Category: Science

Australia moves fast: North-West actually

Australia on globeThis story is about the tectonic plate on which we reside.  Tectonic plates move, and so continents shift over time.  They generally go pretty slow though.

What about Australia?  It appears that every year, we move 11 centimetres West and 7 centimetres North.  For a tectonic plate, that’s very fast.

The last time scientists marked our location on the globe was in 1994, with the Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA1994) – generally called GDA94 in geo-spatial tools (such as QGIS).  So that datum came into force 22 years ago.  Since then, we’ve moved an astonishing 1.5 metres!  You may not think much of this, but right now it actually means that if you use a GPS in Australia to get coordinates, and plot it onto a map that doesn’t correct for this, you’re currently going to be off by 1.5 metres.  Depending on what you’re measuring/marking, you’ll appreciate this can be very significant and cause problems.

Bear in mind that, within Australia, GDA94 is not wrong as such, as its coordinates are relative to points within Australia. However, the positioning of Australia in relation to the rest of the globe is now outdated.  Positioning technologies have also improved.  So there’s a new datum planned for Australia, GDA2020.  By the time it comes into force, we’ll have shifted by 1.8 metres relative to GDA94.

We can have some fun with all this:

  • If you stand and stretch both your arms out, the tips of your fingers are about 1.5 metres apart – of course this depends a bit on the length of your arms, but it’ll give you a rough idea.  Now imagine a pipe or cable in the ground at a particular GPS position,  move 1.5 metres.  You could clean miss that pipe or cable… oops!  Unless your GPS is configured to use a datum that gets updated, such as WGS84.  However, if you had the pipe or cable plotted on a map that’s in GDA94, it becomes messy again.
  • If you use a tool such as Google Earth, where is Australia actually?  That is, will a point be plotted accurately, or be 1.5 metres out, or somewhere in between?
    Well, that would depend on when the most recent broad scale photos were taken, and what corrections the Google Earth team possibly applies during processing of its data (for example, Google Earth uses a different datum – WGS 84 for its calculations).
    Interesting question, isn’t it…
  • Now for a little science/maths challenge.  The Northern most tip of Australia, Cape York, is just 150km South of Papua New Guinea (PNG).  Presuming our plate maintains its present course and speed, roughly how many years until the visible bits (above sea level) of Australia and PNG collide?  Post your answer with working/reasoning in a comment to this post!  Think about this carefully and do your research.  Good luck!

Conversations on Collected Health Data

wearable-health-deviceThere are more and more wearable devices that collect a variety of health data, and other health records are kept electronically. More often than not, the people whose data it is don’t actually have access. There are very important issues to consider, and you could use this for a conversation with your students, and in assignments.

On the individual level, questions such as

  • Who should own your health data?
  • Should you be able to get an overview of who has what kind of your data?  (without fuzzy vague language)
  • Should you be able to access your own data? (directly out of a device, or online service where a device sends its data)
  • Should you be able to request a company to completely remove data from their records?

For society, questions like

  • Should a company be allowed to hoard data, or should they be required to make it accessible (open data) for other researchers?

A comment piece in this week’s Nature entitled “Lift the blockade on health data” could be used as a starting point a conversation and for additional information:

http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/535345a

Technology titans, such as Google and Apple, are moving into health. For all the potential benefits, the incorporation of people’s health data into algorithmic ‘black boxes’ could harm science and exacerbate inequalities, warn John Wilbanks and Eric Topol in a Comment piece in this week’s Nature. “When it comes to control over our own data, health data must be where we draw the line,” they stress.

Cryptic digital profiling is already shaping society; for example, online adverts are tailored to people’s age, location, spending and browsing habits. Wilbanks and Topol envision a future in which “companies are able to trade people’s disease profiles, unbeknown to them” and where “health decisions are abstruse and difficult to challenge, and advances in understanding are used to aggressively market health-related services to people — regardless of whether those services actually benefit their health.”

The authors call for a campaigning movement similar to the environmental one to break open how people’s data are being used, and to illuminate how such information could be used in the future. In their view, “the creation of credible competitors that are open source is the most promising way to regulate” corporations that have come to “resemble small nations in their own right”.

 

Credit for the Work

In our research for OpenSTEM material we often find (or rediscover) that the “famous” person we all know is not the person who actually first did whatever it was. This applies to inventors, scientists, explorers.

Marco Polo was not the first to go East and hang out with the heirs of Genghis Khan, Magellan did not actually circumnavigate the world (he died on the way, in the Philippines), and so on.

In the field of science this has also happened quite often and it’s quite frustrating (to put it mildly). It’s important that the people who do the work credit the credit – and particularly not other people claiming (or otherwise getting, such as through a Nobel prize) that work as their own. That’s distinctly uncool.

Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an accomplished British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. It was her work that first showed the double-helix form of DNA. Watson & Crick (with Wilkins) ran with it (without her permission even) and they only mentioned her name in a footnote. As we all know, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for “discovering DNA”. False history.

X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule
X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, taken 1952 by Raymond Gosling, commonly referred to as “Photo 51”, during work by Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA
(Raymond Gosling/King’s College London)

While it’s not exclusively women who get a bad deal here, there are a fair number, and the research shows that this is often as a result of some very arrogant other people in their surroundings who grab and run with the work. Sexism and chauvinism have played a big role there.

An article by Katherine Handcock at A Mighty Girl provides a short bio of 15 Women Scientists – many of which you may never have heard of, but all of which did critical work. She writes:

For centuries, women have made important contributions to the sciences, but in many cases, it took far too long for their discoveries to be recognized — if they were acknowledged at all. And too often, books and academic courses that explore the history of science neglect the remarkable, ground breaking women who changed the world. In fact, it’s a rare person, child or adult, who can name more than two or three female scientists from history — and, even in those instances, the same few names are usually mentioned time and again.

Read the full article at A Might Girl: Those Who Dared To Discover: 15 Women Scientists You Should Know

People of ENIAC: early digital computer programmers

http://www.phillyvoice.com/70-years-ago-six-philly-women-eniac-digital-computer-programmers/

Without any real training, they learned what it took to make ENIAC work – and made it a humming success. Their contributions were overlooked for decades.

ENIAC, one of the world’s early digital computers (Colossus in the UK was earlier, for example), unveiled 70 years ago Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania, had six primary programmers: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. They were initially called “operators.”

In this video, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli talks about her time in the 1940’s learning about the ENIAC. She was one of a group of 6 women who were recruited to program this electronic computer.

Please note that the referenced article’s title incorrectly declares ENIAC to be the world’s first electronic computer. This is historically incorrect, with Colossus at Bletchley Park in the UK used for code breaking during WWII, and Konrad Zuse’s Z2 / Z3 in Germany.

Girls in Maths and Science

In a piece on a new OECD study in The Guardian it is noted that

school performance could be boosted by parents encouraging girls to consider careers involving subjects such as engineering

and quoting the report directly:

“Gender disparities in performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude, but rather from students’ attitudes towards learning and their behaviour in school, from how they choose to spend their leisure time, and from the confidence they have,” the report said.

That quote gets, I think, closer to what’s actually going on. It also identifies that girls actually score higher on maths and science, yet fewer continue with it in the senior high school years, and study a STEM subject in university.

Indeed, parents and schools have an important role to play. From my own observations, lots of kids have an interest and potential for STEM topics, and the key is to enable and feed that interest and not sabotage it with unfortunate stereotyped remarks and many other unhelpful little things (that affect confidence).

You get the odd argument that maths & science are not cool. Well, kids these days play with all the cool technology, right? There’s the Internet, online games, tablets, and so on – and 3D printing, robotics, and much more. It would be rather odd to say that those things are cool, but the people who research and develop these things are not…

I think the issue with that originates with an idea that exists in some schools that it’s (for instance) science vs sports, and that does help us in exploring as to what’s going on there. With sport, you can see very directly what benefit kids get out of it, what they learn is directly applied and visible.

Often, STEM subjects are taught in a dry fashion, and kids indeed wonder what use it is learning all that stuff. We do appreciate that it’s a challenge for teachers to deliver an interesting program (let alone hands-on) program if the resources aren’t there to support it. This is of course even more problematic for kinaesthetic learners.

This is why we develop materials and programs for STEM subjects. With the use intrinsic to the process, kids want to explore more! Girls as well as boys.