Letters: They would say that
I was dismayed by the article by Glyn Jones, ‘The women who went back
to technology’ (7 March), which revealed that ‘the government’s push to
improve women’s career prospects’ is, apparently, unsullied by any wider
social perspective or insight into why there is a shortage of women engineers.
Although observing that Britain has the ‘most restricted maternity rights
of any within the European Community’ and that engineering is a bastion
of chauvinism (presumably male), the article then goes on, unconsciously
perhaps, to demonstrate just how much difficulty women experience in maintaining
a professional career because of the unquestioning acceptance of attitudes
which militate against that.
This is illustrated by statements like ‘she had to be prepared to move
around the country’ (because of her husband’s job) and ‘How are husbands
to be trained – gently – to an increasing household role?’. This and many
other throwaway lines show that it is expected that women must assume complete
responsibility for smoothing their husband’s career path, caring for aged
parents and arranging child care, and that any work they manage to get done
on top of all that is a tremendous bonus.
Surely the next generation of professional scientists should have, as
part of their general education, the opportunity to draw on the developing
body of scholarship which could educate young women to challenge social
stereotypes as to gender roles, since the existing regime proves so disadvantageous
to them in career terms.
As I write, I can hear that son number two (age 14) is practising the
piano, so he must have finished hanging the washing out and ironing the
athletics gear while his older brother (age 15) cleans the bathroom. I also
see from your Letters page (7 March) that the difference between the sexes
is basically set by biology and to depart ‘too precipitantly . . . from
the patterns of living within which our instincts evolved’ will lead to
unforeseen disasters. I’d say that too, if I were a man.
Jill McKeough University of New South Wales Australia
Letters: Candid but wrong
Paddy Ashdown is as usual refreshingly candid, for a politician, in
his Talking Point ‘Science: a commitment to the future’ (7 March). While
stressing that his Party would increase science spending, however, he believes
that ‘industry is better at making its own decisions than the government’.
He then goes on to say: ‘Too many of our young people reject careers in
science and engineering, or leave to work abroad because of low pay and
poor career prospects . . . too many firms shut their scientists away in
a corner called R&D and do not make use of their full potential in the
business.’
These are related points. Expansion of student numbers and university
research is not going to lead to industrial revitalisation unless industry
wants it to. And to plead ‘above all we must enthuse all our young people
with the excitement and potential that science and technology have to offer’
is a bit rich when it is precisely these enthused individuals who have found
themselves leaving the country to find jobs whose rewards are commensurate
with their skills.
It is not simply a question of training more graduates; in the absence
of demand for them they too will give up or go abroad. Unless incentives
are set up for industry to spend on research, the situation will not change.
John Bull University of Toulouse France
Letters: Stoned
Your article on the benefits of drinking urine (New 杏吧原创, Science,
29 February), confirmed me in my interpretation of The Glory of the World
from the Hermetic Museum, a collection of 17th century alchemical texts.
The matter from which the Philosoper’s Stone is generated is described
as ‘water of bitter taste’. It is ‘familiar to all men, both young and old,
is found in the country, in the village, in the town, in all things created
by God; yet it is despised by all. Rich and poor handle it every day. It
is cast into the street by servant maids.’
It seems possible that the recipe for the preparation of the Stone might
have been a method of making a concentrated, possibly crystalline, preparation
of melatonin. Its psycho-active nature and embarrassment at its origin would
lead to the secretive description of its preparation.
Certainly, ‘Preparing the Philosopher’s Stone’ sounds more intriguing
than ‘Extracting the Urine’.
Tim Pizey Wickham, Hampshire
Letters: BT's golden egg
Barry Fox (Forum, 14 March) wonders why British Telecom has made so
little progress over the past 10 years in simplifying its user interface
for the Telecom Gold electronic mail service. The answer is simple. Imagine
what would happen if customers changed over, en masse, from fax usage to
electronic mail. At present, sending a 10 page document by fax takes about
8 minutes. The same document can be transmitted via the average modem in
around 50 seconds. Result: dramatic drop in BT’s exorbitant profits. BT
has a vested interest in keeping modem usage to a minimum.
Bob Hinchliffe Caerleon, Gwent
Letters: Well workers
Roger Berry’s analysis of the nuclear industry’s health record (Forum,
14 March) typifies the doublethink and distortion of facts to which this
industry’s apologists so frequently descend. It is simply not valid to compare,
as he does, the cancer rates between nuclear workers and the general public,
as people in work enjoy better average health than those not employed. Given
the ‘well worker’ effect, it would probably be possible to demonstrate that
even the most hazardous of jobs was relatively safe.
What would be more revealing, and certainly more honest, would be to
compare the health of nuclear workers with that of people working under
similar conditions who are not routinely exposed to unnatural doses of radiation.
If BNFL has such data, it should publish them. Somehow, I don’t expect that
it will.
Tony Green Rochdale, Lancashire
Letters: Confusing question
I am writing to draw attention to the scientific rationale currently
being forced upon all maintained sector schools through the National Curriculum
(NC) for Science Attainment Target 1 – Scientific Investigation.
It is expected that bright 14 year-olds should be able to design an
experiment in which they manipulate two continuous variables in an attempt
to determine which one has the greater effect on the process being investigated.
Before they begin any practical work, the pupils must provide a detailed
prediction of the results they expect.
Am I old fashioned, or is it not usual to investigate the effects of
single variables whenever possible? Is the multiple variable approach to
enquiry one which should be instilled to all pupils under the age of 16?
Are there any tangible benefits, or are we simply running the risk of confusing
our scientists of the future? Is it usual for experimenters to make detailed
predictions of their results? What about the danger of an ‘experimenter
effect’? These questions have not been answered in any way by those who
constructed the NC Science document, or those who have been ‘trained’ to
assess it.
Perhaps fellow readers of this journal could respond by either explaining
what I have overlooked, or supporting my heartfelt plea for a commonsense
approach to middle school science.
Mike Price Newcastle School, Newcastle under Lyme, Staffs
Letters: Rounding errors
I am fully aware of the points Ross Anderson makes (Letters, 14 March)
regarding ‘A spy’s guide to chaos’ (1 February) – as he could have discovered
by reading some of the things I have previously published. Unfortunately,
he seems to have misunderstood what I wrote. This may be because the first
part of the article gave a conventional introduction to the topic, followed
by a more specific mention of some of the work presently under way. This
entails using a non-linear analog system as a generator, not a ‘function’
which is ‘implemented in fixed-precision arithmetic’. There is, therefore,
no ’rounding error’, and the system is both simple and fast.
The main limitation of such a system comes from the ‘real’ random noise
which arises in all practical systems. This restricts the degree of deterministic
complexity we can synthesise in a given situation, but not in quite the
same way as the problems which arise in digital computation. Noise occurs
in digital computers, too, but the ’rounding errors’ are usually a lot worse.
Jim Lesurf University of St Andrews, Fife
Letters: Down with maths
John Nicholson (Forum, 7 March) complains about scientists who are ‘besotted
with mathematics’. He has an eminent antecedent in this: in Lancelot Hogben’s
Science for the Citizen (published in 1938), he wrote: ‘It is a common belief
that mathematics is the hallmark of Science, and some people are apt to
imagine that the introduction of a little mathematics into subjects like
economics entitles them to rank as genuine science. The truth is that science
rests on the painstaking recognition of uniformities in nature.’
In his earlier and possibly even more famous companion volume Mathematics
for the Million, he added, to the 2nd edition anyway, an Epilogue on Science
or Mathematics and the Real World, in which he warns against the fallacies
that exist regarding the use of maths in science. This sentence was printed
in italics: ‘The great precision with which the rules of mathematical discourse
are stated does not imply that a description of nature is necessarily more
exact because the language used to describe it is mathematical.’
Yes, I will willingly join your movement, which could well extend its
interest to the use and misuse of technique in general.
Ian Anderson Cambridge
Letters: Ghostly hero
I’m uncertain whether I am referring to the electromagnetic radiation
correspondence (Letters, 8 February, 7 and 21 March) or to Marcus Rowland’s
article about laboratory accidents (Forum, 21 March).
A couple of years ago, a Hercules military aircraft narrowly missed
the tower of the British Telecom Research Laboratories at Martlesham, Suffolk,
after appearing to make a bee-line for it. Rumours as to what had nearly
caused a major accident were rife. One suggested that a ghostly hand on
the controls had sought a nostalgic landing on Sir Douglas Bader’s old airfield,
Martlesham Heath, on which the laboratories are built.
Perhaps it was a hero of a different kind. Hazards of Electromagnetic
Radiation to Ordnance (HERO) are a problem with which the American forces
are unhappily familiar. Which could explain why official explanations have
been so elusive.
Peter Lanyon Woodbridge, Suffolk
Letters: Road to Xanadu
John Daintith says that we may not know how Coleridge came up with the
imagery for The Ancient Mariner (Letters, 14 March). This is wrong. Coleridge
kept notebooks in which he jotted down brief phrases and remarks from his
extensive reading of travellers’ and explorers’ books, and his own observations
of natural things that interested him. In The Road to Xanadu: A Study in
the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes, one of the most fascinating
books ever written about the creative process, the author traces the notes
back to the books from which they were taken, and finds in them other words
and phrases which were all absorbed by Coleridge, stirred around in his
subconscious, and transformed by his imagination into the poems of The Ancient
Mariner and Kubla Khan. The quotation from Purchas: His Pilgrimage is only
one of many links and references between the poems, the notebooks and Coleridge’s
reading.
W. F. Hayles Forest Row, East Sussex
Letters: Road to Xanadu
Coleridge’s prose describing ‘a person on business from Porlock’ is
as great a piece of fiction as the poetry he wrote. The tale was invented
to enable the publication of a poem that might look incomplete to the general
public. Additionally, Coleridge disguised his source (Purchas: his Pilgrimage)
and misquoted the relevant passage (‘In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately
palace . . . ‘).
Christian Dowdeswell Lyon, France
Letters: Maisie's saviour
While Maisie’s new-found confidence is heart warming (In Brief, 7 March),
her saviour, the Cow Walker, contrary to your report, is not without precedent.
‘Wheelchairs’ have been used to lift and support bovine paraplegics
for over 10 years in the US. A wheeled lifting frame utilising either winches
or a hydraulic ram has recently been developed at this research centre.
Currently the most commonly used lifting devices for incapacitated cows
include airbeds, tractor harnesses and hip clamps. A recent Danish invention
simply applies Archimede’s principle to raise and support the cow in a trauma
tank filled with warm water.
John Mee Agriculture and Food Development Authority County Cork, Ireland
Letters: Lerning Inglish
Sulfur? Fosforus? Yes pleez! The sooner we chayng to a totally fonetik
alfabet, the better for everywon.
The less tym spent lerning Inglish, the more tym for syans.
Larry Curley Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
Letters: Plane puzzle
F. G. Gisley’s letter on the relative contributions made to lift by
reduced pressure on the upper surface of a wing and increased pressure on
the lower surface (Letters, 14 March) fails to answer the greatest aviation
mystery of all. If this is how aeroplanes fly, how do they fly upside down?
Richard Wiseman London