Category: Uncategorised

Not all retracted papers are fake news – but then, which ones are?

The authors of a 2017 paper about why fake news spreads so fast have asked for it to be retracted because they’ve discovered a flaw in their analysis. This is commendable because it signals that scientists are embracing retractions as a legitimate part of the scientific process (which includes discovery, debate and publishing).

Such an attitude is important because without it, it is impossible to de-sensationalise retractions, and return them from the domain of embarrassment to that of matter-of-fact. And in so doing, we give researchers the room they need to admit mistakes without being derided for it, and let them know that mistakes are par for the course.

However, two insensitive responses by influential people to the authors’ call for retraction signals that they might’ve had it better to sweep such mistakes under the rug and move on. One of them is Ivan Oransky, one of the two people behind Retraction Watch, the very popular blog that’s been changing how the world thinks about retractions. Its headline for the January 9 post about the fake news paper went like this:

The authors are doing a good thing and don’t deserve to have their paper called ‘fake news’. Publishing a paper with an honest mistake is just that; on the other hand, ‘fake news’ involves an actor planting information in the public domain knowing to be false, and with which she intends to confuse/manipulate its consumers. In short, it’s malicious. The authors don’t have malice – quite the opposite, in fact, going by their suggestion that the paper be retracted.

The other person who bit into this narrative is Corey S. Powell, a contributing editor at Discover and Aeon:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

His tweet isn’t as bad as Oransky’s headline but it doesn’t help the cause either. He wrongly suggests the paper’s conclusions were fake; they weren’t. They were simply wrong. There’s a chasm in between these two labels, and we must all do better to keep it that way.

Of course, there are other categories of papers that are retracted and whose authors are often suspected of malice (as in the intent to deceive).

Case I – The first comprises those papers pushed through by bungling scientists more interested in the scientometrics than in actual research, whose substance is cleverly forged to clear peer-review. However, speaking with the Indian experience in mind, these scientists aren’t malicious either – at least not to the extent that they want to deceive non-scientists. They’re often forced to publish by an administration that doesn’t acknowledge any other measures of academic success.

Case II – Outside of the Indian experience, Retraction Watch has highlighted multiple papers whose authors knew what they were doing was wrong, yet did it anyway to have papers published because they sought glory and fame. Jan Hendrik Schön and B.S. Rajput come first to mind. To the extent that these were the desired outcomes, the authors who draft such papers exhibit a greater degree of malintent than those who are doing it to succeed in a system that gives them no other options.

But even then, the moral boundaries aren’t clear. For example, why exactly did Schön resort to research misconduct? If it was for fame/glory, to what extent would he alone be to blame? Because we already know that research administration in many parts of the world has engendered extreme competition among researchers, for recognition as much as grants, and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to pin a part of the blame for things like the Schön scandal on the system itself. The example of Brian Wansink is illustrative in this regard.

What’s wrong with that? – This brings us to that other group of papers authored by scientists who know what they’re doing and think it’s an actually legitimate way of doing it – either out of ignorance or because they harbour a different worldview, one in which they’re interpreting protocols differently, in which they think they will never have success unless they “go viral” or, usually, both. The prime example of such a scientist is Brian Wansink.

For the uninitiated, Wansink works in the field of consumer behaviour and is notorious for publishing multiple papers from a single dataset sliced in so many ways, and so thin, as to be practically meaningless. Though he has had many of his papers retracted, he has often stood by his methods. As he told The Atlantic in September 2018:

The interpretation of [my] misconduct can be debated, and I did so for a year without the success I expected. There was no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation. I believe all of my findings will be either supported, extended, or modified by other research groups. I am proud of my research, the impact it has had on the health of many millions of people, and I am proud of my coauthors across the world.

Of all the people who we say ‘ought to know better’, the Wansink-kind exemplify it the most. But malice? I’m not so sure.

The Gotcha – Finally, there’s that one group I think is actually malicious, typified by science writer John Bohannon. In 2015, Bohannon published a falsified paper in the journal International Archives of Medicine that claimed eating chocolate could help lose weight. Many news outlets around the world publicised the study even though it was riddled several conceptual flaws. For example, the sample size of the cohort was too small. None of the news reports mentioned this, nor did any of their writers undertake any serious effort to interrogate the paper in any other way.

Bohannon had shown up their incompetence. But this suggests malice because it was 2015 – when everyone interested in knowing how many science writers around the world sucked at their jobs already knew the answer. Bohannon wanted to demonstrate it anew for some reason but only ended up misleading thousands of people worldwide. His purpose would have been better served had he drawn up the faked paper together with a guideline on how journalists could have gone about covering it.

The Baffling – All of the previous groups concerned people who had written papers whose conclusions were not supported by the data/analysis, deliberately or otherwise. This group concerns people who have been careless, sometimes dismissively so, with the other portions of the paper. The most prominent examples include C.N.R. Rao and Appa Rao Podile.

In 2016, Appa Rao admitted to The Wire that the text in many of his papers had been plagiarised, and promptly asked the reporter how he could rectify the situation. Misconduct that doesn’t extend towards a paper’s technical part is a lesser offence – but it’s an offence nonetheless. It prompts a more worrying question: If these people think it’s okay to plagiarise, what do their students think?

A sudden spike in meteor influx 290 Mya

About 300 million years ago, something happened. And the Moon was hit by meteorites twice to thrice as often after this period than before.

The Solar System has always been a dangerous place for careless travellers. Out there are large clouds of dust, millions of rocks dislodged from ancient collisions, fragments of comets, meteors and asteroids, even interstellar interlopers. The dangers of space haven’t been limited to radiation and extreme isolation.

But even in this chaotic picture, it is startling to find that the rate at which rocky objects struck the Moon suddenly spiked so sharply. What could’ve happened?

The answer to this question is important because, as a new study notes, if the Moon is being hit faster, then Earth could be as well. We just wouldn’t know it because Earth’s atmosphere burns off many of these objects before they reach the ground. Even when they do, plate tectonics messes with all but traces of the more recent impacts. And then there’s the weather. Our natural satellite has none of these luxuries, and its surface is frequently pocked by small and large rocks.

So the Moon is like “a time capsule for events that happen in our corner of the Solar System,” Sara Mazrouei, a planetary scientist at the University of Toronto and one of the study’s authors, told National Geographic.

However, that doesn’t mean what strikes the Moon stays on the Moon. The lunar surface does undergo some transformations thanks to processes like erosion. Moreover, when larger bodies impact its surface, it shakes and redistributes the looser parts of its soil.

To get around these sources of confusion, the analysts – scientists from the US, the UK and Canada – devised some workarounds.

First, they focused on craters over 10 km in diameter (between the 80º N and 80º S latitudes). The diameter limit was set so high because these impacts are likely to have penetrated the bedrock and chipped off rocks from there to the surface. These rocks are warmer and remain that way for longer than those on the surface.

The researchers also figured that newer craters – formed within the last billion years – would be covered in more such rocks than older ones. This is because the longer the rocks lie around, the likelier they are to be broken up into smaller pieces by micrometeorites, the Moon’s crazy temperature shifts (which recently put paid to an intrepid cotton plant) and other disturbances.

In effect, they were left with a three-way relationship between rock abundance, rock temperature and crater age. And when they brought this to bear on data recorded by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA satellite around the Moon, they made their discovery – described richly by the chart below.

DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4058
DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4058

The x-axis shows the ages of craters in millions of years. The y-axis is self-explanatory, and is a proxy for time. As a first step, look at the dotted line. It’s straight because it assumes that the rate of impacts was constant throughout time. However, the researchers found that the black lines – from LRO data – suggested the real picture wasn’t as straightforward.

Instead, they think the rate of impacts is closer to the blue line, which shows a perceptible shift around 290 million years ago. Its slope beyond this point is gentler than the slope before because the cratering rate has increased, and the fraction changes less quickly as a result.

An even more interesting feature of the chart is the red line, which depicts craters on Earth in the same period. Its flow suggests that the rock barrage that began 290 million years ago is likely going on against Earth as well.

Earth has had a storied relationship with meteors and meteorites. One of the most famous events was when a rock wider than the height of Mt Everest struck Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out all dinosaurs that couldn’t fly and triggering a mass extinction.

If the Moon’s record-keeping has been correct, this cataclysm – and other smaller ones – were part of the ongoing wave of more frequent meteoric events. But to be sure, the scientists had to ascertain that Earth didn’t have fewer impact craters before 300 million years ago because the older craters had been eroded away.

And this they did by studying kimberlite pipes. These are tubular structures about 2 km deep, commonly found embedded within ancient landmasses. They were formed when volcanoes underground exploded in supersonic eruptions millions of years ago, drilling these formations through the crust. They are rich in diamonds and are mined for this purpose.

Kimberlite pipes underwent significant erosion before 650 million years ago, during a period called ‘Snowball Earth’ – but very little after. As a proxy for the amount by which Earth’s surface eroded over time, the pipes suggest there are fewer craters on Earth older than 300 million years simply because the number of craters created since has been increasing at a higher rate.

So there we have it – the beginnings of a new mystery. Something happened in the Solar System about 300 million years ago, and Earth and its Moon have since been assailed over twice as often by meteors. We don’t yet know what this something is, but there are some ideas.

For example, the scientists suspect in their paper that the change “may be due to the breakup of one or more large asteroids in the inner and/or central main asteroid belt”. The tinier of these fragments absorb and reemit sunlight, giving themselves a small kick. As lots of fragments are kicked outward like this, they could become trapped in the gravitational fields of planets and moons, and slowly drift towards them.

Spaceflight institutions like NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation will find this update useful because they can now recalibrate the threat to their space-based assets. They can also work with military organisations to strengthen their planetary defence systems, if any.

There’s also a second mystery here, so to speak. The scientists were able to identify the shift in impact rates 290 million years ago because they assumed there was only one such shift. It’s possible that a larger dataset, with more than the 111 craters they examined, could throw up even more shifts in the rate from a variety of causes.

This in turn could begin to reveal the full extent of the threats Earth faces, and what we can do to keep from getting wiped out.

The Wire
January 18, 2019

An Earth sciences ministry

On January 15, Harsh Vardhan, the Union science and technology minister, mulled renaming India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) as “Bharat Mata Mantralaya”. (In Hindi, the ministry is currently called the ‘Prithvi Vigyan Mantralaya’.)

Vardhan was speaking at a function to mark the 144th foundation of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). He continued there would be no harm in calling the ministry the ‘Bharat mata mantralaya’ (BMM). Vardhan also oversees the MoES, under which the IMD functions.

He argued that the ministry and its scientists work for “the protection of the earth”, which is “indeed Bharat mata for all of us”. He continued to refer to the ministry as “Bharat mata mantralaya” during the rest of his speech.

But contrary to the minister’s beliefs, there will be some harm in calling it the BMM – especially since there’s a lot of Earth left beyond the insular borders of Bharat.

The MoES’s self-proclaimed mission (rephrased) is:

To conduct scientific and technical activities related to Earth system science to improve weather forecasting, monsoon, climate and hazards, explore polar regions, seas around India and develop technology for exploration and exploitation of ocean resources (living and non-living), and ensure their sustainable utilisation.

A lot of this would fail if the MoES was about ‘Bharat mata’ alone.

Of course, there will be those arguments that the author is reading too much into the minister’s words, and that they simply signify certain sentiments. But labels preserve meaning and intent, and it is important to retain them to keep the ministry’s purpose from being corrupted by sentiments that many of us disagree with.

Vardhan’s own government has slowly but surely bent the arc of research towards application-oriented pursuits, particularly prioritising matters of “national interest”. As such, calling it the BMM will risk trapping the MoES’s image between nationalist blinders and keep its own gaze turned inward, confined within borders that science isn’t supposed to recognise.

It could also signal to its employees that their service is to the government’s material vision of ‘Bharat mata’, not to the Earth sciences. This is antipodal to the MoES’s goals. One can’t help but be somewhat wary that the move will also excise ‘sciences’ from the name.

Finally, there’s the trailing suspicion that Vardhan was simply engaging in another gimmick, and that the MoES won’t actually be renamed. However, given the issues involved – and the issues he could be discussing – it’s worth pointing out that his words are unbecoming of his office.

Instead of tinkering with names, the minister could better serve the MoES better simply by supporting what research it already conducts – research that helps keep India afloat and going in a world shaped by unprecedented forces.

CERN’s next collider looks a bit like China’s

The world’s largest particle physics laboratory has unveiled its design options for the Large Hadron Collider’s successor – what is expected to be a 100-km long next generation ‘supercollider’.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) submitted the conceptual design report for what it is calling the Future Circular Collider (FCC). The FCC is expected to be able to smash particles together at even higher intensities and push the boundaries of the study of elementary particles. CERN expects it can come online by 2040, when the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC’s) final run will come to a close.

The LHC switched on in 2008. Its first primary goal was to look for the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that gives all other fundamental particles their masses. The LHC found it four years. After that, physicists expected it would be able to find other particles they’ve been looking for to make sense of the universe. The LHC has not.

This forced physicists to confront alternative possibilities about where and how they could find these other hypothetical particles, or even if they existed. The FCC is expected to help by enabling a deeper and more precise examination of the world of particles. It will also help study the Higgs boson in much greater detail than the LHC allows, in the process understand its underlying theory better.

The CERN report on what the FCC could look like comes at an interesting time – when two supercollider designs are being considered in Asia. In November 2018, China unveiled plans for its Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), a particle accelerator seven-times wider than the LHC.

The FCC, CEPC and the LHC are all circular machines – whereas the other design is slightly different. Also in November, Japan said it would announce the final decision on its support for the International Linear Collider (ILC) in a month. As the name suggests, the ILC’s acceleration tunnel is a straight tube 30-50 km long, and parallels CERN’s own idea for a similar machine.

But in December, a council of scientists wrote to Japan’s science minister saying they opposed the ILC because of a lack of clarity on how Japan would share its costs with other participating nations.

In fact, cost has been the principal criticism directed against these projects. The LHC itself cost $13 billion. The FCC is expected to cost $15 billion, the CEPC $5 billion and the ILC, $6.2 billion. ($1 billion is about Rs 7,100 crore.)

They are all focused on studying the Higgs boson more thoroughly as well. This is because the energy field that the particle represents, called the Higgs field, pervades the entire universe and interacts with almost all fundamental particles. However, these attributes give rise to properties that are incompatible with the universe’s behaviour at the largest scales.

Scientists believe that studying the Higgs boson closely could unravel these tensions and maybe expose some ‘new physics’. This means generating collisions to produce millions of Higgs bosons – a feat that the LHC wasn’t designed for. So the newer accelerators.

The FCC, the CEPC and the ILC all accelerate and collide electrons and positrons, whereas the LHC does the same with protons. Because electrons and positrons are fundamental particles, their collisions are much cleaner. When composite particles like protons are smashed together, the collision energy is much higher but there’s too much background noise that interferes with observations.

These differences lend themselves to different abilities. According to Sudhir Raniwala, a physicist at the University of Rajasthan, the CEPC will be able to “search for rare processes and make precision measurements” and “likely more aggressively” than the FCC. The FCC will be able to do both those things as well as explore signs of ‘new physics’ at higher collision energies.

According to CERN’s conceptual design report, the FCC will have four phases over 15 years.

I – For the first four years, it will operate with a centre-of-mass collision energy of 90 GeV (i.e. the total energy carried by two particles colliding head-on) and produce 10 trillion Z bosons.

II – For the next two years, it will operate at 160 GeV and produce 100 million W bosons.

III – For three years, the FCC will run at 240 GeV and produce a million Higgs bosons.

IV – Finally, after a year-long shutdown for upgrades, the beast will reawaken to run at 360 GeV for five years, producing a million top quarks and anti-top quarks. (The top quark is the most massive fundamental particle known.)

After this, the report states that the FCC tunnel could be repurposed to smash protons together the way the LHC does but at higher energy. And after that also smash protons against electrons to better probe protons themselves.

The first part of this operational scheme is similar to that of China’s CEPC. To quote The Wire‘s report from November 2018:

[Its] highest centre-of-mass collision energy will be 240 GeV. At this energy, the CEPC will function as a Higgs factory, producing about 1 million Higgs bosons. At a collision energy of 160 GeV, it will produce 15 million W bosons and at 91 GeV, over one trillion Z bosons.

Michael Benedikt, the CERN physicist leading the FCC project, has called this a validation of CERN’s idea. He told Physics World, “The considerable effort by China confirms that this is a valid option and there is wide interest in such a machine.”

However, all these projects have been envisaged as international efforts, with funds, people and technology coming from multiple national governments. In this scenario, it’s unclear how many of them will be interested in participating in two projects with similar goals.

Benedikt did not respond to a request for comment. But Wang Yifang, director of the institute leading the CEPC, told The Wire that “the world may not be able to accommodate two circular colliders”.

When asked of the way forward, he only added, “This issue can be solved later.”

Moreover, “different people have different interests” among the FCC’s and CEPC’s abilities, Raniwala said, “so there is no easy answer to where should India invest or participate.” India is currently an associate member at CERN and has no plans for a high-energy accelerator of its own.

To the FCC’s credit, it goes up to a higher energy, is backed by a lab experienced in operating large colliders and already has a working international collaboration.

Additionally, many Chinese physicists working in the country and abroad have reservations about China’s ability to pull it off. They’re led in their criticism by Chen-Ning Yang, a Nobel laureate.

But in the CEPC’s defence, the cost Yang is opposed to – a sum of $20 billion – is for the CEPC as well as its upgrade. The CEPC’s construction will also begin sooner, in around 2022, and it’s possible China will be looking for the first-mover advantage.

A very big sentence

Writing on analytic philosophy is apparently very complex. One essay published on 3QD argues that it actually needs to be that way, and quotes a linguist quoting a philosopher to make its case. The quotation goes thus:

In arguing for his analysis of non-natural meaning, Grice made the mistake of arguing from the sensible premise that a hearer who believed that a speaker did not intend by his words to produce in the hearer a certain belief or intention would not acquire that belief or intention to the invalid conclusion that a hearer who merely failed to believe that a speaker intended by his words to produce a certain belief or intention in the hearer also would not acquire that belief or intention.

Without getting into the specifics of the argument, I want to understand exactly what this 86-word sentence is trying to say.

If we stored the string “a belief or intention” in a variable B, the sentence becomes:

In arguing for his analysis of non-natural meaning, Grice made the mistake of arguing from the sensible premise that a hearer who believed that a speaker did not intend by his words to produce in the hearer a certain B would not acquire B to the invalid conclusion that a hearer who merely failed to believe that a speaker intended by his words to produce a certain B in the hearer also would not acquire that B.

The first part of the sentence suggests that the ‘from’ (word #15) should be succeeded by a ‘to’, which is word #45 (counting the ‘B’ as one word). So let’s break the sentence in two at the ‘to’ and consider them separately. The first half now goes:

… a hearer who believed that a speaker did not intend by his words to produce in the hearer a certain B would not acquire B…

This is now eminently understandable. It means that a hearer who thinks a speaker didn’t intend to produce an effect B on the hearer would not acquire B. Let’s call the Proposition 1.

On to the second half:

… a hearer who merely failed to believe that a speaker intended by his words to produce a certain B in the hearer also would not acquire that B.

Here, the act of not doing something – from the hearer’s point of view – lies with the hearer herself, as opposed to with the speaker in the first half. So the second half means a hearer who failed to believe that a speaker meant to have the effect B would not acquire B. Let’s call this Proposition 2.

Taken as a whole, we get:

… Grice made the mistake of arguing from the sensible [Proposition 1] to the invalid [Proposition 2].

Based on this break-down, this is how I’d edit the sentence:

In arguing for his analysis of non-natural meaning, Grice makes a mistake. He begins from the sensible premise that a hearer who thinks a speaker didn’t intend to produce an effect B on the hearer would not acquire B. However, he reaches the invalid conclusion that a hearer who failed to believe that a speaker meant to have the effect B would not acquire B.

Of course, I don’t know if this simplification would fit in the text’s overall context, and I’ve no idea whether the author would be okay with boiling the string held in B down to one example. But I think it’s illustrative, and that the sentence will have to lose at least that much intellectual mass if it is to be understood by people not familiar with the intentions of analytic philosophy.

Second, science communication’s rise as a widely recognised specialisation within non-fic writing and journalism also underscores a lack of philosophy and humanities writers. Am I missing something here? If I’m not, I think they’re sorely needed to highlight a lot of important work that our philosophers and other scholars are undertaking. These endeavours are funded by public money as well, and these endeavours can also do much good to society.

Stupidity at the science congress

Load Twitter on the browser. Scroll down, scroll down further, keep going, stop… What’s that?

Meh, keep scrolling.

Correlation is not causation – but it’s really hard to set aside the fact that India’s ruling party has empowered a clutch of people to vocalise their pseudoscientific beliefs without fear of ridicule, leave alone consequence. When you hear a person in any kind of leadership position utter unscientific, ahistorical nonsense, you used to be able to laugh and uninhibitedly point out that they’re wrong.

And then you read news reports about how people are being arrested for being sharply critical of the prime minister or for innocuous comments on social media targeting ministers and politicians. You read about vice-chancellors, judges and ministers balking at the slightest insult yet freely dismissing reason and civil liberties in single sentences. You keep your Twitter timeline clean to escape the attention of a wandering troll army, many of whose foot soldiers the prime minister himself follows. You watch your language closer than before, almost as if a syntax-obsessed linguist might.

When someone gets on stage and says something stupid, you no longer see one face. In the visage of G.N. Rao, the Andhra University vice-chancellor asserting at the Indian Science Congress that we had stem-cell technology and test-tube babies thousands of years ago, you see The System glaring down at you. And you swallow the laughter.

But of course, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and their satellite outfits haven’t caused any of this because they haven’t actively directed one event after another. What you’re seeing is just a correlation, a remarkable coincidence but a coincidence nonetheless. If you think there’s causation, then it’s in your head, you liberal, antinational punk.

So you aren’t just silenced. The phantasmal force of the backreaction reaches into you and invites you to reconsider your opinions. Why did G.N. Rao, who sits at the very top of a state university, say what he did? You recoil from the simplest answer: that he’s stupid. (He says we had stem-cell and IVF tech because “the Mahabharat says hundred fertilised eggs were put into hundred earthen pots”.) But then he can’t be stupid; it must be something else.

Maybe Rao simply meant it as a metaphor – as an allegorical explanation for a complicated subject, something he alludes to in the clip. And maybe Narendra Modi was trying to be funny when he said we had plastic surgery thousands of years ago when we fixed an elephant’s head on a human body. Maybe that Rajasthan high court judge was simply illustrating his devotion when he declared peacocks don’t have sex but procreate through tears.

Maybe Satyapal Singh was on the cusp of a new philosophy of science when he said monkeys didn’t turn into men because his grandparents didn’t have a story about it. Maybe Harsh Vardhan was only musing about unknown unknowns when he said Stephen Hawking believedthe Vedas had a better “theory” than E = mc2. But wait: the buck stops with the science minister, and when he’s crossed the line, it’s definitely not a metaphor.

What else could it be? Perhaps the BJP government has thrown the field open to anyone who can craft a call to conservatism in a way that sticks to the parivar‘s ideological line, finds traction among the people and makes news. The best craftsperson is then chosen and granted one ‘boon’, to use Amar Chitra Katha’s favourite word for wishes granted by the gods. This franchisee model of nationalist expression would explain former ISRO chief Madhavan Nair’s comment that two women entering the Sabarimala temple at night was a “government-sponsored act of cowardice”.

Or maybe those of us discomfited by an ecosystem that quietly tolerates and normalises increasingly offensive statements are in fact the cynics we’re often told we are. Cynicism, and the disengagement with public politics that it encourages, is a privilege. Many of us can stop fighting for what we believe is right and shrink into a life no different for it – but most of us can’t. At the same time, cynicism is hard to shed when it is consistently rewarded. You decide to hope when the government appoints an excellent principal scientific advisor – and feel snubbed when a senior educational administrator can’t see the national science congress as anything more than a spitball range. (And he isn’t alone.)

Just like that, we’re left navigating a tangled web of excuses we’re forced to make for The System if only to avoid confronting the abject incompetence at its centre. Correlations jump up at us everywhere we look but we resist the cynical temptation to see causes instead.

However, ad hoc judgments are inimical to the everyday practice of reason – more so when a student’s vice-chancellor invites her to try. Don’t be a cynic and everything will look better.But be a cynic and avoid another demonetisation or starvation death. Don’t be a cynic and read meaning into every silly statement. But be a cynic and think about what G.N. Rao’s and  words might do to the spirit of a student at his university. Don’t be a cynic, be a skeptic instead, and learn to hope. But be a cynic and prepare to have your hopes dashed.

Don’t be a cynic; there are scientists and teachers doing good work in other parts of the country. Let’s hope this much continues to stay true.

The Wire
January 5, 2019

New binary black-hole mergers

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about how quickly the discovery of black-hole mergers through gravitational waves was becoming run o’ the mill.

All of the gravitational wave detection announcements before this were accompanied by an embargo, lots of hype building up, press releases from various groups associated with the data analysis, and of course reporters scrambling under the radar to get their stories ready. There was none of that this time. This time, the LIGO scientific collaboration published their press release with links to the raw data and the preprint paper (submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters) on November 15. I found out about it when I stumbled upon a tweet from Sean Carroll.

This week, the LIGO team may just have one-upped itself. On December 1, Shane Larson, a physicist at Northwestern University, Chicago, and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, wrote on his blog that the LIGO and Virgo teams were releasing a joint catalogue of their gravitational-wave detections till date. And in that catalog, Larson drew readers’ attention to the presence of not one, not two, but four new black-hole merger events.

Can you spot the new events? Credit: LIGO-Virgo collaboration

He continued:

What stands out the most in the new LIGO catalog? We are still letting the implications settle in, but the most important thing the new events do is it makes our estimate of the population of black holes in the Universe more accurate, and we’ve started to examine those implications in a new study that is being released in tandem with this announcement.

This study is available here.

To (shamelessly) quote myself once more:

In the near future, the detectors – LIGO, Virgo, etc. – are going to be gathering data in the background of our lives, like just another telescope doing its job. The detections are going to stop being a big deal: we know LIGO works the way it should. Fortunately for it, some of its more spectacular detections … were also made early in its life. What we can all look forward to now is reports of first-order derivatives from LIGO data.

On the New Yorker’s ‘EDS doctor’ story

A fascinating tale in the New Yorker: Michael Holick, a medical researcher and doctor at the Boston University, Massachusetts, has been finding that many American families that have had their babies taken away from them because State Services suspected abuse are in fact up against a little-known disease, called hypermobile Ehler-Danlos syndrome (EDS). The story typically goes like: family finds bruises on baby, rushes to doctor, doctor finds other bruises all together consistent with abuse, notifies state, State Services separates family and baby with emergency order, baby given to custody of guardian, case goes to trial.

Enter Holick, who, with his hypermobile EDS diagnosis, gives stranded families a new way to deal with an already difficult problem. But it’s not so straightforward. For one, Holick’s ideas are not supported by the scientific literature (nor by people known to have EDS, although this is not directly written in the story). For another, he diagnoses the babies at a rate inconsistent with the affliction’s known prevalence. For a third, he diagnoses babies of hypermobile EDS without seeing them first. In fact, as with most New Yorker stories, a summary is only going to diminish the journey of discovery necessary to understand the story in its fullness, so please go ahead and read it.

In the meantime – some of my notes after reading:

1. The New Yorker story seems to be missing details of whether the babies continued to bruise after they are returned to their parents’ custody. The story begins and ends with fractures that occur before Holick enters the families’ lives. It would be interesting to know if physical injuries, although not necessarily at the level of fracture, continued after as well.

2. It sounds to me like Holick’s research into hypermobile EDS is funded by families he has freed from the blame of child abuse using the explanation of hypermobile EDS. This is a severe conflict of interest. If this cycle was broken, and the donations from families redirected to a fund administered by scientists acting on the basis of empirical evidence, it would be interesting to see if Holick can convert some of his insights into usable data. He could also be disabused of his belief that the burden of proof is on others, not on him, when he has little proof himself (“He said that those who find fault with his views should … do studies of their own”).

2. Holick says that, before him, the conviction rate in child abuse cases used to be 100%, and after him, the rate dropped to about 90%. So in 10% of those cases, did the prosecution win the case despite Holick’s expert testimony? It would be interesting to find out more about these cases – especially if Holick was convinced that the babies had hypermobile EDS while the prosecution was able to prove that they didn’t, and that the babies had actually been abused. It could also highlight whether Holick holds an EDS conclusion before he has proof.

3. At one point in the story, a judge seems really impressed by Holick’s “172-page résumé”. I don’t know if the “résumé” here refers to Holick’s alternative explanation, in document form, of how a baby in question could have been injured or to his professional record. If it’s the latter, then it’s weird that it is 172 pages long: a résumé by definition is brief. The longer version is the curriculum vitae; although most people regularly use the two labels interchangeably, the New Yorker is also famous for its pedantry. So it’s reasonable to assume the judge was impressed by his alternative explanation – but I think the magazine should still clarify. Otherwise, it sounds like the judge is impressed by his CV and that’s never a good thing.

4. The aftermath of the 2014 interaction between Holick and Robert Sege is remarkable. To me, Holick’s reaction (that the hospital he works at expects him to “cease and desist”) gives away his insecurity about his position and his beliefs. I don’t think he’d have reacted this way if he’d had empirical evidence to back him up. The interaction also exemplifies the basis of his opponents’ vehemence: by not submitting to the traditional methods of medical enquiry, Holick is keeping the door open for potential medical malpractice, though it may not be deliberate. More importantly, if he gets just one diagnosis wrong in a trial that ends up compromised for it, things can get really bad really fastfor the baby.

A culture of communication

Srinavasa Chakravarthy, presumably a mathematician going by a reference in his post, penned an open letter for TH Read about how Indian scientists

… rarely follow the scientific work of [our] Indian colleagues, perhaps because such attention has no practical and material consequence. Thus, we constantly face what is popularly called a double whammy. As it is, the Western academics care two hoots about our work and, what’s more, we are also written off by our beloved compatriots.

In all, Chakravarthy’s is an impassioned plea to his peers to fumble in the dark the way they were told scientists generally do, and forge their own paths instead of kowtowing after their Western counterparts. There are many dimensions to this entreaty. For example, @polybiotique, @Vasishtasetty and @leslee_lazar – all students of science – engaged in a discussion on Twitterabout whether Chakravarthy was disingenuous in not citing the many examples of scientists and science journalists who are, in fact, being Indianand original in their work.

As a science writer and editor myself, I found this part of his plea to be a bit annoying:

The somewhat dogmatic mindset has crept beyond the walls of our academic campuses also. How often do we see the local media covering the scientific work of an Indian colleague? I once saw a piece of work on computational neuroscience from a United States university reported in a local Chennai paper. It is a standard piece of work. Many of us in India have more interesting things to say. Why isn’t it talked about as much? I asked. I was told that the media doesn’t like to cover Indian science, as much as it does science from abroad, simply because the readers don’t like to read about it.

It is odd that Chakravarthy chose to lead with the example of a “local Chennai paper” when he could have chosen the national Chennai paper, The Hindu, and its famous science section. Indeed, analogous to the Twitter discussion, science journalists I have spoken to often feel a twinge of pain when their work isn’t being read or acknowledged. Part of the problem is that consumers of science journalism – just as with the scientists in Chakravarthy’s piece – stick to their usual sources and passively, though not inexcusably, miss instances of it that are good, Indian and original. So on this count, I would say Chakravarthy comes off as disingenuous for not expanding his science-writing menu.

At the same time, his choice of a “local Chennai paper” is instructive. While change must begin somewhere, it is at the level of the local paper that it will be most impactful. (Let’s think in terms of voltage: the potential difference between those writing about science and those reading about it is higher the more local you take it.) However, to expect local papers to change first would be silly. In the realm of incremental changes, a large problem is solved first where it is easiest to solve, so national newsrooms are leading the way.

At this point, in order for me to not seem disingenuous to my peers, I should mention that half the reason any Indian newsroom with a science section struggles to cover science is the Indian scientist. Just as much as you need an earnest science journalist to reach out to a scientist, you need an earnest scientist to respond meaningfully and in time. Many of my writers regularly receive the following response from scientists they’ve reached out to: “All the information is there in the paper” – betraying a severe lack of understanding of what science communication is for and/or about. My personal favourite is a researcher who responded (on a story about amorphous superconductors) after two months and then complained that his quote wasn’t used.

On the other hand, it is easy to write about Western science because scientists in the West are so damned prompt. The cost of writing a science story is much lower if, on average, I have to work with Western scientists. And if we’re wondering whether this problem reflects or contributes to a hierarchy, the answer is ‘yes’ both ways.

Let’s call it the cost tree: the lowest branches are populated by Western scientists, and the point is to bring Indians higher up to lower ground. Those Indian scientists already there include those educated in the West, those exposed to – and who endorse – the culture of communication, or both. For example, it is very ease to draw a quote from a scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru but very difficult to get one from a researcher at BITS Pilani. It also matters what the scientist thinks of the journalist. A researcher will sooner speak to someone from The Hindu than to someone writing for The Wire (although this is a strictly personal opinion). More broadly, a scientist is likelier to speak to a more engaged journalist than to a less engaged one, and the former cost more to commission and are typically approached for longer stories. TL;DR: There needs to be empathy on both sides for this to work.

One quick-fix for this problem is to eliminate a simple barrier: that of the unknown-unknowns. For scientists who are unaware of good, Indian and original science writing, a common reference list can be curated by scientists and media-persons alike, and added to with time. For science journalists, a similar list of Indian scientists who are available to speak to, and who have been known to respond meaningfully and in time can be curated.

Recently, an effort was made over Twitter to curate a list of scientists for science journalists. Thanks to my poor record-keeping, I’m not able to find the resulting spreadsheet right now – although here’s a Twitter list compiled by Pranesh Prakash that you can sign up to. Now, establishments like the Times of India, which regularly present bad science, and Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle, etc., which do so less frequently, have one less excuse to publish unverified/unqualified reports.

IMO, this is the easier part: English-speaking science journalists can be expected to congregate on Twitter; those who aren’t on the platform still have colleagues or peers who are. If you work for a digital newsroom, you’re expected to have a functional Twitter handle. However, how many scientists – who aren’t required to be on Twitter – are? More importantly, is there one forum where Indian scientists congregate? I’m all ears.

Featured image credit: Pavan Trikutam/Unsplash.

NatGeo clickbait

A National Geographic article published on November 6 carried a surprising headline:

Earth has two extra, hidden ‘moons’

The lede followed through:

Earth’s moon may not be alone. After more than half a century of speculation and controversy, Hungarian astronomers and physicists say they have finally confirmed the existence of two Earth-orbiting “moons” entirely made of dust.

This sounds strange because there has been little else in the news about dust-moons in the last few years. No major discoveries are made in one instant, and can often be anticipated many years in advance through discussions among scientists. However, the rest of the article put paid to the doubt.

The ‘dusty moons’ National Geographic alludes to are in fact the Kordylewski dust clouds. Late last month, a group of Hungarian astronomers confirmed the presence of these clouds, located in two different directions at about the same distance Moon is from Earth.

Astronomers have been debating the existence of these clouds since the 1950s. In that decade, an astronomer named Kazimierz Kordylewski climbed a mountain and photographed parts of the night sky where these clouds had been predicted by other astronomers before him to exist. The dust clouds have since been called Kordylewski clouds in his honour.

However, confirming their presence has taken so long even though they’re so close to Earth because of their brightness – or lack of it. They are too faint to spot because the stars in their background far outshine them, even at this distance. But they aren’t completely obscured either: they reflect sunlight in feeble amounts, giving themselves away to the persistent observer.

Although Kazimierz Kordylewski found the dust clouds this way, the Hungarian group was more sophisticated. According to their two published papers (here and here), they took advantage of dust’s ability to polarise light. Waves of light are in fact waves of electric and magnetic fields undulating through space at right angles to each other.

The electric fields of different waves point in different directions. But when they hit a dust particle, they get polarised: the electric fields all line up. This is how sunglasses work: the lenses are filters that don’t let light of certain polarisations pass through, cutting glare.

Like all astronomical discoveries, their finding will have to be validated by independent observers before the community reaches a consensus. But in the meantime, the claimed discovery is a matter of concern because of where the Kordylewski clouds are located: at two Lagrange points.

The Lagrange – or libration – points are places in space where the gravitational fields of the Sun, Moon and Earth tug at each other such that an object at that point will be in an Earth-synchronous orbit around the Sun.

Scientists like stationing satellites at these points because they can stay in orbit with much less fuel spent than if they were stationed elsewhere. However, now we (may) know the Kordylewski clouds are located at the points labelled L4 and L5. This means satellites stationed there will have to carry protective shielding. Otherwise, dust particles could  damage sensitive instruments and end the mission before its time.

However, the Kordylewski clouds can’t be classified as moons, although they can be as natural satellites. Judit Slíz-Balogh, a coauthor of the current study and an astronomer at the Eötvös Loránd University, calls them “pseudo-satellites”. The distinction is important because, even when bracketed between single- or double-quotes, the label of moon can’t be applied to a dust cloud.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which decides the meaning of astronomical terms like planet, star, etc., defines a moon only as a planet’s natural satellite. However, that isn’t license to call every natural satellite a moon. (In fact, one of the definitions of a planet would make our Moon a planet, too.)

But a size-based organisational paradigm would imply that an object much smaller than the moon would have to be called a moonlet. For example: Saturn’s moon Pan, which is 35 km at its widest. Something even smaller will have to make do with the catch-all label ‘particles’. Then again, the paradigm falters with the overall form of the satellite. For another example: the dust, ice and rocks that make up Saturn’s rings are called ‘ring particles’ even though some of them weigh a few quintals.

Carolyn Collins Petersen, a former member of the Hubble Space Telescope instrument team, wrote for ThoughtCo. earlier this year, “There is no official definition of ‘moonlet’ and ‘ring particle’ by the … IAU. Planetary scientists have to use common sense to distinguish between these objects.”

Importantly, it would be counterproductive to argue that anything goes because there is no technical definition. To the contrary, especially with science communication, it is important to use words whose meanings are generally agreed upon. ‘Natural satellites of dust’ would have helped that cause better than ‘”Moons” made of dust’.

The Wire
November 9, 2018

Featured image credit: Lucas Ludwig/Unsplash.