Paying to page
As your Feedback item (10 June) on “Caller Party Pays” for radio pagers says, a caller pays heavily when calling premium lines with codes such as 0839 and 0891; there are at least four other such numbers.
It would be nice for consumers if we could recognise such codes easily, and the obvious technique would be to have a standard first digit (after the “0”) for them. But the simplest solution is no longer possible, as 0800 has been made the standard toll-free code. Did BT do this deliberately, did the point simply not occur to them, or don’t they care?
Benefit cut
In Feedback (6 May), you attribute claims that the British Department of Social Security (DSS) has 80 million customers to Andersen Consulting, the organisation that nominated the DSS for a 1995 Computerworld Smithsonian Award.
Please be advised that the press release containing this error was released by the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program and was incorrectly prepared due to an editing error. The nomination information that Andersen Consulting supplied to the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards correctly stated that the DSS provides benefits to 20 million people.
Reducing rats
So rats lose weight when exposed to high-gravity environments (This Week, 13 June). Ariadne’s mult-adjectival friend Daedalus proposed centrifuges as a method of inducing homeostatic weight loss in New 杏吧原创 as long ago as 15 February 1968.
According to David Jones’s book The Inventions of Daedalus, only a month after the New 杏吧原创 article the American magazine Time (8 March 1968) carried an account of some NASA experiments showing weight loss in centrifuged rats.
Nose for fish
Re your story about a dog sniffing illegally caught fish (This Week, 27 May), some years ago we had an Elkhound dog that regularly fished in the Endrick Water, which is a salmon and salmon trout river. He would stand in the river facing upstream, sometimes for hours at a time such that in cold weather ice would form on the feathering on his legs and belly.
He used to sniff at and take little sips of the water flowing past. We were convinced that he could detect fish upstream of him. He would move along the river bank, paddle into the river, taste the water and then sometimes just move on to another place. Fishermen would watch him and say, “Oh right, no fish here, might as well move on.”
Occasionally we would get bored watching him and go upstream, get into the river and walk towards him and often we would disturb a fish which would make a dash downstream and the dog would make a mad rush for it.
He caught quite a few spent fish often by the dorsal fin and would drag them out onto the bank. Leaping fish caused great excitement and he would tear along the bank to where the splash occurred. Has anyone else experienced this and is it likely that the dog could have detected such supposedly low concentrations? The river was obviously not in flood when he fished.
Atomic prices
Students suing a university (Feedback, 27 May) because the work was too hard? Perish the thought!
My Year 10 chemistry class of 14 to 15-year-olds thought it was a good idea, but felt that the Pace University students had given up on too easy a problem. At $1796 per tonne and an exchange rate of $1.6 to 拢1 today they quickly calculated that the tonne comprised 37 037 moles at 3p each. That is 2 脳 1023 atoms for every penny.
They also pointed out that they had to deal with the additional calculation of a currency conversion.
Flushed with success
I read with interest M. P. Lewis’s letter regarding heat loss via toilet flushing (Letters, 3 June). As a graduate student in Edinburgh in the mid-eighties I used to eke out every last joule of our energy usage to conserve my grant. To that end the other main appliances in the bathroom were pressed into service 鈥� the bath and even the washbasin were not emptied until the water in them had gone stone cold.
The cold water supply to the flat was only slightly below room temperature, so not only did we not lose much heat down the toilet, but almost all the energy used in heating the hot water could be reclaimed to heat the flat. This came to about 45 pence for a bathful in those days. Even the homebrew beer did not escape: after sparging it was left in my room to “cool down” before being put in the cupboard.
Second time round
We’ve had this about maggots in wounds before, years back, when Florence Nightingale’s contribution was considered, and the ironic fact that her hygienic regime killed off these useful beasts and actually worsened the rate of sepsis. (Feedback, 13 May and Letters, 3 and 10 June). They not only thoroughly scavenged the dead flesh, leaving the live, but excreted a type of formalin that killed off any marauding germs.
My mother said that I would know I was middle-aged when the fashion in hats returned to that of my twenties. Well, hats are now gone, so perhaps the modern equivalent indicator is the New 杏吧原创 letters pages? This is the second time it has happened recently; the last one was the Coriolis effect north and south of the equator, much discussed in about 1965-66 when I was doing my degree.
Letters to the editor
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Sustaining Scotland
As your editorial of 3 June demonstrates, indicators, like any other branch of statistics, can be used to argue just about anything.
It would be a shame if this were used to undermine current work on sustainability indicators. Strathclyde Regional Council, for example, has published Strathclyde Sustainability Indicators which highlights, for the first time in a British local authority, a selection of sustainability issues including air quality, water quality, transportation, health and waste management.
In presenting this information one conclusion was clear: simple judgements on whether things are getting better or getting worse are not easily made. As no one has yet convincingly described what a sustainable society might be, let alone how we might achieve it, it was not possible to make easy judgements on progress towards this state, or the lack of it
We have been able to identify key issues that relate to sustainability, and to develop indicators to measure these, but I do not believe we can yet measure overall environmental health or “human sustainability”.
Impact has it
I’m afraid that Heinz Gross’s attribution of the extinction of the dinosaurs to magnetic reversal is backed up by no evidence (Letters, 3 June). Impact evidence from the iridium anomaly and shocked quartz in the boundary clay has proved too convincing for vigorous debate to overcome. Charles Officer and Charles Drake amongst others have tried hard to disprove the bolide impact theory. Their lack of success only shows how resistant this is to challenge. For this certainty they deserve our gratitude (it makes exams easier!).
The K/T boundary occurred during the period of reversed (relative to today’s) terrestrial magnetic field known prosaically as 29R. Thus there have been something over 50 reversals of magnetic field in the intervening 65.16 million years, but never with levels of extinction to rival the end of the Maastrichtian.
Backing Bellamy
Two misapprehensions confound your editorial criticising David Bellamy (Comment, 10 June). The first is to contrast “elitist ivory towers” with universities that “forge links with industry”. Both have their dangers and neither is wholesome. The former may isolate from the real world but the latter supports a narrowing world system that is causing ecological and social unsustainability, and therefore is also removed from the real world.
What is needed is active support for a creativity that is imaginative, academically sound, and that questions the conventional. That is what is curbed by current science policies. Universities may be more exposed “to the outside world”, but at the cost of following the dogmas and beliefs behind the sources of funding.
The other misapprehension concerns one of those beliefs, which your editorial fortunately precedes with an “if”: “If genetic engineering can bring stable supplies of inexpensive food 鈥�”. The change of name of the Agriculture and Food Research Council to Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, with a remit to create wealth from biotechnology, is an example of the science policy that Bellamy criticised. At a time when it is at last becoming respectable to correct, “man’s inability to fit his doings into [nature’s] patterns” (Brundtland Report) and to adapt technologies to fit in with natural processes, biotechnologies are continuing the old path of overcoming and short-circuiting nature.
In the process, intellectual efforts in other directions are stifled. For example, there is little if any research into crop plants’ own systems of “integrated pest management” or the biochemistry of the negative effects of many modern agricultural practices. Nor is much work being done on alternatives to hybrid seed, whose main rationale is not genetic but commercial, to the detriment of farmers worldwide.
It is therefore not the individual scientists in their laboratories who “pervert their work to serve the market”, but the whole system which funds them in that direction.
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One cause of public loss of confidence in science is that scientists are suspected of becoming advocates for the products of the industries or the policies of governments that fund their applied research. Few people doubt the objectivity of scientific method, but many are suspicious of the motives of many of sciences’ academic practitioners whose salaries are directly or indirectly paid by their research funders, who may also demand secrecy agreements. In this respect scientists share a common cause of low esteem with Members of Parliament, namely, vested interests that may colour their judgement.
Many of the 20th century’s scientific achievements have contributed to the environmental and social problems that future generations of scientists will need to tackle. The past effects of the Green Revolution in the developing world, including demographic upheaval, increased foreign debt and the genetic erosion of crop plants, can tell us much about the potential ramifications of plant genetic engineering in the future.
Surely scientists, above all other members of society, should be able to learn from such experiences and pass on a balanced but suitably sceptical analysis of the potential impact of their current and future inventions on people’s lives. That is not the action of elitists in ivory towers, but the behaviour that society is entitled to expect from responsible scientists whom it can trust.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with universities forging links with industry but David Bellamy is quite right to sound the alarm about the dangers of academia being perceived as a servant of industry and government, rather than society.
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According to your editorial, “杏吧原创s who see themselves as moral philosophers are all too likely to disappear into a Celtic twilight zone clutching a copy of Walden”. Perhaps your editorial writer could next tell us what scientists who do not see themselves as moral philosophers do. Presumably, they indulge in the selective reporting of factual data that allows many lobbyists with vested interests to continue to claim that fluoride is good for us, nuclear power is safe, smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer and that student numbers can be increased without lowering standards.
Especially in this era of sleaze, perhaps it is indeed time for scientists to spend a little more time on moral philosophy and a little less on mission statements.
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I was there when David Bellamy gave the speech, and the impression that I received was that he was pleading not for universities to be ivory towers, but rather that they should seek to apply themselves to the needs of the wider society, and not just to those of industry.
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I appreciated the thrust of the editorial. But please don’t associate academic isolationism with any “Celtic Twilight Zone”. We in the celtic countries are trying as hard as anyone. Anyway, I thought the Twilight Zone was an American TV series.
Radio daze
Most of the points raised by your correspondents concerning the early history of radio (Letters, 10 June) have already been discussed extensively in Oliver Lodge and the Invention of Radio, which I co-edited with J. Patrick Wilson and which was reviewed last year in New 杏吧原创 (Review, 1 October).
In general, Anthony Constable is quite correct to state that people are not comparing like with like. Nikola Tesla, for example, gave a lecture on radio in 1893, but this was well after Willliam Crookes had published a proposed system of radio communication in February 1892, partly based on prior work by Oliver Lodge and David Hughes.
Tesla had also discussed his proposals with Crookes and Lodge on a visit to England, but the system he proposed in 1893 was unworkable and quite different from the one patented in 1897. The only significant addition in 1893 was the use of raised capacity plates (which were developed by Dugald Jackson and Gugliemo Marconi into high wire aerials), and this was taken from an 1885 patent by the despised Thomas Edison.
As Leonard Shaw states, Lodge is believed to have transmitted Morse code at Oxford on 14 August 1894, and few people would now deny it. He certainly developed the receiver which everybody then copied, and which Marconi alone failed to acknowledge as his source of inspiration.
It is a matter of opinion how “successful” one considers a device must be to claim, as Constable does, that Aleksandr Popov developed the first successful automatic coherer receiver. Lodge had the first automatic decoherer; Popov improved on the principle by adding a relay. Ernest Rutherford developed the first magnetic detector, but didn’t and couldn’t have used it for Morse telegraphy, which would have required automatic remagnetisation.
It will never be possible to attribute radio to a single “inventor”: various people suggested it at an early date; Crookes showed how it could be done in theoretical terms; Lodge made the first workable device and demonstrated it publicly; Marconi delivered it as a fully commercial technological proposition, with help from Popov’s relay, the Edison-Tesla-Jackson system of aerials, and with outright piracy of Lodge’s system of tuning.
Pace Stephen Kaposi’s letter, the significant US Supreme Court decision of 1943 was not in favour of Tesla, but in favour of the US version of Lodge’s British patent of 10 May 1897, bought by the Marconi Company in 1911, which was held to invalidate all others that the company then held.
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Of all the eminent scientists who were important in the transmission of radio waves it was only Marconi who realised the full potential to which they could be put. William Preece, Heinrich Hertz and Lodge all developed the adequate means to transmit etheric waves (or electromagnetic waves) across one extended laboratory to another. But it was Marconi at the age of twenty who had the vision and originality to consider how radio waves might be used to communicate between ship and shore, continent and continent and therefore fulfil his dream to “girdle the earth”.
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Tesla, in his 1893 lecture to the Franklin Institute, stated that he was convinced “that telephony to any distance by induction through the air is possible”, but that such a possibility was “a serious problem in electrical engineering which must be carried out some day”. This does not sound like someone who has already found a practical answer to radio transmission or who was close to it.
Lethal peanuts
In a recent short article (In Brief, 15 April) you discussed the pros and cons of feeding garden birds during the summer. You stated that no relationship has been found between the amount of artificial food in the diet and nestling survival, and for a study of tits breeding in urban gardens in which I was involved this was true.
However, all the broods which we studied in detail received artificial food and therefore we could not compare nestling survival in the presence of artificial food with that in its absence. More importantly, we reported in the same paper that peanuts can kill nestling tits. Three dead chicks which I cut open had pieces of peanut stuck in the gut; above the blockages they were full of caterpillars 鈥� those dangling out of the beak being the reason that I noticed these particular bodies.
Three is a very small sample, but this information was only collected incidentally out of curiosity. Also, small dead young are removed from the nest by the adults and so are not available for inspection.
It has been suggested that peanuts provided in wire mesh feeders cannot be removed whole and hence are safe. In my experience, tits are quite capable of removing pieces of peanut large enough to kill nestlings from such feeders, and the older (and more squirrel-damaged) the feeder, the easier it is.
Given the range of soft foods and small seeds which can be offered to birds in the summer I would suggest that whole peanuts in any form be avoided from late April to early July. Anyone desperate to offer peanuts could grind them up in a blender and put them out as meal, or as meal mixed with fat.
Cake and eat it
Ian Stewart’s article on dividing the disputed cake in “Fair shares for all” (17 June) is interesting to me as a divorce mediator (who used to be an engineer). Clearly the mathematical approach to division in disputes is limited and rather artificial when there are few options. This is the problem for such disputes in for example Bosnia and Northern Ireland where someone has to lose a great deal. The principle behind Brams-Taylor mathematics seems to be to generate more options where possible so that everyone wins something.
Stewart’s comments about division in divorce reflect the often adversarial nature of divorce when arranged at arm’s length through lawyers’ letters on a point-by-point basis. Exploration, face to face, with all issues on the table before negotiation begins often avoids unresolved disagreements. Taking plenty of time to lay out the issues, such as times of contact, maintenance, new partners, housing and stereo versus washing machine-type decisions can mean everyone wins something and especially that children win.
One point forgotten by many would-be negotiators is the need to leave some issues unresolved. It may be that Bertha should have known better than to cut the cake at coffee-time, as Arthur knew tea-time was preferable. So the cake is divided, but everyone can keep their opinions of the others, one’s own integrity is intact and the dispute, while now resolved, can be justified. I imagine that defies mathematical analysis.