Category Archives: Science

General Science

Weather, urban planning, and regional differences

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So, you may or may not be aware, Portland got some snow. Compared to my friends in Pittsburgh, it was about the same they were getting every few weekends. We got between 5-8 inches in the span of a day or so. The impact compared to the east coast city was absolutely insane. There were 500 accidents on Thursday night alone. The public transportation system was almost completely shut down and tomorrow may not be running – I’ll be working from home tomorrow because of that risk. I’ve seen more tire chains here than I have in my entire life having grown up in part of the Snow Belt. It’s amazing the differences.

The major highway between myself and Portland had multiple inches of snow standing on it after a full day with light snowing. I’ve never seen it before. There was actually a full lane missing because of it.

Why does this happen? Well, first Portland normally doesn’t get this type of snow, this was the most since 1971 or something like that. Second, they just don’t have the infrastructure for it. To buy enough salt or trucks to deal with this once in 30 year incident isn’t really responsible buying for a government.

Compared to Pittsburgh which deals with this sort of thing on a regular basis they have designed their infrastructure around dealing with snow or enabling people to get around it. Plus, they just drive through that stuff even if they shouldn’t because they have no choice. Unlike Portland, Pittsburgh doesn’t have as robust of a public transportation system, not that it mattered since the Max was down for a bulk of the weekend.

What does this tell us about urban planning? First, because of climate change, we need to begin thinking about how we’ll be experiencing more snow and extreme storms similar to this. How can we design our mass transit systems and our highway systems to be able to handle these extreme storms? In the case of the Max in Portland, I think they should install some sort of heating element into the switches, which apparently freeze over, so these don’t stop the Max from running.

I think the interesting thing about the snow here and in other locations is that it really brings out spaces that aren’t used by vehicles. This article really pointed it out for me: What Snows Tells Us About Creating Better Public Places. I think that it’s not just snow that points out the spaces that we to design better, but rain does so as well. Thinking back to the flash flooding we’d get in Austin and how that would impact moving around the city, we need to think about how to design these spaces to minimize the impact on people and the environment around the city.

Overall, we need to think about how to plan our cities better for new weather patterns. This is going to take some serious investment into our infrastructure. This will create jobs, but unfortunately mean we need to spend more tax money on our cities. Portland shouldn’t have been shut down from 5 inches of snow, especially not the public transportation, we need to figure out how to enable public transportation no matter what. People that don’t want to drive need that, plus parking in the city costs a ton more than parking. Let’s figure this out.

Science as Diplomacy, nothing new

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Healthcare is a big deal these days. In the US costs are soaring, arguably Obama’s legacy rests on his controversial law the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans have risked shutting down the government over the law. So, it’s no surprise when it’s in the news for other reasons. According to The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the group that publishes the prestigious journal Science, healthcare is now starting to impact diplomacy. Researchers from several different countries are creating novel ways to introduce addicts in both China and the US to the other’s style of medicine. In the US traditional Chinese methods are being experimented within clinics. While in China “western” medicine is being introduced in a very specific manner to address the same issues.

There are several organizations beyond the one I linked to above that deal with cross-cultural issues using either science, engineering, or healthcare. Organizations like Doctor’s Without Boarders work in many different parts of the world to bring care to those in need. These are volunteers that are doing good deeds to bring care to those that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it.

A similar organization is Engineer’s Without Boarders, which improves local conditions of a village or community through technology. For example, one of my friends I met Austin (now teaching at Harvard) would regularly visit a community in Mexico to install different solar panel arrays. This allowed them to have clean drinking water, power for mobile devices, cooking, and heating.

All of these activities help develop good will from one country to another. In fact, foreign exchange students that fully engage with their classmates are also great diplomats. I know that while I was abroad in Europe my friends decided that they would want to visit the US because I introduced them to what people in the US could be like rather than what they’d heard on the TV.

Interestingly, science and engineering have been used for diplomatic reasons for a very long time. I find the most interesting to be the period after World War II. Science played a huge part in rebuilding nearly all of western Europe as well as Japan. Why did we do that? Because we felt having Germany and Japan as allies against the Soviet Union was more important than kicking an enemy while they were down.

The German’s had invented the V2 rocket, which the US wanted to use for our own rockets as well as for nobler purposes. To gain the technical competence to build the rockets we decided to recruit as many Germans scientists as possible and bring them to the US. These were Nazi’s and some of them were likely war criminals, however because we needed them for the Cold War we decided to take advantage of them.

The trade wasn’t simply one way though. The US government encouraged companies to open their doors to European companies. This allowed our allies to rebuild their economy. In fact, the US business leaders like Deming to Japan, which eventually enabled Toyota to best the US automakers with techniques they turned down. These interactions dramatically changed how Europe and Japan evolved over the next few decades.

Diplomacy using science isn’t anything new. It was influential through the Marshall Plan after WWII and will continue to influence the rest of the world. It could be argued that our patent system enables the US prescription drug consumer to subsidize all other economies for their prescription drug use. This is an accidental type of diplomacy that is make the lives better for billions around the world.

I hope that in the future we will continue to influence the world through science and technology support. However, it is best if we help develop the technologies with locals rather than handing them a finished product. As the book Shock of the Old argues in many contexts the newest technology isn’t the best, the best technology is what does the job well enough that the people using the technology can understand and keep running.

Advances in Healthcare science will change our lives

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We are at the very beginnings of a healthcare industrial revolution. Perhaps, we’re beyond just the beginnings, we’ve seen huge leaps and bounds in diagnosis and treatment in the last 20 years. In my life time Aids has gone from being a quickly terminal disease to a disease where people are able to live relatively healthy lives which also last nearly as long as the average person. This is all without needing to have the sums of money of Magic Johnson.

This alone is something to celebrate, but there’s a lot more work to be done in easing the pain of suffering patients. Many Americans suffer from dibilitating heart diseases, which in some cases require heart transplants. Transplants are extremely risky procedures because the body can and does reject the new hearth. So, even after receiving the new heart, many patients are on immune system suppressing drugs. This increases their risk of infection and contracting other diseases, which can of course reduce the quality of life and inreases the risk of premature death due complications of the transplant. Recently, there’s been a serious break through in building a heart scaffold.

What is a heart scaffold? This is essentially a structure that allows your own cells to re-build your heart. In the case of this breakthrough, another heart had all of the specific cells that would have been rejeted by the transplant patient. The underlying structure remains because it is generic tissue that is transferrable between species. This break through allows patients to use their own stemcells and heart cells to convert the scaffolding into a function heart that is the patient’s own heart, not a transplant heart. This reduces the likelihood of rejection by the patient, eliminates the need for the immune suppressing drugs, and improves the results.

In the paragraph above, I said transferrable between species. The heart that is being used isn’t even a human heart, it’s a pig heart. This greatly increases the supply of hearts, because the number of hearts that can be transplanted is based on the number of peole willing to donate a heart and that are in good enough condition to be transplanted into another patient. We can hope for future advances for other types of organs as well.

This isn’t the only type of advancement we’re seeing along this vein. There is a pen that can draw cells on bone, and there are 3D printers that are being developed to print organs, like livers.

We live in exciting times for sciene in healthcare. We just need to figure out how to have medicare and insurers pay for the next.

The word "Terrorism" has jumped the Shark

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“You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means” – Princess Bride. Growing up terrorism meant something. It meant that someone out there could get to you in a very violent way designed to inspire fear in the general population. These events were rare, but horrifying. The first World Trade Center Bombing, Oklahoma City Bombing, The Unibomber, The Olympics bombing, the nerve gas in Tokyo Subway, etc… However, since 9/11 the word Terrorism has begun to change meaning. 9/11 of course was a terrorist attack and spawned may other attacks that were intended to cause damage and inspire fear in the populace. They worked, the US has spent billions of dollars in security measures that are ineffective at best, we’ve spent trillions of dollars on two wars, and who knows how many shadowy engagements using our special forces and drones.

It’s had many other consequences, the no fly lists, the removal of passengers for speaking Arabic or most recently Russian, hateful actions against both Muslims and the religiously unrelated Sikhs – they have turbans therefore must be a terrorist! – and of course more attacks. The disturbing trend however is the lack of even handedness in classifying an act as an act of terrorism. We’re seeing kids getting arrested and facing 20 years for making terrorist threats by posting rap lyrics on facebook. We have the Boston Bomber charged with terrorism (as he should be), but the guys with the guns in the movie theaters aren’t being charged with terrorism.

Most recently in the UK, there was an attack with a machete on a solider that’s being called Terrorism. Just yesterday there was an attack in France which happened in a similar fashion that’s also being called terrorism. Does terrorism mean any attack on non-Muslim by a Muslim? Why are these not politically motivated murders or even assassinations? That is what they are, is that terrorism? I don’t really think so. David Cameron is going to use these murders as an excuse to stamp out what he considers “hate speech” in the UK. Will this simply turn out to be an attack on Muslims in general?

Many of you out there are not fans of the blow back theory, where our actions in those regions are creating hostile agents that attempt to get revenge in any way possible. Initially, I was very skeptical of this stand point. However, as I’ve paid attention to the new more and expanded my sources of information, I completely accept this theory. I believe that there are clear parallels with the US response to hacking activities. The final piece of evidence I’ll provide in support of the theory is this great short read by Juan Cole:  “Who’s the Threat?” It’s a simple chart showing what countries have invaded each other since 1798 and the numbers killed by the “terrorist regions” or the west. Put in this larger context, hearing about drone strikes would be terrifying – especially since you have absolutely no recourse if your brother is “collateral damage” to a strike.

With that in mind, I think it’s paramount that we work to keep terrorism to mean an act of violence that’s more similar to the Boston Bombing than a brutal machete murder which was more of an attack directed against the state than the people of that state.

Europe in the Driver’s Seat

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Today I woke up to wonderful news. CERN has discovered the Higgs Boson particle, the so called “God” particle and the EU parliament has voted against ACTA. This is a great day for science and for freedom of expression.

What do these mean? Well, the Higgs particle is supposed to be the particle that gives everything else mass. It is the actual building block that everything in our universe is supposedly built upon. Why do I say supposedly? Well, the discovery is with a 5 sigma confidence. This is a really good, but in many cases they like to have 9 sigma. What does that mean in layman’s terms? So most testing is looking for a probability of less than 5% that this could happen by pure happenstance, or random error. This means that 95% of your data bear out the test your trying to answer. This happens around 2 sigma where sigma represents a standard deviation. Most products are made with safety specifications around 2 sigma, maybe three sigma (99.73%). The values that we’re talking about are so high, that you’re starting to get into the range of lottery winning (or plane accidents for that matter) likelihood for 5 or 9 sigma. With such high confidence you actually start to run into a greater likelihood of missing the actual signal than for it to not actually be there. You are being so strict on your data requirements that something that actually is the real signal is ignored by your data set.

Does this change my daily life? No not at all. We won’t be able to do anything functional at this level for more than a century if ever. We’re still working on the results of Einstein’s theories and how to apply them. We haven’t really gotten quantum computing working or any of the other cool things we’re working on (teleporting light and particles for example). However, it does give us a greater understanding of how the universe works and we’ve had to develop a lot of new technologies to detect these particles. The technologies could be very useful in the future for completely unrelated applications.

ACTA is a very different story. I’ve talked about it in the past and mentioned how much of a risk it was to the openness of the internet and to our society as a whole. The largest political body in Europe has decided to reject ACTA. The vote wasn’t even remotely close. Our hard work has paid off and the treaty is effectively dead. In the US it hasn’t been ratified by the Legislative branch and is really only going to be between the US and Morocco, which really isn’t going to be very effective. This is fantastic news and I’m extremely excited about this.

Unfortunately, we can’t just take a break, we have to keep working on the main reason why these laws are even brought up for vote in the first place. The USTR is currently negotiating the TPP which is starting to be viewed in a similar fashion as ACTA. I believe that we’re on the right path for stopping these types of legislation and treaties.

Way to go Europe in two major things.