Smooth Pebbles

Ski season opens - wingnut I mean wingsuit base jumping

Now this is serious vertical drop.

wingsuit base jumping from doubleA on Vimeo.

Tennis meets perception science: Wait till McEnroe reads this

As an avid tennis player (though it's been a while), I had to love this and do: The busy bloggers at Neurophilosophy bring their usual lucidity to a paper by David Whitney, of the University of California, Davis, on how inherent dynamics of visual perception make line-call errors by tennis referees virtually inevitable.

Check it out at You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees:

The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be serious!"

McEnroe's outburst was controversial, and he was almost eliminated from the championship because of it. But he may have been right to challenge the referee after all: according to a new study published in Current Biology, in such close calls, professional tennis referees consistently misjudge the location of a ball's bounce because of a perceptual error caused by an inherent property of the visual system.

Some great stuff here, including links to McEnroe, during his second epic match with Borg (the one he won in '81) hollering at the ump, "You cannot be serious!" -- an outburst that nearly got him DQ'd.

Ah, science. Ah, tennis. Ah, Mac.

More questions on cell phone/DNA data

You want mail, write about cell phones and DNA.

Earlier today, when I posted a heads-up to a Science story about questions raised about data-tampering in what Science called "The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers" showing strong links between cell phone use and DNA mutations, I noted I was surprised at the lack of press coverage about this, given how heavily most papers on the subject are reported. Two hours later I got a note from Louis Slesin, who blogs on such issues at Microwave News, asserting that the Science story oversimplified the situation. Slesin pointed me to his Sept 3 blog post:

Making sweeping statements about scientific knowledge is always challenging, especially when writing about an unfamiliar field of research. Take, for example, this opening sentence from an article, "Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage from Cell Phone Fields" by Gretchen Vogel in this week's Science magazine:

"The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cell phones can cause DNA breakage are at the center of a misconduct controversy at the Medical University of Vienna."

Sweeping ... and wrong. Not counting the two papers from Hugo Rüdiger's lab in Vienna, here are 11 papers that point to changes in DNA breaks following exposures to cell phone radiation:

Slesin then lists those papers as well as some others before concluding:

None of this should be interpreted as indicating that the cell phone–DNA issue is closed. Others have failed to see such genetic effects and the jury is still out. But clearly to state that only two papers have shown DNA breaks is grossly misleading —no, simply wrong. We have been closely following the University of Vienna story for some months and we will be reporting on it in detail sometime soon. The Science story gives but a glimpse of some of the maneuvering going on behind the scenes; in this case, manipulating the media to influence public opinion. At the moment, we are still trying to sort out who is doing what.

Did Science cut to the chase or oversimplify? As I'm trying to finish another story right now, I lack the time to run all this down. But this latest wrinkle in the Do cell phones harm you? debate strengthens my impression that a tangle of passionate interests (profits, reputations, righteousness, and a world of ambivalent feelings about connectedness, technology, and the risks posed by the human-made environment) are at work here, greatly complicating the supposedly-but-rarely-straightforwardly-objective path of science and its understanding.

I'll try to keep up with this and report further. Feel free to keep me posted or chime in via the comments section.

Tags: cellphones, fraud, Science magazine, Louis Slesin, Gretchen Vogel, Medical University of Vienna, cell-phone study, DNA mutations, Hugo Rüdiger, scientific misconduct

Pebbles: Fraudulent cell phone calls, daydreaming, autism, Glenn Gould, and Roy O & Dustin Pedroia

Roy Oswalt, bringing it.

Some good hits from the last week or so (but not too many off Roy):

SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT: Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage From Cell Phone Fields -- Vogel 321 (5893): 1144a -- Science 
As shocking a story as the title suggests.
Oops, update: As that story is behind a pay firewall, I excerpt the first couple grafs here. It has received extraordinarily little news coverage since then -- an oddity, given how much press the papers in question generated originally. Time allows I'll post more on this later. In the meantime, from the Science story:

The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cell phones can cause DNA breakage are at the center of a misconduct controversy at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV). Critics had argued that the data looked too good to be real, and in May a university investigation agreed, concluding that data in both studies had been fabricated and that the papers should be retracted....

The contested studies, which exposed cells to EMFs equivalent to those from the most common American and European cell phones, have been widely cited by advocates of tighter regulations on cell phones. Both studies are from the lab of Hugo Rüdiger, who retired this past October after serving as director of the department of occupational medicine at MUV. Other teams have reported only cellular effects of EMFs that are more subtle than DNA breakage, such as changes in gene activation or expression. "If this work isn't solid, then one really has to give up the hypothesis that these fields cause genotoxic effects," says Anna Wobus, a developmental biologist at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, Germany, who has studied the effects of EMFs on stem cells.

I hope to find and run more later.

Important work can be done while daydreaming - The Boston Globe
Jonah Lehrer on the value of letting the mind wander. A nice supplement to his recent New Yorker piece on the nature of insight.

Autism on the rise; additional factors?
From neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, a consideration of what factors (other than the red-herring vaccine connection) might contribute to autism.

Riveting videos of Glenn Gould playing Bach.

From a group blog I just discovered, FanGraphs Baseball, some lucid sabremetric considerations of two of my favorite baseball players, Houston pitcher Roy Oswalt and Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia. The blog's Matthew Carruth also notes that this past Monday Stephen Drew and Adrian Beltre both hit for the cycle (single, double, triple, homer) -- only the second time this has occurred in MLB history. Good juice from the Pedroia piece: Pedroia is so effectively ripping up the AL lately that White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen recently said that "he would rather face David Ortiz at this point than Pedroia."

Tags: cellphone, fraud, scientific misconduct, daydreaming, Jonah Lehrer, autism, Michael Merzenich, Glenn Gould, Johann Sebastian Bach, Roy Oswalt, Dustin Pedroia, baseball, music, neuroscience

Why Baseball Really Is a Game of Inches - Bats - Baseball - New York Times Blog

A particularly nice post by the Times' Tyler Knepper, who keeps the "Bats" blog: Luke Scott explains why hitting is so very difficult. http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/why-baseball-really-is-a-game-of-inches/index.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality

My (very short) story on a new omnidirectional treadmill for spatial cognition research is up at the Wired site:

An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality.

...This April, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform. Treadmills have been tried in VR before, of course, but early models were unconvincing — either too small to keep goggled wanderers on the platform or too slow, bouncy, or gap-ridden to feel the least bit real. The CyberWalk solves these problems with a stiff, gapless, 20 x 20-foot floor and movement and feedback systems that enable quick, fluid changes of direction.

We know what you're thinking: Halo! But gamers must wait. For now, access goes to spatial-cognition and perception researchers, who will use the CyberWalk to "explore all sorts of things we haven't been able to explore before," says William Thompson, a University of Utah computer scientist. In addition to studying our brains and understanding space and movement, they'll assess potential for military and disaster-response operations and see if the device can be used to treat medical issues such as Parkinson's.

Eiger loses face

I enjoy most any mix of science and mountaineering — part of why I so like Mark Bowen's Thin Ice, his book about climatologist Lonnie Thompson's remarkable work documenting global warming in high-altitude glaciers. Scientific work done at rarefied altitudes. How can you not like it?

The North Face of the Eiger, 2005 — aka the Eigerwand of climbing fame. The east face, photos of which I couldn't find, is out of sight around the corner.
Photo by Dirk Beyer via Wikipedia Commons.

I'm less thrilled to see global warming meet alpinism on the Eiger, where last Thursday about 400,000 cubic meters of the Eiger fell off the mountain's east face. Geologist and climatologist Hans-Rudolf Keusen, who specializes in remote detection of geological hazards and chairs a related working group at ProClim (a climate study group), had predicted this the previous week after tracking the expansion of huge rapidly widening cracks in the face. According to Keusen, the east face will lose some 2 million cubic feet altogether — a volume roughly that of the Twin Towers — will collapse this summer because global warming has melted a glacier that helped support the massive cliff, allowing it to crack apart.

The prospect of more collapses is drawing a lot of tourists. The Eiger will stand a while yet, of course. Yet as a fan of the Alps and an avid armchair mountaineer, I find distressing that we're changing these iconic and beautiful mountains. The rockfall is probably only the most dramatic such change. Mountaineer Doug Scott (who at a lecture I was lucky enough to attend explained his assessment and retreat from a particular daunting and dangerous ascent by saying, "Anything you really want to do, you can. So why bother?") told the Times of London that

“In the past few years the alpine climbs like the Dru and the Eiger have become more and more threatened by snowfall and massive collapses. I first climbed the Alps in 1957, but they are far more dangerous today.”

Quite dismaying. Warming is also set to pooch the Alps' skiing. A recent study predicted that the next 25 years will eliminate half the ski areas in the Alps. The decline has already begun, as detailed at the excellent ski site PisteHors.com and the World Wildlife Fund site. Over 20% of the Alp's glacier cover melted between 1985 and 2000, and a Guardian story tells how some Alpine resorts are building trails higher and higher in an attempt to stay in business.

Finally, closer to home, ScienceBlog notes that a Scripps Institution study implicates global warming in Western US wildfires.

Grim stuff all around.