Market mass
I wonder which projection D. Baggs of the Electricity Association is using when he states that “Britain is on target to at least stabilise and probably reduce its CO2 emissions by 2000 compared to 1990, fully satisfying our Rio commitments” (Letters, 14 October).
The Rio agreement was nothing more than agreeing to create a plan aimed at returning CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2000, with no mention of stabilisation. And it’s a good job too, for the Department of Trade and Industry predicts in its latest energy and emission projection for Britain that CO2 will rise by 25 million tonnes of carbon between 1990 and 2020. A strange sort of stabilisation.
Although liberalisation of the electricity industry has greatly reduced its CO2 emissions, this can hardly be described as the result of a great “market success”. The CO2 savings achieved have been the accidental by-product of the “dash for gas”, which has resulted in overcapacity in the market and the collapse of British Coal. In the longer term, emissions from this sector will begin to rise as nuclear capacity retires and electricity demand increases.
Privatisation of the energy utilities has greatly improved supply efficiencies, but although improving the efficiency with which end-users (consumers) use energy has enormous savings potential, the market will fail to deliver these savings due to the plethora of barriers which hamper everyday investment in end-use energy efficiency.
Although one energy efficient light bulb could save up to 拢10 on annual electricity bills, hands up all those who have them? There is little incentive for the energy supply industry to encourage improvement in end-use energy efficiency. The 拢100 million projects referred to by Baggs are the result of tweaks in the current market mechanism.
With the current wave of takeovers and mergers in the British electricity industry creating a more vertically integrated structure, it is difficult to see how the consumer or the environment will benefit. In the short term, consumers will probably notice little difference, but in the longer term they will prohably pay more for their electricity than they otherwise might do.
Unless the market is forced to take the environment into account, it will not. And as yet, no mechanism exists to deal with long-term growth in CO2 emissions. The imperfect markets created by privatisation have emphasised the need for a regulator. It appears that this job will become increasingly onerous in the future.
Waste of time
When I studied for my PhD in the late 1970s, I was ably assisted by a team of technicians. Such people are now a rare species, however, and today’s PhD students are routinely having to do technicians’ work. This is bad for them, and bad for science.
Only last week I came across an outrageous example of this: a piece of applied physics research where a technical first step had been botched for months by an unhappy new student, preventing progress to any real science. Only after strenuous efforts was the research group concerned persuaded to borrow an experienced technician 鈥� who duly carried out the work in a few days.
In the old days, this abuse of PhD students could be justified: when the student went on to further research (with a technician to help) he or she would be intimately aware of the details of experiments. Today, with only 10 per cent of PhDs going into academic research, and even fewer into research in industry, students should not be wasting time doing technicians’ work.
A solution to the problem? Allow each university only as many PhD students as they have technicians. This might also solve the problem of too many contract researchers (“Stuck on the road to nowhere”, 14 October) with all that entails, such as poor scientific career prospects. If science is to prosper it must be seen to have value. That value, as far as possible, must be not just admired but known and measured. This means putting a price on what we do and what we seek to achieve. Because the funding of science, scientists, research students, and indeed of the universities themselves, is at present based on such vague, grace-and-favour terms, we all feel threatened, unloved and in despair.
In the matter of values we must begin with simple questions, such as value to whom? Real values are determined either arbitrarily or by markets. The present arrangements are entirely arbitrary and perhaps we should begin to think in terms of markets, no matter how distasteful that might seem. What is research worth? What is a scientific education worth? What is a university worth? It is no good just answering “a lot”, true though that may be.
杏吧原创s must come out of the closet of ideals and simplicities into the world of realities and complexities.
The Medical Research Council, far from being indifferent about career prospects for young scientists, has played a major role, alongside the Office of Science and Technology, the Royal Society and the other research councils, in developing the concordat on academic careers. We believe this agreement addresses serious deficiencies in the current system, even if some argue it could go further.
It’s also wrong to suggest that the MRC would be reluctant to take steps against universities that fail to deliver on the concordat. This would be a serious matter, requiring a degree of circumspection 鈥� but is not a step we would be afraid to take.
Tail piece
The article by John Bonner on the docking of dogs’ tails was inaccurate in some respects (“Off with their tails”, 30 September). The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) never said that docking was cruel and has not made pain an important issue.
The Government did not (overtly at least) ask the RCVS to stamp out docking. The act forbidding lay persons to dock, while still allowing it to be done by vets, was passed in 1991, becoming law in 1993. In 1989, when discussions were taking place between interested parties, Douglas Hogg, then a Home Office minister, assured the Council for Docked Breeds that in his view docking would continue to be done generally.
It was only in 1992 that the governing council of the RCVS resolved that docking was primarily carried out for cosmetic reasons and was unethical, and threatened any vet doing it (apart from therapeutically) with expulsion from the college. This sequence of events left dog owners and breeders feeling that they had been conned.
The view that docking is cosmetic is not held generally. Most people agree that undocked dogs look more elegant than their docked counterparts. The Breed Standards of the Kennel Club, describing ideal dogs, nowhere specify that any dogs should be docked 鈥� as would be expected if cosmetically important.
Many, dog owners, about a third of whom have undocked dogs, feel that tails, particularly if dirty with faecal matter, are not hygienic and can distribute undesirable matter (including Taxocara which can cause blindness) at a level within reach of small children. Tails are also vulnerable to damage, particularly from sharp corners and car doors.
The RCVS ignores these views. Some of its members are more sympathetic so that docking is still practised, but is carried out in secret.
Sporting breeds were said to account for the majority of dockings. As vets are now the only legally authorised people who can dock, it would seem reasonable to assume that the breeders of puppies of sporting breeds have a specific reason for getting them docked, as they have to pay their vets a fee for this service.
Evidence of an increase in tail injuries in German pointers after docking was banned in Sweden was summarily dismissed in Bonner’s article. However, these results would seem to suggest that the concerns of the breeders of sporting dogs may be to avoid such injuries by getting their puppies docked. It would have been better if Bonner had called for more detailed research on this topic rather than merely reporting that the results of the Swedish study have been said to be flawed.
The need for docking in the German pointer was called into question, especially as English pointers are not docked. The reason for this difference is simple. German pointers are docked because they are used to hunt, point and retrieve on rough shoots (where entire tails do get injured) while English pointers are used in more open country such as grouse moors (where the risk of tail damage is slight).
Dogs’ tails are said by Bonner to be important in communication. As most docking involves only a shortening of the tail rather than total removal, this communication is unlikely to be impaired significantly. Bonner specifically mentions the presence of scent glands in the tail. I am not aware of any in the tail itself although the anal glands (important in scent marking via the faeces) are just underneath the tail. I know of no evidence that the anal glands are adversely affected by docking.
Steer clear of sage
You report that Elaine Perry’s team at Newcastle General Hospital have discovered that sage oil inhibits acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that is the target of many drugs in development for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (This Week, 14 October). You point out that tbe team will have to track down the active ingredient before sage can be used as a medicine. However, sage oil is readily available and this report may encourage people to experiment with it in an effort to stave off mental deterioration.
On no account should they do this. Sage oil is toxic and can cause unpleasant symptoms even when used externally. It contains a high concentration of thujone, which can cause epilepsy or convulsions and, in the amounts that would be used if taken daily, can be toxic to the central nervous system. Even sage as a herb should be used with caution and never in pregnancy.
Rare mycologists
One of the reasons for the decision by the Crown Estate not to fell 20 ancient oak trees in Queen Anne’s Ride in Windsor Great Park was the fact that one of them was host to 25 per cent of the population of the rare oak bracket fungus, Phellinus robustus (This Week, 14 October).
The publicity has resulted in another record of the bracket being reported from Clunton coppice in Shropshire. So the tree in the Ride now shelters only one in five of the known British examples of this species, which is rare and endangered throughout Europe.
The reasons for its rarity are becoming more obvious. To begin with, 275-year-old oak trees are rare. Secondly, mycologists are rare. Rarer still are mycologists who can spot a bracket fungus 20 feet up a tree. Rarest of all are mycologists who are still young and fit enough to climb an oak tree to identify the fungus.
Gum probes
The article on the use of antibodies to reveal warning signs of gum disease (Technology, 23 September) provided an excellent insight into the dental need for such biotechnology. However, it incorrectly described chondroitin-4-sulphate, the marker molecule that reveals serious gum disease, as a “sugary protein”. The molecules of interest are proteoglycans containing chains of chondroitin-4-sulphate linked to a core protein.
Antibody probes that recognise molecular surface features on the proteins and carbohydrates of interest are now available and work is under way to develop them into sensitive tests which can be used to diagnose gum disease.
Horse sense
Adrian Bowyer’s letter about the predominance of lefthandedness in horses raises interesting questions about the origins of the rule of the road (Letters, 7 October). If one always gets on and off at the left side of a horse, it becomes natural to mount from the verge with the horse on the left side of the road. This done, it will be natural to move off on the left, a tendency possibly reinforced by the horse’s left bias.
If meeting a hostile horseman coming the other way, a right-handed rider would surely want to be on the left of the road so as to deploy his weapons on the right, not across his own horse. It thus seems strange that so many countries now ride and drive on the right. Were the rulers of Continental Europe more concerned about the ability of their cavalries to dominate unmounted people at the roadside? Or was it an extension of the rules that applied at sea?
Turning left may not be just a tendency of the horse. I believe that at one stage in the Second World War, British fighter pilots were instructed to vary the direction in which they turned when attacked, since the Luftwaffe had noticed that most pilots turned left under stress, and had devised tactics to take advantage of this. Was it a universal tendency, or just a result of being brought up with Britain’s rule of the road? I must agree with Bowyer that most horses are biased to the left. However, I would dispute the suggestion that mounting from the left is connected to this bias. Horses (in the Western European tradition) are mounted from the left as a result of a closed feedback loop powered by training and tradition. Most riders expect to mount from the left and so the young horse is taught that its rider will mount from the left. Because most horses expect to be mounted from the left, beginner riders are taught to mount from the left, and so on.
The completely inexperienced horse has no preference for the rider mounting on either side, it is only habit which makes him prefer the left approach. I would always advise someone who owns a horse to teach it to stand to be mounted from the “wrong” side occasionally. This will ensure that neither the horse nor the rider will face undue problems if it should be necessary to do such a thing in an emergency.
Historically, I suspect that before the invention of the stirrup most horses were mounted from the right, it being easier for a right-handed person to get a good grip on the mane or neck to help them vault on from that side. With the discovery of stirrups tradition diverged.
In those countries where armed men (the most numerous class to ride horses) wore short, curved swords belted high on their waist, mounting continued to be from the right. The Arabs mounted from the right and spread that tendency across north Africa and into Spain; from Spain it spread to the New World and native Americans mounted from the right.
In Christian Europe the most usual knight’s weapon was a long straight sword. Mounting from the right with a long straight sword hanging by your left side is, at best, awkward. Mounting from the left made far more practical sense. From Europe this tradition spread to northeastern America where white Americans mount from the left.
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Siren call
I think Keir Moilliet has missed the point about sirens (Letters, 21 October). These devices are, indeed, “carefully contrived to make source location 鈥� almost impossible”. Thus everyone, pedestrian and driver alike, slows down or stops when a siren is heard in order to establish its source, facilitating the swifter passage of the emergency vehicle.
Kidproof
The goat bra has been used in the Middle East for many years, but not to keep thorns away (Feedback, 7 October). When the owner of the goat decides that the kids have had enough milk and should be diverted to grass, the bra is used. This makes it possible to use the milk mainly for making cheese 鈥� halloumi in the case of Cyprus.
In the black
I am surprised at the ignorance about kerosene and hydrogen peroxide fuel displayed in your otherwise interesting article on space travel (“Fly me to the Moon”, 14 October). “鈥� no one has used this type of mixture before” indeed!
What about the successful Black Knight rockets built by Saunders Roe between 1959 and 1965, and the unbuilt Black Prince satellite launcher? Most especially, what about the Black Arrow that launched the only all-British satellite in 1971, just after the government decided to abandon the future and cancel all rocket programmes?
Why do you think that Mitchell Burnside Clapp’s craft is named “Black” Horse? If we want a cheap satellite launcher, we could just dust off the plans of Black Arrow, or drag the last one out of the Science Museum in Kensington, where it is on display, and fire that off.
High on science
My cat likes New 杏吧原创. Unfortunately, she does not like to read it 鈥� instead she likes to slobber on it and nuzzle the resulting mess. From this revolting behaviour, she seems to get a “high”. What is the hallucinogenic content in the paper or ink of this and other magazines, and is it worth us humans having a go?
Patching patchers
Feedback’s comments on first aid box silliness reminded me of what has happened in a health centre in mid-Scotland (Feedback, 15 July and 7 October). This place has a fully equipped treatment room for minor surgery to stitch cuts or remove lumps and bumps. In addition each consulting room has bandages, antiseptics and enough antibiotic and moderate analgesic stores to keep a small hospital.
Enter the functionary from the ministry. There was not a 4-by-5-by-2-inch first aid box as prescribed in regulation so and so appended to the act of such and such. In this situation the health centre might have to be closed until the appropriate first aid box was provided to assure the safety of staff should they have an accident.
The first aid box was duly provided by a chastened health board and lies forgotten in some mouldering cupboard while cuts and scrapes are dealt with as before. The contents are doubtless out of date and may be dug up in the ruins by archaeologists in aeons to come. I wonder what they will think?