What is Science?

via spicynodes.org

new web tool called SpicyNodes allows us to create snazzy mindmaps. i can see making use of these for communicating science concepts (el niño, climate risk management, malaria transmission, etc.) and embedding them on your institution’s web site.

How to lie with charts

Great post a few days back over at Open Mind. In a nutshell:

Here’s the full picture:

Here’s the picture skeptics and obfuscators want you to see:

The charts show the temperature data from the Hadley Centre, lower-troposphere temperatures estimated by satellites, and the Mauna Loa CO2 data. One chart starts the series back in the mid-1800s. The other picks the last decade.

New book for those who have Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis

If you’re suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) and are looking for non-pharmocological treatments, then you should give serious consideration to the specific carbohydrate diet, or SCD. The diet has thousands of adherents, who swear that it changed the course of their debilitating illness and got them feeling normal again. I’m not going to go into the diet and its history in this post, since you can find out all you need to know by visiting the Breaking the Vicious Cycle web site. Also, in 2002, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, called Eating is Believing that explained the idea behind SCD in more detail, including why it was, and still is, controversial among the medical establishment. The story is currently behind the WSJ’s subscription wall (Mr. Murdoch, tear down this wall!), but you can easily find the full text by searching for the title and SCD on the internet.

The latest entry in the SCD library is a cook book titled, simply enough, Recipes for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, written by my long-time friend, Raman Prasad.

Raman has had ulcerative colitis since he was a teenager. I’ve watched him battle the illness through the years. I have visited him in hospital rooms, taken note of his extreme swings in weight, observed the side effects of prednisone as they played out in his behaviour and appearance. And I watched as he ultimately learned to manage his colitis using SCD.

Raman can’t expunge the illness from his life, so he’s settled for the next best thing: he’s mastered it. The man has an encyclopedic knowledge about IBD and SCD. He’s been able to capture reams of information on his illness, and focus it through the lens of one who is afflicted by it, evident in a moving autobiography of his experience, called Colitis and Me.

This deep knowledge surfaces in his other writings, his blog especially. Readers will find dozens of thoughtful, well-articulated posts on a range of topics: analysis of science research papers, interviews with movers and shakers in the SCD community, news about clinical trials, and critiques of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.

His new cookbook is gorgeous and easy to follow. My wife and I use it to plan meals a few times a month. That neither of us has IBD really doesn’t matter, since the SCD is first and foremost about eating healthy, nutritious meals. I’m a mess in the kitchen–if I can find a way to ruin a recipe, it most assuredly will happen. But everything in the cook book is so well thought out, and designed so cleanly, that even I manage to prepare something edible. Delicious even.

You can buy the books via links on Raman’s web site, or just click on the images shown here.

Phew. I’m not alone.

A recent column in New York Times by Lisa Belkin discusses the way in which many people have discovered their own personal creativity hotspots, or white spaces, where they are their most productive and most innovative.

Desks suffice for answering phones and filing forms, but when it comes to the creative or introspective aspects of a job, desks can be uninspiring at best, or formidable obstacles at worst.

So we leave those desks. Because we can. We take our laptops and seek shelter (and WiFi) either elsewhere in the building…or farther away in libraries and bookstores.

The term “white space” implies a place set apart, physically and mentally. It is not only used by graphic artists to describe the empty space in a layout, but also by time managers to explain the minutes frittered away between appointments on office calendars.

Since I started my job at Columbia University,

Continue reading »

Kyoto versus the Montreal Protocol

In a recent essay, Scott Barrett, a professor at Johns Hopkins, offers some insights on why the Kyoto Protocol was impotent from the start. All gums, no teeth.

What is the Montreal Protocol’s secret of success? One difference between Montreal and Kyoto is that Montreal imposed restrictions on all countries from the start. A second difference is that Montreal created strong incentives for participation and compliance – a combination of carrots and sticks. A final difference is that Montreal created a system for positive feedback, with each step in reducing ozone depletion creating incentives for countries to take yet another step.

Read the full article here.

heavyweight sparring on climate change

Last week, lauded physicist Freeman Dyson published a provocative essay called Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society that challenged “all the fuss about global warming”:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

This week, former Science and Nature editor, Alun Anderson hits back with a rebuttal:

First and foremost, of course, we would like to know what to expect. And here I would agree, just for a moment, with half of another of Dyson’s heresies. Our models of climate change do not entirely capture “the real world we live in”. We do know that temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than almost any other place and that the extent of the sea ice is shrinking with dramatic speed but our models aren’t accurate. That said, Dyson is totally wrong with the second half of his criticism, that the climate experts end up believing their own imperfect models when they should “put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening”.