Category Archives: Science

Authors of Scientific Articles by Country

The United States National Science Foundation published – Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003.

In an unexpected development in the early 1990s, the absolute number of science and engineering (S&E) articles published by U.S.-based authors in the world’s major peer-reviewed journals plateaued.
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The unprecedented plateau in the number of U.S. S&E articles should not be confused with a decades-long and familiar decline in the U.S. share of the world’s S&E articles. As other states built up their S&E capabilities, the U.S. share of the world’s articles in natural sciences and engineering dropped from 38% in 1973 to 28% in 2003. This decline in share is not surprising, nor has it been viewed as a cause for concern. By many measures, including articles published in peer-reviewed journals, the United States has been the world’s leading scientific nation for decades and remains the world’s leading scientific nation.
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Although the U.S. share of the world’s influential articles dropped substantially, the United States remained dominant in this area. At the end of the period studied, U.S. institutions were at least partially responsible for half of the world’s influential articles; no other major publishing center approached this figure. Moreover, compared with other major publishing centers, a considerably higher percentage of total U.S. output was classified as influential.

NSF includes a great deal of interesting data along with commentary. One compelling area is that of the location of authors of the top 1% of the most cited papers. The USA leads with 64.6% in 1992 and 56.6% in 2003. European Union-15 (15 countries for this measure) 23.3% to 27.7% (interesting, not what I would have predicted – which would have been a decline, though a small one). Japan 4.2% to 5.3%. East Asia – 4 (China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) from .1 to 1.1% (and rising rapidly – .5% in 2001 to .8% in 2002) – interesting but not so surprising, basically what I would expect – rapid gains. All other countries: 7.8% in 1992 and 9.3% in 2003. I predict these figures will have to break out India sometime in the next 10 years – I wish they did now though I expect it is a fairly low figure. China will also be reported separately, I believe.

The NSF data includes all sorts of great stuff. For the same top 1% of cited articles by topic East Asia – 4 in Engineering/Technology: 1992 .9% – 2003 7.2% in Social Sciences 0.0% to .6% in Mathematics 1.3% to 5.6%. In Engineering/Technology the USA dropped from 63.3% to 45.4%.

This is more data supporting what I have said before Science Excellence and Economic Benefits:
Continue reading →

Where is “Everybody”

The Fermi Paradox: Back with a vengeance

The Fermi Paradox is the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of ETI’s. The size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI’s ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.i”The Fermi Paradox is the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of ETI’s. The size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI’s ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.
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There are more stars in the Universe than we can possibly fathom. Any conception of ‘rare’ ‘not enough time’ or ‘far away’ has to be set against the inability of human psychology to grasp such vast cosmological scales and quantities. The Universe and the Milky Way are extremely old, our galaxy has been able to produce rocky planets for quite some time now, and our earth is a relative new-comer to the galaxy.
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The fact that our Galaxy appears unperturbed is hard to explain. We should be living in a Galaxy that is saturated with intelligence and highly organized. Thus, it may be assumed that intelligent life is rare, or, given our seemingly biophilic Universe, our assumptions about the general behaviour of intelligent civilizations are flawed.

A paradox is a paradox for a reason: it means there’s something wrong in our thinking.

I agree. I am going with the it is hard for life to start and it what has started is really far away (so we can’t detect what life there is). Another option I could believe is once you reach a certain level of technological sophistication you often wipe out your civilization – leaving relatively short periods where civilizations produce signals we can detect (included in this is creating something that wipes themselves out, and a nasty thing [virus, bacteria, whatever…] that spreads everywhere because of instant transportation and wipes everybody out). Or maybe civilizations quickly go through a technology phase producing signals we can detect and move onto something else (though I can’t really understand why or what that would mean really). Or, similar to that one, for some reason we are really really odd in our move to technology – maybe most of the time things just stay in a natural state and nothing evolves that wants to do more than eat and sleep (if they sleep). That seems really unlikely but…

Google: Patent System in Crisis

Google’s patents chief believes the US patent system is “in crisis” and I agree, see related posts below. Google: Kill all the patent trolls

There are too many businesses, she added, who do little more than use patents as a means of making money. Such businesses, often referred to as trolls in patent law, have proved to be a serious minefield for tech companies over the last few years. Lee highlighted the tribulations of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry handheld, which settled a patent lawsuit for $612m last May.

Speaking alongside Lee, Apple’s chief patent counsel, Chip Lutton, wouldn’t go quite so far as his Google counterpart. He said the US patent system was “not broken” and that it was “not in crisis,” calling it “the best in the world”. But he acknowledged that there was a “huge bubble” of patent assertions that needs to be scaled back. “The question with this bubble market, as with any bubble market, is ‘Can we solve it without a crisis arising?'” he said.

Lutton believes that the key to fixing the country’s patent problems lies with the courts, not the patent office. “Most patents issued are never litigated and never licensed,” he said. “We need to focus on fixing the litigation system. That’s most relevant.”

Contradictory Medical Studies

I have written before about false research findings. This is an important topic – we need to remember that the interpritation of one study (or many studies) in not necessarily conclusive. Another article – When Medical Studies Collide:

Two years ago, the headlines blared that echinacea was a bust. Millions of people who believed the best-selling herbal remedy was warding off colds were probably deluding themselves, according to The New England Journal of Medicine. Now echinacea is back in the news. This time, it works! So says a study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

How could two studies come to such different conclusions—especially when there have been no new trials of the herb? While the New England Journal reported on one clinical trial, authors of the latest report combined data from previous studies, a controversial approach called a meta-analysis. Its conclusion is dramatically different—not just from that of the New England Journal paper, but also from a review last year of the same studies.
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The problem is, the world of medical and health research is messier than most people realize. Black-and-white answers are rare, even when it comes to a single drug trial.

Just remember those last two sentences. Very simple. And most people would agree if you showed them those two sentences and asked if they agreed. But then they see a headline and away they go… Just force yourself to repeat that idea every time you see a health report. Don’t believe the headline without strong support.

An interesting tidbit from the article. The coneflower is the source of echinacea. I tried to find photos that I am pretty sure I have on my hard drive of the flowers in my back yard, but I couldn’t.

Evolutionary Design

Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers by Paul Marks:

Evolutionary Algorithms take two parent designs – for a boat hull, say – and blend components of each, perhaps taking the surface area of one and the curvature of another, to produce multiple hull offspring that combine the features of the parents in different ways. Then the algorithm selects those offspring it considers are worth re-breeding – in this case those with the right combination of parameters to make a better hull. The EA then repeats the process. Although many offspring will be discarded, after thousands of generations or more, useful features accumulate in the same design, and get combined in ways that likely would not have occurred to a human designer. This is because a human does not have the time to combine all the possibilities for each feature and evaluate them, but an EA does.

Evolving new designs is very cool. One point I would like to make (I am biased since my father did a great deal of work in this area) is the power of design of experiments to allow experimenting on multiple factors at once. This is a methodology that is still used far too little. Regardless, evolutionary design is very cool. The Human-Competitive awards highlight some examples.

National Science and Technology Medals

photo of White House Technology Medal Ceremony - July 2007

The 2005 and 2006 National Medals for Science and Technology were awarded at a White House Ceremony this week. The National Science and Technology Medals Foundation web site has photos of each award winner receiving their medals this year and a list of all winners. The National Medal of Science was established by Congress in 1959 as a Presidential award, has recognized 441 of America’s leading scientists and engineers. The evaluation criteria is based on the total impact an individual’s work has had on the present state of physical, chemical, biological, mathematical, engineering, behavioral or social sciences.

The National Medal of Technology was established by Congress in 1980 as a Presidential award, has recognized 146 individuals and 26 companies whose accomplishments have generated jobs and created a better standard of living. Their accomplishments best embody technological innovation and support the advancement of global U.S. competitiveness.

List of all winners from the White House press release: Continue reading →

Time

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now. Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.
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Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-ÂDeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

Interesting. As usual, quantum actions seem bizarre. Related: Quantum Mechanics Made Relatively Simple Podcasts – Physicists Observe New Property of Matter – Particles and Waves – Quantum Theory Fails Reality Checks – Physics Concepts in 60 Seconds

Light-harvesting Bacterium Discovered in Yellowstone

photo of Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, by John Hunter

Surprising new species of light-harvesting bacterium discovered in Yellowstone

In the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, a team of researchers has discovered a novel bacterium that transforms light into chemical energy.
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Remarkably, the new genus and species Cab. thermophilum also belongs to a new phylum, Acidobacteria. The discovery marks only the third time in the past 100 years that a new bacterial phylum has been added to the list of those with chlorophyll-producing members. Although chlorophyll-producing bacteria are so abundant that they perform half the photosynthesis on Earth, only five of the 25 major groups, or phyla, of bacteria previously were known to contain members with this ability.

“The microbial mats give the hot springs in Yellowstone their remarkable yellow, orange, red, brown and green colors,” explained Bryant. “Microbiologists are intrigued by Octopus and Mushroom Springs because their unusual habitats house a diversity of microorganisms, but many are difficult or impossible to grow in the lab. Metagenomics has given us a powerful new tool for finding these hidden organisms and exploring their physiology, metabolism and ecology.”
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Unexpectedly, the new bacterium has special light-harvesting antennae known as chlorosomes, which contain about 250,000 chlorophylls each. No member of this phylum nor any aerobic microbe was known to make chlorosomes before this discovery. The team found that Cab. thermophilum makes two types of chlorophyll that allow these bacteria to thrive in microbial mats and to compete for light with cyanobacteria.

This discovery is particularly important because members of the Acidobacteria have proven very hard to grow in laboratory cultures, which means their ecology and physiology are very poorly understood. Most species of Acidobacteria have been found in poor or polluted soils that are acidic, with a pH below 3. However, the Yellowstone environments are more alkaline, about pH 8.5 (on a scale of 1 to 14). Bryant noted, “Judging from their 16S rRNA sequences, the closest relatives of Cab. thermophilum are found around Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone and hot springs in Tibet and Thailand. As we look more closely, we may find relatives of Cab. thermophilum in the microbial mats of thermal sites worldwide.”

Photo of Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park by John Hunter.

Creating a Nation of Wimps

I certainly don’t know if this is true, or the even the consensus of the scientific thought today, but it happens to feel right to me. Not exactly a scientific conclusion but there you go. From, Psychology Today says, A Nation of Wimps:

Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers.
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In his now-famous studies of how children’s temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.

As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They’re easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.

Well for whatever it is worth I think the article is interesting (I am not exactly sure about the introversion part that doesn’t seem to have a strong ring of truth but I do think it is better to experience real failure and overcome it than be too sheltered and without that you don’t learn confidence you just are kept from having to feel discomfort as long as the adults protect you…) even if it is just because it attacks something I find a bit annoying the increasing tendency to act like mistakes are not mistakes, failure to achieve an objective doesn’t matter, kids should not be challenged… I don’t think coddling is a good way to create confident people that function well in the world.

People need to learn that things often don’t work the way you might think or hope, things are not fair, things can hurt you, you can loose things you care about, if you make a decision you have to live with the consequences… It is not that hard to understand these things. Kids might well prefer to just be handed everything they want without an risk or effort on their part. But I believe they will learn how to cope and take pride in actually doing good stuff. Which will work much better than trying to convince them they should take pride in something even they can probably tell is fake, coddling. Of course I don’t have any kids either so my opinions are not only not put into practice by me. Oh well go read the article if you are interested.

Quantum Random Number Generator

Quantum Random Bit Generator Service:

The work on QRBG Service has been motivated by scientific necessity (primarily of local scientific community) of running various simulations (in cluster/Grid environments), whose results are often greatly affected by quality (distribution, nondeterminism, entropy, etc.) of used random numbers. Since true random numbers are impossible to generate with a finite state machine (such as today’s computers), scientists are forced to either use specialized expensive hardware number generators, or, more frequently, to content themselves with suboptimal solutions (like pseudo-random numbers generators).
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To achieve high availability of the service, several network access modes are developed, or shall be developed. These include transparent acquisition of random numbers using C/C++ libraries, web services (access over the SOAP protocol), and Mathematica/MATLAB client add-ons.
To enable high security, in future, SSL protocol shall be supported, i.e. all data shall be encrypted, at users request, with user/service certificates.
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We use ‘Quantum Random Bit Generator’ (QRBG121), which is a fast non-deterministic random bit (number) generator whose randomness relies on intrinsic randomness of the quantum physical process of photonic emission in semiconductors and subsequent detection by photoelectric effect. In this process photons are detected at random, one by one independently of each other. Timing information of detected photons is used to generate random binary digits – bits.