4aug03 Are you irked by Auntie’s abject
inability to substantiate its summertime schedules with more than trite trivia
that leaves Today ticking over until its toadying resumes when the politicos
resume after their well-earned recuperation paid by poor old Percy Public’s
purse? Today’s Today exemplified the wanton waste with its ludicrously limp
lampoon of London loonies in sandals ~ Islington idling at its most irritating
and also paid by poor old Percy Public’s purse! Well a year ago I was irked enough
to waste my own working time on words that were never noticed of course but
they made me feel a bit better, though only a tad! Here they just in case
anyone with any influence might be interested enough to consolidate the cudgels
and campaign against the Beeb’s pathetically posturing portrayals, especially
its caricatures of scientific significance in promotion of public policy by
politicos and punditry by their fellow-travelling poseurs.
13aug02 Today’s today@bbc.co.uk > quality vs quantity >
principles vs perspectives > more?
> Essentially the same fence between
quality vs quantity in A-levels divides proponents of quantitative vs
qualitative content in degree courses, also broadly demarcates sympathisers for
technology vs ecology as well as advocates for artisan vs arty educational
emphasis. Whilst the spinners (of course) have been happily creating and
consolidating chattering careers from all this contrived contention over the
past decade or more, substantial numbers of traditional teachers have been
sacrificed on the altar of accessibility for all. The truth remains that tough
topics cannot be avoided in sourcing the scientific skills that convey
capabilities to conduct independent analyses driven by primary principles
rather than passive perspectives. Achieving this end rapidly, reliably and
routinely for resonantly receptive kids was surely the most striking strength
of our traditional approach to advanced / higher education until a decade or
two ago.
The undeniable obstacle to universal
acquisition of this crucial capability is simply ability ~ only the top echelon
in any generation is fortunate enough to experience the necessary environment
from cradle to campus. This situation will not be changed simply because
politicos assert it can be changed ~ it’s no coincidence that the Blairs endure
brickbats as price well paid assuring educational excellence for their own
kids. I don’t know for sure what the studio “experts” teach / taught but I bet
the advocate of access-for-all concentrated on concepts a deal simpler to
convey than those I taught (take a look via the net link below). A rapid
runaround his webbits suggests his emphasis nowadays may be not so much
teaching as tech transfer but this also apparently at the soft end of the
spectrum separating interfacing infrastructure and inventive implementation.
Unlike him, I confronted this challenge
at the sharp end for over a decade only to be rewarded with termination of my
academic career for executive effrontery at my presumption in striving to span
from academe to business. The other “expert” advocating access-on-ability sadly
seems to have ceased academic activity at his affiliated institution ~ anyway,
his absence from the academic sharp end is symptomatic of the spinners’ scary
success for their counter-correctness culling culture.
> PS As afterthought I offer the
following simple illustration of the power of even primitive principles over
passive perspectives. This week’s apocalyptic announcement of an Asian Brown
haze was a neatly timed release for media manipulation in the run-up to
Jo’burg’s sustainability summit. Apparently the outcome of many 100s of
scientist-years funded by the UN (total cost? ~ no doubt measured in $10Ms all
told), the bottom-line conclusion was notified as if it was a breakthrough
finding that would never have been achieved without all that sophisticated
international collaboration. However on first hearing about it as a radio news
item, it needed only a ten-minute thought experiment to confirm plausibility as
follows.
Assuming the haze enveloped the Pacific
Rim countries I took 10000 km as extension scale. Guessing it was coastally
engaged within the fetch of diurnal sea-breezes I took 1000km as the migration
scale and 1km for vertical confinement beneath the inversion layer.
Guestimating a billion population indicates an air volume of 10GL pp (per
person) and adopting popular knowledge of ppm mass concentration for air
quality concern takes you to 10kg particulates per person (density measure
1kg/L say), perhaps a bit high seeing as regulators nowadays worry about sub
ppm levels. As plausibility check consider a car consuming 1000kg pa fuel
(10000km, 10km/L, 1kg/L) dumps ppm volume levels via exhaust gas (1g/L say),
indicating 1kg particulate mass and so suggesting maybe a few kg pp pa from all
sources as European average.
To compare these figures (up to 10kg
Asian haze hold up and a few kg pa European average) we need also an indication
of residence time for the Asian stuff ~ a little fancier but still simply done
in terms of a dispersion coefficient associated with breezes to a few m/s under
an inversion height less than a few km, say a few 10s in units of m2/s. Okay
knowing that bit needed an elementary course of the sort I used to teach (or
easily sourced on the web), also to show that it in turn indicates the layer is
vertically well-mixed after residence of a month or so.
Two main implications follow from this
10 minute reflection ~ 1. Asian practices apparently generate particulates at
most a few 10s of times European rates ~ 2. Reduced generation would clear the
haze within a matter of months. Both (I think) agree with the main bits
produced from the multi $M UN investigation and judging from news reports I
don’t think the study delivered much more than these bits as essential
conclusions. Oh yes, a third implication is that globe-trotting apocalyptic
politicos will probably double their annual injection of atmospheric
particulates in flying Jo’burg return for the sustainability summit. Indeed,
junketers doing more than 10 or so such flights annually probably cause a
bigger burden than any impoverished Asian ~ indeed, maybe it takes much less
than 10 if you believe recent environmental pronouncements that high altitude
flights have far more significant (harmful?) impact on atmospheric (bio)
chemistry than ground level pollutants!
> NB (14aug) Did you spot the
deliberate mistake made in my anti-junketing point scoring above? My “third
implication” incorrectly assumed car and air fuel-distance rates are comparable
whereas I should have taken fuel-time rates, shown simply by another
application of primitive plausibility principles as follows. No point doing the
car sums because most people know 50kW is a reasonable guideline figure for
engine power ~ probably worth remarking that for a reference speed 25m/s
(100km/h say), this is equivalent to a drag force of 2kN corresponding to a
drag dimension 2.5m which is pretty close to geometrical dimension meaning drag
factor close to unity. In similar spirit for the air sums, then, adopt capacity
of 500 passengers at say 100kg standard plus 100kg fuel giving 100T weight (=
lift) and implying10T drag or so, about 200N pp and hence the same power per
person because reference speed is 10 times higher (1000km/h) and drag force is
10 times lower. Worth noting that 50kW pp times 500 passengers corresponds to
25MW, in the right ballpark for aero-engines rated to 50MW or so, cruising on
25% power ~ it’s close considering the crude closures.
So with comparable fuel-time rates and
presuming particulates going mainly with power, it’s not distance so much as
time that counts ~ meaning that junketers might feel they can justify maybe as
many as 10 but at least a few Jo’burg trips pa before feeling too guilty about
burdening the environment more than impoverished Asians! But don’t lose sight
of my main message here ~ that Plausibility Principles provide powerful
platforms for people to test for themselves the truths of policies driven by
politico-commercial incentives / imperatives ~ in contrast to so-called
Precautionary Principles which in reality are never more than Personal
Perspectives or ad hoc / amateur assertions masquerading as rational reasoning!
.
7aug02 Today’s today@bbc.co.uk > pesticide perils >
ethnic electorates > playground perils > more?
> Your top stories on pesticide
residues provided yet more free media mega-mileage for career advancement by
yet another ambitious but hitherto anonymous amateur from the ranks of FoE,
undoubtedly the most manipulative of all apocalyptically opportunistic
political pressure groups.
Why did John Humphries let the FoE nerd
off his hook by failing to ask the key question on the real reason for chemical
applications to crops? It is not attributable to the hidden agenda of some
politico-commercial conspiracy as she was pleased to imply by inference that
FoE was the only barrier between farming practices and public poisoning. No it
is simply to assure the provision of food at competitive retail prices ~ meaning
the only prices that are accessible to the vast majority of families on less
than the national average disposable income.
Money is spent on chemicals only because
there is net saving in reduced wastage and guaranteed quality, not because
farmers like having their hard-pressed capital tied up in expensive sprayers or
are keen seeing upwards 30% of their sale prices squandered on these
activities. Admittedly this point finally materialised in a last minute
interview with a man from the ministry’s advisory agency but the Beeb well
knows that listenership in the last half-hour counts for nothing against the
earlier top spots. >
> In striking contrast to his
softness with the FoEer, JH really hacked into the zealous politico who was on
to promote a policy imposing ethnically predetermined electoral representation.
Of course he was right to do so and all the more so for the politico’s
frightening insistence on her entitlement to see this gerrymandering imposed
despite it’s inevitable denial of due democracy for the majority ~ yet another
manifestation of the distortion driven by contemporary obsessions with focus
follies and correctness compliance. Full marks to JH here then ~ but zero marks
for having failed to dish out similarly strong stuff to the FoEer, indeed so
starkly different that I felt he failed to suppress his personal
predispositions.
> Distracted by a long phone call the
third one slipped from my mind so I checked the Beeb’s website but failed to
find anything to provide a prompt. However I was horrified by what I found
there relating to 1/3 above ~ namely << How much of the food we buy in
supermarkets contain some residues of posonous pesticides? DEFRA has relised a
new league table listing the worst offenders. >>. The typos are disappointing
of course especially from what was formerly an institutional paragon of
language polish but that is sadly an inevitable reflection of declining
standards everywhere.
What really jarred was the appalling
misrepresentation of this summary ~ the words could have been (were?) taken
verbatim from the mouth of the FoE nerd without suggesting so much as even a
hint of the more balanced opinion provided by the ministry man who pointed out
that residues were always and everywhere at least two magnitude orders
(hundredfold) smaller than sensible thresholds for concern. Applying FoE’s
scaremongering ad hoc amplification to other arenas would leave nothing deemed
safe enough for pursuit ~ travel for example would be as hazardous as frontline
soldiering in WW1. Pretty much nonsensical by any sensible standards!
> PS Just remembered what my 3rd item
grouch was ~ disappearance of kids’ playground socialising due to removal of
gear deemed unsafe by silly-billy busybodies. JH got this one right also with
his disdainful dismissal of the bureaucratic braindeads whose legislation
caused this collapse, even identified the key issue of net benefit (what if any
has been shown and if none then most probably negative) but failed to press
home the point and even tolerated the pandering pundit’s appeal to the
“precautionary principle” (the contemporary correctness catchall copout) to
pass without comment despite its misnomer: there is no such “principle” (not
even an unproven one) ~ it is merely a “perspective”.
> PS’. Refer to PS mine 22/7.
.
22jul02 Today’s today@bbc.co.uk > mindless models >
artisan vs academic > cultural collusion > campus coercion
> Naughtie’s interview of the F&M
academic allowed (encouraged even) naïve degeneration of this item into a crude
advertisement for “modelling” as an allegedly powerful forecasting aid for
policy projections. Modelling works providing its driving correlations remain
valid ~ meaning it cannot ever be reliably extrapolated beyond the horizon of
the events it purports to describe. Point is that the event horizon collapses
in presence of embedded attractors masked by noise and forecasting confidence
likewise should the unknown attractors contribute significantly to outcome.
The challenge with F&M was not
characterisation of localised spreading (trivial as modified diffusion fit to
data) but capturing extensive jumps and that cannot be done in principle
without tracking the locations of all movements either as real data or
estimated data but definitely not by modelling at least not in any real sense of
the word and even then not as epidemiological modelling! It’s the same thing
with oil slicks at sea ~ you need to input real data on wind and currents which
together drag the stuff around before having any confidence in modelling
localised dispersion which again is an almost trivial exercise by comparison.
The same is true of the weather and we all know about reliability of weather
forecasting other than as localised interpolation exercises in space and time.
So don’t get carried away with modelling ~ it really is only as good as not
only the driving data but also the renewal intervals.
The really big danger here is politicos
using fancy models for post hoc defence of their actions ~ the fancier models
can return just about any answer that’s wanted depending on how they’re set up
and implemented. This caution is particularly pertinent in relation to the Met
Office’s retrospective modelling of F&M pyres initiated before it dawned on
decision makers that pyre plumes would disperse not only any F&M residues but
also any BSE residues ~ my guess would be that’s probably why they stopped the
burning, not because of public complaints about smoke and ash!
PS There are schemes around that
routinely test for localised confidence in projections and methods to detect emergence
of hitherto unrecognised attractors embedded in noise, even as adaptive
trackers to carry real time forecasting through essential bifurcations. This
issue is a generic one and (as you might imagine) the most obvious applications
have been military ones from the WW2 days of radar window to recent cold war
gizmos for masking submarines (reread Tom Clancy) ~ but also limited
civilianisation, for example, in fancy process control of fast-fermented cheap
lager when the biology undergoes rapid metabolic switches that need to be
detected and matched by equally rapid nutrient switches for a halfway decent
drink!
> Naughtie’s interview of the
politico paired with the IoD lady failed to pick up on the point that more
media graduates are being employed merely because there are more of them in the
pipeline ~ he should have asked whether employment rates (per graduate) look as
rosy and the answer (I imagine) would be emphatically not. Once again then we
had to endure hearing a nicely rounded arty interviewer stumped when it comes
to asking the right questions relating to straightforward scientific /
statistical evaluations.
Perhaps add that it’s also a matter of
commonsense experience that there really is a desperate shortage of artisans
around nowadays and that the quality of service in fault-fixing really has
collapsed as a result of the politico’s determination to engineer a graduate
generation at the expense of quality in both the artisan and academic arenas.
It’s a matter of fact (not opinion) but the IoD lady omitted to mention that
her call for educational segregation was reversionary not visionary ~ of course
she did because nowadays careerists cannot afford to be seen as simply
sensible, they have to appear to be innovative!
> Naughtie’s interview of the
academic paired with the businessman included a remark that thinking time has
always been important at least for people engaged in art / cultural activities,
thereby betraying yet again the Chelsea Chatterers continuing collusion to
sustain CP Snow’s cultural divide. In reality of course this disease has
deepened in the past five decades and nowadays a fair fraction of the science
budget is assigned to academic activities that must appear to accommodate a
cultural connection. Take a look at DTI’s latest gee-whiz initiative styled
“Next wave” and targeted on e-gizmos as an “architectural revolution”.
However, on the question of thinking
time I was prompted to recall the late great George Batchelor’s remark to me
the last time I saw him that his will to live had evaporated with the collapse
of his capacity to concentrate in formulating and fixing complex mathematical
models in his head before committing anything to paper. Of course Naughty won’t
have heard of him because GKB FRS was only Head of Applied Maths in Cambridge
for twenty or so years, protégé and many would say seminal son of GI Taylor FRS
who in turn many maybe most would agree was the founding father for modern
understanding of fluid mechanics (likewise unknown to Naughty)!
It’s intolerably insulting that
scientists have to suffer an endless daily diet of naïvely ignorant prejudices
and criticisms from people who have no agenda beyond today’s headlines any more
than they have any understanding of what science is really all about ~ witness
three examples above taken from less than an hour of radio time!
> PS How come I have got time to key
this diatribe on what should be a busy Monday morning? Well take a look via the
links for insight into the demise of a campus crusader who taught sound sums
inspirationally enough to lure year-on-year top performing engineering
undergrads into underpaid PhDs against all odds from accountancy etc. I got
shoved for striving to span that other persistently pernicious cultural divide,
the one between academe and commerce ~ my initiative went well, very well
indeed (see via links), for the first few years whilst I was inspired and
protected by a visionary VC and his rugged Registrar but it ended in tears
within a year of their departure for prettier pastures.