| Thanks to high-tech, storm track easier to predict By SETH BORENSTEIN 2010-09-02T01:12:19ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- Sophisticated computer models that replaced instinct with cold, hard math have helped forecasters predict where a storm like Hurricane Earl is going about twice as accurately as 20 years ago.... hosted.ap.org |
Steve Jobs was a bit mean to you? Tough! | Martin Robbins Trainee journalists should learn that getting information out of people is not easyAs a freelance journalist, much of your spare time is spent trying to get information from people who at best couldn't give a crap about your article, and at worst are actively hostile to the idea of some grubby writer getting his or her hands on their precious secrets. That a journalism student has had a similar response from Apple is not exactly unusual.Take for example this recent response from the Department of Health to a Freedom of Information request I filed, scripted presumably by the writers of 'Yes Minister':"The Department neither confirms nor denies that it holds information falling within the description specified in your request. [...] This should not be taken as an indication that the information you requested is or is not held by the Department. [...] To be clear, the Department is not neither confirming nor denying whether the Secretary of State met with The Prince of Wales, as it is in the public domain that His Royal Highness met with the Secretary of State on 29 October 2009. The Department is neither confirming nor denying whether it holds any information within the specific terms of your request - i.e. information relating to discussions that may or may not have taken place..."*snip*"I hope that this reply is helpful."Wibble?!Or take this exchange between myself and the British Homeopathic Association. My relationship with them deteriorated to the point where they wrote a press release about me (you can find my response to that here). Even before that, my relationship with their spokesperson Cristal Sumner could best be described as frosty. While the Department of Health were unhelpful in a stylish and entertaining sort of way, the BHA were just plain uncooperative, as you can see in the following exchange. Referring to a comment Cristal had made about homeopathic remedies struggling in clinical trials because they needed to be "individualised" to specific patients, I asked her: "does this not apply to the mass-produced remedies made by companies like Nelson's, and sold off-the-shelf to millions of customers at Boots? These clearly aren't holistic or individualised treatments, since patients won't receive a personal consultation or assessment." In other words, if homeopathic remedies need to be individualised, surely the mass produced ones are inferior? The reply was a curt:"The BHA supports a person's legal right to buy and use homeopathic medicines."And those are mild examples. I get abuse from people on a weekly basis, like the following:"You are so dimwitted that you cannot see the wood for the trees, you will still be kissing the shoes of your muslim overlord's when they decapitate you, that is how stupid and dangerous you really are. Don't e-mail me again, i have no interest in having a drink with putrescence like you, if you do i will just delete it."The point being that if you're going to start out in journalism, you'd better develop a thick skin, because there's no rule that says people have to be nice, or helpful, or not threaten you with eternal damnation. For that reason you have to be polite, persistent, diplomatic, and willing to probe a story from many different angles. What doesn't help is: Sending out a seven-paragraph e-mail to a busy person – all e-mails longer than three paragraphs deserve to be ignored on principle.Filling your e-mail essay with snark directed at someone you need help from, and who probably didn't even know you existed until the contents of your spleen spontaneously appeared in their inbox.Sending the spleen contents to the head of Apple with some gushing comments about Apple products, but then adding the footnote "Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile" Implying to a squillion-dollar multinational company that they ought to help you because their quote is "crucial to my grade in the class, and it may potentially get published in our university's newspaper." Your grades are about as important to me as the colour of the fluff I just pulled out of my armpit (navy blue - it's always navy blue for reasons I can't explain, if anyone knows why please leave a comment). Putting yourself in a position where your article relies on a quote from Apple to be publishable in the first place. If you're relying on a quote from a PR guy for the substance of your piece, it's probably not a very good piece. I mean what are you going to do, just rewrite the press release and pass it off as an article? You won't get anywhere in the newspaper industry doing ... oh.Anyway, hopefully the budding young journalist has learned a lesson or two from her encounter with the patron saint of small devices you didn't realise you needed until you saw your friend's and ... OOOOOOOHHHHHH *kerching* At the very least they've learned the lesson that not getting a quote can be a story too. Which I suppose is as good a lesson as any for a journalist to learn.Martin Robbinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Quarks, gluons and jets | Jon Butterworth The LHC paper I've been working on for the past few months is finally out. It shows quarks and gluons doing what they should do, and I love itIn July we (ATLAS) released a preliminary version of our first jet cross section measurement, and showed it at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris. Today we submitted the final version of this measurement to the European Physical Journal and to the archive."Cross section" in this context is basically a probability. If you fire two footballs at each other, they have a bigger cross-sectional area than two snooker balls, so they are more likely to hit each other. A "jet cross section" is a measure of how likely we are to see jets when we fire two protons at each other.Jets are what quarks and gluons do when they try to escape. The proton is made up of quarks stuck together by gluons. Most of the fundamental forces get weaker with distance - the Earth's gravitational pull gets weaker the further out into space you go, for example. But the strong nuclear force is the other way round.The force between two quarks actually gets stronger as you pull them apart, more like an elastic band. When two quarks in LHC protons bounce off each other they head away really quickly, feeling almost no force at first (physics buzzwords: asymptotic freedom. See this Nobel Prize citation). But at some point that has to end, because as they get further and further from the protons they were knocked out of, the force pulling them back gets stronger and stronger.You can think of the quarks as being the ends of the elastic band. They fly away from each other until at some point the band snaps and two new ends (new quarks) are produced. Eventually, we see a spray of hadrons (particles, like the proton, which contain quarks and generate amusing typos). Because the initial quarks get kicked so hard, this spray is collimated into a jet, and despite all the splitting and production of new quarks, the direction of the jet reflects pretty well the initial direction of the quark.ResultSo, what you see in the plot below reflects the distribution of quarks and gluons scattered in collisions at the LHC.When we collide protons, we really care most about the collisions between the proton's constituents - quarks or gluons. Unfortunately the quarks and gluons only carry a fraction of the energy of the proton, and we have no way of choosing how much. If the fraction was a half, for example, then we would have jets with 1750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) of energy (half of 3.5 TeV). But most of the quarks and gluons carry much smaller fractions.To have a real measurement of this, and show that the theory prediction (quantum chromodynamics, labelled QCD on the plot) agrees with the data, is a real achievement. It directly involved dozens of people, and less directly hundreds. One key component is the energy calibration which I described here.This result, like the minimum bias results, is part of finding our feet in the new energy regime of the LHC - but these collisions are much closer to where we want to be. And we already have about 300 times more data to play with than is shown here, with more flooding in. We are already using these data to look for new forces and particles (see here and here).PSWhen we put the preliminary results out, I wrote an earlier version of this article. Unlike the data, it changed quite a bit in between! In a good way.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
UK scientists develop urine test to detect prostate cancer risk Breakthrough could mean more accurate predictions of disease, which affects around 35,000 men in Britain each yearBritish scientists may have paved the way for a simple and reliable test to discover which men are at high risk of developing prostate cancer, it has emerged.The breakthrough could mean more accurate predictions of the disease which affects around 35,000 men in Britain each year, leading to 10,000 deaths.A urine test to detect levels of the protein MSMB could replace current blood testing for the disease after research showed the protein is present at reduced levels in men diagnosed with the disease.Levels also appear to be affected by tumour aggressiveness.Currently doctors rely on blood tests for prostate specific antigen (PSA) to assess the risk and progress of the disease.MSMB level is affected by a genetic change linked to prostate cancer.The research, published in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE, shows that the urine test has proven to be twice as precise as the current method.Study leader Dr Hayley Whitaker, from Cancer Research UK charity's Cambridge Research Institute, said: "We looked in tissue and urine from over 350 men with and without prostate cancer to find out how much MSMB they had."We then looked to see who had the genetic change. It was really exciting to find out that the genetic change and the amount of protein were linked."The protein is easy to detect because it is found in urine and would potentially be a very simple test to carry out on men to identify those most at risk of developing the disease."Dr Kate Holmes, research manager at The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: "These preliminary results show that MSMB, a protein produced by the prostate gland, is found at significantly lower levels in the urine of men diagnosed with prostate cancer than those without the disease. The study also found that men with an aggressive tumour were also likely to have lower levels of the protein in their urine."The study suggests that measuring levels of this protein could potentially be a powerful way to predict how likely a man is to develop prostate cancer."However, further research on a much larger scale is needed to determine how effective the detection of MSMB in the urine is for predicting the risk of, and potentially even diagnosing, prostate cancer."The research could led to urine testing kits, less expensive than the blood testing, at GP surgeries, with results available within hours. A trial on 1,200 men is currently underway and is expected the be completed by Christmas.Further larger-scale trials will also have to be carried out. Men found to have low levels of MSMB could then be closely monitored with the aim of detecting the disease, should it develop, as early as possible.Prostate cancerCancerMedical researchCancerHealthCaroline Daviesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Farmers Find Organic Arsenal to Wage War on Pests While conventional farmers have a quiver full of chemical arrows to battle the invasion of weeds and pests, the organic farmer has a tougher row to hoe. feeds.nytimes.com |