Anti-Speed Camera Device

Last week a colleague and I headed up to Windermere in the English Lake District to do some fieldwork for a paper we're busily scribbling away at. Despite it being March and the weather being a touch questionable, it was, none-the-less, extremely beautiful:

Anyway, during the long (6 hour) drive we (as generally happens during long drives on British roads these days) touched upon the subject of speed cameras, bane of the motorist. Now, before I begin, let me just be clear, I'm not a raving loony (well, depends on who you ask I suppose) who wants to go tearing round the countryside at 100 miles an hour. It does, however, nark me when we go through miles of road works with 50 mph average speed cameras and see not a single soul working on them.

We mumbled away about how easy it would be to make an anti-speed camera device, in the end coming to a quite surprising solution. Our thought process was basically this:

Speed cameras work using the Doppler Effect; by looking at the apparent frequency shift of a known pulse after it has been reflected off the moving vehicle (see below). In order to prevent said speed camera from catching you, you require some way of scrambling or cancelling this reflected signal. The optimal way of doing this is to emit a phase inverted (upside down) version of this reflected signal. Now, the signal being reflected back to the speed camera is itself the phase inverted version of the original signal emitted by the speed camera as a result of the reflection process.So, the easiest way of making yourself an anti-speed camera device is to steal a speed camera and mount it (discretely, of course) on your car...

Geoengineering

Today a very good article was published in the Guardian newspaper on this most emotive of subjects.

The Climate Engineers - John Shepherd

Personally I'm not a big fan of the idea of geoengineering. A lot of the ideas being bounced around (such as carbon sequestration) are short term fixes to what is clearly a long term problem. Equally, a lot of these methods are likely to have side effects that we don't fully understand, since the vast majority of them involve manipulating extremely complex ecosystems (e.g., ocean fertilization). If there is one thing we really have to learn is that we cannot mess with existing ecologies and expect to get away with it scot free. For example, look at the way Austalia and New Zealand have been forever changed by the introduction of European species by western settlers.

Although John's article does not go into the particulars of the subject, it is encouraging to know that the Royal Society has decided to do something about this. It is also encouraging to hear that John will be chairing the committee. Although I cannot claim to know him well, our paths have crossed several times and he has always come across as an extremely clever and very level headed. Just what the doctor ordered!

The End of Mr Y

In this superb book, Scarlett Thomas throws together the concepts of modern scientific thinking and physiological reasoning regarding consciousness into a thoroughly gripping yarn. To describe it simply as a novel is doing Thomas a great disservice. In truth it is really a very clever thought experiment in the classical sense of Schrodinger or Maxwell, all nicely encased in a fast-paced, entertaining adventure story. Although there are a number of reviews out there(e.g., bookslut or Katrina), here's my two penneth.

The story follows disillusioned Ph.D student Ariel Manto. Her supervisor vanished some 12 months prior to the begging of the tale, and as we begin her University is falling down. Through a series of strange events she ends up finding a very rare copy of the book 'The End of Mr Y' by Thomas Lumas, a supposedly cursed text of which there are only a couple of copies known to exist. Contained within this valuable work is the recipe to make a drug which allows one to access the Troposphere, a extra set of dimensions where all consciousnesses interact. Obviously, being the plucky young heroine in a modern adventure novel, she goes straight out to get the necessary ingredients and have a go herself. Needless to say, all hell breaks loose and and we're led on a merry old romp.

Although the basic skeleton of the story isn't something insanely creative and new, the concepts Thomas discusses along the way are what make it. Some pretty complex and very thought provoking issues are introduced, all in a manner that leaves the reader interested and wanting to know more. Somehow, Thomas manages to strike the perfect balance between being complex and engaging, without also being confusing.

The basic idea revolves around the principle that thought (i.e., consciousness) is matter, thereby enabling consciousness to take the form of a higher dimensional space. This Troposphere therefore allows you to gain access to other peoples mind and their memories. In principle, the statement that thought =  matter is true, thoughts can be observed as increased electrical activity within the brain. For me, how this ties with an extra 'consciousness' dimension is probably a step too far. But, one idea Thomas discusses along the way, is the belief that consciousness evolves in a similar way to physical traits.

This I find immensely emotive. As is pointed out, under this principle there is nothing to stop machines developing consciousness, indeed it could be thought of as being unavoidable. So, HAL or Skynet mightn't be that far off!

In conclusion, The End of Mr Y is a great book, and doesn't feel anywhere near the 506 pages in length it is. If you have an interest in the philosophical sciences then you'll find it extremely engaging, and well worth curling up with one sunny spring afternoon.

Nyquist and sampling

Due to one thing and another (mostly the one thing commonly referred to as my thesis, although I have some more personal terms for it), I haven't found the time to keep this little corner of the blog-o-sphere up to date lately. However, the blighter is just about finished (the light is most definitely in sight), which means normal service should be resumed in the near future.

In the mean time, there are a couple of things of late that have caught my attention, causing my little grey cells of curiosity to spark into life. So, with luck, I hope to take up some of the time off I'm allowing myself over Easter (ssh, don't tell the supervisors) to catch up on a little bit of blogging.

First amongst the musings I wanted to talk about is a few thoughts I had whilst looking up some information on Harry Nyquist. Anyone who has studied physics, maths, or engineering of some description must has come across him and his famous Nyquist Theorem (although, properly it should probably be called the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem).

For anyone who hasn't come across this particular idea, it is one of the fundamental principles of Information Theory (something which Nyquist and Shannon both contributed heavily toward developing). Regardless of whether you've ever studied this subject at all, it will have played a huge part in your life. Information theory is fundamental to the way the all those electronic gizmos (from the telephone to the computer and the microwave) we have got so used having loitering around the place. The fundamental principles of information theory are what govern the way the information is communicated, both within a electronic system (e.g., signals between the CPU and graphics card in your computer), and between them (e.g., telephone signals). While subtle nuances in the theory allows this information to be transferred faster and more efficiently, therefore making your computer or tv work faster and better.

At the core of this is something called Sampling Theorem; i.e., the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem. This basically covers the way analogue signals are translated into digital ones (and vice versa). This is easiest explained if we consider an example, say music. Lets consider we're sat in a quiet room strumming a guitar. The sound produced by the guitar spreads out through the room as a series of pressure waves. If we were to think about how these pressure waves are heard by a human ear, we would get a continuous line of varying amplitude; an analogue signal (see figure below).

However, if we want to record this sound so we can replay it on a computer we have to digitize it. Computers can't store analogue signals since they, by definition, have an infinite number of amplitude values. Thus, analogue signals are digitized, which means we describe the analogue signal as a series of amplitude values (see figure above). Thus, the sound of the guitar becomes a series of numbers that represent the amplitude of the sound (pressure wave) at a moment in time.

This digitization of the analogue signal is where the sampling theorem comes in. We have all got music stored on our computers which we can listen to. In order for this to sound the same as if were were sat in the same room as the real instruments playing, the sound has to be sampled at short enough time steps so as to convince the human ear that it is not a series of descrete samples. Basically, it's the same way as animations work. An animation consists on c. 30 individual drawings which are flashed onto the screen every second. The human eye can't tell the difference between them, and so is tricked into thinking it is a moving picture. With the digitization of the sound from our guitar, we're doing exactly the same process.

Every electrical gadget in your home works with these digital signals. What the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem describes, is the minimum time step at which a signal has to be sampled in order to convey a certain set of information. Engineers, mathematicians, and Physicists think of this information in terms of it's frequency, which is what the theorem describes; the Nyquist Frequency.

I deal with the Nyquist theorem pretty much every day as it also plays a fundamental part in signal processing, which is essentially what I do. However, what I didn't know was just how successful Nyquist and his colleagues at AT&T Bell Labs who pioneered information theory (amongst other things) were. The total of 11 researchers won 6 Nobel prizes between them! That is an incredible success rate, and probably one which will never be replicated anywhere else. Kinda puts into perspective everything us little people are struggling with!

Science communication

Following on from yesterday's banter, I thought I'd say a bit more on the communication between scientists and the general populace.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk given by Michael Jones, Chief Technical Officer at Google and one of the brains behind GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, and GoogleScholar. His talk was titled 'The Spread of Scientific Knowledge from the Royal Society to GoogleEarth and Beyond', and presented a whistle-stop tour of how the communication of science has changed over the past thousand years (he actually started a little bit before the Royal Society).

One of his major driving points was that, when the Royal Society was at its peak, this coincided with a peak in the effective communication of science to the general public. This was because science at that time, rather than being presented as a a paper in one of a few dozen scholarly journals, was presented in the form of lively, open debates that could be attended by anyone. Effectively, data analysis was being done on-the-fly, in a similar manner to the theological debates of Ancient Greece and Rome. As a result, the quality of the science wasn't always of the highest standard, but the communication of ideas between scientists and the public was instant and free-flowing. Today, however, we are at the other extreme. All the analysis is done behind closed doors, with the data kept a closely guarded secret until it is ready for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal that requires a subscription fee, and is therefore never read by Joe public. As a result, the quality of science being published is extremely high (on average), but very, very little is being filtered through to a non-scientific audience.

One outcome of this is the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of science in the media. There is no wonder the issues surround the LHC occured because most people had never even heard of the Higgs Boson before, much less knew people were looking for it. However, another more sinister result of this poor communication of science is the drop in kids taking science subjects beyond the compulsory level. It's all well and good teaching children about Newton or Maxwell (there is no doubt they are hugely important and what they did for Physics is without parallel), but they can't empathize with a guy who died 300/400 years ago. They can however connect with someone who is alive today, someone who can stand in front of them with a giant tank full of water and mud explaining how beaches are formed, for instance.

Yes, they might not understand the finer details of why this ocean model is better than that ocean model or how you grow cocolithophore cultures in the lab, but if the science is pitched at the right level they can understand why it's important and will be interested. The vast majority of children are, by nature, interested in just about everything as long as it appears relevant.

Michael Jones argued quite strongly that we should actively be trying to move toward the middle ground. Finding some kind of status quo where the peer-reviewed system can be used to maintain high standards of science, but whilst also effectively communicating recent developments to a wider audience. I couldn't agree more.

Hunter S Thompson

'Too weird to live, too rare to die,'

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005)

On Saturday I welcomed in the New Year by going to watch the film 'Gonzo: The life and works of Dr Hunter S. Thompson'. This new documentary by Academy Award and Emmy winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, is a humorous and thought-provoking ride into the mind of one the most iconic journalists and writers of the 20th century.

Concentrating mainly on his most productive and, arguably, most influencial early career throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, it follows his development from a bit-part, freelance writer riding round California with Outlaw motorcycle gangs, through into becoming the most notorious journalist of his era (probably any era), punching, tearing, and slicing chunks off any authoritarian figure who dared stand in his way. One of my favorite parts of the documentary was Thompson's reply to a TV interviewer asking about the comments made in his 1972 Rolling Stone article that Senator Edmund Muskie was hooked on the obscure drug Ibogaine:

'I said there was a rumour going round Milwaukee, and I should know. I started it!'

Given my most recent post (Social detritus) on journalists stretching the truth, it may appear somewhat contradictory to now be applauding Thompson for driving a wrecking ball through someone's campaign just because he didn't like him. However, this is where I think there is a big distinction between Social Journalism and Science Journalism.

In the former, facts and figure are considerably hazier, being largely governed by one's own social and economic view point. So, when covering events such as political campaigns and policies, it is important for all the different view points to get aired because what is good for one social group will invariably be bad for another. In this manner, having journalists who are willing to take a stand against things they don't believe in (such as Thompson did against the Vietnam War) are an important way of balancing the status quo, otherwise the politicians (who represent a very small portion of the overall social demographic) would have far too an easy time of it, and we would likely see policies favorably cantered toward their peers.

With the latter, facts and figures are considerably less hazy. Indeed, one could quite easily argue the opposite, that, in fact, there is too much information out there at the moment as the number of peer reviewed journal swell in ranks, each demanding larger wads of money from increasingly cash-strapped academic libraries. The main problem with this area of journalism is that the increasing trend towards sensationalism has lead to several radical theories that do not represent the consensus of scientific opinion (e.g., The Day After Tomorrow) getting blown completely out of proportion, and/or articles completely misunderstanding the fundamental science (e.g., LHC).

However, I think that, given the times in which we live, it is unfair to point the finger solely at journalists saying that they should use one approach for one type of article, and a completely different approach for another. That bold articles standing proudly in the face of authority should be confined to only certain subjects. A good proportion of the blame for the public misunderstanding of science is the poor communication skills of most scientists. Lets face it, we are terrible at explaining what the hell we do all day - even to each other!

Social detritus

'The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state of government can control.'

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and theologian, expressed this opinion in The Last Years, a collection of his journal entries between 1853 and 1855. How apt they were in the middle of the 19th Century, I do not know, but now, over 150 years later, they can have rarely resonated with such truth.

During the course of the last year we have, as always, seen a number of examples of journalists taking their journalistic license just a little bit too far. But, what we all witnessed thoughout the summer regarding the end of the world as soon as the LHC was switched on at CERN, made feeding time in the lion enclosure look like the height of hout-couture!

This problem of media attention for all the wrong reasons was similarly faced by astronomers 5 to 10 years ago. Pioneering work on the Cretaceous-Teriary impact by Walter Alvarez and others cemented the idea of cataclysmic asteroid impacts causing mass extinction events, in turn paving the way for enormous summer blockbusters such as Armageddon and Deep Impact. In the wake of these attention grabbers, every discovery of an asteroid with an Earth crossing obit (known as an NEOs - Near Earth Object) gained pages of dedicated coverage in the world's media. The end of the world was, seemingly, at hand.

In the short-term such publicity can be good for the scientists involved, but in the long-term its effect on the science can be disastrous. The general public have a relatively short attention span when compared to your average scientific experiment. Don't get me wrong, this isn't the scientist inside me coming over all pompous and considerably better than thou, rather simply stating the fact that the public struggle to grasp the immense timescales involved in most scientific project, nor the general scientific adage of 'so-and-so being correct within errors'.

With the NEOs this is particularly apparent; when was the last time you saw a newspaper report of an asteroid getting all snugly with the Earth in a couple of hundred years time? Just because the press coverage has died down doesn't mean the chance of us being wiped out by a lump of rock and metal hurtling towards us from the icy depths of the solar system have diminished, quite the contrary. One will hit us sooner or later, and chances are we might not even see it coming as it approaches us from perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) and is therefore lost in the blinding glare of our dear, little star. The lack of news is simply a reflection of the rapidly waning interest.

I, for one, hope that CERN and the LHC does not suffer a similar fate. Although it will, in all likelihood, take some 5+ years to get meaningful results the team are confident enough to publish, the questions it could answer are enormous. However, somehow, sadly, I think it has already begun. Indeed, one could say it had already begun the moment the world didn't end...even if that was just a rediculous piece of journalistic fiction.

Alternative famine remedy...

Recently I came across a paper published in the September 1920 issue of the journal Nature under the rather presumptuous title; 'The Drying up of South Africa - and the Remedy'. This interesting paper (more of a comment, really) talks about the eternal struggle between Mankind and Nature (as in the hippy-ish force, not the journal!), opening with the paragraph:

'Whilst Man of all races and skin-colours is once more involved in fractricidal quarrels - how Superior Intellegences in more advanced spheres must grin as they watch our wars against one another through super-telescopes or by aethereal telegraphy! - Nature is making one more effort to get rid of man. This time through Drought. She has seemingly hated everything that rose above the mediocre on this planet, whether it was in fish shape, or the fish-saurian, the dinosaur, the struthious bird, the ungulate mammal, or the brain-worker, Man. She tried to nip us in the bud by reviving the Ice ages which she had used for other destructive purposes in the pre-Cambrian, Devonian, Permian, and Jurrasic periods. But this succession of cold spells only braced Northern Man to greater efforts and greater triumphs, and sent Southern Man to grapple with the tropics, and to digest and partly overcome their germ diseases. Now the tropics, and above all the sub-tropical regions are being threatened by drought. The desert is spreading in sub-tropical North America, in tropical South America, in temperate and sub-tropical Asia and eastern Europe, in northern and north-central Africa, and in that prolongation of the African continent which lies beyond the Zambezi and Kunene Rivers.'

Quite a rant, I know! Wait until you see the last paragraph:

'Man must give up internecine warfare and unite all his forces to defeat his arch-enemy, Nature. He must melt the ice at the North and South Poles, and put a stop to the spread of desert conditions in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas.

H.H. Johnston'

'...unite all his forces to defeat his arch-enemy, Nature.' For some reason I now have an image of Nature in my head that's a cross between Brittania and the classical Victorian image of Queen Boudica.

Well, whether by design or not, we seem to be trying to do what he suggests, although somehow I don't think it's working quite how he imagined...

How proxy is a proxy? - Part II

So, I believe that last time I threatened to, for once, have a series of evolving posts that gradually elucidate on a single topic. Henceforth, here is round two.

As a reminder, last time I posed the question:

How accurate are experiments where non-human, proxy cadavers are used?

In particular, I'm considering experiments where we want to use existing acoustic technology to image submerged cadavers.

To start with, lets think about precisely what we're going to be imaging with the acoustic returns. Sounds simple, doesn't it?! Sadly, as with almost everything to do with acoustics, simple questions tend to result in complex answers.

In order to image something using sound, it needs to present a measurable change in acoustic impedance (i.e., basically a measure of the strength to which the material resists the passage the sound wave) to it's immediate surroundings. The human body is generally considered to consist of 60 -70 % water, suggesting that a cadaver sitting on the seabed, lakebed, or riverbed will tend not to offer as strong an acoustic target as, say, the sediments on which it is resting because it closer resembles the water around it than the sediments do.

However, the acoustic backscatter from a target (the sound which travels from the source to the object and is reflected back towards the source again) is the combined response of two processes:

1. Surface scattering: the energy reflected back by the water/cadaver interface.

2. Volume scattering: the energy reflected back from within the target.

Of these, the volume scattering is the one we're particularly interested in. As I said earlier, the surface scattering will not be very strong for a cadaver. The volume scattering, on the other hand, will be. This is because, during decomposition, gas builds up within the tissue and internal cavities of the cadaver. This gas will present a very strong change in acoustic impedance.

So, when we want to acoustically image a cadaver, we would expect the dominant acoustic signature to be from the build up interstitial gas as a result of decomposition.

How proxy is a proxy? - Part I

As I've mentioned in a blog a couple of months ago, Piggy hide and seek, I've recently been looking into the idea of using shallow water marine geophysical techniques in helping Law Enforcement Agencies conduct underwater body searches. Going through the frantic research process involved with writing any kind of research proposal, a particularly interesting thought occurred to me, namely:

How accurate are taphonomic experiments where non-human, proxy cadavers are used?

In certain states of the USA it is possible to use human cadavers when people have donated their body to science, or their body remains unclaimed. This has enabled researchers at the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Centre, in Knoxville, to setup their 'Body Farm', where human cadavers are placed in a variety of environmental conditions and their decay monitored over a period of days, weeks, months, and sometimes years. As a result of the ground-breaking research conducted at Tennessee, other body farms have now sprung up in Western Carolina University and Texas State University, although on considerably smaller scales.

The work undertaken by these institutions has been truly astonishing, advancing forensic entomology immensely. Without this work there must be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of homicides the world over that would never have been solved. However, outside of these specific locations, the vast majority of people trying to undertake research in this, or related, fields have to rely of using proxy cadavers, normally domestic pigs. This leads to the question of how accurately a pig cadaver can imitate a human one? Taphonomically they have been shown to be very, very similar; their skin is close enough to ours for use in skin grafts for burns victims, whilst, also being omnivores, they have much the same gut bacteria, leading to a decomposition progression that very closely mimics our own.

This is all well and good for taphonomic and forensic entomology studies of beetle or fly larvae colonization, etc, but for our purposes, where we want to image the acoustic properties of the cadavers, can we truly say the same?

This is something I'm, hopefully, going to explore in the next few blogs by discussing the physics behind the variety of acoustic profilers that can be used. In this way, it should be possible to see where the potential differences between the different cadavers could result in different observations.

Don't forget the old ways

Recently I've been spending a large part of my time writing quite a complex bit of new code to process the seismic data we acquire using our 3D chirp system (those of you who've been paying attention will remember me talking about this a little while ago). Going through this process I've become increasingly aware just how much we take for granted the insane amounts of computing power those of us in active science research have available to us.

Although the process I'm trying to accomplish (3D seismic imaging) is not in either conceptually complex, nor difficult to write as an algorithm, it is difficult to do well. This spawns from two main factors: firstly, our obsession with data redundancy leading to enormous amounts of data being pumped in at the beginning; and secondly, the complex coupling between acoustic waves and their host medium making modelling the propagation of sound in geologically complex areas mathematically expensive (equally, this can also be thought of as a problem resulting from our desire as scientists to push the limit and explore more challenging environments).

The former problem is the one I've been mainly struggling with. The nature of our system means that trying to produce an imaged volume requires the manipulation of an incredible amount of data. For an average survey you're talking about having 10 - 15 million spatial samples, each consisting of 3000 - 4000 measurements of the reflection energy recorded at different times. To image this, the data has to be converted into the Fourier (frequency) domain since the propagation of acoustic wavefronts through a medium is frequency dependent. This produces a further 1500 - 2000 data points for each time measurement, giving a total of about 1.2 x 10^14 (120 trillion) data samples to manipulate! Not to mention a windowed Fourier transform before and after!

When handling data on these sorts of volumes it's easy to forget that altering the location of a single calculation within the code can dramatically affect it's run time. Simple things, like moving a variable calculation out of a for loop so that it is calculated only once for each frequency component on each time series shaves, literally, days off the processing time. Equally, a clever bit of sorting of your input data can enable the application of a single calculation to time series from multiple surface locations.

These techniques are not new, as sundialsvcs pointed out in this thread on LinuxQuestions.org I recently stumbled across. There is a tendancy with the processor power and memory volumes available at increasingly reasonable prices for our coding to become more slapdash and less optimized. The application of a little thought and some of the tricks commonly employed when computers were beasts that filled entire rooms could, I think, cut swathes off our (by this I mean scientists) processing time.

Also, talk about cutting energy usage to save the environment - imagine how much greener it would make us!

A fifth force farce

Over the weekend a good friend of mine from undergrad sent me a link to this site discussing a joke publication on the discovery of a fifth fundamental force.

Personally, all credit to the guy! Threatening to take the mickey and submit a spoof paper, be it as an April fool or whatever, is something I think most people would talk about (probably somewhere between pint number 4 and pint number 5), but then casually side step when it came to actually joining pen and paper. But not Lawrence Krauss, oh no! He threatened, and then had the balls to back it up.

There are a couple brilliant bits in his article, but I think my personal favorite has to be reference 6:

'6. Thanks to the intermediation of high-ranking officials from certain Italian banks, Vatican archival material was made available to us.'

As good a spoof as the original manuscript is, he was completely out performed by the 'reviewing' team from PRL. Their report is a work of genius. This line from the editor had me in stitches for a good while:

'In addition, we feel that the general interest (and even novelty if you want to be arcane about it) no longer supports the discovery of new forces. Already five have been reported in the literature and we think the time has come to draw a halt to the unbridled publication of force discoveries.'

Hopefully most readers of the science blogosphere, especially those who've ever had the privilege of trying to sift through reviewers comments, should appreciate this as much as I did. Enjoy!

Big History

Big History is an area of science I only recently discovered via a talk given by Walter Alvarez at the 33rd IGC meeting in Oslo, Norway. This multi-disciplinary approach to looking at history, considers the major events/factors that have been the driving forces behind the formation of the world and indeed the universe as we know it today.

Personally, I find the idea of bouncing around ideas on such large scales fascinating. The way that, for instance, you can consider the evolution of complex life from the view point of a series of astronomical forcing factors really tickles my little grey cells. Also, discussing such topics is clearly perfect for pub based debates, where almost anyone from any walk of life can contribute something. It reminds be greatly of my 2nd and 3rd year Astronomy tutorials with Prof. Hughes, which turned into massive debates on subjects such as the origin of the solar system, or asteroid impacts, or any one of a million other subjects.

For an introduction to the topic one shouldn't look any further than Marnie Hughes-Warrington's excellent article in the Bulletin of the Historical Society, which provides a brilliant and engaging overview of the subject and how it has developed from the early imaginings of, for example, Isaac Asimov and Preston Cloud, in the 1980s through to the recent pioneering writings of David Christian and Fred Spier. Anyone interested in the subject should, I think, start there. It certainly worked for me!

Why exams are bad!

This morning, the title story on the Education section of BBC News reads 'Testing harms school science'.

No sh*t sherlock!

This particular little gem is something nearly everybody in science has been screaming to the heavens about for years. Don't get me wrong, I'm not pointing the finger at teachers or pupils (Christ, I was one of the latter not too long ago!), rather my wagging pinky is aimed straight at Whitehall and those suit clad tyrants who dictate just about everything in our lives by instating ever increasing levels of red tape.

Their obsession with tests and league tables and an ever changing syllabus is at the root of this problem, which extends far beyond Science's sacred shores. First year physics students at Bristol, along with most other UK Universities, are made to sit a basic maths test in their first week. This forms a guide to the Maths for Physicists modules that run throughout the first year in order to get everyone up to the required competence level. I quote the test in Bristol specifically, because this test has been running for some 30+ years now, and, while the average A-level grade of entrants has sky rocketed, the average score on this never changing test has plummeted. This is not a reflection of the quality of the students, or their aptitude for maths/science, rather it reflects the method of GCSE and A-level teaching.

The pressure on schools, teachers, and pupils to get straight A's and be at the top of their respective league table is bordering on the obscene. As a result of this Stalinistic approach to schooling kids, the basic understanding of the fundamental subjects (English as well as Maths and the Sciences) is being superseded in preference to exam grades. For me, the key point is that exam results are mistakenly being identified as the goal, whereas, surely, the primary outcome should be that kids leave school brimming with knowledge and skills that can be applied to the rest of their lives.

Unsurprisingly, with such a contentious subject, there are lots of webpages out these discussing this exact same topic. One of my personal favourites is this one on Y Safle, who collates figures garnered from the Exam Boards to back up his arguement. It's well worth a quick peek.

To finish on a bit lighter note...while on my morning browse of BBC News I also discovered something which would only ever happen in Australia:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7632158.stm

'A woman on the north coast of New South Wales in Australia is being held hostage in her own home by a large pig'. That has to be the best opening sentence to a news item since the tiger was found a NY flat, and by some margin! I've got this image now of a very large pig, with Samuel L. Jackson side-burns and a John Travolta quiff, peaking out between blinds at an array of police cars whilst clutching a sawn-off shotgun, cigarette hanging limply from his chops.