Once again, we stray from our customary playground, and wander off into those dreamy realms where art meets science. In this case, art means painting and the things that get painted are not those that are associated with art, generally anyway. Warships, heavy artillery and similar objects don’t usually claim much serious attention from artists. But in World War I and thereafter, they did, and do. What brought the artists’ attention around to the job of painting a big railroad-mounted artillery piece was the tricky problem of how to make it largely invisible, or as much as you can make any seventy-ton object invisible. Camouflage became a very, very big deal in the 1914-18 war. All the bellligerent powers had Camouflage sections, quite large one, which were very active. Armies had traditionally gussied up rather a lot, with scarlet uniforms, plumes, sky-blue capes, all in the hope of intimidating the foe and knowing who was who. But with the advent of long-range weaponry and especially, of aerial reconaissance, high visibility ceased being an asset. In fact, the race was on to conceal as effectively as possible. It has been suggested that since the Great War and the Cubist movement in painting occurred at roughly the same time, camofleurs in the Army and Navy must have been influenced by Cubism, since they came up with whacky patterns and strange uses of form and color that seemed to suggest descent from Cubist sources. Well, maybe and maybe not. The doughty Financial Times, now known simply as the FT, had a good article on the relations between Cubism and WWI camouflage. The Imperial War Museum in London will open an exhibition on the art of camouflage later this month, and that was a good lead in for the piece. It’s too simple to say that camouflage was simply Cubism in uniform, but there are some interesting connections. The whole business of camouflage is more than just crawling around with leaves stuck all over you. There are are some tricky optics involved and some intriguing notions about how brains handle shape, color, motion and size, both individually and together. In the Great War, camouflage at sea took the form of “dazzle” patterns, which made it hard to discern a ship’s true form, and so made it hard to guess it’s course and speed. And that made aiming at it much more difficult. The quest to protect soldiers by tricking the enemy’s eye to see something else continues, although the techniques are now commonly referred to as “disruptive pattern”…definitely a linguistic come-down. I guess too many generals couldn’t spell “camouflage”. Can you imagine Picasso or Duchamp talking about “disruptive patterns” over a pernod at the Deux Maggots? I can’t.
FT
PS: Go to Google, select Images and type “dazzle camouflage” to see some rather spectacular examples of this art.
Archive for March, 2007
Hiding it, Cubistically.
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007A WHOPPER Database!
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007In these lines, the BG has often described interesting databases or databanks of biological information particularly, and has opined that the care and nurture of these compendia are serious matters that have to be tackled by scientists, philanthropy and government. A subtext of those comments was the suggestion that not all the current herd of such creations could be kept going, at least not on the free access basis they enjoy right now, so maybe it might be a good idea to dampen the flow of such products until funding and curation matters get straightened out. Silly me! Things are going in the exact opposite direction, and maybe that’s good. Nature has a item by Declan Butler which shows you the penalites involved in thinking small.
A group of Feds want to create a SuperColossal, Godzill0-Kongish database of ALL, that’s right ALL U.S. scientific research data, to be held in publicly accessible repositories. And it seems as if these guys have been doing more than nipping at the applejack in odd moments. A working group with membership from 22 Federal agencies has been meeting for a while now, and as we all know, once a working group has been formed, it’s pretty hard to go back. To their credit, the group known as the IWGDD, or Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, has come up with some sketches for the creation of a robust infrastructure and, of course, funding. To no one’s surprise, one big hurdle is the lack of standards for data creation and storage.
Even investigators in the same fields, such as genetics and astrononmy, who are accustomed to managing very large data arrays, often have trouble meshing data from other practitioners who are doing things in a slightly different way. Some scientists may be reluctant to share their data, but the IWGDD organizaers are ready to make them play nice through such muscular techniques as making data sharing a condition of funding; share it or else. It’s all early days yet, and a long way to go. But somebody has to do something, and this suggestion seems like a good way to get some grasp on what would be involved, how much it would cost, and who would do it.
Whopper
American Idol and Education.
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 Full Disclosure: the Grouch has never watched American Idol, not even once. The concept calls up memories of the ghastly amateur hour and talent shows that were a staple of early television, and even radio. Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour, for instance, and a guy named Major Bows (Boes?) who ran the gig on radio for years, come to mind, but there were others. They infested the programming of local TV stations, on Sunday afternoons particularly, at least up our way. So AI has no charms for me, and I suspect, for many of my generation. Consequently, I was surprised to find a rather thoughtful piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education drawing explicit and sensible comparisons between the art of pedagogy and what happens on AI. If that sounds too silly to take seriously, consider: the author says that AI and “Education” are alike in three ways. First, there is a desire for honest evaluation of performance against fair standards. There are standards, and they matter. Second, there is a respect for expertise. The panel have all hacked it in popular music, and if they agree that X can’t carry a tune in a bucket, X should listen to them. Third, at first the contestants/students seriously, often absurdly, over-value their own skills, but those submitting to discipline improve, that is, are educated. Something to ponder here? I leave it to the fans.
AI
PS. This piece is in the issue of March 16. I read it through the ARTS AND LETTERS DAILY service
Everybody Got That?
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Stephen Strauss has been writing about science and technology for quite a while, in books, articles and in a long-running feature in the Toronto Globe and Mail. He recently had an article on the CBC web site, in which he went after the mis-use of metaphors by researchers who are trying to tell other people about what they are doing and about why they think it’s important. The point of such explanations is, or should be, to clarify. But Strauss claims that often these efforts don’t succeed, and wind up causuing more confusion, at least if they are read carefully. The thrust of the article is that appealing to the metaphor of the puzzle is itself a large part of the problem. Investigators are much too quick to make us of this comparison, he claims. It’s attractive, in that everybody has tackled some kind of puzzle, the jigsaw puzzle being the one most commonly appealed to. But, Strauss claims, this often does more harm than good, because the borrowed robe of the puzzle often does not fit, and instead of explaining the work in question, the puzzle analogy simply confuses. It seems a bit unfair to tax investigators who are doing their best to explain difficult science, but Strauss has a point. He uses some recent reports of research into the genetic basis of autism as examples. When the researchers’ “puzzling” explanations are read carefully, as Strauss does, it’s pretty clear that they don’t really help us understand what they were doing or what it means. In fact, the “puzzle” stuff obscures and obfuscates so that the real meaning of the work is distorted. The Grouch thinks that scientists and science writers should read this piece very carefully. He also thinks that they should swear not to use the puzzle metaphor, or, if they do, to use it right.
Puzzled?
PS: Puzzle is a funny word. The Oxford English Dictionary says its origin is obscure…and the OED only throws in the towel like that after A LOT of research. The verb seems to have come first, and then the noun. It’s witnessed in the writings of late Elizabethan times, but that’s as far as they can go, without mere guess work. There are some weak connections to Germanic and Dutch verbs that mean “to pick carefully”, or to be picky in our sense of fussy and hard to please. But then the trail grows cold.
Technologies to Watch in ‘07
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Technology Review publishes each year a forecast about the ten technologies that will emerge or rapidly develop in the coming year. There is an “engineering” slant to the picks, but that’s only to be expected considering the source, MIT. And, “technology” is just another way of talking about means to get things done, and that’s just another way of saying “engineering”. Some of this year’s candidates have possible medical applications. Single cell analysis is touted for utility in creating more personalized diagnostic tests and therapies. Another “hot tech” could help improve our use of solar energy by decreasing the costs involved in making solar collectors. There is something there about augmented reality, but I have trouble enough with reality as it is, and don’t like the idea of “augmenting” it one bit. I think reality has most of the aces, so why should I want to up its advantage? Leave it alone, I say, and maybe it will go away. The Nano-healing section is an attention catcher, with a product that seems to be able to stop bleeding, even very serious bleeding, almost at once and that certainly is intriguing. What else it might do is not clear. In all, we have an interesting list, and if even half of these things make it to production, life might be a little easier. I’m rooting for the bleeding thing.
Technologies
Another Database?
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007Yes, I’m afraid so. The Human Metabolome Project….(am I the only one thinking, enough with these -omes already! and definitely with the “omics”. Metabolomics? come on! )…has been launched by researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, with the by now customary assurances of how this one is going to revolutionize diagnosis and treatment, and so on. Science describes the Alberta project, which apparently has not had quite the revolutionary impact its founders were hoping for, at least not so far. In fact, some of the comments have been a bit severe, especially concerning what has been left out. Maybe the founders let themselves in for this by being just a tad over- enthusiastic in describing their creation as a “comprehensive” database of human metabolites, and by comparing it to the ‘first draft’ of the human genome. Perhaps the Alberta team wanted to get some serious ink for their project, and get researchers to use it. Right now, access is free. But the program’s funding ends at the end of this year, so the scramble is on to find money to a. keep it going and b. improve it. The Grouch will say it again: the matter of providing secure and continuing support for all the wonderful data compendia that have been launched is going to the Gordian Knot of research infrastructure in the first decades of the century. Some of them will have to convert to fee for use, and some will just go under, no matter how great they are.
Alberta Project
What’s Doing Out There?
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007Let’s see what’s happening in the wider world of popular culture, shall we? Well, you probably have heard the Show Biz maxim: ” If they liked it once, they’ll love it twice!” That’s the thinking behind the re-makes and sequels and revivals. One of the cadavers being dug up and brushed off is Capricorn One, a movie from the Seventies about a faked mission to Mars. It was faked because the real one was a flop, due to contractor incompetence and equipment failure. At the last instant the crew are removed from the ship and whisked away to a Cheney-like “secure location”, while the crappy craft is launched and sent on its doomed way. Dark Forces in NASA decide on faking the mission to preserve project funding.The current talk about a US expedition to Mars sometime in the 2020 decade or so seems to be one reason for re-baking the Capricorn opus. Hollywood’s paucity of new ideas, and the need to get something as close to sure fire box office as possible are other reasons. The first movie was OK, as the BG somewhat fuzzily recalls. Hal Halbrook walked away with it as the Creepy NASA Project Director, in my thinking at least. The movie had all the makin’s… gummint conspiracy, courageous journalist unraveling the mystery, survival in the desert, gradual elimination of Good Guys by Forces of Evil, “Detroit Ballet”, only in the sky with helicopters….the standard fare, pretty much, and it was competently done on the production side at least. Acting, of course, is something else. The movie was a good way to spend a hot afternoon, and that’s about it. It had nothing to suggest cinematic greatnesss. So, I guess it’s all the jawing about a Mars trip that justified the Suits in thinking this was worth a re-do. The word is that deals have been made and contracts signed, so the production behemoth can be expected to lurch into motion anytime now. Or not, it’s a funny business and you never know.
Capricorn redux
PS. “Detroit Ballet” is the insider’s term for extended car chases in movies. DB is really great from the producers’ viewpoint, because it eats up screen time, requires no dialog, not many actors and much of it can be faked, and even re-used, from different camera angles. You can tell when a movie is in trouble….there’s lots of Detroit Ballet. Some geniuses took this to the logical, if terrible, conclusion and made movies that were really nothing but DB, from start to finish. Its also interesting to note how DB connects to the great silent movie tradition of The Chase Scene from the Keystone Kops comedies. After almost a century of movie making, we’re still doing The Chase!
An Open Access Carnival.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007A blog carnival is a longish entry which contains links to other sources more or less on the same topic. The BG has been pondering events in the Open Access movement and has decided it’s time to bring some of the individual reports together, so that our readers can get a sense of where OA is today. So, where? Well, it’s a bit like Grand Opera, the stage fills up pretty fast with people singing and dead bodies. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is who, except that the dead bodies don’t sing, as a rule anyway. Well, there is the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, who sings plenty, but really is a statue of a dead guy, rather than a “body”. But, I digress. First, let’s talk about Public Access. PA is kind of a OA Lite approach, designed not to scare publishers too much. It states that reports of publicly funded US research should be generally available to everybody, ideally right away, but realistically, after the lapse of a certain ‘embargo’ period, say six months. The USA tried a wimpy program of “recommendng” freer public access, but that got nowhere and tougher measures are being contemplated. Professor Peter Suber reviewed the year’s work on PA mandates and wrote a detailed report. Suber. The mandates require the deposit of the final manuscript in some sort of publicly accessible electonic archive within a reasonable, short period after the article appears in journal form. Funding agencies are also moving to impose archiving mandates as a condition of the investigator’s acceptance of support; if you want the money, you have to archive. Prof. Suber comments on this, and on the chances for a tougher, no-nonsense mandate from the NIH on mandatory deposit for grant awardees, since the previous, cream puff policy of recommendation produced a compliance rate of about 4%. A tough provision introduced in the last Congress by Sens. Lieberman and Cornyn under the monicker Federal Research Public Access Act,died while under consideration and the session ended. Rumors of its resuscitation persist, but there is nothing in the legistlative hopper so far.
Publishers have not been happy at having their hands forced, and quite a bit of bad press for them was generated by stories appearing in Nature, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Scientific American. These stories detailed contacts between the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and a pubic relations firm celebrated for its ‘no prisoners’ approach to burnishing the tarnished images of celebrities or businesses appearing in bad light. Some of the leaked email messages contain suggestions for a PR campaign that is attack-based and relies on slogans to the effect that PA implies government control and the end of peer review. The implication is that commercial publishers are so afraid of OA that they are willing to stoop to bar-room brawl tactics in order to stop it.
Nature
Fee-based Open Access publishing had some bad news recently. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) reported that it was still relying on grant support and that such support would have to continue for a while yet. PLoS also raised author fees by a Grand. The new $2500 charge started with the new year. Some observers say that PLoS’s original fee of $1500 US was absurdly low, but the partisans shrugged this off as publisher’s whining. PLoS is probably the most ambitious and most exciting of the new publishing ventures. It has launched new OA journals generally regarded as being of high quality. But it also has to make the numbers, and has to wean itself away from grant support. Declan Butler reported on the financial woes.
Butler
On the other hand, PLoS recently launched PLoS One, a new venture in “public reviewing” of submitted papers and has posted announcements of a new journal to be added to its stable in the autumn of 2007. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases . You could say that expanding the inventory is not the act of a company in financial trouble, and so the launch of a new journal is a sign of confidence.
PLoS Home
The European Union was in the nutcracker recently between OA activists and researchers , calling for a Union-wide mandate on self-archiving of research papers by investigators. On the other side, publishers were predicting the end of the Known Universe if such a mandate passed. Like good little bureaucrats, the bureaucrats passed and ducked, saying, on the one hand that full access to publicly funded resarch reports is an absolutely marvy idea, and offering to pay the tab of authors who publish in “author pays” OA journals. But, the boys in Brussels expressed doubt about the business model, and called for more discussion, research and debate.
Science has a report and here’s the citation:
Science 23 February 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5815, p. 1065
(The URL was so long that I was reluctant to try capturing it.)
If anything like a self-archiving mandate does come about, authors will need a place in which to place the mandated copy. In the USA, we have PubMed Central, at the National Library of Medicine. Now there is a British Isles version, since UK PubMed Central is up and running. For the present, it mirrors the content of NLM’s PubMed Central free archive of journal material in the bio sciences. However, the plan is to add material of greater interest to the UK perspective, as the system matures.
UK PMC
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is a activist-pressure group devoted to spreading the evangel of generous, indeed, immediate and total access to reports of research paid for by Federal money. Their page showcases a recent position paper released by the American Society for Cell Biology. The ASCB is a pretty big outfit with over 11,ooo members. It publishes Molecular Biology of the Cell which it maintains on an OA basis. The Society says it still makes money, so there.
ATA
ASCB
The one stop shopping site for getting with events in OA publication is Prof. Suber’s analysis of what happened in ‘06. If you could only read one of the items suggested in this post, that would be the one.
More on Data Sharing
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007Research produces data, and the more research, the more data. What happens to all that information is something we have wondered about on this site for some time now. Data preservation and managment is that aspect of the advent of netword-based research and dissemination activity getting the least attention. You could say that data preservation is the nuclear waste of modern research. You have to do something with it, once it is no longer immediately useful as “fuel” for the investigation. Two new projects are discussed in Nature, both of which are described as tools to make data visualization and manipulation (in the good sense) easier and faster. One program is called SWIVEL. The other, coming from IBM’s lab, is named Many Eyes. The model for these projects is “social software”, such as MY SPACE and FACEBOOK. These have nothing to do, per se, with science, research or data sharing, but they do provide a forum for information sharing and communication. Will it work? Hard to say. The Nature article seems to imply that younger researchers who grow up with social software networking will ease into the use of similar programs for data display and analyis. The director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI) is rather enthusiastic about the concept, according to the story at least, and is thinking about the introduction of similar mechanisms in the NCBI’s own software array.
Many Eyes and Swivel