinetic energy of movement. Exactly the same goes for the magnet. The potential energy the piece of metal has from its position in the magnetic field is translated into the kinetic energy of movement. The energy is not somehow sucked out of the magnet to propel the metal.

I think the reason it's fairly obvious with gravity, but less so with magnetism is that our experience tends to be inverted. On the Earth we usually lift things up against gravity's pull, then let go. The only things that get placed in the Earth's gravitational field from outside (the aspect that confuses us with a magnet) tend to be meteors and other space debris. By contrast, with the magnet we are usually putting the piece of metal in from the outside, so it is less obvious that we are giving it potential energy than if we start with the metal stuck to the magnet and drag it away before letting go.

I am sure I will be caught out again this way. When you are thinking on your feet, unless you are working in a subject day to day, it's easy to get into rabbit-in-the-headlights mode and fail to come with a sensible answer. But it won't stop me giving that open request for questions. What I've got to work on is saying 'I'm not sure, I'll check and get back to you,' rather than woffling as I tend to...

The unbearable heaviness of being Welsh

Eight booklets? No, just four, twice.I'm not Welsh, but the title of this post refers to a reflection that to do business in Wales seems to carry a painful overhead.

Over the last couple of years I've been working with an excellent project called CIME which has been bringing the sort of business creativity support than can usually only be afforded by big companies to micro-businesses in the south west corner of Wales.


The project has just finished, and as part of the wind up, a pack was produced with a booklet on the different contributors with hints on creativity, plus three well-written booklets on creativity techniques and applications by consultant Derek Cheshire. These are very professionally produced and look extremely smart, and probably quite expensive.
Read all about me...
Anywhere else, that would be it. But because it's Wales they have had to duplicate all the documentation in Welsh. So instead of getting a pack of four booklets, you get eight booklets. Whatever your language, half of those are going straight in the bin. But more to the point, I can appreciate the value of the Welsh language, but I think to be so rigid about requiring all this kind of documentation to be bi-lingual is simply a huge waste of money.

It's fine if we are talking government forms - but it's a different matter for booklets from a project like this. There needs to be more flexibility, the option to choose whether to go for a single language or both, depending on your audience.
... in Welsh
As it happens, this project was funded by the EU, so had plenty of money for this kind of thing (in itself, perhaps an indictment of EU projects) - but, really, Welsh people. Would you rather your money was spent on duplicating every document in sight, or on services like schools and health? Just wondering.

For that matter, just think of the impact on the environment. Half these booklets you can absolutely guarantee are going to be thrown away without being looked at. That's really thinking of the environment, isn't it?

Since this was the finale of CIME, I'll leave you with a fun video from one of my sessions featuring the 'visual minutes' taken by a couple of enterprising art students.

Looping the Looper

Since writing How to Build a Time Machine/Build Your Own Time Machine, time travel has been a particular interest for me, so I was delighted to be offered a chance to have a preview of the new movie Looper a few weeks ago. (No spoilers in the first part of this piece.)

The premise is an interesting one. In the future, criminals send people they want to get rid of back in time around 30 years. There a hired killer shoots them as they arrive. But part of the contract is knowing that eventually the person who gets sent back with you. At that point the killer gets enough money to retire on and has 30 years left. But, of course, things get complicated when our hero, Joe, faces the future version of himself. (I'm not sure how he knows it's him as there is no resemblance, but hey.)

I'll give you some general feelings here, safe, if you are going to see the movie, and then some detailed comments after the spoiler break. It's being promoted as this decade's Matrix. I think that's wrong - for me that accolade could only be applied to Inception. But I know why they've said it. Looper is good at combining exciting action with bits where you have to think a bit. And segments of it are downright clever. I think they could have made more of the possibilities for Inception like multi-layered action, but is still works well and I would highly recommend it if you like science fiction action movies with a little more thought that a typical Arnie movie. Certainly streets ahead of the recent remake of Total Recall.

The spoilers come after this trailer:



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SPOILERS!
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There are some lovely ideas in this movie. I like the concept of the killer finishing his contract by killing himself. There was some real poignancy in Bruce Willis losing his memories of his wife as young Joe's future changes as a result of old Joe's presence in the past. And the time travel comes close to making logical scientific sense. There's one big science fact error - it is loudly announced that time travel hasn't been invented, but it will be. The implication is people are travelling back to a point before time travel has been invented, which isn't possible. But I like to think this is the director/writer Rian Johnson setting us up for a Looper 2 where it turns out that time travel really had been invented earlier.

One weird thing was the telekinesis aspect. It has nothing to do with the rest of the plot - I just can't see the point of it. Should have been binned unless it too is primarily for future movies.

I had more trouble with a couple of basic logic issues. The whole point of the looper system is that it's not safe to kill people in the future as you will definitely get caught, so they send people back thirty years to kill them there. But we see them kill Bruce Willis's wife quite casually in the future. Why doesn't this present the same problem? If they can get away with this, they can find an easier way to get away with other killings than sending people into the past.

Small physical quibble. The blunderbuss used to kill the victims would not send the bodies flying back. Simple Newtonian physics, guys. I know a lot of movies get this wrong, but it's poor science.

The other big logic problem is over the use of resets. Fairly early on, young Joe is killed. Then the action just restarts a little earlier. The (sensible) implication is that if he was dead his future self couldn't come back, so the chain of events would never have started. That's fine, though it is presented in a rather confusing way. But the denouement involves young Joe killing himself to stop old Joe from killing others people. Why didn't this also cause a reset? It's inconsistent.

One lovely idea I've never seen before was that the young versions of loopers could communicate with the old version by carving a message on their arms to leave a scar. This is brilliant - the only slight problem with the execution is that the old loopers suddenly realize the message is there, where actually they would have known about it for 30 years.

I'm nitpicking here, but detail can make a lot of difference to a science-driven movie like this. I know it is fiction, and I'm quite happy for science to be distorted to fit the storyline - but it doesn't do any harm to point out where it went wrong. Overall, though, I really enjoyed the movie and it even occasionally made me think, which can't be bad.