Dennis A. Minott | Extracting signals from noise

More than fifty years ago, I wrote a chapter in my doctoral thesis with a disarmingly simple title: “Noise”.

I was then a young OAS Research Fellow, trained in physics and mathematics, working experimentally to, among other tasks, mathematically model the demanding world of oscillometric instrumentation. My task was not merely to observe energetic systems, but to measure them remotely and non-intrusively by detecting extremely weak electromagnetic signals buried inside powerful interference — the specific types of interference that characterise artificially produced plasmas, the fourth and most abundant state of matter in the universe. 

In the course of this work, I invented four configurations of related difference-field oscillometers. Three years of effort eventually yielded three peer-reviewed papers published in J Phys E and a PhD thesis that helped advance inductive oscillometry. Yet the chapter of my thesis that I remember most vividly is still the one simply titled "Noise".

That memory has returned to me with increasing force because Jamaica, and much of CARICOM, now faces a civic version of the same scientific problem.

We are drowning in information overload. 

We have reports, commissions, consultants, press conferences, manifestos, sectoral presentations, MOUs, strategic plans, podcasts, social-media thunder, ceremonial launches, institutional rankings, and endless expert commentary. Yet the more information we collect, the less disciplined we often seem in distinguishing what matters from what merely dazzles, distracts, or deceives.

In the laboratory, noise is an interference. It is what prevents a real signal from being measured, understood, and acted upon. A detector may be beautifully designed, and the phenomenon under investigation may be entirely real, yet the truth-bearing perturbation or signal may remain hidden beneath louder, less meaningful disturbances. The scientific challenge is to extract meaning from confusion.

That is now a national challenge.

Take education. Jamaica debates examination results, school rankings, prestige schools, uniforms, hair rules, prize-giving, Quiz, ceremonies, Math Olympiad and institutional vanity with great energy. But those are not necessarily the strongest signals of a healthy education system. The deeper signal is literacy.

When a child cannot read fluently and think clearly by the upper-primary years, that child is not merely weak in English. He or she is being quietly and avoidably disabled in mathematics, science, history, geography, technology, citizenship, and future earning power. Literacy is the first infrastructure of nationhood.

The evidence is not flattering. In Jamaica’s first participation in PISA 2022, our 15-year-olds scored below the OECD average in mathematics, reading, and science. Only about a quarter reached at least Level 2 in mathematics, the basic level at which students can begin applying mathematics to simple real-world situations. In regional CSEC results, mathematics remains a chronic warning light. These are not noises to be explained away. They are signals to be obeyed.

Yet we continue to amplify the wrong things. We celebrate the few who soar while failing to redesign the system for the many who are left barely literate, barely numerate, and barely confident. We confuse nodules of excellence with national transformation.

The same signal failure infects higher education. Universities may advertise campuses, partnerships, rankings, ceremonies, and branded programmes. But the signal is simpler: What can the graduates actually do? Can they solve unstructured problems? Can they write clearly? Can they reason numerically? Can they build enterprises, repair institutions, improve communities, and create new value? A country is not transformed by credentials alone. It is transformed by competence.

Energy policy provides another example. Announcements are made, memoranda are signed, delegations travel, and impressive phrases are deployed. But the electrical grid is not persuaded by rhetoric. It responds only to engineering, maintenance, investment, redundancy, storage, controls, and disciplined management.

Jamaicans know this in their bones. When the whole island can be plunged into darkness by a grid failure, the signal is not the speech made afterwards. The signal is the fragility revealed. When electricity remains costly, the signal is not the promise of some fashionable future FOAK and RIOC SMR technology. The signal is whether communities receive affordable, reliable, resilient power.

As a physicist, I am not impressed by energy theatre. I am impressed by systems that work.

This is why Caribbean young people must be trained not merely to consume information, but to interrogate it. The future will not belong to those who scroll fastest, shout loudest, or repeat official language most obediently. It will belong to those who can ask, with discipline: What is the signal? What is the evidence? What can be measured? What has actually improved? What assumption is being amplified? What fact is being hidden?

Every major advance in civilisation has depended on that discipline. Science advances when measurement defeats guesswork. Medicine advances when evidence defeats superstition. Engineering advances when instruments become reliable. Democracy advances when facts resist propaganda. Economies advance when productivity overcomes what the Bible calls "eye-service" performance.

The discovery of the DNA double helix offers a famous example. The decisive clues did not arrive as a loud announcement. They appeared as faint patterns in X-ray diffraction images, especially physicist Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51. It took trained eyes, mathematical imagination, chemical knowledge, and model-building courage to recognise the signal inside the blur. Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins did not merely handle information. They interpreted structure.

That is the widespread and ordinary intellectual habit our Caribbean needs.

We need students who can read beneath and beyond headlines. Citizens who can distinguish policy from performance. Journalists who can separate public interest from public relations. Engineers who can test claims against physical reality. Teachers who can diagnose learning rather than merely process syllabuses. Leaders who can recognise that the quietest signal may be the most important one in the room.

Fifty-odd years ago, I spent the dead of many long nights in an instrumentation laboratory designing passive and active filter circuits to detect weak signals with precision. Today, as an older Jamaican scientist, I see my country facing a similar problem on a larger and more urgent scale.

The instruments have changed. The principle has not. A nation does not fail because it lacks noise. It fails when it loses the discipline to extract signal from noise.

The signals of Caribbean renewal are still present: in literate children, competent teachers, honest measurement, resilient grids, productive graduates, serious institutions, and young people trained to question bravely. Our task is to hear them, measure them, strengthen them, and act upon them before the noise consumes and excretes the future undigested leaving a still-famished homeland.

Dennis Minott, PhD, is the CEO of A-QuEST-FAIR. Send feedback to: a_quest57@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.