Scientists flying high

(Written on July 1, 2009 but uploaded later)

I’m writing this at 30,000 feet on the way from San Francisco to London where the World Conference of Science Journalists is taking place, although I’ll only catch the last day of that meeting on the way to other places. Being on the plane reminds me of how much flight plays a role in the lives of scientists. They fly so much because they need the face-to-face contact that builds the relationships and eases the communication that moves science forward. Here are a few stories about scientists I know and their relationships to planes and air travel.

A. I’d like to invent a device that one particular colleague could wear on his lapel, and he always has lapels, that shows the current update of how many miles he has flown this year. It’s not possible to have a conversation with him that doesn’t include some proud declaration of how miles he has accrued. The device would automatically interrogate his frequent flyer account, grab the latest number of miles, and perhaps proclaim in glowing ultra-bright LEDs, “I’m 178,452 miles douchier than last year”. He’s not alone in this behavior and there would probably be a market for this device, even with such a self-immolating message. I wonder if he’s tweeting his mileage status.

B. Another colleague is so concerned about the energy costs of travel for science that he is doing everything he can to reduce his personal energy consumption. He has charts and data, all available online of course, and has taken to not eating meat for periods–because of the energy savings–started cycling, traveling by bus or train to other cities for conferences instead of driving or flying. He was recently faced with the need to fly from the United States to the United Kingdom for a job interview and needed to find some large energy savings to be able to meet his energy consumption goals. At a recent conference he asked if anybody in the audience would be prepared to make behavioral changes to save some energy which they would effectively donate to his cause. I realize as I write this that he was essentially building a personal cap and trade system for energy consumption. I admire his discipline and know I couldn’t replicate it. But can his dedication and approach scale up to larger communities?

C. A prominent physics blogger writes at length about identifying the very best seat on each model of plane that he regularly boards to fly between the United States and Europe. He’ll explain why this seat makes such a difference to his flying experience, and is close to obsessive about getting that particular seat. Of course, he won’t tell you which seat it is and won’t leave quite enough information for you to deduce which it is, in fear of somebody else following his plan and grabbing that seat before him.

D. Another colleague first experienced the online wi-fi network aboard a major carrier. What did he do with it? He called into a weekly videoconference that his colleagues were in. Whereas most scientists see a nine hour flight as a chance to get some work done without interruption, he jumped right back into the collaborative research he’d be doing 30,000 feet lower.

E. That same guy berates his graduate students if they ever need to check luggage. Checking luggage introduces inefficiency into travel that they ought to be smart enough to avoid. The frequent flyer I mentioned above feels a personal disappointment if he gets to the end of a trip and hasn’t worn every item in his bag precisely once. Make sure you don’t stagger near him with an overfull cup of coffee because you could really wreck his day with one small slip.

Each of us has behaviors in flying, although I often see scientists configuring their flight environments to make sure they make their work lives as efficient as possible. That’s fair enough, but now that I’m at the end of this essay, I’m going to pull out a book that has nothing to do with work, try to find a way to put my feet, if not up, somewhere that my legs won’t cramp over the next eight hours, and try to get some sleep, because I don’t seem to take quite as much pride in being jetlagged as so many of my colleagues.

Dark and light

Sitting in another meeting room, the guest speaker decides she wants to show some slides. A flurry of scientists whirl about the room pressing buttons haphazardly to make the screen descend from the ceiling, to ensure the projector is actually plugged in and working… Then comes the tricky part, lowering the light levels so that people can still write notes and see each other, but also see the projections on the screen. The light goes off, people titter at this quite expected eventuality, the lights come back on even brighter than before, and after a few more fumbling button pressings, dimmer slidings, and switch flickings, everybody is set. At least until the speaker needs to write on the whiteboard to draw a supplemental diagram.

In the laser lab in the next building over, my colleagues face lighting challenges. Much of the experimenting needs to be done in darkness, but the setting up and adjustment of lenses, beam splitters, laser cavities, vacuum systems, cooling pipes, and the rest requires nice strong light to handle the delicate, fiddly parts. The trouble is that most of the material in the room, including the optical table everything is mounted on, is made of reflective metal. Having good, bright lighting that lets you see everything, and isn’t going to cause strong reflections on most of your surfaces–which make it harder to see fine details—is tricky. You don’t even have the luxury of being able to light from directly above, because of the racks of equipment feeding power cables and electronic signals and sensors down to the optical table. When working in the dark, these physicists have gotten used to looking at certain things from the corners of their eyes, where the cells are more susceptible to dim lights, even though it’s at the expense of color vision. Looking right at something is the best way to make it disappear in a dark room, and even though they’re physicists, that has nothing to do with Schrodinger’s cat—it’s just a function of biology.

On another part of campus, a friend is studying photoautotrophism. In this instance, her photosynthetic bacteria need both the environment of a sterile lab for replicability and a source of light that mimics sunshine. Fortunately, there is a whole range of lightbulbs that give different variants of daylight spectra suitable for the purpose. There is a market for lightbulb with exotic spectra for uses in science labs, but also in spinoff applications for experimental photography.

Science’s ascetic aesthetic

What does science look like? What do scientists look like? What do scientists’ workspaces look like? If you have a sense of any of these, it probably confirms to a deserved stereotype. Scientists like to claim that they don’t care about fashion, but that’s not quite true. They don’t care much about what’s fashionable, except to avoid it, and in doing so create a strong aesthetic of their own.

This aesthetic manifests itself in everything from architecture and office furniture to design and dress sense. Yes, that’d be the concrete box buildings to socks with sandals. The anti-einsturzende neubaten, if you will, and stuck in the same era.

So how does this aesthetic come about? Based on more conversations than I care to count, it comes down to something pretty simple: Scientists want to project an image that they really are all about the science, and that anything else is a distraction, a diminution of their aims. Scientists have become so acculturated by this idea that they have practically become ascetics, rejecting anything that might signify a motivation other than scientific research. Their environments and accoutrements lean toward bland simplicity, self-abnegating and almost monastic.

“We,” the scientists say in my imagination, “have much more important things on our minds than fashion. And so we will make sure that we can never be accidentally mistaken for subjecting ourselves to the whims of trends, which have no logical or rational reason for coming about.

“We find our beauty in the world of the mind and, to signify that to the each other and be part of the club, deny ourselves the so-called luxuries. We stick to the essentials of function and find ourselves empowered by our asceticism.”

Of course, there is no evidence that this really helps anything.

Everybody within the scientific community over a certain age knows what happened to Carl Sagan, not only for daring to try to communicate beyond his peers, but also for wearing his famous turtlenecks, which were out of place within the scientific aesthetic, but well accepted at that time as a fashion option within broader society.

And yet, Sagan did more for the public appreciation of science, and more for encouraging students to study science than just about any other scientist of the era.

In a strange reversal, it is only a matter of time before the hipsters accidentally adopt the scientific aesthetic, having already passed through the turtleneck phase. Then it would be race between them to reject it all, except that the scientific culture won’t have even noticed the hipsters until they are long gone. And not just that passing fashion, but the whole tribe.

It’s fair to ask why it even matters what fashion choices scientists might make. The issue is that the ascetic aesthetic pervades not just clothing but all kinds of choices about the scientific environment and plays a big part in determining the public image of science. Most surprisingly, it is a decisively anti-creative choice given that science is fundamentally a creative pursuit.

Even the constraints of this aesthetic might not necessarily damage the creative scientific process. But they do damage the image of science among non-scientists. And so we end where we began, looking for an answer to questions about what does science/a scientist/a scientist’s workplace look like. Scientists have a well-developed intracultural aesthetic. It helps them convince each other that they are serious about their work. But it doesn’t do much to convince the rest of the world to play along.

About scienvironments

There is a hidden world of science. It’s right there to see but nobody particularly notices it. Non-scientists don’t live in the world of science and so rarely have an opportunity to observe it and scientists are so embedded in their world that they don’t notice this world. This hidden world is the environment of science. It includes the places, objects, behaviors, and cultures of science that exist outside the realm of what would conventionally be called “the science” that scientists perform, but is inextricably linked to the science. There is a complex interplay between “the science” and the “environments of science”.

Of course, there is not just one environment for all science. There are vast differences between fields of science, locations of laboratories, and global cultures. But perhaps there is something characteristic of science environments. And perhaps those environments contribute in some essential way to the practice of science. Do science environments arise from the scientific culture, or do they environments help build and reinforce scientific cultures?

These are all topics and questions that this blog will try to address. I realize that it’s an area I’ve been skirting around for a long time, and has influenced a large number of stories in my day time job editing symmetry magazine. As an ex-research physicist who came to gain a different view of science as a journalist, the environments of science and how they are shaped by and shape scientific endeavors have become clearer.

The scope will be fairly broad, driven mainly by examples, from which I hope to see various recurrent themes. I’ll be exploring connections between science and physical space, tools, architecture, design, objects, fashion, location, sensory experiences, processes, and cultural constructs. Many of the examples will be from the world of physics, as it is the area I have strongest connections with but I will be looking for guest commentaries from others that concentrate on other scientific fields. For now, I’m not going to try to be comprehensive, but just observe, describe, and conjecture about the environments of science.

Week 10/11: The TwitterLamp

“This micro-knowledge of others has been termed ‘ambient awareness’ by sociologists, a new kind of social proprioception or ethereal limb, and I learned to flex it with ease.”

New York magazine, April 5, 2009, regarding Facebook status updates

We are bombarded with information, most of which we have relatively little conscious awareness of as we go about our everyday lives. Signs, advertisements, piped music, and video displays all litter our environment, coming into our conscious minds typically only as we need or want the information presented by those sources. And yet, we still pick up some sense of what is happening through their ambient presence.

Recent Web tools make this idea of ambient information presence a little more explicit (and more useful) through sources like a Facebook news stream, or a twitter stream. By simply scanning these sources, we are able to get a sense of the lives of groups of people. With these tools we get a sense not through partial reception of the information, as for environmental background sources, but through partial information supplied in these streams.
However, these new Web tools also exist primarily through interfaces that require conscious actions to access. How do you know what is happening in your streams without going to a Web site, mobile device, or some other interface? Some desktop twitter clients play a sound or show an alert for updates, but that is a fairly intrusive action, and can be distracting. How can you gain a semi-conscious sense of twitter activity?
I wanted to play with this idea of ambient awareness further and create something that gives a purely ambient sense of stream activity.
The TwitterLamp

The device I decided to create monitors my twitter stream and lights up different colors depending on the levels of status updates, @replies, and direct messages in my stream. The three color channels (blue, green, and red) light up at different intensities depending on how many new updates there have been since the last reset. A press button resets the counts.
The TwitterLamp will sit your desk glowing more intensely blue as more updates arrives, more green as you get more @replies, and with more red in the mix as you get direct messages. To make the simplest version, I decided to run this via a USB cable to the computer, which will supply power and the data needed to light the lamp.
Some features
– The color channels can be reassigned easily.
– The color channels can be modified to trigger from other kinds of levels such as occurrences of words in an RSS feed, number of new emails present in various email accounts, etc.
– The intensity can be scaled depending on your twitter activity. For example, if you only get the occasional direct message but you care about them a lot when they arrive, direct messages can turn the red channel to full intensity, whereas the blue updates might require a few hundred updates to reach full intensity.
– Updates can be scheduled at whatever intervals you choose so as not to use up the regular allotment of 100 API calls per hour.
– The hardware is small so it can be mounted inside various kinds of lamps. The one shown above is a blown glass lamp from IKEA. That particular lamp is larger than I would have chosen but it was there and handy, so I decided to use it for the prototype.
How it works

Building a device like this from scratch would take considerable effort but modern microprocessor hardware is incredibly powerful and easy to use. I decided to use the Arduino platform for the hardware, with the closely integrated Processing programming environment for running the code. 
The hardware is shown in the photo to the right. It’s really pretty straightforward, with the Arduino board connected via a USB cable to my computer, with the solderless breadboard there for prototyping, with a few LEDs and a pushbutton switch. For best brightness with the components I had on hand, I used pairs of each color of LED. In the image, the blue and red are illuminated to indicate the presence of new friend updates and some direct messages. The green LEDs are turned off because there are no @replies at that time of the photo. 
The Processing code uses the twitter4j library to access the Twitter API and read the streams. It determines how many updates are in the streams, changes the appropraite levels and sends those levels out through the USB connection. It also constantly monitors for a button press, ready to reset the counts as needed. The code can compile to a standalone lightweight java application that runs unobtrusively but also gives numerical counts of the updates, with times to the next updates, if you choose to open the app.
The Arduino code does the conversion from the data coming from the computer and illuminates the LEDs in response. It also monitors the button and sends the reset signal back to the Processing code.
Possible updates/improvements
– Make a version of this using the blinkM programmable LED (it’s overkill but means that little hardware beyond the Arduino and the blinkM are required). That will require a different programming protocol. Using the blinkM would also make it very easy to intergrate other types of information such as a pulsing or color variation to indicate information beyond the three basic channels.
– The button can be wired so that pressing down on the light causes a reset instead of having a regular button that needs to be pressed.
– The TwitterLamp could communicate wirelessly with either your own laptop, or via a Web server, and operated on batteries or a powerpack so that it isn’t tethered to a specific computer.
– The current system counts updates only from when the Processing code is started. A future version will store the most recently accessed information in the Arduino or in a file on the computer so that switching it on will immediately show updates since the TwitterLamp was last operated.
– Add a fourth yellow channel for new followers. (This might be a little odd as it’s not really an independent color from RGB, but perhaps specific physical placement within the globe might allow this to be differentiated–a spot at the top of the globe, or a yellow rim of light around the bottom, perhaps.)
– The software currently operates using the twitter4j library, which is most useful for me because it handles the authorizations very easily. However, some of the functions don’t seem to be working properly within Processing because, I think, the twitter4j library relies on a version of java more recent than is implemented in Processing. If I figure out how to do the authorization myself, I’ll just use the twitter API direct. (I had never programmed in java before this project so I’m not quite up to handling the authorization process yet! Last time I programmed was 15 years ago so the whole world of programming on the Web is new to me.)

Week 9: A return to electronics–setting up

As a kid, I used to spend a lot of time inventing and building electronic circuits. I could have told you immediately that yellow-violet-orange meant a 47 kilo-ohm resistor. Alas, those details have slipped into the murky depths of time, but I have regained an interest in electronics recently because I’ve seen how powerful and easy-to-use modern microprocessors are.

In particular, I’ve been looking into the Arduino microprocessor (shown right) as the core of a few applications I want to build. 
But before I leap into more complex projects, I want to re-acquaint myself with building electronic circuits again. All of my electronics gear is back in Australia so I needed to do quite a lot of shopping to get myself all set up again. After a very long time spent wandering the confusing aisles of Fry’s (the handiest place for this kind of gear, even if not the best), I came home with quite a haul.

As a starting point, I just wanted to have a reliable 5V power supply available for building circuits. This should be easy (and is in hindsight), but it took a while to figure out precisely how to do it. I opted for an off-shelf power adaptor that has a switch to select voltages in 1.5V increments up to 12V. 
I grabbed a prototyping breadboard to build the circuits on, and a handful of components to have a properly regulated power supply. The cheap power adaptor has settings for 4.5V and 6V but nothing for 5V so I definitely needed to do something to give a reliable 5V supply. Of course, those settings are very loose as it is and if you measure the voltage across the supply without any load or a very small load, the actual voltage is much higher than that stated. 
The first problem was getting power from the power adaptor to the breadboard. I found a convenient socket for a power adaptor cord that I could attach a couple of wires to the back off and run them to the power terminals on the breadboard. That way I didn’t need to hack apart anything in the power adaptor and I can still use it for other purposes.
With power to the breadboard, I just needed to regulate the voltage. The solution was the very convenient LM7805 voltage regulator (which only took me 20 minutes to find at Fry’s because they have a supplier that relabels everything in some obscure code that I only deciphered once finding a full catalog).  You can essentially apply any voltage from 7-20 volts or so to the chip, and pull off 5V+/-0.25V. Add a few capacitors on the input and output sides of the chip to smooth out the voltage under load, and it’s all set. 
Just to test there was power working properly, I just drove a single LED (via a resistor to avoid the characteristic pungent smell of frying electronics that I recall from undergraduate laboratory classes). And here is the result. As you can see, the LED is lit and my digital multimeter is showing a voltage of 4.99V. A perfect start to getting back into electronics.

Next was a simple circuit to make sure I have things working. Using the classic 555 timer integrated circuit, I decided to make a small sound generator. It produces a sawtooth pattern with the frequency depending on the values of resistors and capacitors in the circuit. I don’t have very many components on hand so I had to steal the capacitors from the voltage regulator for now, and just used the resistors I had to hand, but the frequencies come out in the audible range and different resistors do indeed create different tones.
Yes, this is a pretty boring outcome so far, but it’s amazing how much I am re-learning just in the process of getting all the gear together and setting it up! My Arduino board should be arriving soon, and I have the Processing language installed and I am playing with it so that I can make my computer talk to the microprocessor, all on the way to a fun application I’ll write about as I get further along.

Week 8: How twitter might change news

Well, I’m not exactly keeping up a weekly project every week but I thought I might as well number sequentially and in some weird dream land I might catch up to the actual week number… but anyway…

This week, the creation is another essay. It might seem like cheating a little but I think that writing this particular analysis was creative in its own way. I absorbed myself in a process and learned a lot and then created by distilling it.

Essentially I watched a news story break over twitter, and then inspired by a comment about the fast news cycle, started to think about the implications for how people will react to conventional fast-breaking news stories in the future. I asked a question about it, which provoked some discussion, and that led to me fleshing out my thoughts in this essay.

The essay is over on Cathemeral Thinking but this is how it starts:

On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident.

I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to share my experience about how this is an example of ways in which somebody can follow news in a format completely different from conventional news reporting. This experience is, obviously, peculiar to me, in that only I follow my set of twitter users, and this is my personal reaction to it. However, I believe that this kind of process is starting to occur for many more people and it changes the way those people will use conventional news reporting.

For the rest, jump over here.

What does twitter mean for breaking news stories? The ISS near-collision case study

On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident.

I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to share my experience about how this is an example of ways in which somebody can follow news in a format completely different from conventional news reporting. This experience is, obviously, peculiar to me, in that only I follow my set of twitter users, and this is my personal reaction to it. However, I believe that this kind of process is starting to occur for many more people and it changes the way those people will use conventional news reporting.

Continue reading What does twitter mean for breaking news stories? The ISS near-collision case study