Moth Eyes

Twitter love: #auteched #arc202

If you read my Twitter feed (and, let’s be honest, it’s not like I’ve put any effort into promoting it), you may have noticed that, last week, I was at Tech.Ed. Anyway, I’ve got notes on a number of the sessions and I figured I may as well post write them up in some sort of coherent format. Some sort of coherent format – I’m working from some fairly disconnected dot points here.

The first session will be Pimp My App, presented by Shane Morris.

The user experience of an application is defined not so much by the designers as by the developers and their time frames. The specification usually defines the features – and if the user experience is simply one line in the spec – “and it should be usable”, that will define how much attention it gets during development.

One trick that designers use is the “squint” test – you squint at the page, and see what draws your eye. This should, ideally, be what your users are supposed to find.

User experience design is not primarily about graphics – graphics can set the tone, but they are the last part of the UX design.

All user interface elements need to be processed by the user, so remove all unnecessary elements – it makes it easier for the user to understand the page. Unlike in school essays, variation should be limited – the more consistent the user interface is, the easier it will be for your users to deal with it.

How many colours should you use. Scott suggested this simple test: rate your graphic design skills on a scale of one to five. Now use that many colours. Background colours should be neutral colours – white, grey, black, navy, blue or brown are good choices. Cool colours appear to recede in the user’s vision, hot colours pop forward. One good way of adding colour is to pick new shades of the same colour. Another trick is to pick an image that expresses the right sort of feeling, and select colours from that.

Some useful sites for colour selection:

Kuler, ColourLovers

These allow you to select and search colour pallets. If you select “Create” it will allow you to upload an image and select colours from that, or from a base colour.

Vischeck

Vischeck shows your UI (or image) as it would be seen by a colour-blind user – a useful check to have.

Scott also suggested a simple test for how many fonts you should use. First, rate your graphic design skills on a scale of one to five. Now, use one font.

Alignments between document elements create relationships. This is a useful thing – but it’s no good if you create relationships between the wrong things.

There are several ways you can group elements besides groupboxes – proximity, similarity, alignment and even just by surrounding them with whitespace. You can add visual weight to an element with the use of colour, size, constrast, irregular shape, and misalignment.

This was a deservedly popular session – both the presenter and his content was great. I enjoyed it greatly and I’ve got to recommending watching Shane Morris give a talk if you ever get the chance.

Burhinus grallarius, photographed on Magnetic Island.

This is actually my first astronomy photo – I quite like how it turned out. Photographed in Canberra, 13 August 2010.

You can click to embiggen.

People often think of evolution as though natural selection were sitting around waiting for new mutations to promote or cull. But it’s not really like that. A great deal of variation exists in any population, much of which has little or no effect on the survival or reproductive success of individuals carrying that variation. However, a changing environment can alter all that.

Barrett et. al. (2010) were interested in how population of three-spine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) would respond to lower temperature extremes. They collected a sample of sticklebacks from both marine lagoons and freshwater lakes in British Columbia, Canada. First, they acclimated the fish to living in fresh water, as well at a consistent temperature and daylight length.

Lakes are far more variable in temperature than the oceans – they are warmer in summer and cooler in the winter – due to the smaller quantity of water which needs to gain or lose heat. Rather unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the lake-dwelling sticklebacks could tolerate significantly colder temperatures than their marine counterparts (both populations could tolerate much higher temperatures than they ever encountered in the environment). They also demonstrated that the degree of tolerance for cold extremes was heritable – even raised in the same environment, the offspring of lake-dwelling fish could tolerate lower temperatures, whereas marine sticklebacks could not (and hybrids were intermediate).

The interesting part, however, was when they got to raising populations of sticklebacks with marine ancestors in ponds, which could get even colder in the winter than the freshwater lakes. In just three generations (three years), the population evolved to tolerate temperatures 2.5°C colder than their marine forebears! This wouldn’t have been a new mutation – existing genes, already present (but perhaps rare) had become far more common in the population than they had previously been.

It wasn’t all good news for the sticklebacks, though. Genetic diversity is critical to maintaining populations, and a period of such strong natural selection will dramatically reduce a population’s diversity. Even if a population can adapt to one sudden shock, it may so deplete their genetic diversity that there won’t be any convenient alternative genes in the population when the next hit comes.

The next year brought the coldest winter that part of Canada had seen for several decades, and despite all their adaptations, all three of the experimental populations were wiped out. It may be that it was just too cold, or perhaps the increased ice cover on the ponds reduced the oxygen levels in the water to below what the fish needed. Either way, it’s a grim prospect for conservation biologists if a population that seems, by all accounts, to be surviving and even adapting to the changes in its environment can suddenly hit an unpassable barrier and go extinct.

Sticklebacks have a history of being able to adapt to significantly changing temperatures over the last few millennia, and so they may have had an advantage in having genes for dealing with a changing climate already present in their populations. That may not be the case for all species, and this study has shown just how drastic effect a change in temperature extremes can have on populations.

References

Barrett, R., Paccard, A., Healy, T., Bergek, S., Schulte, P., Schluter, D., & Rogers, S. (2010). Rapid evolution of cold tolerance in stickleback Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0923

Tom Nelson has made an amazing discovery, sure to shock the scientific and mathematical worlds!

Apparently, if you look at a bunch of different numbers, some of them are higher than average! Shock! Someone alert the statistics community, they’ve got to know about this! Of course it would be copied onto WUWT and Climate Depot. Is there any notion of quality control on those sites?

Here’s a map (from NASA’s GISS). The average, as you can see, is an anomaly of 0.51°C. You’ll notice that some regions have a larger anomaly than this, they’re coloured orange, red and dark red (as well as probably most of the medium-orange ones). Those regions are warming faster than average. The others aren’t.

Oh, and part of Nelson’s post is a link to a completely off-topic post on Mars on the website of some scumbag.

It’s difficult to protect large marine areas from fishing – a great deal of resources must be put into patrolling and enforcing such an area. However, new research suggests that small but well-targetted protection zones can have a significant effect all the way up the food chain.

African Penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are a vulnerable species of penguin restricted to South Africa. They are threatened by human activities, such as egg collection and oil spills. Their population dropped by about 90% in the 20^th Century, and has continued to drop since. There are now fewer than 26,000 breeding pairs.

Top predators, such as these penguins, are important members of an ecosystem, and removing them from an environment can ripple throughout the web in drastic ways. Pichegru et. al. (2010) looks at the effects of a small no-take zone around a penguin colony has on the success of the colony, comparing it with another nearby colony which did not get a protected zone. They measured the duration and length of their hunting trips, diving time and dive depth to calculate the effort expended by the penguins in finding food.

Over just three months, the protection had a substantial effect on the penguins. Overall, the penguins in the protected zone spent less time hunting, travelled shorter distances and stayed closer to the colony, reducing their effort spent foraging effort by 25-30%. This meant that they were able to spend an extra 5 hours each day on their eggs. They also shifted their hunting patterns – before the protected zone was created, they foraged in it about a quarter of the time, but by the end of the study they were doing over 70% of their hunting inside the zone.

It is interesting that the penguins in the control colony lost weight and spent longer foraging during the study period. It’s possible that protecting the one area shifted more of human fishing into the area around the other island. However, the positive effects on the protected colony far outweighed the negatives on the control island, and in any case the fishing wouldn’t all be shifted to the other colony. This study also didn’t look at what effects the protection may have had on the breeding or survival of the penguins – which, of course, is an important question.

References

Pichegru, L., Gremillet, D., Crawford, R., & Ryan, P. (2010). Marine no-take zone rapidly benefits endangered penguin Biology Letters, 6 (4), 498-501 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0913

Earlier, Watt’s Up With That posted an article entitled “Climate Skepticism Could Soon Be a Criminal Offence in UK”. No, don’t go looking for it, it’s been disappeared down the memory hole. Roughly, the chairman of the far-right British Nationalist Party claimed that the EU was planning to make climate change denialism a crime. Now, sure, were it true, that would be wrong, but there’s absolutely no actual evidence of that and the BNP has a reputation for saying some pretty crazy things. After a few people pointed out that the source for the story was entirely unreliable, the story was deleted sometime in the night.

The trouble with a complete lack of skepticism is that you tend to believe some pretty stupid things. When these sorts of things are disputed, wouldn’t it be more honest to post a retraction, rather than just pretending it didn’t exist?

But don’t worry, it’s still being promoted by Marc Morano on Climate Depot, from whence it’s being copied around the internet.

Cassiel is a set of utilities for the online game Utopia, incorporating a T/M operation formatter and a science calculator.

It’s licensed under the GPL. You can download it from cassiel.motheyes.com.

Intelligent design proponent (and young earth creationist) David Tyler has a post on the ARN blog about a fossil pelican’s beak. The short version is that it seems that there was a pelican with a beak similar to that of a modern pelican flying around 30 million years ago.

The gist of David’s argument is this:

What we are seeing here is a particular type of stasis, and it concerns complexity. Much diversification has little or no effect on complexity and examples of diversification therefore have little or no bearing on the origin of complexity. The pelican beak, however, is not just a big beak! There are numerous coordinated elements that have to be present for the beak to function at all. The fossil find is important because the earliest fossil of a pelican exhibits the full functionality of the modern birds. As far as the known fossil record is concerned, complexity was present – before the radiation of the Pelecanidae.

Over 65 millions ago there were dinosaurs. Many of them were fairly complex. It’s hardly surprising that there were complex things a mere 30 million years ago. Unless he’s basing the argument off Lord Kelvin’s estimate of the age of the Earth, there’s really nothing more there.

Evidently, the pelican beak in much its current form at least 30 million years ago. This fossil puts pelican beak evolution back at least that far, and there is certainly an interesting question as to why it hasn’t changed in that time. But it is not evidence that the pelican beak did not evolve.

Yes, this makes stasis in the pelican beak intriguing and it means that Darwinism has nothing to offer by way of an explanation. New explanations should include the options opened up by intelligent design.

I can only wonder what those options might be.

Petrogale assimilis, photographed on Magnetic Island.