Science and the media: 23 - 29 October

In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses Representative Bart Gordon’s advocacy of the America Competes Act in a New York Times letter, front-page Times news about China’s fastest supercomputer in the world, Times columnist Tom Friedman’s cheerleading for the “Gathering Storm” report, an ex-astronaut’s Times op-ed urging NASA budget increases for development of asteroid-deflection technology, a New Republic thought piece about conservatives’ climate denial, a math professor’s Washington Post op-ed criticizing STEM enthusiasm, and two letters responding to the professor’s views.

New York Times letter: Rep. Bart Gordon presses America Competes Act

The 26 October New York Times editorial “48th Is Not a Good Place” advocated for the recent update of the “Gathering Storm” report by building on the observation that “the World Economic Forum ranked this country 48th out of 133 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction.”

Now, in a 29 October letter to the editor, Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, builds on that editorial by declaring that “the Senate needs to approve the reauthorization of the America Competes Act.” Gordon’s letter reiterates the purposes of what he calls “this noncontroversial legislation” and concludes, “I strongly encourage all who care about improving science, technology, engineering and math education in this country—including the New York Times—to call on the Senate to pass America Competes.”

The Times editorial had never actually mentioned the title of the original report or of the update, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5. And when Gordon does cite the original report’s title, the online version offers no hyperlink.

It’s also worth noting that two other letters accompany Gordon’s.

Thomas Loughlin, executive director of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, caps his advocacy of improved STEM education by quoting what he calls “the words of the great engineer and innovator Theodore von Kármán, ‘Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.’”

Ezra S. Abrams of Newton, Massachusetts, a patent-holding molecular biologist, declares that the “idea that there is something wrong with having half of all patents in the United States awarded to foreign companies . . . is just silly nostalgia” and that we “have to learn to live with the fact that universities and companies in other countries are just as innovative as we are.” He also disagrees “that American science education is bad,” at least in schools in wealthy areas like the one he cites as using a 10th-grade honors chemistry textbook that’s at a higher level than some college texts.

NYT front page reports on international supercomputer “race”

The New York Times ends its 28 October news article “China Wrests Supercomputer Title From US” by quoting “a well-known computer designer” who “played down the importance of taking the top spot on the supercomputer rankings.” It’s only “a snapshot in time,” says Steven J. Wallach.

In any case this Times article makes the most recent snapshot into front-page, above-the-fold news—science news. “A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made,” it begins, “replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.”

The computer Tianhe-1A reportedly “has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer,” which is apparently at Oak Ridge, though the Times editorial staff, maybe supposing that the name Oak Ridge National Laboratory is just too much information for an overly brain-taxed public, calls it only “a national laboratory in Tennessee.” (This aid to understanding, if that’s what the omission is, appears in a partially technical article about supercomputers that does cite the name of the Chinese national research center involved, the National University of Defense Technology, and also reports that Tianhe-1A is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.)

The article says that Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, maintains the official supercomputer rankings, “as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations.” He updates the rankings twice a year.

The article reports that the “race to build the fastest supercomputer has become a source of national pride,” that research centers with large ones “are magnets for top scientific talent,” that supercomputers “are valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science” as well as in “mainstream business"—where “oil and gas companies use [supercomputing] to find reservoirs and Wall Street traders use it for superquick automated trades,” and where Procter & Gamble even uses it “to make sure that Pringles go into cans without breaking.”

The article also reports that the core of the Chinese advance is its method of networking among the supercomputer components—an interconnect that “can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.”

Thomas L. Friedman chastises America for scanting “Gathering Storm”

“All that’s missing this campaign season is serious debate about the important stuff.”

So says the teaser blurb beside the link to the online version of Tom Friedman’s 27 October New York Times column. And indeed Friedman offers, almost angrily, a litany of issues not being seriously debated—a litany leading to the big omission that is his point: the absence from national attention of the recently updated “Gathering Storm” report, produced by what Friedman calls “a nonpartisan group of America’s most distinguished engineers, scientists, educators and industrialists.”

“A dysfunctional political system,” laments Friedman, “is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.”

Here’s how Friedman summarizes what he says is missing:

Friedman also reports further on what he learned from Vest:

Friedman closes with one further lament. If you want to see the updated report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, you’ll have to Google for it, because it “hasn’t received 1/100th of the attention given to Juan Williams’s remarks on Muslims.”

Asteroid deflection, NASA’s future, NASA’s budget

In a 26 October New York Times op-ed , the former astronaut Russell Schweickart, who cochaired the NASA Advisory Council’s Task Force on Planetary Defense, argues for boosting NASA’s budget by up to $3 billion over 10 years to develop “detection-and-deflection” countermeasures against potentially Earth-threatening asteroids.

Along the way Schweickart mentions that this program would overlap synergistically with development of capabilities for planetary manned missions. But he presents the op-ed as its headline indicates: “Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out!” Here’s his “lede” paragraph:

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Schweickart reports, has recommended that NASA begin preparing a deflection capacity. He summarizes how deflection might work.

He also declares that “our asteroid efforts may be the key to the survival of millions, if not our species,” and that we “need to pinpoint many more of these objects and predict whether they will hit us before it’s too late to do anything other than evacuate ground zero and try to save as many lives as we can,” and that by “preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species.”

Here’s his mention of the manned spaceflight dimension:

“Why are conservatives so radical about the climate?”

In a fairly lengthy 6 October New Republic thought piece , Bill McKibben states and engages the question headlined above.

I recommend the article. Below I’ll report on it. Then I’ll ask some nonscientist conservative or conservative-sympathizing friends about it—an anesthesiologist, an insurance executive, a general solicitor for a large corporation, an engineer in a high-tech organization, a legal scholar, a lifestyle magazine publisher, and some others as well. I’ll report back anything I may hear. Judging by past experience discussing and sometimes debating climate with these friends, I could hear a lot.

McKibben calls anthropogenic global warming (AGW) “quite possibly the single biggest issue the planet has faced.” He charges that “American conservatism has reached a near-unanimous position” on it: “pay no attention to all those scientists.”

One “crude” explanation, McKibben proposes, could be money. He points out that six of the planet’s ten largest companies deal in fossil fuels, spending “some small part of their wealth in recent years to underwrite climate change denialism.” Another “easy answer,” he supposes, would be that conservatives have new climate-science information—but he notes immediately that none of the skeptics are actually doing any new research “that casts the slightest doubt on the scientific consensus that’s been forming for two decades.”

Then he reveals his own answer: “These people aren’t reading the science and thinking, I have some questions about this. They’re convinced of a massive conspiracy.” He continues:

McKibben disdains the reflexive conservative tendency to mix discussion of physics and economics. Conservatives are OK with the “creative destruction” in free enterprise, he observes, but it doesn’t follow that it works in nature: “Destruction of the planet’s fundamental physical systems isn’t creative—it’s just destruction. If Microsoft disappears, innovators will take its place. If Arctic ice disappears, no young John Galt"—an allusion to the work of Ayn Rand, the libertarian prophet—"is going to remake it in his garage.” McKibben offers this “essential question": “Is the environment a subset of the economy, or is it the other way around? Or, more combatively, you really think you can out-argue physics?”

(Out-argue physics? Here it must be noted—if only because my AGW-denying friends will certainly note it for me if I omit it—that McKibben never so much as mentions those physicists who so energetically oppose the American Physical Society’s official statement on AGW. That those critics might not have submitted any peer-reviewable climatology papers of their own doesn’t change this certainty.) If conservatives would only acknowledge that AGW “is the greatest attack on freedom we’ve ever witnessed,” McKibben declares, “they could make a powerful contribution to the solution.” Though he claims that he holds no particular hope for that, he nevertheless offers three hopeful examples of conservatives awakening to the challenge—not only conservative leaders in other countries, but conservatives leading religious institutions and the military:

The only thing harder than dealing with climate change, McKibben predicts near the end of his piece, “will be not dealing with it and inheriting a world radically changed.”

Math professor’s Washington Post op-ed: too much STEM hype

On 23 October—first day of the two-day finale in Washington of the USA Science and Engineering Festival , with all its cheerleading for STEM—the Washington Post ran an op-ed with the contrarian headline “How much math do we really need?” and with the contrarian message that math’s limited purposes are perfectly well served without STEM hype.

The writer is a professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, G. V. Ramanathan. He argues that

• math education has not improved in the 27 years since the report A Nation at Risk, and that
• “the marketing of math has become similar to the marketing of creams to whiten teeth, gels to grow hair and regimens to build a beautiful body,” and that
• unlike “literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life,” and that
• the claim that math education can “improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth,” and that
• all “the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss.”

“Those who do love math and science have been doing very well,” he declares. “Our graduate schools are the best in the world. This ‘nation at risk’ has produced about 140 Nobel laureates since 1983 (about as many as before 1983).”

Professor Ramanathan concludes:

An oblique editorial addendum: The Post‘s choice of this op-ed at this time calls to mind a news article that the Post ran just when Ken Burns’s documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea was about to begin airing last year. The headline read, “Humble Md. Park Typifies Shift From Scenic to Cerebral.” The “lede” sentence said, “Welcome to America’s 344th-best idea.” The point, apparently, was that on the eve of the airing of the Burns series, this tiny, humble, and seldom visited national historic site—it wasn’t even a national park, though that apparently was fine for the Post‘s purposes—was tiny, humble, and seldom visited.

A postscript to the media report above: The 26 October Washington Post contains two letters sarcastically enlarging on Professor Ramanathan’s contention that despite enthusiastic national efforts, math education hasn’t improved in the 27 years since the report A Nation at Risk. Whether the Post also received earnest letters supporting STEM efforts can’t be known, of course, but it’s possible to summarize the point reinforced by the letters that the editors did choose. The first says yes, we’re bad at math, and you can see it in our legislators’ inability to add up deficits and in our obese people’s inability to add up calories. The second letter, reaching for pithy wryness, says only, “I wonder if a little math would have helped certain home buyers and lenders understand that you can’t buy a $500,000 home on a $23,000 salary?”

There’s nothing about actual STEM-improvement implications.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.