#TBT Electron Mass Necklace

This is a Kokoba beta release. It was originally an item for the Mad Scientists of Etsy!'s monthly challenge at some point in 2013: an item inspired by the discovery of a new species of frog that is the world's smallest vertebrate.

Image courtesy Christopher Austin, LSU

I'm still quite pleased with how it came out.

Electron radius necklace by Kokoba Jewelry

I tried to stick with frog-y colors, and the green aventurine beads you see there are 8 mm in diameter: around the same size of Paedophryne amauensis (which is technically an average of 7.7 mm in length). And since we're talking about something really, really small, what better way to celebrate it than with a subatomic particle?

Skeptical Saturday: Bad Charity Facebook Infographic

I've seen this making the rounds in my personal Facebook feed recently:

And while the spirit of the post is right—before any large charitable donation, you'll probably want to think a bit and do some research before you donate—everything else is...questionable.

First and foremost, I want people to stop calling Salvation Army a charity. They're not. They're a religious proselytizing group who actively campaign against LGBTQ+ rights whenever possible. There's a good reason that noted queer rights supporter Macklemore didn't name drop the charity in his paean to secondhand clothes shopping. I refuse to even dignify it with any further discussion here.

But secondly, if you run this information via Snopes, you get something...interesting. Turns out it's...mostly outdated and inaccurate!

Anyway, here is what Charity Navigator has to say about all of the charities in this image:

Ronald McDonald House: 4 star rating; CEO receives no compensation.

Lions Club International: 4 star rating; CEO receives no compensation from the organization (but some from affiliates)

Veterans of Foreign Wars Foundation (what I assume that image means by "The Veterans of Foreign Wars"): 3 star rating; president receives no compensation from the organization (but some from affiliates, as does the former president). They get 4 stars for transparency but only 2 for financials.

St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital: 3 star rating; current CEO receives around $1.3 million compensation annually (accounting for just 0.13% of expenses) and CEO of ALSAC receives around $600,000 annual compensation (accounting for just 0.06% of expenses). They have a full 4 stars on transparency and 3 on financials.

World Vision: 2 star rating; president receives $447,000 in annual compensation (accounting for just 0.04% of expenses). The CEO tried to do a good and awesome thing by allowing Christians in same-sex relationships and marriages to work for them, but then chickened out after a whopping total of 48 hours, so...

Make-A-Wish Foundation: 4 star rating; president and CEO (same person) receives around $220,000 in compensation annually (accounting for 5.31% of expenses).

So most of the "good" charities are good. World Vision has a ding on Charity Navigator in their financial score, not in their transparency score.

Now, on to the baddies:

The image says UNICEF, but when you nose around a bit, the comment about "CEO having use of a Rolls-Royce" seems to point to the U. S. Fund for UNICEF specifically. It just so happens to have a 4 star rating on Charity Navigator and the organization actually dispels this Rolls-Royce and millionaire myth right on their damn page.

Anonymous emails claim that the U.S. Fund for UNICEF's CEO earns more than $1 million and has use of a Rolls Royce. These assertions are false. 

As President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, Caryl Stern earns $521,820. She does not have a company car; she drives a 2007 Prius which she purchased in 2009.

March of Dimes: 2 star rating; president receives around $500,000 compensation annually, which accounts for 0.24% of expenses. And while they have a full 4 stars for transparency, they have a 1 star rating on financial performance, which was the lowest financial score for any of the named organizations.

Again, the image is unclear, so I assume they mean United Way Worldwide. Otherwise there are hundreds of different United Ways in different cities listed on Charity Navigator, each with their own individual ranking. United Way Worldwide has a 3 star rating: 4 stars for transparency but only 2 for financials. The president and CEO (the same person) receives $764,000 annually for compensation (0.84% of expenses). However, there is a good chance that your local United Way has a different score. Many local ones have strong 4 star ratings.

The American Red Cross: 3 star rating; the president and CEO (same person) receives $562,000 annually in compensation (which accounts for 0.01% of expenses). 4 stars for transparency, 2 for financials.

Goodwill Industries: not listed on Charity Navigator, but they've also addressed this meme-ified accusation head-on:

The message then quotes erroneous information and salary figures for several nonprofit organizations’ chief executives, including a reference to a so-called “Goodwill CEO and Owner Mark Curran, who profits $2.3 million a year.”  Jim Gibbons is the CEO of Goodwill Industries International...

Goodwill Industries International earns $5 billion revenue per year, and we spend about 83 cents of every dollar on programs and services for people in need. This is a very healthy number in the nonprofit world, and a solid indicator of our commitment to good stewardship of your donations.

Should you think before you donate? Yes, absolutely. Should "thinking" involve a mindless image shared a thousand times over in your Facebook news feed? Probably not. While most of the good ones were certifiably good, not all of them were—and good organizations like Goodwill and the U. S. Fund for UNICEF were erroneously labeled as wasteful. And, if you want to talk about administrative costs, the Make-A-Wish Foundation's president and CEO takes the largest percentage of funds compared to anything else here—and this was considered a "good guy"!

The funny thing about data is that you can massage it to paint any picture you like. Like how the image up there lists CEO salaries: some of that information was inaccurate, but some was not, but it was all deliberately chosen to paint a certain picture. But when you take those salaries, some of which are quite generous, and compare them with the organizations expenses, that's something totally different.

What disturbs me a little in these smear campaigns is a distrust of secular or multinational groups, and an implicit trust in religious (Christian) and American ones. I don't fault the faithful for wanting to do good in the world (charity is probably one of the most universal tenets among religions) and for wanting to give to charities specific to their denomination, but if the organization you're donating to is continuing to fight against progress and tolerance, you might want to donate elsewhere. Or you might not! That would make us very different people, though.

What Facebook meme has really gotten on your nerves recently?

Five Fandom Friday: Postponed

Sorry, but Paris has me not really feeling it this week. Tomorrow, maybe.

Instead, I invite you to rekindle your lost faith in humanity by browsing the #LookForTheHelpers, #OpenDoor, and #PorteOuverte hashtags. Me? I just watched a video of a corgi going down stairs. Now I'm going to brush my teeth, hug my boyfriend, and hope the world is a little cheerier when I wake up. Then I can talk about food.

Science Saturday: Bombs and Choosing to Believe

The story about Ahmed Mohamed and his not-a-bomb clock that's blowing up right now touches just about every sensitive nerve ending I can still bear to leave out in the cruel unforgiving world: science, kids, education, race, etc.

I could either say a lot or a little, but I'm going to try to keep it to a little. To do that, I'm going to talk about beliefs.

Beliefs are a really interesting concept, philosophically, and there's been a lot of ink spilled on the nature of them. Among other things: how much are they related to volition? Can you choose to believe? Can you want, but be unable, to believe something? If you stop believing in something, did you ever really believe in the first place?

Forgive me, I couldn't resist.

How do beliefs tie into this? In a couple of ways. From the inside out: did the principal or any of the teachers believe that the not-a-bomb clock was a real bomb? That it was a hoax? How much were their beliefs shaped by the fact that it was a project by a brown kid named Ahmed Mouhammed?

The more interesting layer to this, however, is the trilemma (it's a dilemma, but with three!) left to me. There are three interpretations—three beliefs—about this story I can choose from:

1. The faculty at this school mistakenly thought this was a bomb, and they were doing what they thought best to protect the students.

Makezine broke this down for you to explain why this pencil case is not a bomb. Y'all know there'd have to be some explosives in there, right? Right.

2. The faculty at this school thought this was a hoax bomb, and they were doing what they thought best to protect the students and enforce whatever kind of zero-tolerance policy they have on "terrorist threats" or whatever.

3. The faculty at this school thought this was a hoax bomb and they decided to use this opportunity to pick on a kid named Ahmed who attends a school in Texas and looks like this:

Image courtesy Snopes

So, which one do I choose to believe? The first one is tempting and gives people the benefit of the doubt—"never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" is a bit of a life motto—but the way they handled the situation made it clear that they knew it wasn't a bomb. I want to believe the first one, but there's just too much evidence stacked against it.

That leaves 2 and 3. Neither of those are good choices. Neither are things I want to believe about the world: that the people running it, from school principals to cops to mayors to future Presidents (knock on wood), are either ignorant enough to think that something that looks almost like a movie bomb could be a real bomb, or ignorant enough to think that Bill Maher's defense is at all rational or cogent. 

I don't want to believe.

Science Saturday: Vertical Farming

Hydroponic farming: it's not just for marijuana anymore!

There is a small part of me that is a weirdo futurist, and one of the things I'm really excited for in the future is vertical farming. A shockingly small percentage of the world's land surface is actually arable, so anything to maximize growing potential (whether through GMOs, oh I went there, or better fertilizers, or what have you) is going to be key for humanity's continued existence on the planet.

But even so, much of what little arable land we have is far away from major population centers. Transportation costs play a large role in the final price you end up paying at the store, no matter where you do your food shopping. Vertical farming in urban centers (like this one planned for Newark, NJ) could dramatically cut the financial cost and carbon footprint of your favorite fruits and veggies, and make them more affordable and easier to access for the people who need them most.

Of course, vertical farming isn't a closed system. All of the energy used to manage the light, temperature, and irrigation systems has to come from somewhere, so much of the potential good is undermined if it's still running on coal. But imagine these, all running on solar energy, in every major population center...!

Science Saturday: The Power of Writing

Of course, this is a very particular kind of writing, but it goes to show how being able to express yourself with words, even at a basic level, can help focus your thinking and build focus towards personal goals.

NPR: The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives

A summary, for the link phobic:

Jordan Peterson teaches in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto. For decades, he has been fascinated by the effects of writing on organizing thoughts and emotions.

...

"The act of writing is more powerful than people think," Peterson says.

Most people grapple at some time or another with free-floating anxiety that saps energy and increases stress. Through written reflection, you may realize that a certain unpleasant feeling ties back to, say, a difficult interaction with your mother. That type of insight, research has shown, can help locate, ground and ultimately resolve the emotion and the associated stress.

At the same time, "goal-setting theory" holds that writing down concrete, specific goals and strategies can help people overcome obstacles and achieve.

Peterson's class based around this subject has had significant benefits. These same concepts have been applied in universities in the Netherlands, leading to a near-complete closing of the performance gap between foreign students at risk for "stereotype threat" and native and/or Western students.

I'm not at all surprised by these findings, though I do think there probably needs to be more research done? But speaking from personal experience, I've found that journaling about fears, goals, and anxieties helps me see them for what they are and develop strategies for accomplishing/conquering them. Not to mention I am an incorrigible list-maker, especially when I feel stressed and overwhelmed. There must be all kinds of stuff that lights up in your brain while you write—arguably even more when you write by hand, though of course not everyone enjoys writing by hand as much as I do—that help you calm down and think of creative solutions.

Dr. Peterson has done a lot of interesting work, but these above ideas of "self-authoring" are explored in material he has for sale (I guess you gotta make a buck where you can).

Do you do much self-reflective writing? Do you think it's helped you succeed?

Junk Science: The News Path of Least Resistance

This reporter fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss. This is why scientific literacy (including statistics) and critical thinking are such important skills. I mean, getting tricked into eating more chocolate than you normally would "because diet" isn't a bad thing—chocolate fucking rules—but because so many other nutrition news articles and diet fads are based on equally shaky footing.

If you're link-phobic or pressed for time, here's the most important part of the article:

Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.

Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it’s just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being “significant” is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?

P(winning) = 1 - (1 - p)ⁿ

With our 18 measurements, we had a 60% chance of getting some“significant” result with p < 0.05. (The measurements weren’t independent, so it could be even higher.) The game was stacked in our favor.

And yet, not a single media outlet dug enough to find this out. Bohannon explains:

When reporters contacted me at all, they asked perfunctory questions. “Why do you think chocolate accelerates weight loss? Do you have any advice for our readers?” Almost no one asked how many subjects we tested, and no one reported that number. Not a single reporter seems to have contacted an outside researcher. None are quoted.

...

Shape magazine’s reporting on our study—turn to page 128 in the June issue—employed the services of a fact-checker, but it was just as lackadaisical. All the checker did was run a couple of sentences by me for accuracy and check the spelling of my name.

So if it sounds too good or bizarre to be true, it probably is.

Bat Love

You may or may not remember that I have a long-time love of bats (it comes from working in a cave) and a concern with the killer White Nose Syndrome that's devastating bat populations across North America.

Researchers have finally successfully treated a bat with WNS! YASSSSSSSSS!

Image courtesy Ann Froschauer/USFWS

So cute! How could anyone be scared of these guys?

Just as importantly, Ireland legalized same-sex marriage by popular vote. While I'm of the school of thought that holds that rights are something that should be granted as a matter of course, never voted on, I'm glad that the voters in Ireland turned out in a celebration of love. If it takes a popular vote to make a moral right a legal reality, so be it.

Courtesy The Department for Culture, Media and Sport

It was a good week last week and hopefully this continues!

Science Saturday: The Intersection of Anthropology and Science

The great thing about having a Facebook page (for Kokoba, I mean; in addition to the private personal account I have) is that it's a great way to store links and stories I find interesting but don't have the time to immediately blog about.

One such story is this article from NPR about constructing a giant telescope in Hawaii. The peak of Mauna Kea is considered sacred ground to a number of people; astronomers also say that it's the best possible location for this new telescope. A clash ensues.

The Twin Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. 

If you look at this as an isolated incident, it's easy to brush away Hawaiian concerns as silly superstition. However, if you posit this conflict as part of America's longer history in Hawaii, the waters get muddied. Land grabbing, arguably including land used to build the other telescopes in the islands, has been a pervasive issue in this history; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to make a connection between repeated land grabs and the resistance this telescope is facing. As this piece in Nature points out,

The Mauna Kea debate reflects larger issues of Hawaiian history, including past abuses such as using one of the islands as a practice bombing range, says Robert McLaren, associate director of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “There’s more to this than just a telescope on Mauna Kea,” he says.

Maxwell emphasizes that many of the protestors are not anti-science. “It’s just that enough is enough,” he says. “The land is an extension of you, so any destruction is hard inside.”

The telescope would be the largest so far on the Mauna Kea site, commonly referred to as the TMT—Thirty Meter Telescope. It's a joint project between two California universities as well as the governments of Canada, China, India, and Japan.Because of its location and isolation, Hawaii is a great place to build telescopes and observatories. There are already more than a dozen observatories on Mauna Kea for that very reason (including the ones pictured above). Some of them—maybe even most or all of them?—have faced similar objections. Can one of them be updated instead of building a new one? One of the pre-existing Mauna Kea observatories is actually slated for deconstruction and the land will be left untouched, allowed to be reclaimed by nature.

There is a lot more on this topic that deserves to be written, and I didn't have the time to write as much as I would, but I wanted to at least float the topic. It's a problem that speaks to two things I hold near to my heart: social justice/decolonization and the stars. This is more than just a simple religion versus science issue. This is a conflict that has its roots in political decisions going back two hundred years and beyond. How do you heal that rift? How can both sides win? Any thoughts, readers?

The Failure of Mars One

I missed out on Pi Day and St. Patrick's Day on the blog, but it warmed my hear to see so many other blogs observing some math nerdiness! The truth is that I am still a little busy at the moment, so I couldn't really give Pi Day its proper due. And St. Patrick's Day? Living in neither the US nor Ireland, I can assure you that the only place that was a "thing" was in Stockholm's Irish pubs.But I'm taking half a minute out of my life to talk a bit about Mars One.

This is a project that has been getting a lot of hype, and it's not hard to see why: most sane people are concerned about the potentially irreversible changes we're triggering in our planet (or they at least agree that it will eventually be a problem for someone to deal with). If we've unequivocally ruined Earth, expanding out into other space and other planets is our only hope for long-term survival. Even if we manage to salvage Earth's climate so that it remains more or less hospitable for humanity, there's nothing we can do about the Sun's inevitable life cycle—either way, space travel is part of our future, if humans are going to play the really long game. Space colonization and extraterrestrial life is the premise of so much science fiction, from the classic (Star Trek) to the obscure (Henry Martinson's Aniaria), that the appeal is no surprise.

It seems like the Mars One project has taken that appeal and turned it into a poorly-organized cash grab. This Medium.com article has a great run-down on it. That's really all you need to read on the topic.

I really hope that I can live to see a successful mission to Mars. I think it's entirely possible, but maybe it isn't.

No More Heroes: Brian "Skeptoid" Dunning Convicted of Massive Wire Fraud

For those of you who don't read Pharyngula but do follow Skeptoid, you might want to know that Brian Dunning has been convicted of defrauding eBay* of millions of dollars. He did it by "cookie stuffing."

Dunning and a colleague developed their own little widgets for websites: one was a "where in the world?" widget where you could see where in the world your visitors were coming from, and the other (Dunning's) was just a page hit counter. Totally harmless-seeming and fun little things to have on your website.

Nestled within that code was a sort of sleeper cookie unrelated to the widget's stated purpose. That cookie would only activate (not really the right term but it'll do) if you browsed to eBay and bought something. It would trick eBay into thinking that you had purchased your item via an affiliate link belonging to Dunning, and they would then send him an appropriate cut of the purchase.

This chafes me because I have definitely visited the Skeptoid website on this computer with this browser and have also bought a handful of things off eBay—shame on me for not regularly clearing out my cookies and such, I guess—so I've probably contributed to his ill-gotten gains by crediting him with a couple sales he has no right to claim. I should say that there is no official word on whether he used that widget or that particular piece of code on his website, but it would be naive to think he didn't.

Not the worst thing a person can do, but still pretty shitty.






*I mean it's eBay and not little old ladies, but still.

Music Monday: Picking on 13-Year-Old Kids For Science is Tacky

How Our Story on a Child's Science Experiment Sparked Controversy (NPR)

The story about Laura Arrington's school fair project about lionfish (an invasive species in Florida) has been making the rounds because we all love a story that can be translated into an attention-grabbing headline, and young people doing science is (fortunately!) an attention-grabber. Like these stories:

Middle schooler suggests using Garamond to save ink, money.

Which is it, CNN? $234 million or $400 million?

High schooler develops early detection test for pancreatic cancer.

Another high schooler creates a nanoparticle that could potentially cure cancer.

Laura Arrington's study on lionfish and their salinity tolerance has sparked something of a controversy because a former colleague of one of her father's colleagues has also done research on the invasive lionfish and is bummed that it's not his name all over the headlines. Because doing science is all about getting the credit and becoming famous.

The point of a middle school science fair isn't to publish original results:* it's to teach kids the methodology of science in a self-directed, hands-on manner. I'm surprised that none of the top comments on the NPR story are making this point; rather, they're all trying to (de)legitimize Arrington's middle school science project. Um, hello? Did we all miss the part where it's a grown-ass adult coming after a freaking middle schooler? Who neither asked for nor expected this kind of media blow-up around her science fair project? Arrington even cites Jud in her sources, so it's not like she's getting away with plagiarism. Jud's complaint basically breaks down to "I wanna be interviewed by NPR, too."

It's not surprising, though, considering the climate surrounding professional science. The "publish or perish" mindset has created an obsession with publishing as much as possible (leading to the phenomenon of "least publishable units," or generating multiple papers from one study) as well as rabid defense of ownership of ideas (thanks, capitalism!). That has blinded people to the point of science: to learn about our world and to make it better. For every Elon Musk or Jonas Salk, you have a megacorporation like Monsanto that doesn't care about contributing to humanity's knowledge base or betterment. In an environment of cooperation, not competition, would Jud be so protective of his work and so intent on getting credit—even the unofficial credit of news story headline? 

*That said, there is the Journal for Emerging Investigators, with all the peer review and rigor of any respectable science journal, but targeted at "any middle school or high school student" working with  "a middle school teacher, high school teacher, or college/university professor" as senior author. It's run by graduate students at Harvard's School of Arts and Sciences. 

On The Turing Test and AI

The news about yet another chatbot "passing" the Turing Test has been all over my news feed. It seems that few of the people writing on Eugene Goostman, the chatbot posing as a 13 year old boy from eastern Europe, have actually read the paper in question or have any kind of nuanced understanding of what the Turing Test entails. PZ Myers has summed up everything wrong with the reporting quite nicely. I just wanted to talk a little bit about something near and dear to my heart: the Turing Test.

The Turing Test, for those of you unfamiliar with the original source material, was originally proposed by computing genius and visionary Alan Turing, whose homosexuality was more important to the authorities of Great Britain than the fact that he was an instrumental member in the think tank that ultimately outwitted the Germans' Enigma machine. Oop.

It appeared in a longer piece called "Computing machinery and intelligence," published in Mind magazine in 1950. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there, and if you're at all interested in computer science....well, honestly, you've probably read it already, but there it is in case you haven't.

The Turing Test, Defined More Clearly

As an introduction to his proposal, Turing initially describes an imitation game played with three people: a man (A), a woman (B), and a judge (whose sex is irrelevant) (C). The goal is for the judge to correctly identify which player is the man and which the woman. There is, of course, a series of questions and answers involved, but it isn't the kind of interviewing that has been accepted as the Turing Test standard:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. 

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?" 

Then he proposes that the same game be played, only this time with a human and machine trying to fool the judge, instead of two humans.There is a level of trickery and strategy involved with the background of the Turing Test (what he calls "the imitation game"; Turing wasn't vain enough to name the test after himself in his own paper). It's not merely a conversation with ELIZA.

And while it seems like a very limited situation—a judge just getting written or secondhand feedback from players confined to different rooms—that's really just Turing trying to make the game as fair as possible, so that the machine could be judged on its cognition alone.

The question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavour that we wish to include. We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant. The "witnesses" can brag, if they consider it advisable, as much as they please about their charms, strength or heroism, but the interrogator cannot demand practical demonstrations.

To limit the idea of the Turing Test to a reiteration of the imitation game (even the more complex, deceit-filled model of the imitation game as described above) is missing Turing's larger point: can machines demonstrate the same behaviors that we associate with thinking and intelligence?


Polishing the Turing Test

Unsurprisingly, chatbots have been the favored method of would-be Turing Test passers, since the medium of instant messaging is basically identical to Turing's hypothetical setup. But daily life is mediated by computers and technology in ways that were probably unthinkable even to a visionary such as Turing. If he were writing "Computing machinery and intelligence" today, he'd perhaps make Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr (ugh) the means of his contest. Surely it's not impossible to conceive of an AI that would post to social media (maybe even on multiple accounts), sharing thoughts and articles and quiz results and interacting with its followers the same way that people do. Some of the people who post in your news feed might already seem like thoughtless automatons.

The other problem with chatbots as Turing Test experiments is that it misses the spirit of the Test. Programming an AI only to pass the Turing Test and nothing more doesn't a thinking machine make. However, that doesn't mean the Turing Test is bullshit, or isn't a useful tool for evaluating AI, either. If you take something like Siri, for example, or Samantha from Her, which are programmed to do quite a number of tasks, we'd say they were "thinking" if they passed the Turing Test incidentally. Turing never mentions this incidental nature of the test but  it seems an intuitively important part of the test. When you consider how much of human cognition and intelligence is incidental to our brains and the problems they evolved to solve, this seems only fair. Or, as Harnad suggests, the Turing Test isn't something that should last for five minutes or fifteen or an hour, but indefinitely.


Objections to the Turing Test

Humans tend to assume that everyone else we come into contact with are human too, or are at least human-like. Which is why you get vegans assuming their cats should also be on a vegan diet, for example: we are biased towards believing things more or less "like us" and generally it takes more proof to disprove rather than prove. The Turing Test may, in fact, be too simple to be a good criterion.

There's also Searle's Chinese Room objection. I've never much cared for it or thought it to be a particularly strong objection, but it's a famous one nonetheless.


TL;DR

The AI singularity is not yet upon us and we will not be bowing before our robot overlord Eugeene Goostman. Goostman, really, could hardly be said to have "passed" the test; whether or not this implementation of the Turing Test even adheres to Turing's original vision is another question altogether.

Atlassian, Maven, and Stupid Gender Jokes in Tech

Developer compares a plugin framework to his girlfriend, saying that it's "beautiful" but "it demands a lot of attention" and "interrupts [him] while [he's] working."

You would have made the same point by comparing it to your fancy show dog. Or without any cutesy metaphors at all.

Way to be classy and go for the low-hanging fruit of a joke there, Doklovic.

People who make jokes like this always baffle me: if your girlfriend is that much of a pain, or if your boyfriend is that much of an inept manchild, you're the one choosing to maintain a relationship with them. And if you think that every man or woman is going to behave in those ways, then please die alone without reproducing.

The jokes about women rustle my jimmies particularly (unsurprising, considering my ovary ownership), but I would be lying if I said I didn't die a little inside every time I see a pin like this on Pinterest:

Haha, it's funny because women are nagging harpies and men are clueless oafs!

But you know, let's not forget that the tech industry is still run by men and that jokes about women being annoying decorations contribute to a frigid culture that discourages them from joining, Which is a shame, because computer science is one of the fields where the gendered paygap is basically nonexistent.

I appreciate Atlassian's response to this and their stated commitment to doing better as a group.  They haven't outlined exactly how they plan to help Doklovic see the goof-up; I assume he has enough empathy and insight to realize just from this blowback alone why a joke about girlfriends being nothing more than pretty bimbos who keep men from getting stuff done was juvenile and inappropriate for an official presentation in a formal tech conference.

The Vox Day Hugo Drama

Science fiction nerd that I am, I am never one to pay attention to book awards, past or current. There's such a backlog of great works I have yet to finish and new ones coming out that I can't find the time in my life to to get caught up in awards ceremonies—not just of books, but of anything.

Yet it seems I can't escape the drama over this year's Hugo nominees (or rather, one Hugo nominee in particular). Vox Day's Opera Vitae Aeternita in the novelette category has outraged many in the SF community because it seems Day, née Theodore Beale, has some unpopular views. Like that homosexuality is a birth defect, or that it's ~scientific~ to oppress women.

Oh, did I say "unpopular"? I meant "bigoted."

The aforementioned John Scalzi has weighed in on it, and so has PZ Myers, to different ends. Should awards like the Hugo or the Nebula be "apolitical" and be awarded to works by authors who are, well, less than exemplary? After all, odious figures like Orson Scott Card and L Ron Hubbard have won past Hugos. There is some speculation that a voting bloc wanting to protest the supposed Leftist regime of the SFWA (or the WSFS? can't keep all those alphabet soup groups straight) by rallying around one of Day's works and stuffing the ballot box. Which isn't against the rules, but it does taint (hah, "taint") Day's nomination with the speculation that he was nominated not on the merit of his story, but just for his politics to ~make a statement~ or prove a point or whatever.

Scalzi's point is that the book was fairly nominated by the rules of the award, and that there's no rule that an asshole can't be nominated, so there's no point making a fuss. Moreover, there is (for those who vote in these things) a "No Award" option if you really feel a work's presence was unwarranted, for whatever personal reasons the voter may choose. Myers' point is that remaining apolitical is a political statement and by doing nothing, the Hugos and the SFWA/SFWS are condoning Day's absolutely bugfuck assertions, like that it's okay if some girls get acid thrown in their faces, the rest of the child brides in Pakistan have such happy marriages! Or that being gay is totally like being born without legs and thus should be cured!

Because I'm not entirely familiar with the nomination or voting process of the Hugos, or the history of the award, I'll refrain from commenting too much. I only want to observe that a liberal determination to be tolerant and hear everyone out no matter what seems to be borne out of a fear of a slippery slope; namely, that one day, the person being silenced by the powers-that-be may be on the right side of history and that absolutely no precedent must ever be set that would allow their voices to be successfully muted.

The question then is, which should you value more in a situation like this: hypothetical people in the future, or the people in the here and now having to deal with this odious bullshit? I don't know. It's hard to know. But I do know this: as life goes on, society inevitably (and to the despair of turds like Vox Day) moves towards equality, tolerance, and freedom. I think the slippery slope fears are unfounded for that very reason; I think that if organizations like SFWA and the SFWS are committed to being a progressive, welcoming atmosphere for EVERYONE (not just straight white males), they have an obligation to their members to revisit the rules for their awards to allow something like organizational veto power, or injunctions against being a public bigot, or something similar, to keep hateful turds off their radar. If this is a Leftist campaign to thought-police writers, then people who disagree can always leave the groups and form their own association with its own awards.

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

However, because of that moral arc of the universe, I don't think the brain droppings of assholes like Vox Day or Orson Scott Card really matter—history is not on their side. Justice is not on their side. Not that this means we should be complacent and sit on our laurels; rather, my point is that there are bigger fish to fry. The universe only bends towards justice because we temper it to do so.

The Physics of Finding Flight MH370

MH370's final destination has been calculated by a British company, Inmarsat. If you're wondering exactly how they did it, PhysicsBuzz breaks it down:

How Inmarsat hacked their data to find MH370.

And you thought you'd never need trigonometry outside of high school!

I'm not one to link to the Daily Mail too often, but this write-up is mostly devoid of sensationalism and has lots of information on the disappearance and crash of MH370. Just ignore the ridiculous headline. Tl;dr: an explosion or fire on board that rendered passengers and crew alike unconscious, leaving the plane on an autopilot route to nowhere, is the most likely explanation.

 

The Bogus Science of BMI

Did you know that this week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week? It is if you're an American, at any rate.

I have been fortunate enough to maintain eating habits that are more or less free from disorder, myself, but diets and disordered eating are still topics that touch a nerve with me. While there are numerous factors that contribute to an eating disorder, I thought I'd take this space to focus on a small detail that is nonetheless integral to the public discussion of health that encourages and applauds such self-destructive behavior. It lends a tenor of scientific objectivity and medical (almost moral) authority to suggestions to lose weight; it is the sound of science without any of the actual content of science. I'm talking, of course, about BMI.

What is BMI? In case you somehow missed it.

BMI is a measurement of how much of you there is per space: your weight (in kilograms) divided by your height (in meters) squared. We all remember learning that in high school health class. If you somehow missed it in school, then there's no shortage of health journalism and medical studies that constantly cite the metric and use it as a way to sort people into convenient groups.

Yet no one ever mentions where and why this metric came to be. It sounds scientific enough, after all!


Why do we even use it?

While people had been writing and theorizing about health risks associated with being fat since the late 1700s, the first epidemiological studies on the topic (specifically, between fatness and cardiovascular disease) didn't really appear until the middle of the 20th century. Health insurance companies jumped on that data and began to cast about for a way to figure out which of their customers were more likely to drop dead of a heart attack. This economic concern over people's bodies really started in earnest after WWII, though there was no one agreed-upon method. Insurance companies basically made up body weight/height tables on a whim, with little (if any) hard data backing them up. It would take twenty years for the industry to settle on a preferred, somewhat validated method: the Quételet Index.


The Quételet Index? What?

About a hundred years prior to these insurance salesmen and worries about cardiovascular disease, a Belgian Renaissance man named Adolphe Quételet was obsessed with statistics, the Gaussian distribution, and the "normal" human body. He started off by measuring the heights and weights of infants and children, then expanded his studies to adults: a few hundred contemporary Belgians, to be precise. (Quételet may have even cherry-picked the samples and only measured the people he felt had the best or most pleasing figures—I've read this in a few places, but I was unable to substantiate it for this post.) His numerous studies and essays were collected in a volume entitled Treatise on Man and the development of his aptitudes. Included in this volume was his estimation of the best way to predict average weight: weight in kilos divided by height in meters squared. (Sound familiar?)

Quételet was gifted in many ways, but he was not a medical expert. Nor was he seeking to make medical prescriptions; he was only after an average, a way to describe the ratio between the rate of growth of height and weight and the "normal" figure.

Yet somehow insurance salesmen got a hold of the Treatise and lighted upon the Quételet Index (rebranded by a physiology professor and obesity researcher named Ancel Keys as "Body Mass Index" in 1972) as the preferred method of people-sorting. In some detail: Keys' study took the properly calculated body fat percentages from men across five countries, as well as their weights and heights. He then used a variety of "fat calculating" formulas and height-weight tables to see which ones would come closest to matching actual body fat distribution across the populations—to be fair, in this regard, BMI performed the best. But it doesn't take much to be the best out of a bunch of crap. From insurance companies the practice trickled down to scientists and healthcare professionals, until BMI became the ubiquitous statistic it is today.

To reiterate: BMI is a statistical tool used to describe the bodies of people who lived in Europe 150 years ago, popularized in the 1970s by health insurance companies as a means of prescription and diagnosis, despite the protests of professional epidemiologists, including Keys himself.

 Yet here we are in 2014 with official government health websites, scientific studies, and diet programs all using the statistic as if it means something—even as streams of stories and studies maintain that BMI is nothing but a mathematical artifact and basically useless.


What are we supposed to use, then?

Your own well-being.

If you can do the things you love to do with an abundance of energy and enthusiasm, then do you really need anything more? No, really: do you?

Of course, we are forever coming up with new ways to reduce our bodies into numbers and find the best way to figure out just how much fat we have. But in the interest of my stated purpose and participation in NEDA's Awareness Week, I'm not going to list them here—even if they're better science, linking to fat calculators here would just be tacky. Instead, a quick round-up of some good resources on BMI, nutrition, and body positivity:

• The Skinny White Buddha has great, in-depth analysis on nutritional and obesity studies.
• Atchka Fatty also doggedly researches and analyzes the medical science of fatness from time to time, which you can read over at FierceFatties.com.
• If you are newly-recovered from, or still struggling with, disordered eating, Dr. Deah's nutritionist blog is worth your time.
• So is Dr. Linda Bacon's book.
• Any of the links I've provided in the body of this text are interesting, and were the bulk of my sources when writing this post.

In summation: just because something sounds science-y doesn't mean that it is. Don't let numbers and buzzwords fool you, and don't feel beholden to them.

Science Saturday: Stellar, the Astrophysics Video Game

I came across this one by way of STEMinist.com: UCSC Students Design Video Game Aimed at Making Astrophysics Fun. For the link-phobic:

Kate Compton and April Grow, both students at UCSC's Center for Games and Playable Media, hope players will feel like they're "farming" in space as they cultivate star gardens. In doing so, gamers will also learn about nucleosynthesis, the process by which stars forge atoms into the elements that make up the periodic table. But Stellar, which will be soon be available on Google's Chrome Store, is first and foremost a game -- and its programmers hope the approach will help spark children's interest in science.

Players start with one star called Sol, Latin for sun, and a stash of hydrogen atoms. To keep Sol burning, players must feed it hydrogen. When their hydrogen supply runs low, players are free to zoom around the cosmos in search of space dust containing more of the element.

Compton, Grow, and Stellar (Dan Coyro)

As players sprinkle these hydrogen atoms into their star, it fuses them into helium atoms. Players can harvest this helium and use it as another nutrient to feed their star. The stellar foundry can then fuse helium to create heavier atoms, like carbon. Stars can then squeeze these atoms into even heavier iron atoms.

Unfortunately "soon" is the best the article can do when it comes to naming a release date. I can't wait to try it out—stars and astronomy were among my earliest science loves.

Science Saturday: "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"

The Edge Foundation asks a question of the science community every year; this year the question is, "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" There are some really fantastic answers. In particular, I like the responses from Nina Jablonski ("Race."), Martin Rees ("We'll never hit barriers to scientific understanding."), Fiery Cushman ("Big effects have big explanations."), David Berreby ("People are sheep."), Dean Ornish ("Large randomized controlled trials.") and Laurie R. Santos & Tamar Gendler ("Knowing is half the battle."), but there are too many for me to list them all here. The link is worth reading (or bookmarking for reading when you have a minute). I wanted to highlight one from Kate Clancy over at Scientific American:

Last year, I spearheaded a survey and interview research project on the experiences of scientists at field sites. Over sixty percent of the respondents had been sexually harassed, and twenty percent had been sexually assaulted. Sexual predation was only the beginning of what I and my colleagues uncovered: study respondents reported psychological and physical abuses, like being forced to work late into the day without being told when they could head back to camp, not being allowed to urinate, verbal threats and bullying, and being denied food. The majority of perpetrators are fellow scientists senior to the target of abuse, the target themselves usually a female graduate student...

When the payoff is millions of dollars of research money, New York Times coverage, Nobel Prizes or even just tenure, we often seem willing to pay any price for scientific discovery and innovation. This is exactly the idea that needs to be retired—that science should be privileged over scientists.

Of course, part of the problem in what could be described as typical (though not systemic) abuse is scarce resources. When federal grant money dries up and the private sector is only interested in "profitable" research, the scientific community is bound to turn into some version of The Hunger Games. (The Funding Games?)

What more funding wouldn't stop is the historically and perpetually chilly atmosphere women in science often face—prejudice, assumptions, or just plain bad habits exist irrelevant of money. Still, it would be a nice first step.

23andMe (and the FDA)

In case you missed it: as a result of ongoing disputes (not the right word, but it'll do) with the FDA, 23andMe has agreed to forego the "health risks" part of their analysis. Customers who purchased their kit before November 22, 2013,  still have access to that data, but any new customers will only get the genealogy data. You can read 23andMe's official response on their blog.

The FDA asked 23andMe to comply with legislative standards set forth by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, specifically by "validat[ing] the PGS [Personal Genome Service] for its intended uses, which have expanded from the uses that the firm identified in its submissions." One can only assume that the "the uses the firm identified in its submissions" are the genealogical ones. 23andMe was years behind in providing the validation of their medical recommendations and interpretations, and to avoid further action by the FDA, has agreed to suspend any health interpretations of the data until they can verify the accuracy of their results.

To the public, this comes across as the FDA stepping in on the public's behalf to prevent them from making any permanent, important health-related decisions (e.g. mastectomies) on data that aren't 100% sound and verified. That would seem to be the logical conclusion. Some arguments about FDA's "unholy union" with Big Pharma etc. are also coming to the surface, but that's a road that's a bit too tin hatty for my liking.

When you send your spit kit off to 23andMe, the data you get back from them doesn't just stay with you. They—and your survey results—are also part of a vast genomic library. Your individual results, as linked to you, John Doe, can't be sold, but 23andMe

reserves the right to sell that information in the aggregate, or use it to market other events and products to individual customers.

The issue then becomes not of protecting consumers from their own idiocy, but of protecting their information from being used in ways they couldn't foresee, know about, or agree to. It's not the accuracy the FDA is concerned with (multiple Internet searches do not indicate any rash of faulty results), nor is it the consumer's private use; it's 23andMe's corporate use of said data. The question is about whether or not that kind of data in the hands of large corporations (health insurance, life insurance, drug companies, etc.) is a desirable or ethical thing.

That said, I found the medical results from 23andMe useful. In particular, I was surprised to find out that I had one copy of the APOE-4 gene. I understand science enough to know that this doesn't mean I'm definitely going to get Alzheimer's (even with one copy of the gene my chances are 14%, compared to 7% without), but if I had just looked at my family history, I would have never known I was at an elevated risk for the condition—not the same way I already knew from family history that I was at risk for hypertension and high cholesterol.

Do I value those, and other, results enough to be okay with my anonymized survey and spit kit results being sold to corporations? Yes, actually. At least, the deed is done, so there is no good regretting it. And in a way, I'm excited that my DNA is contributing, at least in part, to medical research. Is corporate buying and selling of this kind of information something to be concerned about? I don't know. This is a relatively new field and we have yet to see just how the nuances will play out.

Originally I was prepared to come to the conclusion that I simply couldn't understand the FDA's concern with 23andMe, since the site is full of disclaimers about how genetics only indicate risks and that you should consult a medical professional and so forth (your personalized risk factors for Alzheimer's and breast cancer are even hidden behind little "consent" walls where you have to read through an explanation of these points before you can even see your results). The information they provide to their customers is reliable enough, after all, and can be immensely beneficial. As one comment on the 23andMe blog suggested: if the FDA is so concerned about people making terrible medical decisions, why does WebMD still exist?

But after some reading on it—and the implications of all that genetic information in 23andMe's possession—I can begin to understand the concern. The question then is: should the FDA be in the business of regulating market practices? (If the kits and the PGS work as intended and provide accurate results, that's really all the FDA should be concerned about.) Would this be better left to something like the FTC? Is fear of buying and selling genomic information justified, or is it destined to become part of "business as usual" in the near future?

May you live in interesting times, indeed.