The 1700s were a century of phenomenal progress in the subject of electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made dead muscles twitch, inspiring Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Volta discovered that electricity was dynamic, flowing through conductive materials like water in a stream, which is why we call it an “electric current.” William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discovered that running an electric current through water broke the molecular bonds, generating hydrogen and oxygen, linking the stuff of electricity to the very atoms themselves (Asimov, 1985).

Benjamin Franklin’s electrostatic motor Credit: Peter Collinson, Royal Society

The great American polymath, Benjamin Franklin, made some major contributions to our understanding of the stuff as well. In his Memoirs there is a section Wonderful effect of points.–Positive and negative Electricity, where he hypothesizes, correctly, that electricity is only one fluid, and electric currents, like static electric shocks and lightning, are the result of an excess of this fluid in one place and a deficit in another, which sought equilibrium.

A, who stands on wax, and rubs the tube, collects the electrical fire from himself into the glass… B, passing his knuckle along near the tube, receives the fire which was collected by the glass from A… To C, standing on the floor, both appear to be electrisied… If A and B approach to touch each other, the spark is stronger, because the difference between them is greater; after such touch there is no spark between either of them and C, because the electrical fire in all is reduced to the original equality… Hence have arisen some new terms among us; we say B is electrisied positively; A, negatively. Or rather, B is electrisied plus; A, minus.

We know now that this “electrical fire” Franklin speaks of is a surplus of electrons, and he was correct that static electric shocks were the result of deficits and surpluses of electrons. The problem was that he had no way of knowing where the surplus, the plus/positive, was. So he took a 50/50 guess… and got it wrong. He meant to give electrons the positive/plus/excess charge, and where they flow to the negative/minus/deficit charge.

For most conceptual purposes, this causes no problems with understanding electricity; however, in thinking of electricity as a flowing entity, it does vex slightly. As Isaac Asimov observes, when recounting how the scientist Michael Faraday used it in naming the two poles between a flowing electric current:

The two poles were “electrodes,” from Greek words meaning “electrical route.” The positive pole was the “anode” (“upper route”) and the negative pole, the “cathode” (“lower route”). This visualized the electric current flowing, as water would, from the higher positions of the anode to the lower position of the cathode.

Actually, now that we follow the electron flow, the electric current is moving from the cathode to the anode, so that, if we go by the names, it is moving uphill. Fortunately, no one pays any attention whatever to the Greek meaning of the words, and scientists use these terms without the slightest feeling of incongruity. (Well, Greek scientists might smile.)

So, thanks to Benjamin Franklin, electric currents are an excess of negatively charged electrons flowing to the deficit of electrons, where there is a positive charge. Thanks to this labeling, we inadvertently labeled the point from which the electrons flow lower and the point to which they flow higher.

You now have enough background to get the following cartoon:

Urgent Mission Credit: XKCD

I do have to side with those academics who argue Franklin wasn’t wrong in assigning electrons the negative charge. Electrons and protons could just have easily had their respective charges named “up” and “down,” as we do with some quarks, or “black” and “white,” or “male” and “female.” The labels “positive” and “negative” assign no characteristics to the particles except to describe them as opposites.

Okay… maybe it does irk me slightly. But, living in America, solving this problem has to take a lower priority than adopting the metric system or establishing phonetic spelling.

References

Asimov, Isaac (1985). Salt and Battery, printed in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press Inc.

“Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.”
– Chief Seattle

This quote from Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes, is paraphrased by modern naturalists as, “Take only photographs, leave only footprints” (and sometimes adding, “Kill only time.”).

Beetle in Flight Credit: Matthew Fang

In the past, Naturalists like Charles Darwin had to collect live specimens of animals, sometimes with amusing results. This method would present a moral dilemma for modern naturalists, as killing potentially endangered plants, insects, and animals is counterintuitive to preserving them.

Luckily, today’s naturalists have a non-destructive tool in cataloging the Earth’s biodiversity, the camera. The World Wildlife Foundation and other scientists have begun deploying Camera Traps, cameras with motion sensors that photograph everything that wanders by, and the technique has caught the existence of many animals not seen in nature for a very long time. Bioblitzes are 24-hour events where groups catalogue all the species they can find in a location, be it a forest or public park, where digital cameras come in especially useful. The wonderful iNaturalist.org website combines nature photography with mapping in such a way that the data will be used in future years to track species migrations in a warming world and the health of various populations.

Animation of a race horse galloping taken from photographs Credit: Eadweard Muybridge

Photography also contributes to science in other ways. Time is infinitely divisible, and humans are able to perceive the briefest instant of time, but a sequence of quick events are distorted in our minds. For instance, in 1872 there was a highly debated question about the gait of a galloping horse, and whether all of the horse’s hooves were off the ground at any time during a stride. Photographer Edward James Muggeridge was able to capture a series of images that conclusively resolved the question. Surprisingly, many museums, textbooks, and illustrators today still get the gait of dogs wrong despite having such evidence at their disposal.

Sequence of a race horse galloping Credit: Eadweard Muybridge

Digital cameras are cheap. Flickr accounts are free (basic ones at least). I think one of the best ways to introduce children to science and nature is to introduce them to both of these innovations. It’s like collecting beetles, comics, or stamps, only there’s a much larger realm of things to collect, a lot to learn in the process, and a whole Internet full of people to share with.

The Horticultural Gardens in Amsterdam is a suprisingly small garden, however, incredibly rich in biodiversity.

Fuchsias

And what a fascinating collection of specimens too. There’s the giant rubarb, the southern ash tree grafted onto a northern ash to allow it to survive the colder climate, the semicircle of systematics, the Wollemi pine a living fossil, and more to follow as I get further sets uploaded.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

I remember a conversation I had with a retired Coast Guard pilot seven years ago who was testing our Flight Record application still in development:

“I just recorded a shipboard landing with a C130 in your application,” he complained.

“Is that a bad thing?” I blinked.

His eyes bulged, “I’d like to see you land a C130 on a Coast Guard cutter!”

I frowned, confused, “What’s a C130?”

He was taken aback. See, to him, a C130 was a great big airplane used to put out forest fires and fly heavy equipment and supplies all over the world:

To me, a C130 was:

Because I was the one writing the application, it was the metadata inside my head–or rather the lack thereof, that made me write it so that users could record they had landed the above behemoth on a ship with barely enough room for one helicopter. With the metadata inside the pilot’s head, we were able to get the proper constraints in place.

For nearly two years now, we have been reengineering our aviation logistics management application to accommodate the Coast Guard’s surface fleet. Our “Electronic Aircraft Logbook” has become the “Electronic Asset Logbook,” and “Aviation Logistics” has become “Asset Logistics.” But these are merely cosmetic changes. The real work has been behind the scenes, rearchitecting our database to make it wholly dynamic. For instance, an old table like this would no longer work:

We can’t fit a boat into this table. Boats don’t have “Wing Types,” and they have numerous other attributes we want to record that we don’t have columns for. We could add new columns, but then we end up with lots of empty cells, and more empty cells when we try to put trucks or buildings into the table.

The solution is to make the database generic to any asset type. To do this, we convert the columns to rows:

Mind you, I’m seriously over-simplifying this. In reality, a highly-normalized database requires countless tables, each responsible for a subset of data. For instance, there would be a table of all possible attributes, a table of possible values for those attributes, a table defining the attributes for an asset group, a table establishing parent-child relationships among attributes, a table of ids for identifying assets, a table of historical values to log changing attributes with tables to support it, and so on until you get something that looks like this:

Normalized Database Detail

Where does metadata fit into this? Metadata is data that describes data, but I dislike this definition because it could be anything. The attributes of an asset are data that describes data, as are the structures that describe the attributes. Even the aircraft or boat itself is metadata in a metaphysical sense, self-referential in the context of the user’s understanding of it.

In practice, although rarely defined as such, metadata is data used internally to inform the application or other applications. It’s not meant for the users. There’s metadata in the source code of this blog, which search engines use to categorize its content. In the terms of our application, metadata is anything we use to inform the business-layer of our application, and the dream is to have a completely generic application that can be built entirely off of metadata descriptions.

But for now, all metadata still comes back to we human developers, who must know what to do with it functionally. There are very few algorithms flexible enough to run completely dynamically based on any metadata fed to it, but this does not make metadata “metacrap” as Cory Doctrow described it.* Metadata categorizes my posts, pictures, and is the only viable strategy for constructing the semantic web. One day, we will produce an Artificial Intelligence that can learn metadata, creating a strange loop that will raise it to the level of being our peer.

Until then, it’s back to tagging photos and posts for me.

* Doctrow totally loses prescience points with that essay, but it’s easy to identify his error in logic. If metadata won’t work because people will abuse it, then by that same logic, the Internet and e-mail wouldn’t work because too many people would be trying to game it. Metadata works for the same reason the World Wide Web works, the people who want it to work far outnumber the people trying to overthrow it.

I have these in my RSS reader, where I let them mass up until there are hundreds. Then I go through and download all the ones that sound interesting to a folder and burn them to a CD (as MP3s) or store on a thumb drive. These are listed in order of my personal preference:

• Science Friday is indispensable. I’ll download hours worth of shows for company on long, thoughtful drives.
• Dr. Kiki co-hosts The Week in Science, another great science podcast.
• Quirks and Quarks is a longtime (by interweb standards) standard.
• Groks Science Radio Show (formerly Berkeley Groks) is fun for it’s rough, yet erudite content.
• Scientific American’s 60-Second Science makes for nice, quick blips of Science Data.
• The Microbworld Radio Show is another 60-Second podcast. I’ve downloaded the archives for regular listening.
• From the prestigious AAAS comes a weekly review of the most recent published research.

With MP3’s, daily links, science videos, and books, there’s not reason not to have science everywhere you go!

A PDF of this Paper is available here.

The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Style enhances an author’s accuracy and allows for the incorporation of more modern sources in his or her research. With its focus on research writing, APA citations provide a means of enforcing the ethics of integrity in the sciences by providing a means for authors to build upon the works of others and properly credit their sources. The APA style has several features in its referencing schema that allow authors to cite more modern works than other styles. Additionally, the APA style enhances the authors’ accuracy while promoting his or her cultural sensitivity in providing guidelines for how to refer to genders and ethnic groups.

“Principle C: Integrity” of the APA’s Ethic’s Code states, “Psychologists seek to promote accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness in the science, teaching, and practices of psychology (2003).” While this statement targets the field of psychology specifically, these ethics of “accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness” apply to the broader scope of science and education in general. Part of the peer review process for publishing journal articles involves reviewing the authors’ citations and ensuring proper credit has been given to the work of other researchers (Macrina, 2000). According to the DocStyles website, the APA style is uniquely suited for research writing in the sciences and academia:

The APA Manual is the only style guide focused solely on the essential product of modern research in the sciences, education, and psychology–the research paper. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers is an effective counterpart in the humanities. Everything else–the Chicago Manual of Style, Turabian’s Handbook for Writers, the American Medical Association Manual of Style, and the Council of Science Editors’ Scientific Style and Format–all lack this singular focus. This helps explain the popularity of APA style, and the inevitable need for you to become familiar with it. (Scribe, 2009)

Scribe compares the APA Style to several others used in the humanities, medical writing, and popular print writing. It might therefore illustrate how APA enables research writing by noting its differences to other writing styles. Fortunately, the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, located on the campus of Long Island University, has a website providing the ability to compare the citation styles of APA, MLA, Turabian, AMA, and Chicago Manual of Style. From it, we find that APA is a very forward-thinking and cutting-edge writing style. It is the only style that allows utilizing the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a database identifier used by online journals to identify articles, instead of the article’s web address in the references list. This is a particularly prescient aspect of the style, as web addresses can change with time, as when an article moves from the Journal’s front page to its archives, but the database keys are much less mercurial. APA Style also takes a more modern approach in providing for the capability to cite Wikis and PowerPoint presentations found online (Delaney, 2009).

Although most websites and other sources tend to focus on the proper use of citations, APA style is about more than reference lists. It also provides guidance on proper language and terminology. For instance, the style stresses “sensitivity to labels,” indicating that authors should avoid using words that stereotype ethnic groups and genders. For instance, the term “Hispanic” could include people in North and South America, and Spain, many of who would prefer the terms “Latino” or “Chicano” to describe their ethnicity, while the terms “Cuban American” or “Mexican” refer to very specific ethnic groups (Dewey, 2003). Not only does being cognizant of such terms make for more sensitive writing, it also enhances the author’s verbal acuity as well.

In referring to his own accomplishments, Galileo Galilei famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Citation lists provide a tool for authors to build upon the works of others and for peer reviewers to verify the work in the context of its research. The APA Style specifically enables authors to include the latest media in their research by providing for the use of DOIs, online PowerPoint presentations, and Wikis. APA Style also increases the authors’ accuracy in speech by emphasizing the use of culturally sensitive terminology over generalizations and stereotypes. For all of these reasons APA Style is an innovative, modern, and accurate writing style, making it perfect for authoring in the sciences and academia.

References

American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, AMA, June 1, 2003. Retrieved April 19, 2009 from APA website: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html

Delaney, Robert (2009). APA Citation Style. Retrieved April 18, 2009 from Long Island University website: http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citation.htm

Dewey, Russ (2003). APA Crib Sheet. Retrieved April 19, 2009 from College of Wooster website: http://www.wooster.edu/psychology/apa-crib.html

Macrina, Francis, (2000). Scientific Integrity, An Introductory Text with Cases, ASM Press, Washington DC, 2000.

Scribe, Abel PhD. (2009). APA (Style) Lite for College Papers. Retrieved April 18, 2009 From DocStyles website: http://www.docstyles.com/apalite.htm

Other assignments from CIS517 IT Project Management:

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090428Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090504Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090518Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090529Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090612Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: APA Research Paper

CIS517 IT Project Management: The Project Development Experience

CIS517 IT Project Management: Effective Project Mangement

CIS517 IT Project Management: Final Project

CIS517 IT Project Management: Final Project MPP

Rainbow Following us Out of the City

There are some incredibly progressive cultural values in the Netherlands, as well as demonstrations of enlightenment values. I previously covered the NEMO Science Center, a children’s science center that had sex displays. There were Obama posters everywhere, wind turbines, as well as bicycles, rows and endless rows of bicycles… dorkiest bicycles you’ve ever seen. : )

Einstein on Currency

This is not to say what I saw in Amsterdam was more cultured than America, our museums are bigger, more diverse. Not better, but the stereotype of Europeans having more culture than we do is just that, a stereotype.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

IBM 360/65 mainframe Credit: John Sloan

I worked in a wide variety of development environments as an independent contractor in Washington DC, mostly on small teams or individual assignments, but I’ve found there’s an incredible wealth of learning opportunities that come with working in the large-team environment we have at the Coast Guard. In addition to having a wide variety of perspectives and solutions coming from my coworkers, I also get to hear some great tales from the early days of computing.

Our DBA is in his 50s, and one day he related to me the most expensive programming mistake of his career. This was in the 70s, and computers were still too expensive for most companies, so his employer leased processing time on a mainframe computer at General Electric.

Punchcard with Map Data Credit: bootload

Because of memory constraints, programmers in these days had to work off of print-outs of their code, writing out their programming changes on paper, and then modifying the specific lines of code through a terminal. Once a program was ready for testing, it was sent to General Electric’s central computer for processing, and the company was billed for the time required to run the program.

While working as a programmer in this environment, our DBA had sent his code to General Electric’s central computer for processing. Knowing that the code still required a great deal of debugging, he decided to go to lunch, expecting the program to error out in a few minutes.

Upon coming back from lunch an hour later, he found his program still running. He immediately canceled the request, and, after reviewing his code, found a bug that created an infinite loop. Thus the program never stopped processing.

Although he never was reprimanded for it, this little programming mistake cost his company more than $10,000 1970s U.S. Dollars.

Further Reading: 50 Years of Conventional Wisdom and Eye-raising Anecdotes from Programming Veterans

Sun Credit: onlinewoman

A hydroelectric dam converts the motion energy of water flowing downhill into electrical energy through mechanical turbines. The water flowing downhill expends the gravitational energy it stored when it was deposited up in the mountains. The water got from the ocean to the mountaintop via thermal energy, which evaporated it into the air to accumulate in clouds and rain. The thermal energy accumulated in the water when it absorbed the Sun’s radiant energy.

Hydroelectric Power Radiant->Thermal->Gravitational->Electric Credit: DOE

The motion energy of a car driving down the street comes from the mechanical energy that makes the wheels go round. The mechanical energy is driven by the combustion engine, which converts the chemical energy stored in gasoline to thermal energy, which expands the air and drives the pistons. The chemical energy stored in the gasoline’s hydrocarbons comes from plants, which converted the Sun’s radiant energy to chemical energy through photosynthesis.

Coal Formation Credit: DOE

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:

“No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up,” I would say.

“How did the spring get would up” he would ask.

“I wound it up”

“And how did you get moving?”

“From eating”

“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

– Richard Feynman, Energy in Textbooks

The total solar energy hitting Earth is about 1.5×10²²J each day, while the Sun’s total daily output is 3.34×10³¹J.

Note: Nuclear Energy and bacteria that live off chemical energies would be exceptions to the Sun-origin of all energies for this game. : )

On a recent canoe trip through what has to be the most exotic state park I have yet adventured through, Vicky and I saw turkey vultures, lily pads, beavers, geese, Spanish moss, two bald eagles, painted turtles, bald cypress, and this fine fellow:

Alligator in Merchant’s Millpond State Park Credit: Moi

The pond is the northernmost extent of the American Alligator’s habitat, and was built in the early 1700s, where it was the center of trade in Gates County. In the 1960s, A.B. Coleman purchased the property, but thought it too beautiful to develop on. So he donated it, and his generosity is for all to enjoy.

In addition to canoeing in this enchanting landscape, there is also a six-mile trail that takes you through a variety of ecosystems, from swampland, to older forests, and long-leaf pines.

Check out the complete flickr set here.