Current trends in the reliability of science

A nice paper HERE by  Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò called "Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank".  Go download it.

Their Abstract reads:

Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.

And their Conclusions

While at this point it seems impossible to quantify the relative contributions of the different factors influencing the reliability of scientific publications, the current empirical literature on the effects of journal rank provides evidence supporting the following four conclusions: (1) journal rank is a weak to moderate predictor of utility and perceived importance; (2) journal rank is a moderate to strong predictor of both intentional and unintentional scientific unreliability; (3) journal rank is expensive, delays science and frustrates researchers; and, (4) journal rank as established by IF violates even the most basic scientific standards, but predicts subjective judgments of journal quality.

The following Figure from their paper shows (A) Exponential fit for PubMed retraction notices (data from pmretract.heroku.com) and (D) Linear regression with confidence intervals between Impact Factor and Retraction Index (data provided by Fang and Casadevall, 2011).

Cosmic View (1957)

Long before Charles and Ray Eames made 'Powers of Ten' (1968 & 1977) a Dutch writer called Kees Boeke wrote Cosmic View, it was published in 1957. It also inspired the computer game Spore.

The Introduction was by Arthur H. Compton:

INTRODUCTION

What are we? Where do we live? Who are our neighbors? Children and grown-ups, we all ask these questions.

The answers that Kees Boeke gives are only the beginning of the story, but that beginning is straightforward and clear. The author shows us a series of pictures of a little girl as seen from different distances. Around her are the things that form her world. We see her also as it were from within, showing the parts she is made of. These various views present one school child in an immense range of perspectives. We begin to understand how big things are and how we are related to them.

It is not easy to do what the author has done so well, to tell accurately and in simple language what the world is like. Here is a reliable framework to which further knowledge can be added. In describing this framework, the author has gone as far as the present state of our knowledge permits. Fifty years ago our cosmic view would have been much more limited. Nothing could have been drawn with confidence in pictures 20 to 26 or in pictures -8 to -14. There is reason to question whether we shall ever be able to draw what would be the next pictures, 27 or -14.

So it is that only now, in our day, we can see ourselves so clearly. In this immense and varied universe we find ourselves indeed one with other boys and girls, other men and women. In showing us how we ourselves look in perspective, Kees Boeke as a skillful teacher helps us also to know how and what our neighbors are.

The author deserves our thanks for giving us his answers to our questions in this fascinating and understandable form.

ARTHUR H. COMPTON 

A full set of the images and text are HERE.

Data to Life

I have just published a new book called Data to Life with  a long term collaborator and friend of mine Joss Langford. The back cover blurb:

Digital technologies are becoming ever more integrated into our daily lives. Wearable devices, big data and the Internet of Things are poised to create a myriad of personalised services in health, wellness, commerce and leisure. These will have the potential to deliver huge benefits to society, but there are real and growing concerns they could open the door to Big Brother. Starting with the simplest atoms of behaviour, Data to Life covers a remarkable breadth of topics: the significance of daily rituals, a taxonomy of everyday life and tools for behaviour change. It presents a radical new roadmap for collecting and handling personal data that protects the interests of both individuals and businesses. 

 

A typical two-page spread below.

Swiss Topographic Maps

Edward Tufte argues that the Swiss National mountain maps:  

"... provide a standard of excellence for serious information displays. Specifically:

- all about content
- high-resolution
- vigorous expression of third dimension
- local details always imbedded in larger context
- use of appropriate light colors to avoid optical clutter
- realistic, content-driven colors
- smart, graceful typography done by serious typographers
- size of type proportional to size of object labeled (type is quantified)
- intense quantitative data by means of contour lines (at sparkline resolution)
- contours = sparklines that flow in three dimensions!
- thorough, natural integration of words, numbers, depictions
- shows intense local data information in position without annoying pop-ups
- zero chartjunk, all pixels carrying content
- many exact numbers provided (labels for contour lines, and the height of mountain peaks)
- avoids dequantification found in much datviz stuff
- all about content
- great content (the Swiss Alps!)
- open-source, non-proprietary formats
- driven by content, a spirit of public service, pride in the forever craft of cartography
- not driven by marketplace ethics, not driven by focus groups".

They are available HERE including 1957 vintage topographic maps for purchase.

ImageQuilts

ImageQuilts is a new site and Google Chrome App for creating 'Quilts' of images obtained from Google image searches. Some examples below.

Josef Albers

Sorting Algorithms

A Quincuncial Projection of the Sphere

The Quincuncial projection of the sphere is a way of projecting what is on the surface of a sphere (like the surface of the Earth) onto a square, or more accurately onto a tessellation of squares. 

It was invented in 1879 by the American polymath and measurement scientists Charles Sanders Peirce. His illustration of the projection is shown below.According to Peirce, his projection has the following properties:

1. The whole sphere is presented on repeating squares.

2. The part where the exaggeration of scale amounts to double that at the centre is only 9% of the area of the sphere, against 13% for Mercator's projection and 50% for the stereographic.

3. The angles are exactly preserved.
4. The curvature of lines representing great circles is, in every case, very slight, over the greater part of their length.

In addition it can be tessellated in all directions.

 

Image from HERE.

Heaney's Beowolf

An Oak Fern printed directly from Nature (1857)

Nature printing is a process whereby a natural object is somehow used directly to create a print (HERE).

Below is a nature printed image of an Oak Fern (Polypodium Dryopteris) from a book by Thomas Moore (1821-1887) - The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland; Edited by John Lindley. Nature-printed by Henry Bradbury. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. 

A digitised copy of the book is available HERE.

A Nearly perfect Book

A great piece HERE on the Arion Press in San Francisco - a fine art letterpress printer and publisher. 

In 1970 the Arion Press published an edition of Melville's Moby Dick:

To study the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick today is to have an almost sacred experience of the power of physical print. Its ink is black, with wide margins and initial letters in a dark, aqueous blue. The paper is a faint blue-gray, like the surface of the ocean on a cloudy day. When the reader lifts a page to turn it, the watermark of a whale shimmers through. Because the letter w is particularly wide, Hoyem made the abutting spaces slightly narrower; every semicolon has a hairsbreadth gap before it, as if signaling the partial stop. The result is something that one would not think possible: a nearly perfect book.

an image from the book [HERE].

A New Candide

From next week the Royal Shakespeare Company are putting on Candide, a new play by Mark Ravenhill inspired by Voltaire's book of the same name.

 Image: Royal Shakespeare Company

Structure, Substructure, Superstructure

Cyril Stanley Smith (1903-1992) was a historian of science and quantitative metallurgist. 

One of his classic books is Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art and History (1981, ISBN 0-262-19191-1, MIT Press).

The object stands at the very point where the structures and properties of matter resulting from forces between atoms are in visible interaction with man's ideas and purposes. An artists work preserves a record of both - one in the outer form and decoration, the other in the texture and color and fine contours that result from the interpley of atomic, molecular and crystalline forces.

Below is an image from one of his papers: Structure, Substructure, Superstructure published in the Rev. Mod. Phys. 36, pp 524–532 in 1964. The paper begins as follows:

Anyone who works with the microscope for an intellectual or practical purpose will frequently pause for a moment of sheer enjoyment of the patterns that he sees, for they have much in common with formal art.

CAPTION: Raft of tiny uniform soap bubbles showing 'grain boundaries' where zones of differing orientation meet.

Josef Albers Album Covers

Josef Albers (1888-1976) was, amongst other things, a colour theorist, observer and artist. He also designed album covers. Here is an exhibition of some of his best, four of which are below.

 In an essay on them Joseph Masheck makes the following connection with the work of Cyril Stanley Smith:

Persuasive Percussion (1959; in this case not the Light Brigade but Terry Snyder and the All Stars) shows a tightly packed grid or lattice of small black disks from which a few wander up and out like stray molecules of some light gas; or better still, like the diagrams from a classic essay in which Cyril Stanley Smith would show how natural lattice structures are surprisingly tolerant of irregularities (“Structural Hierarchy in Science, Art, and History,” 1974-75, 1978).

The Walls of Ireland

A beautiful dry stone wall from Glasdrumman in Ireland.

Image © Copyright Paul McIlroy

On Nature: Jon McNaught

HERE are the illustrations that Jon McNaught did for On Nature, a collection of essays on getting the most out of the British countryside.

 Image copyright Jon McNaught

 

The Crucian Carp

When I was younger I was a keen fisherman. I fished in the hard fished small farm ponds and canals of the North-West of England. There are two books that I remember helped me get into fishing. The first was first published in 1950 as a Puffin Picture Book - Fish and Fishing by Bernard Venables. This was a basic introduction to the fish, tackle and methods used in coarse fishing. Below is a page from the book - taken from a full set of pages HERE. 

The image shows several of the different type of Carp. My favourite was the Crucian Carp. Although these do not have the avid following that the other carp do, nor do they attain the same weights, they are a beautiful fish. I always threw the fish back in after catching them.

The second book was World Class Match Fishing by Kevin Ashurst. This described in detail Ashurst's methods for winning highly competitive match fishing contests on rivers and canals.  I had no interest in match fishing, but from Ashurst I learnt how to make my own floats from peacock quill, copper wire and balsa wood. I spent hours perfecting my own set of floats, complete with a colour coding scheme for the lead shot that they needed to be perfectly set in the water. Unfortunately, I find I don't call on my float making skills too much these days.

Refraction of soldiers through a field of wheat

The Vertebrate eye and Its Adaptive Radiation. G.L. Walls (1942) - HERE 

'This bending of light rays when they pass through boundary surfaces is called 'refraction'. Its basis may be best understood if we use an old favorite analogy for our light beam and our pair of optically different substances. 

Suppose a platoon of soldiers to be marching over bare ground towards the edge of a wheat-field, which is at an angle to their line of march. The ranks of soldiers now represent successive wave-fronts in a light beam, and their files represent the individual light rays in the beam. Obviously the soldiers cannot march as fast through the dense wheat as over open ground, so that the latter may represent air, and the wheat-field a piece of glass of higher optical density.

As the first soldiers in the front rank start into the wheat, they are slowed up, but those at the other end of the front rank are still able to march rapidly since they have not yet reached the wheat (a). Consequently the front rank is swung around as if hinged at one end, and by the time the whole of the rank is in the wheat, it has taken a new direction of march which is of course followed by each rank in the whole platoon (b). 

Upon emerging from the wheat-field on the other side (c), the process is reversed and the platoon's line of march becomes parallel to its original one, displaced laterally a distance which depends upon the width of the wheat-field and the difficulty of marching through it'.

MIndless Statistics and Feynman's Conjecture

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy in Berlin. His web page is HERE.

He is also the author of an entertaining paper from 2004 called Mindless Statistics (HERE).

The Abstract reads:

Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of science. What I call the “null ritual” consists of three steps: (1) set up a statistical null hypothesis, but do not specify your own hypothesis nor any alternative hypothesis, (2) use the 5% significance level for rejecting the null and accepting your hypothesis, and (3) always perform this procedure. I report evidence of the resulting collective confusion and fears about sanctions on the part of students and teachers, researchers and editors, as well as textbook writers.

Gigerenzer takes apart what he calls the 'null ritual' that scientists are taught about in statistics lessons. In particular psychologists. 

One of the great pieces of evidence Gigerenzer presents is the result of a test that was set by Haller and Krauss (2002). In this test the researchers posed a question about null hypothesis testing to 30 statistics teachers, including professors of psychology, lecturers, and teaching assistants, 39 professors and lecturers of psychology (not teaching statistics), and 44 psychology students. Teachers and students were from the psychology departments at six German universities. Each statistics teacher taught null hypothesis testing, and each student had successfully passed one or more statistics courses in which it was taught. The question was followed by 6 statements and the people taking the test were asked to mark which of the statements they believed to be true or false.

In fact all 6 of the statements were false. But all 6 of the statements erred "in the same direction of wishful thinking: They make a p-value look more informative than it is".

The results of this study were presented by Gigerenzer:

Gigerenzer also goes on to quote Richard Feynman on hypothesis testing and states Feynman’s conjecture:

To report a significant result and reject the null in favor of an alternative hypothesis is meaningless unless the alternative hypothesis has been stated before the data was obtained.

And quotes Feynman's anecdotal story about his interaction with a psychology researcher at Princeton whilst he was a student.

And it’s a general principle of psychologists that in these tests they arrange so that the odds that the things that happen happen by chance is small, in fact, less than one in twenty. . . . And then he ran to me, and he said, “Calculate the probability for me that they should alternate, so that I can see if it is less than one in twenty.” I said, “It probably is less than one in twenty, but it doesn’t count.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because it doesn’t make any sense to calculate after the event. You see, you found the peculiarity, and so you selected the peculiar case.” . . . If he wants to test this hypothesis, one in twenty, he cannot do it from the same data that gave him the clue. He must do another experiment all over again and then see if they alternate. He did, and it didn’t work. 

References 

Feynman, R., 1998. The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. Perseus Books, Reading, MA, pp. 80–81.

Haller, H., Krauss, S., 2002. Misinterpretations of significance: a problem students share with their teachers? Methods of Psychological Research—Online [On-line serial], 7, pp 1–20.

Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.

The wreck of a small boat on the Caldy shore this morning.

 Copyright M.G. Reed 2013

Ashmolean Mummy & Penicillin electron density plots

The Ashmolean museum in Oxford is just one of the delights of this brilliant city of learning. 

One of the unexpected exhibits is the gallery of Egyptian mummy's, some of which include elaborate body wrappings and painted portraits (HERE). 

In addition there is a mummy of a 2 year old boy. Next to the mummy and about life size, is a fantastic glass sculpture artwork by Angela Palmer. The 2000 year old mummy was scanned with a CT scanner to create a full 3D data set. Palmer then created a physical representation of this virtual data set by tracing details from the 3D data set onto a set of 111 sheets of glass. The sculpture now sits near to the boy and is a permanent part of the exhibition.

Image copyright Angela Palmer

The technique of drawing contours on parallel sheets of glass that Angela Palmer uses was inspired by her seeing the work of Nobel prize winning crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin-Crowfoot. Below is an image of her work created in the mid 1940's (from HERE).  An original of this artefact is in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science (HERE).

From the 1949 penicillin monograph published by Princeton University Press. A photograph of electron-density contours drawn on sheets of perspex showing the thiazolidine and beta-lactam of potassium benzylpenicillin. 

Owing to the urgency created by the `extreme importance of penicillin as a military weapon' in WWII, determining the crystal structure of penicillin involved the first crystallographic use in Britain of a Hollerith computer; with Dorothy Hodgkin-Crowfoot as lead crystallographer and with Leslie J. Comrie's Scientific Computing Services Ltd developing the computing methodology. 

As noted in the penicillin monograph: `Under the terms of the contract for the publication of the Chemistry of Penicillin the publisher has agreed to waive its rights under the copyright after five years from the date of publication. Thereafter this volume will be in the public domain and dedicated to the public.' 

Data Analysis for Politics and Policy

Before Edward Tufte became very well known for his work on data visualisation, he wrote on the application of statistical methods in the social sciences. 

One of his best books is a slim volume published in 1974 by Prentice Hall, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy.  Even if you have no interest in either Politics or Policy, this is a great book for learning about data analysis. 

The book was previously available to download for free from Tufte's site, but is now available there for $2 as an e-book in PDF format (HERE). 

Below is one of the figures from the book, which shows a data set on US death rates from motor vehicle accidents that Tufte analyses in some detail through the book. The plot shows the distribution in death rate across each of the states in the US. The graphic doesn't reach the high standards that he set himself later in his career, but it already shows a dedication to showing the data in a clear visual manner. 

Images Copyright E.Tufte.

On the unreliability of (some) neuroscience

Raymond Tallis has a superb piece in today's Guardian on the ludicrousness of some of the claims that are made by those who use functional brain imaging to try and explain that who we are and what we do is somehow revealed by the particular bits of the brain that 'light up' in big imaging bits of kit. HERE.

In the piece he references a Nature Neuroscience Review paper by Katherine Button and friends. The abstract reads as follows:

A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.

 See  also previous posts HERE and HERE.

Square Word Calligraphy

The Chinese artists Xu Bing plays with words and characters. One example is a project called Square Word Calligraphy.

The blurb on this project from his website:

"Square Word Calligraphy is a new kind of writing, almost a code, designed by Xu Bing. At first glance it appears to be Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read it but cannot. Western viewers, however, are surprised to find that they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed."

An example below. 

A rough translation: Baa Baa Black Sheep have you any wool yes sir yes sir three bags full one for my master one for my dame but none for the little boy who lives(?) in the lane

The city embodies the people...

The Irish GPO has just released a new postage stamp that has a complete short story printed on it celebrating Dublin (HERE).

The 60c stamp has a short story printed on it, that was written by Eoin Moore when he was 17, describing the essence of Dublin. It celebrates Dublin’s permanent designation as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2010.

The Hunting of the Snark - An agony in eight fits

Here is a newish illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark from the entertaining and enterprising publisher Melville House Books.

The book is illustrated by Mahendra Singh (more examples of his Snark art here).

Although Lewis Carroll is more famous for the Alice books the Hunting of the Snark has generated a whole industry of speculations about what it means.

The mathematician Martin Gardner published an annotated version of the poem in 1974.

Lewis Carroll was also known as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Lewis Carroll "explained" the Snark in 1887:

I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse – one solitary line – "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee
He had softly and suddenly vanished away
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Images copyright M. Singh

The aerial photograph and its interpretation

Eduard Imhof's classic, Cartographic Relief Presentation, is available to buy from ESRI Press HERE.

From the blurb:

Within the discipline of cartography, few works are considered classics in the sense of retaining their interest, relevance, and inspiration with the passage of time. One such work is Eduard Imhof's masterpiece on relief representation. Originally published in German in 1965, Cartographic Relief Presentation provides guidelines for properly rendering terrain in maps of all types and scales. This book is an example of the art of combining cartography with intellect and graphics when solving map design problems. The range, detail, and scientific artistry of Imhof's solutions are presented in an instructional context that puts this work in a class by itself, with universal significance. Esri Press has reissued Imhof's masterpiece as an affordable volume for mapping professionals, scholars, scientists, students, and anyone interested in cartography.

Below is a plate that shows Imhof's skills applied. The top two images are a stereo pair aerial photograph. The bottom two are Imhof's illustrations, showing at left a contour plot and at right a combined contour and shaded representation. 

Image Copyright E. Imhof / ESRI press.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

On the word Quark:

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

Murray Gell-Mann

[M. Gell-Mann (1995). The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Henry Holt and Co. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-8050-7253-2.]


The passage that Gelll-Mann refers to from Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Book 2, Episode 4, Page 383) is the following:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!

And below a typographic confection of the phrase by Jacob Drachler from "Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Confabulation With Finnegans Wake" (HERE)

The Journal of Mundane Behaviour

There are thousands of issues of hundreds of learned journals published every year. Some are prestigious very widely read science journals such as Nature, which was founded in 1869 and is the most highly cited of interdisciplinary science journals. Others are deeply specialised and of little interest to most people.

Then there is the most gloriously named journal I have ever come across - the Journal of Mundane Behaviour. 

This classic journal was published from about 2000 - 2004.  I am currently making my way through it and it doesn't disappoint. It is the preeminent journal of the prosaic, a peer reviewed outpost of the ordinary and a focus for studies of the unremarkable in life. As Wayne Brekhus points out in the first volume: "The history of mediocrity, the sociology of the boring and the anthropology of the familiar are neglected fields".

Some examples:

Fruit Stickers—The Overlooked Booty of the Lunchroom
Andrea Shiman

Yummy, Steaming Bowls of Mundanity
John D. Schwetman

and even a manifesto:

A Mundane Manifesto (2000)
Wayne Brekhus
Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia

Abstract

This mundane manifesto calls for analytically interesting studies of the socially uninteresting. I argue that the extraordinary draws disproportionate theoretical attention from researchers. This ultimately hinders theory development and distorts our picture of social reality. This manifesto paves the way for an explicit social science of the unmarked (mundane)...

The full manifesto is HERE. 

1981 Vintage Drum Machine

Below is a Movement Systems MCS Drum Computer, details HERE.

Image from HERE.

The ink of a scholar is more precious than the blood of a martyr.

A great piece in the Guardian about the manuscript treasures of Timbuktu HERE.

 

Image of Manuscipt from HERE

Sometimes good comes through adversity.

Ruth Asawa is a Japanese American artist who lives in San Franciso. She is best known for her large and intricate sculptures made from twisted wire. Her work is currently the subject of a solo show at Christies in New York.

Her website is HERE.

During the Second World war she was interned with her family and almost 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who were living on the US west-coast.  In 1943 she was released so that she could study at University.

Below is one of her wire sculptures, more on her site and Christies.

Image of Asawa wire scupture from HERE

The skill of observing... is something that every science student must possess

The Dutch born scientist Geerat Vermeij is a renowned ecologist, marine biologist and geologist who is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Davis. He has achieved success in his chosen fields of observation based science, in spite of being blind since he was 3 years old. Here is a typical paper by him on the academic fields that interest him.

Here is a great piece by him on the importance of observation in science. 

 

A typical image by Haeckel 

The hunters mind in science

"The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve".

E.O. Wilson The Diversity of Life (1992) 

Natural History - past and present

According to the Wikipedia entry on Natural History it is defined as "... the study of organisms including plants or animals in their environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study". Natural history is one of the most venerable threads of observational science with roots that can be traced back to Aristotle. 

The Natural Histories Project is an interesting collection of conversations on what natural history means, hosted by the Natural History Initiative - "a collaborative platform for revitalizing and re-imaging natural history in the 21st century. We are a loose coalition of individuals and institutions dedicated to a re-emergence of natural history".

A less west coast form of natural history, and definitely more hands on, is the Manchester Microscopical & Natural History Society, founded in 1880.

Here is an image from their collection of historical microscope slides. 

I GOT UP

Between 1968 and 1979 the Japanese conceptual artist Mr On Kawara sent two postcards per day on which he had printed the time he had got up. All of the cards list the artist's time of getting up, the date, the place of residence and the name and address of the receiver. Kawara travelled extensively and these daily cards often link into detailed records of his getting up times and local sights. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of 47 of these cards from 1970 covering a visit of Kawara to New York. 

Below one of the New York sequence, I GOT UP 9:47 AM, from FEB 12 1978 (from HERE).

On Kawara does not give interviews or talk about his work. 

He apparently stopped this sequence when the set of rubber stamps he used for the times and addresses was stolen.

Copyright Kawara

 

The Seaboard

There aren't many innovations per year these days in pianos. So it is definitely worth having a look at, and listen to, the new Piano like key board, called  a Seaboard, that has been developed by the London based company Roli.

Image Copyright Roli