Honey NOT so sweet

[A Duke]

Just cause somebody has a Pee Aych Dee doesn't make them a scientist, scientists have the education and, critically, scientists are honest.

Hi,
We all know what Bs stands for, Ms is more of the same and Phd is just piled higher and deeper.

Regards

[rob streeper]

Look at the snippet on public opinions of scientists.

Oddball scientists, the rise of Chinese research, and other highlights from NSF’s new tome of essential science statistics | Science | AAAS

Unfortunately the full report isn't available because our government, in its most recent paroxysm of childishness, has shut down.

[BobL]

Australians tend to go the extra kilometre at putting anyone down that does better than them, whether its scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, sports people or politicians. It's even worse for home grown successful people or inventions who often have to go overseas to get the recognition they deserve.

The following lists some famous and less well known australian inventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeli...ian_inventions
How many of these were/are ever made here in Australia and how many have ended up being made overseas.
How many of us have ever heard of one of our most prolific inventor, David Unaipon - he's even on our $50 note.

[rob streeper]

Bob,

Interesting. The US is the same but different. We don't have a formalized or widely shared named concept of anti-intellectualism but the current here is very strong. The closest we come to that theme is embodied in the epithets such as 'book-smart' or 'nerd'. Nerd isn't thought to be insulting so much these days because of the admiration of Silicon Valley types because of their vast money piles.

[BobL]

It's called "tall poppy syndrome" here in Oz.

Most Australians will claim "It's not success that Australians put down but over self promotion by successful people". This attitude helped make Oz a less class bound society than the UK where most of it's migrants came from pre WWII. You might notice this appearing on these forums from time to time. I have no trouble with that at all.

Cutting down the tall poopies was evident in the past especially in sporting situations, and military circumstances with lower ranks taking less put downs, and questioning orders, from big noting officers who acted superior for no good reason other than they were officers. The English officers in WW1 found this very difficult to handle.

I suspect the "over self promotion" aspect is less so these days especially now that Tattler type news outlets and social media in general feeds the trolls and the tendency is to "dig" or "make" up something to put the tall poppies down whether they are acting superior or not.

[rob streeper]

Yes, I've read about it. I didn't want to mention the term to avoid provoking the trolls. My experiences in the on-line and off-line woodworking communities give me the feeling that the USA is in worse shape than Australia is in that regard.

[ian]

Turns out this is what the mining companies and Govt like you think so they can blame "natural contamination", but it turns out this effect is quite small.

The lead isotopes in dust sampled around an exposed undisturbed lead ore body turns out to be mainly dominated by what's in the wider area local soils and rocks which is usually quite isotopically different to the lead in the ore so can be clear distinguished and apportioned. If the deposit is anywhere near a dry region, dust from hundreds or even thousands of km away can contribute in a major way to local dust.

The other factor is that exposed and weathered lead ore bodies (gossans) are quite tough and resistant to abrasion compared to many other surface rocks, and as ore outcrops represent only a small fraction of the area of exposed soil/rocks they don't contribute much to local dust even if wet they contribute is highly concentrated. It's only when the ore body is disturbed by mining and especially by smelting that large amounts of lead are dumped into the atmosphere that mined ore lead isotope signatures are picked up.

Here is an article that includes one of my former students in the author list.
https://research.jcu.edu.au/tropwate...eltingtown.pdf

Xstrata Pty Ltd and Queensland Government agencies have disputed the industrial source of environmental Pb and have argued persistently that the elevated PbB of local children and Pbin the Mount Isa urban area are sourced predominantly from natural surface exposures of ore bodies. This line of argument has been maintained despite the fact that mining operations at Mount Isa have already been connected strongly to environmental contamination (Parry, 2000; Queensland EPA, 2008, Taylor and Hudson-Edwards, 2008; Munksgaard et al., 2010; Taylor et al.,2010, 2011; Mackay et al., 2011, Mackay and Taylor, 2013).

funny that.
From memory it was in the 1920s that the dust problem in Broken Hill was recognised to be so bad that a vegetation / re-vegetation effort commenced aimed at reducing environmental dust. A pretty significant initiative when you realise how scarce water was in the city.
I'm pretty sure that as late as the 1970s, lead exposure in BH was still regularly monitored -- unfortunately, the techniques of the day didn't permit an isotopic analysis.

[MAPLEMAN]

Australians tend to go the extra kilometre at putting anyone down that does better than them, whether its scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, sports people or politicians. It's even worse for home grown successful people or inventions who often have to go overseas to get the recognition they deserve.

The following lists some famous and less well known australian inventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeli...ian_inventions
How many of these were/are ever made here in Australia and how many have ended up being made overseas.
How many of us have ever heard of one of our most prolific inventor, David Unaipon - he's even on our $50 note.

Absolutely correct...MM

[BobL]

funny that.
From memory it was in the 1920s that the dust problem in Broken Hill was recognised to be so bad that a vegetation / re-vegetation effort commenced aimed at reducing environmental dust. A pretty significant initiative when you realise how scarce water was in the city.
I'm pretty sure that as late as the 1970s, lead exposure in BH was still regularly monitored -- unfortunately, the techniques of the day didn't permit an isotopic analysis.

Isotopic techniques were developed by nuclear scientists in the 1960's that could just do this work. A Caltech scientist (Claire patterson) who was also the first scientist to use lead and U isotopes to accurately date the age of formation of the earth used these methods and developed many of his own to determine that lead in petrol was slowly poisoning us and was instrumental in push authorities in the US to remove the lead from petrol. The problem was not the isotope measurements themselves but determining the extent of contamination of samples. Lead from petrol had by then contaminated labs and lab equipment and also reagents. It took about a decade for Patterson to build a clean lab, develop the clean lab procedures and to purify the reagents so he could establish the true natural back ground using ice cores and other environmental reservoirs.

The rest of the world took another decade or so to catch up on these methods with scientists from all over the world undertaking sabbaticals at Caltech to learn the methods. One of my PhD supervisors started doing this sort of work from the late 70's and spent a year at Caltech in 1983. He had started a petrol archive whereby whenever he filled up his tank he also collected 50mL of petrol direct from the servo pump into specially cleaned test tubes - the archive ran from 1978 until my PhD supervisor died in in 2009. Whenever he was away I often collected petrol samples for him and sometimes did the analyses. I also developed a simpler method for extracting the lead from the petrol using small disposable plastic syringes which had to be cleaned in purified acids. We refurbished an old photo dark room into our first tiny clean lab in 1978. It was only about about 5 sqm in area so it was very cramped. I designed and built our first true clean lab in 1985. This one was ~18 sqm and we called it the Femtolab because for the first time we achieved water with 720 femtogram/g lead concentration (0.00000072 ug/g). I used the lab for meteorite residue research but others used it for lead research. In 2000 we built a 400 sqm ultra clean lab and it's still running today although no one is doing any lead work in it.

Interestingly I know someone who is a farmer and also a FIFO worker on a lead mine here in WA. He drives a water truck that helps keep dust levels down around the mine site and ore loading facility. Like all workers on the men site he has a blood lead check once a month and has always been well below the accepted level. The highest his lead blood level has been was still below the accepted level but was when he returned from extended leave during which he mainly worked on his farm. It appears that farm work put more lead into his blood than working on the lead mine does. During his time off he did spend quite a bit of time fertilising so this could have been the source. Some fertilisers which add trace metals do have slightly elevated lead levels so this is something to watch out for. Some fertilisers from third world countries can have quite high lead levels.

[rob streeper]

Very interesting paper on the history of leaded gasoline. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...bIYIy_kV-XkWrR

[BobL]

Very interesting paper on the history of leaded gasoline. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...bIYIy_kV-XkWrR

It demonstrates how hard it is for scientists to convince authorities about a critical issue even when overwhelming evidence is provided.

Since that article was written in 1990, according to WikiP as of 2016 there are only 3 countries left in the world that sell leaded petrol, Yemen, Algeria and Iraq.

[MAPLEMAN]

Very interesting paper on the history of leaded gasoline. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...bIYIy_kV-XkWrR

Thank you for posting Rob...informative read I must say.
And after all these years,governments and corporations continue to ignore the advice of 'good' and 'credible' science in favour of their own economic agenda
Extraordinary just how deceitful these multinationals can be at times...and all because of this $...MM

[ian]

Isotopic techniques were developed by nuclear scientists in the 1960's that could just do this work. A Caltech scientist (Claire patterson) who was also the first scientist to use lead and U isotopes to accurately date the age of formation of the earth used these methods and developed many of his own to determine that lead in petrol was slowly poisoning us and was instrumental in push authorities in the US to remove the lead from petrol. The problem was not the isotope measurements themselves but determining the extent of contamination of samples. Lead from petrol had by then contaminated labs and lab equipment and also reagents. It took about a decade for Patterson to build a clean lab, develop the clean lab procedures and to purify the reagents so he could establish the true natural back ground using ice cores and other environmental reservoirs.

Patterson should have apprenticed with my dad. Controlling for contaminated equipment was bread and butter for him.
The lab that would have been doing the doing lead analysis in the 70s was run by the NSW Health department.

[BobL]

Patterson should have apprenticed with my dad. Controlling for contaminated equipment was bread and butter for him.
The lab that would have been doing the doing lead analysis in the 70s was run by the NSW Health department.

What sort of contamination?

[ian]

usually everything that might harm or kill you -- the lab's primary role was forensic toxicology