The blogpost is here.
The bottom line is relatively good news I think for Tokyo Bay and also for the Japanese fishing industry. Nevertheless, public panic is already reducing the price of seafood at Tokyo’s famed seafood wholesale market. Perhaps this will be good for the population of blue fin tuna.
The notion of sharing scientific equipment is absolutely central to science. In my first days as a young aspiring scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, working on a phenomenon called sponge cell reaggregation, in an invertebrate zoology class this was drilled into me.
The equipment used to ask scientific questions, especially in biosciences, are extremely costly, but they are key enablers of researchers. One needs access to such equipment to conduct experiments and test hypotheses. Using grant money or even institutional funds to purchase duplicate instruments is not only often wasteful, it promotes the sort of silo mentality, more commonly found in other sectors.
The collegiality of scientists as they share instrumentation, without demand for compensation, is one of the characteristics of the profession which really sets it apart from others. It helps create a fellowship that transcends borders, disciplines and even scientific disagreement (which can be vehement).
I’m very proud of the state-of-the-art shared instrumentation at Krasnow, but even more proud of the way our investigators share the tools they need.
Of course, behind a firewall, for those without subscriptions, but if you do have one, I think it’s an important article for those of us interested in the intersection of human cognition and computation. Click above to get the abstract.
The basic cognitive problem addressed is how human rapidly learn and abstract given the noisy, relatively sparse inputs of our sensory systems. It’s a big problem for the Decade of the Mind crowd and for those interested in the whole notion of reverse-engineering our brains.
At the same time, this is not the article for explaining how things are done at the neural level. But it does perhaps lay out some clues as to what we might be looking for.
Yes, it’s Cherry Blossom Festival time. Today’s perverse Spring snow storm didn’t really materialize, but the fear of it kept the crowds manageable. Just to give our readers some sense of scale, think that there are probably a thousand trees like this one, all in bloom at the same time around the Tidal Basin next to the Jefferson memorial.
We’ve all seen it over and over, for the past decade. In today’s FT, four new books are reviewed that put forward a potential counter-meme: namely that the US has some crucial advantages going forward. My only worry: Tyler Cowen’s thesis that those US advantages don’t necessarily translate into jobs.
Here are some more i-phone pictures of the new Phase II space. In the top photo, one of our brand new wet labs, and in the bottom, a corner faculty office with views of Mason’s faculty housing, Masonvale.
Enjoy!
Right now, as I write these words, the trajectory of future policy on nuclear energy is being altered by the science of an element called Zirconium. That’s because the spent fuel rods of the Number 2 nuclear reactor at Japan’s Fukushima power plant have lost their water shielding and there is now the possibility that their cladding, Zirconium, will catch fire with catastrophic results.
Science has a way of catching up with policy very suddenly, because being very firmly rooted in reality (we hope!), ground truth can render existing policy moot in an instant. In contrast, policy, rooted in the politics of the moment, often pushes very hard against science, but inevitably loses out when scientific reality pushes back–a Tsunami can moot a policy on sea-wall height.
As a scientist, I’m not in favor of a Technocracy (actually a political movement that existed here in the US in the early 20th century). I’m quite comfortable with the market-based western democracy form of government that has been the norm here in the States. On the other hand, I would like to see policies better informed by science.
How to get there?
The current Obama administration has tried the approach of appointing very high achieving scientists to top-level leadership positions both in the Cabinet (Secretary of Energy Chu is a Nobel laureate) and in the White House. I’m not sure that’s enough.
The problem is that until science rears up and enforces reality upon the polity (these black swan events are often disasters), it’s often quite politically convenient for factions to deny science–arguing that since scientific consensus is constantly evolving (we don’t believe that the Earth is at the center of the Solar System anymore), any group of scientists offering advice to policy makers are just one more special interest group. Just another version of the K-Street lobbyist.
I’ll stay away here from Climate Change, but instead return to nuclear power. The use of nuclear fission as a method to generate electric power is both attractive and fraught with complex dangers for nations–particularly those with limited access to fossil fuels. The science of nuclear fission on the contrary is quite simple.
Problems arise however as a result of the scientific truth: highly enriched nuclear fuel rods will continue to emit heat without cooling and that heat can, under the right circumstances damage and melt-away fuel rod cladding. Returning to Zirconium, its melting point is 1852 degrees Centigrade. Above that point, we have problems.
Hence, the science overtakes the policy when the temperature of the nuclear fuel exceeds the melting point of Zirconium. At that point, the scientist is not another special interest group. Actually the scientist becomes an oracle of sorts, advising the decision-maker on a moment of ground truth.
A caveat: scientists need to act more like scientists and less like K-Street lobbyists if they are to do a better job of informing policy.
From my first days as director, I have always been struck by how our Institute was internationally incredibly diverse. This has continued to the present, one can’t walk the hallways without hearing several languages going on at the same time (not including the constant Java and C++).
At the same time, particularly since we began the Decade of the Mind initiative in 2007, the Institute itself has been reaching overseas. Our faculty have recently visited East Africa, Moldova, Singapore and, as I write these words, we have a critical mass in Paris.
In less than a month, I’ll visit Berlin for the second time in two years and we just recently hosted a scientist from Indonesia.
This both reflects, the very real internationalization of “advanced studies” and, more importantly, a changed outlook: while US research universities (including Mason) remain superb, there is an entire global generation that is coming of age and they are highly literate in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields–and hence the potential for growing new gardens of collaborations.
In the next five years, I hope that we can do something substantive along these lines both in Asia and Europe, combining both research and education.
From today’s New York Times, William Broad’s excellent piece of the projected path–arrival in Southern California on Friday?
Discoverers and Discoveries 