Root Privileges

Scicomm

How does a fan work?

Everywhere I turn, all the talk is about the coronavirus, and it’s exhausting because I already deal with news of the coronavirus as part of my day-job. It’s impossible to catch people having conversations about anything else at all. I don’t blame them, of course, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

I must admit I relished the opportunity to discuss some electrical engineering and power-plant management when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nine-minute power shutdown event on April 5. So now, to take a break from public health and epidemiology, as well as to remember that a world beyond the coronavirus – and climate change and all the other Other Problems out there – exists, I’ve decided to make sense of how a fan works.

Yes, a household fan, of the kind commonly found in houses in the tropics that have electricity supply and whose members have been able to afford the few thousand rupees for the device. The fan’s ubiquity is a testament to how well we have understood two distinct parts of nature: electromagnetic interactions and fluid flow.

When you flick the switch, a fan comes on, turning about faster and faster until it has reached the speed you’ve set on the regulator, and a few seconds later, you feel cooler. This simple description reveals four distinct parts: the motor inside the fan, the regulator, the blades and the air. Let’s take them one at a time.

The motor inside the fan is an induction motor. It has two major components: the rotor, which is the part that rotates, and the stator, which is the part that remains stationary. All induction motors use alternating current to power themselves, but the rotor and stator are better understood using a direct-current (DC) motor simply because these motors are simpler, so you can understand a lot about their underlying principles simply by looking at them.

Consider an AA battery with a wire connecting its cathode to its anode. A small current will flow through the wire due to the voltage provided by the battery. Now, make a small break in this wire and attach another piece of wire there, bent in the shape of a rectangle, like so:

Next, place the rectangular loop in a magnetic field, such as by placing a magnet’s north pole to one side and a south pole to another:

When a current flows through the loop, it develops a magnetic field around itself. The idea that ‘like charges repel’ applies to magnetic charges as well (borne out through Lenz’s law; we’ll come to that in a bit), so if you orient the external magnetic field right, the loop’s magnetic field could repel it and exert a force on the wire to flip over. And once it has flipped over, the repelling force goes away and the loop doesn’t have to flip anymore.

But we can’t have that. We want the loop to keep flipping over, since that’s how we get rotational motion. We also don’t want the loop to lose contact with the circuit as it flips. To fix both these issues, we add a component called a split-ring commutator at the junction between the circuit and the rectangular loop.

Credit: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/comtat.html

The commutator consists of two separate pieces of copper attached to the loop. Each piece brushes against a block of graphite connected to the circuit. When the loop has flipped over once, the commutator ensures that it’s still connected to the circuit. However, the difference is that the loop’s endpoints now carry current in the opposite direction, producing a magnetic field oriented the other way. But because the loop has flipped over, the new field is still opposed to the external field, and the loop is forced to flip once more. This way, the loop keeps rotating.

Our DC motor is now complete. The stator is the external magnetic field, because it does not move; the rotor is the rectangular loop, because it rotates.

A DC electric motor with a split-ring commutator (light blue). The green arrows depict the direction of force exerted by the magnetic field on the current carrying loop. Credit: Lookang/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

In an induction motor, like in a DC motor, the stator is a magnet. When a direct current is passed through it, the stator generates a steady magnetic field around itself. When an alternating current is passed through it, however, the magnetic field itself rotates because the current is constantly changing direction.

Alternating current has three phases. The stator of an induction motor is really a ring of electromagnets, divided into three groups, each subtending an angle of 120º around the stator. When the three-phase current is passed through the stator, each phase magnetises one group of magnets in sequence. So as the phases alternate, one set of magnets is magnetised at a time, going round and round. This gives rise to the rotating magnetic field. (In a DC motor, the direction of the direct current is mechanically flipped – i.e. reoriented through space by 180º degrees – so the flip is also of 180º at a time.)

A stator of ringed electromagnets produces a rotating magnetic field as a sum of magnetic vectors from three phase coils. Caption and credit: Mtodorov_69/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The rotor in an induction motor consists of electrical wire coiled around a ring of steel. As the stator’s magnetic field comes alive and begins to rotate, the field ‘cuts’ across the coiled wire and induces a current in them. This current in turn produces a magnetic field coiled around the wires, called the rotor’s magnetic field.

In 1834, a Russian physicist named Heinrich Emil Lenz found that magnetic fields also have their own version of Newton’s third law. Called Lenz’s law, it states that if a magnetic field ‘M’ induces a current in a wire, and the current creates a secondary magnetic field ‘F’, M and F will oppose each other.

Similarly, the stator’s magnetic field will repel the rotor’s magnetic field, causing the former to push on the latter. This force in turn causes the rotor to rotate.

We’ve got the fan started, but the induction motor has more to offer.

The alternating current passing through the stator will constantly push the rotor to rotate faster. However, we often need the fan to spin at a specific speed. To balance the two, we use a regulator. The simplest regulator is a length of wire of suitably high resistance that reduces the voltage between the source and the stator, reducing the amount of power reaching the stator. However, if the fan needs to spin very slowly, such a regulator will have to have very high resistance, and in turn will produce a lot of heat. To overcome this problem, modern regulators are capacitors, not resistors. And since resistance doesn’t vary smoothly while capacitance does, capacitor regulators also allow for smooth speed control.

There is another downside to the speed. At no point can the rotor develop so much momentum that the stator’s magnetic field no longer induces a useful current in the rotor’s coils. (This is what happens in a generator: the rotor becomes the ‘pusher’, imparting energy to the stator that then feeds power into the grid.) That is, in an induction motor, the rotor must rotate slower than the stator.

Finally, the rotor itself – made of steel – cannot become magnetised from scratch. That is, if the steel is not at all magnetised when the stator’s magnetic field comes on, the rotor’s coils will first need to generate enough of a magnetic field to penetrate the steel. Only then can the steel rotor begin to move. This requirement gives rise to the biggest downside of induction motors: each motor consumes a fifth of the alternating current to magnetise the rotor.

Thus, we come to the third part. You’ve probably noticed that your fan’s blades accumulate dust more along one edge than the other. This is because the blades are slightly and symmetrically curved down in a shape that aerodynamics engineers call aerofoils or airfoils. When air flows onto a surface, like the side of a building, some of the air ‘bounces’ off, and the surface experiences an equal and opposite reaction that literally pushes on the surface. The rest of the air drags on the surface, akin to friction.

Airfoils are surfaces specifically designed to be ‘attacked’ by air such that they maximise lift and minimise drag. The most obvious example is an airplane wing. An engine attached to the wing provides thrust, motoring the vehicle forward. As the wing cuts through the air, the air flows over the wing’s underside, generating both lift and drag. But the wing’s shape is optimised to extract as much lift as possible, to push the airplane up into the air.

Examples of airfoils. ULM stands for ultralight motorised aircraft. Credit: Oliver Cleynen/Wikimedia Commons

Engineers derive this shape using two equations. The first – the continuity equation – states that if a fluid passes through a wider cross-section at some speed, it will subsequently move faster through a narrower cross section. The second – known as Bernoulli’s principle – stipulates that all times, the sum of a fluid’s kinetic energy (speed), potential energy (pressure) and internal energy (the energy of the random motion of the fluid’s constituent molecules) must be constant. So if a fluid speeds up, it will compensate by, say, exerting lower pressure.

So if an airfoil’s leading edge, the part that sweeps into the air, is broader than its trailing edge, the part from which the air leaves off, the air will leave off faster while exerting more lift. A fan’s blades, of course, can’t lift so to conserve momentum the air will exit with greater velocity.

When you flick a switch, you effectively set this ingenious combination of electromagnetic and aerodynamic engineering in motion, whipping the air about in your room. However, the fan doesn’t cool the air. The reason you feel cooler is because the fan circulates the air through your room, motivating more and more air particles to come in contact with your warm skin and carry away a little bit of heat. That is, you just lose heat by convection.

All of this takes only 10 seconds – but it took humankind over a century of research, numerous advancements in engineering, millions of dollars in capital and operational expenses, an efficient, productive and equitable research culture, and price regulation by the state as well as market forces to make it happen. Such is the price of ubiquity and convenience.

Apr 12, 2020
Science journalism, expertise and common sense

On March 27, the Johns Hopkins University said an article published on the website of the Centre For Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), a Washington-based think tank, had used its logo without permission and distanced itself from the study, which had concluded that the number of people in India who could test positive for the new coronavirus could swell into the millions by May 2020. Soon after, a basement of trolls latched onto CDDEP founder-director Ramanan Laxminarayan’s credentials as an economist to dismiss his work as a public-health researcher, including denying the study’s conclusions without discussing its scientific merits and demerits.

A lot of issues are wound up in this little controversy. One of them is our seemingly naïve relationship with expertise.

Expertise is supposed to be a straightforward thing: you either have it or you don’t. But just as specialised knowledge is complicated, so too is expertise.

Many of us have heard stories of someone who’s great at something “even though he didn’t go to college” and another someone who’s a bit of a tubelight “despite having been to Oxbridge”. Irrespective of whether they’re exceptions or the rule, there’s a lot of expertise in the world that a deference to degrees would miss.

More importantly, by conflating academic qualifications with expertise, we risk flattening a three-dimensional picture to one. For example, there are more scientists who can speak confidently about statistical regression and the features of exponential growth than there are who can comment on the false vacua of string theory or discuss why protein folding is such a hard problem to solve. These hierarchies arise because of differences in complexity. We don’t have to insist only a virologist or an epidemiologist is allowed to answer questions about whether a clinical trial was done right.

But when we insist someone is not good enough because they have a degree in a different subject, we could be embellishing the implicit assumption that we don’t want to look beyond expertise, and are content with being told the answers. Granted, this argument is better directed at individuals privileged enough to learn something new every day, but maintaining this chasm – between who in the public consciousness is allowed to provide answers and who isn’t – also continues to keep power in fewer hands.

Of course, many questions that have arisen during the coronavirus pandemic have often stood between life and death, and it is important to stay safe. However, there is a penalty to think the closer we drift towards expertise, the safer we become — because then we may be drifting away from common sense and accruing a different kind of burden, especially when we insist only specialised experts can comment on a far less specialist topic. Such convictions have already created a class of people that believes ad hominem is a legitimate argumentative ploy, and won’t back down from an increasingly acrimonious quarrel until they find the cherry-picked data they have been looking for.

Most people occupy a less radical but still problematic position: even when neither life nor fortune is at stake, they claim to wait for expertise to change one’s behaviour and/or beliefs. Most of them are really waiting for something that arrived long ago and are only trying to find new ways to persist with the status quo. The all-or-nothing attitude of the rest – assuming they exist – is, simply put, epistemologically inefficient.

Our deference to the views of experts should be a function of how complex it really is and therefore the extent to which it can be interrogated. So when the topic at hand is whether a clinical trial was done right or whether the Indian Council of Medical Research is testing enough, the net we cast to find independent scientists to speak to can include those who aren’t medical researchers but whose academic or vocational trajectories familiarised them to some parts of these issues as well as who are transparent about their reasoning, methods and opinions. (The CDDEP study is yet to reveal its methods, so I don’t want to comment specifically on it.)

If we can’t be sure if the scientist we’re speaking to is making sense, obviously it would be better to go with someone whose words we can just trust. And if we’re not comfortable having such a negotiated relationship with an expert – sadly, it’s always going to be this way. The only way to make matters simpler is by choosing to deliberately shut ourselves off, to take what we’re hearing and, instead of questioning it further, running with it.

This said, we all shut ourselves off at one time or another. It’s only important that we do it knowing we do it, instead of harbouring pretensions of superiority. At no point does it become reasonable to dismiss anyone based on their academic qualifications alone the way, say, Times of India and OpIndia have done (see below).

What’s more, Dr Giridhar Gyani is neither a medical practitioner nor epidemiologist. He is academically an electrical engineer, who later did a PhD in quality management. He is currently director general at Association of Healthcare Providers (India).
Times of India, March 28

Ramanan Laxminarayanan, who was pitched up as an expert on diseases and epidemics by the media outlets of the country, however, in reality, is not an epidemiologist. Dr Ramanan Laxminarayanan is not even a doctor but has a PhD in economics.
OpIndia, March 22

Expertise has been humankind’s way to quickly make sense of a world that has only been becoming more confusing. But historically, expertise has also been a reason of state, used to suppress dissenting voices and concentrate political, industrial and military power in the hands of a few. The former is in many ways a useful feature of society for its liberating potential while the latter is undesirable because it enslaves. People frequently straddle both tendencies together – especially now, with the government in charge of the national anti-coronavirus response.

An immediately viable way to break this tension is to negotiate our relationship with experts themselves.

Mar 29, 2020
On India’s path to community transmission

There’s a virus out there among many, many viruses that’s caught the world’s attention. This virus came into existence somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where, and developed a mutation at some point that allowed it to do what it needs to do inside the body of one specific kind of animal: Homo sapiens. And once it enters one Homo sapiens, it takes advantage of its new surroundings to produce more copies of itself. Then, its offspring wait for the animal to cough or sneeze – acts originally designed to expel irritating substances – to exit their current home and hopefully enter a new one. There, these viruses go through the same cycle of reproduction and expulsion, and so forth.

This way, the virus has infected over 210,000 people in the last hundred days or so. Some people’s bodies have been so invaded by the virus that their immune systems weren’t able to fight it off, and they – nearly 9,000 of them – succumbed to it.

Thus far, the virus has reportedly invaded the bodies of at least 282 people in India. There’s no telling how the virus will dissipate through the rest of the population – if it needs to – except by catching people who have the virus early, separating them from the rest of the population for long enough to ensure they don’t have and/or transmit the virus or, if they do, providing additional treatment, and finally reintegrating them with the general population.

But as the virus spreads among more and more people, it’s going to become harder and harder to tell how every single new patient got their particular infection. Ultimately, a situation is going to arise wherein too many people have the virus for public-health officials to be able to say how exactly the virus got to them. The WHO calls this phase ‘community transmission’.

India is a country of over 1.3 billion people, and is currently on the cusp of what the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has called ‘stage 3’ – the advent of community transmission. It’s impossible to expect a developing country as big and as densely populated as India to begin testing all 1.3 billion Indians for the virus as soon as there is news of the virus having entered the national border because the resource cost required to undertake such an exercise is extremely high, well beyond what India can generally afford. However, this doesn’t mean Indians are screwed.

Instead of testing every Indian, ICMR took a different route. Consider the following example: there’s a population of red flecks randomly interspersed with yellow flecks. You need to choose a small subset of flecks from this grid (shown below) such that checking for the number of yellow flecks in the subset gives you a reliable idea of the number of yellow flecks overall.

The ideal subset would be the whole set, of course, so there is one more catch: you have a fixed amount of money to figure out the correct answer (as well as for a bunch of other activities), so it’s in your best interests to keep the subset as small as possible. In effect, you need to balance the tension between two important demands: getting to a more accurate answer while spending less.

Similarly, ICMR assumed that the virus is randomly distributed in the Indian population, and decided to divide the population into different groups, for example by their relative proximity to a testing centre. That is, each testing centre would correspond to the group of all people who live closer to that testing centre than any other. Then, ICMR would pick a certain number of people from each group, collect their nasal and throat samples and send it to the corresponding labs for tests.

Say group size equals 100. For a Bernoulli random variable with unknown probability p, if no events occur in n independent trials, the maximum value of p (at 95% confidence) is approximately 3/n. In our case, n = 100 and p at 95% confidence is 3/100, which is 3%. Since this is the upper bound, it means less than 3% of the population has the ‘event’ which didn’t occur in n trials – which in our case is the event of ‘testing positive’. Do note, this is what is safe to say; it’s not what may actually be happening on the ground. So by increasing the sample size n as much as possible, ICMR can ascertain with higher and higher confidence as to whether the corresponding group has community transmission or not.

Thus far, ICMR has said there is no community transmission in India based on these calculations. Independent experts have been reluctant to take its word, however, because while ICMR has publicised what the sample size and the number of positives are, there is very little information about two other things.

First: we don’t know how ICMR selected the samples that it did for testing. While the virus’s distribution in the population can be considered to be random, especially if community transmission is said to have commenced, the selection of samples needs to have an underlying logic. What is that logic?

Second: we don’t know the group sizes. It’s important for the sample size to be proportionate to the group size. So without knowing what the group size underlying each sample is, it becomes impossible to tell if ICMR is doing its job right.

On March 17, one ICMR scientist said that some testing centres had admitted fewer people with COVID-19-like symptoms and the source of whose infections was unknown (i.e. community transmission) than the size of the sample chosen from their corresponding group. She was suggesting that ICMR’s choice of samples from each group was large enough to not overlook community transmission. To translate in terms of the example above: she was saying ICMR’s subset size was big enough to catch at least one yellow fleck – and didn’t.

As it happens, on March 20, ICMR announced that it would begin testing for a potential type of community-transmission cases even though its sampling exercise had produced 1,020 negative results in 1,020 samples (distributed across 51 testing centres).

The reasons for this are yet unclear but suggests that ICMR suspects there is community transmission of the virus in the country even though its methods – which ICMR has always stood by – haven’t found evidence of such transmission. This in turn prompts the following question: why not test for all types of community transmission? The answer is the same as before: ICMR has limited resources but at the same time has been tasked with discovering how many yellow flecks are there in the total population.

The virus is not an intelligent creature. In fact, it’s extremely primitive. Each virus is in its essence a packet of chemical reactions, and when each reaction happens depends on a combination of internal and external conditions. Other than this, the virus does not harbour any intentions or aspirations. It simply responds to stimuli that it cannot manipulate or affect in any way.

The overarching implication is that beyond how good the virus is at spreading from person to person, a pandemic is what it is because of human interactions, and because of human adaptation and mitigation systems. And as more and more people get infected, and their groups verge towards the WHO’s definition of ‘community transmission’, the virus’s path through the population becomes less and less obvious, but at the same time a greater depth of transmission opens the path to better epidemiological modelling.

When such transmission happens in a country like India, the body responsible for keeping the people safe – whether the Union health ministry, ICMR or any other entity – faces the same challenge that ICMR did. This is also why direct comparisons of India’s and South Korea’s testing strategies are difficult to justify, especially of the number of people tested per million: India has nearly 26-times as many people but spends 11.5-times less on healthcare per capita.

At the same time, ICMR isn’t making it easy for anyone – least of all itself – when it doesn’t communicate properly, and leaves itself open to criticism, which in turn chips away at its authority and trustworthiness in a time as testing as this. Demonetisation taught us very well that a strategy is only as good as its implementation.

But on the flip side, it wouldn’t be amiss to make a distinction here: between testing enough to get a sense of the virus’s prevalence in the population – in order to guide further action and policy – and the fact that the low expenditure on public healthcare is always going to incentivise India to skew towards a sampling strategy instead of an alternative that requires mass-testing. ICMR and the Union health ministry haven’t inspired confidence on the first count but it’s important to ensure criticism of the former doesn’t spillover into criticism of the latter as well.

Anyway, the corresponding sampling strategy is going to have to be based on a logic. Why? Because while the resources for the virus to spread exist abundantly in nature (in the form of humans), the human response to containing the spread requires resources that humans find hard to get. Against the background of this disparity, sampling, testing and treatment logics – such as Italy’s brutal triaging policy – help us choose better sampling strategies; predict approximately how many people will need to be quarantined in the near future; prepare our medical supplies; recruit the requisite number of health workers; stockpile important drugs; prepare for economic losses; issue rules of social conduct for the people; and so forth.

A logic could even help anticipate (or perpetuate, depending on your appetite for cynicism) ‘leakages’ arising due to, say, caste or class issues. Think of it like trying to draw a circle with only straight lines of a fixed length: with 200 strokes, you could technically draw a polygon with 200 sides that looks approximately like a circle – but it will still have some discernible edges and vertices that won’t exactly map on a circle, leaving a small part of the latter out. Similarly, using a properly designed technique that can predict which person might get infected and who might not can still catch a large number of people – but the technique won’t catch all of them.

One obvious way to significantly improve the technique’s efficacy as it stands is to account for the fact that more than half of all Indians are treated at private hospitals whereas you can be tested for COVID-19 only at a government facility, and not all VRDLs receive samples from all private hospitals in their respective areas.

Ultimately, the officials who devise the logics must be expected to justify how the combination of all logics can – even if only on paper – uncover most, if not all, cases of the virus’s infection in India.

Mar 22, 2020
‘Hunters’, sci-fi and pseudoscience

One of the ways in which pseudoscience is connected to authoritarian governments is through its newfound purpose and duty to supply an alternate intellectual tradition that subsumes science as well as culminates in the identitarian superiority of a race, culture or ethnic group. In return, aspects of the tradition are empowered by the regime both to legitimise it and to catalyse its adoption by the proverbial masses, tying faith in its precepts with agency, and of course giving itself divine sanction to rule.

The readers of this blog will recognise the spiritual features of Hindutva that the Bharatiya Janata Party regularly draws on that fit the bill. A German rocket scientist named Willy Ley who emigrated to the US before World War II published an essay entitled ‘Pseudoscience in Naziland’ in 1947, in which he describes the sort of crazy beliefs that prepared the ground with other conditions for the advent of Nazism.

In Hunters, the Amazon Prime show about Jewish Nazi-hunters in 1970s America, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s sci-fi novel The Coming Race (1871) finds brief mention as a guiding text for neo-Nazis. In the novel, a subterranean race of angelic humanoids has acquired great power and superhuman abilities by manipulating a magical substance called Vril, and threatens to rise to the surface and destroy the human race one day.

Bulwer-Lytton also wrote that Vril alludes to electricity (i.e. the flow of electrons) and that The Coming Race is an allegory about how an older generation of people finds itself culturally and political incompatible with a new world order powered by electric power. (At the same time, he believed these forces were a subset of the aether, so to speak.) In a letter to John Forster on March 20, 1870 – precisely 150 years ago in twelve days – Bulwer-Lytton wrote:

I did not mean Vril for mesmerism, but for electricity, developed into uses as yet only dimly guessed, and including whatever there may be genuine in mesmerism, which I hold to be a mere branch current of the one great fluid pervading all nature. I am by no means, however, wedded to Vril, if you can suggest anything else to carry out this meaning – namely, that the coming race, though akin to us, has nevertheless acquired by hereditary transmission, etc., certain distinctions which make it a different species, and contains powers which we could not attain through a slow growth of time’ so that this race would not amalgamate with, but destroy us.
And yet this race, being in many respects better and milder than we are, ought not to be represented terrible, except through the impossibility of our tolerating them or they tolerating us, and they possess some powers of destruction denied to ourselves.

The collection of letters is available here.

In Bulwer-Lytton’s conception, higher technological prowess was born of hereditary traits. In a previous letter, dated March 15, Bulwer-Lytton had written to Forster:

The [manuscript] does not press for publication, so you can keep it during your excursion and think over it among the other moonstricken productions which may have more professional demand on your attention. The only important point is to keen in view the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races, that such a race would be very gradually formed, and be indeed a new species developing itself out of our old one, that this process would be invisible to our eyes, and therefore in some region unknown to us.

So this is not a simple confusion or innocent ignorance. Bulwer-Lytton’s attribution of the invention of electricity to genetic ability was later appropriated by interwar German socialists.

This said, I’m not sure how much I can read into the reimagination of technological ability as a consequence of evolution or racial superiority because another part of Bulwer-Lytton’s letters suggests his example of electricity was incidental: “… in the course of the development [of the new species], the coming race will have acquired some peculiarities so distinct from our ways … and certain destructive powers which our science could not enable us to attain to, or cope with. Therefore, the idea of electrical power occurred to me, but some other might occur to you.”

Now, according to Ley, the Society for Truth believed Vril to be a real thing and used its existence to explain how the Britons created their empire. I don’t know how much stock Adolf Hitler and his “shites of the round table” (to quote from Hunters) placed in this idea but the parallels must have been inescapable – especially so since Ley also writes that not just any pseudoscientific belief could have supported Hitler’s rise nor have acquired his patronage. Instead, the beliefs had to be culturally specific to Germany, pandering to local folklore and provincialism.

Without commenting on whether this conclusion would apply to Fascism 2.0 in a world with the internet, civil aviation and computerised banking, and in naïve spite of history’s fondness for repeating itself and the politico-corporate-media complex, I wonder what lessons there are here – if any – for science educators, a people already caught between political anti-intellectualism and a stronger sense of their purpose in an intellectually debilitated society.

Mar 8, 2020
Dehumanising language during an outbreak
It appears the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has begun local transmission in India, i.e. infecting more people within the country instead of each new patient having recently travelled to an already affected country. The advent of local transmission is an important event in the lexicon of epidemics and pandemics because, at least until 2009, that’s how the WHO differentiated between the two.

As of today, the virus has become locally transmissible in the world’s two most populous countries. At this juncture, pretty much everyone expects the number of cases within India to only increase, and as it does, the public healthcare system won’t be the only one under pressure. Reporters and editors will be too, and they’re likely to be more stressed on one front: their readers.

For example, over the course of March 4, the following sentences appeared in various news reports of the coronavirus:

The Italian man infected 16 Italians, his wife and an Indian driver.
The infected techie boarded a bus to Hyderabad from Bengaluru and jeopardised the safety of his co-passengers.
Two new suspected coronavirus cases have been reported in Hyderabad.
All 28 cases of infection are being monitored, the health ministry has said.

Quite a few people on Twitter, and likely in other fora, commented that these lines exemplify the sort of insensitivity towards patients that dehumanises them, elides their agency and casts them as perpetrators – of the transmission of a disease – and which, perhaps given enough time and reception, could engender apathy and even animosity towards the poorer sick.

The problem words seem to include ‘cases’, ‘burden’ and ‘infected’. But are they a problem, really? I ask because though I understand the complaints, I think they’re missing an important detail.

Referring to people as if they were objects only furthers their impotency in a medical care setup in which doctors can’t be questioned and the rationale for diagnoses is frequently secreted – both conditions ripe for exploitation. At the same time, the public part of this system has to deal with a case load it is barely equipped for and whose workers are underpaid relative to their counterparts in the private sector.

As a result, a doctor seeing 10- or 20-times as many patients as they’ve been trained and supported to will inevitably precipitate some amount of dehumanisation, and it could in fact help medical workers cope with circumstances in which they’re doing all they can to help but the patient suffers anyway. So dehumanisation is not always bad.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the word ‘dehumanise’ and the attitude ‘dehumanise’ can and often do differ. For example, Union home minister Amit Shah calling Bangladeshi immigrants “termites” is not the same as a high-ranking doctor referring to his patient in terms of their disease, and this doctor is not the same as an overworked nurse referring to the people in her care as ‘cases’. The last two examples are progressively more forgivable because their use of the English language is more opportunistic, and the nurse in the last example may not intentionally dehumanise their patients if they knew what their words meant.

(The doctor didn’t: his example is based on a true story.)

Problematic attitudes often manifest most prominently as problematic words and labels but the use of a word alone wouldn’t imply a specific attitude in a country that has always had an uneasy relationship with the English language. Reporters and editors who carefully avoid potentially debilitating language as well as those who carefully use such language are both in the minority in India. Instead, my experiences as a journalist over eight years suggest the majority is composed of people who don’t know the language is a problem, who don’t have the time, energy and/or freedom to think about casual dehumanisation, and who don’t deserve to be blamed for something they don’t know they’re doing.

But by fixating on just words, and not the world of problems that gives rise to them, we risk interrogating and blaming the wrong causes. It would be fairer to expect journalists of, say, the The Guardian or the Washington Post to contemplate the relationship between language and thought if only because Western society harbours a deeper understanding of the healthcare system it originated, and exported to other parts of the world with its idiosyncrasies, and because native English speakers are likelier to properly understand the relationship between a word, its roots and its use in conversation.

On the other hand, non-native users of English – particularly non-fluent users – have no option but to use the words ‘case’, ‘burden’ and ‘infected’. The might actually prefer other words if:
- They knew that (and/or had to accommodate their readers’ pickiness for whether) the word they used meant more than what they thought it did, or
- They knew alternative words existed and were equally valid, or
- They could confidently differentiate between a technical term and its most historically, socially, culturally and/or technically appropriate synonym.
But as it happens, these conditions are seldom met. In India, English is mostly reserved for communication; it’s not the language of thought for most people, especially most journalists, and certainly doesn’t hold anything more than a shard of mirror-glass to our societies and their social attitudes as they pertain to jargon. So as such, pointing to a reporter and asking them to say ‘persons infected with coronavirus’ instead of ‘case’ will magically reveal neither the difference between ‘case’ or ‘infected’ the scientific terms and ‘case’ or ‘infected’ the pejoratives nor the negotiated relationship between the use of ‘case’ and dehumanisation. And without elucidating the full breadth of these relationships, there is no way either doctors or reporters are going to modify their language simply because they were asked to – nor will their doing so, on the off chance, strike at the real threats.

On the other hand, there is bound to be an equally valid problem in terms of those who know how ‘case’ and ‘infected’ can be misused and who regularly read news reports whose use of English may or may not intend to dehumanise. Considering the strong possibility that the author may not know they’re using dehumanising language and are unlikely to be persuaded to write differently, those in the know have a corresponding responsibility to accommodate what is typically a case of the unknown unknowns and not ignorance or incompetence, and almost surely not malice.

This is also why I said reporters and editors might be stressed by their readers, rather their perspectives, and not on count of their language.

A final point: Harsh Vardhan, the Union health minister and utterer of the words “The Italian man infected 16 Italians”, and Amit Shah belong to the same party – a party that has habitually dehumanised Muslims, Dalits and immigrants as part of its nationalistic, xenophobic and communal narratives. More recently, the same party from its place at the Centre suspected a prominent research lab of weaponising the Nipah virus with help from foreign funds, and used this far-fetched possibility as an excuse to terminate the lab’s FCRA license.

So when Vardhan says ‘infected’, I reflexively, and nervously, double-check his statement for signs of ambiguity. I’m also anxious that if more Italian nationals touring India are infected by SARS-CoV-2 and the public healthcare system slips up on control measures, a wave of anti-Italian sentiment could follow.
Mar 4, 2020
A new beginning

When The Wire was launched on May 11, 2015, we (the editors) decided to organise the site’s content within six principal categories: politics, political economy, foreign affairs, science, culture and law.

In the five years since, the Big Three categories — politics, political economy and foreign affairs — have come to dominate The Wire‘s identity as a digital news site, even as our science category has acquired a voice of its own and performed much better than we expected. And yet, given the crush of ‘conventional’ news, science has not been able to voice at its fullest on the crowded pages of The Wire.

To fix this issue as well as to give our science stories the freedom — and responsibility — to constitute their own publication (of sorts), we launched on February 28 The Wire Science as its own beast: https://science.thewire.in.

While we remain strapped for resources, we recognise that it’s a necessary step in the road to the top: an Indian independent, fully reader-funded, science news, analysis and commentary website. That said, we will begin populating the new site with shorter, longer and different types of stories that we can already afford and which now have the breathing room they need.

As always, please engage with The Wire Science, share the stories you like, comment and discuss on Twitter and Facebook, send your bouquets and brickbats to science at thewire dot in, and please donate (especially if you can). This is all we need for the trek. 🙂

Mar 1, 2020
Mad Mike: Foolish Road

On Sunday, an American thrill-seeker named Mike Hughes died after attempting to launch himself to an altitude of 5,000 feet on a homemade steam-powered rocket. A video of the accident is available because a crew of the Science Channel filmed the incident as part of a programme called ‘Homemade Astronauts’. On February 23, Science Channel tweeted condolences to his loved ones, and said Hughes had died trying to fulfil his dream. But in fact he had died for no reason at all.

Hughes believed Earth was flat and had hoped to ‘prove’ it by flying himself to space, which makes Science Channel’s conduct irresponsible if not entirely reckless. I assume here that the Science Channel knows Earth is an oblate spheroid in shape as well as knows how such knowledge was obtained. But it still decided to capitalise on the ignorance of another person, presumably in the names of objectivity and balance, and let them put themselves in danger (with airtime on the Science Channel as an incentive).

For his part, Hughes wasn’t very smart either: aside from thinking Earth is flat, he could never have proven, or disproven, his claim by flying to 5,000 feet. Millions of people routinely fly on airplanes that cruise at 35,000 feet and have access to windows. Even at this altitude, Earth’s curvature is not apparent because the field of view is not wide enough. Hughes likely would have had some success (or failure, depending on your PoV) if he had been able to reach, say, 40,000 feet on a cloud-free day.

But even then, the Kármán line – the region beyond which is denoted space – lies 328,000 feet up. So by flying to a height of 5,000 feet, Hughes was never going to be an astronaut in any sense of the term nor was he going to learn anything new, except of course finding new reasons to persist with his ignorance. On the other hand, a TV channel called ‘Science’ quite likely knew all this and let Hughes carry on anyway – instead of, say, taking him to a beach and asking him to watch ships rise as if from under the horizon.

Feb 25, 2020
The difficulty of option ‘c’

Can any journalist become a science journalist? More specifically, can any journalist become a science journalist without understanding the methods of scientific practice and administration? This is not a trivial question because not all the methods of science can be discovered or discerned from the corresponding ‘first principles’. That is, common sense and intelligence alone cannot consummate your transformation; you must access new information that you cannot derive through inductive reasoning.

For example, how would you treat the following statement: “Scientists prove that X causes Y”?

a. You could take the statement at face-value

b. You could probe how and why scientists proved that X causes Y

c. You could interrogate the claim that X causes Y, or

d. You could, of course, ignore it.

(Option (d) is the way to go for claims in the popular as well as scientific literature of the type “Scientists prove that coffee/wine/chocolate cause your heart to strengthen/weaken/etc.” unless the story you’re working on concerns the meta-narrative of these studies.)

Any way, choosing between (a), (b) and (c) is not easy, often because which option you pick depends on how much you know about how the modern scientific industry works. For example, a non-science journalist is likely to go with (a) and/or (b) because, first, they typically believe that the act of proving something is a singular event, localised in time and space, with no room for disagreement.

This is after all the picture of proof-making that ill-informed supporters of science (arguably more than even supporters of the ideal of scientism) harbour: “Scientists have proved that X causes Y, so that’s that,” in the service of silencing inconvenient claims like “human activities aren’t causing Earth’s surface to heat up” or like “climate geoengineering is bad”. I believe that anthropogenic global warming is real and that we need to consider stratospheric aerosol injections but flattening the proof-making exercise threatens to marginalise disagreements among scientists themselves, such as about the extent of warming or about the long-term effects on biodiversity.

The second reason (a) and (b) type stories are more common, but especially (a), follows from this perspective of proofs: the view that scientists are authorities, and we are not qualified to question them. As it happens, most of us will never be qualified enough, but question them we can thanks to four axioms.

First, science being deployed for the public good must be well understood in much the same way a drug that has been tested for efficacy must also be exculpated of deleterious side-effects.

Second, journalists don’t need to critique the choice of reagents, animal models, numerical methods or apparatus design to be able to uncover loopholes, inconsistencies and/or shortcomings. Instead, that oppositional role is easily performed by independent scientists whose comments a journalist can invite on the study.

Third, science is nothing without the humans that practice it, and most of the more accessible stories of science (not news reports) are really stories of the humans practising the science.

Fourth, organised science – hot take: like organised religion – is a human endeavour tied up with human structures, human politics and human foibles, which means as much of what we identify as science lies in the discovery of scientific knowledge as in the way we fund, organise, disseminate and preserve that knowledge.

These four allowances together imply that a science journalist is not a journalist familiar with advanced mathematics or who can perform a tricky experiment but is a journalist trained to write about science without requiring such knowledge.

§

Anyone familiar with India will recognise that these two principal barriers – a limited understanding of proof-making and the view of scientists as authority figures – to becoming a good science journalist are practically seeded by the inadequate school-level education system. But they are also furthered by India’s prevailing political climate, especially in the way a highly polarised society undermines the role of expertise.

Some people will tell you that you can’t question highly trained scientists because you are not a highly trained scientist but others will say you’re entitled to question everything as a thinking, reasoning, socially engaged global citizen.

As it happens, these aren’t opposing points of view. It’s just that the left and the right have broken the idea of expertise into two pieces, taking one each for themselves, such that the political left is often comfortable with questioning facts like grinding bricks to unusable dust while the political right will treat all bricks the same irrespective of the quality of clay; the leftist will subsequently insist that quality control is all-important whereas the rightist will champion the virtues of pragmatism.

In this fracas to deprive expertise either of authority or of critique, or sometimes both, the expert becomes deconstructed to the point of nonexistence. As a result, the effective performance of science journalism, instead of trying to pander equally to the left’s and the right’s respective conceptions of the expert, converges on the attempt to reconstruct expertise as it should be: interrogated without undermining it, considered without elevating it.

Obviously, this is easier said, and more enjoyably said, than done.

Feb 8, 2020
A trumpet for Ramdev

The Print published an article entitled ‘Ramdev’s Patanjali does a ‘first’, its Sanskrit paper makes it to international journal’ on February 5, 2020. Excerpt:

In a first, international science journal MDPI has published a research paper in the Sanskrit language. Yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s FMCG firm Patanjali Ayurveda had submitted the paper. Switzerland’s Basel-based MDPI … published a paper in Sanskrit for the first time. Biomolecules, one of the peer-reviewed journals under MDPI, has carried video abstracts of the paper on a medicinal herb, but with English subtitles. … The Patanjali research paper, published on 25 January in a special issue of the journal titled ‘Pharmacology of Medicinal Plants’, is on medicinal herb ‘Withania somnifera’, commonly known as ‘ashwagandha’.

This article is painfully flawed.

1. MDPI is a publisher, not a journal. It featured on Beall’s list (with the customary caveats) and has published some obviously problematic papers. I’ve heard good things about some of its titles and bad things about others. The journalist needed to have delineated this aspect instead of taking the simpler fact of publication in a journal at face value. Even then, qualifying a journal as “peer-reviewed” doesn’t cut it anymore. In a time when peer-review can be hacked (thanks to its relative opacity) and the whole publishing process subverted for profit, all journalists writing on matters of science – as opposed to just science journalists – need to perform their own checks to certify the genealogy of a published paper, especially if the name of the journal(s) and its exercise of peer-review are being employed in the narrative as markers of authority.

2. People want to publish research in English so others can discover and build on it. A paper written in Sanskrit is a gimmick. The journalist should have clarified this point instead of letting Ramdev’s minions (among the authors of the paper) claim brownie points for their feat. It’s a waste of effort, time and resources. More importantly The Print has conjured a virtue out of thin air and broadcast asinine claims like “This is the first step towards the acceptance of ‘Sanskrit language’ in the field of research among the international community.”

3. The article has zero critique of the paper’s findings, no independent comments and no information about the study’s experimental design. This is the sort of nonsense that an unquestioning commitment to objectivity in news allows: reporters can’t just write someone said something if what they said is wrong, misleading, harmful or all three. Magnifying potentially indefensible claims relating to scientific knowledge – or knowledge that desires the authority of science’s approval – without contextualising them and fact-checking them if necessary may be objective but it is also a public bad. It pays to work with the assumption (even when it doesn’t apply) that at least 50% of your readers don’t know better. That way, even if 1% (an extremely conservative estimate for audiences in India) doesn’t know better, which can easily run into the thousands, you avoid misinforming them by not communicating enough.

4. A worryingly tendentious statement appears in the middle of the piece: “The study proves that WS seeds help reduce psoriasis,” the journalist writes, without presenting any evidence that she checked. It seems possible that the journalist believes she is simply reporting the occurrence of a localised event – in the form of the context-limited proof published in a paper – without acknowledging that the act of proving a hypothesis is a process, not an event, in that it is ongoing. This character is somewhat agnostic of the certainty of the experiment’s conclusions as well: even if one scientist has established with 100% confidence that the experiment they designed has sustained their hypothesis and published their results in a legitimate preprint repository and/or a journal, other scientists will need to replicate the test and even others are likely to have questions they’ll need answered.

5. The experiment was conducted in mice, not humans. Cf. @justsaysinmice

6. “‘We will definitely monetise the findings. We will be using the findings to launch our own products under the cosmetics and medicine category,’ Acharya [the lead author] told ThePrint.” It’s worrying to discover that the authors of the paper, and Baba Ramdev, who funded them, plan to market a product based on just one study, in mice, in a possibly questionable paper, without any independent comments about the findings’ robustness or tenability, to many humans who may not know better. But the journalist hasn’t pressed Acharya or any of the other authors on questions about the experiment or their attempt to grab eyeballs by writing and speaking in Sanskrit, or on how they plan to convince the FSSAI to certify a product for humans based on a study in mice.

Feb 7, 2020
Another controversy, another round of blaming preprints

On February 1, Anand Ranganathan, the molecular biologist more popular as a columnist for Swarajya, amplified a new preprint paper from scientists at IIT Delhi that (purportedly) claims the Wuhan coronavirus’s (2019 nCoV’s) DNA appears to contain some genes also found in the human immunodeficiency virus but not in any other coronaviruses. Ranganathan also chose to magnify the preprint paper’s claim that the sequences’ presence was “non-fortuitous”.

To be fair, the IIT Delhi group did not properly qualify what they meant by the use of this term, but this wouldn’t exculpate Ranganathan and others who followed him: to first amplify with alarmist language a claim that did not deserve such treatment, and then, once he discovered his mistake, to wonder out loud about whether such “non-peer reviewed studies” about “fast-moving, in-public-eye domains” should be published before scientific journals have subjected them to peer-review.

https://twitter.com/ARanganathan72/status/1223444298034630656

https://twitter.com/ARanganathan72/status/1223446546328326144

https://twitter.com/ARanganathan72/status/1223463647143505920

The more conservative scientist is likely to find ample room here to revive the claim that preprint papers only promote shoddy journalism, and that preprint papers that are part of the biomedical literature should be abolished entirely. This is bullshit.

The ‘print’ in ‘preprint’ refers to the act of a traditional journal printing a paper for publication after peer-review. A paper is designated ‘preprint’ if it hasn’t undergone peer-review yet, even though it may or may not have been submitted to a scientific journal for consideration. To quote from an article championing the use of preprints during a medical emergency, by three of the six cofounders of medRxiv, the preprints repository for the biomedical literature:

The advantages of preprints are that scientists can post them rapidly and receive feedback from their peers quickly, sometimes almost instantaneously. They also keep other scientists informed about what their colleagues are doing and build on that work. Preprints are archived in a way that they can be referenced and will always be available online. As the science evolves, newer versions of the paper can be posted, with older historical versions remaining available, including any associated comments made on them.

In this regard, Ranganathan’s ringing the alarm bells (with language like “oh my god”) the first time he tweeted the link to the preprint paper without sufficiently evaluating the attendant science was his decision, and not prompted by the paper’s status as a preprint. Second, the bioRxiv preprint repository where the IIT Delhi document showed up has a comments section, and it was brimming with discussion within minutes of the paper being uploaded. More broadly, preprint repositories are equipped to accommodate peer-review. So if anyone had looked in the comments section before tweeting, they wouldn’t have had reason to jump the gun.

Third, and most important: peer-review is not fool-proof. Instead, it is a legacy method employed by scientific journals to filter legitimate from illegitimate research and, more recently, higher quality from lower quality research (using ‘quality’ from the journals’ oft-twisted points of view, not as an objective standard of any kind).

This framing supports three important takeaways from this little scandal.

A. Much like preprint repositories, peer-reviewed journals also regularly publish rubbish. (Axiomatically, just as conventional journals also regularly publish the outcomes of good science, so do preprint repositories; in the case of 2019 nCoV alone, bioRxiv, medRxiv and SSRN together published at least 30 legitimate and noteworthy research articles.) It is just that conventional scientific journals conduct the peer-review before publication and preprint repositories (and research-discussion platforms like PubPeer), after. And, in fact, conducting the review after allows it to be continuous process able to respond to new information, and not a one-time event that culminates with the act of printing the paper.

But notably, preprint repositories can recreate journals’ ability to closely control the review process and ensure only experts’ comments are in the fray by enrolling a team of voluntary curators. The arXiv preprint server has been successfully using a similar team to carefully eliminate manuscripts advancing pseudoscientific claims. So as such, it is easier to make sure people are familiar with the preprint and post-publication review paradigm than to take advantage of their confusion and call for preprint papers to be eliminated altogether.

B. Those who support the idea that preprint papers are dangerous, and argue that peer-review is a better way to protect against unsupported claims, are by proxy advocating for the persistence of a knowledge hegemony. Peer-review is opaque, sustained by unpaid and overworked labour, and dispenses the same function that an open discussion often does at larger scale and with greater transparency. Indeed, the transparency represents the most important difference: since peer-review has traditionally been the demesne of journals, supporting peer-review is tantamount to designating journals as the sole and unquestionable arbiters of what knowledge enters the public domain and what doesn’t.

(Here’s one example of how such gatekeeping can have tragic consequences for society.)

C. Given these safeguards and perspectives, and as I have written before, bad journalists and bad comments will be bad irrespective of the window through which an idea has presented itself in the public domain. There is a way to cover different types of stories, and the decision to abdicate one’s responsibility to think carefully about the implications of what one is writing can never have a causal relationship with the subject matter. The Times of India and the Daily Mail will continue to publicise every new paper discussing whatever coffee, chocolate and/or wine does to the heart, and The Hindu and The Wire Science will publicise research published in preprint papers because we know how to be careful and of the risks to protect ourselves against.

By extension, ‘reputable’ scientific journals that use pre-publication peer-review will continue to publish many papers that will someday be retracted.

An ongoing scandal concerning spider biologist Jonathan Pruitt offers a useful parable – that journals don’t always publish bad science due to wilful negligence or poor peer-review alone but that such failures still do well to highlight the shortcomings of the latter. A string of papers the work on which Pruitt led were found to contain implausible data in support of some significant conclusions. Dan Bolnick, the editor of The American Naturalist, which became the first journal to retract Pruitt’s papers that it had published, wrote on his blog on January 30:

I want to emphasise that regardless of the root cause of the data problems (error or intent), these people are victims who have been harmed by trusting data that they themselves did not generate. Having spent days sifting through these data files I can also attest to the fact that the suspect patterns are often non-obvious, so we should not be blaming these victims for failing to see something that requires significant effort to uncover by examining the data in ways that are not standard for any of this. … The associate editor [who Bolnick tasked with checking more of Pruitt’s papers] went as far back as digging into some of Pruitt’s PhD work, when he was a student with Susan Riechert at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Similar problems were identified in those data… Seeking an explanation, I [emailed and then called] his PhD mentor, Susan Riechert, to discuss the biology of the spiders, his data collection habits, and his integrity. She was shocked, and disturbed, and surprised. That someone who knew him so well for many years could be unaware of this problem (and its extent), highlights for me how reasonable it is that the rest of us could be caught unaware.

Why should we expect peer-review – or any kind of review, for that matter – to be better? The only thing we can do is be honest, transparent and reflexive.

Feb 1, 2020