national geographic - Tag Archive

To Die for Science

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

This week the weather has been pretty wild here in the USA, with dozens of people killed by tornados in the Oklahoma area. One of those killed is world renowned scientist Tim Samaras. He was killed alongside his son Paul and research assistant Carl Young as they were doing their rather dangerous job.

The Samaras Team

The Samaras Team, Tim, Paul and Carl Young

Samaras was a Severe Storms researcher, much of his funding coming from the National Geographic magazine. He might have just seemed like a storm geek to some, but his pioneering work has helped us to predict and understand these types of storms a lot better.

He and his team worked for decades on how to predict where and when tornados would form, so that they could race to the spot and leave their battery of measuring and photography equipment inside the storm.

They developed a probe that took measurements within the tornado itself, helping forecasters to determine where storms may form and to give warnings to people living in its path. The new generation of this probe measures pressure drops within tornadoes, the very cause of the high winds that characterize these storms, alongside other data that can be used to determine the destructive capability of the storm.

The team has also pioneered storm photography, devising a high speed series of cameras that can take pictures from different angles inside the storm. His photography work around lightening has helped to push scientific understanding of the phenomena.

These were not some reckless guys driving around looking for danger as some might think, Samaras was a scientist, a meteorologist, an adventurer and an engineer. His team were experts in their field, highly educated and determined, and they will be sadly missed within their community.

Their approach seems to hark back to a day of science pioneers, Marie Curie dying of radiation sickness through her work on radiation therapy, or Jean-Francois De Rozier, the first ever air crash death as his balloon crashed to the ground in 1783.

The fruits of their research live on today though, as will those of Samaras and his team.

For more information about their work look up their TWISTEX Facebook page.

Are user generated reviews reliable?

18 Replies Jonny Hankins

The current March to April issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine has an article about user generated reviews that raises some interesting issues. I looked at the commercial invasion of the blogging world in one of my previous posts, but here author Christopher Elliott raises the issue of interested parties posting positive comments about their own businesses and negative ones about others, raising their star status and damaging others.

I was particularly drawn to this article because it addresses a problem faced by frequent travelers, and having spent a couple of years all in all on the road with all of my worldly belongings on my back I can relate to the problem.

Local offering help to lost travellers

Ask a local for advice and he looks it up on his iPhone

When you are out there alone, who better to ask for advice than fellow travelers? Many look to the internet for recommendation, and here lies the problem, lack of competition. There are really only 2 large websites of reference, Yelp and Travel Advisor, so it is relatively easy to either build up a profile or destroy somebody else’s using different user names and computers.

Within the industry an understanding of the problem is widespread, and both companies named above defend their positions stating that they have vetting procedures to catch out the bogus reviewers. It is very telling however that after a British Advertising Standards Agency investigation, Trip Advisor changed its slogan from “reviews you can trust” to “reviews from our community”, the implications are obvious.

The broader implications are vast too, many people read reviews before choosing a dentist or a school for their kids, and a bit of underhand behaviour could easily destroy somebody’s reputation.

My personal opinion is that these problems are representative of wider issues of internet governance. They are essentially born out of monopoly, the democratizing power of the internet and peer to peer communication usurped by business interests and competition. An infiltration of commercial interest into a non commercial ideology, that of offering advice to someone who finds themselves in a position that you were once in, becomes unreliable.