Sandy Studies

The clock says, "Hoboken lost power at 9:05." Or so. City clocks are always off a bit.

A Hoboken City Clock at 11th and Washington

It's like a mystery novel. The detective looks down at the body on the ground, and his eyes scan to the wrist; the watch has struck some object during the fall; it's broken; the time stopped. Ah ha, that's when . . .




9:05 is about right. I was laying in bed writing an essay on the history of regulation and technological change when lights went out. It was unsettling to open my laptop right now for this blog post. All of my work was still awake and waiting for me, as it was when I put the laptop to sleep when the power died, like nothing at all has happened. But it has.

We know now that the electricity systems went down when the surge hit. Just about then, water began pouring into my colleagues house. Just about then, the streets on the south end of town became lakes. And just about then, the electrical substation on the backside of town flooded. We won't have lights until they can get water out of the substation. The head of the local electric utility joked, "We don't have divers."

A Blurry View Down 1st Street from Bloomfield Towards the Worst Hit Area of the City

Today, we walked down to most damaged part of town to City Hall, where the National Guard is staging. There, we saw some young kids in fatigues. I think they were Marine ROTC. An older National Guard officer was talking to them. He pointed down 1st Street and said to them, "You go as deep that way as you can, and you see if anyone needs help."

The National Guard at Newark and Bloomfield

What else can you say? What else can you do? You get big vehicles with engines that won't flood, and you try to save some people, to pull them out. All of our fancy gadgets don't give us solutions more sophisticated than that.

(You already hear people talking about technological systems that have failed us, though. Why, people are asking, is the electrical substation below sea level? There are flashes of anger and confusion. I imagine that there will be more of that to come: how blame relieves us.  I wonder how long the substation has been back there. Since 1910? A long time, I imagine.)

 I keep thinking of this Samuel Delany novel, Dhalgren (1975). It's set in a postapocalyptic city, but (as far as I remember) it's not a smashed place full of violence or raging mobs or zombies or whatever. It's just sideways somehow. Not the here we know.

It's funny how you learn to reason through new problems. Last night, I finally got to charge my phone because my friend has power. I couldn't get any reception, however. I have Sprint. My friend's fiance reminded me that someone we had bumped into said that she couldn't get a call out on AT&T. And that's right. As you talk to more people, you come to realize the state of things: the Verizon network seems to be managing; Sprint and AT&T are for shit. 

My friend and colleague, Andy Russell, and his fiance have been kind enough to put help me out and even put me up last night when I got locked out of my building. (The front door lock is electric, don't you know. You use a key fob to open it. RFID, I imagine. But there is no electricity, and someone removed the duct tape that was holding the lock open. I stood for a while in the dark. That got creepy.)

Andy brought up the phrase "return to normalcy" yesterday. We were talking about how it's hard to know the resonance of those words until the world inverts. That night New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and several others used the phrase on TV. Yes, a return to normalcy--that is what people here are looking for. But it's Halloween.

Keeping the Spirit Alive on Washington St.

A few years ago, I attended a small workshop on the history of disasters and accidents. There was a professor there who specialized in disaster response. I remember him talking about why social scientific knowledge about disasters matter. He said, "We know that people do not panic in disasters. If only people had known that, they wouldn't have bought into sensational news reports during Katrina." Those words ring true today.

We don't have riots here. It's just the opposite. If anything, you see real solidarity. Strangers are helping strangers. My colleagues and I check in on each other. The community at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I am a professor, has rallied. This isn't my ringing endorsement of humanity; it's just what I see.

I want to tell you about the neatest thing I've run across. Last night, we were walking down 11th Street, and we saw that people with electricity had run extension cords out of their front windows to power strips on the sidewalk. People who don't have power are coming to these places to charge up their electronics and cellphones. Then they call their loved ones.

An Ad Hoc Charging Station at Bloomfield and 11th St.

Would it cheapen things for you if I called this an innovation, a social innovation that has arisen from the human heart? That's probably too much.

People Recharging at an Impromptu Station on 11th between Washington and Bloomfield

I walked down 11th St around noon. There were around 20 charging stations within the span of four blocks. I've seen more since, up and down Hudson Street, at Clinton and 11th. There must be nearly fifty of them. 

I'm sorry that this has rambled. I meant this to have more drive, more clarity, more point, but I can't really give you that right now.  Andy Russell and I see Science and Technology Studies all around us. My friend, Maggie Curnutte, who writes about biotech, has recently been researching the origins of some scientific term. I'll probably botch it, but I think it is "studies" or "science in nature." The idea is that you conduct science out there, in the world, outside the lab. (I'm screwing this up.) But what I mean to say is that Andy and I--and many other people no doubt--are already doing STS in nature: let's call them Sandy Studies.

I have reacted to this as I react to all things--with my head, not my heart. Nothing is wrong for me. I don't have power. It's chilly. But I have plenty of calories laying at hand and somewhere to retreat to. I came up to the Stevens campus to get on the network. They have a building with lights and the net, where the students are holed up. As I've sat here writing this, someone came in announced that Trick-or-Treating has begun. Students are dressing up and walking around. Several houses on campus, including the president's and the provost's, are giving away candy. They are doing a good job boosting morale.

Then a while later, another student came into the large lecture hall where I am sitting with others. He asked the hall, "You guys having fun yet?" Everyone stared at him blankly. Then he said, "'Cause we got us a dance party upstairs."

I'm headed out. I want to avoid a repeat of last night's lock out. When you walk through the streets here, you use a flashlight.

From Hoboken,

Lee

Embracing and Communicating Uncertainty

I am hesitant to blog about the hurricane ripping through the Mid-Atlantic, especially while I'm sitting comfortably safe and warm, six time zones away. I've read too many sad stories already and seen, electronically, too much destruction to want to drain the moment of its significance, its discomforts, and too often its tragedies. To my friends in the path, and every one else: I hope you're experiencing a speedy recovery.

Sandy's Cone of Uncertainty, National Weather Service

Still I think it is appropriate to notice the success of the National Weather Service and its associated forecasters. Without their efforts, and subsequent evacuations, many more people might have been been killed or injured. One key to that success, according to Nate Silver, is the NWS's embrace of uncertainty, its frank acknowledgement of error, and its skepticism of its own models. The "cone of uncertainty," above, exemplifies the NWS ethos and makes it public. Instead of simple trajectory, we get a range of possible paths, and the caveat that areas outside the path may still feel some impact of the storm. I'm sure you've all seen some version of this graphic recently.


Silver, whose political forecasting blog (fivethirtyeight) offers some of the best analysis of the ins and outs of predictive modeling that I've read anywhere*, published an excerpt from his new book last month on the development of weather forecasting. It's snappily written with a standard new journalism flair. Silver shows us the shiny innards (in-nerds? ha, ha, get it?) of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (which I had never heard of) and makes lame jokes along the way (but who am I, really, to judge?).

While Silver offers a capsule history of weather prediction, his real points are: 1) the embrace of uncertainty has been key to improved prediction and 2) even the best models have flaws that require expert judgment and human intervention. On the first point, Silver contemplates the impact of chaos theory on the way forecasters deal with their data and he notes the increasing tendency of forecasters to make their uncertainty more evident. It makes me wonder if the general public has been learning a new way of thinking, a probabilistic way of thinking, or is at least getting more comfortable with ranges of prediction.

On the second point, Silver draws our attention to NWS technicians who "draw on their maps with light pens, painstakingly adjusting the contours of temperature gradients produced by the computers...." He interviews a NOAA official who explains that there are lots of models and they seldom agree. Those closest to the predictions know just how much they still don't know. But that does not incapacitate them. Silver draws analogies to poker players, billiards sharks, and high-frequency stock traders in an effort to explain how human judgment can make it possible for people plagued by uncertainty to find an advantage. The moral here is that uncertainty need not lead to inaction, and in fact can lead to smarter action.

I'll close this post with the "Modelers' Hippocratic Oath," written by Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott for the sake of financial modelers, but more broadly applicable:

The Modelers' Hippocratic Oath 

~ I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations.
~ Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.
~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.
~ Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.
~ I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

Good science, it turns out, and good modeling, require a strong dose of humility.


*Seriously, I could make the argument that Silver is just using the election to teach a huge number of people how to think responsibly about statistics and predictive modeling. Ben Schmidt does a similar service for the digital humanities using nostalgic TV shows like Downton Abbey.

On Eclipses and Scientific Thinking: Simon Newcomb, Mark Twain, Ernst Mayr, and Bing Crosby

What do Newcomb, Twain, Mayr, and Crosby have in common? No, they aren't a 60s folk rock band. The answer is that they all tell us something interesting about the cultural power of the eclipse.

28 March 2006 Solar Eclipse, courtesy of NASA

What is most interesting about them is the way they reflect various ideas about the capacity for scientific thinking among Americans and others, past and present. 

This occurred to me while reading Matt Stanley's very interesting article, "Predicting the Past," from the second number of Isis this year (2012). Stanley traces changing attitudes toward the role of history in astronomy and astronomy in history. His centerpiece is a disagreement between Greenwich's Astronomer Royal, George Airy, and the head of the American Nautical Almanac, Simon Newcomb. Airy turned to ancient Greek sources for data on past eclipses that could help him calculate the "secular acceleration"of the moon, a small but crucial constant necessary for making precise lunar tables. Newcomb, on the other hand, distrusted ancient, unscientific sources and instead ventured to Paris and St. Petersburg, looking for 17th and 18th century data that could provide an alternate route to the same end. Along with fascinating questions about the history of observation, the paper led me to think about about astronomers' extraordinary concern with error and the quantification of error. Stanley, for his part,  points ultimately to Huxley and Darwin and to a rising faith that science that predict both the past and the future. I won't rehearse Stanley's entire argument here, but I encourage our readers to check it out.

Newcomb emerges as a particularly intriguing figure. A long-time computer under Charles Henry Davis and Benjamin Peirce at the Nautical Almanac in Cambridge, Newcomb took over the program and ran it throughout the late nineteenth century. Stanley presents Newcomb in 1871 as so determined to acquire data from the Paris observatory that he "had to maneuver past the Commune barricades to spend this days in the observatory. As he sorted through their extensive records, he reported being distracted by the flashes and booms of nearby artillery fire." (267) Newcomb undoubtedly enjoyed telling the story---seldom do archival visits provide so ready a tale of scientific heroism. But it also makes me wonder how a close experience with the Commune shaped what David Alan Grier has called Newcomb's "conservative nature" and his lack of "sympathy for the complaints of workers, labor movements, and strikers."(When Computers Were Human, 114)

Newcomb had ambitions to make America more scientific. He imagined applying the predictive powers of astronomy to political economy, in striking terms: 

“Were our knowledge of the whole world, including, including every man in it, complete in every particular, and were we able to apply this knowledge at every moment, we might imagine ourselves to predict all economic phenomena by this method much as the astronomer predicts the motions of the planets.” (272)

Apart from this renewal of Laplace's demonic(!) dreams, he envisioned organizing American society around scientific thinking. As Stanley puts it, "he thought science was a necessary part of citizenship and social progress. If the American people could be trained in science, the country could be improved immeasurably."(273)

One of the inheritors of Newcomb's faith was a passionate reader "in popular science, particularly astronomy," Mark Twain. (275) In a famous passage from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain uses an eclipse to advance his plot. The Yankee headlining the book, who magically travels back in time from the nineteenth to the sixth century, happens to have past eclipse dates memorized. This allows him to conjure up a test to confirm what the "lunatics" were telling him, that the year he found himself in was in fact 538. It also provides him with a tool to free himself from a death sentence: he says he will blot out the sun, and then he does. Quaking with fear from his powers, King Arthur grants him the title Sir Boss, and the story goes from there.

Twain, like Newcomb, understood there to be a fundamental difference between scientific thinking and pre-scientific thinking. That's what makes Ernst Mayr's later story so wonderful. Here it is, from the Museum of Comparative Zoology's "informal chronology":

 1928 [Mayr] Leads ornithological expeditions to Dutch New Guinea and German Mandated New Guinea. An experience that fulfilled “the greatest ambition of [his] youth.” Collected ca. 7000 bird skins in two and a half years. Dr. Mayr recently recounted an anecdote concerning these expeditions that illustrates the playful side of the scientist: He tried to increase his standing with the New Guinea natives by using a trick employed in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Upon learning from his almanac that a lunar eclipse was about to occur, Mayr announced to the tribe, through an interpreter, that the moon was about to totally darken. Unlike Twain’s characters, however, they were not impressed, and the elderly chief said to Dr. Mayr, “Don’t worry, my son, it will soon get light again.”

Mayr inadvertently tested Twain's ideas about scientific thinking (and maybe Newcomb's too, although we probably shouldn't blame Newcomb for Twain). Those ideas failed spectacularly and hilariously.

Mayr relied on an almanac instead of memory, which strikes me as more sensible and plausible. Hollywood must have thought so too. In the movie version of A Connecticut Yankee, Bing Crosby also consults his pocket almanac to discover the timing of the eclipse. Newcomb, an almanac maker, would have approved. Still, I think there's an important distinction here. Newcomb made a specialized nautical almanac, a self-consciously scientific document---indeed, a kind of proto-Big Science. Crosby's Sir Boss draws on an older tradition of texts (if my memory serves right), the farmer's almanac: one part modern science and one part early modern miscellany, an amalgam of new thinking and folk wisdom. 

Talking to Insects

Autumnal forest in Charlevoix, Quebec.  From the series The Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

The painter and experimental filmmaker Jeff Scher has a wonderful video in today's NY Times entitled Leaf and Death. Scher collected fallen leaves from around his neighborhood, dried them, and placed them on a light table to photograph. The result is stunningly beautiful, no less because there is something haunting and melancholy about its subject matter. 

As the summer begins to wane, leaves turn to brilliant colors before they are shed and fall to the ground. “Entire landscapes are transformed into a state of agitated Technicolor,” Scher writes in a statement that accompanies his piece. “It’s nature’s color-coded warning of the approaching longer nights and colder days sneaking up the calendar.”

But why do autumn leaves really change their color?

It turns out that this question has become something of a controversy among botanists. (For a review of the relevant arguments, check out this recent paper in the aptly named journal TREE.) The issues at stake in the debate are fascinating, and they will ensure you will never look at an autumnal forest the same way again!

For a long time, botanists did not trouble themselves with the question of why leaves turn from green to red and yellow. There was a shared consensus that color change was simply a byproduct of leaf senescence. As temperatures begin to drop and days grow shorter, the energetic benefits of maintaining leaves capable of photosynthesis are gradually outweighed by the physiological costs associated with doing so.  For this reason, treed begin to shed their leaves. As they do so, chlorophyll is broken down into more basic pigments of lower molecular weight, which causes leaves to loose their green color.

Although this story has a certain poetry to it—trees die a little bit each year, only to be renewed again come springtime—it has recently been found wanting. First, although there is no question that its central premise is correct, it only explains why trees shed their leaves in the autumn, not why they change their color. Second, botanists have found that the color change cannot be explained by the breakdown of chlorophyll alone. The bright red and yellow colors we see are also a product of de novo pigment synthesis. Leaf color change is therefore an active process, not just a byproduct of death!

But why would a tree go to the trouble of changing the color of its leaves? Two competing but not entirely incompatible hypotheses have recently been proposed, both of which suggest leaf color change is an adaptation, not just a spandrel of sorts. The first actually dates back to the 19th century, but it has only recently been revived.  It holds that changes in pigmentation act as a kind of sunscreen, protecting leaves against light and low temperatures. What’s the point of screening a leaf that’s about to fall off and die? The tree is not just protecting its autumnal leaves because they continue to engage in some low-level photosynthetic activity, but mostly because functional leaves enable a better reabsorption of nutrients.

But it’s the second hypothesis that really changed the way I look at autumnal trees. To my knowledge, it was first proposed by Marco Archetti, an evolutionary geneticist and theoretical biologists at Oxford. Archetti argues that changes in leaf coloration may be a tree’s way of talking to insects.

At the end of the summer, a number of insects, including aphids, migrate to trees where they lay their eggs. This is bad news for the tree, because when the next generation of insects hatches, they can cause considerable damage to their host. Of course, the tree has ways of defending itself against parasites. Among other things, it can produce Jasmonic Acid to ward off a pest. However, defending themselves against parasites is metabolically costly for trees. Hence, vigorous, healthy, plants can devote more of their resources to fighting parasites than sick ones do.

Red leaves are also costly to produce, since metabolic resources have to be diverted for pigment synthesis. Hence, leaf color change serves as a signal of a tree’s health. The redder the leaves, the healthier the tree. And, by extension, the better it will be able to ward off insect parasites. Over time, we would therefore expect that insects evolved a preference for trees that don’t have red leaves.  Leaf color and insect preference, the hypothesis states, have coevolved over time. Differently put: autumnal changes in leaf coloration act as an honest signal of a tree’s health, and insects have evolved the ability to interpret this signal correctly.

(Economists make similar arguments about education, advertising, money-back-guarantees, and a host of other practices in which we humans engage.  The idea is always the same: because they are expensive to produce, they serve as an honest signal of product quality.)

If Archetti’s hypothesis is correct, what we are seeing when we walk through an autumnal forest is a none too cordial conversation between trees and their insect parasites.