Smartphones: sexist?

It looks like I will be the one getting a new smartphone. I'm mostly overwhelmed by the options and features. I barely keep my current cell phone with me, and rarely actually have it on me to know if someone is calling. I've thought about not having a phone at all. So, a smartphone seems like a reasonable solution - I bet they are rubbish for actual calls. But have all sorts of games!

I went in to the Verizon store to look at them today. I realized why I think of them as being very redundant with a tablet... I don't think smartphones are any more portable than tablets. When I look at a smartphone, I see a device that will sit in my backpack all the time. Granted, my current phone normally does this. But sometimes... sometimes... it goes in my pocket. A smartphone will never do so. It is too damn big.

Are the tech companies to blame for this? No, it is just an unfortunate truth of women's fashion: pockets tend to be very small, if they exist at all. Specifically I am thinking of front pockets on jeans and slacks. A phone like the X2 or iPhone will not fit in the front pocket of the majority of my jeans. Could I get a cell phone holster? This was my solution back in the day, but I don't know if people use them anymore. I don't want to look geeky, right? A belt-holder for a cell phone is only a partial solution: it will work with chunky belts that are structural, not those skinny belts. Honestly, I've never figured out how to wear the skinny belts anyways.

Of course, there is then the problem of skirts and dresses and all of the fashion choices that don't have pockets or belt loops at all. I rarely have this problem, but if I dressed according to the Stanford Clinic dress code, I would. So when the people perceive that tech gadgets are predominantly a men's market, I believe that this is at least fashion driven. Not because the X2 doesn't come in pink, but because women in a business environment won't have as easy of a time carrying them around. If I accept I'll be hauling some sort of purse or briefcase around to carry my smartphone, I might as well just have a netbook or tablet.

So no, I don't think smartphones are sexist. They just aren't very compatible with women's business attire.

The Computer Culture War

Our household will be increasing its quantity of computer gadgets. Some number of laptops/tablets/smartphones will be purchased in the next few months due to expiring contract, expiring backlights, and a general sense of patriotic consumerism (lol). While the majority of the responsibility of this lies with Tom, I am part of conversations and the phone decisions. The upcoming purchase is quite different in tone to my recent (few months ago) purchase of a netbook. I hadn't appreciated the capability-to-cost ratio in modern netbooks until a vist to Fry's, after which I did some online research and returned to Fry's the next day to purchase one. I knew I would be working in Ubuntu ~100% of the time, especially after installing more memory than Windows would support.

Now Tom is going to buy an apple product or two. Other products have been considered, but some sort of iThingy looks like the new addition to our digital household. Through this process I have decided that digital gadget monopolies - I mean, brands - are a sort of geek culture war. There is often little room for compromise and we may view those who hold different opinions as being responsible for the current destruction of society. Here are my sides in this battle:

Med School (sexist) Softball!

I'm playing on the Radiation Oncology team in the Stanford Medical Center Co-Ed Softball league. It is lots of fun - I'm getting to meet many people from the medical side of the department who I haven't interacted with before. Also, I get to play softball and drink beer. It is a touch better than when I was in Junior High playing softball and drinking iced coffee. People are much nicer now than when I was in Junior High. I'm not a better softball player though. I might, in fact, be worse.

I can deal with being a bad softball player, because it is all about having fun, right? Unfortunately there is something severely limiting the fun I'm having, and it has nothing with my inability to throw/catch/hit. It turns out that the rules for Co-ed softball (which I first assumed were just for this league) are disturbingly sexist. I knew some of the "strange" rules coming in - the men and women are pitched different sized balls. But others I only learned at our first game last night. I was pretty pissed off and decided to make it a battle against the power-that-be who make the softball rules. Unfortunately, these are the "official" rules of the Amateur Softball Association. So my battle is going to be difficult.

Women in Dark Matter

I'd like to compare and contrast two articles:
Women Atop Their Fields Dissect the Scientific Life, NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07women.html

Possible Sighting of Dark Matter Fires Up Search and Tempers, Science (requires subscription)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1144.full

The Times article talk with a few female scientists, one of whom is Elena Aprile, about being a woman in science. The Science article talks about the personality-laden conflicts in the field of dark matter. One of the researchers involved is Elena Aprile, and another is Rita Bernabei.

Dark matter has been a contentious field for some time. Many of the professors in charge of the experiments have "large" personalities and some of the results are contentious. I've seen many dark matter talks given and thought some of the attitudes and phrases bordered on being unprofessional. But when one researcher calls the results of another experiment "pure, weapons-grade balonium" at a large physics conference, it sets a new bar for unprofessional behavior. Seriously, Prof. Juan Collar actually had this on a slide about XENON's results at the APS April meeting. I spoke with some researchers at the conference who aren't connected to the dark matter community and they were amazed. I wasn't as surprised.

Can Rotational Motion Effect Radioactive Decay?

This post is an analysis of "Changes of decay rates of radioactive 111In and 32P induced by mechanic motion" by YuJian He, Fei Qi and ShengChu Qi, located at http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1q13217t2427059/

Summary: Two different radioactive isotopes were put in a centrifuge and spun. The half-life appeared to increase if spun one way and decrease if spun the other way.
Claim: There is a difference and it can be explained by the chiral dependence of the weak force.

Question 1: Are the results "Significant"?
Statistically, is the proof strong enough to not just be a coincidence? Well... somewhat. For 111In they measure a "natural" half life of 2.83 +/- 0.03 days, clockwise is 2.75 +/- 0.03 days, and anticlockwise it is 2.88 +/- 0.03 days. None of this is the "3 sigma" difference which is necessary in particle physics (though not other fields) to claim an observation.

For 32P the natural is 14.29+/-0.03 days, clockwise is 13.75+/-0.03 days, and anticlockwise is 14.54 +/- 0.03 days. This is a "significant" observation if those errors are true.

It is somewhat unclear where these errors are coming from. They claim to fit their data in Excel, so perhaps that spit out a fit uncertainty. However, they quote the SAME errors for the other isotope even though the half life is an order of magnitude different. They don't provide any measure of "how good" their fit is - like a chi2 test.

Answer: Some of their results do not appear to be statistically significant. Their error bars are not explained so significance cannot really be judged. I can't say their results are "wrong", but they are not good science

Question 2: Is the mechanism they explain the effect with reasonable?

This is dangerous territory since they appear to be chemists and anything effecting radioactive decay half life would be a physics process. Unfortunately this section is poorly written, presumably because English is their second language. This makes it somewhat difficult to tell if what they are saying is nonsense or if it just sounds this way. The general idea is that elementary particles have a property called chirality that relates to spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. It appears as if the authors of this paper try to relate chirality to all sorts of things.

The first problem is that the "physics paper" they cite to discuss the chiral nature of the Weak Force is a Scientific American paper from 1990. This is scary! Scientific American has articles on whether robots will rule the world any time soon. It is not a good source for citing the fundamental rules of the universe. Yes, there is a preference for particles to "spin" clockwise vs counterclockwise. I don't think the authors understand what this means.

Spin is a technical term in physics and is inherently quantum mechanical. It is possible to align the spins of particles, but it must be done on a quantum mechanical level. The authors haven't modified the orientation of the spins of the atoms in their sample (for instance, by putting them in a very strong magnetic field like in MRI or cooling them down to almost 0 kelvin) so they will be randomly distributed. Basically, the motion of the centrifuge in this paper is too "big" for the individual atoms/particles to know that there is a difference between clockwise and anticlockwise.

Answer: No, they seem to misunderstand the physics concept they are citing

Final Conclusion: The most generous judgment is that they misunderstood the physics process and didn't properly consider their sources of measurement error. I would judge it "Sloppy Science" and am surprised it was published in a peer reviewed journal. Perhaps the reviewers didn't understand the physics either.

Science: Made in China?

Unfortunately the "rules" about diagnosing "Bad Science" break down when the research is done in another country, such as China. There are brilliant Chinese Scientists. There are wonderful research facilities and institutions in China. But there can also be a lack of communication between Science in China and Science in the USA.

So here is the scenario:

• A paper is published in a Chinese Chemistry Journal (in English) in 2007
  
• The journal is peer-reviewed
  
• One of 3 authors has no affiliation; the other 2 sound like good Chinese Institutions
  
• The results are surprising and have consequences in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology
  
• The authors explain the strange result via Physics, but are in Chemistry Departments
  
• It has only been cited 2 times, once by a different group not able to confirm the results and once by the original group rejecting the results of the 2nd group.
  
• There are some communication issues in the paper; it isn't written in the "scientific tone" that I am used to
  
• Of the 12 references, 6 are to papers written by the same authors
  

Diagnosing "Bad Science"

Science is often referred to as one entity (especially in political discussions), but there is no specific line between what is "Science" and what isn't. There is a bunch of "stuff" that gets done by people (many of whom call themselves scientists) and some of this "stuff" is done more scientifically than others. The scientific method we teach in primary school (make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, etc) doesn't always map well to the research industry. Much of the time - especially in interdisciplinary research - it is difficult to know all of the possible effects and think of all of the variables.

Hence, there is a system for people (who identify as scientists) to discuss research. One arm of this system are conferences - face to face meeting filled with talks and posters. Another is journals, especially the "peer reviewed" ones.