Category Archives: Soapbox

Chemical Imbalance

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chemicalimbalance

Cover of the book to go with the film

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about population and its rapid rise (see ‘Population Control’ on September 25th, 2013).  Despite our burgeoning population many university engineering schools in the English-speaking world tend to recruit from only half the population, i.e. the male population.  Representation of females in engineering is woefully low, generally worse than in science.  To learn more how women feel about the situation in chemistry watch a short film called ‘A Chemical Imbalance’  – I highly recommend that you spare the 15 minutes to watch it at  http://chemicalimbalance.co.uk/

Go on do it now! The rest of this posting is boring stuff so watch the film which was made with support from the Royal Society.

In the film ‘the leaky pipeline’ is talked about in the context of women entering science and engineering not making it to the top.  Of course this is not unique to science and engineering; only about 20 of the Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO.  This is an important issue but the supply to the pipeline is a bigger problem.  Only 20% of the students awarded an A-level in Physics in the UK this year (equivalent to AP exams in the US) were female and since most university engineering programmes require Physics the supply of qualified women is almost decimated before it gets to the pipeline.  This year my school has taken the step of dropping the physics requirement and accepting that we will need to teach the necessary physics as part of our engineering courses; incidently we also raised the grades we require so this does not represent a lowering of standards!

Another sobering thought is that nearly half of co-education state schools in the UK had no females studying for A-level physics.  I don’t have statistics for the US but I suspect they would be the same.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political scientist at Princeton argues that ‘the way we view women [has] changed radically, [but] the way we view men not at all’ so that achieving further gender equality requires a cultural change about and by men, which is going to be tough in a male-dominated conservative profession like engineering but we have to do it.  So if you didn’t watch the film, do it now and think about how you can be an agent for change.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19603399

Eduardo Porter’s column ‘Economic Scene’ entitled ‘Is leaning in enough to fix the gender gap? in the New York Times on September 24th, 2013 see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/business/economy/for-american-women-is-it-enough-to-lean-in.html?ref=eduardoporter&_r=0

Population Control

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The jury is out on whether the global population will reach 10 billion though there seems little doubt that our planet cannot sustain the current population, never mind 10 billion, with a Western life style.  Maybe some of you saw Stephen Emmott’s show ‘Ten Billion’ at London’s Royal Court Theatre last year; I didn’t but you can read his book of the same title.  As you will probably have guessed from the title, he thinks we are headed for a global population of 10 billion and that radical social and political action is needed because science and technology cannot avoid the impended disaster.  Erle C. Ellis does not believe that overpopulation is problem because he subscribes to Ester Boserup’s theory that population growth drives land productivity.  He suggested in the New York Times last week (13th September 2013) that we have transformed ecosystems to sustain ourselves in the past and will continue do so.

This idea could be extended to suggest that the human society or population is self-controlling that has parallels with the Gaia principle that the planet is self-regulating system in which organisms co-evolve with their environment.  The UN low-fertility model offers some evidence of self-regulation of the human population being to operate because it predicts the global population reaching a maximum of 8.34bn in 2050 and declining to 6.75bn by 2100.  At those levels engineering solutions could probably manage the rest and avert disaster.  Danny Dorling in his book ‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ provides further evidence by pointing out that the global average family size has never been so small with the norm being less than one child per woman for more than half the planet and immigration to wealthier countries leading to further declines in birth rates.  If the UN low fertility model is right then perhaps we will be able to avoid overpopulation but  scientists and engineers will still need to redouble their efforts to provide sustainable goods and services.  Progress is being made but mainly through incremental improvements that many of us take for granted perhaps in part due to our ignorance of science and engineering or at least of the advances in living standards that it are being delivered to billions of people who previously did not access to the internet, mobile phones and medicines.

Sources:

‘Overpopulation is not problem’ by Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times on September 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0)

‘Crowded Planet’ by Clive Cookson in the Financial Times on July 13/14, 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ by Danny Dorling, published by Constable http://10billion.dannydorling.org/

’10 Billion’ by Stephen Emmott published by Penguin http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141976327,00.html

‘Damn the cynics and embrace the positive’ by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson or http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson

Risky predictions

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flood

Risk is a much mis-understood word.  In a technical sense, it is the probability of something happening multiplied by the consequences when it does [see post on Risk Definition, September 20th, 2012].  Tight regulation and good engineering could reduce the probability of earthquakes induced by fracking and such earthquakes tend not to produce structural damage, i.e. low consequences, so perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that the risks are low because two small quantities multiplied together do not produce a big quantity [see last week’s post on ‘Fracking’, 28th August, 2013].

The more common definition of risk is the probability of a loss, injury or damage occurring, i.e. severity is ignored.  Probability is used to describe the frequency of occurence of an event.  A classic example is tossing a fair coin, which will come down heads 50% of the time.  This is a simple game of chance that can be played repeatedly to establish the frequency of the event.  It is impractical to use this approach to establish the probability of fracking causing an earthquake, so instead engineers and scientists must simulate the event using computer models.  One approach to simulation is to generate a set of models, each based on slightly different set of realistic conditions and assumptions, and look at what percentage of the models predict earthquakes, which can be equated to the probability of a fracking-induced earthquake.  When the set of conditions is generated randomly, this approach is known as Monte Carlo simulation.  Weather forecasters use simulations of this type to predict the probability of rain or sunshine tomorrow.

The reliability of a simulation depends on the model adequately describing the physical world.  We can test this (known as validating the model) by comparing predicted outcomes with real-world outcomes [see post on 18th September, 2012 on ‘model validation’].  The quality of the comparison can be expressed as a level of confidence usually as a percentage.  Crudely speaking, this percentage can be equated to the frequency with which the model will correctly predict an event, i.e. the probability that the model is reliable, so if we are 90% confident then we would expect the model to correctly predict an event 9 out of 10 times. In other words, there would be a 10% ‘risk’ that the model could wrong.

In practice we cannot easily calculate the probability of a fracking-induced earthquake because it is such a complex process. Validating a model of fracking is also a challenge because of the lack of real examples so that establishing confidence is difficult.  As a consequence, we tend be left weighing unquantified risks in a subjective manner, which is why there is so much debate.

If you made it this far – well done and thank you!   If you want more on weather forecasting and extending these ideas to economic forecasting see  John Kay’s article in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 entitled ‘Spotting a banking crisis is not like predicting the weather’ [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fdd0c5bc-0367-11e3-b871-00144feab7de.html#axzz2dNrTKPDy ].

Fracking

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The British Prime Minister, David Cameron has argued in an article in the Sunday Telegraph (on August 11th, 2013) that if we don’t back fracking technology then the country will miss an opportunity to help families with their bills and make the country more competitive.  In his article the Prime Minister only makes the economic case in favour of using fracking to extract shale gas.  He completely ignores the environmental costs of these economic gains, which will always be present as in any industrial process – the second law of thermodynamics tells us to expect these costs – a form of increased entropy.  The environmental costs of fracking are still disputed.  Companies and politicians with something to gain from its successful implementation argue that the costs are very low or insignificant.  However, recent research has concluded that more than 100 earthquakes were triggered in a single year in Ohio due to fracking-related activities (J. Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, doi.org/nh5).  The largest of these quakes was of magnitude 3.9 and was caused by pumping pressurised waste water into a deep well.  There are also concerns that waste water from fracking might contaminate groundwater.

A joint report of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering has concluded that the fracking process can be successfully managed without significant risks to the environment or society.  However, in France fracking has been banned.  So, the arguments flow in both directions.  As a society we are addicted to energy, and fossil fuels in particular, and hence we need sources of oil and gas.  The risks involved in extracting shale gas by fracking are probably no greater than those associated with oil or natural gas; its just that they tend to occur closer to people’s backyard, which makes people more sensitive to them.  Actually, the technology has been around and used for a long time; see John Kemp’s column at Reuters for an explanation of the process and its history.  However, if we intend to use it on a larger scale then we need to guard against unexpected consequences and be ready to deal with the mess when things go wrong.  When engineers succeed in these two goals then no one will notice but when they fail the public and many politicians will be quick to attribute blame to them, whereas it likely will be our addiction to fossil fuel that is to blame.