The last word of science

Last Updated on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 |
Meteorology

Animals, as well as trees and joints, aren’t perfect weather forecasters. If taken literally, folklore forecasting can lead to serious consequences! That’s why people have developed instruments for quantitative measurement of weather parameters, and put the power of scientific method to work in formulating weather and climate forecasts.

Today, when you see a big thunderstorm coming straight towards your town on Doppler radar by checking out the Web page for your Zip code at the Weather Channel (www.weather.com), you don’t need to watch the birds, look at the trees, or flex your elbows. You know that rain will soon fall.

PROBLEM 3-1

How can a device such as the Maine Weather Stick actually work? Or is it nothing more than a gimmick?

SOLUTION 3-1

The wood in the top of the stick behaves differently—under changing temperature and humidity conditions—than the wood in the bottom of the stick. Fig. 3-1 illustrates the principle. The stick’s position during good or improving weather is shown at A; the stick’s position during bad or deteriorating weather is shown at B. There are at least four possible scenarios that can cause the stick to work.

• The wood in the top of the stick (X) tends to contract when the temperature rises and/or the humidity drops, conditions typical of improving weather; it tends to expand when the temperature drops and/or the humidity rises, conditions typical of deteriorating weather. The wood in the bottom of the stick (Y) does not expand or contract as the humidity and temperature change.

• The wood in the bottom of the stick (Y) tends to expand when the temperature rises and/or the humidity drops, conditions typical of improving weather; it tends to contract when the temperature drops and/or the humidity rises, conditions typical of deteriorating weather. The wood in the top of the stick (X) does not expand or contract as the humidity and temperature change.

• Other factors, such as changes in the barometric pressure, affect the wood. These factors could operate in addition to, or instead of, temperature and humidity changes.

Y

Fig. 3-1. Illustration for Problem 3-1. At A, the Maine Weather Stick during fair weather; at B, the same stick during foul weather.

Continue reading here: Synoptic Forecasting

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A Global Vision

Much of what is possible will be built on the foundation of what can be achieved in the next two decades. So I will focus on the Academy’s potential in the year 2030.

2030 has become an iconic year. Based on a consensus of 193 nations, 17 «Sustainable Development Goals» (SDGs) will be pursued over the next dozen years and, by 2030, we hope the world as we know it will be transformed for the better.

Extreme poverty will be banished from the earth, except perhaps in remaining conflict zones or pariah states. Hunger and malnutrition will largely be scourges of the past thanks to a doubling of agriculture achieved through sustainable uses of energy, water and so forth. And with regard to health and wellness, epidemics won’t become pandemics, and there will be dramatic reductions in maternal and infant mortality. And that’s just for starters. (Read the full SDG list.)

Now, even if you haven’t been following this ambitious playbook closely, I think you will agree that these 17 SDGs embody the most ambitious detailed vision of a better planet ever proposed by humankind. And perhaps for that reason you may feel some skepticism concerning the likelihood that these ideals can be achieved. But perhaps you haven’t noticed the extraordinary progress made over the last two decades through the power of collective action:

• Extreme poverty was cut in half empowering a billion people to join the world economy.
• Deaths from malaria were reduced by up to 70 percent.
• Maternal mortality was reduced by almost 50 percent.
• And millions more children — especially girls — are graduating from primary schools with the next target being universal graduation from secondary schools.

How did all this happen? Visionary macro-economic planning, improved policy adoption, savvy investments, public-private partnerships in extraordinary numbers and — particularly warming to our hearts — innovations in science and technology.

In a world where the daily news is often horrific, the Sustainable Development Goals are expanding on the surprising success of their precursors, the Millennium Development Goals. And nothing is more inspiring than the stories of the institutions and individuals who are coming together to help achieve these goals through collective action.

An Academy Vision

So, collective action has become the key to my vision of what the New York Academy of Sciences can achieve in its Third Century. Without fanfare — perhaps even without notice — collective action has been at the heart of many of the Academy’s greatest and most promising new initiatives during the last decade.

To cite some examples, our Science Alliance for Graduate Students and Postdocs in the New York area overcame what had been previously nearly a zero-sum-game ethos among competing academic institutions. Today, young scientists from across the New York Tri-State region come together on a regular basis for career mentoring and special frontiers-of-science inspiration and collaborative opportunities. Because of the Science Alliance programs, tens of thousands of young scientists are engaging in collective action.

The synergistic effect of that landmark project in New York was soon recognized by the world-class universities of London — King’s, Imperial and University College, London (UCL). They commissioned the Academy to help them overcome natural competitiveness, and after we organized and held three landmark conferences on cutting-edge topics — combining the best of King’s, Imperial and UCL and demonstrating the power of working together — a sea change took place in cooperation among not only the London-based universities, but even among long-time archrivals Oxford and Cambridge.

Gradually, world political and business leaders, seeing concrete results from such activities, began to take notice. The Academy was invited to develop collective-action-fostering initiatives in Mexico City, Russia, Qatar and Malaysia. PepsiCo, realizing the potential of the Academy’s neutrality to innovate, invited us to develop a public–private partnership that, with the crucial collaboration of the Mortimer D. Sackler Foundation, enabled the World Health Organization to create its first-ever prioritized road map of interventions desperately needed by 2 billion under- and over-nourished people on our planet — an unprecedented public–private partnership.

From that success, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer asked the Academy to organize an international Alzheimer’s initiative. This led to a landmark summit that brought together, for the first time, Alzheimer’s governmental policy leaders from the United States, Canada, the European Union and Japan. Among other things, the summit provided critical precursors of transformational activities now being funded by the G7 that are advancing Alzheimer’s research.

All of these extraordinary efforts by the individual and institutional Members of your Academy resulted in perhaps its greatest honor and challenge. In January 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asked the Academy to catalyze the private sector in innovative partnerships to help the UN agencies achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

No wonder that the New York Academy of Sciences has become devoted to the notion of collective action in the sciences and technology. For its first 190 years, the Academy was primarily a convener and a disseminator of knowledge discussed at scientific conferences. Among the thousands of conferences and tens of thousands of scientists who have participated in our convenings and publications over the last 200 years, we can be particularly proud of holding the first-ever meetings on antibiotics, asbestos hazards, women in science, AIDS and SARS, to name a few. Indeed, much scientific progress has emerged from Academy ventures through serendipitous collisions of outstanding talents at our many meetings and conferences, and insights gleaned from papers published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Those accomplishments notwithstanding, in the last decade, the Academy’s Board, staff and Membership have begun to realize an even grander vision: to catalyze change by incentivizing competing institutions and individuals — as well as those normally unknown to one another because of the silos in our society — to work together in unparalleled collective efforts.

The immediate impact has been twofold: First, we can take great pride in driving significant social change. Second, we have discovered that the participants involved in these collective action initiatives are finding inspiration and a sense of fulfillment in volunteering to make a difference.

Once upon a time, professionals joined organizations (like ours) to improve their career prospects or, even, to get discounts on services! Today’s professionals, in contrast, seem to want to spend their spare time volunteering for NGOs that give them opportunities to make a real difference.

So imagine the attraction of the Academy’s work in early childhood development, or our newest initiative to enable the private sector to engage in the grand challenges of the planet. Young scientists and engineers — and especially secondary school students — are expressing a passion for the Academy and what it can accomplish.

Scaling to a Million

What can the Academy hope for as its Third Century initiatives develop? When I left the editorship of Science to take the leadership helm of the Academy in November 2002, there were about 200 Student Members, and the majority of Members were well past their early careers. Today, roughly 40 percent of our 20,000 Members are post-docs, PhD students and gifted high school students. They are the Academy’s future, and the planet’s lifeline.

Thanks to the generosity of the Blavatnik Family Foundation — and more recently the Takeda Foundation and Japan’s relatively new Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) — we are now developing a pipeline of the world’s most promising young scientists and engineers, who will not only be the innovators of the future but serve as role models and mentors, inspiring the generations behind them.

I have already alluded to our 8,000-strong network of post-graduates. But for the science and technology students coming up behind them — the undergraduates of promise who desperately need mentoring — we have initiated the Next Scholars Program. This initiative matches collegiate woman with a female mentor from academia or industry to support the development of professional skills that will position them for future leadership roles.

As the Next Scholars kicks off recruitment, and our population reaches 600 self-identified female undergraduates and their mentors, by 2030, we see undergraduate women from other global regions as well as students with STEM majors from other historically underrepresented groups joining the program. At scale, we’ll have created a continuous pipeline of mentoring to our most engaged STEM students from their early high school years through their graduate school and career.

And taking one more step back into the pipeline of tomorrow’s innovators, I arrive at what could prove to be the most significant initiative developed by the New York Academy of Sciences: the Global STEM Alliance.

You no doubt have read about it before, so I will only summarize the highlights of this extraordinary opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the world by noting first that the GSA was inspired by inspirational Nobel Laureate and previous Academy President Joshua Lederberg. As a junior in high school with extraordinary science potential, Josh had been honored by the Academy by being inducted into the Junior Academy. In conversation with me, he claimed that this early honor confirmed his lifelong mission to use science to make a difference.

The Junior Academy provides uniquely inspiring experiences for the world’s most gifted students who meet on a social network we created called LaunchPad. They quickly get to know one another across geographies — children from every continent interacting with one another around scientific topics. And they gain access to hundreds of experts willing to act as their advisors and mentors.

This unprecedented social network encourages the students to self-assemble into multinational teams to tackle an SDG related challenge and attempt to create a commercially feasible solution. To get a sense of the inspirational power of this activity, consider these two examples:

AquaeVitae Team (four students from the U.S., Macedonia, U.K. and India):
By combining nanotechnology and other water filtering methods, AquaeVitae aims to distribute its filters worldwide to people lacking access to potable water.

Go-Deck Team (four students from the U.S., Singapore and Tanzania):
Go-Deck, an off-the-grid cooling solution made from landfill bound materials, provides a reduction in temperature and humidity control during the transportation and storage of produce via the use of evaporation technology. Considering the uniqueness, power and potential scale of the Junior Academy, it will come as no surprise that over 300 corporate and academic partners in 100 countries now support it with scores more joining annually.

So What Does All This Mean for the Third Century of the New York Academy of Sciences?

Because there is no practical limit to the number of professional scientists and engineers who would gladly serve as experts and mentors, and because the costs of expanding the social network are hundreds of times less than what would have traditionally been required through the sponsorship of face-to-face meetings — not to mention ongoing collaborations — the true power of the Junior Academy initiative will be established when we have shown that 1 million of our Junior Academy Students mature into the innovators of tomorrow and, importantly, remain with us as Members of the Academy.

All of this would not be possible if it were not for the Academy’s incredibly talented staff who develop and manage our awards programs, scores of great conferences, seminars and workshops, and Annals (the longest continuously published scientific journal in the United States), not to mention the relatively new team building the Global STEM Alliance and special after-school programs that inspire middle school children in underserved schools around the world. By creating a Million-Member network of engaged scientists and engineers we can prove the power of collective action.

I hope you find this vision worthy of continued support and — in particular — participation. And as our Third Century gets underway, if you haven’t already been engaged in our current activities — or if you have ideas about new initiatives — please write me an email. Tell me your passions and become another crucial Member of the Million Member Club a.k.a. «the World’s Smartest Network®.»

Ellis Rubinstein
President & CEO
erubinstein@nyas.org

Please tell me you can read my mind

I need that

You’ve got the symptoms of a friend

I see that

The stork showed up and you were saved overnight

It’s funny you should say because

This stuff is authorized to enter into my body

If I’ve changed you, buddy

Don’t you know that I’m sorry?

A doctor’s note is everything’s ok this time

And the last word, of course, is mine

So I prefer a lighter fare

I fit right in Until we travel, we’ll be here

And still you hoist your chin

The stork showed up and you were saved

And I’m still the same

It’s funny you should say because

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Last Word Quotes (10 quotes)

Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense.
What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.
Commonly said to be his last words. However, different true last words are stated by Augustus De Morgan.

Quoted in Augustus De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes (1915), Vol. 2, 3.

L’homme ne poursuit que des chimères.
Man follows only phantoms.

His true last words, according to De Morgan. As quoted in Augustus De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes (1915), Vol. 2, 3.

In science, attempts at formulating hierarchies are always doomed to eventual failure. A Newton will always be followed by an Einstein, a Stahl by a Lavoisier; and who can say who will come after us? What the human mind has fabricated must be subject to all the changes—which are not progress—that the human mind must undergo. The ‘last words’ of the sciences are often replaced, more often forgotten. Science is a relentlessly dialectical process, though it suffers continuously under the necessary relativation of equally indispensable absolutes. It is, however, possible that the ever-growing intellectual and moral pollution of our scientific atmosphere will bring this process to a standstill. The immense library of ancient Alexandria was both symptom and cause of the ossification of the Greek intellect. Even now I know of some who feel that we know too much about the wrong things.

Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science (1979), 46.

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.

In ‘Philosophy, Religion, and So Forth’, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989), 12.

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O’Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 237.

Science, especially natural and medical science, is always undergoing evolution, and one can never hope to have said the last word upon any branch of it.

From Introduction to Alphonse Laveran and Felix Etienne Pierre Mesnil Trypanosomes and Trypanosomiasis (1904). English edition translated and much enlarged by David Nabarro, (1907), xvii.

THE DYING AIRMAN
A handsome young airman lay dying,
As on the aerodrome he lay,
To the mechanics who round him came sighing,
These last words he did say.
“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
The connecting-rod out of my brain,
Take the cam-shaft from out of my backbone,
And assemble the engine again.”

From Edith L. Tiempo, Introduction to Poetry: Poetry Through Image and Statement (1993), 6.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

From ‘Conservation’ (c.1938), Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1953), 141. Collected in The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries (1999), 142.

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

From The Hope of Progress (1973), 137. Medawar defends science against the attacks of critics who claim that science cannot enrich our lives.

Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word.

Address at the Inauguration of the Pasteur Institute. In René Vallery-Radot, The Life of Pasteur, translated by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire (1919), 443.