Tobias Gerken

Academic job perspectives

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:40:00 +0100

Disclaimer: All the data in this post is just for illustrative purposes and was cobbled together rather quickly. So in case you are reading thins while thinking to hire me for a Post-Doc etc. - this is not the extent of data analysis I am capable of…

There has recently been a spell of articles publsihed about the job perspectives of early career researchers (aka PhDs and Post-Docs). Some links are below. On all of these the comment sections filled up immediately with scientists complaining about their career prospects.

The glass is half empty; at least - Credit: CC Moeview is Aaron Molina via flickr

The most striking thing for me was the fact that there was pretty much a unanimous complaint: Academia is a pyramid scheme with one permanent position on top (Principal Investigator or newspeak for professor) and 12+ people being trained for it through PhDs and a few Post Docs, who actually do the day to day work.

At the same time almost everyone was asking for what we call Mittelbau in Germany and got rid of in the 80s in order to make research more competitive: Permanent positions for people below the professorial level, with decent pay and even more important decent funding to do quality research.

Instead, we currently have both in the UK and Germany a funding regime, where research grants are given for 3-6 years and almost all research positions are tied to that grant, meaning that no-one except the PI can plan ahead longer than 3 years (more often 2 than 3), which is ultimatively toxic for your personal life, family and skills development in general.

Additionally, the lack of permanent positions and the competitive nature of output focused science harms discovery. In order to secure a permanent position you need lots of publications, which is most easily done by doing low-risk, low-impact research, which is then split into smallest publishable units. In addition to that you need luck (lots of): Your project, something that has never been done before (that’s why it’s called science) doesn’t work - tough luck. You look shitty in comparison to the guy that publishes the same thing over and over again with minor alterations.

The sad thing is, hardly anyone does a science PhD for the money or the title as it is hard work and mediocre pay. The vast majority of researchers genuinely love science and what they do and the fact that they feel pressured to look for perceived impacts (i.e. publications) instead of actual impact shows how bad it is.

Some data taken from my own institution:

For each group in the Geoscience department I have listed whether the group leader is a full-professor or a junior-professor, which means not yet tenured, and I looked through the website how many permanent scientific staff, Post-Docs and PhD students there are . Other refers to temporary staff I would classify as temporary but at least in theory not as their main occupation.

My main observations and also my conclusion from this is that the groups without PhD-students or Post-Docs usually also don’t do a lot of research and even with them there is only 1 out of 4 researchers permanent.

Additionally one has to bear in mind that this is a snapshot. Each permanent staff trains more than the number seen here over their careers. It obviously also means that these numbers vary with time and don’t take into account the grant cycles etc.
I also sometimes had problems classifying staff as they are not necessarily labeled Post-Doc or PhD-student, so I took scientific staff without PhDs as PhD-students and scientific staff with PhDs, which were not called Post-Docs on the website as permanent (unless I knew their status).

A word about money (only rough guides as academic salaries in Germany vary by state, by length of employment, sometimes age and assigned pay grade):

It is not that great…
Decent, but bearing in mind that everyone has very good MSc degree, hours are long and tenure is almost impossible. Also the professorial pay grade, which no-one reaches before the age of 40, is probably a lot less than the comparable pay of someone at a reasonably sized company having similar qualifications.

Approximate calculations for typical pay-grade rounded to nearest 100 EUR. All figures are for a single without dependents. Permanent university positions are tenured and work according to really complicated pay and tax regimes, which makes the net calculations really quite uncertain.
http://www.beamtenbesoldung.org/images/bund/bund-ueberleitung.pdf
https://bezuegerechner.bva.bund.de/index2.php
http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/

Links (look at the comments)
Prekariat statt Professur(Precariate instead of professorship)

Unipräsensident fordert tausende neue Professuren (University president asks for thousands of new proffesorships)

I am a research scientist, and that’s why I drink

Colormaps

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:39:00 +0000

I have just finished a manuscript for a journal and had to spend some time on making my figures look ok.

As a matlab user, I was never happy with the built in colormaps and especially the standard jet colormap, which is really bad for diverging data, produces weird color gradients in smooth data and produces problems for colorblind people.

David Borland and Russell M. Taylor II have written a great article called Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful about it and the below comparison between a linar greyscale and the jet colormap shows that the jet colomap produces artifacts, that people will interpret for features.

Credit: IEEE Computer Society, 2007

I have now started to use the colorbrewer colormaps (or their implementation in matlab). Colorbrewer in general is a great tool for helping with the choice of appropriate colors, letting you chose between sequential, diverging and qualitaitve colomaps.

(C) C. Brewer, M. Harrower and Penn State Univeristy, 2009

The simple interface, lets you select colormaps based on the number of classes needed and additional constraints such as printer-friendly or suitable for color-blindness.

Some more info on figures and the use of color here.

Explaining your work in only the ten hundred most used words is hard.

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:28:00 +0000

I work on high lands and the air moving around them. I look at water and warm air going up and coming down. Sometimes this causes rain. I try to understand why this happens.

Try it yourself.

As always xkcd wins:

Energy Ideas

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:30:00 +0000

New Scientist is currently running an idea competition about the future of energy. The contest is sponsored by Statoil an Oil company owned 2/3s by the Norwegian Government and the winner will go on a cruise in the Arctic and 300 m below the see at gas rig.

Entrants have to explain in 100 words or less, what energy technology will shape the next century and there is currently (28. Jan 2012 00:00) 287 pages of answers online. I must admit that I have not read them all, but they are a quite fascinating read.

You will read a lot about renewables such as solar, wind, waves or tides. A lot about nuclear fission and fusion and a lot about saving energy or going for smart grids. Then there is a lot of wacky ideas like harnessing the kinetic energy of landing air crafts by replacing runways with conveyor belt like machines etc. I guess that would be as good of an energy source as installing turbine generators on the downspouts off all buildings as calculated by xkds’s What if?

What do I believe?

I think that the 21st century will probably be the century of shale gas and unconventional oil from oil sands, shale etc. And this is going to be a bad thing. While the abundance of new fossil energy will probably limit the increase in energy prizes and will power the heavy industries of Europe and the US (The US could become energy independent and a net exporter of fossil fuels by 2030), it will make it harder to de-carbonize our societies. Even with high energy prizes, we failed to reduce our consumption.

Renewable energy will be less competitive and will be adopted slower. Less incentives are given for the development of new energy saving technologies and we will keep emitting carbon dioxide. Getting anthropogenic climate change under control will be even harder, especially since the current warming targets practically require a reduction in global CO2 emissions from 2015 and everybody knows that this is not going to happen anymore.

My New Year's Resolutions

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 01:01:00 +0000

KISS:

Take the HSK Level I, Chinese language certificate.
Cut down on air travel.
Exercise 3 times per week
Have at least one meet free day per week as meet consumption disproportionally contributes to CO2 emissions:

Source: Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, 2008
Only have meat from ruminants (including beef, lamb, game) at most once per week as the associated CO2 equivalent emissions are greatly bigger than for other meats (Methane is to blame).
Credit: Environmental Working Group, 2011

Too much air travel

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:27:00 +0000

This year I have been traveling a lot, and mainly by plane. A girlfriend in the US and a big measurement campaign in Tibet were the main factors.

Yesterday, I added all the flights of 2012 I could remember and according to travelmath.com I traveled 1.5 times around the globe, totaling more than 60,000 km. About half of it was connected with my work as a scientist and half of it was for personal reasons.

I then calculated the total amount of CO2 emitted by my air travel using 158 g(CO2)/km for domestic flights, 130 g(CO2)/km for medium distance flights and 105 g(CO2)/km for long-haul flights. These factors are a lot lower than what is found in the US wikipedia and don’t take into account any other effects than CO2 emissions.

For comparison, the average carbon footprint per person for 2008 in the UK and Germany were 8.5 t and 9.6 t of CO2, respectively. For 2006, the average British resident caused about 2 t of CO2 emissions for all leisure activities such as air travel, sports etc. Food contributed to about 1.5 t CO2 per capita (The Independent).

Considering all this, I should really try to cut down on travel.

"Needless to say, this is not a good idea!"

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 14:14:11 +0000

I have just seen an official FAQ written by the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA (US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) explaining why trying to nuke hurricanes (as in throwing nuclear bombs at them) is not only stupid, but also useless. Thanks to xkcd What if? to pointing it out.

Ignoring things like nuclear fallout (which would be blown right in your face) and other environmental consequences: A nuke just wouldn’t make a difference as the energy released by such storm is way too big:

The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. (Chris Landsea)

This shows me once again that there are just some things that are beyond human control and that install a sense of wonder in me.

On the other hand it also puzzles me that in the 21st century people would even think about such a thing.

Disclaimer: This does not mean that humans are powerless against nature. Quite the contrary we have found (mostly by accident) so many ways to change natural processes that we are in the midst of a giant terra-forming experiment: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Lesson Plan: Geoengineering

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:14:59 +0000

I finally got around to finish the second lesson plan about Global Environmental Challenges (Part 1 here).
These are some things I wrote together about the current state of the discussion regarding Geoengineering. Most of it summarises a 2009 Royal Society Report, which itself summarises the current state of knowledge on Geoengineering:

Geoengineering refers to conscious technical interventions into the climate system with the objective of stopping or slowing climate change.

They are currently the object of research and debate

Two approaches: Solar radiation management and CO2 removal

Solar Radiation Management is about reducing the incoming solar radiation to Earth and thus reducing the warming effect of ACC without addressing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere

CO2 removal is looking into ways of permanently removing CO2 from the atmosphere and thus eliminating the cause of ACC.

All sorts of (sometimes) whacky ideas proposed: from white roofs, over ocean fertilization to mimicking the effects of volcanoes by adding aerosols to the stratosphere.

They are currently science fiction:

1.       theoretical concepts —> not tested or fully researched

2.       for some we currently lack the technical capabilities

3.       all are expensive

Extensive research is being conducted about the

They are currently seen as a fall-back option in case that averting climate change through emission reduction fails.

It will mean that humans will start to actively engineer their climate, unlike know where we change it as a side effect of our economic system —> Ethical question about the relationship between humans and nature/ Earth

Unlike the IPPC process of emission reduction, that requires global consensus GE might be rolled out by single countries or even individuals. The intended global effect might spark conflicts.

The Royal Society has devised a mechanism for evaluating the GE proposals in 4 criteria:

1.       Effectiveness (can it make a global impact)

2.       Timeliness (can it be rolled out fast and will the effects be seen soon)

3.       Cost

4.       Risk (Can we screw up out planet even further if things don’t go as planned?): eg. Adding nutrients to oceans in order to encourage algae growth might lead to reduction of global CO2, but could also mean destroying oceanic ecosystems …

Some examples:

1.       Pain all roofs white —> more reflection of incoming solar radiation

2.       Add sulphur aerosol to the stratosphere —> reflect radiation before it hits the surface

3.       Build CO2 scrubbers to remove CO2 from the atmosphere

4.       Fertilize the ocean so that algae remove CO2

5.       Have ships spray salt water into the sky, so that maritime clouds become brighter

6.       Mine limestone and spread over fields removing CO2 through chemical reactions between the limestone and acids (Enhanced weathering)

The bottom line is the below graph: The best bet in terms of cost/benefit is stratospheric aerosol, but it is quite dangerous. Afforestation and enhanced weathering a less risky, but less effective or more expensive —> How do you chose?

Some thought and views:

Could be a last resort, if negotiations fail

The science is not there yet.

Many scientists fear that future advancements in GE might be used as rationalization to do nothing today. This means CC advances further increasing the scale of action needed to take care of it.

Our understanding of the Earth system is very limited. We will almost certainly not have a full knowledge of the consequences, when we roll out GE techniques.

Real risk of unintended and potentially irreversible consequences, like changes in precipitation patterns etc or breakdown of ecosystems as a direct consequence of GE, that might lead to human suffering or global conflict

Unmitigated CC will certainly have these consequences.

We might become addicted to these methods. Once you start you need to keep going.

For CO2 removal: if you stop, you stop and CC will start again

For Radiation management: if you stop you will experience the accumulated effects of CC as the CO2 is still there —> rapid catastrophic warming

Proponents of GE say, that GE can only be used to by time, while we decarbonize our economies

Solar Radiation Management only addresses the warming; other consequences of GE are still around, like ocean acidification.

Geoengineering and weather modification research started as military research with the intent to cause floods as a weapon.

Completely unclear governance of GE.

Possible discussion questions:

Is it ethically okay to start conscious, global modification of our environment? (Taking into account that the constantly modify the Earth system as a by product of all sorts of activities - We are a force of nature: see “The God Species”

Given the risks and potential benefits of GE, should we even invest money into the research of GE?

Should it be rolled out

Is it okay for a nation or a billionaire to just do it without global consent?

Who would even be the institution in charge of monitoring and globally managing GE? What is global consent?

PS: The 7 recommendations from the RS report are:

1.       While we increase efforts to stop CC, research in GE should be done

2.       We need to be aware of the differences in approaches (Radiation Management v. CO2 removal)

3.       GE cannot be substitution for CC mitigation.

4.       Evaluation of GE must include: Risk, Cost, Benefits, Timeliness, Public Acceptance and the ability to reverse the effects if needed.

5.       A public dialogue about GE should be started

6.       A political international framework should be established to negotiated/ discuss GE and policies related to it

7.       An implementation protocol (standards for GE) needs to be developed by the scientific community.

From:
Geoengineering the climate: science,governance and uncertainty
Royal Society Policy document 10/09
September 2009 RS1636
http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2009/geoengineering-climate/

A discussion of the report in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090901/full/461019a.html

wikipedia has a good outline of proposed GE strategies and a discussion of risks etc. (a lot shorter than the report):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering

Lesson Plan: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:00:44 +0000

My girlfriend Caitlin teaches science and technology studies at a US university and this weeks topic was global environmental problems. So I provided her with some info on climate change. This is what I wrote. It is not as well referenced as it should be, but almost everything I wrote is commonly accepted knowledge. There are some links below to web-pages that have all the info and nice visualisation:

A word of caution: A lot of people deny “Global Warming” for ideological reasons. There is also a lot of people that believe in “Global Warming,” also for ideological reasons. Most people don’t have a clue about the facts and what the current scientific consensus is. We know enough to accept the underlying theory of anthropogenic climate change, but we basically lack estimates of how this will affect us. The general feeling is that ACC will be bad for some people, mainly poor countries and coastal areas, but might be beneficial for others (Nordic Countries).

Global Warming is a “marketing term” or a description of the effects, but has little meaning

We are currently in a phase of anthropogenic climate change. Our industrial activity has a measurable influence on atmospheric composition (http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/):

1.       Increase of CO2 from 250 ppm pre-industrial to now 400 ppm and rising

2.       Increase of other greenhouse gasses (methane, N2O, CFCs)

Our Earth has a natural greenhouse effect:

1.       Without the greenhouse effect the average surface temperature of the Earth would be abut -15°C and too cold to support life.

2.       Naturally occurring greenhouse gases (Water vapor, CO2, methane …) absorb energy that would otherwise escape to space (long-wave absorption) and emit this back to the surface.

3.       The net effect is a warming of c. 30°C making the Earth a pleasant place to be.

4.       The greenhouse effect can be weak or strong depending on gas concentrations in the atmosphere (Mars: no GHE, Venus: runaway GHE with surface temperatures way beyond livable conditions)

Through industrial activity we are increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere thus enhancing the greenhouse effect. This must lead to a warming unless the effect would be otherwise compensated.

This is the mechanism. And I can’t stress this enough! It is not just correlation or modeling: There is observations of an effect and a generally accepted cause-effect relationship through the mechanism of enhanced GHE

A warming of temperatures is observed (global trend). However this trend is obscured due to natural variability that is a lot greater than the trend.

One of the warms years was 1998 and many “sceptics” say that this is proof that warming has stopped since then, however 1998 was a strong El Nino year. El Nino is a naturally occurring cycle that produces cyclical warming. The next strong El Nino will be even warmer.

There have always been changes in climate on the regional and global scale.

Regional climate change could be caused by all sorts of processes (changes in vegetation, catastrophic events …)

Global climate change is caused by global effects on the available energy. A prominent example would be the ice ages that are caused by the so called Milankovich solar cycles:

1.       Available solar radiation decreases, which leads to a cooling that amplifies through feedback mechanisms (e.g. growing polar ice caps reflect more radiation).

2.       There are global changes of vegetation and the carbon cycle (less plants —>less photosynthesis —> less removal of CO2) associated with this.

3.       At some point the regime changes as enough CO2 has accumulated and warming sets in.

There are always feed-backs involved, which means the processes are complicated and poorly understood. It is not clear what will happen as you don’t know which positive and negative feed-backs will be triggered. One example is water in the atmosphere:

1.       A warmer climate means more evaporation and more water in the atmosphere.

2.       Water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, which will lead to more warming (positive feedback)

3.       More water vapor could mean more clouds: clouds can reflect radiation, leading to cooling (negative feedback)

4.       Just to make things more complicated clouds can also cause warming, as low clouds cool and high clouds warm.

5.       What is the net effect of those feed-backs: Nobody knows.

6.       A closer look at feed-backs: http://climate.nasa.gov/uncertainties/

As with the current ACC, we don’t know the feed-backs that will be involved. This leads to lot of speculation about sudden cooling, Amazon forest die-back, catastrophic events … all of which is quite speculative.

ACC will change the global circulation, even though we predict a warming in the order of 2-6°C globally to 2100, this might mean 12 at the poles and 0 somewhere else. It is not only temperature that is affected. Precipitation patterns will change and this is a lot harder to predict than global temperatures.

There is going to be a very substantial rise in sea levels (10s of meters) due to thermal expansion of the water and melting of ice sheets.

Storm should get stronger as warmer oceans mean stronger storms, however up to now there is not enough data to confirm this.

There is a huge social dimension:

1.       The western world is responsible for most of the greenhouse gasses emitted (cumulative since industrialisation) and we have reaped the development benefits.

2.       Now China and India want to have the same benefits. This is why Copenhagen failed. It is a bit comparable to a group of people in the desert where one person has gulped down most of the water and then tells the others that they now have to act responsibly and share the rest.

3.       A lot of the carbon emissions in China are coming from the production of goods that are then exported to Europe and the US.

4.       Adverse effects of ACC are likely to affect the livelihoods of poorer societies much stronger than ours, as our governments have more resources to cope and droughts etc are more likely to occur in poorer countries (African countries) and/or exposure to sea level rise is bigger (Bangladesh, Bahamas …)

Some links on climate change:

NASA has a nice overview about climate change, the causes, the effect and the uncertainties. I highly recommend you take a look and give your class that link.

http://climate.nasa.gov

Sceptical Science counters the “sceptic’s” arguments

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

A PBS broadcast about the politics of CC

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

Overview about the knowns and unknowns of CC:

http://www.newscientist.com/special/climate-knowns-unknowns

Will learning foreign languages make sense in the future?

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:01:12 +0000

The BBC and others report that Microsoft has developed instant translation between English and Chinese and with the rise in computing power universal automated translation seems to be an achievable goal in the near future. In fact the NY Times predicts it for 2018 (Artificial Intelligence running our governments is seen for 2306).

Needless to say, this will hugely impact the value learning a foreign language, something that takes a large investment of time and commitment. Likewise it is a skill employers assign monetary value to.

If the 2018 date is vaguely correct, this will definitely affect me. So will my learning of English, Spanish and currently Chinese have been in wain?

I hope not, as speaking a language is a social exercise. Speaking a language is about context, about cultural understanding and lastly about showing that you make an effort and show interest in the person across the table. So (hopefully) universal translation will become a tool, but will not replace human interaction and appreciation of learning a foreign language.

German Economic Angst

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 14:23:30 +0000

A new OECD (Organization for Economic Coperation and Development) study about the economic development of nations in the 21st century was published on Friday (pdf) and one of the key findings is a shift in economic power away from Europe and the “West” to emerging economies.

It was interesting to see the different reaction this got in German and English-language media. While UK/US media barely paid attention and shrugged (google news UK and US had 24 stories) :

German media outlets went into a frenzy (178 stories - both at Fri 19:00 GMT):

In addition to that the tone of reporting was widely different, with German news sources (especially conservative media) stressing the economic decline of Germany:

Bild: “China und Indien hängen uns ab” (China and India leave us behind)
Welt: “Deutschland verliert Status als Weltwirtschaftsmacht” (Germany loses its status as economic power)
FAZ: “Deutschland wird zum Globalisierungsverlierer” (Germany becomes a loser of globalisation)

- Sorry but I am too lazy to link those and have only taken a screenshot:

So what is the deal? Germany is predicted to go from 4th biggest economy in the world to 10th place, which is not really surprising as Germany and the “developed” world are punching way above their weight in terms of economic power compared to their population.

With German population predicted to go from 80 million today to 60 million by 2060 and assuming that the so called “emerging markets” are really growing economically, you would expect Brazil or Turkey to have bigger economies than Germany for the future. I won’t mention India or China with billions of people. It is not surprising that small economies grow at a higher annual percentage as large economies, especially when labor market participation drops as it does in aging societies.

In my opinion this is good news: It means that poverty on Earth is likely to go down. The report also predicts a 1.5% annual per capita growth of the German economy, so there is no reason to fear that Germany will grow poor, assuming that economic benefits are shared fairly (But then, this is entirely a different topic).

Digital Ecosystems

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:00:00 +0100

As an environmental scientist I am usually concerned with natural ecosystems. I have written before in my review of Mark Lynas’ book “The God Species” that I am not particularly fond of romanticizing nature and simple life. Technology is great.

Unlike people a few hundred years ago, we have spare time that we can us for instance in order to go out and enjoy nature or watch a movie …That sounds hell of a lot better than working 80 hours a week on a farm barely growing enough to subside.

Without antibiotics I would have died at least two times before the age of 20 and the ear infection I had two weeks ago would have been more than a medium sized annoyance and might have left me deaf on one ear or worse.

When the first pension system was introduced in Germany after the industrialization in 1891 the set retirement age was 70 and the average life expectancy was just over 40 years. We have come a long way since then and the principal reason for this is scientific research and technological development.

My work and research give me the opportunity to visit a conference in Madrid, do field-work in Tibet and go on holiday in the US, all in the same year, whilst peasants in the feudal age were bound to the soil they lived on and were unlikely to even leave their villages.

However, this doesn’t mean that we should shelf all criticisms of technology and that we should not discuss the impact that technologies have on our culture as long as we don’t enter the discussion with a predefined outcome in mind.

We have created a complex society, where the individual has a very limited understanding of what is going on. How do we fix the economy? I don’ know. How exactly does my smartphone work? I don’t know. How will the Internet shape the way people interact? I guess that one is still in development.

The Internet is a great development that makes commerce, communication and research a lot easier as it makes information easily available across the globe. However, it also means that we make ourselves more and more dependent on technological networks which extent is probably not fully understood by any single living human being. We have created “digital ecosystems” with similarly complex relationships as we find them in natural systems.

To illustrate this if you buy something from i-tunes you have agreed to a 56 page end user license agreement (EULA) and have stated that you read the whole thing. The last time I tried to read an EULA was probably in the late nineties (probably Windows 3.1) and it stated (if I remember correctly), that I was i.e. granting the right to Microsoft to search my room for illegal copies of Microsoft products.

On September 2nd the Hugo Awards ceremony, which is comparable to the Academy Awards, was held and was supposed to be broadcast over the Internet. The Internet stream was suddenly interrupted as the streaming software had a built-in copyright protection algorithm that detected that the awards ceremony contained copyrighted material and pulled the plug, even though all material had been licensed and no one at Ustram, the company responsible, was able to turn the stream back on, as they did not have that kind of control over their software.

We also loose control over our private information and as everything is linked that can have dire consequences as the next two examples illustrate: Microsoft Skydrive, a cloud storage, prohibits the upload of nude pictures, which may include lets say private topless beach pictures (it could also mean pornography) and monitors this with automated software. The response of Microsoft to such an infringement in at least one example was to block the full Microsoft-ID, which possibly means losing access to your email, your MS-office online worksheets and your X-box account.

An even bigger ecosystem of services is associated with the typical Apple or google account, which might also be lost. In the case of apple this even means that someone could remote wipe your Macbook’s hard drive or your I-phone, through Apple’s theft protection system. This happened to the journalist Mat Honan, who had his twitter account hacked, with the attackers trying to prevent him from re-gaining access by destroying his google apple account on the go. Terrifying!

By comparison my own experiences of last week that triggered that (sort of) rant are pale. I tried to order a phone online and had to pay via moneybookers. As my moneybookers account was opened in Germany the default currency was EUR, so that MB auto-converted the currency from Pounds to Euro and then debited my British bank account in EUR, with both MB and the bank charging a currency conversion fee, so that I canceled the order. I then tried to change the currency of the MB account which was not possible as there were EUR transactions. I then closed the account and opened another MB account, but could not use my English debit card there, because MB remembered the card being linked to the German account. This was only sorted out after calling MB, which proved difficult in the first place as they did a good job of hiding their customer service phone number.

Shortly later Barclays decided that I did too many online transactions in a day (as was explained to me by a Barclays call centre employee) and blocked my debit card just when I was doing my weekend grocery shopping. Once again this was only to be resolved after talking to someone in person.

I guess the bottom line here is, that it feels terrible to not be in control and technology almost by definition robs us of some control.

PS: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a report evaluating Internet companies performance on protecting your data against governments (here).

UPDATE: Earlier today, there was a different version of this article published, that frankly speaking didn’t make any sense as tumblr failed to save the final version of this test.

Groupon banned from selling fake PhDs in Germany

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 11:41:00 +0100

Some time ago I ranted about Groupon running a promotion selling fake honorary Doctoral degrees. Groupon claimed that these degrees issued by an obscure Miami based church should be seen as a joke or party gift and that you were not allowed to use the title anyways (39 EUR for a piece of paper is still kinda expensive though). Nevertheless more than 3500 were sold giving groupon net takings of at least 75000 Euros.

Yet, while some of the titles were clearly wacky (i.e. Dr of Ufology or Dr of Immortality), titles like Dr of Drug and Alcohol Counseling or Dr of Religion do have a professional sound. And with that many different degree programs to go around, who knows what is genuine or not.

I as a PhD student felt ab bit offended. Putting in 50+ hours a week in order to get a real PhD, I fail to see the party laugh of fake academic honors and apparently the Superior Court of Berlin(German) thought so too and banned groupon from selling them.

This adds fake PhDs to the list of things you can’t sell over groupon anymore like discount nose jobs.

PS:

mad-as-a-marine-biologist: Give credit where credit is due -...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:58:14 +0100

mad-as-a-marine-biologist:

Give credit where credit is due - show Cathay Pacific the love for banning shark cargo on their planes.

It’s positive reinforcement and increases their exposure and hopefully, other companies will go green with envy and follow suit!

Science-Ed XKCD style

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 13:29:30 +0100

Every Science PhD-Student I know, loves xkcd even though some of them are ~~impossible, unless it happens to be your field of science~~ quite hard to get. Nevertheless, the comic strip enthralls with geeky humor, brilliant observation of human nature and scientific awesomeness.

Now Randall Munroe the creator of xkcd has started a new project: What If?, where every week a science question posed by a reader gets answered in a mixture of comic, text and links.

Current questions include:

What would happen if you were to gather a mole(unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? A “Pluto” of boiling meat.

How much Force power can Yoda output? About an electric car’s worth of.

-or-

What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty? If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

They are well researched and fun to read. Thumbs up for science education xkcd-style.

Back from Tibet after having had a successful research campaign....

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 16:01:10 +0100

Back from Tibet after having had a successful research campaign. Now being able to blog again…

Held Captive by Stephen Wolfram

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 11:57:00 +0100

This Thursday I went to a talk, a very long talk, by Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica, organized by the Cambridge University Scientific Society. The title was “Science, Computation and the Future.”

First of all Stephen Wolfram is an entirely fascinating figure. After quitting his undergrads in Oxford and publishing journal articles on his own he got a PhD from CalTech in Particle Physics at the age of 20 and joined the faculty there, then left to found his own company.

The key message of the talk was about tools. One should always use the best tools available to do something. Automate and standardize as much as possible and focus on the issues that are most important. If the tools are lacking then one can either try to persuade other people to develop the tools or do it oneself.

I am, like most people, notoriously bad at those things. I tend to muddle and then realize later, that I should have automated something or developed a proper tool at a point, when the investment does not pay back anymore. However, Stephen seems to be quite good at that and this is how Mathematica came to life. I never worked with Mathematica and potentially never will, but I was amazed by its abilities of symbolic computing and Stephen showed some awesome examples.

He also talked quite a bit about the search engine Wolfram|Alpha that wants to make all the knowledge in the world accessible and computable. Try typing MacBeth into it or make it compute the amount of iron in 3 bananas and 1 cookie (examples he showed during the lecture). The next day I tried some more and was rather disappointed as the same did not work for Goethe’s Faust I and WA failed to deliver the answer to a fairly straight forward and useful question (mean household income of Germany, where it delivered total GDP).

He also talked quite a bit about simple machines or algorithms that are able to create complexity and how they will revolutionize the way we will do research or construct things. At the moment we engineer things as a straightforward design process. In the future computing power will probably enable us to use design algorithms that compute the properties of structures and then optimize or discard. Apparently many algorithms in Mathematica are already created by machines on this basis. The same could be true in science. Briefly put: You just ask the question and then try all possible answers until you reach a solution that satisfies you. Or even shorter: Instead of putting a 1000 monkeys into a room with a 1000 typewriters for a 1000 years, try a billion monkeys on steroids…

All of this is fascinating stuff and he is not the first person to say or develop these things. He is certainly quite successful in doing so.

The scheduled end of the lecture was 9.15 pm. Briefly after 10 the organizers had to pull Stephen of the stage as the building was about to close, whilst he told people to keep asking questions. Briefly before Stephen had shown us an entry to his blog about the analytics of his life. Fascinating and scary how much data is recorded. Basically there is a statistic about him, at what time of the day he writes emails, is on the phone, moves around etc. From the data you can easily deduce that he almost never sleeps outside the hours of 4-10am, that his peak productivity is between 10pm and 3am. He has also conflated his exercise and work time, so that he still works while being on a treadmill each day. Absolutely amazing or even scary!

However, it is still good to know, that even a genius fails at some tasks, as making his Ipad and MacBook communicate with each other, which he tried unsuccessfully during 10 minutes of his talk.

"You know hat you spend too much time in a bubble, if a weekend with friends who all have MSc degrees..."

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:50:28 +0100

“You know hat you spend too much time in a bubble, if a weekend with friends who all have MSc degrees and work in industry is your contact to reality.”

- random thought

500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:55:57 +0100

500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities :

thenewenlightenmentage:

Humanities & Social Sciences

Archaeology

Hannibal - iTunes – Patrick Hunt, Stanford

Architecture

Architecture Studio: Building in Landscapes (Video) – iTunes – Jan Wampler, MIT

Roman Architecture - YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video - Download Course – Diana E. E. Kleiner, Yale

More Courses

Geek Manifesto, really?

Sun, 27 May 2012 16:30:00 +0100

A couple of days ago, I attended the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) Distinguished Lecture titled: “Mobilising the geeks” by Mark Henderson, Head of Communications at the Wellcome Trust and former Science Editor at The Times. He spoke about how “science” has become more and more important in society and how this is not yet adequately reflected in the political process. Incidentally, Marc Henderson’s book “The Geek Manifesto” has just hit the shelf and copies of the book were on sale before and after the event.

The talk was opened with the statement that out of more than 600 members of parliament in Britain there was only one research scientist (Julian Huppert - the Cambridge MP,of course) and only a total of three science PhD holders (not counting medical doctors) and how this was an underrepresentation compared to lawyers and other professions. However, scientists does not really strike me as being underrepresented for society as a whole.

While science and its representation through the media, blogs, social networks etc. have created vast public interest in science (whatever science actually means), the political process has been slow to adopt science in spite of calls for evidence based politics and that politicians and civil service are fairly removed from scientific thinking. While not being hostile to science, they approach politics from a different angle thinking more in terms of opinion polls and making the evidence fit the story rather than the other way around. He also said that the big understanding besides science and policy is that if policy makers look towards science they often want solutions, but all science can offer is probabilities or potential risks, as was seen during the recent Icelandic volcano eruptions.

This led to Mark’s central call that scientists should get involved in the political process: They should communicate their findings to the public, should lobby for reasonable politics that affect their field of research and should join political groups and parties in order to have direct influence. He also said that while humanities students (him having been a history undergrad at Oxford himself) have time to build political networks during university, science students are more busy and then later feel uncomfortable to engage in politics.

With this I totally agree: Everyone who thinks that he has something to say, should try to get heard, may he be a scientist or whatever. But then this is just common sense. It is also common sense that the political process is more than just science, especially if science and only deliver probabilities. Making policy is a complex process with many stake-holders, personal and public consequences etc.

But then so is “science”. Whenever people talk about science in general they adopt either a “cheerleader” (HOORAY, science/technology creates jobs) or “sceptic” (those scientist are part of a deliberate scam to take our hard earned money and determine how we should live) attitude. I think we should knowledge that there is no science in general: There is a theoretical process of gaining knowledge that is executed by groups of humans with all the interpersonal implications of the political process. I don’t think that there is any way of lumping together all facets of research, technology, natural science etc. ~~together.~~ In addition to this: my seat neighbor remarked that the interaction between science and policy is very unique to different countries.

One of my questions is: Would politics run by geeks be better than policies made by politicians? I am not convinced. In the end it has the same appeal as technocratic governments. There is a problem —> apply some science wizardry —> optimal solution. This cannot work! There needs to be a sort of open process, in which all perspectives are seen and in which the view of scientists in only one of them. And to be fair in the Q&A this was clarified by Mark with a crass example: A mandatory 6 pm curfew would significantly reduce crime, yet such a policy is not desired for other reasons. What matters is accountability of governments to their voters and to the public.

Once again, I think we should be reasonable: If you have something to say then get involved and make yourself heard. What we don’t need is people who have nothing to say, but still think they should be listened to.