Blue Collar Scientist

…because the judge says so.

Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler said the verdict should provide a lesson. “We should get young people to stay home after midnight,” she said. She later amended that to say adults should be home by midnight as well.

Sorry, Miss Astronomer, you aren’t allowed to go to work anymore. Sorry, cardiac patient, but there are no doctors or nurses at the hospital after midnight, you will just have to wait….

I can only assume that this kind of civilization-disrupting advice springs from the naive understanding that no crimes are, or would be, committed during the daytime.

And when does “after midnight” end, anyway? I know people that go to work at six AM - that’s only six hours after midnight. Are they OK? Or do you have to wait until the number of hours after midnight is less than the number before? That would mean we all get to sleep in until noon….

Yet another in a series of scientific studies has shown that bear spray is significantly more likely to stop bear aggression than a firearm - and it was conducted using encounter data exclusively from Alaska. The study, called Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska, overturns the conventional wisdom that a gun is necessary in bear country, and is published in the April issue of Journal of Wildlife Management.

The study reports that bear spray stopped aggression 92% of the time with brown bears, 90% on black bears, and 100% on polar bears (warning: for polar bears, n=2, so you wouldn’t want to bank on that result). Of the total sample of 175 people involved in the bear spray incidents, only three were injured, in each case minor injuries that did not require hospitalization. Self-inflicted injuries from bear spray affected 12 people; ten of them with minor irritation and two of them with temporary near-incapacitation.

ScienceDaily reports on some data from a previous study: that firearm use stops bear aggression in only 67% of cases. There’s no data on self-inflicted firearms injuries or their severity, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they were less frequent but more severe than with spray. Most if not all of the self-inflicted gunshot wounds I have heard about from the nearby Chugach have been people carrying firearms for bear protection.

The study also debunks two myths: that spray doesn’t work in the wind, and that the can might malfunction. The wind issue is at least a legitimate concern, but the study found that in actual encounters, in windy conditions, the spray still deterred bears.

As for the spray can malfunctioning - they found zero malfunctions in their sample of data. And I consider the argument a bit silly to begin with. I enjoy shooting a good deal, and I’ve had a few dud rounds and gun jams since I started shooting as a teenager. I even fired a .45 squib round about 15 years ago. But I can’t recall ever having a spray can malfunction just when I needed it, even though I’ve been using them a lot longer, and a lot more frequently.

One other statistic jumped out from the data. The number of times per year that a bear gets close enough to a human to be sprayed in Alaska is only 3. I’m thinking my odds of getting killed by being run over by an ATV are considerably higher than encountering a bear in close quarters. I’m going to continue to not worry unduly about bears.

Charles Deehr, the best aurora forecaster on the planet (as far as I am concerned), has advised that active periods for the current solar rotation include the period now through April 2. So if you want to see some fine Alaskan aurora, we have a window of opportunity.

Based on a look at the sun today, with new sunspots rotating on and a recent CME, I’m guessing this is about the best shot we’ve had at some good aurora for two and a half years. I took this photo during the last really good show, in September 2005; since then, we’ve had relative inactivity - there have been a few ok auroral displays, but nothing like the September 2005 storms.

Incidentally, you can sign up for Dr. Deehr’s aurora forecast mailing list if you want (the forecasts are specific to Alaska).

Last Thursday, I attended the Anchorage Science/Skeptics meetup as planned, and it was a ripping success! So much so that we’ve decided to do it again and again, and have set up a Google group for event announcements and member discussions.

Image courtesy the unknown barista who agreed to take the shot with Zach’s camera.

We had 14 people there at the peak, and at least three different conversations going on at any given time. Several people in attendance had heard about it from the announcement on Pharyngula, and a couple each from the announcement on Skepchick and Bad Astronomy.

Zach has already written up a review, so here are my highlights from the event:

• Zach and Scott Elyard told the story of the T. Rex skull cast that they worked on at the Alaska Museum of Natural History. And what an epic it was.
• Two people in the local media attended and determined they knew each other as colleagues.
• Ceci, who had read of PZ Myers’ expulsion from Expelled not long before our event started, was fairly bursting at the seams and made sure to tell us all to go read Pharyngula when we got home.
• Greg, Scott Rhode, Kent, and I discussed the difficulties of experimental design in psychology - a topic I’m barely educated in and yet strangely still opinionated about.
• Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation was shown in all its 50-lb, glossy-paged glory, complete with photos of fishing lures represented as living insects.
• Paleoart was not only shown, but produced, right there at the event!

I was down at one end of our long table, so I wasn’t able to track whatever was happening at the other end. We had that many people - we shoved together a bunch of tables into something approximately as long as an aircraft carrier, and then filled all the seats and then some.

We had a discussion of whether or not to do this again, and the consensus was yes, definitely. I was placed in charge of setting up a mailing list for event announcements and discussions amongst members. I unilaterally chose the name Science and Skepticism in Anchorage¹ for the name of our little dis-organization, and as mentioned above I’ve set up a mailing list for us. Check it out and sign up if you’d like.

Based on our discussions, we’re planning to hold an event about every three weeks or so, on different days of the week so that everyone interested gets a chance to attend at least some events. We will also cycle between coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and probably even my living room, so that we don’t get stale staring at the same walls, or bogged down with the same kind of venue each time. There are also plans to conduct an occasional Barcamp type event, a mini-conference with our members giving short presentations on topics of interest.

So, if you want to get involved, head on over to our Google group and sign up!

1. The name is intelligently designed to avoid an unfortunate acronym of the sort that a local used car dealer is saddled with. [↩]

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Susan Hepburn is giving a number of presentations across the state to parents and teachers on autism. Hepburn is a child psychologist and has an evidence-based view of autism, as does the Alaska Autism Resource Center, based at the SESA offices in Anchorage.

Hepburn could use some media training, to judge by the answers that the ADN printed. But she does point out the CDC and Danish data that refutes a vaccine-autism link, and correctly calls autism “highly genetic.” The delivery is a tad bungled but the message is there.

Should we expect some backlash from the Mercury Militia DAN folks biomedical people vaccines suck lobby? I don’t know. I’m just raising an FYI in case anyone is going to attend these programs. The schedule is prominent at the Alaska Autism Resource Center site.

Researchers at the University of Oslo Natural History Museum have announced the discovery of an enormous marine reptile - a 50-foot (15 meter) pliosaur.

The pliosaur was found in the arctic island chain of Svalbard (the BBC reports it was found on Spitzbergen) by a “team of Norwegian paleontologists and volunteers from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum” and their principal investigator, Jørn Hurum. But at least one Alaskan, Patrick Druckenmiller, was involved with the find. A plesiosaur specialist at the University of Alaska Museum, he’s quoted in the press release as saying:

“Although we didn’t get the entire skeleton, we found many of the most important parts, including portions of the skull, teeth, much of the neck and back, the shoulder girdle, and a nearly complete forelimb (paddle)” said Druckenmiller, “Amazingly, the paddle alone is nearly 10 feet long.”

In a bit of a departure from established taxonomy practices and the usual reticince to announce such things before a paper has passed peer review, the PI says:

“From the bones we have finished stabilizing so far this absolutely looks like a new species” Jørn Hurum tells enthusiastically.

The fossil is 150 million years old, putting it in the late Jurassic.

One of the things interesting to me about this find is how many significant fossils are coming out of the arctic or nearctic in the last decade or so. Finds like Tiktaalik roseae, the Axel Heiberg champsosaurs, the Victoria Island acritarchs, the Colville River finds, the Bathurst Island vascular plants, Greenland’s Ichthyostega, and so on. This could be for any or all of a number of reasons:

• The arctic is well-mapped geologically, mainly by the oil companies, allowing paleontologists to conduct well-planned digs at carefully selected locations.
• More easily accessible areas are already pretty well prospected.
• Arctic areas don’t have a lot of trees on the ground to interfere with access to fossils.
• Until relatively recently, access was prohibitively expensive, especially if you wanted to transport fossils out.
• In this case, the Svalbard Tourism Board made the prospect of a working vacation irresistable.

Anyway, now we can chalk up another interesting arctic find. According to the BBC, they’ve done a literature search, and this is apparently the biggest pliosaur ever.

Andrew Kitchen, Michael M. Miyamoto, and Connie J. Mulligan report in PLoS-ONE on their development of a three-stage model for the colonization of the Americas by Homo sapiens. This issue is of deep interest to anthropology outreach in Alaska, and I’m accordingly very interested in the paper. The attention that these ideas will likely receive in Alaska suggests several major avenues for effective public outreach:

• It provides an opportunity for “what is the nature of science and knowledge” education. The concepts of falsifiability and refinement of knowledge over time are particularly rich opportunities with these new results.
• It provides an opportunity to provide some “cutting edge” science to students. As noted below, many of the interpretive materials in greater Anchorage on these subjects reflect what was “cutting edge” twenty years ago, but which is now largely rejected in paleoanthropology.
• This paper is largely about analysis of genetic populations, and statistics. Therefore, it is an open door to talk about mutation rates and evolution, and some simple statistical exercises could easily be devised to give students an idea of what the authors are doing in their analysis.
• It provides an example of multidisciplinary work in science. The authors present a genetics analysis but subject it to controls imposed from other fields.
• Because some broadly similar studies of the past have not been subject to those controls, it provides an example of why there might be apparent disagreement about knowledge amongst scientists. For example, I’ve heard about genetic data that supports migration into the Americas both much earlier, and significantly later, than well-dated archaeological sites. By not imposing constraints from other fields of study, such findings result in apparent disagreement, without necessarily being valid disagreement. The distinction is worth teaching since organized antiscience uses such cases as a wedge.

The authors propose that the population of Amerind ancestors expanded out of east central Asia between 43,000 and 36,000 years ago, and occupied Beringia, the easternmost portion of Asia and the western part of Alaska, including the sea floor which was exposed at the time. A stable population of 8,000 to 10,000 people remained there from that time until around 16,000 years ago, at which time 1,000 to 5,400 of them rapidly expanded into the Americas. The study conforms to prior hypotheses that this expansion occurred either through an ice-free corridor in eastern Alaska and western Canada, or along the coast.

Consistent with other recent work, this paper proposes a single migration, as opposed to studies of the past that considered Amerinds, Na-Dene, and Eskimo-Aleuts to be the result of different migrations. This hypothesis gained popularity in the mid-1980’s, and is the model adopted by a number of interpretive materials in and around Anchorage. The model has been in disfavor for some time in the professional literature, and it seems likely that this new study would help to change these interpretive aids (assuming that scientific evidence trumps political expediency).

The authors point out that the genetic studies to date have strongly supported a single-migration model, but that they have varied significantly concerning the proposed date of the migration, with dates anywhere from about 13,000 years ago, to 40,000 years ago. As a result, that data has been interpreted by a variety of scenarios involving additional migrations, migrations of various ages, and so on. At least from the layman’s perspective, many of these seemed like clever possibilities that had the unfortunate air of being ad-hoc about them.

The new study accommodates some of the more puzzling aspects of the prior genetic studies, particularly ones that come up with very old dates of 30,000 years or more for the migration. A stable population in Beringia for some thousands of years would explain those results, and also explain why there are no American archaeological sites older than around 15,500 years old, while accommodating nicely the archaeological evidence that Homo sapiens was in northwest Beringia by about 30,000 years ago.

The study incorporates data from both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of both Native Americans and Asians. Mitochondrial DNA evidence was cited in 2005 (with quite a bit of publicity, at least in Alaska) to support the idea that the population colonizing North America was extremely small, so it appears to me that the re-analysis of the mitochondrial data is of particular interest. Also of interest is that this study, unlike some in the discipline, uses archaeology, geology, and paleoecology as opportunities for imposing controls on the analysis of the genetic data. Some of the genetics studies of the past have given the appearance of being statistical analyses that avoided giving very much consideration to what is known from other disciplines. The study constrains divergence time to 15,000 years ago, and by trying out different migration rates between Asia and Beringia (and back), it is shown that the lower (and “more biologically realistic,” as the authors put it) the migration rate the larger the population of Amerind ancestors:

Our results demonstrate that smaller estimates of Ne depend upon a substantial level of migration from Asia to account for present-day levels of Amerind genetic diversity, e.g. Hey’s estimate of ≈70 founders is associated with a mAsia→NW > 9.0, which is twice the migration rate for contemporary Europe (m = 4.3).

Emphasis mine. I agree with the authors that the high migration rates assumed by other studies are implausible. Intuitively, I have a hard time accepting that the rate of migration on a modern industrial continent serviced by jets and trains is substantially lower than that found in east Asia in the Pleistocene, but I’m not an expert.

The authors also build into the paper a very nice opportunity for those doing outreach to talk about “what is science:”

Our goal is to provide a comprehensive model for the initial settlement of the Americas that generates new testable hypotheses and has high predictive power for the inclusion of new datasets. In light of our results, we propose a three-stage model in which a recent, rapid expansion into the Americas was preceded by a long period of population stability in greater Beringia by the Paleoindian population after divergence and expansion from their ancestral Asian population.

In other words, science produces conclusions that are testable. When you come to a conclusion, you are sticking your neck out a bit - because by definition a scientific finding is subject to being disproved at some point by someone who has better data, or is better at interpreting your data than you are.

One of the most interesting aspects of this paper, from an outreach perspective, is the opportunity to discuss how we know the dates. Here in a single paper are incorporated various methods for dating prehistoric events and materials (carbon dating, stratigraphy, genetic statistics, and surely a few others), and all of the methods agree that this recent event in world geological history still took place thousands of years before some believe the world was even created. The contrivances that are required to refute these vastly different, yet mutually-supporting dating techniques are awesome in their implausibility, and that’s where the teaching opportunity comes from.

–

This blog article is about:

Kitchen, A., Miyamoto, M.M., Mulligan, C.J., Harpending, H. (2008). A Three-Stage Colonization Model for the Peopling of the Americas. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1596. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001596

…one where I am now, one where I live.

I’m currently visiting Florida. (The whirlwind ‘08 Blue Collar Scientist East Coast Tour comprised Orlando -> Jacksonville -> Tampa -> Orlando again -> Jacksonville again -> Fort Lauderdale for TAM 5.5 -> Washington, DC, and then -> Jacksonville again. I’ll be here a week and then I go home.)

Local news is reporting that a cop is being investigated by the New Port Ritchey Police Department and the Florida Attorney General’s Cybercrimes Unit. His action that might have been a crime? He has a MySpace “friend” who linked to porn. So apparently in Florida you can and will be criminally investigated for something that someone else does, even if it is associated with your police-department-approved MySpace activities.

What’s weird about this case is that the cop merely had a “friend” who linked to porn, and he is now under criminal investigation, but the school he worked at linked directly to a gay porn site from their official school website. But as far as I can tell, nobody at the school is under investigation by the elite cyber crimes unit.

There is, apparently, nothing about Florida schools that isn’t stupid.

Moving right along, back at home, we’ve got some State Senator - one of the seemingly few who have so far escaped prosecution, jail, or suspicion in the corruption cases surrounding the former VECO - who wants to ban a plant. Salvia divinorum, it is said, is a powerful hallucinogen.

Sen. Gene Therriault, R-North Pole … said the drug’s effects, which are similar to LSD’s, are too powerful, dangerous and unpredictable to leave it unrestricted.

Uh - ok. Here’s the thing, though. I can say that pine cones are a dangerous drug with effects that are too powerful, dangerous, and unpredictable to leave restricted - but saying that doesn’t make it so. Is it too much to ask that legislators actually give reasons when they want to ban stuff? I have no interest in using Salvia divinorum, but I also have no interest in going to jail for five years if some is found growing in my flowerbeds at home. (The BCS is not botanically savvy enough to identify which plants are banned and which aren’t.)

Reports of problems stemming from the plant’s use are rare to nonexistent in Alaska, said Lt. Andy Greenstreet, deputy commander of the Alaska Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Enforcement.

Its use while driving is of particular concern, he said, but driving under the influence laws already encompass all drugs.

Unlike LSD, however, Salvia’s effects generally last only about a half hour.

So we have a state senator trying to ban a plant that isn’t used as a drug, but which might be, and if it is, it is already illegal to use it in a dangerous and stupid way, and the high from which really doesn’t last long enough to make it an attractive drug to abusers in the first place?

I don’t get it.

Some Alaskans - in particular those who have political favor to pass around - are obsessed with killing wolves. One of the old stories about wolf hunting is that the Natives, back in the day, used something called the “blood knife” to do the job. The idea was, you smear a knife with the blood of a prey animal, stick the knife in the ground or freeze it in a big block of ice so that the blade sticks up, and walk away. Eventually, a wolf will come by, lick the knife, cut its tongue, and bleed to death.

Wolves in Alaska, you see, have no clotting factors. Or platelets.¹
The Anchorage Daily News, which isn’t really known for running evidence-based stories, nor for doing any sort of investigative journalism, has run a story skeptical of the myth. Columnist Craig Medred, the long-time outdoor writer, talked to several scientists and then performs the takedown.

Kudos, ADN.

1. Obviously, I am making this up. [↩]