Linklist: October 9, 2021
"âIt's the $60,000 question: How do we get the kids involved?" says Howard Michel, former CEO of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). (Since speaking with IEEE Spectrum, Michel has left the ARRL. A permanent replacement has not yet been appointed.)
This question of how to attract younger operators also reveals deep divides in the ham community about the future of amateur radio. Like any large population, ham enthusiasts are no monolith; their opinions and outlooks on the decades to come vary widely. And emerging digital technologies are exacerbating these divides: Some hams see them as the future of amateur radio, while others grouse that they are eviscerating some of the best things about it.
No matter where they land on these battle lines, however, everyone understands one fact. The world is changing; the amount of spectrum is not. And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it."
đș Nuclear noir
"In Manual for Survival, historian of science Kate Brown documents the mutual interest of the United States and the USSR in minimizing the extent of the threats resulting from the Chernobyl meltdown. US scientists did not actively cover up evidence. However, as Brown shows, the concerns of local doctors and scientists working on the ground in affected areas in Ukraine and Belarus who challenged the literature on radiation threat were largely brushed aside. And the international body that led the official assessment of the incidentâs health effects, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was run largely by scientists with an interest in maintaining popular support for nuclear power.
The official death toll of the Chernobyl incident ranges between 31 and 54.6 Taking into account the number of people who died from highly unusual afflictions in the affected areas in the aftermath of the event, Brown suggests that the minimum range is closer to 35,000â150,000.
To call Dark and Chernobyl ânuclear noirâ is to recognize two things: first, that noir is an ideal aesthetic for invoking the secrecy and danger that surround nuclear energy production, and second, that as of the past four years or so, a growing, albeit small, number of shows have made use of noir aesthetics to grapple with themes related to nuclear energy production.
Occupied, a Norwegian drama created by Nordic noir royalty Jo NesbĂž, depicts a near future in which Norway completely converts to nuclear energy and is invaded by Russia as a result. Netflixâs Finnish noir series Deadwind, due to release its third season in fall 2021, features a corporate conspiracy involving experimental nuclear-waste disposal. And even Stranger Things, although not noir, makes liberal use of nighttime settings and deals centrally with scientific experiments conducted by the Department of Energy. A highly popular fan theory holds that the fourth season, which will likely be released in early 2022, will incorporate the Chernobyl incident centrally into its plot.
These shows are, in some ways, fighting the other side of a public-relations battle with the DOE."
đąïž The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil (2009)
"When he boarded his flight from London to Oslo, Farouk al-Kasim, a young Iraqi geologist, knew his life would never again be the same. Norway was a country about as different as it was possible to imagine from his home, the Iraqi port city of Basra. He had no job to go to, and no idea of how he would make a living in the far north. It was May 1968 and al-Kasim had just resigned from his post at the Iraq Petroleum Company. To do so, he had had to come to the UK, where the consortium of western companies that still controlled most of his countryâs oil production had its headquarters.
For all its uncertainties, al-Kasimâs journey to Norway had a clear purpose: he and his Norwegian wife, Solfrid, had decided that their youngest son, born with cerebral palsy, could only receive the care he needed there. But it meant turning their backs on a world of comforts. Al-Kasimâs successful career had afforded them the prosperous lifestyle of Basraâs upper-middle class. Now they would live with Solfridâs family until he could find work, though he had little hope of finding a job as rewarding as the one he had left behind. He was not aware that oil exploration was under way on the Norwegian continental shelf, and even if he had known, it wouldnât have been much cause for hope: after five years of searching, still no oil had been found.
But al-Kasimâs most immediate problem on arriving in Oslo that morning was how to fill the day: his train to Solfridâs home town did not depart until 6.30pm. âI thought what I am going to do in these hours?â he says. âSo I decided to go to the Ministry of Industry and ask them if they knew of any oil companies coming to Norway.â"
"The Monte Carlo method consists of repeatedly simulating random individual events to understand the likelihood of possible outcomes.
Imagine, for example, that youâd like to calculate the likelihood of rolling two dice and obtaining a sum of seven.
One of the ways of doing it is to enumerate all the 36 possible result combinations and count how many of those results yield a sum of seven. Considering 6 of those 36 results produce a sum of 7, the probability of rolling a seven is 16.67%.
Alternatively, you could roll two dices for the next couple of months, take notes of all the results, and check how often you rolled a seven. The more rolls youâve made, the more precise your final probability estimation will be.
Now, rolling dice for days isnât very exciting (and takes too long). Instead, we could get the computer to roll the dice for us. Thanks to the machines, we can roll two dice a million times quite quickly.
Now, letâs write a simple Rust program to roll two dice a million times and tell us how often it rolls a seven.
When running this program, itâll simulate a million dice rolls, divide the number of sevens rolled by the total number of simulations, and output the empirical probability of rolling a seven. This probability will be close to 16.67%, which is the actual probability of rolling a seven.
Congratulations, you just did your first Monte Carlo simulation."
"In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didnât exist totally in a vaccuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to their will, writing games, math software, and more generally hacking on the platform just for the sake of it.
True to my interests, itâs all deeply embedded, pushing the limits of platforms that were obsolete when they were released. Iâll take you through some of the highlights of Texas Instruments calculator hacking done over the past two and a half decades, along with an explanation of why these projects are so technically impressive."
"A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:
People invest into it because they expect good profits, and
that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,
the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while
the operators take away a large portion of this money.
Investing in bitcoin (or any crypto with similar protocol) checks all these items. The investors are all those who have bought or will buy bitcoins; they invest by buying bitcoins, and cash out by selling them. The operators are the miners, who take money out of the scheme when they sell their mined coins to the investors.
Features 3, 4, and 5 imply that investing in bitcoin, like "investing" in lottery tickets, is a very negative-sum game. Namely, at any time, the total amount that all investors have taken out is considerably less than what they have put into the scheme; the difference being the amount that the operators have taken out. Thus the investors, as a whole, are always in the red, and their collective loss only increases with time."
"In 2018, a team of Nature reporters and editors began documenting, in real time, the lives and experiences of two scientists at the University of Sheffield, UK. Alison Twelvetrees, a neuroscientist, and molecular biologist Daniel Bose are on a path to establishing their own research laboratories. They are also a married couple, and their stories â the highs and lows, the triumphs and tribulations â are told in a three-part Feature (and can be heard in a four-part Nature Podcast series).
The intention, with Ali and Danâs agreement, was to present their lives in science over a year or more. Documenting such a process is not very common in science reporting, where the emphasis is more often on describing results. Our aim was to chronicle the journey involved in becoming a principal investigator (PI). But neither we at Nature, nor Ali and Dan, knew whether they would be able to build up their research groups, or that the story would run for more than three years. In addition to other crises that arose, the pandemic would shut down their experiments.
The United Kingdomâs universities â like those of many countries â are powered by people such as Ali and Dan, who were employed as PIs on fixed-term contracts. In the United Kingdom, some 74,000 academic staff â out of a total of 223,000 â are on such contracts. In the smaller group of staff that do just research, 35,000 out of 50,000 are on fixed-term contracts, according to data from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency. For the aspiring academic researcher, such a precarious existence is, sadly, a rite of passage."
"Almost a year after releasing his wildly popular footage of muppet-like insects, Dr. Adrian Smith is back with another montage in incredibly slow motion. This similarly spectacular follow-upâwhich is shot at 6,000 frames per second with a macro lensâdocuments the unique flight maneuvers of seven moth species as they slowly lift into the air. Capturing both graceful wing movements and ungainly leg flailing, Smith records rare glimpses of the yellow underbelly of the Virginian tiger moth, the spiky mohawk of the white-dotted prominent, and the beautiful wood-nymphâs habit of scattering microscopic scales all with extraordinary detail. For more close-ups of moths, beetles, and other insects, head to Smithâs YouTube."
đčïž Computer game play reduces intrusive memories of experimental trauma via reconsolidation-update mechanisms (2015)
"Memory of a traumatic event becomes consolidated within hours. Intrusive memories can then flash back repeatedly into the mindâs eye and cause distress. We investigated whether reconsolidationâthe process during which memories become malleable when recalledâcan be blocked using a cognitive task and whether such an approach can reduce these unbidden intrusions. We predicted that reconsolidation of a reactivated visual memory of experimental trauma could be disrupted by engaging in a visuospatial task that would compete for visual working memory resources. We showed that intrusive memories were virtually abolished by playing the computer game Tetris following a memory-reactivation task 24 hr after initial exposure to experimental trauma. Furthermore, both memory reactivation and playing Tetris were required to reduce subsequent intrusions (Experiment 2), consistent with reconsolidation-update mechanisms. A simple, noninvasive cognitive-task procedure administered after emotional memory has already consolidated (i.e., > 24 hours after exposure to experimental trauma) may prevent the recurrence of intrusive memories of those emotional events."
"There has even been a government call for research proposals on âthe uniqueness of indigenous cows and the curative properties of cow urine, dung, and milk, including potential cancer treatments.â Enraged by this, five hundred scientists wrote a letter to the Modi government in 2020 asking for withdrawal of this call, to no avail. Unfortunately, several scientists are now having to include cow urine in their research proposals, as they believe this will raise their chances of government funding that is hard to come by. According to Arnab Bhattacharya from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), many of these papers are actually about nanoparticles.Â
This is the Indianisation of pseudo-science â a nationalism rooted in divisive faith-based politics that has come to the forefront in India, across sectors. However, this is not how it has always been. In the 1900s, pioneering scientists (often women) worked towards a different kind of Indianisation of science, one that was in service of the people of India.Â
Before gaumatra, it was neera.
Studying the properties of neera (nectar from toddy palm trees) was one of the defining projects of Kamala Bhavgatâs scientific career. Kamala Bhagvat (later Kamala Sohonie), one of Indiaâs earliest women PhDs, called neera Indiaâs national drink in the mid-20th century. She met Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India in the 1950s, and took up the study of neera at his suggestion. This work would later win her a Presidentâs Award. She found that neera contained sizeable amounts of vitamins B and C, as well as iron in stable forms. With her efforts, it became an economical and easily producible supplement to the Indian diet. To this day, pre-fermented neera is distributed by multiple state governments."
"By the 1990s, conservationists were beginning to worry again about the state of wildlife in these areas. While tiger numbers on paper increased in every quadrennial tiger census, ground realities were of concern. Settlements were mushrooming even inside sanctuaries and reserves. New encroachments were appearing and existing villages were expanding by girdling trees to kill them quietly without the noise of axes. Livestock numbers also grew. Cattle grazed within forests in large numbers. They competed with deer for forage and transmitted foot and mouth disease and anthrax to gaur, causing epidemics and local extinctions. The Central Indian wild buffalo, found only in Eastern Central India was driven to near extinction.Â
Unlike other âtiger statesâ, the states of Eastern Central India were lethargic about bringing more areas under the protection of wildlife sanctuaries or the focused management of Project Tiger. Maoist insurgency provided the perfect excuse to not do anything, and the mining industry funded bureaucratic and political reluctance to create the âinconvenienceâ of Protected Areas that would restrict forest clearances. As a result, the worldâs largest tract of sal forest, Saranda in Jharkhand, and adjoining forests in Odishaâs Keonjhar and Sundargarh were left to the mercy of fate. Once prime tiger habitats, these were turning into silent forests.
But on paper, tiger numbers always rose! This was made possible by a census methodology that counted tigers based on the shape of their left hind pugmarks. Devised by the Divisional Forest Officer, Palamau, J.W. Nicholson in 1934, this technique was refined by S. R. Choudhury in Similipal. In the 1970s, this was the most reliable scientific method that existed. Unfortunately, its results depended entirely on the expertise of the officers who compared the pugmark plaster casts. This gave unlimited scope for manipulation. Under pressure to show success, Forest Departments continued to show increasing trends in tiger numbers."
"The productivity of scientists working in a field that has recently won a high-profile award increases rapidly in the following decade. That is according to an analysis led by Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University in the US, which also finds that citations per person increase during that time as well. The ability to retain and attract scientists into the prize-winning field rises too.
The study was carried out using data from Wikipedia on 400 different scientific prizes â including the Nobel Prize, the Wolf Prize and the Turing Award â that were awarded 2900 times between 1970 and 2007. After cross-checking award information against prize webpages and news reports, the researchers assigned the prizes to scientific topics based on the winnersâ previous work and data from Microsoft Academic Graph, which classifies scientific topics.
The researchers then matched each prize-winning field with five non-prize-winning areas that had identical growth patterns in the decade prior to the award. These links were made using criteria related to productivity, citations as well as the movements of scientists in and out of the topics. The work covered more than 11,000 scientific topics in 19 disciplines.
The analysis shows that the growth of prize-winning fields deviates significantly from non-prize-winning areas, which continue to grow as expected. âWhen a topic is associated with a prize, that topic grows in an unexpected and extraordinary way the year following the prize and for at least the next 10 years,â says Uzzi."