| Report: Climate science panel needs change at top By SETH BORENSTEIN 2010-08-30T21:37:46ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists reviewing the acclaimed but beleaguered international climate change panel called Monday for a major overhaul in the way it's run, but stopped short of calling for the ouster of the current leader.... hosted.ap.org |
Santa Claus and The Grid | Lily Asquith Lily Asquith: The world wide web was famously invented at Cern to help international collaborators share information. The Grid is there to help them share computing power, tooI have recently been "submitting to The Grid". This is not some kind of freaky S&M thing, disappointingly perhaps to some. It is a process we have to go through in order to analyse the data being collected by the Atlas detector at Cern.The Atlas experiment has approximately a zillion (2,000) people working on it. (My new town declares itself to have 11,000 people but I have not noticed any update to this since we moved here.)It is burbling out data in vast quantities. We can't catch it all because we would then have to store it somewhere, and it is currently producing terabytes of data per second*. Mental. So we just catch and store some of it. About 100 megabytes per second.Every single physicist working on Atlas wants to get their hands on that data. But making copies of 26 terabytes of data every day would be ridiculous. Especially as most of it is junk to most people.That's why we have The Grid. The burbling mass of mainly-junk-data is collected and stored and copied to just a few locations around the world. We don't copy anything to our laptops, instead we write a bit of analysis code, something like "Please give me all the events that look like a giant web made by a spider that has been given caffeine pills. And it has to have at least one mummified ant in it, and it has to have a diameter of 6.5-7.5 cm."Then we send this request to The Grid. A bit like sending a letter to Santa (you have no idea where it is going and you can be fairly sure you won't hear anything back). However, being a good girl does not help. Phew.I feel reluctant to be publicly rude about The Grid, but am happy to hurl all sorts of abuse at It in the privacy of my own office. Or on the bench on my porch, which is where I am writing this because I don't have a chair yet. Or a kettle. These things are way down the "to do" list, which became a bit crumpled and forgotten once I achieved the first four points: school, house, inflatable mattress, wi-fi.We have to use The Grid because (a) most people have no other option and (b) it will never work if we don't use it and report problems.So when my next job fails with a beautifully opaque error code (most recent one: "Lost heartbeat") I take comfort in knowing that thousands of physicists around the world are sending letters to Santa and sitting there with a cup of tea (or a crate of Guinness, or a sack of Haribo) just waiting for their letter to come back with a sticker on it saying "Nope" and humbly hoping that it won't be too long. And just maybe one day they will get a postcard from the north pole.*At some point in the future the LHC will undertake a large increase in luminosity. This means that the bunches of protons it will be colliding will have more protons in them, so there will be lots more collisions between the protons and lots more data. The amount of data produced at peak luminosity will be about 1 petabyte per second. That is 1,000 terabytes.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
When it comes to race, the move-on brigade can't dismiss the problems | Aditya Chakrabortty The new trend to 'move on' from the problems of the past and dismiss them as old hat will not wash when it comes to race relationsOne of the most-thumbed pages in the Almanac of Political Strategy (hardback edition soon to be ditched for a collaboratively edited creative commons Wiki, natch) must be the entry on how a young tyro can beat opponents simply by labelling them as – horrors! – old hat.A tricky manoeuvre, it demands Mandelsonian deftness rather than Stalinist force. Bowing his head and affecting a tone of sincere regret, the assassin acknowledges that the rival's arguments were useful – nay, essential – in the past, but times have changed, haven't they? And bam: you've floored 'em.It's the tactic used by Ed Miliband this week with his call for a "new generation, not New Labour". Before him came David Cameron, Barack Obama, Tony Blair and every other insurgent in an off-the-peg suit.Call it the move-on move, and it works across a whole range of arguments. One issue where it's been deployed to devastating effect is on race. The argument runs thus: since the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, and the Macpherson report that followed in 1999 accusing the police of "institutional racism", race relations in this country have turned around. Sure, there were massive problems of discrimination and unequal opportunities and racial violence before. But now, say the move-on brigade, now the authorities have got their act together.Now, ministers tell us, it's the mythical lost tribe of the white working class that requires urgent attention (as opposed to the plain old working class, which would obviously be far too retrograde a term). Now, TV execs say, it's right to give Nick Griffin equal billing with frontbenchers from other parties and allow him an hour on the consecrated ground of Question Time. Enoch Powell may have been drummed out of mainstream politics for warning of rivers of blood, but hey, times have changed.And now we get a special issue of the usually thoughtful Prospect magazine to lay out what is apparently the state-of-the-art thinking on race. Put together by Munira Mirza, who is Boris Johnson's adviser on arts policy and therefore ranks as one of the most powerful ethnic-minority officials in the country (not that competition is stiff), it makes one point over and over: like smallpox or polio, racism has been all but eradicated."Old prejudices have faded," declares Mirza. "Race is no longer the significant disadvantage it is often portrayed to be." Which means that "1980s anti-racism", as the magazine refers to it, is presumably as outdated as "1980s earmuffs" or "1980s singles by Five Star", and with less chance of a revival.Two things stand out in these pieces. The first is how fact-free they are, with Mirza and her co-authors offering up scarcely a statistic between them. Instead, we get arguments that begin in the anecdotal or purely personal: "as a black man", or "as a black woman", or "as someone born in Oldham". Well, as "someone who missed his bus this morning", my views on public transport still aren't worth much without some evidence.The other detail that strikes you is how narrowly Mirza and her team define racism. For them it is simply the most humiliating and vicious forms of discrimination – paki-bashing or landlords' notices stating "No Irish, no dogs".That these former everyday horrors are no longer everyday is something to be celebrated; although anyone who wants to argue that they have entirely disappeared might try to run that by the relatives of the 89 people killed because of their race since Lawrence was murdered. They might also remember that the government's own figures show that black people are over seven times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than whites. And they suffer harsher treatment at every stage of the criminal justice system, even when it comes to how long they are put in prison.Read enough of these pieces, or pay attention to what senior politicians from all parties tell you, and you might think that Britain now is in the middle of a national re-enactment of the Cosby Show. Colour is just an incidental feature and certainly no bar to pulling one's self up by the bootstraps. Talk such as this gives austerity-minded coalition politicians all the excuse they need to cut funding to all those old-fashioned community groups.Yet race remains a massive factor in determining our opportunities and life chances. Two in three British Bangladeshi children grow up in poverty in the UK (compared with two in 10 of their white counterparts). Even those at the top of the career ladder, who have been dealt all the right cards and played them correctly, are still subject to what Bristol academic Tariq Modood calls an "ethnic penalty". What does that mean? The typical Chinese-origin man now earns about 11% more than his white British counterpart; but he is still paid 11% less than would be implied by his qualifications. Since time immemorial, ethnic-minority children have been told they need to work twice, three times as hard as their white friends: that rule hasn't expired yet.Britain now isn't the same place as it was when the Windrush docked, and the nature of race relations in this country have got more subtle. But racism can still be as simple as being pulled over by a policeman for having the wrong colour of skin. No amount of sophistry can mask that. Some problems can't be wished away by calling them old hat. And you can't move on if others are blocking the way.Race issuesPsychologyAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
US, China blame each other for slow climate talks By TINI TRAN 2010-10-09T12:47:02ZTIANJIN, China (AP) -- Modest progress at U.N. climate talks Saturday was overshadowed by a continuing deadlock between China and the United States, clouding prospects for a major climate conference in Mexico in less than two months' time.... hosted.ap.org |
Green: Governor Bans New Gas Wells on State Land Governor Rendell sends a message about what he describes as a rush by drilling companies to exploit public lands. feeds.nytimes.com |