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The education bubble and science

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

I like George Will’s writing and his insight. I watch the ABC Sunday news commentary show to see him make pithy comments containing more wisdom that the rest of the commentary combined. His column this week is an example of his insights.

Deborah Wince-Smith of the Council on Competitiveness says: “Talent will be the oil of the 21st century.” And the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite. The late Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod said, “Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists.”

With populism rampant, this is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones. Nevertheless, the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them.

U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

He goes on to recommend support of the “elite universities,” by which I suppose the Ivy League. I think there is another point of view that should be considered.

There’s a lot of work ahead to enable the United States to meet the coming challenges. I’m reasonably confident that we remain the best placed large society on earth to make the right moves. Our culture of enterprise and risk-taking is still strong; a critical mass of Americans still have the values and the characteristics that helped us overcome the challenges of the last two hundred years.

But when I look at the problems we face, I worry. It’s not just that some of our cultural strengths are eroding as both the financial and intellectual elites rush to shed many of the values that made the country great. And it’s not the deficit: we can and will deal with that if we get our policies and politics right. And it’s certainly not the international competition: our geopolitical advantages remain overwhelming and China, India and the EU all face challenges even more daunting than ours and they lack our long tradition of successful, radical but peaceful reform and renewal.

No, what worries me most today is the state of the people who should be the natural leaders of the next American transformation: our intellectuals and professionals. Not all of them, I hasten to say: the United States is still rich in great scholars and daring thinkers. A few of them even blog.

The number of hard science and engineering students at major and/or “elite” universities is a small fraction of the total enrollment. Harvard, for example, only recently revised its engineering curriculum.

The A.B. in engineering degree teaches students how to solve problems and builds confidence doing so, explains Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The degree is a good bridge to further education such as business, law, government, architecture, and medical schools, she says, and draws people who might not normally be interested in more narrow engineering subjects. Another benefit of the broader curriculum: Murray says 38% of the A.B. enrollees at Harvard are women, almost double the national average in regular engineering programs.”

I’m sorry to say that doesn’t sound like a rigorous engineering program. What about MIT ? The list of majors is reassuring, although I don’t know why anyone would major in Theater Arts at MIT.

My own personal favorite is Cal Tech. In 1956 I was accepted and even had my dorm room assigned but my father refused to provide any financial information so I was not able to get a scholarship and there were very few loans in those days. It’s one of two missed chances that I cannot forget. Cal Tech is serious science and engineering education. I’m sorry to have missed it.

There are many excellent state university engineering programs so the emphasis on “elite” universities is an example of provincialism on Will’s part. Stanford is considered elite these days and has excellent engineering programs. The University of Southern California, where I was a student, has good engineering programs, especially chemical and petroleum engineering. In the days I attended it was an inferior program but I had a scholarship so that’s where I went. I eventually switched to medicine and that was excellent for the times.

The biggest problem, and one hinted at by critics of the “Education Bubble,” is the plethora of weak majors, like the “studies” programs, which enroll students with weak scholarly skills and produce graduates with large student loans who cannot find a job. A recent book by Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, makes the point that too many students are attending college today under the fallacious impression that all are equally entitled to a college degree. His theory is that there is a minimum IQ below which a college education is probably a poor choice. There are many trades that can provide a good stable income and real pleasure in performing tasks that suit one’s ability. The role of vocational education has been minimized the past 40 years and there are few vocational high schools anymore that teach the basics of manual trades. This may suggest that the smaller number of male college students, compared to female, may in fact be the result of better choices on the part of the young men.

Women fill the classes in weak majors like Women’s Studies and Sociology. Many undergraduates in big universities are expected to digest a steady diet of leftist politics before they can get to the serious part of their major field of study.

There is something to be said for limiting student loans to certain fields of study. Engineering and hard science should be eligible for loans without restriction. For other majors, especially the weak ones, the loans should be limited to those with high grades. If a student wants to continue in a weak major, they or their parents should be responsible. Limits on student loans might even bring tuition inflation under control.

Tags:education, politics, science
Posted in economics, education, politics, science | 5 Comments »

Bacteria, Bowels and Health

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Most people do not understand that we live in a sea of bacteria. There are bacteria, and related organisms called Archea, at the bottom of the sea and probably deep into the earth. The vast majority of these bacteria do us no harm and, in fact, some are necessary for health and even life. For example, if a patient has been taking antibiotics for several weeks, their blood clotting may be seriously impaired. This is because vitamin K is manufactured in the gut by bacteria, which are killed off by antibiotics.

Antibiotics have another undesirable effect on bacteria in the gut. The bacteria which are sensitive to that antibiotic are killed off and this leaves room for more dangerous bacteria, which are resistant to the antibiotic, to take up residence. My professor of surgery had a theory, which I have not seen proven, that harmless bacteria are the best adapted for life in the gut. If they are killed off by antibiotics and replaced by pathogenic organisms, removal of the antibiotics will allow the harmless organisms to reestablish themselves, displacing the pathogenic strains. I saw evidence of this in his and my own patients.

He kept a pure culture of Escherichia coli, a common colon bacterium, in the hospital lab. This strain was sensitive to all antibiotics so would be quickly killed off in their presence. Many of his elective surgery patients would come in for surgery with highly antibiotic resistant organisms in their colon. This was because they had been taking antibiotics, usually for diverticulitis. If these patients developed an infection postop, most common antibiotics would be useless. What he did was to stop all antibiotics and give the patient a dose of the lab E. coli in a malted milkshake. On admission, we would take a culture of the patient’s stool and have the lab check sensitivity to the common antibiotics. Usually, we found that the stool organisms were resistant. A couple of days after the dose of sensitive E coli had been given (I never asked the patients if they knew what was in the milkshake), the stool culture was checked again. In almost all cases, we found that the resistant organisms had been replaced by sensitive ones.

The residents at the County Hospital used a variant of this method on elective colon surgery patients. Since the lab was not about to keep a culture of sensitive organisms for us, we used an alternate source for them. Patients coming in for simple surgeries, like hernia repairs, who had not been on antibiotics and who had not been around hospitals, had a stool sample taken. That stool specimen was mixed with a malted milkshake and given to the colon surgery patients. Needless to say, they were not told the contents of the milkshake. We were less able to test the effect because the labs were very uncooperative with any of these exotic concepts. Still, I think it worked although we now know that the bowel flora is actually not what we thought it was in the 1960s. The anerobic organisms, like Clostridia, were not well understood and Bacteroides had not been discovered. It is now known that 90% of colon organisms are anerobic, meaning they cannot survive in an oxygen containing atmosphere. Many species have not been discovered because they cannot be cultured. They also produce nutrients, like fatty acids, that are essential for the health of the colon mucosa. There is even a disease called “diversion colitis” that is due to diversion of the fecal stream, by a colostomy usually, from the lower colon.

Why am I bringing up these old war stories ? There is a lot of interest right now in how colon bacteria affect normal health. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is much in the health news. There is a theory that it is caused by bacteria in the bowel that produce too much gas and cause other irritating conditions.

Researchers have built a strong case that bacteria may be the actual culprit. Mark Pimentel, M.D., a colleague of mine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who heads the GI Motility Program, has spent the last decade studying IBS, specifically the role bacteria may play in causing the condition. He and his colleagues unveiled the results of a large clinical study during Digestive Disease Week earlier this year in New Orleans. This study showed an antibiotic is effective in providing long term relief of IBS symptoms – excellent news for a large number of IBS sufferers.

If an antibiotic is helpful, what about other bacteria that may not cause the irritation ? WE hear a lot the past few years about “probiotics” on the radio. What are they ?

Our bodies are a complicated ecosystem full of flora. In fact, the bacteria outnumber our own cells by 10 times. There are around 10 trillion cells that make up the human body, and we have around 100 trillion bacteria cells in our digestive tracts.

As more people become increasingly aware of the importance of this “good bacteria,” hundreds of products in recent years have attempted to catch our eye by promising to help our troubled stomachs. Probiotics, defined as “live microorganisms which, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host,” have become a big business. During a casual flip through the television channels, I frequently encounter commercials filled with attractive women gushing that their digestion has never been more regular thanks to certain yogurts or other products.

There may be something to some of those claims.

Probiotics include both yeastlike members of the saccharomyces group and teria, which usually come from two groups: Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium. Probiotics are sold as capsules, tablets and powders, as well as in a growing number of foods. Among them, yogurt, yogurt drinks, kefir, miso, tempeh, as well as some juices and soy beverages. Sometimes the bacteria were present originally, and sometimes they are added during the preparation of the foods.

I have for many years prescribed yogurt and lactobacillus containing milk, available in the supermarket, for my patients recovering from conditions in which they took antibiotics.

Despite its narrow range of participants, the study confirmed that probiotic yogurt aided many of those involved. “We have shown that simply giving a probiotic drink to elderly patients who are prescribed antibiotics reduces their risk of getting diarrhea,” says Mary Hickson, a research dietician at Imperial College in London and the lead author of the study.

Gastrointestinal illness is a common side effect in an antibiotic’s battle against bacterial infection. Antibiotics don’t just go after the bad guys — they also kill some of the beneficial or neutral place-holding flora in our digestive tracts. This collateral damage allows deleterious organisms to establish themselves, often inflicting abdominal distress and discomfort as a result. Yogurt, like other “probiotic” foods, helps to promotes the growth of favorable bacteria in our digestive tracts. These microorganisms assist us in absorbing nutrients from our food and also occupy valuable real estate so that pathogens cannot proliferate and make us sick.

It’s nice to see the theory catch up with practices that I and others have been using for 40 years. Those patients who got the fecal milkshakes never knew how advanced the therapy they were getting really was.

Tags:health care, medicine, science
Posted in medicine, science | 9 Comments »

W-w-weather Is Not C-c-climate

Saturday, December 18th, 2010

By Bradley J. Fikes

It’s the standard disclaimer of believers in anthropogenic global warming whenever there’s a period of unusual cold: you can’t discern climate from singular weather events. And it’s true, although some AGW believers sing a different tune when the weather is unusually warm. In those cases, we’re told, the warm weather is a foretaste of what we can expect from global warming.

This increasingly (in)famous article in the UK Independent predicting milder winters is an example of the double standard. Dated March 20, 2000, the article stated:

“Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

“The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.”

However, 10 years after the article, Britain is enduring what may be a record-setting period of cold. From the Dec. 18, 2010 UK Daily Mail: (emphasis mine)

“Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned – grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.

“And tonight the nation was braced for another 10in of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures – with no let-up in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.

“The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond and as temperatures plummeted to -10c (14f) the Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910.”

And in the UK Independent itself, we read:

Millions of Britons faced travel misery today with planes grounded, rail services cancelled and roads rendered impassable on what is traditionally the busiest weekend before Christmas.

Plunging temperatures and heavy snow saw large swathes of the country grind to a standstill, as London’s Gatwick Airport closed its runway and British Airways cancelled flights at Heathrow.

This is the third year of unexpectedly cold winters in Britain. In January, 2009, AGW uber-believer George Monbiot wrote a weather-is-not-climate column in the UK Guardian:

“The thought that I might never skate outdoors again feels like a bereavement. I pray for another cold snap, even though I know it will bring all the nincompoops in Britain out of their holes, yapping about a new ice age.”

In January, 2010, Monbiot recycled the same column:

Yes, it is colder than usual in some parts of the northern hemisphere, and warmer than usual in others. Alaska and northern Canada are 5-10C warmer than the average for this time of year, so are North Africa and the Mediterranean. The cold and the warmth could be related: the contrasting temperatures appear to be connected to blocks of high pressure preventing air flow between the land and the sea.

But in 2005, Monbiot likened the weather to climate. Of course, that was during a relatively warm British winter. From Monbiot’s Dept. of Double Standards:

“It is now mid-February, and already I have sown eleven species of vegetable. I know, though the seed packets tell me otherwise, that they will flourish. Everything in this country – daffodils, primroses, almond trees, bumblebees, nesting birds – is a month ahead of schedule. And it feels wonderful. Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are – unless the Gulf Stream stops – unlikely to recur.”

Well, the Gulf Stream has not stopped, and Britain is freezing. So what happened to the confident prediction of AGW believers in 2000 that “snow is starting to disappear” from Britain?

Perhaps Monbiot will tackle that in his third “weather-is-not-climate” column. Thanks to Britain’s icy weather, it should be due any day now. A dose of humility about the difficulty of predicting climate wouldn’t hurt his credibility.

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DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.

Posted in media, politics, science | 3 Comments »

How To Sell Global Warming To Those Bitter Clingers In Flyover Country

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

(Cross-posted from SD Rostra).

By Bradley J. Fikes

From the New York Times, via Climate Depot:

“Don’t mention global warming,” warned Nancy Jackson, chairwoman of the Climate and Energy Project, a small nonprofit group that aims to get people to rein in the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. “And don’t mention Al Gore. People out here just hate him.”

Focus instead on the quaint religious beliefs and nationalistic values of the natives, the article states:
If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

And above all, don’t mention the C-word or the G-word, says the New York Times, dripping with condescension for the ignorant indigenous residents.
Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer,” a poll conducted in the fall of 2009 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed — far fewer than in other regions of the country.
The Jacksons already knew firsthand that such skepticism was not just broad, but also deep. Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped some Kansans define themselves.
Yes, to the all-knowing East Coast elites at the New York Times, and those transplants in the unlettered wilderness of the Midwest, differences of opinions on these issues or “affirmations of religious faith” can’t be the result of informed views, just a “cultural marker” to help those Kansas morons deal with the world.

Nevertheless, Ms. Jackson felt so strongly that this opposition could be overcome that she left a job as development director at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to start the Climate and Energy Project with a one-time grant from the Land Institute. (The project is now independent.)

It’s a good thing for Ms. Jackson that those ignorant Bible-thumping Kansas rednecks don’t know how to read, or they’d be very angry.

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(DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times).

Posted in energy, media, politics, science | 2 Comments »

Getting into medical school.

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

This has been moved to a page.

Posted in education, personal, science | 2 Comments »

A Nexus Between Medical Journals and Government.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

The Wall Street Journal has one more article on the effect of Obamacare on doctors. A couple of interesting statements bring up some statements on an excellent medical blog I read.

First the WSJ points about Obamacare.

The act will reinforce the worst features of existing third-party payment arrangements in both the private and public sectors — arrangements that already compromise the professional independence and integrity of the medical profession.

Doctors will find themselves subject to more, not less, government regulation and oversight. Moreover, they will become increasingly dependent on unreliable government reimbursement for medical services. Medicare and Medicaid payment, including irrational government payment updates, are preserved (though shaved) and expanded to larger portions of the population.

The Act creates even more bureaucracies with authority over the kinds of health benefits, medical treatments and procedures that Americans get through public and private health insurance. The new law provides no serious relief for tort liability. Not surprisingly, various surveys reveal deep dissatisfaction and demoralization among medical professionals.

I’ve been posting about this for a couple of years and it is no surprise.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

On top of existing payment rules, regulations and guidelines, the new law creates numerous new federal agencies, boards and commissions. There are three that have direct relevance to physicians and the practice of medicine, and the nature and scope of the regulatory regime will be decisive.

Under section 6301, the new law creates a “non-profit” Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. It will be financed through a Patient Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund, with initial funding starting at $10 million this year, and reaching $150 million annually in Fiscal Year 2013, with additional revenues from insurance fees.

Don’t you think the “Patient Centered” touch is a nice one ?

In effect, the Institute will be examining clinical effectiveness of medical treatments, procedures, drugs and medical devices. Much will depend upon how the findings and recommendations are implemented, and whether the recommendations are accompanied by financial incentives or penalties or regulatory requirements.

Under section 3403, there will be an Independent Payment Advisory Board, with 15 members appointed by the president. The goal of the board is to reduce the per capita growth rate in Medicare spending, and make recommendations for slowing growth in non-federal health programs. It’s hard to imagine any other outcome other than continued payment cuts.

Now, we turn to the blog I mentioned. The author, a cardiologist mostly retired, discusses a recent randomized clinical trial. The way we decide on “clinical effectiveness” in an ideal world is randomized trials. They are the Gold Standard. So how was a recent randomized trial treated in a major medical journal? From the blog.

This week, the Archives of Internal Medicine published four (four!) articles assaulting the legitimacy and the importance of the JUPITER trial, a landmark clinical study published in 2008, which showed that certain apparently healthy patients with normal cholesterol levels had markedly improved cardiovascular outcomes when taking a statin drug.

Superficially, at least, the JUPITER study appears to have been pretty straightforward. Nearly 18,000 men and women from 26 countries who had “normal” cholesterol levels but elevated C-reactive protein (CRP) levels were randomized to receive either the statin drug Crestor, or a placebo. CRP is a non-specific marker of inflammation, and an increased CRP blood level is thought to represent inflammation within the blood vessels, and is a known risk factor for heart attack and stroke. The study was stopped after a little less than two years, when the study’s independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) determined that it would be unethical to continue. For, at that point, individuals taking the statin had a 20% reduction in overall mortality, a dramatic reduction in heart attacks, a 50% reduction in stroke, and a 40% reduction in venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. All these findings were highly statistically significant.

This is a dazzling result for a randomized trial. Usually, you are looking at small changes and trying to calculate the “p value” to see if it is significant. Why would a journal publish attacks on such a dramatic study ?

If medicine were practiced the way it ought to be – where the doctor takes the available evidence, as imperfect as it always is, and applies it to each of her individual patients – then the incompleteness of answers from the JUPITER trial would present no special problems. After all, doctors never have all the answers when they help patients make decisions. So, in this case the doctor would discuss the pros and cons of statin therapy – the risks, the potential benefits, and all the quite important unknowns – and place the decision in the perspective of what might be gained if the patient instead took pains to control their weight, exercise, diet, smoking, etc. At the end of the day, some patients would insist on avoiding drug therapy at all costs; others would insist on Crestor and nothing else; yet others would choose to try a much cheaper generic statin; and some would even opt (believe it or not) for a trial of lifestyle changes before deciding on statin therapy.

This is the way we all want to practice. “Best Practice” they call it.

But in recent years, and especially now, as we bravely embark on our new healthcare system, this is not how doctors will practice medicine. Instead, they will practice medicine by guidelines. These guidelines (which, in modern medical parlance, is a euphemism for “directives”) are to be handed down from panels of experts, identified and assembled by members of the executive branch of the federal government.

And this makes the stakes very high when it comes to a clinical trial like JUPITER. For guidelines do not permit a range of actions tailored to fit individual patients (consistent with the uncertainties inherent in the results of any clinical trial). Instead, guidelines will seek to take one of two possible positions. That is, under a paradigm of medicine-by-guidelines, the results of clinical trials generally cannot be permitted to remain imperfect or nuanced or subject to individual application, but must be resolved by a central panel of government-issue experts into a binary system – yes (do it) or no (don’t do it). In the case of JUPITER, the guidelines must decide whether or not to recommend Crestor to patients like the ones enrolled in the study, at a potential cost of several billion dollars a year. It should be obvious that the answer which would be more pleasant to the ends of the central authority, and by a large margin, would be: No, don’t adopt the JUPITER results into clinical practice.

Well, we shouldn’t worry because all doctors, and especially well known academics are ethical. Right ?

Right ?

Now comes the interesting part and I think he is absolutely correct.

This, DrRich submits for your consideration, is likely what instigated the almost violently anti-JUPITER issue of the Archives this week. DrRich theorizes that what we’ve got here is a bunch of wannabe federally-sanctioned experts, auditioning for positions on the expert panels. What better way to get the Fed’s attention than to let them know that you are of the appropriate frame of mind to assiduously seek out scientific-sounding arguments to discount the straightforward and compelling, but fiscally unfortunate, results of a well-known clinical trial?

Of the four papers appearing in this week’s Archives, three are more-or-less legitimate academic articles that make reasonable points, but do no harm to the main result of JUPITER. The fourth is a straightforward polemic, which has no place in a peer-reviewed medical journal, and whose very presence, DrRich believes, very strongly suggests that the editors of the Archives themselves must be auditioning for the Fed’s expert panel.

Most doctors resent guidelines unless they are obviously data driven. Most of that data comes from randomized trials.

What we are seeing her is the erosion of the ethics of those who publish and conduct such studies and who use them to establish guidelines. There is another type of guideline, call “consensus guidelines” in which a committee of “experts” debates the best practice. These are the guidelines most doctors distrust. Now we see the corruption of even the randomized trial as a source of data driven guidelines.

Posted in corruption, economics, health reform, medicine, science | 9 Comments »

Working with tools.

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

UPDATE: It now appears that a plumber in Kansas has provided a major design improvement to the BP oil well cap. He designed a cap using a flange arrangement similar to that used in high pressure hotel sewage lines. Once again, American ingenuity to the rescue as the tool user saves all the PhDs from their mishap.

I have previously posted my concern about the low status of manual arts in the educational and vocational fields in this country. This also applies to science but to a lesser degree. That previous post was obviously prior to the encounter between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber.

One major point is the fact that Joe is making $250,000 a year at that point. How many law school graduates made that much in 2008?

Even in the field of innovation, it does not require a PhD to innovate in design or manufacturing. The basic problem, to me, seems to be the lack of manual skills with tools. People who make things, or can fix things, are the bedrock of a society that needs to design and manufacture quality objects. There is even a connection to the ability to do science. I wonder how many engineers cannot take apart and reassemble the things they design or work on. The same applies to surgery. Manual dexterity should be a basic requirement for the surgeon.

Today, there are a lot of unemployed people with useless degrees who would be better off learning plumbing or auto repair. In World War II, we benefited from the technical skills of the American soldiers who had learned to work with tools and many of whom could fix cars. The solution to the hedgerows of Normandy was an American army sergeant who devised a hedgerow cutter for the front of the Sherman tank. His name was Curtis G Culin and he was one of the heroes of World War II.

Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of the United States, in a January 10, 1961, speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers:
“ There was a little sergeant. His name was Culin, and he had an idea. And his idea was that we could fasten knives, great big steel knives in front of these tanks, and as they came along they would cut off these banks right at ground level – they would go through on the level keel – would carry with themselves a little bit of camouflage for a while. And this idea was brought to the captain, to the major, to the colonel, and it got high enough that somebody did something about it — and that was General Bradley — and he did it very quickly. Because this seemed like a crazy idea, they did not even go to the engineers very fast, because they were afraid of the technical advice, and then someone did have a big questions, “Where are you going to find the steel for all this thing?” Well now, happily the Germans tried to keep us from going on the beaches with great steel “chevaux de fries” – big crosses, there were all big bars of steel down on the beach where the Germans left it. And he got it – got these things sharpened up – and it worked fine. The biggest and happiest group I suppose in all the Allied Armies that night were those that knew that this thing worked. And it worked beautifully.

One of the reasons I like Neville Shute’s novels is because he has that theme in several of them. One, titled “Round the Bend” has as its theme the development of a new religion among men who work on airplanes. It is set in Asia and concerns the religions of Asia such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The chief character is an airplane mechanic who teaches other mechanics that to do a careful, flawless job in working on an airplane is the same as praying. His interpretation of Islam (The novel was written in 1951) becomes extremely popular in the Persian Gulf region as the imams see this as a new view of religion that attracts the young men who have become interested in mechanics and science and have drifted away from traditional life. His new creed is equally popular with Buddhists and Hundus, all of them aircraft mechanics and pilots. The resulting increase in quality of the work is appreciated by the airlines and he becomes a cult figure.

Like many of Shute’s novels, the engineer, even without a degree, is the hero. I wish we had more of this. Shute knew what he was writing about as he was a successful aeronautical engineer who had owned his own company. I titled my other post, The Manual LIfe. I wish it was more appreciated.

Tags:education, science
Posted in education, science, technology | 3 Comments »

Enough is enough

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Tipper Gore seems to have had enough of fat Al. What will be interesting is the property settlement. That’s where we will find out how much global warming paid off.

‘I can’t wait to see.

Tags:Al Gore
Posted in corruption, politics, science | Comments Closed

Herman Wouk

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I did not know that Herman Wouk was still alive, I’m ashamed to say. He’s 94. I’ve read many of his novels, Winds of War and War and Remembrance many times. One of my medical students was the daughter of the producer who put them on TV as miniseries.

Today, I found this and it is priceless. In addition to Wouk’s novels, Richard Feynman was to me the pinnacle of intellect in my lifetime. I can’t complain, but one sadness is that I never met him or listened to a lecture of his. I was accepted to Cal Tech in 1956; a faculty member traveled to Chicago to interview me, but I didn’t have the money and my big scholarship didn’t come through. Anyway, I would have been an undergrad before he got there. Here is Wouk’s story:

More years ago than I care to reckon up, I met Feynman. I was then out to write a sort of War and Peace of War World II, and early on in the moonstruck enterprise I realised that if I were at all serious about it, I had to learn something right away about the atomic bomb. Tolstoy could not consult Kutuzov, the general who drove Napoleon out of Russia, because the canny old one-eyed field marshal was long since dead; but when I started to work on my unlikely notion nearly all the men who had created the bomb were alive, and several of them were at the California Institute of Technology, including Feynman. President Truman, who had been an artilleryman in World War I, said of the bomb, “It was a bigger piece of artillery, so I used it,” a striking remark which shows up in my War and Remembrance but surely something less than the whole story. So I went to Caltech to talk to those who knew the whole story.

This may seem monstrously pushy, and no doubt it was. Like many novelists I have spun my books out of my experiences when I could, but in attempting work far outside my own relatively jog-trot existence I have had to pick other men’s brains. My World War II service, three years on destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, gave me the substance of The Caine Mutiny, but taught me nothing at all about the world storm that swept me from Manhattan to the south Pacific like a driven leaf. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima my ship was a bobbing speck on picket duty in the rough waters off Okinawa, and we had just survived a kamikaze attack unscathed; so I joined heartily in the merriment aboard ship, very glad that I had survived the war and would soon go back to my free civilian life and marry my sweetheart. As to the larger issues of dropping a whacking new bomb made of uranium on a Japanese city, I was innocent and indifferent. The radio said that our scientists had “harnessed the power of the sun”, and that was quite enough for me and for all of us aboard that old four-piper, halfway around the world from home.

The Caltech scientists received me cordially, and talked freely about their adventures in working on the bomb. I remember one physicist telling me, for instance, how he drove to the Trinity test site in New Mexico with the dread plutonium core in the back seat of his car. But to a man, one after another, they warned me so earnestly not to try to see Richard Feynman that I began to think of him as a human plutonium core. However, I had nothing to lose so I did try, and somehow I found myself in his office, talking to a lean guy in white shirtsleeves, with long hair and a sharply humorous countenance calling to mind a bust Voltaire. It didn’t go well at first.

“You know,” he said, as I groped to explain my purpose, “while you’re talking, you’re not learning anything.” So I blurted out baldly, any old way, my vision of a fiction work throwing a rope around the whole global war. As I spoke, an enigmatic look came over that strong face, something like remote tolerant amusement. “Well, that’s the sort of thing genius reaches out for,” he said, and he took over the conversation.

In swift strokes Feynman brought the entire Manhattan project to life, the excitement and the perils alike, mentioning that once in a laboratory corridor he passed uranium materials stacked so carelessly that a chain reaction was within a whisker of going off. His main point was that the whole enterprise was gigantically messy, and that the atomic bomb was by no means at a frontier of science. He put it so: “It wasn’t a lion hunt, it was a rabbit shoot.” There was no Nobel prize, that is to say, in the concept or the calculations; it was just a challenge, if a huge one, to audacious innovative technology and brute industrial effort.

This formidable fellow walked out of the building with me, and said as we were parting: “Do you know calculus?” I admitted that I didn’t. “You had better learn it,” he said. “It’s the language God talks.”

Wouk has an excellent section on the Manhattan Project in both books.

I should add that I have many books by and about Feynman and a series of his recorded lectures. A nurse friend of mine took care of Feynmen and loved him as he lay dying, still able to joke. What a loss! He was only 69 years old. The year before he died, he figured out why the shuttle blew up. Nobody else had an idea of why it happened. Fortunately, he was on the commission and figured it out by himself.

Posted in History, science | 1 Comment »

Global Warming Research Must Become More Transparent, UK Report Says

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Crossposted

By Bradley J. Fikes

Thanks to Watts Up With That?, which provided the UK parliamentary report on the Climategate global warming scandal in PDF.

Inevitably, the report will be spun according to whatever political views one holds. Those who back AGW will probably say it vindicates Phil Jones and the other University of East Anglia’ Climatic Research Unit scientists, because it finds no evidence that the science is false. Global warming skeptics will say the report provides evidence that the scientists’ practices were inadequate and need to be improved.

Of course, these interpretations can both be true. It’s like the dueling claims that global temperatures in the last decade are the highest recorded, and that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995, or that there’s still a question about whether the Medieval Warm Period some thousand years ago could have been warmer than the present.

It all depends on which facts you emphasize.

Doublethink

However, the report is rather ambiguous on the evidence. in fact, it smacks of doublespeak and doublethink:

From Page 50, a troublesome paragraph:
“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.”

So, the report says:
“We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”.

That seems clear enough. But in the very next sentence the troublesome paragraph states:
“It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.”

So the report authors say there’s no reason to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming, but they didn’t seek evidence on CRU’s science. And anyway, examining the consensus view is the job of the Scientific Appraisal Panel.

With such clarity in writing, you can see why they’re in government.

Associated Press Saves The Day

An Associated Press article by Raphael G. Satter ignores the contradiction in favor of a pro-AGW interpretation. That’s much easier for readers than pointing out the report’s flaws.

Of course, as a professional reporter for the AP, Satter is beyond bias. He’s just telling it like he sees it — the facts just always seem to come out in favor of global warming activism, which has nothing to do whatsoever with any personal agenda. Even in the unlikely event that the vast majority of journalists were well to the left of the American public, you’d never detect a hint of it in their objective reporting.

Just to show how totally fair Satter and AP are in covering global warming, here’s part of an earlier Satter “news” article on a petition blitz organized by the UK’s Met office to drum up political support for AGW activism.

A typically unbiased AP story on global warming

Click the photo for more unbiased AP global warming reporting.Hiding evidence

Just to recap, here’s the troublesome paragraph in the report, with the confusing stuff AP has helpfully omitted in boldface:

“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.“

Highlighted — the confusing stuff AP doesn’t think you should know.

And here’s Satter’s deft editing of that troublesome paragraph:

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

A masterful job of editing out inconvenient truth

Isn’t it easier to understand when the narrative is predigested?

The Total Exoneration of Phil Jones And CRU*
*If you don’t pay attention to those emails about hiding and destroying data, which is totally acceptable practice among climate scientists.

Now let’s look at the second paragraph of Satter’s article, and then look again at the report.
Satter writes:

“The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.”

On pages 26-28, the report details allegations that the CRU violated the Freedom of Information Act, quoting from emails by Phil Jones and others.

This excerpt from a Phil Jones email to Michael Mann is on Page 26:
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,[…]Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of
Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !. […]

The report then discusses these and other examples of emails that ask for research data to be hidden from skeptics.
On page 32, the report states:

It seems to us that both sides have a point. There is prima facie evidence that CRU has breached the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It would, however, be premature, without a thorough investigation affording each party the opportunity to make representations, to conclude that UEA was in breach of the Act. In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six- month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions. Much of the reputation of CRU hangs on the issue. We conclude that the matter needs to be resolved conclusively— either by the Independent Climate Change Email Review or by the Information Commissioner.

In other words, just because a bunch of scientists wrote emails to each other discussing the hiding or destruction of data to keep it from skeptics doesn’t necessarily means FOIA was breached. Or maybe it does. Let’s not be hasty about this. We’ll kick the can down the road and let someone else handle it.

Satter disposes of this complexity nicely.

Phil Willis, the committee’s chairman, said of the e-mails that “there’s no denying that some of them were pretty appalling.” But the committee found no evidence of anything beyond “a blunt refusal to share data,” adding that the idea that Jones was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakened the case for global warming was clearly wrong.

So according to Satter, this email from Jones to Michael Mann isn’t evidence of a conspiracy to hide evidence that would weaken the case for global warming:

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.

Obviously this email is totally innocent of unethical intent. It’s customary for climate scientists to be “worried” about FOIA requests and “hide behind” excuses not to honor them. Why should climate scientists share data with skeptics? They’re just trying to find something wrong with it! Real scientists should only share data with trusted colleagues, and keep the “dirty laundry” away from skeptics.

But the report insists on once again injecting doubt into what should be a total exoneration of these totally ethical scientists who would never, ever, practice deception or break the law.

In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six- month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions. Much of the reputation of CRU hangs on the issue. We conclude that the matter needs to be resolved conclusively— either by the Independent Climate Change Email Review or by the Information Commissioner.

All sarcasm aside, I’ll say one thing in favor of Satter and the Associated Press: The story included a link to the report, so people could read it for themselves.

AP’s link to the UK parliament’s report

Unfortunately, this is the message I got when clicking the link: http://bit.ly/c4VfsY

The AP’s link to the report

Surprisingly, those crazy climate denialist at Watts Up With That? managed to get a copy and even correctly posted it on their server.

Oh, that’s just the blogosphere. Everyone knows the news is defined by what professional journalistic outlets like AP cover, because they have an unimpeachable record of accuracy.

A consensus about what?

And what is this scientific “consensus” of which they speak? In the report, the consensus quoted on page 46 states that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”

That definition is most interesting for what it doesn’t mention. No mention of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases. It doesn’t even say how much warming is taking place, or whether it’s dangerous.

As a global warming skeptic, I find little objectionable in that bare-bones definition of “consensus.”

There is indeed strong evidence of human influence on climate, such as in the Himalayan glaciers. Research has found the glacial melting is almost entirely (90 percent) caused by soot and other aerosol particulates. Unfortunately for the alarmists, greenhouse gases are not aerosols.

The “global” aspect of this “consensus” definition is about the only thing I would take exception to. I don’t think this is conclusively proven. And someone tell the committee that prepared the report that “global warming” is out of fashion. The politically correct description is “climate change,” because it allows for both unusually hot and cold changes to be attributed to human influence.

But let’s say there is some global human warming influence. It’s quite plausible that human-produced aerosols, changes in land use or greenhouse gas emissions have some warming effect on global temperatures. But is the influence overwhelming, somewhat important, or minor in comparison with natural climate fluctuations? And what is the relative importance of these human-created warming influences? The quoted “consensus” definition doesn’t say.

What global warming skeptics like myself really object to is the hysterical we-stand-to-get-fried apocalyptic demonization of CO2 and the Draconian measures proposed to combat this unproven menace. But don’t expect most of the mainstream media reporters, who have swallowed the global warming Kool-Aid, to note the difference.

Such is the slippery, Janus-faced use of language about “consensus” by global warming alarmists.

Even Phil Jones now admits that a lot of warming isn’t due to CO2 after all, according to the UK Guardian.

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.

What’s not in the report
For a supposedly exhaustive investigation into whether CRU scientists unethically tried to suppress skeptical research, the report leaves a lot out.
Here’s one Climategate email from a scientist, Keith Briffa, seeking help about reviewing a skeptical paper. You can see that Briffa meticulously follows the norms of peer review as practiced in climate science.

From: Keith Briffa
To: Edward Cook
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 13:42:54 2003

I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting – to support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith

And returning the scientific courtesy ….
(email portion from Briffa omitted)
Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper. Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims. If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. . .

Isn’t the impartiality of climate science peer review a beautiful thing to behold?

Now, on to the news coverage:

Bloomberg says:
U.K. Climate Science ‘Damaged’ by Leaked E-Mails, Lawmakers Say

Canada’s National Post says
‘Climategate’ scientists didn’t manipulate data: lawmakers

The UK Independent says:
Climate change scandal: MPs exonerate professor

The UK Daily Mail says
Climategate university condemned for ‘unacceptable culture of secrecy’

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says
House of Commons: No “Climategate”

Eureferendum says
It was never going to be any different

Climate Progress says
House of Commons exonerates Phil Jones

Tags:global warming
Posted in media, science, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »