Brian Clegg's Blog, page 79

Can a fact be a stereotype?

Despite its theoretical veneer of objectivity, science - and even more so, writing about science - is subject to the cultural mores of the day. I discovered this recently when I had to modify a piece of text because what I wrote was seen as perpetuating a stereotype. I'll come back to the specifics, but this does raise a rather more important question than the issue at stake, which is whether it is acceptable to perpetuate a stereotype if it's true?

I suppose the classic example from the history of science is the way that people with different ethnic backgrounds scored in relatively predictable ways in an IQ test. Here the stereotype, which definitely isn't true, was that people of a particular ethnic background were more intelligent than others. However, this wasn't what the test actually showed. What it showed was that people of a particular ethnic background were better at doing IQ tests than others. This definitely was true, but some still considered that unacceptable, considering it to be the application of a racial stereotype. It wasn't. All it was saying is that the test was designed with a certain cultural background in mind and someone with that background would do better. The danger here is the knee-jerk response that if a statement fits a group that is often stereotyped, then that statement must be false, offensive, lazy and disgusting.
I ought really to take one step back and ask what a stereotype is. According to my dictionary it is 'A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception.' So, by implication a stereotype can't be totally true, because it is oversimplified. So it would be a stereotype to say that all people with naturally red hair (to choose a minority I am a) a member of and b) who those who defend minorities don't care about) burn easily in the sun. I would suggest, however, that it would not be a stereotype to say that most people with naturally red hair burn easily in the sun, because there are good genetic reasons why this is likely to be the case, and because there is reasonable experiential evidence for this to be true.
In the case of my correction, I had said that chocolate seems to have a particular appeal for female consumers. Now, I would say that similarly, it would be a stereotype to say 'all women love chocolate', but that to say 'seems to have a particular appeal' is not a stereotype, because it describes the appearance - and I would challenge anyone to give me evidence that this is not the case. As a simple example, in last week's episode of Broadchurch, Olivia Colman's character said to her son 'I love you more than chocolate.' There's an obvious implication there.
So the stereotype would be 'all women love chocolate' or 'women love chocolate more than men do.' But I think it is entirely factual to suggest that women express the appeal of chocolate more than men do, just as, for instance, more men express the appeal of football than do women. The whole point is that this is not a generalisation. There are men who don't like football - I'm one. For that matter I have a male friend who goes on about his liking for chocolate. But we are exceptions. Expressing the particular appeal of football is primarily a male activity, just as making comments like Coleman's character does about chocolate is primarily a female activity, is not a stereotype, it is a fact.
So then we have to ask, is it okay to suppress facts because we don't like them? Well, it's certainly not a scientific thing to do. It can be a social thing to do - it's called a white lie, and I can only think this is why some people get het up about this kind of thing - but I'm really not sure that white lies have a place in science.

That name sounds funny - I'll change it

For hundreds of years it has been the norm to give names a tweak if they sounded odd in the language being used - particular names of people and places. So for a long time, when Latin was the go-to language of Europe, it was the norm to Latinise people's names. We now find a lot of these fiddly and they have been discarded, but some still remain - Jesus and Copernicus, to name but two.

Medieval scholars also struggled with Arabic names, which became essentials when Europe was regaining its interest in science, largely spurred on by the writings of Arabic scientists and their translations of Greek books. So, for instance, Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd, or Ibn Rušd for short (whose name inspired Salman Rushdie's surname) somehow became Averroës, while Abu Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān became Gerber.

However, the most lasting and interestingly nuanced is our current approach to place names. Traditionally we gave a name to a place, and that was its English name, even if its 'real' name subsequently changed. But now we try harder to keep up... except where we don't. So we have gone along with the change from Ceylon to Sri Lanka, and we've even tried to keep up with as arbitrary a change as an update of transliteration from some languages that don't use the same characters as us. So, for instance, Peking has become Beijing and Mao Tse Tung turns into Mao Zedong. Yet somehow  what probably should be transliterated Moskva stubbornly remains Moscow.

In Europe, we are impressively confused over what to do. Most French places we seem to cope with, but we can't bring ourselves to say Paris the way we should. In Germany, Köln is still usually Cologne, and in Italy we shun Roma (it's not difficult, guys), Firenze and Venezia for Rome, Florence and Venice.

However, we are most confused of all when it comes to Wales. Here, we simply can't make our minds up, so end up with dual names for many places, causing strife, confusion and I'm sure road accidents as people have to cope with twice the amount of words, working out which to apply. Personally I love the Welsh names, and I'd rather we simply dropped the anglicised versions. Who wouldn't prefer Y Trallwng to Welshpool? Once you learn the basics of Welsh pronunciation (and I'm the first to admit, mine is rudimentary as it's mostly picked up from non-Welsh speakers) there's far more fun to be had with Caerdydd than Cardiff. What I wish, though, is that people would use one or the other. It really irritates me, for instance, when people use the Welsh pronunciation of, say, Aberystwyth (as happened when they were on University Challenge), but don't then go on to use Welsh place names for towns that have dual designation.

So, frankly, names are a mess. We've gradually moved away from Latinisation and Anglicisation, but only to a point. I know we don't have a body that sorts out English, it just sort of evolves. But I wish that evolution could get a move on and head in one direction or the other, rather than taking its current drunkard's walk.

(Next week, we drag astronomers, kicking and screaming into using SI units.)

A dark day for Huddersfield

As someone brought up in one of the pennine towns, I know Huddersfield reasonably well and have always thought of it as, frankly, a bit of dump. So I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago when I accompanied one of my daughters on a visit as a potential student at the University of Huddersfield. Its compact campus is a really well designed, pleasant environment. And, I mean, it has Patrick Stewart as Chancellor!
However I am decidedly concerned about a press release I received from them. It tells us 'Following a pilot study in Huddersfield, researchers feel that Reiki, as a complementary therapy, should be available to cancer sufferers on the NHS.' Hmm.

Here's what I say about reiki (I can't see why it deserves a capital letter) in Science for Life :

Like acupuncture, reiki claims to use energies unknown and unde- tectable to science in its cures, but where acupuncture depends on the inner human energy of ch’i, reiki, which was devised in Japan in the early years of the 20th century, makes use of something more like ‘the Force’ in Star Wars – an external universal energy which is supposed to be channelled by the healer’s hands into the body of the person being treated.
     The only positive trials of reiki seem to be those where no controls were imposed – the treatment was not compared with a placebo, and so a natural sense of wellbeing resulted from a belief in its effectiveness. Although reiki can do no harm, there is always the danger if it is used instead of a functional treatment in the case of serious illness that the individual’s health will get worse as a result of not being properly treated.
     If you want a placebo-based treatment, over-the-counter home- opathy is a cheaper way to go.

 Now to be fair to Huddersfield, they aren't claiming reiki can cure cancer (this would be illegal), but they are saying that it can make sufferers feel better. Dr Serena McCluskey, who is a Senior Research Fellow in the University’s Centre for Applied Psychological and Health Research said 'Acupuncture and other techniques that were regarded as quite unorthodox are prescribed on the NHS, so we just thought that more research on Reiki was needed. We are not suggesting that we can establish scientific effectiveness, but we are adding to the body of evidence for the quality of life benefits it has for women with cancer.'

Hmm again. The research was done by D McCluskey and an-ex colleague Dr Maxine Stead, who is a 'Reiki master' and is 'now the owner of a holistic health spa in Huddersfield'. Triple hmm. No possibilities of vested interests here, then.

What did the research consist of? Over the course of a year, the researchers conducted detailed interviews with ten women who had received reiki therapy. They 'discovered benefits such as a release of emotional strain, “a clearing of the mind from cancer” and feelings of inner peace and relaxation.'

So it's a tiny trial using subjective interviews and they discovered, surprise, surprise, that when these patients received a lot of attention they felt better in themselves. But this is a classic placebo reaction. There was no attempt here to control the trial. No blinding. No attempt to compare with and without reiki. No suggestion that the same effects could be done without paying the fees of 'Reiki masters' by buying some ten-a-penny sugar pills. No consideration of the morality of placebo-as-treatment. (It may be justified, but it at least needs considering, and if it is to be done, it should be low cost and avoid encouraging misunderstanding of science.)

Frankly, this isn't science at all, it's effectively advertising for an alternative therapy. And the University of Huddersfield has seriously declined in my estimation.

In search of the quadrilemma

I've just read for review Amir Aczel's book Finding Zero . A lot of the book is concerned with his challenging attempt to track down a Cambodian inscribed stone that bears what is thought to be the oldest zero so far discovered. But along the way, he speculates on the differences between Western and Eastern approaches to thought that could have led to the invention of the mathematical zero.

Specifically he points out that traditional Western logic is very much binary - something is either true or it isn't. There are two options. But the Eastern equivalent, he suggests, which sometimes goes by the name of the quadrilemma, has four options: true, false, both and neither.

Now, on shallow observation, the 'both' and 'neither' options might seem like wishy-washy useless philosophical musings. And in some cases they are. But in fact they do sometimes make sense and are, in fact, also present in Western thinking - we just don't emphasise them as much as they might be emphasised in Eastern cultures.

So, for instance, Aristotle, when discussing infinity, described it as 'potential'. And to illustrate what his meant he used the example of the Olympic Games. If a little green man came down in a flying saucer (that bit is my addition to the illustration) and asked you 'Do the Olympic Games exist?' then I think you would say 'Yes.' But if he then asked 'Can you show me these Olympic Games of which you speak?' your answer would be 'No.' Aristotle's concept of potential is, I would suggest, pretty much identical to the third possibility in the quadrilemma - it is something which is both true and false.

How about something that is neither true nor false? Now here I would say I diverge from the Eastern approach, because while the third and fourth possibilities are distinct - so there is another, different case, which I'll illustrate in a moment - I can't say for certain which way round they are to be applied. But my final and distinct possibility is something that is imaginary (not in the mathematical sense, but literally) or fictional. Does a fictional character or an imaginary notion exist? Well, no. But on other hand, its existence isn't really false either, because we talk about them, think about them - and they make things happen. Yet this isn't the same as a potential, because a potential definitely can be, but isn't.

Who said philosophy wasn't fun?

The Museum of the Future - Review

I was a little bit wary of this collection of short stories, as it has the look of being self-published even though it isn't (specifically the paragraphs have gaps between them, like this blog, rather than the indented start you always see in a 'real' book) - but I needn't have worried because this isn't reflected in the content.

My suspicion is that these are Marmite stories - you'll love them if you like period writing. The first, for instance, is (intentionally) in the style of the wonderful M. R. James' Victorian ghost/horror stories, and several others adopt a Victorian style. I can't say every story worked for me - but that's true of pretty much every short story collection I've read, even those by masters of the art like Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman. The ones that did work, were genuinely engaging and intriguing.

Andrew May gives us a mix of science fiction, fantasy and mild horror. I think this is a collection that works best for those who are well versed in these genres, as you will get the references and the cleverness of stories like The Call of Cool-o, which is an H. P. Lovecraft style plot written in the style of Philip K. Dick, or The Museum of the Future, which is essentially the same story (each set in 2012), told as the story would have been if written in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992, employing the styles and recurring themes common in each period. Quite often 'Fortean' themes are explored, something of a speciality of May's, using a story of real life weirdness* as a setting for the fiction.

If I had to pick out a favourite it would be the relatively long story (many are only a few pages) A Case for Crane, which sees the main character watching a 1970s US crime drama, which he gets pulled into at various levels, sometimes inhabiting the mind of the character, sometimes the actor playing the character and sometimes the author, giving a strange and mind-twisting meta-view of the story. This sounds messy, but actually works really well. And I'm a sucker for period tales set in Oxford or Cambridge, of which there are several, though I should point out that all the best Cambridge colleges have a Senior Combination Room, not a Senior Common Room as mentioned in The Rendelsham Magi, with its unusual twist on the star of Bethlehem.

May's writing is assured and mostly enjoyable. His only weakness, I'd say, is that his female characters (when there are any) are straight out of the 1940s - either mousy and slightly plump or dominating Amazons. This is a very male-oriented collection of stories.

It's a mark of the effectiveness of the storytelling that there were several where I wanted to to find out more, to have the story taken on further. What's more, I took the book with me to read on the train, intending to put it aside for the important physics book I should have been reading last night, but instead I read on. If you like genuinely inventive and interesting short fiction, often with a period feel, it's well worth a try. You can find it on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (I'd go for the Kindle edition if you use ebooks, as it's significantly cheaper, and I think short stories are amongst the best things to read in this format).

* Well, as real as you might consider the likes of a haunting or the Loch Ness Monster to be. (Not that  Nessie is featured, but it's that kind of thing.)

Time for open book exams?

Reading Steve Caplan's interesting piece on cheating I was reminded of two very different types of exam I've done in my youth. (Thankfully I haven't done an exam in over 30 years and have no intention to start now.)
The first are the traditional horror exams where you might be tested on your expertise, but you only got a chance to use it if you could remember a whole pile of facts. And I still occasionally get nightmares where I am in exams and can't remember this or that formula. 
The other type was pretty much the last exam I ever took, on my OR course at Lancaster. Called a 'jumbo' it was a 6ish hour exam with a single question. (Though admittedly that question was a good few pages long). You could take in whatever books you wanted - and go out and get more if you wanted. Not only was it far more interesting to do than a traditional exam, I believe it told you far more about the candidate than any ordinary test. 
I really can't see any reason exams should test memory. Surely they should be about understanding and what you can do with the equations (or history dates or whatever)? I think this also fits very well with the RSA's alternative school curriculum, which is all about giving students the tools to research and work, rather than remembering lots of facts. 
How about it, educationalistas? Can we move to a better way?

Remembering Adventure

I recently posted this piece of text on Facebook and asked who remembered it.

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLEY.

Given I have pretty geeky friends on FB, I expected most would spot it immediately, but many didn't. Which gives me the opportunity to pop in a little extract from my upcoming book, Ten Billion Tomorrows, which looks at how science and science fiction have influenced each other (and how science fiction really isn't about predicting the future, yet manages to shape it). I had great fun writing it. If you think it'll float your boat, it's out in December and you can already pre-order it on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

So here we go with the extract:

By coincidence, 1976 was also the year when a true computer-based virtual world came to life. It was then that American computer engineer Will Crowther, who was working on ARPANET at the time, had an idea that would capture of the hearts and minds of computer enthusiasts – me included. Crowther was a fan of the fantasy pen and paper role-play game Dungeons and Dragons, which came out in 1974, and was also having family issues at the time. A caver, he had mapped out a real cave system on an early computer, and used the idea (if not the actual map) as an inspiration when he wanted to have something to play with his daughters after his marriage break-up. So he put together a simple game that used the computer’s ability to respond to a series of text commands to build a virtual world, which would later be improved on by graduate student Don Woods, who strengthened the fantasy elements in the game.

When playing, the early gamers would be told their position in a series of linked caves and could ask to move in different directions. They might discover swords or treasure – or, for that matter, deadly monsters – all of which were summed up with a few, tightly conceived words. Any pictures were in the imagination of the player. Crowther called his game Adventure, set in Colossal Cave. This wasn’t the first game to make use of computer power. The stand-alone tennis game Pong, running on TV sets with a simple computerized controller to produce the signal, came onto the market in 1972. But Crowther’s Adventure was the first computerized adventure game (giving the name to the genre).

In 1976 I moved from the bustling world of Cambridge to the isolated campus of Lancaster University in the north of England to take my masters degree. Until then, my use of computers had been limited to running simple programs written in languages like Fortran on a stack of punched cards. But Lancaster had a secret computing weapon in George 3, a computer operating system running on an already antiquated 1900 series mainframe from the now long-defunct ICL company, an operating system that transformed the way that the user interacted with the computer. Instead of punching a set of cards, feeding them through a reader and waiting for the output to churn out on a line printer, users communicated with George III using teletypes, electronic typewriters that could both take input from a keyboard and respond by typing controlled directly from the computer. Suddenly it was possible to have a conversation with a computer in real time.

I made a small amount of use of George 3 for my coursework. But by far the most frequent command I would type after logging in to the system was ADVENT. The command to run the game Adventure, which had been ported from its original implementation on a DEC PDP-10. I would play long into the night under the stark fluorescent lights of the computer lab, immersed in a world that could only be accessed via the imagination and the clattering print-head of the teletype:

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLEY.

When in response I typed GO IN, the system would respond:

YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING. A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

The adventure had begun. I genuinely can still feel the hairs standing up on my arms when I read those nostalgic words again. There had never been anything quite like it. It was a whole world that you interacted with through text – these text adventure games have become known as interactive fiction, and the name fits well. Perhaps most extraordinarily back then, it was a computer program that responded to ordinary words, rather than the terse instructions of a command language. The game would stay with me in 1977 when I moved to work at British Airways, where we had a PDP-10 and were able to play the original in all its glory. 

The Critic of Wolf Hall

I type this warily, with 'Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,' in mind. And I ought to say straight up that I am enjoying the BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall. But. I can only assume that the fervent praise for it I see on social media is from people who have read and loved the books, and who are delighted to see what I gather is generally a very good adaptation on the screen.

As someone who hasn't read anything by Hilary Mantel (in fact I've hardly read anything by any Booker Prize winner, because with a few exceptions like William Golding, I really don't get anything from reading literary fiction except a sense of worthiness), I do think that the glowing praise needs to be balanced by a little negative criticism.

Before I do, I'll get some praise in. It's very well acted, the locations are excellent, and as someone who is fascinated by Tudorbethan times (mostly because it's my favourite period for music), there's a distinct thrill of thinking, when we first meet, say, Dr Ridley, 'I know what's going to happen to you!' It's a bit like playing god. But.

So here we go with a few bullets to the heart:

It's a bit dark. I don't mean ominous, I mean without enough lighting. Sometimes this works wonderfully. It's hard not to think when, for instance, you see Cardinal Wolsey glowing by candlelight against a murky backdrop, 'I now understand why paintings of the period look the way they do.' But I still have two problems. One is that I'm currently re-watching the X-Files, and I've always felt they spent far too much time wandering around in the dark by torchlight. Similarly, it seems a trifle overdone in Wolf Hall - just substitute candles for torches. The other problem is that eyes don't work the same way that TV cameras do. I think with the number of candles in some scenes, because the human eye is so good at working in low light (think how well you can see by moonlight), there wouldn't be so many dark voids - you would comfortably be able to see the whole room.An awful lot of the scenes have the same format. Character spends a long time walking into a room. Character exchanges a few lines with another character. Character spends a long time walking out the room. I think the series could lose about an hour of walking and benefit from it. I get it that this isn't 24, and they want to be leisurely about it, but sometimes the pace verges on somnolence.If you live in Wiltshire, it is hard not to spend quite a lot of time thinking, 'That's not Greenwich, that's Bowood House... if you go through that door you get to the gift shop' or whatever. This is, of course, an unfair complaint, as they had to film somewhere, but it's hard not to get distracted by it. Oh, and I did think they could have spruced up some of the stonework, which looked as if it were over 400 years old, rather than newish.Finally, I hope they'll get a bit more variety in the period music. We're only two episodes in and we've heard the mournful sounding tune Ah, Robin three times now. Admittedly it's quite appropriate, as when performed as it should be, as a part song, it's essentially about two friends discussing their mistresses, and it's a piece I'm very fond of, but even so this was a very rich period musically.So there we have it. I like it, but I can't get as excited as everyone else seems to be. I shall now retire to my bomb shelter and await the assault.

Are people from London and the South East physics dullards?

All together now: 'Maybe it's because he's not
a Londoner, that he's a physics great...'While walking the dog yesterday I got to thinking about Isaac Newton (the way you do) and from him, of the other great physicists in British history. And it started me thinking that London and the South East is rather under-represented.

As a little experiment, I've listed all British Nobel Prize in Physics winners, plus the obvious individuals who would have won a Nobel if it had been around in their day.

I came up with:

Isaac Newton (NE)Michael Faraday (born in London, but his family had just moved from NW)James Clerk Maxwell (Scot)1904 Lord Rayleigh (SE)1906 J J Thomson (NW)1915 WH and WL Bragg (NW)1927 Charles Wilson (Scot)1928 Owen Richardson (NW)1933 Paul Dirac (SW)1934 James Chadwick (NW)1937 George Thomson (East Anglia)1947 Edward Appleton (NE)1948 Patrick Blackett (London)1950 Cecil Powell  (SE)1952 John Cockroft (NW)1973 Brian Josephson (Wales)1974 Martin Ryle (SE)1974 Anthony Hewish (SW)1977 Nevill Mott (NE)2003 Anthony Leggett (London)2013 Peter Higgs (NE)So, London manages 2, and the SE manages 3. That's not a bad score, but still seems a little meagre compared with 7 from the North West.
Of course the numbers are small, and it's hard to read a lot into such statistics (though it's worth a pause for thought that we didn't get a single Nobel Laureate in Physics between 1977 and 2003). Even so, it would be interesting to compare the ratio of, say cabinet minsters from London and the South East to other parts of the country since 1901 (the year of the first Physics Nobel).

My suspicion is that such a comparison might suggest that where physics greats are chosen on merit, cabinet ministers are chosen for a different reason entirely.

P.S. I couldn't be bothered to go through cabinet ministers, but I did prime ministers and it's quite interesting that a) Scotland is over-represented, b) NW is under-represented and c) the domination of London and the SE is relatively recent:

Arthur Balfour (Scot)Henry Cambell-Bannerman (Scot)Herbert Asquith (NE)David Lloyd George (Wales)Andrew Bonar Law (Colonies)Stanley Baldwin (Midlands)Ramsey McDonald (Scot)Neville Chamberlain (Midlands)Winston Churchill (SE*)Clement Attlee (SE)Anthony Eden (NE)Harold Macmillan (London)Alec Douglas-Home (London)Harold Wilson (NE)Edward Heath (SE)James Calaghan (SE-ish**)Margaret Thatcher (NE)John Major (SE)Tony Blair (Scot)Gordon Brown (Scot)David Cameron (London)
The two starred items are because we don't have a South Midlands:* Oxfordshire is spiritually SE** Portsmouth is not spiritually SE, but Hampshire is

I have been studied (sort of)!

I was fascinated to discover that my old book Armageddon Science has become the subject of a masters thesis. To be more precise, the experience of of translating two chapters of it into Chinese has been documented. All I know about the exercise is that it is the work of one M X Xi and was finished by May 2013. I haven't seen the actual thesis, but here is the abstract for your delectation:

This paper is a report based on the author’s experience of translating two chapters of Brian Clegg’s popular science book Armageddon Science, under the guidance of her supervisor. The report consists of six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the task. The second part describes the translation process and translation requirements. Translation process generally includes three stages:preparation, translation and proofreading. And the translation requirements fall into two parts:format requirements and quality requirements. The third part focuses on the source text analysis, in which features of popular science are discussed and illustrated in details from three aspects, lexis, syntax and style. The fourth part is theoretical resources. A brief introduction is given to Nida’s theory of translation process, that is, analyzing, transferring, and restructuring. Then in the fifth part the focus is moved to the translation strategies under the guidance of Nida’s theory of translation process at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels:at the lexical level, the report discusses the translation of polysemy and cultural-loaded words; at the syntactic level, it talks about the translation strategies of passive voice, long and complex sentences, post-positioning of attributives and nominalization; at the textual level, it analyzes the logicality of the translation. In the last part the author summarizes the whole translation process and brings this report to an end.By describing the translation process and analyzing the source text, the author hopes that the report as well as the translation of Armageddon Science can give some enlightenment to those who translate such kind of texts.

So there you are. It's not everyone who gets Nida's theory applied to their work. If M X Xi ever sees this, please drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net - I would love to hear a little more about why this book was chosen and how the experience went.