Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:
- The Washington Post's and SciDev.net's differing outlooks on meteorology and Pakistani flood devastation
- A discussion of data deluges in the Washington Post and Science magazine
- Implications of IBM's artificial-intelligence Watson tour de force performance on the TV show Jeopardy!
- Weather extremes and climate as seen in the popular press
- Vaccine anti-science hysteria as engaged at the Wall Street Journal and City Journal
AGU journal article: Pakistan flood controversy
A forthcoming article in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Review Letters has stimulated some reporting at the Washington Post—and some controversy at SciDev.net.
For context, the Post's story "Devastating 2010 Pakistan floods highlight difficulties in sounding alarm" summarizes last summer's catastrophe:
On the day of the heaviest downpour in northern Pakistan, July 29, ten inches of monsoon rain pounded the largest city in the area, Peshawar. The subsequent floods overwhelmed the country, inundating an area about the size of Italy. Two thousand people drowned, and 20 million more—12 percent of Pakistan's population—were displaced. The disaster also destroyed billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure, crops and livestock.
The forthcoming journal article carries the title "Were the 2010 Pakistan floods predictable?" The Post reports that it will say that if data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting "had been properly analyzed, Pakistan could have been warned more than a week ahead of the calamity." The Post quotes lead author Peter Webster of Georgia Tech declaring that there was an "80 percent probability [of severe rain] eight to nine days out."
The Post continues: "The incident highlights both the growing sophistication of computer programs to predict extreme weather and the difficulties in communicating that information to an anxious public." The article reports that an official from the European weather center said that his organization has neither the resources for, nor the mission of, doing anything more than running "continuous global weather simulations" and posting daily summaries online "for members of the World Meteorological Association, which includes Pakistan, to use as they see fit."
But the Post also quotes Arif Mahmood, director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, in an interview from Islamabad:
Mahmood lamented the information gap that left potentially lifesaving data sitting unnoticed on computers in England. "Nobody informed us," he said.
The Post also explains that "Webster has already shown that effective flood-warning systems can be built in the developing world":
After extreme flooding devastated low-lying Bangladesh in 1998, Webster developed a flood-warning system for that country. Data from the European center flow to Webster's group, which passes it on to non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh. From there, warnings propagate along cellphone calling trees to reach remote areas, Webster said. Public education programs, which include religious leaders, have primed the population to move themselves and their livestock to higher ground.
The system got its first robust test in 2007, when heavy floods inundated much of the country again. By all accounts, the system excelled. "Nobody was drowned, and the savings [in the flooded regions] was $400 to $500 per household," said Webster. "That's about the annual salary there."
The Post article goes on to attribute the 2010 problems to insufficient funding. But the SciDev.net article presents the story in a different light, starting with the headline: "Pakistani scientists reject flood criticism." It says that the Webster et al. paper uses data that were available "five days before the deluges began" and that the paper "argues that the floods themselves could also have been predicted if [these] data had been fed into a model that took into account the local terrain." Then SciDev.net continues:
The study blamed the lack of a cooperation between the EU centre and Pakistan. It also said that Pakistan's own meteorological department failed to predict the downpours.
But Arif Mahmood, director-general of the meteorological department, told SciDev.Net: "We reject that theory. It is against the spirit of meteorological forecasting research. In weather-forecasting sciences it is easy to say something after the event."
SciDev.net also quotes Ajmal Shad, director of the flood forecasting division of the Pakistan meteorological department: "The AGU study results are a concocted story. Both the EU consortium and the Pakistan Meteorological Department are members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the data could have been shared through that forum."
Near the end, SciDev.net quotes Shad continuing: "I think they are responsible for large-scale human miseries in Pakistan."
Science magazine special issue: "huge influx" of data
With what could almost have been a publicity boost from the Washington Post, the 11 February special issue of Science offers a special collection of articles—most of them outside the paywall—seeking "to provide a broad look at the issues surrounding the increasingly huge influx of research data."
Science's introduction says that "two themes appear repeatedly: Most scientific disciplines are finding the data deluge to be extremely challenging, and tremendous opportunities can be realized if we can better organize and access the data."
The recent Post article, headlined in the paper edition "Digital data now comes in exabytes," focuses on one of the Science articles, a behind-the-paywall piece headlined "The World's Technological Capacity to Compute, Store, and Communicate Information."
The Post introduces readers to the exabyte—a billion gigabytes. Worldwide digital storage capacity, after first outstripping nondigital only in 2002, by 2007 represented 94% of storage overall, and added up to 276 exabytes. For imagining that unimaginable quantity, the Post offers a mental image: "a stack of CDs—each holding an album's worth of digital music—shooting from the top of your desk to 50 000 miles beyond the moon."
The Post cites Science, but unfortunately fails to mention the articles in the special, free collection. Here's a sampling of those, slanted for physicists' likely interest:
The "Perspective" commentary "Metaknowledge" comes with a summary meriting quoting in full:
The growth of electronic publication and informatics archives makes it possible to harvest vast quantities of knowledge about knowledge, or "metaknowledge." We review the expanding scope of metaknowledge research, which uncovers regularities in scientific claims and infers the beliefs, preferences, research tools, and strategies behind those regularities. Metaknowledge research also investigates the effect of knowledge context on content. Teams and collaboration networks, institutional prestige, and new technologies all shape the substance and direction of research. We argue that as metaknowledge grows in breadth and quality, it will enable researchers to reshape science—to identify areas in need of reexamination, reweight former certainties, and point out new paths that cut across revealed assumptions, heuristics, and disciplinary boundaries.
The news article headlined "Is There an Astronomer in the House?" tells of an "unusual collaboration" at Harvard that takes advantage of "visualization software developed for use with medical scans such as MRIs to analyze astronomical data sets." A similar effort at the University of Cambridge reportedly relies on "the surprising similarity between images of tissue samples and the cosmos: Spotting a cancerous cell buried in normal tissue is like finding a single star in a crowded stellar field."
The "Perspective" commentary "Climate Data Challenges in the 21st Century" calls for "a new paradigm of more open, user-friendly data access . . . to ensure that society can reduce vulnerability to climate variability and change."
The news article "Rescue of Old Data Offers Lesson for Particle Physicists" laments the absence of any "standard format for sharing or storing information after an experiment shuts down" and the fact that old "data can end up scattered across the globe, stored haphazardly on old tapes, or lost entirely." Improved data archiving, the article says, is becoming a particle physics priority.
The news article "May the Best Analyst Win" introduces an Australian startup called Kaggle that "is exploiting the concept of 'crowdsourcing' in a novel way." Here's an excerpt from the article's summary:
Despite often modest prizes, the competitions have so far attracted more than 3000 statisticians, computer scientists, econometrists, mathematicians, and physicists from approximately 200 universities in 100 countries, Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom boasts. And the wisdom of the crowds can sometimes outsmart those offering up their data. In the HIV contest, entrants significantly improved on the efforts of the research team that posed the challenge.
Watson, Jeopardy!, artificial intelligence
What's the cosmic significance of this week's demonstration of artificial intelligence by the IBM robot Watson, which beat the two all-time-best contestants on Jeopardy!, the TV trivia-knowledge quiz show?
I missed the telecasts themselves, but I liked a commercial explaining a bit about Watson. For oblique context, it presented an old clip of Groucho Marx exclaiming something like, "I shot an elephant in my pajamas! How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know!" The commercial's point: Watson can sort quickly through ambiguity to discern relevance and fetch information.
What does it all mean? In answer, the New York Times's John Markoff has offered both a Science Times front-page piece and a Section A front-page article.
The Wall Street Journal has offered an op-ed by Ray Kurzweil, who says it means that hereafter, it'll be "more difficult for anyone to argue that there are human tasks that computers will never achieve." Kurzweil predicts that "Watson-like 'natural language processing'" will "show up in Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years." His closing line calls to mind the "singularity" concept with which he's associated: "Ultimately, we will vastly extend and expand our own intelligence by merging with these tools of our own creation."
A letter in the New York Times from Bill Hibbard, an emeritus scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, may be worth noting too. In the Watson story, Hibbard sees not just Jeopardy! the TV show, but jeopardy the status.
Watson, Hibbard says, has been "presented as another of an endless series of prosthetics, spurring human minds on to their next great challenge." However, "the key point is that this cycle will change fundamentally when we invent a prosthetic with a better mind than ours," for then "it will be the prosthetic rather than the human mind that faces the next challenge." Hibbard notes that recent writings try to reassure the public that artificial intelligence is not such a threat. "But the threat is real," he warns, "and we'd better have sane public policy to face it before it arrives."
Extreme simplification on weather extremes
Is it time—in fact, did it ever stop being time—for newspeople to remember that simplification has costs?
A pair of news stories last weekend, one in the New York Times and one in the Wall Street Journal, offered starkly contrasting opinions about extreme weather events—and in both cases claimed the special authority of science. Please compare these assertions:
- Excerpt from the Times article: "Global warming is most likely responsible, at least in part, for the rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events—like floods, storms and droughts—since warmer surface temperatures tend to produce more violent weather patterns, scientists say."
- Headline and subheadline from the WSJ article: "The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder: The latest research belies the idea that storms are getting more extreme."
It's not news, of course, that these two papers differ concerning the effects of human activity on climate. But as Gavin Schmidt notes in the new RealClimate posting "Going to extremes," the currently expanding public "conversation about extreme events and their potential relationship to climate change" engages a complex issue that is "not well-suited to soundbite quotes and headlines."
Schmidt offers what he calls "some very basic, but oft-confused points":
- Not all extremes are the same. Discussions of 'changes in extremes' in general without specifying exactly what is being discussed are meaningless. A tornado is an extreme event, but one whose causes, sensitivity to change and impacts have nothing to do with those related to an ice storm, or a heat wave or cold air outbreak or a drought.
- There is no theory or result that indicates that climate change increases extremes in general. This is a corollary of the previous statement—each kind of extreme needs to be looked at specifically—and often regionally as well.
- Some extremes will become more common in future (and some less so). ...
- Attribution of extremes is hard. There are limited observational data to start with, insufficient testing of climate model simulations of extremes, and (so far) limited assessment of model projections.
It seems to me that these points add up to a caution against oversimplification, whether or not newsfolk will listen.
Vaccine antiscience, cont.
It's not physics, but it's antiscience, and it matters. And this time it's not only about that bogus autism scare, though that does figure. The online version of the Wall Street Journal this week highlights an opinion piece from City Journal headlined "The Whooping Cough's Unnecessary Return: Vaccination fears allow a once-vanquished killer to stalk California's children."
The authors, Paul Howard and James R. Copland of the Manhattan Institute, begin by summarizing what they call a "public-health calamity":
Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public-health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine's supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all.
Paradoxically—and citing statistics—the authors trace the calamity to "the affluent and well-educated, presumably because those groups have greater access to vaccine pseudoscience" underlying misinformation that, the authors charge, litigators have used to extract jury awards.
Looking decades back, the authors indict two hysteria-generating events: a later-debunked "1974 British study that appeared to link the whooping-cough vaccine to rare brain injuries" and the 1982 documentary Vaccine Roulette, which, they charge, "stoked fears" but won an Emmy despite being scientifically unfounded. "By the mid-1980s," the authors write, "plaintiffs' lawyers were seeking billions in damages, and the price of the whooping-cough vaccine shot up 10,000 percent."
In response to the ensuing near-bankruptcy of the vaccine industry, as the authors characterize it, "Congress stepped in and created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which took all childhood vaccine cases out of the courts and placed them before a special judicial panel." In the quarter-century since then, the authors write, "the VICP has become one of Washington's rare success stories, offering rapid, fair compensation for the small number of cases in which vaccines have caused serious or life-threatening side effects," and allowing vaccine innovation to flourish, leading to "new vaccines to prevent cervical cancer and safer versions of older vaccines."
Now, however, the authors warn, new litigation threatens the stability of immunization practices. They predict that if the Supreme Court "agrees that cases based on alleged design defects aren't covered by the VICP," not only will there ensue "a flood of new lawsuits . . . making specious claims about the links between vaccination and autism," but vaccine manufacturing will "once again be at risk, and public fears of vaccination would intensify."
They close by reminding readers that before "the advent of the whooping-cough vaccine, the debilitating disease struck hundreds of thousands of children annually and killed thousands of them," and that it's quite possible for herd immunity to decline, with a consequent rise in the incidence of disease. By shunning vaccines and ignoring science, they declare, "well-intentioned parents hurt both their children and their communities."
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
