Skip to main content

The Crowd and the Cosmos - Chris Lintott ****

We tend to have a very old fashioned idea of what astronomers do - peering through telescopes on dark nights. In reality, not only do many of them not use optical telescopes, but almost all observations are now performed electronically. Chris Lintott does a great job of bringing alive the realities of modern astronomy, and the way that the flood of data that is produced by all these electronic devices is being in part addressed by 'citizen scientists' - volunteer individuals who check image after image for interesting features.

Inevitably, all this cataloguing and categorising brings to mind Ernest Rutherford's infamous quotation along the lines of 'all science is either physics or stamp collecting.' This occurred to me even before Chris Lintott brought it up. Lintott defends the process against the Rutherford attack by pointing out that it can be a useful starting point for real, new research. To be fair to Rutherford, I think this misses the great man's point, which was not that the activity has no worth, but that it's a touch boring. For me, although this book is really valuable for the insights it gives, this was the one real problem - quite a lot of what was going on verged on the tedious.

It's certainly not true of all the book. Interestingly, although I'm far more interested in astronomy than wildlife, the parts where the writing really came alive tended to be on applications of this kind of crowdsourced data processing to natural history. In an example on penguin surveys, the reason for the lift in interest was that Lintott gave us an entertaining (and self-deprecating) description of his own spare-time involvement in replacing cameras for such a survey. In another example, involving cameras spotting African wildlife, what was particularly interesting was the discovery that the volunteers didn't like it if software was used to pre-select images that had animals in - they seemed to prefer the animals to be a surprise, rather than a constant presence.

There were some interesting accounts of astronomy-based citizen science (working with the misleadingly titled 'Zooniverse' software - I assumed from the 'zoo' part it was to do with living things), particularly where a discovery was made pretty much live on a TV show from Jodrell Bank, but it was in the astronomical sections that things did get a bit bogged down, perhaps because Lintott was inclined to go into too much detail. Incidentally, his repeated explanations of astronomical terminology does emphasise that maybe it's time astronomers got their act together and used proper scientific terms.

The book finishes with some interesting speculation on how things will develop as computer image recognition gets better. So far, humans are far better at spotting exceptions - the question is whether we will get to the point where machines have been trained with sufficient exceptions to be likely not to miss things in the long tail of the distribution. Perhaps citizen science is doomed long term - but it remains an interesting venture and opportunity for outreach for the moment.

I wish I had found the content more interesting, but there can be no doubt that the book is an excellent introduction to ways of handling large quantities of visual data.
Hardback:    

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more