In the latest edition of Marine Mammal Science a team from the University of Queensland published a paper outlining an explanation of the much observed and highly spectacular “breaching” behaviour.
Paper: Evidence for the functions of surface-active behaviors in humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)
As part of their social sound repertoire, migrating humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) perform a large variety of surface-active behaviors, such as breaching and repetitive slapping of the pectoral fins and tail flukes; however, little is known about what factors influence these behaviors and what their functions might be. We investigated the potential functions of surface-active behaviors in humpback whale groups by examining the social and environmental contexts in which they occurred…
…Involvement in group interactions, such as the splitting of a group or a group joining with other whales, was an important factor in predicting the occurrence of pectoral, fluke, and peduncle slapping, and we suggest that they play a role in close-range or within-group communication.
The good news: child mortality has fallen in every single country over the past few decades. 4 million fewer children died before their fifth birthday in 2015 than in the year 2000.
despite remarkable progress in the improvement of child survival between 1990 and 2015, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 target of a two-thirds reduction of under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) was not achieved globally.
In other words, more than 60% of the world’s child deaths occur in just 10 countries…
According to the WEF, the world has made enormous strides in reducing child deaths, cutting the under-five mortality rate by more than half (53%) between 1990 and 2015. But there’s still much more to be done, and this achievement fell short of the Millennium Development Goal target of cutting the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds.
Estimates suggest that 5.9 million children under five died last year, including 2.7 million newborns. More than 60% of these deaths happened in just 10 countries in Africa and Asia: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, China, Angola, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.
I recently [briefly] participated in a planning session and debate [through my WhaleSongServices consultancy business ] with an ex-colleague and some of his senior/executive staff regarding particular public policy challenges for a Government Department in the near to medium term [5-10 years] and the broader strategic needs of their planning.
We [again briefly] touched on the concept within public debate of “balance” and “both sides” of the story. False equivalence, is in my view, the scourge of public discourse, but it sure sells papers/improves ratings. The rise, of what Barry Jones called many years ago, “managerialism” in public policy, further deadens policy progress in to ‘binary’ decisions that create philosophical and programmatic “trench-warfare”. We find many who wish to find “balance” where there is none, or perhaps are happy with simply being in the trench…
This most certainly does nothing for those in need of sound and strategic public policy [ all of us ].
This exchange made me reflect that if there was only one word a teacher could use in any classroom, if there was only one word I could teach any student or my own children, it would be consilience.
Agreement between the approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities.
In other words, multiple, independent, verifiable converging views.
Consider the National Review. The editors describe the National Review as “America’s most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion”
In December 2015, The US National review highlighted [at best] their own flawed methodologies or [at worst] an intentional, untruthful re-adjustment of selective data to support a pre-defined position when they posted on twitter a seemingly straightforward contribution about Climate Change. They said:
The same graph with the Y-axis corrected for scale from Scripps.
[Source: NOAA ]
But what about the Y-Axis?
Yes, anyone that has been through a high-school class of statistics, will probably remember the “Lies, damn lies and statistics” approach that many [most?] teachers seem to take. Right at the top of the “hit-list” is the suspicion drummed into students when someone presents a chart that has a “compressed” Y-Axis. This is, in many circumstances, a valid cause for review, certainly suspicion, if the publisher is unaware that the axis has been compressed.
Sometimes, starting the Y-axis at zero is the BEST way to lie with statistics
Vox.com journalists were so fed-up with the ‘blow-back’ they received whenever they posted a chart with a compressed y-axis, they responded in the way they know best.
Consilience
…but wait, there’s more..
Perhaps the National Review should consider a reconstructed graph going back 2000 years? Proxy measurements can be used to reconstruct the temperature record before the historical period.
From these, proxy temperature reconstructions of the last 2000 years have been performed for the northern hemisphere, and over shorter time scales for the southern hemisphere and tropics [Source: Wikipedia]
Brooke Gladstone [ @OTMBrooke ] and Bob Garfield [ @Bobosphere ] from the ever-valuable and always erudite On-the-media from WNYC in the United States made two excellent contributions to the debate about false equivalence and media reporting in their pieces:
Human-created noise has increased steadily in recent decades and getting these first recordings allows scientists in the future to determine if the noise levels are growing and how this might affect marine animals that use sound to communicate, navigate and feed, such as whales, dolphins and fish.
Challenger Deep is a valley inside the Mariana trench, seven miles below the surface of the ocean. If Mount Everest was placed inside Challenger Deep, the mountain’s peak would still be a mile underwater.
That’s deep…
I am reminded of the work of esteemed American marine biologist, Roger Payne, [producer of the famed Songs of the Humpback Whale] who found in the 1960’s that the great whales of the world ‘enjoyed’ a global communication network for tens of thousand of years, gaining the benefit of a “deep sound channel in the ocean”, a combination of thermal layers and currents that allowed these whales to transmit their ‘songs’ at a wavelength of 20hz over incredible distances to communicate with whales in other oceans.
There’s nothing like evidenced-based public policy…
News that the CSIRO plan to cut over 100 jobs from the agency’s climate science staff.
Wide-spread opinion fears cuts to the CSIRO’s climate modelling and measuring research will breach Australia’s obligations under the recent Paris agreement and will result in huge costs to the economy. News reports here, here, here, here and here .
Duke University [in the US] has announced that a first draft of the “tree of life” for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes — from platypuses to puffballs — has been released.
A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.
Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life — some containing upwards of 100,000 species — but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life. The end result is a digital resource that available free online for anyone to use or edit, much like a “Wikipedia” for evolutionary trees.
“This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together,” said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University. “Think of it as Version 1.0.”
[ Source: http://www.opentreeoflife.org ]The current version of the tree — along with the underlying data and source code — is available to browse and download at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org
Teachers teaching misconceptions: a study of factors contributing to (US) high school biology students’ acquisition of biological evolution-related misconceptions
Research has revealed that high school students matriculate to college holding misconceptions related to biological evolution. These misconceptions interfere with students’ abilities to grasp accurate scientific explanations and serve as fundamental barriers to understanding evolution. Because the scientific community regards evolution as a vital part of science education, it is imperative that students’ misconceptions are identified and their sources revealed.
The purpose of this study was to identify the types and prevalence of biological evolution-related misconceptions held by high school biology teachers and their students, and to identify those factors that contribute to student acquisition of such misconceptions, with particular emphasis given to the role of the teacher.
Stanford Professor Andrei Linde [known as the father of inflation] is given the news that his life’s-work appears to be confirmed by the BICEP2 experiment based at the south-pole and his first reaction is.. “if it is true……” “do I believe just because it is beautiful?”
