Internet sleuths

Image from "The amateur detectives tackling murders and kidnaps," BBC

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Somewhere I picked up the term internet sleuth. I thought it was in a TIME Magazine article by reviewer Daniel D'Addario writing about The Hidden Danger of Making a Murderer and Other True Crime Entertainment. But it seems I'm wrong, 'cause it's not there, online at least.

But the concept is fascinating: using your computer and the records available through the internet to solve mysteries. The goal is often finding missing persons and solving cold cases.

Two sites stand out: Internet Sleuth, a repository of links to information on airports, phonebooks, death records, to name a few of the categories; and Websleuths, a forum for sleuths and would-be sleuths. To delve into the information offered by Internet Sleuth, check out the How do I... page. To learn about and assist with informal (not official) investigations on Websleuths, sign up and verify. Note that Websleuths recognizes Professional Posters & Verified Insiders. There seems to be a lot of health care professionals and lawyers; the reporters and private investigators seem to me a given. Pursuit Magazine has an interesting article on Locating Mobile Phones through Pinging and Triangulation.

Also helpful for sleuthing are meta search engines. SocioSite, based in Amsterdam, offers three--Dogpile, Metacrawler, and SavvySearch--plus interfaces for other tools.

If you wonder whether relatively untrained investigators can be helpful in investigations where they have no official role, take a look at this collection of headlines: The amateur detectives tackling murders and kidnaps (BBC); How Internet sleuths on Facebook and Reddit solved the 20-year-old mystery of a missing teenager (Washington Post); and Internet sleuths are furiously trying to find out who made an ominous viral video (Washington Post).

To check out the mechanics of sleuthing, I picked out the name of someone missing at random---Palmgren, Gail Nowacki--at Websleuths. In respect for Gail's family I won't publish here all the details of my search. But following leads and ferreting out information is definitely absorbing.

Happy hunting to you, Sleuths.

-- Marge

LSD news

thisisvegas, This cat.., reddit 

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This is just in from the Alchemist Newsletter, a ChemWeb publication--Wondrous, tender music:

New research into the hallucinogenic drug, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, could help explain why music gives us the tingles and makes us emotional. There is renewed interest from medical science into the mode of action of LSD as well as its potential therapeutic effects. This coupled with its infamous use by musicians and other artists, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, led to a placebo-controlled study that looked at whether or not LSD enhances the emotional response to instrumental music. In a preliminary study with a small group of volunteers, LSD was found to boost emotions such as "wonder", "transcendence", "power" and "tenderness", according to a team from Imperial College London writing in the journal Psychopharmacology (Berl) in August this year. 

Reports on this study are in The Atlantic, Seeing Opportunity in Psychedelic Drugs, and The Guardian, Psychedelic drugs like LSD could be used to treat depression, study suggests. The team at Imperial College London reports New study discovers biological basis for magic mushroom 'mind expansion'.

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LSD illustration, Imperial College London

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For a more traditional view of LSD, check out the Wikipedia article, Lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD is a controlled substance in the U.S; HowStuffWorks explains what that means. The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has published a fact sheet on LSD (PDF format).

Disclaimer: Please don't take this post as an encouragement to experiment with LSD. This writer is simply offering information.

-- Marge

Science: ancient soundscapes

Lanzon Gallery at Chavin, Physics Today

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This headline, "Uncanny acoustics at a Peruvian archaeological site," at AIP's Physics Today caught my attention because it's unusual to hear a scientist use the word uncanny.

According to Encyclopedia Brittanica architectural acoustics is known to have been studied and applied for 2000 years. Miriam Kolar's research as part of the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics Project has pushed the knowledge envelope back a thousand years. Similar research has been done at Stonehenge. In fact you can purchase apps for Apple and Android in which reproduce conditions there.

Below is a video illustrating the sound dynamics of Stonehenge, posted by Rupert Till.

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Returning to the Peruvian archaeological site, Kolar describes the effects of the chamber:

Present-day pututu musicians playing in the narrow, stone-lined corridors, alcoves, and rooms of Chavín have reported sensing their instruments “pulled into tune,” almost as if an unseen presence were guiding their playing. If two musicians blow on their shell horns close together, they may sense their instruments coming into sync with each other. What could account for that seeming phantom force?

While playing a shell horn, a musician’s lips vibrate in sync with the oscillations of the air in the shell’s spiraled interior. A player can modify the instrument’s tone by increasing the frequency of his or her lip vibrations, changing the shape of the air column inside the instrument by inserting a hand in the shell’s opening, or changing the shape of the vocal tracts. Those actions are all intuitive performance techniques.

Kolar explained that the small, enclosed spaces inside Chavín’s massive stone buildings have strong naturally occurring resonance frequencies, which can couple with the resonance of the pututu and the musician’s own lips and vocal tract. The acoustic coupling guides the musician and the instrument into a matching sound with the room. Both musician and listeners sense the eerie effect.

This is an ancient pututu. Note that it's modelled after a large conch shell.

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Chavin pututus, Stanford Chavín de Huántar project

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Acoustic couplers like the one below were used in the early days of using modems to connect to a network. And resonance is a powerful effect, known to bring down bridges.

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Acoustic Coupler, Wikimedia

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--Marge

DIY: research

Science, Chemical Engineering News

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With the internet at our beck and call, almost any question that comes to mind can be answered simply by opening a web browser and googling it.  But knowing which answer is true and which is someone's attempt to spread unsubstantiated claims and/or pet theories can be a challenge.

University libraries and educational systems seem to be particularly sensitive to the reliability of information.  Two good references on how to verify whether the information you've found is reliable are the McGraw Hill Higher Education and Georgia Mason University pages.

Often we use the web to diagnose a health problem. Medical News Today talks about "Dr Google And The Unwise Practice Of Self-Diagnosis." On the other hand researching medical diagnoses given by a doctor, especially one for a serious disease is probably a must. This article at Johns Hopkins in an eye-opener: "Diagnostic Errors More Common, Costly And Harmful Than Treatment Mistakes." A good rule of thumb would be to search on the disease name and, if the condition is serious, find a support group or forum.

What about finding out what to do about your newly replaced faucet cartridge that has reversed hot and cold? Again forums are a good resource. Google your question with simple terms.  If the links that come up don't address the issue, reword your query until you get something meaningful.  It may take several tries to get to an answer that appears useful. Usually you don't have to sign up for a forum to just read the threads. This method is useful for troubleshooting computer problems, too.

And then there is 'real' research. Most often the hard sciences require a laboratory or place to carry out experiments. A garage will often do; and the internet is very useful for finding out about equipment, what's been done, and where to buy supplies and equipment.

Science requires method to get repeatable results, but most of all it requires a firm understanding of current scientific theory that applies to your area of interest.  So back to the internet to gather and digest information on what you will be working on.

As for research techniques in geneal, WiseGEEK has some good information. There are two types of research, basic and applied. Another set of terms you may encounter are qualitative vs. quantitative. Generally, qualitative indicates a verbal analysis or report; quantitative a numerical analysis or report. Online I'm seeing these terms applied mostly to the sociological and psychological fields.

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Aiden Yeh, Formal research process, Slideshare

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For an overview of scientific frontiers being challenged today and where we earthlings may be headed, take a look at this video featuring physicist Michio Kaku, posted by Big Think.

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-- Marge

The black box in the corner

After a survey of what's happening with photovoltaic power stations and grid energy storage (you can find a list of large-scale photovoltaic power plants currently in operation at the Sun Energy site), I ended up back at cold fusion, the black box.

While still as unpopular as ever, the topic has acquired some new variants, such as muon-catalyzed fusion which, according to Wikipedia is "is well established, real, and repeatable."  Also, there's pyroelectric fusion and a polywell.

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Polywell WB-6 model assembled, Wikipedia

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One of the problems with cold fusion was the inability of independent labs to repeat the original experiment, as the Wikipedia article on cold fusion states:

Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts.

However the U.S. Navy persisted with its own work, zeroing in on the low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) and chemically-assisted nuclear reaction (CANR) aspects of cold fusion.

According to an article at Phys.org (March, 2009), there may be a "'Cold fusion rebirth."  Quoting the article:

Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.

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An experimental "cold fusion" device produced this pattern of "triple tracks" (shown at right), which scientists say is caused by high-energy nuclear particles resulting from a nuclear reaction Credit: Pam Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), phys.org

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For reference three sites offer current information:  Cold Fusion Times, Cold Fusion Now, and LENR - Cold Fusion.  There's also an interesting article at ExtremeTech (a number of comments say too good to be true).

-- Marge

Online art magazines revisited

A while back I came across a reference to Juxtapoz magazine which describes itself as the "Online version of the leading monthly contemporary and underground art bible..."  Being of the curious sort, I surfed on over and took a look.  It has an interesting array of topics available -- Videos, Illustration, Erotica, Street Art, Tattoo, Graffiti, and Music -- to name some.  I'd show you some samples of what I found but the popup ads for vodka were too insistent to read any of the content.  Apparently the original Juxtapoz, which was started by a group of artists, has been "acquired" by Complex Media, an extensive network of vodka-dominated sites geared for 20-something males. Moving on....

There are many magazines related to art online.  For a list to use for exploring, try this link.  The ones that looked most useful to me are the following.

The Art Newspaper where you will find information on recent shows. One piece shown this year at the Sydney Biennale was an interactive one, described thus:

Philip Beesley’s “Sibyl”, 2012, is a magical multi-media installation which responds to visitors’ touch with flapping feathers, lighting bulbs, and inflating balloons. Inspired by the Greek concept of “hylozoism”, the belief that all matter has life, the work consists of a system of interconnected mechanisms recalling a human neural system

Artist Beesley explains his concept of hylozoism and it is demonstrated in the video below.  It seems to me most interesting that he is using his art as a precursor to architectural innovation.

Absolute Arts appears to be mostly a site for selling artwork, but there are some features useful to artists, as well.  (Face it: galleries are a necessary evil for the artist who would like to eat and have a warm place to live.  They take a large percentage of the sale price.)  Artist portfolios are hosted and the art patron/collector can find news on latest art trends.  Here's a piece by Cheryl Hrudka titled "5276 Self Portrait" (2012).

Art News presents all kinds of information about art; the main categories are new, investigations, features, trends, profiles, market, looking at art, reviews, and books.  Here's the headline for one of the articles:

Charting a New Course

By William D. Cohan Posted 09/06/12

Under the leadership of its founder’s son, Vienna’s Leopold Museum is attempting to identify potential war loot in its collection 

 I'm closing with a quote that has been coming to mind a lot lately:

Research means going out into the unknown with the hope of finding something new to bring home. If you know in advance what you are going to do or even find there, then it is not research at all; then it is only a kind of honorable occupation. 

--Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

-- Marge