Author: Tim

Empathy games

Reading yesterday’s The Times newspaper (actually it was the glossy magazine that comes with the newspaper on Saturday and never has anything worth reading in it…) I was taken by the following quote from author Rose Tremain:

“On Tube journeys I try to imagine the thoughts of the people I feel most afraid of. After four or five stops they morph into ordinary citizens. I’d encourage people to play this kind of empathy game as often as possible.”

It was part of a short interview in which she talks about the need to listen to everybody, however young or old, because listening to people is the best way to have interesting questions to ask. She also describes how as she has grown older she has stopped asking herself “What makes me happy?” and started asking herself “What gives my life meaning instead?”. The result is that she has become far happier. Simple, but profound…

The Hundred Days

Last night I finished reading “The Hundred Days”, the 19th novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series. If you haven’t come across these books, they are naval history novels set in the late 18th/early 19th (you may have seen the film “Master and Commander” which is based on one of the books – I have it on DVD but have never managed to find time to watch it). Jack Aubrey is a sea captain who leads various voyages of derring-do, always accompanied by Stephen Maturin, naval surgeon, naturalist and intelligence expert. The novels slowly weave stories of long voyages, bloody battles at sea, political intrigue etc. They are slow reads – it takes weeks to move around at sea and the books depend greatly on O’Brian’s attention to detail and the subtle interplay between his main characters. Anyway, in “The Hundred Days”, Aubrey and Maturin disrupt Napolean’s attempts to mobilise mercenary troups in the Mediterranean and prevent a large amount of gold from reaching its intended recipients (Napolean’s allies). Rather shockingly, and completely out of the blue, towards the end of the book a character who has been at Aubrey’s side throughout the series is blasted by a cannon-ball. Returning the book back to its place on the shelf I was dismayed to find that there is now just one more left for me to read in the series before I have to bid farewell to Aubrey and Maturin altogether.

A new Phoenix rises

This is just a quick note to record that this morning my youngest daughter made her debut for the Phoenix City under 12s football team (also known as “The Firecrackers”). She played in defence which is not her normal position, made plenty of tackles and blocks and helped her side to a 4-2 victory over Activate. Phoenix were always in front (1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 3-2, 4-2) but it was very nervy when the scoreline was 3-2 and the whole game turned in one second half minute when the Phoenix goalie made a great double save, the ball went up the other end and Phoenix scored at the second attempt to re-gain their two-goal cushion. I’ve added a link over on the right to the club website and, just for good measure, here it is also)

Carbon negative? That’s in-tree-ging

A few weeks ago I attended an excellent seminar at work given by a Professor from Cranfield University about the future for marine renewable energy in the UK. A key point that he made was that because there is a time lag between us humans putting “Greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and the effects of these gases showing up in the global climate change signal we need to be thinking not about carbon neutral technologies (which don’t add CO2 to the atmosphere) but rather what we actually need are carbon negative technologies that actively reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A recent article in New Scientist (“Clearing the Air” – Issue 2690: 10 January 2009) picks up on this point and describes attempts to develop systems for scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere. Currently, a number of prototype CO2 scrubbing devices have been developed and although the challenge is great, the prospects for producing larger and more efficient versions seem to be encouraging. I found it interesting to read that CO2 is a commodity that some parts of industry pay good money for (e.g oil companies use CO2 to flush out old oil-fields and fruit and vegetable growers use CO2 to enrich the air in greenhouses) – apparently CO2 can cost as much as $300 per tonne.

However, it occurs to me that nature does already possess an excellent piece of technology for removing CO2 from the atmosphere – namely the tree. So, perhaps what we need to do is to plant a lot more trees (and, of course, stop chopping down those that already exist). A diagram that accompanies an article in this week’s New Scientist (“Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left” – Issue 2697: 28 February 2009) seems to back this idea up. It shows various different methods of geoengineering that might help to cool the Earth, ranging from placing mirrors in space, growing reflective crops, seeding clouds and fertilising the oceans with iron. Each method is given a pair of ratings to show when the technology might be ready to make a difference and what the technology will cost and guess what, “Foresting” is, arguably, the best bet, having low cost and a relatively fast timescale (“within decades”) with the only drawback being the amount of land area needed. Still, there’s lots of unused land around the place, so why don’t we all get planting. It might not have an instant and dramatic effect but as long as we don’t use lots of energy maintaining the resulting trees it would be a step in the right direction.

The Poles are not healthy

The staff canteen at work has a number of TV screens on the walls that are invariably tuned to BBC News 24 or Sky News. Fortunately the volume is turned down to zero but the screens display the instant subtitles that can accompany the news feeds. I always find it interesting to read these subtitles when I am waiting for colleagues to join me at lunchtime etc. It is amusing to observe how badly the spoken words are translated into subtitles and there are often great mis-translations that entirely alter the meaning. One such gem occurred today in a political report. The reporter must have been talking about the current level of support for the Government in the latest opinion polls but the translation came out as “The Poles are not healthy”. So there you have it, the hard-of-hearing across the country will now be thinking that the Polish people are suffering from ill-health. It’ll be down to eating too many meat dumplings, too much fermented cabbage and that dreaded extra slice of poppy-seed cake I’ll wager (information on Polish cuisine courtesy of Wikipedia).

Good companies don’t need fancy adverts

What a weekend…  This isn’t a pleasant story.

A couple of weeks ago we started to get bad smells around our house. These weren’t the normal, temporary bad smells that arise from time to time (you know what I mean), they were all-pervading sewerage smells that increased in intensity over a number of days to the point where there was nothing for it but to call in a drain clearing company (because we were in a hurry and without any other means to select who we called we plumped for a big, well-known national one ending in “Rod”). I wasn’t at home at the time but evidently when the man-hole cover was raised the entire space beneath it was, how shall I put this delicately,… full. I am led to believe that it was quite a struggle, but eventually the blockage was cleared and we got back to some kind of normality.

However, a week later the smells started to return and, feeling brave, I decided to open up the man-hole cover myself to do a quick check. There was some stray material, but it didn’t look too bad until I ran some water down the pipes and watched as the level slowly rose and having risen, stayed risen. Uh oh, I thought, and because it was Saturday evening and we couldn’t risk the level continuing to increase overnight and through Sunday we called “Rod” back. One and a half hours after Rod arrived the blockage remained and the gully was full of filthy, smelly water. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the gully, similarly foul stuff was beginning to bubble up through the slate tile-covered concrete floor of our utility area. At this point, after a quick phone consultation with the boss, Rod decided there was nothing more he could do, advised us to phone our insurance company and withouth much further ado vanished.

At this point I’m going to cut the long story short. This morning (Sunday) we ended up with the boss of a  local drainage company coming round (coincidentally he lives opposite and knows some friends of ours). He cleared the blockage in a couple of minutes, removed a considerable amount of material from the pipes, carried out a camera inspection and discovered damage to the underground pipes which we now have to get fixed – a job that will entail digging down through our concrete floor to find the broken part and make the mend. It’s bad news but at least we seem to have stumbled on a great drain clearing company and the nature of the problem is such that, for the time being at least, we’re free of blockages.

The funny thing is that looking in the Yellow Pages, our new-found local company is one of the ones that hardly has an advert, whereas Rod’s company has a huge, flashy advert. There’s clearly a lesson here – good companies don’t need fancy adverts…

Extreme ironing

I used to teach a student who listed Extreme Ironing as one of his leisure pursuits. For the uninitiated, Extreme Ironing involves taking an ironing board and an iron to a remote or in some way difficult location, setting it up and then doing so ironing. If you don’t believe me, you can check this out for yourself with this BBC News report from 2002. Being a diver, his particular brand of the sport involved ironing underwater…

Recently, news of a different sort of marine ironing has come to the fore, namely the idea of adding iron (the chemical element) to ocean waters in order to promote growth of phytoplankton (microscopic plant life). Iron is a nutrient that is required for phytoplankton growth but it is lacking in many parts of the oceans. It is argued that the enhanced phytoplankton growth caused by the addition of iron leads to increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the ocean waters which then absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When the plankton subsequently die the solid parts sink to the seafloor taking the absorbed carbon with them and forming sediments in which the carbon remains locked for thousands of years. Thus the plankton bloom caused by the increased iron level serves to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so reduces its impact there as a Greenhouse Gas and its contribution to global warming. That’s the theory anyway and there have a been a couple of small scale experiments to try to see this process in action and establish its potential for a means of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Not surprisingly, this is a controversial topic as it is not clear how efficiently it would work and what other impacts adding iron might have to marine ecosystems. Now there are plans for a new (larger) experiment on iron fertilisation in the Southern Ocean and there was a nice piece about this, and about measurements of the effects of naturally occuring iron fertilisation caused by volcanic islands, on the BBC Radio 4 programme “The Material World” last week.  Further details and more relevant web-links can also be found at this related BBC News report.

The most fun you can have with 31 small pieces of paper?

Every week this term I am taking a couple of one hour sessions with first year students that are designed to improve their understanding of basic statistical concepts – you might know this already because you might be one of those students (or you might be saying to yourself  “so that’s what it’s all about”). This week’s session (Number 5 in a series of 9) is all about exploring the difference between population statistics (i.e. statistics obtained when the whole population has been measured – such as the mean height of all students at the university) and sample statistics (statistics obtained when it is only possible or practical to measure a subset of the whole population – such as the mean height of 100 randomly chosen students at the university). Usually it is only possible to measure sample statistics but what we really want to know are the corresponding population statistics.

So, the session involved taking an entire  population of measurements (the 31 maximum daily August temperatures in Plymouth in 2003 as it happens) and calculating the mean and standard deviation for this population. Then small samples of varying size (2, 4, 8 and 16 values) were selected randomly from the population and the sample mean and standard deviation for the sample were calculated in each case. When you do this lots of times you find that the statistics obtained with the small sample sizes vary a lot and can be a long way off the population statistics but when the sample sizes are larger there is less variation and the values are close to the population values (which is a fairly obvious result but still a nice one to demonstrate). Anyway, the fun part revolved around how the students obtained their random samples from the population. To do this I gave small groups of students a strip of printed numbers (1 through to 31) which they ripped up into 31 small pieces of paper (each with one number on) then folded (to obscure the numbers) and then randomly picked however many numbers they needed. It is such a simple process but at the end of a busy day (for them) it was a joy to watch them all merrily ripping up their paper strips, mixing up the numbers, drawing them out and then doing the calculations. They were smiling and laughing and joking when they messed things up and I was instantly struck by the thought that this must undoubtedly be the most fun you can have with 31 small pieces of paper. Unless that is, you know otherwise…

Ocean Gliders

Way back when I was a PhD student one of the big fusses in oceanographic circles was an autonomous instrument platform that was under development called Autosub. Autosub is a fairly large autonomous submarine capable of powering its way through the oceans whilst carrying a payload of oceanographic instrumentation. Everyone was excited about the possibilities that Autosub would provide but it was some time before the plans came fully to fruition (the first science missions were carried out in 1998).

Without wishing to do anyone a dis-service, the story that I heard was that the original calculations of the weight of the required battery packs were wrong and so when the first attempts to build Autosub took place it was impossible to get the whole package to float… only when battery technology had advanced several steps was Autosub able to get back on track. I’ve no idea whether this story is true, but if it isn’t it should be because it is a much better excuse than simply saying that these things take time. Anyway, following six science mission campaigns funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council, Autosub moved onto its full-on wow-factor missions, Autosub-Under-Ice although an Autosub did become trapped beneath Antarctica on only its second mission under ice mission. There is a BBC Radio 4 “The Material World” programme on Autosub that was broadcast just before this incident.

More recently, there have been a number of other developments using autonomous underwater vehicles to measure oceanographic parameters. One such involves a trio of robot gliders that are being used to profile the top 1000m of the Atlantic Ocean between the Canary Islands and west Africa. The measurements are being made as part of the Rapid-WATCH programme (Rapid Climate Change – Will the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation Halt?) and help to fill gaps in data coverage that resulted from traditional moorings being damaged by trawlers. The gliders, which are under 2m long use a pair of floatation bladders within which oil is pumped to vary the buoyancy and thus cause upward or downward movement of the glider. There are also now plans to use the gliders in the waters off Antarctica and also for a new generation of gliders, so it seems as though the early work, and the excitement this generated back in the late 1980s and early 1990s is finally paying off. There is a New Scientist article (Issue 2684, 29 November 2009) on the gliders being used within the Rapid-WATCH programme.