[Ada Lovelace Day 2011] Caroline Herschel

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Today is Ada Lovelace Day – a day when bloggers around the world aim to raise awareness of women in science, technology and mathematics. One day, I would really like to be able to interview and profile my mother for this (she was a research chemist before circumstances forced her to change career) but so far I have not managed to make her comfortable with the idea of being written about. My subject this year, therefore, is Caroline Herschel.
In astronomy, the name Herschel is commonly associated with Sir Friedrich Wilhelm (or William), a German-born astronomer who lived and worked in Britain for much of his life. William made his own telescopes which are described by experts as very advanced, as well as discovering Uranus and a number of binary starts and deep sky objects. What is less well-known is that William’s younger sister, Karoline Lucretia (Caroline), was both his assistant and a successful and accomplished astronomer in her own right.
Caroline was born in 1750 in Hannover. After her growth was stunted as a result of a bout of typhus at the age of ten, Caroline’s family gave up hopes of marriage for her. She was expected to remain at home as a house servant. Upon the death of their father, however, Caroline was able to follow her brother William to England in 1772. At their house at 19, New King Street in Bath (now a museum to the Herschels), Caroline began helping her brother in cataloging his discoveries and also proved skillful at setting up and maintaining telescopes.
Tutored by her brother, she began to understand astronomy and make her own observations from about 1782. She made a number of independent discoveries, including eight comets (with unquestioned priority of discovery on five of them), 14 nebulae, and M110 (NGC 205), the second companion of the Andromeda galaxy. She also confirmed a number of her brother’s discoveries. In 1787, Caroline became the first woman to be granted a salary (of £50 annually, by George III) for scientific work.
Caroline’s work on documenting astronomical discoveries, both by simplifying, re-organising and extending existing catalogues and by compiling her own catalogue of nebulae, was a significant contribution to astronomy in its own right. After her brother’s death in 1822, she returned to Germany where she continued this work.
In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded Caroline its Gold Medal – no other woman would receive this until Vera Rubin in 1996. In 1835, she was elected an honourary member of the Royal Astronomical Society along with Mary Somerville. Unsurprisingly, Mary and Caroline were the first female honourary members of the Society. In 1846, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia.
Comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet which Caroline discovered is named after her. So is the asteroid 281 Lucretia and the C. Herschel crater on the Moon.
Caroline died peacefully in January 1848, aged 97. She left a legacy as an extraordinary woman and a pioneer astronomer.

Heresy

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Steve Jobs has died.
Many people have claimed that he changed the world, and many people have given accounts of his achievements. Charlie Stross points out that Jobs championed a number of ideas which ultimately made computing accessible to the masses – from graphical user interfaces, to smartphones and multi-touch interfaces. His passion for beautiful, flawless design made computing attractive too. For that, he deserves thanks.
There was, however, also a darker side to Steve Jobs’ impact on the world of computing. His flawless design led to computers becoming shiny black boxes which were not to be opened or played with. His drive for control – over hardware, software and content – led to users losing control of their own devices.
We live in a world where most of us haven’t got the faintest idea how the gadgets we rely on so heavily work, and where said gadgets are explicitly designed to discourage us from finding out. Apple’s approach to design also poses significant sustainability issues: if your gadget breaks, you cannot repair it. Apple may be able to, but often this comes with a price tag so large that you might as well buy the newer, shinier model instead. There is always a newer, shinier model.
When it comes to content, Apple’s control is absolute. There is a reason your iPod won’t talk to your computer without the intermediary of iTunes, and it’s that Apple likes to keep tabs on the content you consume. They also decide who can and can’t sell what through the App Store. What is perhaps worst is that Apple has conditioned an entire generation of users to believe that this is perfectly acceptable, even normal.
In his Commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs said that death was the “single best invention of life”.

It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But some day not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

We have an opportunity now. Jobs’ legacy was to make computing attractive and accessible to anyone and everyone, regardless of their level of technical ability; but he also made many of us slaves to our technology, users who are not in control and do not understand what the technology does or how. Our opportunity is to build upon the good bits of Steve Jobs’ legacy – the universality and accessibility of computing – while rejecting the dogma and casting off the mindset of the shiny, closed, black box.
In honour of Steve Jobs, here’s what I think we should do. Go find an old computer – you almost certainly have one lying around, or can get one from a friend. Find that old computer and open it up. Find out what’s inside. Take it apart. Put it back together. Install Ubuntu or Debian, or any other flavour of a free, open operating system you like. Learn to use it. Uninstall iTunes. Install Rockbox on your iPod instead. Go read up about cookies and how they can be used to invade your privacy. Learn how to control what information you pass on to whom. Learn to control your devices.
Goodbye Steve, and thank you. Now it is time for us to move on.

[Elsewhere] Digital rights matter – to us all

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(I am starting a new category on this blog under the [Elsewhere] label. This is intended to collect all my writings published elsewhere on the web.)
I recently gave a talk at Skeptics in the Pub on digital rights. While the audience were lively, engaged, well-informed and provided lots of food for thought in the post-talk discussion, it didn’t escape my attention that only about 10% were female. Read more over at ORGZine.

[Elsewhere] What is a family-friendly government?

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In January 2010, before he came to power, David Cameron expressed an ambition for his government “to be the most family friendly government we’ve ever had in this country”. Since Cameron became Prime Minister, we have seen the scrapping of child benefit for higher rate tax payers, a number of changes in benefits and taxation and the scrapping of plans to extend further the right to request flexible working arrangements, among other measures which significantly disadvantage families.
Over on the F-Word, you can read my vision of what a family-friendly government really looks like.

The #cpc11 drinking game

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In between Star Trek and episodes of True Blood I have been entertaining myself today with coverage of the Conservative Party Conference (or #cpc11 for the Twitterati). I have decided that this can only be survived with the aid of a drinking game, so I’m proposing a first draft below.

  • The mess that Labour left us/Labour’s legacy – take a drink.
  • The nation’s credit card/Living beyond our means – take a drink.
  • Deficit – take a drink.
  • We’re all in this together – take a drink.
  • Quoting Ed Miliband or other senior Labour figures – take a drink.
  • Hard-working families – take a drink.
  • Referring to one’s own or another speaker’s weight – take a drink.
  • Government minister mistakes conference speech for stand-up act – take a drink.
  • First Past the Post is the best thing since sliced bread – take a drink.
  • Putting price tags on intangible benefits of things like the environment because audience wouldn’t get it otherwise – take a drink.
  • Let’s have the Scottish independence referendum right now – take a drink.
  • Values or Conservative Values – take a drink.
  • Tax cuts (except corporation tax) – take a drink.
  • We’re not imploding in Scotland! – take a drink.
  • Government minister sounding like 12-year-old behind the bike sheds (except Michael “I am a banana” Gove) – take a drink.
  • Speaker congratulates government on success in Libya… and conveniently does not mention Syria, Bahrain, or Yemen – take a drink.
  • Let’s have a positive campaign – take a drink.
  • Scottish independence eats babies – take two drinks.
  • Enterprise/Business/Entrepreneurship – take two drinks.
  • Choice (except on abortion) – take two drinks.
  • Corporation tax cuts – take two drinks.
  • Cap on immigration – take two drinks.
  • Michael Gove sounding like a 12-year-old behind the bike sheds – take two drinks.
  • Big Society – take two drinks.
  • I am a volunteer who doesn’t have a minimum wage – take three drinks.
  • Modern Conservatism – take three drinks.
  • We told you so about the Euro – take three drinks.
  • Greece – down the bottle.

Anyone else want to add to it?

Unwanted

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I first realised I wasn’t wanted around the age of 9. It was having to get up at 4am to be in a monstrous queue outside an embassy by 5am in the hope of getting a visa for some foreign Western European country that did it. It sticks in your mind when you have to spend most of your summer doing this, aged 9.
The next clue I got aged 10, in Austria, when I had to stay in on the anniversary of Reichskristallnacht for fear of skinheads.
Aged 12, my class mates were talking about all the foreigners and refugees from the wars which heralded the demise of Yugoslavia, who got “free food, and free housing, and even an allowance” and got to “sit around doing nothing all day”. Our teacher pointed at me and asked, “What about Mili?” “Oh,” they said, “Mili’s not like them. Mili’s different.” It left a bitter taste.
More recently, there was Bigoted Woman. A couple of the days ago, it was Ed Balls lamenting how Labour shouldn’t have let the likes of me into this country. In some ways, two thirds of my life have been a long series of microaggressions, based on the simple fact that I was born in a different country.
What is particularly painful is watching this trend get worse, all over Europe. From the neo-fascists in my own native Bulgaria, to policing the way women from certain cultures dress in France, and the persistent barrage of immigration scare stories in the British media, Europe is lurching to the right faster than you can say “flocking Eastern Europeans”. I find it sad, frustrating, and simply unworthy of liberal, democratic Europe in the 21st century.
Maybe one day the low-level racism and xenophobia I encounter on a daily basis will drive me away from this country. Where I’ll go I don’t know. Where are human beings welcome these days?

Ed Miliband’s new clothes – or a pox on all their houses

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Ed Miliband stood up yesterday and said that if Labour were in government right now they would “cut” tuition fees to £6,000 a year. What struck me about this is that no one batted an eyelid – the conversation simply degenerated into tribal mud slinging without even the briefest of pauses to examine the extraordinary claims the Leader of the Opposition was making.
Here’s what gets me about Miliband’s proposal: He is “cutting” tuition fees from a current £3,290 per year to £6,000 per year – and we are to feel grateful for that. Yes, you read that right. It is true that from 2012 onwards tuition fees will be, for most intents and purposes, £9,000 a year – but right now they’re not. Right now Ed Miliband is saying if Labour were in government they would “cut” tuition fees from three grand to six grand. I’m sorry, what?
The second thing that got me was the reaction from Liberal Democrat circles on Twitter to Miliband’s announcement. @markwhiley opined, “I think Labour owe all those Lib Dem members they convinced to sign up on the back of fee increases BECAUSE of them and the Tories, a refund”. There was something almost smug about @aligoldsworthy‘s “What #lab11 are showing this morning is that there isn’t an easy solution to HE funding in current climate. We Lib Dems know that pain.” And @AAEmmerson tweeted at party president Tim Farron, “have you looked at Eds tuition fee proposals? Why arent we out briefing it’s a tax cut for the rich?” (To Tim’s credit, he responded that he didn’t brief but stood behind anything he said.)
“[W]e are only pointing out labour’s opportunism and hypocrisy over fees”, quoth @WoollyMindedLib, before explaining that it was still Lib Dem policy to scrap tuition fees while Labour policy would be to double them.
What none of these vocal Lib Dems on Twitter seemed to understand is that, had their party not broken their election pledge and enabled the trebling of tuition fees, we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – be having this absurd conversation right now. It was the Lib Dems’ support of the coalition government’s policy to treble fees which has ensured that scrapping them is now permanently off the table, and that Labour can come along with a proposal of fees of “only” £6,000 and seem like a saviour.
Right now, the only people I trust on tuition fees are Tories promising full deregulation and privatisation, and the SNP. Everyone else is probably lying.

Two million people to be hit by a chunk of satellite today

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If you’ve ever watched any of Brian Cox’s TV programmes in a room full of physicists[1], you may have realised that communicating science to the general public is somewhat challenging. Cox’s enthusiasm for “amazing” things is… well, amazing, but his metaphors can be rather clunky and a common criticism from physicists is that he tends to misrepresent or oversimplify areas he is not an expert in. On the other extreme of course, scientific papers are rarely written with the general public in mind and trying to read one may put you to sleep, explode your brain and/or leave you none the wiser after three hours of trying to understand a single page[1].
Two examples of science coverage struck me this morning which illustrate some of the pitfalls nicely. Let’s start with the bad one.
On the Today Programme this morning, we were repeatedly told that there was a one in 3000 chance of being hit by a chunk of satellite today. Why, wondered I, weren’t we being advised to take shelter in bunkers, not to leave the house, and to take other sensible precautions, given that two million of us would be hit by space junk today? Why wasn’t there mass panic? If one in 3000 people were going to be victims of orbital debris, and there are somewhere between six and seven billion people on the planet, after all, about two million of us were going to make the acquaintance of a piece of NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).
You may think I’m being pedantic here, but I found the way the report was phrased extremely misleading. It felt like, in an effort to reassure the public, someone had picked a big number out of thin air and was throwing it at us in an attempt to stun us before the space junk hit. Looking at coverage of the UARS story across the BBC, it’s extremely patchy:

  • The headline for this video from BBS Breakfast quotes “1 in 20 trillion”, though the 1 in 3200 figure is in the text. To make matters worse, Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society (the talking head in the clip) makes an on-the-fly conversion between these two expressions of probability without showing his working. You could be forgiven for being confused.
  • Kevin Yates of the National Space Centre in Leicester does a slightly better talking head job on the Today Programme, converting the 1 in 3200 figure into a 99.7% chance that we won’t be hit.

Ultimately, though, the question remain: 1 in 3200 what?
To be fair to the BBC, a lot of the fault for this farce lies with the original NASA risk assessment. Overall, it’s quite a good document. It gives us the history of the satellite, tells us it’s been defunct since 2005, explains how risk is assessed and communicated. However, on slide 8, we find the following statement: “Estimated human casualty risk (updated to 2011): ~ 1 in 3200”.
Now, what I think this means is the every one in 3200 re-entry events (of this particular type?) is expected to cause human casualties. Context is everything, and context is very much what is missing here.
The second story that caught my attention this morning was the one about the faster-than-light neutrinos. This too I had heard on Today, and I only looked it up on the Guardian because someone posted the “If we do not have causality, we are buggered” quote on Twitter. I was, however, extremely pleasantly surprised by the Guardian’s coverage of this story. They gave me numbers, and those numbers made sense! Even better, they gave me error bars! And they explained the statistical level of confidence! They even linked to the original paper! Still, the story is very readable and understandable to someone with basic numeracy skills. The “buggered” quote does help too, and what I particularly like about this story – and the scientists’ approach to it – is that it gives a very good insight into the uncertainties of scientific research.
Moral of the story: You don’t need to stay indoors today in fear of space junk, but when someone’s presenting you with dodgy science coverage, do call them out on it.

[1] What do you mean this is not how normal people spend their free time?

Making good things happen – the crowdsourcing way

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I first met Morna a few months ago when I wrote an article about her for ORGZine. Little did I know then that a short while later I would be giving up practically every weekend over the course of a month, staying at a hostel in Dundee (What do you mean, bunk beds?), and adding the rather fancy title of “Marketing and Media Consultant” to my LinkedIn profile. That last one raised a few eyebrows at my usual place of work. But such is the persuasive power of Morna – she makes things happen.
I may, perhaps, have thought it slightly insane to attempt to start up a business – even a Web 2.0 business – over the course of three weekends with a bunch of strangers one had found on Twitter. Then again, I appear to be physically incapable of saying no to a shiny project, so I thought “What the heck, it’ll be fun!”
FlockEdu is nothing if not shiny. It’s an educational network, aiming to make education for adults accessible and affordable. For a generation for whom a university degree will cost as much as an average house in some parts of the country, FlockEdu may be a game-changer. As someone who is passionate about education I just had to get involved, bunk beds or not!
As it was, even though the small number of shares in the business I got in return for my efforts are highly unlikely to enable me to give up the day job any time soon, I feel I got at least as much out of participating in the FlockEdu “Sweatshops” as I put into it. I got to meet in person some great people I’d only known from Twitter; I made lots of awesome new friends and potential future business contacts; and I learned a huge amount about technology, media, marketing and running a business over the three weekends.
If you want to know more about crowdsourcing a start-up from the person who invented it, Morna is appearing at a couple of events at Social Media Week in Glasgow next week. And if you have a passion for teaching, learning or both, sign up for a beta invite over on FlockEdu. I think it’s got the potential to change the world.