Letters: Whale wrangles
The article ‘Whales win southern sanctuary’ (This Week, 4 June) states
that ‘in a report to the IWC’s scientific committee in Mexico. . . (I) .
. . accused Norway of applying the plan (the IWC’s Revised Management Procedure)
wrongly’, and cites some figures relating to the numbers of whales and
potential catch quotas.
The paper referred to is merely a technical re-analysis of data from
surveys of minke whales in the northeast Atlantic. It contains no accusations
against anyone, nor any reference to the RMP or to catches of whales, nor
any explicit estimates of whale numbers. The numbers cited in the article
come not from me but are inferences drawn by others from the results in
the paper. The committee identified some additional analyses that need to
be conducted before such inferences can be made. Until these are completed,
speculation about the outcome should be avoided.
Justin Cooke Centre for Ecosystem Management Studies Winden im Elztal,
Germany
Letters: Overhyped
Don’t you think it is a truly amazing phenomenon that those fearsome
Japanese are able to achieve their legendary competitiveness and work more
efficiently and cost-effectively only with paper, without computers, compared
to the West with all its advanced information technology (Comment and This
Week, 28 May)? Does it mean that all those efforts of computerisation were
a waste of time and money?
In fact it’s nothing new and the answer is, yes. For instance, Jacques
Valee wrote in 1982 in his book The Network Revolution: ‘When a consultant
to a major electronics firm conducted a study of the computer market. .
. he found that in over 80 per cent of all cases, company executives who
had acquired a computer system, in order to lower costs or meet other objectives,
felt that the computer had either failed to meet those objectives or had
resulted in higher expenses.’
And Datamation wrote on 15 June 1986: ‘The US is the world’s single
largest market for information technology. But when it comes to productivity
and competitiveness, it has been slipping for years. . . While we have
changed the business practices of the Western world dramatically because
of computers and communications, there is not a lot of evidence that it
has translated to increases in productivity or value of life.’
Your comment ended with the words ‘Japan could end up as a cul-de-sac
on the information superhighway’. Isn’t the information highway just a hype
at the moment? Computerworld of 28 February stated: ‘Last week’s sudden
collapse of the mega-merger between Bell Atlantic Corp. and Tele-Communications
Inc. shows how really difficult it’s going to be to pave this information
superhighway. Computer/television convergence is increasingly looking like
fusion in a bottle – exciting to think about but impossible to pull off.’
And what is, for instance, IBM doing now? According to Computergram
(4 May), Louis Gerstner, Chief Executive of IBM, told the German weekly
Der Spiegel that he was sceptical of the development of information superhighways.
He said IBM was concentrating on satisfying its customers rather than talking
about things which are still totally unclear and immature. ‘No-one knows
if TV viewers even want to have 500 channels and what they are willing to
pay for it,’ he said.
What if the Japanese computer companies are thinking the same, too?
And why should kanji be a problem, with all those handwriting and voice
recognition software and user-friendly graphical interfaces in the pipeline?
Igor Fodor Munich, Germany
Letters: Fair do's for diesel
The Retail Motor Industry Federation has no bias for or against diesel
(Forum, 4 June). It is concerned, however, that policy decisions from government
are based on accurate information, and that the motorist is not bombarded
with pseudo-environmental or anxiety-mongering health claims having little
if any substance.
First, the estimated 3000 deaths per annum which William Bown quoted
as being attributable to diesel vehicles could just as easily have been
500 or 6000 because, as his source will appreciate, the figure is unprovable.
Unprovable that it is correct, and unprovable that it is incorrect. Hardly
a scientific basis for government policy, but safe in academic terms.
Secondly, there is no proven mechanism by which PM10 particulates affect
health, and the US, the source of the scare, is particularly short on diesel
cars. It would be truly astonishing if all PM10 particulates of whatever
composition, organic or inorganic, were to have the same effect.
Thirdly, despite the fact that we are arguably the longest-lived generation
in history, we must, in the end, die of something – unless William Bown
is proposing immortality of course. In most cases we will die of an illness
we have a predisposition to be affected by, and no one can demonstrate that
lives would have been extended by a week, a month or a year if sales of
diesel vehicles were reduced or vice versa.
Surely, the key question is whether diesel emissions are, in total,
any worse than the alternative petrol engine emissions. There appears to
have been a convenient amnesia about the relatively high levels of volatile
organic compounds released during the manufacture, marketing and use of
petrol. These are directly and demonstrably linked to the production of
ground level ozone which will also affect those at risk of pulmonary illness.
Have these been relegated to insignificance by the more fashionable PM10?
And what has happened to the older bogey, leukaemia-producing benzene in
petrol?
No vehicle is benign in terms of environmental or health effects. However,
major steps have already been taken to reduce vehicle emissions, diesel
and petrol, on a national and European basis, and those measures are now
being seen to have a beneficial effect on air quality. Even tighter legislation
on vehicle emissions comes into force in 1996, while the motor and oil
industries are collaborating in research programmes to determine the technology
and set the emission standards for the next decade. These are the real advances
that will help to reduce permanently environmental and health effects. The
practical balance between diesel and petrol vehicle numbers is insignificant
by comparison.
Peter Barlow Retail Motor Industry Federation Alton, Hampshire
Letters: Legalise cheating
Illustration (omitted)
John Croucher asks for comments on dealing with the problem of student
cheating in examinations (Forum, 11 June).
One way of disabling many of the methods he mentions is to make them
legal. Most of our examinations are ‘open notes’, and students may bring
in and refer to almost any material they want. (We do not usually allow
textbooks – the idea is to force the students to generate their own reference
material in advance of the examination rather than relying on a book with
a good index).
Similarly, if their calculator can store text, they can put anything
they think might be useful into it in advance. We are just as happy for
them to solve their definite integrals on a calculator as we are for them
to use the square root key. If they know they have to solve a definite integral,
they have already understood much of the question; if they have the right
integral, they are almost there. There is no particular virtue (in an engineering
context) in the actual mechanics of the solution. If they can devise an
ear scratching code to pass a definite integral round, they deserve some
credit for data encoding.
This approach will not cope with the problem of portable phones or the
cordless modem, though the latter could similarly be defused by ‘open computer’
examinations, which will surely come before all that long.
Surely the answer to most types of cheating is not ever tightening security,
but the creation of an environment where cheating will simply not provide
any benefit.
J. R. Calvert University of Southampton
Letters: Into Internet
Comment (11 June) describes the Internet as an electronic Trivial Pursuit.
This is akin to saying that tabloid newspapers are the only ones that carry
any real content, and also to deny that the equivalent of a New 杏吧原创
could ever arise within this new medium.
People need to be shown that serious science is occurring in what many
believe does represent a revolutionary medium, and magazines such as yours
carry a responsibility to be pro-active in this. Your quiet introduction
of a New 杏吧原创 Internet e-mail account, and the use of a ‘world-wide-web’
based on on-line information pages produced by the BBC networking club,
are encouraging signs.
I also suspect that cable operators will soon wake up to the potential
of ‘e-money’, and then Internet to the home alongside television and video-on-demand
is a real and not too distant possibility.
Henry Rzepa Imperial College of Science London
Letters: V-1 realities
The implication in ‘The V-1 menace: secret weapons that saved Britain’
(4 June) is that anti-aircraft defences shot down ‘nearly 80 per cent of
the V-1s’ but the qualifying phrase ‘they engaged’ is the key here. In actuality,
only 1970 V-1s out of 5672 reaching land were destroyed by AA fire (34.7
per cent). The 80 per cent your author refers to is the 8 out of 10 anti-aircraft
posts that were equipped with combination radar/proximity fuse artillery.
This means that about 28 per cent of all incoming V-1s were destroyed by
the technology described in your article, not 80 per cent.
There is a supplementary point. The cost was tremendous. Total dead
from the nine-month V-1 campaign numbered 7810, of which 1950 were RAF aircrew,
lost on bombing missions to destroy launch ramps on the continent, the balance
being the people of Southeast England. For an expenditure of 拢12.6
million, the Germans had caused damage, loss of production and defence costs
totalling 拢47.6 million.
It was the occupation of France and Belgium by the Allied forces in
the months after D-Day that ultimately denied to the Germans launch sites
for their V-1s. But forget not the further 3012 V-1s fired against targets
on Continental Europe, against which there were no AA defences.
David Baker Cambridge
Letters: Accepting blame
I was intrigued by the irate tone with which Dick Atkinson denounced
the notion that aggressive behaviour may result from social influences rather
than genetic determinism (Letters, 18 June).
He seems disturbed by the idea that human behaviour could be influenced
by external factors. This is perhaps not surprising: after all, it is very
unsettling to believe that we may all play a part in creating social trouble
and general human misery. Far more seductive is the idea that ‘faulty genes’
are at the root of such problems, since that way, nobody’s to blame. We
are able to pity the poor souls who are suffering, and yet stay safe in
the knowledge that we don’t have to take any responsibility for it.
The very fact that ‘deterministic science provides no-blame explanations’
is reason enough for us to be wary of swallowing it whole. The only way
‘humane solutions’ – as Atkinson puts it – will be found, is if we begin
to care more about those who have to live with problems such as mental
illness, poverty, homelessness and lack of love.
Frances Culshaw Stockport
Letters: Privileged?
It is curious that Alice Hearne believes that she is ‘supporting herself’
while living on Income Support aud Housing Benefit (Letters, 18 June); one
can’t help wondering what role the tax-payer has been playing in her maintenance.
The privilege of devoting three years of one’s life solely to doing
one’s own research while being supported by the state is open to few. A
doctorate can be either a means to an end or an end in itself; in the former
case the rewards are garnered later in one’s career, in the latter they
are certainly not financial in nature.
Furthermore, postgraduate study has always relied upon the student’s
enthusiasm and goodwill, and always will. Motivation must come from a love
of the work, not financial considerations. Otherwise disappointment will
almost certainly be the result.
Ian Giles Bath
Letters: Nothing new
‘Figures published this week show which universities earned most from
industry in 1992/3′ (This Week, 18 June). Not if you have reported them
accurately, they don’t.
They omit to mention Cranfield University, which would, on the figures
published, come second to London’s multi-college total, with Pounds sterling
10.61 million earned from industrial R&D in 1992/3. Cranfield’s industrial
income is equivalent to four times the amount it receives from research
councils.
Provided that no other high-earning university is omitted (shouldn’t
UMIST, Warwick and Heriot-Watt be in there, somewhere?) this makes Nottingham’s
拢6.29m third, not second, and Cambridge’s 拢5.94m fourth, Oxford’s
拢4.79m fifth, and so on.
Revel Barker Cranfield University Bedfordshire
* * *
Andy Coghlan writes: Company Reporting, the consultancy that compiled
the UK R&D Scoreboard for the government, drew its university statistics
from the University Statistical Record, a document published annually by
the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (formerly UCCA). The USR
only included data on the ‘old’ universities funded by the now-defunct Universities
Funding Council. ‘New’ universities such as Cranfield will be included for
the first time in data for the year 1994-5, when the USR is taken over
by a new body called the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Letters: Warped
I applaud the courage of Miguel Alcubierre and the editors of Classical
and Quantum Gravity on publishing an article about a kind of ‘warp drive’,
in which, by distorting space-time, a spaceship can be made to travel quickly
between, for example, two stars (New 杏吧原创, Science, 11 June). ‘Science
fiction-like’ topics of this kind are often accused of being insufficiently
serious for ‘real’ journals while, in fact, being the original motivation
for many of us in studying physics.
It is just because popular accounts such as yours might well be a source
for future science fiction writers that it would be a shame if they didn’t
point out one or two important differences between the ‘Alcubierre drive’
and the Star Trek kind. The first difference is that the entire space-time
in a tube between the initial position of the spacecraft and its destination
gets crushed to a thin sheet. This would surely annoy the environmentalists
of the 22nd century. I also doubt if the ‘space-time pollution’ (due to
the expansion of a thin sheet of space-time behind the spacecraft to the
original distance between the spacecraft and its point of departure) would
be too popular.
The second difference is that if you can crush the space-time in front
of a spacecraft, there is little reason to expand it again. All one really
needs to do is to use a ‘warp field’ similar to that in front of Alcubierre’s
spacecraft to reduce the distance ‘once and for all’ between the two stars
and then carry out all future journeys by conventional rocket. I suppose
the problem here is that if everyone did it the Universe might become a
very small place very quickly.
And what about planets ‘in the way’ between two places made nearer by
crushing the intervening space-time? Don’t I remember something about the
Earth being demolished to make a hyperspace bypass?
Peter Grove Home Office Research & Planning Unit London
Letters: Warped
Your reference to Star Trek-inspired faster-than-light travel has overlooked
an earlier and much more specific description of the technique. It was,
as I recall, in Harry Harrison’s book Bill the Galactic Hero. I am sure
that the book was published well before Star Trek began, and so Miguel Alcubierre
and Star Trek should both acknowledge Harry Harrison’s priority on the subject.
Frank Everest Stevenage, Herts
Letters: Buttered up
Colin Morgan of Warrington (Letters, 4 June) is quite wrong with his
theory of toast landing on the buttered side.
His problem, and it is common in Cheshire since the Smiling Cat discovery,
is that he buttered the toast on the wrong side.
Richard Clowes New York
Letters: Why psychology?
To imagine that this growth is in any way connected with students being
‘sick of the Thatcherite view of the world’ is not very credible; the growth
began after the Second World War, and did not coincide with the Thatcher
years; a similar growth occurred in Germany, Spain, and the Scandinavian
countries, hardly Thatcher country; and in the US an even steeper growth
occurred under Roosevelt and Truman, and is still continuing.
You grudgingly admit that we ‘now know quite a lot about coping with
phobias’, but ‘do not know how to stop juvenile delinquency, cure drug addiction.
. . ‘ We have elaborated much more effective methods of treating not only
phobias, but also anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive neurosis, enuresis,
and many other neurotic disorders. There is also experimental evidence that
psychological methods can produce greatly improved rehabilitation programmes
for juvenile defenders, if only politicians and others could be persuaded
to look at facts rather than pursue the absurd notions of civil servants
not familiar with the field.
We cannot cure drug addicts, true, but research and treatment in this
area is almost entirely in the hands of medical experts with little knowledge
of psychology; given a chance, we might have a contribution to make. We
do not claim to ‘condition children to do anything’, or to be able to end
wars, as you say. No respectable psychologist has made such nonsensical
claims since I came into psychology over 50 years ago. What J. B. Watson
may have claimed 70 years ago (and retracted two years later) may make a
good horror story, but is utterly irrelevant to modern psychology.
Students will continue to flock to psychology’s colours because they
see that most of society’s problems and difficulties are psychological –
from strikes and crimes, divorce and drug taking, to race discrimination
and prejudice – and because they realise that only the development of a
truly scientific psychology will lead us to finding answers to these problems.
H. J. Eysenck University of London
Letters: Why psychology?
I was somewhat surprised at your editorial comment on psychology (18
June). In the past, New 杏吧原创 has, with some notable exceptions, largely
confined its coverage of psychology to short articles and book reviews on
psychoanalysis and parapsychology – providing a curious, if lamentable,
19th-century perspective on the discipline. I had therefore long ago given
up hope that psychology would ever be treated seriously by New 杏吧原创.
It is depressing to have to state that your editorial merely confirms this
view.
The fact is that psychology has made many important advances in understanding
basic cognitive processes and in applying this understanding to the behaviour
such processes support. How people read, how people remember, how people
solve problems, and how these activities become disrupted following neurological
injuries and in the processes of natural aging and its converse, development,
are inherently fascinating questions to which psychology can now provide
answers. This is one of the main reasons the subject is so attractive to
undergraduate students.
There are, however, other equally important reasons. One is that psychology
is unique in providing high-level training in numeracy skills, research
methods, and, unlike other science disciplines, literacy skills. These three
features of the subject, coupled with the high interest value of the area,
make psychology extremely attractive to students with either science or
arts A levels. In addition to this, post-degree vocational opportunities
in psychology are expanding, as are roles for psychologists in commerce
and industry. Hardly surprising then that the subject is now the most highly
subscribed among all the science undergraduate degrees.
But there is another aspect to the increase which is less obvious and
more worrying. Much of this increase has come from students with science
A levels. Indeed, in our own department, psychology students with science
A levels far outnumber their colleagues with arts and social science A
levels. I presume that psychology undergraduates with science A levels
would in the past have taken science degrees such as physics or chemistry,
or related subjects. Why have they switched to psychology?
Psychologists do not choose to monopolise the market in science undergraduates
and along with their colleagues in other science subjects are concerned
with falling rates of applications to science degrees. It seems to me that
a careful scientific study and analysis of the current popularity of psychology
at degree level could reveal a great deal about what has gone wrong with
science education and how it can be put right.
Martin Conway University of Bristol