The Times, STEM and conehead boffins

Posts here in the past (eg in August) have taken up points raised in The Times’ monthly science and technology supplement, Eureka. But last week I was left wondering just how seriously the editorship of the Times newspapers takes STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).

Britain’s premier scientific institution is the Royal Society. Founded in 1660, its Fellows have included Newton, Darwin and Hawking. Last week, presumably as part of its mission to raise public awareness of science and innovation, the Society published rankings for the most significant inventions in the history of food and drink. The Society’s Vice President said:

Royal Society Fellows have played vital roles in improving people’s lives for 350 years and science has a major role to play in meeting the global challenges of the 21st century. We thought it appropriate to look at how that innovation has shaped what we eat and drink. The poll reveals the huge role science and innovation have played in improving our health and our lives. This is something to which the scientific community continues to add.

The fridge, pasteurised milk, and the tin can were identified as the top three. On 14 September The Times Science Correspondent, Tom Whipple, covered the story in a straightforward but not overly serious fashion, quoting the Fellows’ explanation for their choices. But alongside was a piece by Giles Coren, This is the worst list I have ever seen of anything ..., beginning:

Fridges, pasteurising and the tin can were voted the three greatest innovations in the history of food and drink yesterday by . . . whom? By chefs? No. By dieticians? No.  

By gluttons? No. By restaurant critics? No.  

By the fellows of the Royal Society — by scientists, in other words. By the sort of conehead boffins who think that making food last forever is more important than eating anything even vaguely fresh or nice. These are men and women who got where they are by doing 48-hour lab shifts living off cold baked beans spooned from the can, instant tea with UHT milk and whatever ancient takeaway they found at the back of the college fridge with “Hands off, this is MINE!” scribbled on it in whiteboard marker.

Well, Coren is a humorist, sadly not as funny as his late father, Alan, and no stranger to controversy, so perhaps shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But The Times’ Sunday stablemate, is running advertisements (below) for a series feature, 100 Answers Every Grown Up Needs To Know,

addressing ‘the eternal questions of childhood’, examples being about lightning, sleep and evolution. The implication that ‘scientific’ questions are just for kids or conehead boffins is underlined by the ad using a father and son mimicking a notorious photograph (left, explained here) of Albert Einstein. who, as it happens, was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

Before concluding that The Times has been letting slip its real and unsympathetic editorial opinions about STEM, it is only fair to point out that they are advertising (below), and associated with, a series of 40 books being published weekly, Everything is Mathematical, which:

… presented by Marcus du Sautoy, approaches the subject of mathematics in a completely new, fresh and reader-friendly way. Covering a range of topics such as: the Golden Ratio, Prime Numbers, the Fourth Dimension, Fermat’s Enigma, the Secrets of Pi and Chaos Theory, the collection demonstrates clearly how mathematics shapes the world around us. From now on, mathematics is something to look forward to and enjoy.

Well, let’s hope it succeeds. I’ve not yet spotted it in any newsagent I visit. It will be interesting to see, for example, how the issue Pushing the Limits Infinitesimal calculus, due out on 5 December, handles its subject, in particular how algebraic the treatment will be:

The importance of calculus and of concepts such as 'derivatives' and 'integrals' is hard to underestimate. It has been said that without them the scientific revolution would have been impossible. Although their origins date back to the Ancient World, the crucial breakthrough came with the simultaneous work of two giants of Western thought: Leibniz and Newton. Their battle to lay claim to the discovery of these key mathematical concepts shook the world of 17th-century science in Europe.

If the approach adopted in the series tends to the qualitative and reliance on graphics rather than formulae, it may give an encouraging but ultimately misleading view of the study of mathematics. There is a consequent risk of some young person embarking on what I described in another Eureka-inspired post at the beginning of the year: David E. Goldberg’s “math-science death march”.
 

Why Britain did not have a “Baby Boom”

In a post in 2011 I made various criticisms of David Willett’s book, The Pinch. One was that the demographic evidence did not support his assumption that the UK had experienced a “Baby Boom” like that in the United States. The same notion is so often trotted out by journalists, that I think it’s worth repeating the key facts again, explaining that the UK had a “post-war bulge”, not a baby boom:

The two World Wars were both followed by short sharp surges in live births soon after demobilisation of the men who had been conscripted to fight. The children born after the First World War in the 1920 surge were, as it turned out, destined to fight in the Second. Then, after victory in 1945, those who survived were able to return home to start their own families. Thankfully, those who were born in that second 1946/1947 surge never had to be conscripted and were able to spread their family-building over a longer period, but nonetheless the concentration was enough to cause a further bump in the birth rate in the 1960s.  

To underline this interpretation, the next pair of charts show the numbers of men and women being demobilised from the Armed Forces in 1945 and 1946, and births in England and Wales in the final years of that decade. That there was a lag of about three quarters (nine months) between demobilisation and maternal deliveries shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Nor should the drop in births in the last two quarters of 1945. This reflected the lower number of young males present in the UK after D Day in June 1944. 

The UK experience was not the same as that of the United States which did have a sustained “baby boom”. This also started with a higher birth rate after GI demobilisation, but then continued more or less unabated through to the 1960s, as can be seen in the chart below.

Sources for the data above can be found in the original post. Another way of making the same point can be found in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) animation of the Age Structure of the United Kingdom, 1971-2085. The frame for 2012 is shown below and I have annotated it to indicate the ‘bulge’ of post-WW2 babies who now in their mid-60s:

UPDATE 13 JUNE 2013

Barry Pearson is another old codger with a similar bee in his bonnet: http://blog.barrypearson.co.uk/?p=3634 which provides a better graphical comparison of US and UK demographics than mine.



Footnote

This post was triggered by an article, Top-heavy pyramid will loom over planet for generations, in The Times on 21 August 2012 by their science correspondent’, Tom Whipple, who really should know better:

… for most countries, the population pyramid — the demographer’s graph of choice, which classically shows each generation bigger than the one preceding — is often no longer a pyramid at all. Instead of being wide at the base and narrow at the top it is shaped more like a cowbell.  

If it were a real structure, the base would struggle to support the top. As a graph, it shows the young struggling to support the old. In the UK the change is particularly stark. As the baby boomers age, a vast bulge works its way up the pyramid into retirement, with all the fiscal menace of a python’s meal working its way along its belly.  

This is what people mean when they talk about the demographic timebomb, and why governments around the world are trying to raise pension ages. But as unpleasant as this outcome may be for taxpayers, if not the wealthy and retired baby boomers with free bus passes, this should not be seen as anything other than a transition period.

I don’t think the ONS Age Structure chart supports talk of a vast bulge, let alone a python’s meal and belly (odd phraseology for a science correspondent, surely). However, it’s more than likely that British journalists will still be writing about ‘baby boomers’ when the UK’s post-war bulge have long died out.  Cheltenham colonels, bowler-hatted civil servants and blue-rinsed ladies all seemed to have endured in print for years after their departure from these isles.


UPDATE 28 NOVEMBER 2015

This turned out to be one of the more popular posts on this blog, so I thought it might be worth adding this chart taken from the ONS’s population projections for the UK published last month.