The day my world stood still

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Error lies at the heart of science; but there are a number of different kinds of “wrong”. An error in hindsight, where a past hypothesis of yours – perfectly reasonable at the time – is disproven by more accurate or complete measurements, or the discovery of unappreciated complexities in the system you’re studying, is just part of the scientific process, even if many scientists have trouble acknowledging such errors. An interpretive error – making questionable inferences from your experimental data, or wrongly using extant knowledge from other sources – is more serious, but is something that peer reviewers are usually only too happy to point out to you (there is, of course, a fine and fairly hazy line between a truly erroneous conclusion and a disagreement over how particular data should be interpreted). By far the worst breed of wrong, however, is the data error, where some sort of experimental or analytical error invalidates your results, and undermines any conclusions you draw from them. Discovering such an error means that corrections have to be issued, or in the worst cases, entire papers have to be withdrawn. It’s Not A Good Thing.
So you can imagine my horror last Friday, when I was confronted with the serious possibility that a correction error had invalidated all of the palaeomagnetic data I collected for my PhD, and hence the work which represented the bulk of my current publication record.

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Categories: academic life

Calling all geobloggers

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Chris Rowan

The first Accretionary Wedge was a big success, with major kudos due to Brian (who is also celebrating his first blogiversary) for doing the necessary cat-herding to make it happen. Now discussion is underway to organising the next few editions – we need hosts, and topic ideas, and people motivated enough to write relevant posts. Head over here to join the conversation.

Categories: bloggery, links

At least one University department likes blogging, then

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Janet is about to submit her tenure dossier, a three ring binder which simultaneously manages to look imposingly thick and yet a rather flimsy thing on which to hang your academic destiny. It also has an interesting addition: a section on academic blogging, with her department not only consenting but actively encouraging her to do so:

My department has been quite insistent that the blogging I do here does constitute a kind of scholarly activity that ought to be recognized. They think that communicating philosophy to a wider audience is A Good Thing. So, a colleague wrote an evaluative letter about a selection of posts, and that letter and the posts are included in the dossier.

This is an agreeably enlightened perspective; it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in feeling that for a University, sharing knowledge with the outside world should be just as important as generating it is, if not more so. Perhaps my online activities will be viewed in a similarly positive light in the future. At this juncture, however, my personal experience is mixed: whilst I haven’t gone out of my way to publicise this blog amongst my friends and colleagues, a number have stumbled across it by various means, and their reactions have ranged from enthusiasm to vague bemusement. More tellingly, I have noticed a degree of inverse correlation between age and enthusiasm – in other words, the people most likely to be populating tenure boards are also the ones most likely to see blogging as a distracting waste of time.
Of course, should I ever get to the stage where I’m compiling my own version of Janet’s dossier, it’s a fair number of years down the line, and the situation may change. In the meantime, let’s hope that Janet’s university do the bleedingly obvious thing, and ask her to stay.

Categories: academic life

Peru’s new crater extra-terrestrial, but illness not

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Chris Rowan

One of the main risks of our media-saturated world is that although events can make it onto our TV and computer screens with unrivaled speed, this does not necessarily mean we have any idea of what’s actually going on, which often leads to the speculation getting a bit out of hand. Last weeks extra-terrestrial events in Peru are a case in point. Meteorite impact? Yes – the coincidence of a previously unnoticed hole and something falling from the sky close to where it appeared made that reasonably likely. Alien contagion about to wipe us all out? Only in the dreams of the nuttiest panspermia advocates. If the meteorite had happened to be a carbonaceous chondrite, then it was vaguely possible that something non-biological from the meteorite, within the gases emanating from the impact site, was causing nausea and headaches amongst the locals. However, by far the most reasonable, if the most mundane, explanation, was the one offered by the BBC, who actually bothered to ask someone who might know what they’re talking about:

A local journalist, Martine Hanlon, told the BBC experts did not believe the meteor would make anybody sick, but they did think a chemical reaction caused by its contact with the ground could release toxins such as sulphur and arsenic.

And, lo and behold, that’s pretty much the right explanation, according to a Peruvian geologist who went to have a look:

The illness was the result of inhaling arsenic fumes, according to Luisa Macedo, a researcher for Peru’s Mining, Metallurgy, and Geology Institute (INGEMMET), who visited the crash site.

The meteorite created the gases when the object’s hot surface met an underground water supply tainted with arsenic, the scientists said.

Numerous arsenic deposits have been found in the subsoils of southern Peru, explained Modesto Montoya, a nuclear physicist who collaborated with the team. The naturally formed deposits contaminate local drinking water.

“If the meteorite arrives incandescent and at a high temperature because of friction in the atmosphere, hitting water can create a column of steam,” added Jos?© Ishitsuka, an astronomer at the Peruvian Geophysics Institute, who analyzed the object.

Hopefully no-one is too disappointed that humanity is not going to have it’s blood crystallised….

Categories: geology, planets, public science

Mars less wet than we thought?

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Mars has a habit of disappointing us; exotic possibilities are presented to us, before fading away into nothingness when we look more closely. Percival Lowell’s canals didn’t survive close scrutiny, and now Phil reports that the merciless gaze of the HiRISE camera is casting doubt on the evidence seen in lower resolution imagery for recent flows of liquid water on the Martian surface.
If you recall, there was a lot of fuss at the end of last year about patches of bright material, which had appeared on some crater slopes imaged by the dear, departed Mars Global Surveyor where no such patches were seen in previous images. This evidence of recent activity on the Martian surface was made more exciting by the form that these bright patches took: they appeared to divert around elevated topography, and often fanned out at their ends. Could the bright material be mineral salts left behind as water escaping from the Martian subsurface evaporated or sublimed?

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Categories: paper reviews, planets