TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 3 of n

October 21, 2010 – 12:30 am

This post continues my review on TAMLondon 2010. I will go into details of the audience and the talks, and memorable quotes. I keep the individual talks for the last post, due tomorrow.

The audience: with an audience reaching one thousand delegates (more than twice the first edition), question time was in some cases limited, but the questions intriguing. Approximately half of the delegates were Brits, the other half from the rest of Europe. A thumb-statistics survey from chitchat and nametag-gazing would indicate strong presence of Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Norway in particular. Some delegates were also from Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland. Strongly underrepresented Italy, with only a very cheerful and pleasant lady I met in the last minutes of the meeting, and of course myself. Around 60 % of the audience was male. The average age was around 30, ranging from 15 to over 60. Concerning the profession, I heard about tourist operators, managers, box manufacturers, computer programmers, students and academics, but my sample is very limited in size.

The speakers and the talks: a very broad set of presentation styles was available. Most speakers preferred a freestyle speech with a minimal number of slides. I reckon a maximum of four or five slides in talks using them. The speakers were in any case incredibly good in keeping the audience interested in every detail, even when no supporting slides were present.

Interviews were definitely over-represented. In comparison, I don’t recall any interview from last year’s TAM. As I previously said, I think this introduced some occasional yawn, but I don’t want to give the impression they were boring. It’s a matter of rhythm.

Memorable quotes

  • “The Internet is creating people who wouldn’t be able to create the Internet” – Graham Linehan
  • “Be the best dick you can be!” – P. Z. Myers
  • “Common Sense. So rare it’s a super power.” – Unknown
  • “Scientists don’t have the whole truth, but a path to the truth” – P. Z. Myers
  • “we need mythology and symbology, as long as we don’t confuse it with reality” – Alan Moore
  • “Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you’re honest to strangers” – Graham Linehan
  • “If more of our political masters understood statistics, the world would be a better place.” – Richard Dawkins
  • “The nerds shall inherit the earth” – Ben Goldacre
  • “Tough mind and tender heart is the right recipe” – D. J. Grothe
  • “Science is humility before the facts” – Stephen Fry
  • “Yesterday’s pirates are today’s admirals” – Cory Doctorow
By Stefano Borini | Posted in Meetings, Opinion | Comments Off

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 2 of n

October 20, 2010 – 1:19 am

TAM London 2010 was highly different from the first European edition in 2009. If I had to describe the 2009 edition in just three words, these would be: showmen/women, music, science. For this year edition, the three words would be very different: interviews, feelings, activism.

First, interviews. For the sake of argument, I will consider interviews board of discussion as well. A concrete number of guests speakers were interviewed, such as Randi (by Ince), Stephen Fry (by Tim Minchin, more on this later), a panel discussion about skepticism initiatives, the Tim Minchin night with the interview at the team for the “Storm movie”, and the interview of Melinda Gebbie by Rebecca Watson. My personal opinion is that interviews should be kept to a minimum at an event such as TAM, as I feel they tend to become boring when too long. Twitter messages I spotted during interviews tend to validate that I’m not the only one holding this opinion. Finally, Tim Minchin interviewing Stephen Fry was unfortunately characterized by Tim’s strong lack of experience.

Second, feelings. This TAM was consistently characterized by depth: emotional, philosophical, of thought. A broad set of topics was analyzed, with strong focus on skepticism, education, and scientific methodology. Insightful quotes were uttered and propagated through twitter. I personally interpret the overtone of wisdom-oriented topics, compared to the cheerful 2009 showmanship as a natural intellectual growth from a “young” to a “mature” TAM.

Third, activism. Both the speakers and the audience realized that if a line exists between being scientifically curious, inquisitive, looking for evidence to support claims, and being an activist for truth and correct scientific dissemination, this line is blurring.

It is blurring because, I believe, the point of skepticism is all about doing the right thing in front of daily quackery: getting people informed to prevent their exploitation. One would think that education is a good step to protect against exploitation. Unfortunately it’s not enough: quoting James Randi, “education doesn’t necessarily make you smart. It just makes you educated.” It is a moral duty to protect people from being scammed, exploited and controlled, because it’s the right thing to do. Some of the world’s problems are also due to credulity of false claims and exploitation of credulity.

Everybody is occasionally a skeptic: checking the tyres and the engine before buying a car is skepticism. It is a method of inquire that promotes rejection of quackery by verification of claims through supporting, testable evidence. It is a legal trial applied to notions. Activist skeptics apply the “check the tyres” approach to every important claim they encounter. This applies also, but not exclusively, to misrepresentation of research performed by news: there’s a lack of interest about the peer review mechanism in scientific journalism. Unfortunately, sensationalism trumps correct dissemination anytime, leading to wrong, awkward, counterproductive dissemination, generally focused on increasing fear, uncertainty and doubt in the general public. I already wrote about this on my previous post “The challenges of scientific communication”, on page 3.

Skepticism is in the nature of the curious, positive mind. Through skepticism, the scientific method, and evidence-based verification of claims is the only method that gives answers to the mechanisms of the world we live in, and in particular its many problems. With good and true knowledge on these problems, we have a chance to find good and true solutions. If we have wrong and false knowledge, we will only find wrong and false solutions.

In the next post, I will write about the audience, the speakers and the talks, commenting on some of them and highlighting their important points.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Meetings, Opinion | Comments Off

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 1 of n

October 18, 2010 – 12:08 am

I just arrived home from The Amazing Meeting 2010, and I would really like to report my warm comments on the event, but for practical reasons I am forced to delay a clearly articulate post. Those who followed @forthescience on twitter already had an idea of the event, although reporting with clarity a live situation is always difficult, at least for me. In the next days, I will start writing more details about the event; if the posts become excessively long, I will do multiple posts, separated by some days. I won’t do a unique, long post with multiple pages.

That said, stay tuned, but briefly said… how was the meeting for me ? On a scale from negative to positive, my overall feeling about the meeting is neutral with a hint of positive.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Meetings, Opinion | Comments Off

TAMLondon 2010

October 16, 2010 – 10:16 am

I am attending the Amazing Meeting in London. I am tweeting updates on @forthescience like last year.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Meetings | Comments Off

Shuffling around: SCM

October 5, 2010 – 10:37 am

I just relocated to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where I started my new employment as a scientific software engineer with Scientific Computing & Modelling. I am completely excited for the opportunity and I am guaranteed to have an incredible time with their impressive software.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Personal | Comments Off

The challenges of scientific communication

September 13, 2010 – 11:25 pm

I read with strong interest this post “How Hard Science Saves Lives” from Bente Lilja Bye at Science 2.0. I will make a very short summary for presentation purposes, but I encourage to read through her very interesting post.

The point being made, shortly stated, is the argument between hard-science and soft-science representatives on saving human lives through hard-science research. With hard-science is intended chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, and any other discipline requiring the application of the scientific method to rigorous, quantifiable information; On the other hand, soft-science are disciplines like sociology, political science, psychology, and more generally encompasses journalists, politicians, and the layperson. The controversy is that hard-science research doesn’t save lives, a position brilliantly refuted in the post with effective and concrete examples.

I had the same issues with soft-science scholars in the past; similar personal experiences, where scientific knowledge is not considered strictly as “culture”, or where the fact of not understanding math or chemistry was presented as an asset to be proud of, rather than a lack of knowledge to compensate as soon as possible with simple, plain curiosity. I also observe that many scientists and hard-science practitioners I know are also generally interested in philosophy, arts, sociology, psychology, behavior, literature, and they actively search for more information on these topics. On the other hand, soft-science representatives I know, seldom search for accessible scientific knowledge to complement their expertise.

Where does this issue comes from? What are the reasons behind the pure existence of the argument? What can be made to address the issue? I seldom use this blog for “opinion posts”, but I think the observation that such issue exists in the first place is a phenomenon that, as scientists, we should analyze by virtue of its intrinsic existence. The risk to neglect this analysis is lingering misunderstanding and falsity, and as scientists it is our duty to promote the truth.

I personally believe there are many factors to be considered for this analysis. It is a complex and long post, so I tried to make it manageable. I divided my post into different sections, one for each factor. In each section, I will

  1. try to analyze one specific factor I consider important
  2. analyze the root causes of the issue
  3. propose possible strategies for mitigation.

I will rely solely on my experience for this analysis, which can be in some cases not factual nor representative of a general behavior. You will feel a lot of weasel words, a lot of “citation needed” spots along the way. I am aware of this, and I basically risk to become what I criticize in lack of proper communication, thus condemning myself. I plead guilty and appeal to the  McKean’s law extended to concepts and the Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for extenuation causes. I also declare I am ready to change my statements in response to additional experiences complementing or refuting the points being made.

Next page >>

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
By Stefano Borini | Posted in Dissemination, Opinion | Comments Off

Fortran 90 pitfall: initialization of vars at declaration

September 5, 2010 – 2:27 pm

I am dusting my Fortran 90 skills. One big gotcha that always leaves me baffled is the following. Suppose you write the following program

program test
  implicit none

  call testsub()
  call testsub()
end program

subroutine testsub()
  implicit none
  integer :: var

  var = 0
  print *, var
  var = 5
  print *, var
end subroutine

If you expect the output to be

0
5
0
5

you are right. This is indeed the output you get.

Now consider the following slight different testsub routine

subroutine testsub()
  implicit none
  integer :: var = 0

  print *, var
  var = 5
  print *, var
end subroutine

See the difference ? I just coalesced the first assignment of var to the
declaration line. You wouldn’t expect a big difference right ? Sorry to bring
the news, but that’s a completely different story. The output you will obtain is

0
5
5
5

What happened? The fact arises from a very subtle point of the Fortran
standard: local vars with initialization at declaration are automatically SAVE,
so they preserve their content between subsequent calls (in C terms, they
are local static). In other words, this statement

integer :: var = 0

is totally equivalent to

integer, save :: var = 0

This is totally counter-intuitive and a huge pitfall if you don’t know it. What’s the rationale behind this practice ? I asked on StackOverflow, and user kemiisto referred me to this page where this behavior is explained in rather detail. The reason is due to historical bad practices.

Apparently, initialization during declaration was already possible in Fortran 77. Usage of this variable without redefinition was allowed behavior, commonly done when you initialize and assign a parameter, for example. On the other hand, redefinition within the routine body was a disallowed practice because, according to the standard, the variable technically became undefined upon reentry.

Before standardization of Fortran 90, the actual internal handling of initialization during declaration was performed with a lot of freedom by compilers, as there was nothing specifying for that in the standard. There were two possible strategies to perform it: static initialization (doing the assignment only once), and reinitialization at every new subroutine call (doing it every time). These two solutions are equivalent, if no reassignment is done inside the subroutine, i.e. the expected practice according to the standard. Compilers were free to choose which strategy to use, but in practice, most compilers used the “initialize once and consider it static” strategy, probably because it’s more efficient (you assign only once), so even if the variable was technically undefined if  reassignment occurred, in practice it behaved like a static variable.

While the Fortran 90 standard was defined, a lot of code was produced abusing this behavior. As time passed, forbidding it in the new release was not feasible, because it would have introduced a lot of trouble with existing code. This was probably one of those moment in history where programmers would have learned that when something is declared undefined in the standard, it’s your fault if you abuse it, and you eventually pay the consequences. The Fortran committee instead condoned and ratified this practice, and now it is part of the standard. Regardless of its status, please follow my advice and stay away from it.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Fortran | Comments Off

Fear the crowd. Digg 4 spurs users’ revolt.

August 30, 2010 – 5:30 pm

The community-powered news site Digg played an occasional role on the development of this blog. Some of the findings I posted here started, in some cases, as a spark from a Digg submission, further developed through my personal research. This is the reason why I am writing here about it. News on Digg were frequent and fresh: reloading the page after some minute was already enough to see new upcoming content, and the time span from release to fruition was short, much shorter than Slashdot (which I also follow with very strong interest since almost the very beginning). Last but not least, in addition to interesting scientific or technological news, Digg was also one of the best sites to waste time on when bored.

This all changed recently. Digg’s new version (Digg 4), introduced a radical change on both interface layout and use. Apart from the huge amount of errors the new site presented to the user (the now infamous Ox cart axle message), the main page content has become so stable that reloading and checking “what’s fresh on the web, now” is no longer possible.

The recent changes triggered a raging reaction from the community, and in a perfect and hilarious example of coordinated mob assault, submissions promoted by the community to the current “Top News” front page now contains only links toward the similar site Reddit. If you are the host for an army of users so large they can bring servers down, having them unsatisfied can promote some issue to be dealt with.

I certainly hope the old Digg style comes back, otherwise I will have to look for alternatives to stay fresh on the internet.

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Opinion, Websites | Comments Off

Eight molecules that changed the rules of the game: Bakelite

August 25, 2010 – 1:00 pm

Rule changed: it started the world of plastic we live in

Bakelite

Bakelite structure

When it comes to materials for making tools, housing, chariots, and dishes, humanity had only one choice for many thousands of years: use what nature provided. Clay, rocks, metals, resins, rubber, and wood were the most common materials directly available for harvesting. As primitive technology improved, materials with new and interesting properties were created, such as glass and concrete, but at that time there was little or no understanding of the “magic” behind the process, the new material’s properties, or how to improve them, except by trial and error. The discovery process improved considerably when the rules of physics and chemistry were rationalized: the gained understanding of existing natural materials made possible to design similar ones, either partially or completely synthetic, endowed with unusual interesting properties. One remarkable example of these man-made compounds is plastic: discovered at the end of the 19th century, plastic materials changed and still change the world. Read More »

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Chemistry | Tagged , , | Comments Off

New StackExchange proposal: Academia

August 6, 2010 – 10:39 am

I just created a new proposal at Area51: Academia. The aim of such Question/Answers site, when opened, is to provide assistance to academics of any level and discipline, with particular focus towards academic life, grants, papers and posters, conferences, career, management, research group directions, and academic services.

You can subscribe to the proposal by following this link and clicking “follow”. You will probably have to login using any OpenID provider (such as Google mail).

By Stefano Borini | Posted in Websites | Comments Off