Letters: Competing funds
I welcome the possibility of open competition for government research
grants (This Week, 3 October). However, although the principle of competition
is a good one, the plans I’ve heard so far could be made more practical
by recognising the real nature of government-funded research and development.
The critical point is that the customer is the British public and economy,
not the research councils or funding bodies. With this in mind I’d like
to propose that open competition could be more usefully introduced by requiring
funding bodies to become competitive.
The current situation is that we have a set of research funding bodies
who are limited to funding specific subject areas. ‘Poaching’ is suppressed
by a combination of argument and agreement behind the scenes. This arrangement
is fundamentally ‘anti-competitive’ and should be abolished. Instead, we
should set up a number of reorganised research bodies under a system which
actively encourages them to fund overlapping areas. This should have two
useful effects.
The primary result would be that, at last, we could obtain some real
evidence that a body is (or is not) supporting the right projects and people.
At present, research funding bodies make great play of the ‘winners’ they
have funded. Successful projects are used as evidence that their judgement
is sound. But it is impossible to decide whether anyone else would have
done better. This is because there isn’t anyone else trying to identify
and support beneficial projects in the same area.
Given more than one body funding an area we could gather evidence to
see which was better at finding useful projects, supporting better ideas,
and getting the best value for money. This, in turn, would provide a way
of assessing the relative amounts each funding body should receive in future.
Each body could then adjust its area of interest depending upon its successes
and failures.
A secondary, but valuable, result is that research workers would be
able to approach more than one potential source of support. At present,
ideas which don’t suit (or aren’t understood by!) the research body meant
to cover a subject usually end up in the bin. Given a range of competing
funding bodies the situation would become more akin to publishing. If they
all reject a proposal it probably is a bad one. If one accepts it, the outcome
will show who was right and who was wrong.
Jim Lesurf University of St Andrews Fife, Scotland
Letters: Deadly drivers
I am grateful to Fred Pearce for his article on Britain’s roads (‘The
deadliest roads in Europe’, 24 October). He has helped to remind us that
the reason they are so deadly is largely the fault of the motorist.
Claims by successive transport ministers that Britain’s roads are getting
safer are fatuous, as any commuting cyclist like myself knows only too well.
And as any parent knows, no matter how well trained and responsible their
children are, they are in constant danger when cycling or crossing roads
while walking.
We are told that road design has made them safer, but look at any modern
junction, even on quiet roads, with its broad sweeping curve that allows
cars to corner at speed; totally hostile to pedestrians. This is just one
example.
We have to teach our drivers to drive safely in all lighting conditions.
We have to teach them to respect pedestrians and cyclists. In the long run,
a more positive approach is needed, but in the short term, at least, drastic
changes in the law are needed so that drivers will be severely punished
for even the most minor injuries to pedestrians and cyclists, with punishments
increasing rapidly with the seriousness of the injury. A life sentence
for taking a life on the road does not seem to me disproportionate.
If anyone is prepared to join me in a campaign to try to change the
law in the direction stated above, I would be grateful if they could get
in touch.
Mike Ellwood 20 Morton Close, Abingdon Oxon, OX14 3XL
Letters: Deadly drivers
I am incredulous at Fred Pearce’s championing of continental road crossings
without a pedestrian-only phase. I rarely feel less safe than when crossing
the roads with the ‘green man’ of continental Europe, knowing that the traffic
has NOT been instructed to stop.
Roger Lampert Borehamwood, Hertfordshire
Letters: Deadly drivers
The evidence that drivers drive faster while wearing seatbelts is typical
of the sort of psychological evidence that government departments find difficult
to accept as scientifically valid. Such evidence was presented to the DoT,
and ignored, at the time that front-seat safety belts became compulsory,
and your gruesome figures are the result.
The best answer is, as ever, the simplest. Seatbelts should be banned
on drivers and made compulsory on passengers.
Kit Davies Redhill, Surrey
Letters: Green wood
I must, alas, take issue with one part of John Emsley’s analysis in
his piece ‘On being a bit less green’ (Forum, 17 October). He says human
activities generate carbon dioxide in five main ways. One of these, he says,
is ‘using wood’. Whoa! That depends how it’s used.
The carbon in wood fibre is already part of the atmospheric CO2
cycle: the destruction of a tree cannot introduce any more CO2
into the atmosphere than it has previously extracted from it. Trees simply
act as temporary carbon store or sink. This is in contrast to the burning
of fossil fuels, the carbon in which would not otherwise be available to
be added to the CO2 already in the atmospheric cycle.
Clearly, the failure of humans to replace the trees they cut down reduces
the total size of the carbon store and this means more CO2 actually
in the atmosphere (as distinct from the cycle). The overwhelming majority
of tree felling is done not because humans want to ‘use’ the wood, but because
they don’t. They want the land used by the trees so they can use it for
something else.
When it comes to using wood, the situation is different. If a tree is
milled into hard products such as construction and furniture timbers, the
product continues to function as the living tree did: as a carbon store.
Assuming logging involves allowing the continued existence of the forest
and that every tree felled is replaced by another, then ultimately an equilibrium
is reached.
Given that all the alternatives to using timber – bricks, cement, steel,
aluminium – are products which require the burning of fossil fuels in prodigious
volumes, the choice of timber whenever possible is the environmentally correct
one.
Stephen Guest Carlton Victoria, Australia
Letters: Green wood
In his list of CO2 sources, Emsley has overlooked the human
activity that may well be giving the greatest contribution of this gas.
About the same time as the start of the industrial revolution, the process
of draining marshes, ploughing ancient grass meadows and reclaiming of estuaries
commenced on an increasing scale as drainage techniques improved and mechanical
power became available for agriculture. The financial rewards justified
the expenditure of effort as the land so drained and converted to agriculture
produced more abundant crops than average soils.
This is no surprise, since the ‘rich’ soils of reclaimed welands contain
massive stores of carbon residues from the vegetation that has grown on
them for many, perhaps thousands, of years and has not decayed fully each
season due to the rot-inhibiting effect of excess water. Draining and deep
ploughing speeded up the decomposition of seasonal growth and started the
reduction of the previously stored hydrocarbons. The effect on new growth
was obviously beneficial but this reduction of the soil hydrocarbon reservoir
must also have released quantities of CO2 and the other decomposition
gasses such as methane.
Thomas Robertson Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Letters: Faster than light
Frequent discussions of infant galaxies, and the news recently of ‘ripples
in the cold glow from the Big Bang’ leave one fundamental question unanswered.
Can anyone give a simple explanation to a non-cosmologist: how is it
that we are only now seeing light waves from an event which happened so
soon after the Big Bang? Why have these signals not passed us long ago?
After all, the Big Bang did not happen in a galaxy far, far away. When
it happened we were part of it. We were there. Did the Universe expand initially
at a rate much faster than the speed of light?
Jeff Bishop Connells Point NSW, Australia
* * *
John Gribbin replies: There are two aspect to this puzzle. First, the
Universe did indeed expand ‘faster than light’ early in its lifetime. This
is possible because what makes the distance between two galaxies (say) increase
is not that they are moving through space, but that empty space is expanding
and carrying them along for the ride.
Secondly, when we look at the light from ‘distant’ galaxies, the term
really applies to time, not space. We are seeing light which left those
galaxies long ago, and has been travelling across expanding space and getting
stretched in the process (the redshift effect). It is meaningless to quote
a spatial distance to such objects, which may no longer exist by the time
we see them, but from one perspective – since the light from the ripples
seen by COBE has been on its journey for 15 billion years – it therefore
comes from 15 billion light years away.
Letters: Blooming butterflies
Re your article on the Alpine butterfly sanctuary (This Week, 24 October).
Britain has its own butterfly sanctuary, based in the Surrey Docks area,
London. This was developed by the Trust for Urban Ecology in association
with Butterfly Conservation.
Stave Hill Ecological Park is a totally created park in Docklands with
a mosaic of meadows and young woodland traditionally managed. The site
has become a haven for butterflies and over 20 species have visited it since
its creation in 1986.
Trust for Urban Ecology London
Letters: Backing the WHO
Phyllida Brown in her ‘Gloomy prognosis for malaria summit’ (This Week,
24 October) quotes me as saying ‘It’ll be even worse than Rio’. I have no
recollection making that statement and I wish to make it clear that when
talked to I had no detailed knowledge of the WHO’s Amsterdam summit meeting,
I had not read the draft strategy to be considered at the meeting and I
was in no position to judge whether the summit would be better or ‘worse
than Rio’. I wish to point out that I supported the summit, as I do any
activity that increases public awareness of malaria and attempts to generate
the political will and financial support that is required to control this
disease, which is one of the world’s most serious public health problems.
It has been my privilege for the last six years to serve on a WHO committee
which is overseeing malaria vaccine development. I think it is of utmost
importance that everyone with an interest in reducing the burden of ill-health
throughout the world, and particularly in the populations of tropical developing
countries where malaria is of major concern, should provide their wholehearted
(including financial) support for the important work of WHO.
Robin Anders The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
Melbourne, Australia
Letters: Chemical isotopes
The article ‘In the beginning was uranium’ (24 October) was very interesting.
However, there is one statement that definitely should be corrected. ‘Since
two isotopes of the same element do not differ in their chemical properties,
they can be separated only by exploiting the small difference in their weight.’
Although this statement seems to have crept into some modern textbooks,
many studies of chemical isotope effects have been published and chemical
exchange reactions have been and are now in use to fractionate the isotopes
of hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other elements.
The French and Japanese are currently investigating chemical systems for
the possible concentration of uranium 235.
George Begun Oak Ridge Tennessee, US
Letters: Exploding trolleys
It is not the European Commission that is working on European Standards
for fireworks (‘Gunpowder, reason and plot’, 7 November) but CEN, the European
Committee for Standardization, of which BSI is the British member.
Feedback (same issue) may like to know that CEN is also keeping an
eye on supermarket trolleys.
Stewart Sanson European Committee for Standardization Brussels
Letters: Exploding trolleys
I have experienced some strange, sometimes violent behaviour from supermarket
trolleys. In Sainsbury’s once, a trolley forcibly ejected my daughter from
the seat in the front by deliberately losing a wheel. I wouldn’t mind but
she was reined-in.
We even have a corner near the station in Brighton where drunk and derelict
trolleys hang out, although no-one I know has ever seen any arriving, so
I presume they move under cover of darkness.
Or maybe the act of them being observed changes their behaviour in some
subtle way . . .
S. Aycrigg-Tate Brighton, Sussex
Letters: Exploding trolleys
A couple of years ago, at Inverness railway station in Scotland, I saw
a luggage trolley clearly marked ‘Not to be moved from Penzance’ (in Cornwall).
Can this be beat?
David Milsted Skye
Letters: Correction
an embarrassing typographical error transformed sodium nitrate into
sodium nitrite in last week’s Feedback.
Feedback
What’s this, one of the great edifices of British science crumbling
at the edges? The dear old Royal Institution, in Albemarle Street, London,
has had to be corsetted with wire netting to stop parts of its classic facade
from falling away. Funds are gravely short and the building is in urgent
need of repair. The RI, founded in 1799 by the American Count Rumford –
inventor of a famous stove – is Britain’s oldest national research laboratory.
It was where Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, Lord Rayleigh
and William Bragg did all their best research, and is a centre of splendid
research today. Through its public lectures, and especially the televising
of its famous Christmas lectures for young people, it is known to millions.
But in more ways than one, it is fast becoming a sad monument to British
science today – badly in need of propping up.
* * *
Do you have days when you feel only ‘half there’, as if you’ve left
part of yourself at home – often your brain? Well, the problem seems to
be rife at Britain’s Defence Research Agency. In a letter to Jim Cousins
MP regarding the DRA’s contribution to European research programmes, the
DRA states that 5.8 personnel were allocated to research projects in 1989/90,
with 11.6, 10.5 and 13 seconded in successive years. Likewise, the DRA drafted
2.1 persons into Link collaborative projects organised by the Department
of Trade and Industry in 1990/91, with 3.1 in 1991/2 and 4.9 the year after.
Feedback wonders which bodily parts of the incomplete secondees are involved
in the projects, and whether those involved are giving their all to their
work.
* * *
Among the things that the technological age cannot wither are door-to-door
salespeople. A Feedback reader was recently visited by an Encyclopaedia
Britannica salesperson, who spent two hours extolling its virtues.
As exhaustion approached, our reader asked if or when there would be
a CD-ROM version. The salesman looked perplexed, assured him there were
‘no plans’, and a couple of days later faxed over a long explanation:
it would take ‘100 to 200 floppy discs just to hold the index’, a dial-up
system (to an EB stored on a mainframe) would be expensive and cumbersome,
and reading articles on screen is ‘difficult and disjointed’. Also, searching
for words (such as ‘orange’) would produce too many false hits – William
of Orange, Orange County, and so on.
To which Feedback says: so what? Officially, the EB contains 44 million
words. Taking the average word as being six characters, that’s equivalent
to 264 megabytes. And the index can’t be larger than the document. That
may be 200 floppy discs, but it’s only one CD-ROM with a 600 megabyte capacity.
Another reason for the EB’s failure to computerise could be that CD-ROMs
come in cheap packaging, while the paper EBs come in Pyrolex plastic, hand-tooled
leather, or Moroccan goatskin. And it just so happens that the salesperson’s
commission is upped by the value of the binding.
Our reader isn’t buying. He says he will keep accessing the ‘adequate’
American Encyclopaedia on his e-mail network, and get something else for
his CD-ROM drive.
* * *
Feedback can only assume that ignorance of the nuances of the English
language as it is spoken in Britain led to this extraordinary headline in
The New York Times on 3 November: ’32 People Got HIV On the Job, US Says.’
* * *
Madonna has started something. A new book about sharks, The Jaws of
Death, contains a warning in red on the cover, ‘This book contains disturbing
photographs’. As you flip through the book, with its chapters like ‘Devilish
jaws’, ‘Sequences of a bite’, ‘Post-mortem of an attack’ and ‘Attacking
nuclear submarines’ (eh?), you come to the pictures.
Truly disturbing they are, too – they feature the gory remains and mutilated
limbs of the victims of shark attacks. But you can’t look at them at first,
because like the pictures of Madonna’s rude bits in her book Sex, they are
sealed. There is no aluminium foil wrapping, however. These pictures are
simply stuck together and have to be separated with a knife.
Feedback can think of several other books that would benefit from the
same treatment of built-in inaccessibility. Readers might like to suggest
some, too.
* * *
The latest fad in the Far East is collecting payphone cards. Whereas
British Telecom’s cards are pretty dull-looking objects, in many countries
on the other other side of the world they come with nice colour pictures
on the back. Some telephone operators are now issuing limited edition commemorative
cards. Especially if unused, these are now worth far more than their face
value.
Telecommunications giant GPT, which has just produced its hundred millionth
card, proudly claims that tourists in countries to which it exports buy
cards as souvenirs. All of which sounds fine – but any traveller who has
arrived tired at a foreign airport, desperate to make a phone call, might
prefer a single card that works in all countries.
* * *
Computer giant Microsoft has announced results of tests that compared
its Word for Windows software for word processing with WordPerfect, made
by WordPerfect Corporation. Needless to say, Word came off best. We cannot
help wondering whether Word comes with a checker for spelling and syntax.
Says Microsoft’s press release, ‘The test conclusively shows that WordPerfect
users’ (sic) found Word for Windows easier to transition to than WordPerfect.’
Pardon us as we transition to another story.
* * *
Everyone is used to hyberbole in mail-order catalogues, but surely the
clothing company Edelrid is going a bit far in its claims for its ‘trekking
thermo socks’. These, apparently, ‘are unique in having a four-dimensional
knit pattern’.
Made of cosmic string, perhaps?