A Lousy News Article on Melting Ice

This piece of AFP news from Straits Times came into my attention through Google News: Estimated icecap loss halved . In it, it was said that new published research showed that glacial ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland is only half as much as previously thought because the older estimates "fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment".

Having scanned through the mentioned research article a couple of days ago and knowing something about this subject, I must say that the article is quite wrong in its summary of the results. First, glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is a very well-known but poorly-constrained problem in such estimates. All previous estimates do take into account GIA, but how they take it into account is another matter. Different ways of modelling GIA yields different results. There is currently no best method of doing so.

Some are simple: a direct linear elastic rebound with a constant upward velocity; some are more complicated. Of course, if we have observations -- which can be achieved through GPS stations -- that will be ideal, but planting a station in the middle of Antarctica isn't quite cheap or easy.

What the new article has to offer is a semi-empirical method of modelling GIA. It is certainly insightful and novel, but this does not mean that its estimates are necessarily more accurate than previous numbers. Certainly, as the authors have suggested, more GPS stations will better constrain the uncertainties and eliminate poor models.

From my perspective, the AFP journalist is either poorly equipped to interpret scientific research, or has an opinion which skewed his writing. Regardless, it is a very lousy piece of news.

If you're interested, the original research article is here. If that's too tough, there's an analysis by Nature as well.

How many people outside Singapore has heard of the Youth Olympic Games?

I did a straw poll to shed some light on that question.

A Huge Serve of Simulation Data

Sometimes, it does seem quite incredible how fast the size of hard disks grow. 1 GB was quite a huge thing a decade ago, and now it's hitting 1 TB. It wasn't too long ago that people started collecting movies on their hard disks. I remember my first computer wasn't even big to hold a music collection!

Whenever I upgrade my computer or buy a new laptop, the size of the hard disk always seems amazing because of the great increase in space. And it was so when I got my current laptop, with ~ 500 GB split between Windows 7 and Ubuntu (on hindsight, I should not have left Windows so much space...). This is considering that I do not have a movie collection, and my music collection is rather small by most comparisons.

And that's when my simulation results come in. At ~ 40 GB a pop, it's grabbing my hard disk space like some super hungry monster. In fact, my hard disk looks puny now, being able to store at most 3 sets of simulation before I have to move them elsewhere. Fortunately, I only need them on my laptop to run some analysis scripts.

But still, 40 GB of data... Makes me wonder how people handled such simulations more than ten years ago when the code was first written.

Boo Boo Apple

After struggling with the PowerPC assigned to me for more than a week, I decided to give up on it. And when I say give up, I'm saying that my humble laptop can perform way better than the Mac OS X in that PowerPC in all respects that I need my desktop for.

Basically, I failed miserably in trying to dual-boot Linux on the PowerPC. Linux was installed but there was no way to boot it. Something to do with the bootable hard disk and stuff like that. But that's okay, because it's not essential for my tasks.

However, I needed MatLab and NCView as well, and I went mad trying to get them working on the PowerPC. For the former, the version that was supported for PowerPC was not available on the ANU MatLab website, so I had to hunt down the CD from the IT guys. And it was an old version which I suspect may not be compatible with the toolboxes that I need. For the latter, it just refuses to compile for no apparent reason.

So for a week I clashed with the desktop, and it was pretty much a draw: I got some stuff working but not all that I need. And a couple of days back, I brought my laptop and installed all that I need within one hour.

What can I say? Ubuntu rocks!

Good Student, Bad Teacher

From BBC News,

Zenna Atkins, stressing these were her personal views, earlier told the Sunday Times "every school should have a useless teacher".

Atkins, the chairman of Office for Standards in Education in UK, stressed that she is not telling schools not to eradicate bad teaching, but her point is that bad teachers may serve a purpose.

Actually, I do agree with her, in that a bad teacher can "teach" students something. For example, a crappy teacher may force students to learn on their own, to form study groups and assist each others, or even prompt students to take this issue up with the school and gain a lesson on activism. Lacking a concrete real life example, one can look at Harry Potter, who, in the fifth book, set up his own group for his peers to learn what their lousy teacher refused to impart.

Nonetheless, for bad teachers to "teach well", it will depend on the students themselves. If they are apathetic on their education, then bad teachers are bad. And it may also depend on the subject itself, because certain fields require much guidance.

So basically, bad teachers teaches students self-learning. And that's a quality one should have.

Wrestling with PowerPC

There is some sort of Mac fever in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics lab that I'm under. Pretty much all the desktops and laptops issued to staff and students are all Macs, and I've been assigned an old PowerPC system.

It doesn't matter much to me that it is old because I won't be performing high-power computing with the system. Nonetheless, the different shortcut keys and ways of handling files always irritates me whenever I used Mac, so I was determined to install Ubuntu on it (not to mention the increase in speed that will come with Linux).

But boy it was not easy. For some reason I could not get the Ubuntu CD to boot, only to discover today that PowerPCs require a different boot CD. And that's after I've burnt like two different CDs in my previous attempts. And my desk is out of CD-Rs. Moreover, there seem to be this tiny problem that the monitor cannot detect signals before Mac OS X boots. So when I try to bring up the boot selection screen, I cannot see a thing.

Hopefully, when I bring over a fresh CD-R tomorrow, I can get Ubuntu up and running without much problems...

Reversing Out of Facebook

For a couple of months, this blog has laid silent. Part of the reason is the increasing workload and real life commitments. But another part comes from using Facebook as an alternative.

Facebook is great for quick snippets of posts and it does automatically alert friends to what you're saying. Contrast this with blogging, in which people will be informed of an update if they subscribe to the feed or check the blog. It is like a very centralised RSS feed reader with a user-friendly and fast interface.

But soon I found it cumbersome. Much as it keeps me aware of things happening to other people, sometimes there is just information overload. Moreover, I found it hard to write longer posts like these.

I'll still be on Facebook, and I'll be alerted to important (in a relative sense) messages through email, but I think I'll still stick to my blog.

Rain, Strike and Exams

It rained this morning, and then in the afternoon. This makes cycling quite horrendous.

There was a scheduled bus strike today, so public transport is completely down. So it's either down to carpooling or taxi.

While I laze in my room with a steaming up of tea, I pity those with exams today.