When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that the dinosaurs really never left the Earth. In fact, the dinosaurs are all around us, they just evolved into something more well-suited to the changing environment:

Indian Peafowl (Peacock)

While admiring the Peacocks in the aviary, I overheard a woman tell her friend, “How can anyone look at that animal and say there ain’t no God?” Putting the double-negative aside, I thought about the incredibly fascinating the process of sexual selection that led to the Peacock’s tail. Sexual selection doesn’t disprove the existence of god, but it does disqualify the mere existence of a peacock’s tail as proof of god’s existence.

As long as we’re challenging paradigms, let me remind everyone of one of my favorite examples of homosexuality in nature, the flamingo. Here’s an animal with a well-documented habit of forming non-traditional relationships with its fellows. Two male flamingos will often pair-up, taking eggs from females or females will even give them their eggs, and then the males will raise the chicks. The evolutionary advantage to this arrangement is that two male flamingos can secure more territory than a male-female pair.

Remember, you can’t spell flamingo without “flaming.”

: )

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Emily Dickinson Kindle Screensaver Credit: Cheneworth Gap

I have hundreds of megabytes worth of free books that I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg and various other sources online, which presents me with the dilemma of finding a way to read all of them. Reading them at my desktop is uncomfortable, although I have done this, sitting at a computer monitor for hours to read a novel. I’ve gotten through a couple of books on my cell phone, but the small screen is also headache-inducing. My OLPC would make a great reading device, but it takes a long time to boot and crashes when I try to access large text files.

That’s why I decided to try out Amazon’s second-generation Kindle, an iPod for books. I was drawn to the fact that the screen is not backlit, which is easier on the eyes, and the device uses very little energy to render text, making it portable on long trips. Plus, as text-files are extremely small, I knew the device’s several gigs worth of storage space was something I would never exhaust. Could you imagine telling someone they’d be able to store thousands of books and hundreds of hours of music on devices smaller than a dimestore novella twenty years ago? Technology is magic.

Since this is a positive review, I’ll start with the bad and get that out of the way. At $360, the Kindle is very over-priced. I would value this device around $200 max, and there are cheaper e-readers out there with more features, such as the Sony PRS-700BC. Additionally, the Kindle should really be priced at $390 as you should absolutely buy a $30-$50 cover for it. I made the mistake of buying just the Kindle, and got a scratch on my screen within two weeks of owning it, just from carrying it around in my messenger bag with pens and a clipboard.

With the capacity to store thousands of books on the device, it’s an incredible oversight that Amazon provides no way to organize books on the Kindle. Despite organizing my library into folders by category on the device itself, all of my books are displayed in a single list sortable by title, author, and last accessed. This is fine now, while I only have four pages of books to flip through, but will become unacceptable years down the road, after I’ve downloaded dozens of public domain texts from Gutenberg and need to find that one passage in The Age of Reason to quote in a post.

One final gripe is that the Kindle offers an incredibly useless feature, the capability to subscribe to blogs. For a small monthly fee, you can subscribe to a wide selection of well-known blogs. Whoopdee-doo. What use is it to subscribe to a link-blog like Boing Boing on my Kindle, if I can’t navigate to anything the site links to? That would be as worthless as looking at ideonexus on the device.

Edgar Allan Poe Kindle Screensaver Credit: Stillframe

Which brings me to the cool stuff. I am enthralled with the idea of being able to download newspapers onto the kindle for a small monthly fee, even if I have no intention of using the feature. Unfortunately for me personally, I read the news with an open text editor to take notes and links for later reference on ideonexus. Had this device come out ten years ago, newspapers might have found a viable way to survive the Information Age. Reading a newspaper on the back porch or at the breakfast table is a very relaxing and enlightening habit, and the Kindle enables this, making it a great gift for the Baby Boomers in your life.

Another feature Boomers will appreciate is the thriftiness of the device. I easily blow through a couple-hundred dollars a month in (mostly used) books from Amazon. Two inconveniences of this practice is having to wait a week for books to arrive in the mail and having to pay delivery fees. The Kindle 2 comes with a free, built-in cellular connection, which allows for buying books from Amazon right from the device. The e-versions of books are usually about half the price, if you factor in the shipping, and the book downloads directly to the Kindle, restoring the all-important “instant gratification” factor that is missing from online shopping.

One bit of advice though, keep the connection turned off except to synch the device, as it drains the battery. Thanks to the Kindle’s E-Ink display, the device uses very little energy. After a week of heavy reading on it, my Kindle’s battery hadn’t even lost a quarter of its charge.

My favorite characteristic of the Kindle is how it enables active reading. I read paper-based books with my cell-phone on hand to take notes on everything I read, diligently copying passages down into word files (I hate to deface a paper book by highlighting pages) and summarizing important passages. The Kindle interweaves this practice into the e-book. With the keyboard built into the device, I can take notes directly in the book I’m reading and highlight passages on screen. It’s like I’m adventuring through realms of knowledge and taking photos of things I see along the way. : )

The Kindle is not for everyone, but my fellow bookworms out there should definately consider an e-reader to support their addiction.

Credit: Green England

On June 1, 2008, China joined countries like Bangladesh, Ireland, and Rwanda, and the city of San Francisco in instituting a ban on plastic bags. As a result, China saved 1.6 million tons of oil in the year following the ban, the amount of oil it would have taken to manufacture 40 billion plastic bags.

In addition to reducing China’s dependence of foreign oil, the country is also taking a stand against a form of pollution that has incredible detrimental environmental consequences. Plastic bags make up 10 percent of the debris that washes up on America’s coastline, they are choking whales, dolphins, seals, and turtles that mistake them for food, and are breaking down into toxic petro-polymers which we consume as they enter the food chain.

Turtle with plastic bag Credit: Melbourne Zoo

With all the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of doing away with plastic bags, I made the mistake of thinking State Senator Marc Basnight’s proposed plastic bag tax, which would levy 10 to 20 cents on each plastic bag, the revenues from which would go to pay for college scholarships. Win-win right?

Nope. Dare County Republican Party Chairman Keven Connor has a complaint about politicians who want clean air and water. According to Connor:

They cower to broken science without any consideration whatsoever of the economic consequences to thousands of people and the businesses they depend on for a livelihood.

If a plastic bag ban is bad for the American economy, then why wasn’t it bad for China’s economy? This is a country that is expected to outrank the United States as the world’s largest economy and exporter in the near future. How is reducing America’s dependence of foreign oil bad for the economy? How is preventing toxins from having deleterious effects on the public health bad for the economy? How is sending kids to college bad for the economy?

Why is Connor so confused. Here’s a hint:

This is a textbook example of why science is not perfect; it’s all subjective.

It’s obvious that when Connor uses the term “subjective” to describe science, he is confusing the field with his own discipline, politics, where obfuscation, distortion, and spurious interpretations of the facts are required skills for success. Not so with science, where an impeccable, reproducible, and thoroughly peer-reviewed understanding of the truth is mandatory in order to produce complex medical procedures, nuclear power, computer systems, and all the conveniences of modern life. Try making a subjective interpretation of the second law of motion and see how many rocket ships you get into space.

Liberalism in America poses a threat to one of our most basic freedoms: private property rights. They’re already working to ban smoking in privately owned establishments; now they’re trying to dictate how retailers will bag our groceries based on an imperfect science.

This is the most disingenuous part of Connor’s largely entirely unsubstantiated letter, the idea that we are going to have to just keep putting mercury in your food supply, bisphenol-A in your baby bottles, and pollution into the air you breath because to do otherwise would infringe on people’s “property rights.” That’s because, in Connor’s world, your health and well-being are neither property nor a right.

grocery bag graveyard Credit: halflifehalflived

“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.”
– Arab Proverb

Cacti

Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert, but it’s also an environment of remarkable biodiversity, and much of the diversity found there exhibits fascinating geometry and emergent patterns.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly…”
– 1 Corinthians 13:12

There is a common theme among religions of the world: humans are flawed. We are subject to a cycle of suffering, guilty of original sin, or afflicted with a modern malaise of dissatisfaction, which may only be cured through adherence to Buddhism, accepting Jesus Christ as our lord and savior, or following the Sastras. If we fail to follow the official path, we are damned to misery of some form or another.

Science also recognizes the flaws in human beings, chiefly our stunted natural perceptions of the world around us. We don’t see that the solid world around us is made up of atoms that are mostly empty space because there was no evolutionary advantage to perceiving this fact. Optical illusions can distort our perspectives because our brains try to predict the way the world should be, rather than simply accept things as they are. As with religion, science purports to have the solution to such shortcomings as well.

Wavelengths for colors Credit: NASA

The visible spectrum, the range of light frequencies we can see with our eyes (ROY G BIV), is an itsy-bitsy subset of the possible frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. While we can see wavelengths from 380 to 750nm, the entire spectrum runs from 1 pm up to 100 Mm. We see ROY G BIV, but we don’t see radio, microwave, far and near infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, or high energy gamma rays. At best, we must indirectly perceive these frequencies using the scientific innovations such as radios, night vision goggles, Geiger counters and other inventions.

The human senses of smell and taste are examples of chemoreception, where chemical signals are converted into stimuli. Receptors in our noses are triggered by molecules in the air and receptors in our tongues are triggered by molecules in what we eat. Humans have approximately 800 olfactory receptor genes, while mice have 1,400. There are more ways to combine molecules than there are atoms in the universe, so it’s easy to understand how limited our senses are in differentiating molecules, however the magnitude of how stunted our senses are is difficult to comprehend. Thank the Cosmos we have chemistry, through which we may detect the mercury, arsenic, and other toxins we cannot taste; spectral analysis, which reveals the elemental content of stars; or biochemistry modeling the molecular processes of life.

Chunking in Short-Term Memory Credit: Python Software Foundation

Human working memory can only hold about seven elements at time for a mere 18 seconds on average. When we are given a set of things, say {“blue”, “robot”, “mirror”, “a-flat”, “time”, “42”, “warm”, “E.O. Wilson”}, the overwhelming majority of us will fail to commit at least one of the items to memory. If this last is unconvincing, take a moment to try and memorize pi to one-million digits in order to understand the scope of the world around us and how little of it we can hold in our minds at any one time. One way we overcome this imprecision is through the discipline of computer science, where we may store everything we know about the world, and even generate new information from algorithms that do the inference for us.

Human long-term memory is incredible fallible. Our brains are not video cameras, recording things as they happen, but rather they recreate events in our minds in a biased and inaccurate manner, often giving false positives where a suggestion from someone causes us to remember something that did not actually happen. Eyewitness accounts can often be wrong, with victims identifying the wrong person in a line-up, but science has identified this problem and provides us with DNA testing, photography, recordings, citations, the peer-review process, archaeology, and psychology to compensate, so that we may discover even our own personal pasts the way they actually happened.

Science gives us infrared cameras that we may see in the dark, computers so that we may calculate the incalculable, writing and recording that we may revisit the past as it actually happened, chemical analysis, spectral analysis, medical diagnoses, telescopes, electric lights–Of course, without science, we would also be completely unaware of how incredibly stunted is our ability to perceive the world, but anyone who would like to give it up, return to life without antibiotics, modern agriculture, air conditioning, television, and a future where knowledge will continue to grow, along with the enhancements it will bring to our lives, is welcome to drop out of civilization anytime.

“When a government builds a road, it subsidizes the car industry.”
– Comment seen on a Blog

Wind turbines at night Credit: lukewestall

A peer, who is also a Rush Limbaugh listener, was explaining to me the folly of things Obama said in his ASU Commencement Speech, where the President emphasized charitable volunteer work, shrugging off the facade of materialism, and green-collar jobs as where students should seek to make a lasting mark on the world. Limbaugh apparently derided Obama for wanting a green-energy modeled exactly like Spain’s, which is a horrible failure that will bring doom doom doom upon America if we don’t cut taxes for the rich–or some such nonsense.

Obama didn’t mention Spain or Europe in the Commencement speech (Doughboy can never seem to keep his facts straight, but his fans are a very forgiving lot.. but only to Doughboy.), but he did make the following talking point while on the campaign trail:

Think of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan where they’re making real investments in renewable energy. They’re surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries. This isn’t because they’re smarter than us, or work harder than us, or are more innovative than we are. It’s because their governments have harnessed their people’s hard work and ingenuity with bold investments—investments that are paying off in good, high-wage jobs.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece counters this argument with a study that indicates, “Spain has lost 2.2 jobs for each job created by solar, wind or hydroelectric power producers.” A myriad of other articles cite the same estimate¹, but I prefer the Economist’s ever-fair and accurate explanation of what this estimate means:

Spain’s private sector, on the other hand, creates a job for every €260,000 or so invested, by Mr Calzada’s reckoning. So if the government had left the €29 billion in the hands of the private sector, it would have created 113,000 jobs with it—2.2 times as many. In other words, the government, Mr Calzada finds, is destroying 2.2 ordinary jobs for every green one it creates.

The study has numerous critics, and was written by an organization whose purpose is combating fears of global warming, which they do with generous donations from ExxonMobile, but let’s analyze this point, specifically the idea that renewable energy costs more jobs than it creates.

I take particular issue with the idea that green jobs destroy ordinary jobs. This supposedly occurs because the government takes money from the private sector and invests it in a less efficient manner. If the private sector were able to keep the money, it would create 2.2 times the jobs as government. But this assumes that private industry has an incentive to create these jobs. The past decades have demonstrated no such proclivities. We gave industry a tax cut, and they pocketed it, generating record profits for ExxonMobile, but creating no jobs.

Secondly, articles citing the study conveniently ignore Germany and Japan’s renewable energy initiatives. Germany and Japan are now global leaders in photovoltaic technology. Germany has taken this course of action to cushion the country against soaring energy prices, as it experienced in the 1970s. Germany now holds half the world’s solar energy output, putting the country in the lead in a technology the world will have to move towards sooner or later, which is why California and Japan have their own initiatives following Germany’s model.

Finally, there is the argument being floated by dittoheads that renewable energy requires fewer jobs in and of itself. Coal power plants employ far more workers because, in addition to personnel running the plant, there are all the miners, truck drivers, and supporting personnel who are employed in removing coal from the ground to power the plants. In comparison, wind and solar energy only require the personnel to run the plant, the sources of energy deliver themselves naturally. We are therefore going to suffer huge job losses by switching to sustainable energy sources.

I only have to look at my own job to understand why this argument is spurious. I’m a computer programmer. Before the automated computer, there were hundreds of personnel employed with the title of Computer, people who performed computations all day. Then the electronic computer came along, putting these hundreds and thousands of people out of work. Who replaced them? Me. As a single computer programmer, I have put dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people out of jobs by automating the work they do.

But you know what? I’ve also created jobs. The computer industry has created hundreds of thousands of jobs by opening the realms of possibility and freeing people from mundane tasks. Renewable energy puts people out of work the exact same way, and, like information technology, will free people from mundane tasks, which will ultimately open more opportunities than it makes obsolete, which will ultimately generate far more jobs than will be created by sticking with antiquated strategies for powering our civilization.

¹ The WSJ article also makes the bizarre argument that green jobs aren’t sustainable because, once you’ve built the power plant, the construction workers are out of a job (the same argument is made here and elsewhere)

A PDF of this Paper is available here.

On the one hand, it is difficult to think of this as the half-way point in the Blue Group’s project; however, what I may perceive as a slow start to project is, in fact, just what is expected in what was mostly a formational period. Although the project sponsor defined the project so broadly and vaguely as to generate some disconcertion among team members, feedback on the project has been good to the extent that the project sponsor’s time can provide. Team-building activities, introductions and coordinating on tasks have also taken time, but only as is expected. Finally, the nature of the medium, the online collaboration tools provided in the Blackboard Suite, both enables group progress by allowing for asynchronous collaboration across multiple time zones and personal schedules and is lacking in some respects in tools for collaboration on the actual document in production.

Bradbary and Garrett identify securing the support of the project sponsor as a crucial component of running a successful project (Bradbary & Garrett, 2005). Our project sponsor, Dr. Manning, has been fairly, seemingly purposefully, cryptic in explaining the project details, as when he responded on the “Ask the Professor” discussion board to a request for additional details by a student with, “The Group will decide upon one project. There will be one document developed by the group. Everyone in the group will submit the same document (Manning, 2009).” While there is no budget for him to divert funds to other projects, and the project requirements are so flexibly defined that we don’t have to worry that he might “telepathically send his ideas” and then “berate us for not asking input (Bradbary & Garrett, 2005),” Dr. Manning does fit the profile of a project sponsor who has numerous other pressing responsibilities on his plate, which prohibits him from providing the ideal level of support for the project. On the plus side, Dr. Manning does not take a pessimistic view of our project, and has stopped in our discussion board to praise our group’s progress, regularly sets project milestones to check on our status, and has provided important feedback on the details of our project progress; therefore, while his many responsibilities legitimately prevent him from becoming too involved in directly supporting our project, Dr. Manning does genuinely support the success of the project and believes in our capabilities to accomplish it.

I volunteered to research the Human Resource Management aspect of the project plan, which presents some unique challenges on a project of this type, where project scope is nebulous and resources are difficult to define. Understanding the skill sets and work styles of the individuals in the Blue Group will go a long way towards understanding how to leverage each member’s unique style and talents. The Myers and Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) holds the most appeal for developing the project team as a team building exercise to determine the personality preferences of everyone on the Blue Group (Schwalbe, 2007). Although the DISC Profiling system, based on the work of William Marston Ph.D in 1928, is equally, if not more, prestigious (Schwalbe, 2007), the only online sources for taking the Disc Profiling test charged between $20 and $70 for each test (DISC, 2009), multiplied by four team members, and the test becomes cost-prohibitive for our relatively under funded project, while the MBTI is available online for free at HumanMetrics.com (Human Metrics, 2008). While it is my hope to have each member of the group take the MBTI test, accomplishing this will require overcoming the demands currently placed on everyone’s time.

Such external demands are easily the biggest complication when it comes to coordinating with individuals in different time zones and personal schedules. Luckily, the suite of tools provided in the Blackboard system enables asynchronous meetings and collaboration, which has be indispensable to project progress. While the online format does prevent the team for reading one another’s body language and facial expressions, as Herding Chickens recommends (Bradbary & Garrett, 2005), I personally find that I thrive in the world of written communication, where I may finely articulate my contributions to discussions and take the time to ensure accuracy in my statement. The file-sharing tool in the Blackboard Suite would be it’s one failing, as it is extremely basic. A more comprehensive file-sharing tool would provide the capability for Version Management (VM), so that multiple team members could work on the same document at once, merging their modifications upon commit, as the TortoiseSVN VM software allows (Collins-Sussman et.al, 2008), or, at a more basic level, allow members to check out files so that others may not modify them as they are being worked on. An alternative means to achieve this capability of multiple members working on a single document with a complete history of changes would be to set up a Wiki. A survey of 168 Corporate Wiki Users reported that 63 percent of them benefited from “increased collaboration efficiency” and 71 percent of users reported easier dissemination of work (Majchrzak, et al., 2006). It is possible that a Wiki could provide a comprehensive solution conducive to team collaboration on the project.

While the Blackboard Suite of online collaboration tools does lack VM software for collaborating directly on the same electronic document and project file, and is lacking many of the features cutting edge developments like Wikis include, without it, progress on this project would be impossible. Although collaboration is not face-to-face and is asynchronous, team-building efforts such as MBTI analysis and continuing coordination on project tasks are crucial to completing the project on time, as is continual support from our project sponsor in requesting deliverables and providing feedback on those deliverables. No matter the outcome, no effort on this project will be wasted, as there are lessons learned in every step.

References

Bradbary, Dan and Garrett, David (2005), Herding Chickens: Innovative Techniques for Project Management, SYBEX Inc, Alameda, CA.

Collins-Sussman, Ben, Fitzpatrick, Brian, and Pilato, C. Michael (2008). Version Control with Subversion. Retrieved from red-bean website: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.basic.vsn-models.html#svn.basic.vsn-models.copy-merge

DiscProfile (2009). DiscProfile – The Originial DISC Profiles Tests & Online DISC Profiles. Retrieved from DiscProfile on May 16, 2009 at: http://www.discprofile.com/

Human Metrics (2008). Jung Typology Test. Retrieved from HumanMetrics on May 2, 2009 at: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

Majchrzak, Ann; Wagner, Christian; and Yates, Dave (2006). Corporate Wiki Users: Results of a Survey, Retrieved from the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p99.pdf

Manning, James (2009). Ask the Professor. Retrieved May 17, 2009 from Blackboard website: http://strayeronline.blackboard.com/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&course_id=_14554_1&nav=discussion_board_entry&conf_id=_11505_1&forum_id=_57527_1&message_id=_1220134_1

Schwalbe, Kathy, (2007). Information Technology Project Management, Course Technology, Boston, Massachusetts.

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

Nobody flunks a science museum. – Frank Oppenheimer, founder of Exploratorium

Center Director Jenny Eaton at the Port Discover Booth for Knobbs Creek Recreation Center’s Safety Day

There’s a feeling I get when I find a picture of a living species on Earth that looks as though it belongs in a science fiction film, come across a new mathematical equation that explains some part of the world around me I previously thought unquantifiable, or read the philosophical speculations of a researcher who has spent a decade immersed in the intricate details of some obscure scientific realm. These are discoveries already made known to the world, but I am discovering them personally for the first time, and I come away from them seeing the entire world around me with a new layer of understanding. I’m addicted to this feeling, constantly seeking it out, so that I am perpetually looking at the world in a different light.

This state of mind, the sense of harmony we receive from comprehending that our reality is orderly and understandable is known as the Ionian Enchantment, a term coined by the physicist and philosopher Gerald Holton, and I’ve always thought the Physicist Richard Feynman best articulated it in this passage:

The World looks so different after learning science.

For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.

A regular visit to the Port Discover science center in downtown Elizabeth City offers a fresh bit of Ionian enchantment each month. Walk into the center one week and you might find a light box filled with rows of sprouting plants, another week might find a new terrarium filled with local plant life, and every month brings new guest speakers to present engaging perspectives on the infinite enlightening subjects science has to offer. This perpetual introduction of new ideas to engage the mind is an attribute of all good science centers.

When volunteers were helping to put the Port Discover together, Director LuAnne Pendergraft kept reminding everyone that we were building a center not a museum. Nearly 50 years ago the Science Center Movement began, a “dramatic shift toward the empowerment of students and individuals to be in control of their own learning,” and creating “new institutions of ideas rather than things.” Yet, despite being a half-century in age, the movement is still in its emergent phase, still catching on; however, as Alan Nursall of Science North argues, centers serve an important need in our communities:

A science center can illustrate to visitors that science is an energizing human activity and that great works of science are as passionate and inspirational as great music, art, and sport… [Science Centers] must provide an opportunity to enjoy science, to do science, to laugh at and about science, to be skeptical of science, and to be awed by science. We need places like that–science arenas–where we can play with our friends and let our minds work up a sweat.

Director LuAnne Pendergraft Setting Up LED Booklights at the Port Discover booth for the Fourth of July

Port Discover serves this fantastic function in our community, and it does so with a miniscule amount of space. Recently, the space adjacent to the science center became vacant, providing the perfect opportunity to expand; however, in order to do this, Port Discover needs public funding to purchase the space, and is asking for $50,000 each year for three years, which the center will match with equal funds raised through charitable donations:

May 6, 2009

Friend of Port Discover:

Port Discover is seeking to expand its operations to the former Arts of the Albemarle space adjacent to the current center location. Exhibits, activities and programs would expand along with the physical space. In order to be most successful, Port Discover is requesting public financial support from the City of Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County. The request from Port Discover’s Board of Directors is not from the general fund, but rather from funds that are restricted to tourism-related projects, for which Port Discover qualifies.

If you believe that Port Discover is a positive addition to Elizabeth City and that your family and the greater community would benefit from an expanded space, we need your help. Please express support by communicating about a positive experience related to Port Discover; your feelings about the need for informal science education centers; a family trip planned around a center like Port Discover or the positive effect Port Discover creates for visitors and residents. Or simply say “I support Port Discover and hope that you will too by helping them grow”.

Contact your Pasquotank County Commissioner. Information at www.co.pasquotank.nc.us/Departments/manager/commissioners.cfm

Contact your Elizabeth City Council representative. Information at www.cityofec.com

Write a letter of support to Port Discover at 613 E. Main Street, Elizabeth City

Email a letter of support to luanne@portdiscover.org

Become a Port Discover member. Download a membership brochure at www.portdiscover.org under “Get Involved.”

Send a monetary donation to Port Discover.

Thanks for your commitment to Port Discover!

Science centers nurture an environment conducive to free Inquiry, where young minds are encouraged to explore whatever suits their interests, and, by providing the means to explore the world of ideas, the science center tailors learning to the individual, empowering them. In fostering a community curious about the world of ideas around them, science centers can bring us a bit closer to Dennis Schatz’s dream:

I have a fantasy–that someday science will be as pervasive as sports in our society. Just think what it would mean to have intramural science, after-school science, and even that pickup science activity at the local park…. The ultimate test for knowing when science is as pervasive as sports will be when everyone has to rush home to see Monday Night Science.

On March 9, 2009, the White House issued a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, directing the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop recommendations for improving scientific integrity based on six core principles. The OSTP opened a solicitation for public comment on their blog for ideas on how best to implement and enforce these principles.

There are a lot of thought-provoking and insightful ideas being posted, like exposing all software code used in simulations for public review, and there are some irrelevant comments, like the standard Obama-bashing or personal issues like “Legalize Marijuana!” Luckily, the OSTP is using a SlashDot-strategy for moderating comments, so the good ones float to the top and the trolls get banished to irrelevancy.

Here are my responses to the six questions posted:

Principle (a)

The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate’s knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity;

What are the best metrics for the four listed criteria?

Knowledge is very specialized in scientific disciplines, and the only way to test if someone is an expert in their field is to have another expert interview them; however, there are flaws with this strategy, as many academics lack the social skills to perform well in interviews. I personally do very poorly in one-on-one situations; therefore, people like myself would much prefer to respond to a short-answer examination that would then be reviewed by an expert within the organization.

Credentials appear fairly straightforward, what institutions did they graduate from? How did they fair academically? What continuing education or professional accomplishments have they added to their cirriculum vitae since earning their degree?

Experience is more difficult to guage. Here again an expert is needed, not in the same field necessarily, but someone familiar with the background work environments. Two candidates could have spent the past five years developing software applications for the military, but differences between department development methodologies can make a world of difference between the quality of the two candidates’ backgrounds to ensure the past five years were spent doing things the correct way.

Integrity, I firmly believe, can only be measured on the job and should be measured by having the employee’s job performance rated by their coworkers and direct supervisor. As the employee’s work ethic and principles directly affect the individuals they interact with on a day to day basis, these individuals will have every incentive to review them truthfully.

Principle (b)

(b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency

How can the integrity of scientific processes be assured? What are some good examples to learn from?

Ensuring the openess of the scientific process is the primary means of assuring its integrity. So long as everything is documented and published for the world to see online (including, as McNamara notes, software code), many eyes will review the process over and over again for years to come, ensuring the research will be reviewed in light of new knowlege and discoveries. The Public Library of Science is a good example of the advantages of publishing online, as research gets disseminated and reviewed within days.

It is important to remember that this is the scientific integrity of the United States Government that we are discussing. We citizens have a right to this research, and the Government has a responsibility to include us in it. Data.gov is going to be a fantastic step in this direction, and scientific integrity will certainly benefit from continuing along this course of online, easy inclusion of interested citizens.

Principle (c)

(c) When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards

What are the most effective processes and organizational structures for assuring that scientific and technological information is reliable? How can the processes and structures used in each case best be disclosed as part of the public record?

The basic peer review process is still the most effective strategy for ensuring reliable scientific and technological information. The peer review process should be conducted as any quality assurance process is administered, and formally documented every step of the way. This documentation should be published real-time as it happens, so that the public can review the results and identify errors before they continue into implementation, where they will become much more costly.

Publishing this process will open it to analysis and review by the public, better methodologies will result as academics are able to find metrics and contribute improvements to process. This publication will also bring citizenry into the process, where they can learn how it opperates and perhaps adopt portions of it into their organization’s own standard operating procedures.

Principle (d)

(d) Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions;

What are the best ways to maximize the legitimate public release of scientific and technological information relied upon by agencies?

Multiple strategies are required for releasing scientific and technological information agencies rely upon for public access and review. Firstly, this information must be released as quickly as possible, including finalized reports, their earlier drafts, and other documents used in their production. The public needs to see the entire history of how these reports came to exist in their final draft form. This will prevent agencies from editing out facts inconvenient to political ideologies and personal motivations. This first step is a data-dump to a regularly updated website, something very few citizens will have any interest in for themselves, but some citizens will scrutinize for impropriety.

Secondly, the information, the finalized reports and supporting data, should be given tags, described with XML, categorized, and published online in such a way that search engines will list it, citizens will read it, and students can cite it in their research papers. In the first stage of releasing the information, the Government is publishing it for the sake of transparency, in the second stage, the Government is publishing it as a resource of which citizens can make use.

Principle (e)

(e) Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised

How can agencies best ensure that they will know when scientific or technological integrity has been compromised?

Public transparency will allow private citizens to review the scientific process in government and blow the whistle should they see any misinformation, poorly-designed methodologies, or researchers accidentally using out-of-date information. It is important to keep in mind that the citizens are raising alerts, but not neccessarily to dishonesty or inethical behaviors. By making the scientific process within government transparent, we are opening the whole process to peer-review from academics from all over the world, who will take interest in it to further their own knowledge and understanding.

There is a concern that this transparency, allowing anyone, even the uneducated or misinformed, to review the process could bog government down in false alerts; however, in the open-source community, such false alarms are raised daily, and, in having to respond to them, researchers come to a better understanding of how to document their processes to avoid future misunderstandings.

Principle (f)

(f) Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decisionmaking or otherwise uses or prepares.

What are the best ways to make sure that the science and technology an agency relies on is reliable?

While transparency will open the scientific process within government to the public, it won’t ensure the public will actively get involved. Agencies should provide incentives, awards perhaps, to citizens that can find concrete faults in research and data. Offering an award of $100 to anyone who can find a mathematical error in a report’s research will give dozens, perhaps hundreds, of citizens the incentive to spend hundreds of collective hours reviewing the report for errors. Such an incentive not only provides quality assurance on the cheap, but also includes citizens in the process. Students would learn about the mathematics and research methodologies in reports as they strive to attain a monetary award.

Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly

As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go.

Check out the complete flickr set here.