Kick the government in the Bucky balls
Sir Harry Kroto has a breathtaking piece in the Grauniad today on the fact that the UK is turning out shockingly few scientists and engineers. The root cause is - in my experience - the 11-18 period, where science just isn’t a draw for students. A lot of people who would be doing science at university aren’t because of the fact that science at school is taught so badly.
The root cause of so much distrust of things like computers is that people do not think scientifically about them, but just look on and give up. It’s not going to bite you. But if you approach the problem logically, you can try and solve it. Like, if you push a button and it does something every time, you can make a tenuous hypothesis of how it works. But people don’t.
Understanding the scientific method was one of the best things that has ever happened to me, because it’s formalised something that I do every single day. If I am debugging a piece of code, I am engaging in a scientific practice of sorts. If I am reading the manual (as I find myself doing quite often) and try out a code sample, I am testing a hypothesis.
I can, if I am so inclined, open up the machine which is processing the code and see what is going on. Which is kind of a more useful way to look at the world than “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it”, which, once you clear off the (post-)modern spin, essentially the position of Blair et al.
Link via Dave Cross.
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Open letter to sensitive wi-fi folks
Speaking of science, the BMJ reported last year on a double-blind, randomised controlled study performed on people who claim that they have a ‘sensitive’ headache in the presence of GSM signals. Only one problem. There’s no evidence to suggest that it has anything to do with GSM signals. The wi-fi scaremongering is likely to be of the same kind - “psychological factors” (to use the Rubin et al. study’s terminology).
But, just to see, I would like to offer people who think they suffer from wi-fi-induced headaches or other symptoms to take part in a small-scale test.
I will arrange for equipment to be set up in a central London location and we can conduct a battery of tests on wi-fi using commercially available equipment to see whether this is true or not.
Think of it as open source science, outside of academia and laboratories. It’ll be a fun day and maybe we’ll find out some interesting things about human beings and low-energy radio waves.
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Scoble: “Just look at TechMeme lately. It’s not about building stuff. You don’t see Ajaxian or the Make Blog on TechMeme. You see Wallstrip selling for a few million to CBS.” That’s why it’s more accurately called BizMeme - as I said earlier this month, and Kent agreed calling it WallStreetmeme. I’d go further than that. I think TechMeme is one of the leading causes of blog dullness. I really don’t care who is on TechMeme anymore, and I don’t care what it says. The reason that we are dancing the Web 2.0 dance is because it’s slightly more interesting than building enteprise apps for insurance companies and banks…
