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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
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

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more