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“Not peer-reviewed” but it seems to work – A new green revolution underway in Bihar

February 17, 2013

The System of Rice Intensification was discovered almost by accident in 1983-84 in Madagascar by the French Jesuit Father Henri de Laulanié. It is a system of managing crops and is not based on fertilisers or insecticides or new gene modifications. As such it does not give rise to a huge number of supposedly “peer-reviewed” publications. Politically correct “scientists” are not keen to accept the benefits of SRI since it is not a   “science”.

Father de Laulanié died in 1995 but SRI has spread globally largely due to the efforts of Norman Uphoff and the International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

SRI field

SRI field wikipedia

Father Laulanié’s unpublished paper from 1992 is here: Laulanie SRI unpublished

This System of Rice Intensification was discovered almost by accident in 1983-84. Due to a lack of time for letting rice seedlings grow for 30 days before being transplanted, students in a farm school at Antsirabe (1,500 meters a.s.l.) were obliged to use their very small nursery twice within a month. ….. Such was the beginning of the System of Rice Intensification.

But now some 3 decades after it was discovered SRI seems to be having a quite dramatic effect in the State of Bihar in India and rice yields have risen by a factor of 2 – 4. So much so that it is being called India’s secod “green revolution”. For Bihar and Chattisgarh – which have long had to put up with being labelled India’s least developed States – SRI is part of a new vigorous and  unexpected growth.

India Today: Bihar’s resurgence begins at the grassroots level. For many years, villages in Bihar saw their youths migrating to other states in large numbers in search of livelihood. It was left to the minuscule minority of do-gooders to stay back and contribute their mite towards a silent agricultural revolution in the state. 

Leading the pack of achievers are five young and doughty farmers from Darveshpura village from Nalanda district who recently created a new world record in paddy cultivation. Sumant Kumar had a bumper yield of 224 quintal per hectare which was enough to eclipse the world record set by a Chinese farm scientist Yuan Longping. Four of his friends from the same village – Krishna Kumar, Nitish Kumar, Ramanand Singh and Sanjay Kumar – also had extraordinary produce.

The achievements in Bihar and Chattishgarh are begining to attract international attention much to the chagrin of the International Rice Research Institute which does not like to acknowledge any advance which does not originate with them. Low tech solutions just aren’t sexy enough to attract funding especially when no large corporation will make any extra profit on new, expensive, high-tech products.
The Guardian: Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually managed. …. This was not six or even 10 or 20 tonnes. Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India’s poorest state Bihar, had – using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides – grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare of land. This was a world record and with rice the staple food of more than half the world’s population of seven billion, big news. 
…… It beat not just the 19.4 tonnes achieved by the “father of rice”, the Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, but the World Bank-funded scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and anything achieved by the biggest European and American seed and GM companies. ….
……. That might have been the end of the story had Sumant’s friend Nitish not smashed the world record for growing potatoes six months later. Shortly after Ravindra Kumar, a small farmer from a nearby Bihari village, broke the Indian record for growing wheat. ….
…. What happened in Darveshpura has divided scientists and is exciting governments and development experts. Tests on the soil show it is particularly rich in silicon but the reason for the “super yields” is entirely down to a method of growing crops called System of Root Intensification (SRI). It has dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops and is being hailed as one of the most significant developments of the past 50 years for the world’s 500 million small-scale farmers and the two billion people who depend on them. ……  While the “green revolution” that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. ….
…… In its early days, SRI was dismissed or vilified by donors and scientists but in the past few years it has gained credibility…..
Low -tech crop management does not lead to a splurge of publications, corporate funding or scientific career advancement. It does not offer the chance for developing new high-tech plants or fertilisers or insecticides. In modern “science”- it would seem – being “peer-reviewed” is more important than being real!
…. The state will invest $50m in SRI next year but western governments and foundations are holding back, preferring to invest in hi-tech research. The agronomist Anil Verma does not understand why: “The farmers know SRI works, but help is needed to train them. We know it works differently in different soils but the principles are solid,” he says. “The biggest problem we have is that people want to do it but we do not have enough trainers.“If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat.”

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI)

was developed as a methodology aimed at increasing the yield of rice produced in irrigated farming without relying on purchased inputs. Its main elements were assembled in 1983 by the French Jesuit Father Henri de Laulanié in Madagascar after 20 years of observation and experimentation.[1] However, systematic evaluation and then dissemination of the system did not occur until some 10-20 years later. The productivity and merits of SRI have been debated between supporters and critics of the system since 2004, but the controversy has waned in recent years.

SRI concepts and practices have continued to evolve as they are being adapted to rain-fed (unirrigated) conditions and with transplanting being superseded sometimes by direct-seeding. Regarding the management of rice plants, the basic practices of SRI according to SRI-Rice at Cornell University are:

  • Rice plant seedlings should be transplanted very young (usually just 8-12 days old) with just two small leaves
  • Seedlings should be transplanted carefully and quickly to inflict minimum trauma on the roots
  • Seedlings should be transplanted singly, with only one per hill instead of 3-4 together to minimize root competition
  • Seedlings should be widely spaced to encourage greater root and canopy growth
  • Seedlings should be transplanted in a square grid pattern (25×25 cm, or wider in good quality soil)

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Altruism among plants? or do they mean nepotism?

February 2, 2013

There is a suggestion that plants can be “altruistic”  but requires a rather curious definition of altruism as being only when the benefactor is related to the beneficiary. I would have thought that this was a case of nepotism among plants rather than altruism. It does not mirror the altruism observed among animals which are not related.

The research may be fine for all I know but the press release hypes a minor finding and the subsequent publicity is weird.

Colorado University Press Release:

… a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests some plants are altruistic too.

The researchers looked at corn, in which each fertilized seed contained two “siblings” — an embryo and a corresponding bit of tissue known as endosperm that feeds the embryo as the seed grows, said CU-Boulder Professor Pamela Diggle. They compared the growth and behavior of the embryos and endosperm in seeds sharing the same mother and father with the growth and behavior of embryos and endosperm that had genetically different parents.

“The results indicated embryos with the same mother and father as the endosperm in their seed weighed significantly more than embryos with the same mother but a different father,” said Diggle, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “We found that endosperm that does not share the same father as the embryo does not hand over as much food — it appears to be acting less cooperatively.”

A paper on the subject was published during the week of Jan. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the study included Chi-Chih Wu, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department and Professor William “Ned” Friedman, a professor at Harvard University who helped conduct research on the project while a faculty member at CU-Boulder.

Diggle said it is fairly clear from previous research that plants can preferentially withhold nutrients from inferior offspring when resources are limited. “Our study is the first to specifically test the idea of cooperation among siblings in plants.”

“One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives,” said Friedman. “Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary. When the endosperm gives all of its food to the embryo and then dies, it doesn’t get more altruistic than that.”

Science Daily merely reproduces the press release: Some Plants Are Altruistic, Too, New Study Suggests

 

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Shocking gender inequality in scientific misconduct

January 22, 2013

Apparently men are more likely than women to commit scientific fraud according to a new study. Of course the study only deals with misconduct and frauds that have been found out.

Important areas that the study does not address are – for example – :

  1. Whether women are being denied the same opportunities to cheat that their males colleagues obviously have and if so how this can be rectified, or
  2. Whether women cheat as much as men but are better able to conceal their misconduct and avoid being found out and if so what training or ability their male colleagues lack, or
  3. Whether this behaviour is due to the more aggressive nature of the male species and whether all male research should be subjected to greater scrutiny.

Whatever the reasons this kind of gender inequality should not to be tolerated in a modern society. Further study is clearly needed and I think there is plenty of room here for a number of PhD theses in social psychology. That is not to say that immediate actions to promote gender equality should be delayed. For a start quotas for women found to be committing misconduct could be introduced at all research institutions.

Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females and the fraud occurs across the career spectrum, from trainees to senior faculty. The analysis of professional misconduct was co-led by a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and was published today in the online journal mBio.

“The fact that misconduct occurs across all stages of career development suggests that attention to ethical aspects of scientific conduct should not be limited to those in training, as is the current practice,” said senior author Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of microbiology & immunology and professor of medicine at Einstein, as well as editor-in-chief of mBio.

He added, “Our other finding – that males are overrepresented among those committing misconduct – implies a gender difference we need to better understand in any effort to promote the integrity of research.”

In a previous study, Dr. Casadevall found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all retractions of scientific papers. The finding was unexpected, since earlier research had suggested that errors account for the majority of retracted scientific papers.

Researchers embarked on the current study to better understand those who are guilty of scientific fraud. They reviewed 228 individual cases of misconduct reported by the United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI) from 1994 through 2012. ORI promotes the responsible conduct of research and investigates charges of misconduct involving research supported by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An analysis determined that fraud was involved in 215 (94 percent) of the 228 cases reported by the ORI. Of these, 40 percent involved trainees, 32 percent involved faculty members, and 28 percent involved other research personnel (research scientists, technicians, study coordinators, and interviewers).

Overall, 65 percent of the fraud cases were committed by males, but the percentage varied among the academic ranks: 88 percent of faculty members who committed misconduct were male, compared with 69 percent of postdoctoral fellows, 58 percent of students, and 43 percent of other research personnel. In each career category, the proportion of males committing misconduct was greater than would have been predicted from the gender distribution of scientists. The gender difference was surprisingly large among faculty, said Dr. Casadevall, who also holds the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Chair in/of Microbiology & Immunology. Of the 72 faculty who committed fraud, just 9 were female – one-third of the expected 27 if females had committed fraud at the same rate as males.

 

 

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Noted in Passing 19th January 2013

January 19, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Engineering and Technology

A work of genius: Harry Beck's map of 1933

A work of genius: Harry Beck’s map of 1933

The London Underground is 150 years old and the iconic London Underground Map is a work of some genius – by an electrical draughtsman Harry Beck – in focusing on connections and ignoring geography.

Boeing is facing a torrid time with the 787 Dreamliner and has stopped all further aircraft deliveries. This is going to hurt their cash flow even before all the claims from the airlines come in for the grounding of their aircraft.

The advent of hydraulic fracturing and the consequent availability of shale gas means that new lines are drawn on the energy map of the world and many of the oldest and most stable geopolitical truths will be turned on their heads.

If graphene turns out to be the wonder material that it promises to be then it is time to invest in graphite.

Science and Behaviour

The dangers with blindly assuming that correlations represent a causal relationship is well demonstrated by this study on milk, chocolate and Nobel prizes. Derby Proctor believes that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness but her “ultimatum game” experiments were not strictly ultimate games at all and are not convincing.  Altruism among chimpanzees is – if it exists at all – strictly limited and only after basic needs are satisfied and restricted to a very few.

Matt Ridley joins the list and also dumps on Mark Lynas and green orthodoxy

The curious case of Zuma’s deputies deals with the intricacies of politics in South Africa and in the ANC today. An interesting post on the French need to be relevant in the world and Hollande’s adventures in Africa.

How much of the chatter on Twitter or postings on Facebook are real communication and how much is noise? Nandana Sengupta looks at the pluses and the minuses of the explosion of opinions via social media in India.

Having spent a lifetime with contracts I have always taken “terms” of “terms and conditions” to signify “limits of time” but terms and conditions have now converged in usage to be almost identical in meaning.

On where Tolkien may have found the word “hobbit”.

For Wodehouse fans and for the first time since Ralph Richardson as Lord Emsworth in 1967, BBC are showing a  new TV series centred around Blandings Castle. The reviews were not very kind:

“The performances weren’t bad exactly, but there was an impression that the cast had raided the charity shop and were merely having a spiffing time in vintage clothing.”

Bad Science

Michael Marotta describes four books on bad science.

The British Met Office makes yet another misstep and demonstrates that massaging science to get a desired result makes for bad science.

Climate models are hardly worth the paper they are printed on and they don’t seem to have any idea of how to handle the effect of clouds. Models – which are pushing the alarmist cause – generally assume they have a positive feedback on global warming but in reality the feedback is negative.

Professor Debora Weber-Wulff reports on Multiple Retractions of Articles by Computer Science Professor

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Cosmological Principle may not hold

January 13, 2013

A new paper describes the discovery of the largest known Large Quasar Group – with a longest dimension of some 1200 Megaparsecs and a typical dimension of about 500 Mpc. (One parsec is about 3.3 light years). This LQG is thus some 1600 times longer than the distance between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy. The research team – led by Dr Roger Clowes from UCLan’s Jeremiah Horrocks Institute – has identified the LQG which is so significant in size that it also challenges the Cosmological Principle. As Dr. Clowes remarks:

“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe. This is hugely exciting – not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.

“Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 4 billion years to cross. This is significant not just because of its size but also because it challenges the Cosmological Principle, which has been widely accepted since Einstein. Our team has been looking at similar cases which add further weight to this challenge and we will be continuing to investigate these fascinating phenomena.”

And if the Cosmological Principle does not hold it means that the fundamental constants of the known Universe may no longer be so fundamental or so constant.  The list of such constants is long but the most fundamental of these on which we build our understanding of the Universe – which we take as being  immutable – are the speed of light in a vacuum, the gravitational constant and the Planck constant. This opens up the possibility that the physical constants may take different values in different parts of the Universe. They may be a function of space and time. They may change over cosmological time – and of course this could mean that the passage of time itself is not uniform. So perhaps the “arrow of time” is really a “boomerang of time”? Or it could be that what starts out as an arrow may be morphing into a boomerang or something else as time progresses (or not). The concept of time – and not only the passage of time – may vary. What if the trajectory of time could loop on itself? or proceed in the form of a double spiral? Even if the Universe is still a non-static Universe – that itself makes a static Universe – Stasis – possible. The possibilities are legion – and not only for science fiction.

Stardate would no longer be uniform – but this could explain the variation between the different series of Star Trek!

Quasar - atists impression NASA-AFP

Quasar – artists impression NASA-AFP

A structure in the early universe at z ~ 1.3 that exceeds the homogeneity scale of the R-W concordance cosmology by, Roger G. Clowes, Kathryn A. Harris, Srinivasan Raghunathan, Luis E. Campusano, Ilona K. Soechting, Matthew J. Graham, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6256

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Sheldon Cooper would approve – “A rock is a clock”

January 11, 2013

This is right up Sheldon Cooper’s street (not that I understand his physics which is best explained here). A new paper suggests that the wave properties of matter (as contrasted to particle physics) could be used to measure time. If every rock is a potential clock Sheldon will have to change the rules of the “scissors, paper, rock” game. In any case, I look forward to a suitably acrimonius debate between Sheldon and Leslie Winkle on the nature of time and change.

A Clock Directly Linking Time to a Particle’s Mass, by Shau-Yu Lan, Pei-Chen Kuan, Brian Estey, Damon English, Justin M. Brown, Michael A. Hohensee and Holger Müller, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1230767

Science Daily reports:

Taking advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, he (Holger Müller, assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley) has discovered a way to tell time by counting the oscillations of a matter wave. A matter wave’s frequency is 10 billion times higher than that of visible light.

“A rock is a clock, so to speak,” Müller said.

In a paper appearing in the Jan. 11 issue of Science, Müller and his UC Berkeley colleagues describe how to tell time using only the matter wave of a cesium atom. He refers to his method as a Compton clock because it is based on the so-called Compton frequency of a matter wave. ……

…… While Müller’s Compton clock is still 100 million times less precise than today’s best atomic clocks, which employ aluminum ions, improvements in the technique could boost its precision to that of atomic clocks, including the cesium clocks now used to define the second, he said.

“This is a beautiful experiment and cleverly designed, but it is going to be controversial and hotly debated,” said John Close, a quantum physicist at The Australian National University in Canberra. “The question is, ‘Is the Compton frequency of atoms a clock or not a clock?’ Holger’s point is now made. It is a clock. I’ve made one, it works.”

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Are IQ tests fundamentally flawed?

December 20, 2012

The issue is not measurement – for measurements made properly do not lie.

But the interpretation of what they measure and how they may be related to what we choose to call “intelligence” is controversial. The uncertainty is exacerbated by the varying definitions of what “intelligence” is. Where is the boundary between native intelligence and that dependent upon some measure of knowledge? Is there intelligence without memory or artificial intelligence without data storage? Is intelligence just processing power or is it processing with purpose? Does judgement matter? Or the speed of learning? Can there be wisdom without intelligence?

Nevertheless “well-constructed IQ tests are generally accepted as an accurate measure of intelligence by the scientific community”.

IQ scores are used as predictors of educational achievement, special needs, job performance and income. They are also used to study IQ distributions in populations and the correlations between IQ and other variables. The average IQ scores for many populations have been rising at an average rate of three points per decade since the early 20th century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect. It is disputed whether these changes in scores reflect real changes in intellectual abilities.

Science Daily reports on a new paper : “After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one’s intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading.”

Fractionating Human Intelligence by Adam Hampshire, Roger R. Highfield, Beth L. Parkin and Adrian M. Owen, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.06.022

(A pdf version of the paper is available here).

Summary

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or “factors” reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demonstrate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor “g” is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity. 

Highlights

  •  We propose that human intelligence is composed of multiple independent components
  •  Each behavioral component is associated with a distinct functional brain network
  •  The higher-order “g” factor is an artifact of tasks recruiting multiple networks
  •  The components of intelligence dissociate when correlated with demographic variables
While this paper adds weight to the view that the standard IQ test is much too simplistic, I tend to accept that IQ tests do measure some diffuse thing which is connected to whatever can be said to constitute intelligence. But in over 30 years of recruiting I have never found it particularly decisive as a selection criterion. While it has been sometimes helpful in screening a large number of applicants, I cannot recall a single instance where an IQ score has been the deciding factor for my making a selection.

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Science and advocacy do not mix (the “Greenpeace syndrome”?)

December 4, 2012

It is not the first time that “activists” have turned to dubious and manipulated science to further their cause. And it will not be the last. The peer-review process which is supposed to catch this kind of politically motivated pseudoscience is often not capable of doing so – and certainly not when the purported science is presented in a stage manged  PR exercise. Anything published by an advocacy group may – sometimes – contain some science but – and it should be axiomatic – no advocacy report is ever science.

In this case a “scientist” – Gilles-Eric Seralini – who is also a well-known activist campaigning against GM crops managed to get the reputed Elsevier Food and Chemical Toxicology journal to publish some highly dubious results that genetically modified corn caused tumors in rats. Seralini is also known for making up honors or paying for them to be awarded to himself! Perhaps this should be called the “Greenpeace syndrome”. Greenpeace is not averse either to making up science to further their political goals. (In fact Greenpeace just today published another apparently independent study in favour of wind power but which they had themselves commissioned!)

Reuters reports today that

(Reuters) – The publisher of a much-criticized study suggesting genetically modified corn caused tumors in rats has come under heavy pressure from scientists to retract the paper and explain why it was ever printed.

(more…)

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When “science” becomes a marketing tool for pharmaceuticals

December 3, 2012

There are many industries which play the “science as marketing game” but perhaps the most blatant are the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Sometimes researchers are just unwitting pawns in the marketing game but in a sense they are also at fault in being susceptible to becoming pawns. This cautionary tale about the diabetes drug Avandia reported in the Washington Post only enforces my view that since society invests the scientist with an aura of objective truth-seeking, then society must also demand a measure of responsibility and accountability from the scientist. And that can only happen if scientists have a measure of liability for the “product” they produce.

(more…)

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On the shoulders of midgets:10 years of scientific fraud at University of Kentucky

November 29, 2012

Maybe the detection of fraud has improved lately but it is still highly unlikely that the majority of cases are being discovered. I have the clear perception that the increasing number of cases of manipulating or faking data that are being discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. These cases – as with the case described in my previous post about Diedrik Stapel – also demonstrate the systemic disinclination of peers to be critical or to find fault with their colleagues. Traditional peer review has always had its failings but  is now also proving to be incapable of handling the huge increase in the number of papers being published. And the apparently increasing incidence of fraud among scientists will not change until scientists can be held liable for their misconduct. Academic freedom is all very well but it needs to be tempered with some responsibility and some corresponding accountability.

In the long run – over a few centuries – it probably does not matter. Scientific cheating does not alter natural laws or relationships but in the short term of our lifetimes the damage is considerable. Not only does it waste resources but the the misdirection of other scientific efforts leads to much work being done on a foundation of quicksand. On the shoulders of midgets!

In this case where Eric Smart has been found to have been falsifying data for a decade, the Office of Research Integrity has published its findings and 10 papers are to be retracted and he will not seek grants for 7 years. 13 researchers at his lab “have moved on to other projects and endeavors.” The papers to be withdrawn have been cited over 100 times.

(more…)

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