read | Chris Aldrich

A new fossil could push back the start of life on Earth | The Economist

Read A new fossil could push back the start of life on Earth (The Atlantic)

The putative fossils formed just a few hundred million years after Earth itself

Science remains male-dominated | The Economist

Read Women in research Science remains male-dominated (The Economist)

But a new report says females are catching up

MARCH 8th was International Women’s Day. That seemed to Elsevier, an academic publisher, a good occasion to publish a report looking at the numbers and performance of female scientists around the world. The report, “Gender in the Global Research Landscape”, analysed the authorship of more than 62m peer-reviewed papers published in 27 subject areas over the past 20 years, in 11 mostly rich countries and in the European Union as a whole. The papers and their citations are indexed in Scopus, a database that is run by Elsevier.

In the EU, and in eight of the 11 countries considered, the share of women authors grew from about 30% in the late 1990s to about 40% two decades later. Brazil and Portugal are closest to equality, each just a percentage point shy of it. In Japan, by contrast, barely a fifth of researchers are female—a fact that may reflect the particularly uncool image science has among Japanese schoolgirls.

Women are best represented in subjects related to health care. In nursing and psychology, for example, they outnumber men in several countries, including America and Britain. Less than a quarter of researchers who publish papers in the physical sciences are women. Perhaps as a consequence of this, inventors who register patents are still almost all men. In the places covered by the report the share of patent applications by women ranges from 8% of those filed in Japan to 26% in Portugal. Women are, however, making progress, even in the still-male-heavy world of engineering. Though they constitute only between 10% and 32% of authors of papers in that field in the places the report looks at, the share of those papers in which a woman is the lead author is between 35% and 52%.

All of this is qualified good news. Women do, nevertheless, still suffer from a “leaky pipeline” phenomenon that sees them drop out of scientific careers at a higher rate than men do. At Imperial College, London, regarded by many as Britain’s leading technological university, about 35% of undergraduates are women. But that percentage falls with each step up the career ladder. At the moment, only 15% of Imperial’s professors are women.

Partly, this stems from the fact that when those professors were undergraduates the sex ratio was even worse. But it also reflects the problem of career-building which women face in all areas, not just science. Even in the most progressive countries, they still shoulder the lion’s share of child care and housework. Boosting their numbers in the laboratory will take more than merely convincing girls that science is cool.

The minimum age of criminal responsibility continues to divide opinion | The Economist

Read The minimum age of criminal responsibility continues to divide opinion by The Data Team (The Economist)

A proposal to let Philippine criminal courts try nine-year-olds has drawn sharp criticism. But in 35 American states, children of any age can be convicted and sentenced

COMMON law has long held that committing a crime requires both a prohibited act and a “mens rea”, or “guilty mind”—the criminal knowing that the act was wrong. There is no global consensus regarding the youngest age at which a child can be deemed to have such intent, and thus can be tried and convicted of a criminal offence. Ten years ago the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended an “absolute minimum” age of 12 for criminal responsibility, and urged countries “to continue to increase it to a higher age level”. The Philippines appears poised to move in the opposite direction: lawmakers there have proposed reducing the cut-off from 15 years old to nine. The bill has prompted sharp criticism both at home and abroad, and legislators are still arguing over its text.

Not long ago the Philippines earned a reputation for a relatively progressive stance on this issue. It introduced its current minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) in 2006, making it one of just 19 countries whose MACR is 15 or older. However, Rodrigo Duterte, the president, has adopted a harsh “tough-on-crime” agenda. The bill’s supporters say it would stop adult criminals from recruiting children under the age of criminal responsibility for drug-trafficking. Human-rights advocates counter that there is no evidence that this would reduce crime. Instead, says Leo Ratledge of Child Rights International Network, a British charity, it would punish victims of exploitation rather than those who exploit them.

The other members of the MACR-above-14 club are an incongruous bunch. Predictably, they include places like Norway and Sweden, which take a generally liberal approach to criminal justice. However, the top of the table is occupied by less developed countries that happen to have revised their juvenile-justice laws in recent years: in Timor-Leste and Mozambique, the MACR is now 16. Although most European states sit comfortably above the UN recommendation, there are notable exceptions. Scotland can hand out criminal records to eight-year-olds, though legislation is being mooted that will raise the minimum age limit to 12. In the rest of Britain, ten-year-olds can be tried for a crime. This British colonial legacy is reflected in the relatively low MACRs seen in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Similarly, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are among the 21 countries that set a MACR of seven, the lowest national age globally.

In some cases the law is not clear-cut. The MACR in Comoros is based on puberty. It can differ by sex (as in Iran) or type of offence (Malaysia), while Poland and France entrust the issue to judges’ discretion. Nonetheless, even a vague minimum of “puberty” provides more protection than simply having no MACR at all. Just a handful of countries have no national MACR. The most striking is the United States. Although America sets a threshold of 11 years old for federal offences, the overwhelming share of crimes are policed at the state level. And 35 out of the 50 states have not set a MACR, putting them in a club with Cuba, Malaysia (exclusively for terrorism) and Sudan (for drug offences).

🎧 Industrial strength craft beer | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Industrial strength craft beer from Eat This Podcast

Italy, land of fabled wines, has seen an astonishing craft beer renaissance. Or perhaps naissance would be more accurate, as Italy has never had that great a reputation for beers. Starting in the early 1990s, with Teo Musso at Le Baladin, there are now more than 500 craft breweries in operation up and down the peninsula. Specialist beer shops are popping up like mushrooms all over Rome, and probably elsewhere, and even our local supermarket carries quite a range of unusual beers. Among them four absolutely scrummy offerings from Mastri Birai Umbri – Master Brewers of Umbria. And then it turns out that my friend Dan Etherington, who blogs (mostly) at Bread, cakes and ale, knows the Head Brewer, Michele Sensidoni. A couple of emails later and there we were, ready for Michele to give us a guided tour of the brewery.

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I’m sure there was audio all the way through the tour, but portions of it were cut out, likely for time editing, but I kind of wish the whole thing was there… I could probably listen to this kind of beer talk all day long. I would also appreciate a more chemistry-based technical approach to the topic as well.

The question of the definition of craft beer versus industrial beer is a very good, yet subtle one.

I’m actually curious to try a beer that’s based on legumes to see what the increased protein percentages do to the flavor. It’s also interesting to hear about the potential creation of a signature Italian style beer.

🎧 A computer learns about ingredients and recipes | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A computer learns about ingredients and recipes by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Perhaps you've heard about IBM's giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that anyone can use.

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Back in February I had retweeted something interesting from physicist and information theorist Michael Nielsen:

“Augmented cooking with machine intelligence”, with interesting remarks on generating food analogies… https://t.co/UluYk6p8TV

— michael_nielsen (@michael_nielsen) February 2, 2017

I found the article in it so interesting, there was some brief conversation around it and I thought to recommend it to my then new friend Jeremy Cherfas, whose Eat This Podcast I had just recently started to enjoy. Mostly I thought he would find it as interesting as I, though I hardly expected he’d turn it into a podcast episode. Though I’ve been plowing through back episodes in his catalog, fortunately this morning I ran out of downloaded episodes in the car so I started streaming the most recent one to find a lovely surprise: a podcast produced on a tip I made.

While he surely must have been producing the episode for some time before I started supporting the podcast on Patreon last week, I must say that having an episode made from one of my tips is the best backer thank you I’ve ever received from a crowd funded project.

Needless to say, I obviously found the subject fascinating. In part it did remind me of a section of Herve This’ book The Science of the Oven (eventually I’ll get around to posting a review with more thoughts) and some of his prior research which I was apparently reading on Christmas Day this past year. On page 118 of the text This discusses the classic French sauces of Escoffier’s students Louis Saulnier and Theodore Gringoire [1] and that a physical chemical analysis of them shows there to be only twenty-three kinds. He continues on:

A system that I introduced during the European Conference on Colloids and Interfaces in 2002 [2] offers a new classification, based on the physical chemical structure of the sauce. In it, G indicates a gas, E an aqueous solution, H a fat in the liquid state, and S a solid. These “phases” can be dispersed (symbol /), mixed (symbol +), superimposed (symbol θ), included (symbol @). Thus, veal stock is a solution, which is designated E. Bound veal stock, composed of starch granules swelled by the water they have absorbed, dispersed in an aqueous solution, is thus described by the formula (E/S)/E.

This goes on to describe in a bit more detail how the scientist-cook could then create a vector space of all combinations of foods from a physical state perspective. A classification system like this could be expanded and bolted on top of the database created by Jaan Altosaar and improved to provide even more actual realistic recipes of the type discussed in the podcast. The combinatorics of the problem are incredibly large, but my guess is that the constraints on the space of possible solutions is brought down incredibly in actual practice. It’s somewhat like the huge numbers of combinations the A, C, T, and Gs in our DNA that could be imagined, yet only an incredibly much smaller subset of that larger set could be found in a living human being.

Small World

The additional byproduct of catching this episode was that it finally reminded me why I had thought the name Jaan Altosaar was so familiar to me when I read his article. It turns out I know Jaan and some of his previous work. Sometime back in 2014 I had corresponded with him regarding his fantastic science news site Useful Science which was just then starting. While I was digging up the connection I realized that my old friend Sol Golomb had also referenced Jaan to me via Mark Wilde for some papers he suggested I read.

References

[1]

T. Gringoire and L. Saulnier, Le répertoire de la cuisine. Dupont et Malgat, 1914.

[2]

H. This, “La gastronomie moléculaire,” Sci Aliments, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 187–198, 2003 [Online]. Available: http://sda.revuesonline.com/article.jsp?articleId=2577 [Source]

Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor | Salon.com

Read Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor (Salon)

Conservatives and the media treated Vance's memoir like "Poor People for Dummies." Watch his damaging rhetoric work

Study debunks old concept of how anesthesia works | Phys.Org

Read Study debunks old concept of how anesthesia works (phys.org)

Anesthesia induces unconsciousness by changing the function of proteins that reside on the surface of a thin membrane that forms a barrier around all cells, according to new research from Weill Cornell Medicine scientists. The findings challenge a century-old concept of how anesthetics work and may help guide the development of new agents associated with fewer side effects.

Why some infinities are bigger than others | Aeon Essays

Read Why some infinities are bigger than others by A. W. Moore (Aeon Essays)

Georg Cantor showed that some infinities are bigger than others. Did he assault mathematical wisdom or corroborate it?

Lofty goals here, but I’m not quite sure he’s really make the case he set out to in these few words. The comments on the article are somewhat interesting, but seem to devolve into the usual pablum seen on such posts. Nothing stuck out to me as a comment by a solid mathematician, which might have been interesting.

There Is No Deep State | The New Yorker

Read There Is No Deep State by David Remnick (The New Yorker)

The problem in Washington is not a conspiracy against the President; it’s the President himself.