Letters : Patent myth
London
Your report on British patents (In Brief, 31 August, p 11) may sadly fuel a
myth about patents which has caused grief to many inventors, not just Britain’s
poorer ones. It lies in the suggestion that once a British patent has been
acquired, backers can then be approached to finance a European patent
application.
Sadly, this is not the case: backers are generally aware of the golden rule
that you must apply for your patent while the invention is still secret.
Under the British patent system, the application is published around 18
months after it is filed. Even if the inventor has kept the idea secret since
filing, that publication destroys his or her ability to secure valid patents on
an application filed after the publication date. So it is no good getting a
patent here first, and then thinking you can get another patent elsewhere
afterwards.
Filing a patent need not be too hard either. The British Patent Office is to
be congratulated for reducing the number of its standard forms for various
matters relating to patents from 57 to 22. A single inventor filing a patent
application in his or her own name has to fill in only three forms.
Letters : Cosmic solitude
Rayleigh, Essex
Ian Crawford (Forum, 5 October, p 52) should not be surprised by the apparent
absence of extraterrestrials. It seems totally reasonable that any imaginable
developing civilisation, relentlessly gaining knowledge, must eventually attain
self-limiting, if not terminal, instability.
Although it is natural enough for us today to argue that staying alive is
better than dying, in other circumstances it may become difficult to argue that
existence could be logically preferential to nonexistence. To phase out a
species totally, however, is extreme as there may be arguments for maintaining a
small token society.
It is also highly probable that minds鈥攁lien or human鈥攃ould be
directly satisfied without resorting to physical excursion. With every
conceivable mental state controllable, why leave your chair, let alone your
planet? Such measures would be very effective in conserving resources for the
long term.
If, despite all this, there are still ETs who for some strange reason are
motivated to visit Earth, then in all likelihood they are being careful not to
be found out. To be truthful, if there is any being out there which is content
to watch the horrors of Earth unfold in silence, are we likely to benefit from
knowing it?
If we value this relatively fortunate period of our own development, let us
rejoice in our cosmic solitude.
Letters : Bang on
Seascale, Cumbria
Mr West’s suggested cure for pigeons (Letters, 12 October, p 50) would take
more than three months. After the first “bang” the pigeons would go away.
Farmers use gas guns which go bang for that very purpose鈥攖o keep the
wretched things off seeds. But like bad pennies they always return.
What we require is a gun which does not go bang. One could suggest the use of
steel pellets in an electromagnetic gun or, by a stretch of the imagination, an
electrostatic gun using glass pellets鈥攐r something.
By far the simplest solution would be to place a bounty on their heads. At
拢1 per bird, 拢17 000 would get rid of 17 000 pigeons very
quickly.
But give pigeons their due. What other species would clear human detritus
(half-eaten pizzas, sandwiches, chips, and so on) off our streets?
If humans clean up their act, pigeons will start to decline. And people
should stop feeding them.
Letters : Red peril
Cambridge
It is indeed shocking that a review quantifying exactly how endangered
particular mammal species are has only just been completed (This Week, 5
October, p 5). Fish, reptiles and amphibians still await even this level of
treatment. Birds were fully reviewed in 1988 with a revision in 1994 (Birds
to Watch 2, by N. J. Collar, M. J. Crosby and A. J. Stattersfield, Birdlife
International).
Red Lists on their own are not enough. Conservationists also need to be able
to express their priorities in terms of sites of particular concern. Again, this
has already been done for birds where we know the location of the 5 per cent of
Earth to which one-quarter of all birds, and 75 per cent of threatened bird
species, are confined. There is thus a pressing need for mammalogists,
herpetologists, ichthyologists and others to collaborate in the way that
ornithologists and ornithological organisations have long done to express these
critical facts clearly beyond the specialist arena.
Your article could be seen to imply that somehow ornithologists have misled
conservation by overemphasising the threats to birds. If any overemphasis has
been construed it is precisely because we are waiting for the level of knowledge
about other groups of species to catch up.
Finally, surely it is not the fact that one group of species is more
threatened than another that we should be too concerned with, but more the fact
that there are still large numbers of many species鈥攂e they mammals, fish
or birds鈥攖hat face real threats and need our protection.
Letters : Heads or tails?
Oxford
Tim O’Riordan (Review, 19 October, p 46) tells us that “the vast majority”
would give a wrong answer (tails) to the question: “If you toss a coin and land
three heads in a row, how do you call after the next throw?”
His treatment of the question, and that of Peter Bernstein, whom he quotes,
is little better because it rests upon an assumption about coins which is not
stated, and which may not be true. This is that the coin is a “fair” one, so
repeated tosses are independent, with the probability of landing heads being
50:50.
Not everything in life is fair, and some coins may not be. Even if we suppose
the independence assumption to be true, we still have to decide the probability
of heads. The observed sequence may not affect the actual probability for the
next throw but certainly affects a rational estimate. If we knew nothing
about the probability we would estimate it from the observed sequence, giving a
point estimate of p(Heads)=1. If we think we know something about it
beforehand, we can combine that with the observed result. We should call heads
unless our prior belief is biased towards tails. O’Riordan’s approach in effect
uses a degenerate prior belief with all the probability on p
(Heads)=1/2.
This becomes clear if we ask the same question after 100 heads: most of us
would be very suspicious about the “fairness” of the coin, although the theory
remains the same.
We cannot, of course, assume that coins people use are a random sample of all
coins unless we take precautions to ensure this. Cheats exist as well as unfair
coins! Nor can we exclude the possibility that a really cunning coin tosser has
constructed a coin with an internal mechanism that ensures throws are not
independent.
Letters : Creative writing
Sevenoaks, Kent
The answer to A. E. Parrott’s question (Letters, 12 October, p 50) about the
reference to “the Creator” in the last sentence of his copy of On the Origin
of Species, is that he and Stephen Jay Gould were using different editions
of the book.
The reference to “the Creator” is missing from the last sentence of the first
edition of 1859 but was added to the second edition, published in 1860. It is
found in all later English editions. It is not found in the US edition of
1861.
The absence or presence of the reference to “the Creator” in the last
sentence of any English copy of the book enables one to determine whether or not
it is a copy of the first edition text. As there is a reference to “the Creator”
in line 5 of the last paragraph but one of the first edition, just as in all
subsequent editions, the change in the last sentence does not appear to reflect
a change in Darwin’s theological opinions.
Anyway, its use by Darwin is only a manner of speaking: he makes clear in a
letter to Thomas Huxley (Life and Letters, volume 2, p 251) that he
uses the word “created” to express total ignorance of how life originated.
Letters : . . .
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
It is a futile exercise to quote references by Darwin to “the Creator,”
“design” or any such loaded terms. These were, in part, mere literary devices
common at the time; they were of additional value to Darwin as a means of
avoiding excessive religious reaction.
We know that Darwin did not believe in creators, design, purpose, inevitable
progress, perfect adaptation or any other accretions which many have tried to
tack onto his ideas. At the same time he saw no point in attacking religion
explicitly. Not only would that be bad for business, it would also cause undue
offence: not the job of an English gentleman.
Letters : Expensive mistake
Camberley, Surrey
Tam Dalyell is surely wrong in saying that “no expense is too great for the
safety and peace of mind of the flying public” (Thistle Diary, 21 September, p
58). Spending without limit will eventually give ever-diminishing improvements
in safety. And spending too much can be counterproductive: if large amounts are
invested in making marginal improvements to one form of transport (say the
railways, which are already extraordinarily safe), costs will rise and the
public will tend to switch to another, much less safe, form (private cars).
To bring public peace of mind into the equation makes things even more
complicated, as public confidence notoriously bears little relationship to
actual safety.
Letters : Doomsday doubts
Amsterdam
I am a reasonably good computer modeller: tell me what you want modelled, and
I can probably do it. Tell me what answer you want, and I can probably get it
for you. I have inadvertently done this often enough to realise that my
subconscious subtly influences my choice of parameters. Now, whenever I get an
answer that warms the cockles of my heart, I suspect that I have been suckered
yet again.
The comforting population study from the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (This Week, 5 October, p 8) seems to fall into this same
category: bear in mind that not a single professional demographer in the past
three centuries has believed that the population could double. Remember when the
US population was going to level off at 180 million?
I will put my money on an earlier model in New 杏吧原创, which at
least has the merit of having been exactly on target for a third of a century:
J. H. Fremlin’s “How many people can the world support?” (New 杏吧原创
, 29 October 1964, p 285). Yet even your illustrator treated it as a joke.
Letters : . . .
Victoria, Australia
Crawford says that our continued existence proves that high-tech
civilisations do not destroy themselves.
Brave words, those, but hardly convincing. We have had microwave
communication for only 50 years, and practical means of traversing stellar
distances are still far away. Both technologies are by-products of the
development of techniques for mass destruction of people and the environment.
Our support for leaders who want to conquer nations, space and nature instead of
conquering disease, hunger and poverty may well wipe us out long before we
manage to contact other worlds.
There may be numerous civilisations in our cosmos sensible enough to see
their achievements in terms other than the aggression which motivates our
technology. I find the thought of “being alone” (with 6 billion other human
beings) easy to cope with. I also take comfort from the thought that others “out
there” apparently have the intelligence to concentrate their energies closer to
home than we do.
Letters : . . .
Headington, Oxford
Once again I see the argument being set forth that the absence of
extraterrestrial visitors to our planet, or the failure to detect their
interstellar communications, is strong evidence that advanced civilisations are
extremely rare in the Universe.
Surely any other civilisation will be bound by the same laws of physics, and
so will find interstellar travel extremely difficult. Even if nearby stars could
be reached “in a few decades”, finding a star with habitable planets would in
all probability take far longer. Why should we assume that individuals from
other advanced civilisations would be willing to spend their entire lifespan,
and possibly that of future generations, in a tin can travelling to another
star, or that they should devote huge amounts of their planetary resources to
sending a few individuals on a trip which will bring little or no benefit to
their home planet?
I would turn the argument on its head, and assume that our advanced
civilisation is not so unique, and that the absence of alien visitors to our
planet is evidence of the extreme difficulty of interstellar travel and
colonisation.
Letters : Alive and kicking
Liverpool
Like rumours of the death of Mark Twain, your Editorial (“Why the mind
matters” 5 October, p 3) and Michael Day’s story (p 9) anticipating the demise
of psychological research are greatly exaggerated.
First, I suggest reading a 1987 paper by Larry Hedges (American
Psychologist, Vol 42, p 443), which demonstrates that several of the
findings of psychology are no less reliable or consistent than a number of the
“discoveries” of particle physics. Secondly, it can be argued with some force
that the major advances made by psychology in the last few decades have been in
precisely those specialisms that outsiders see as “soft”, such as social and
clinical psychology. It is true there is a lot of junk on the fringes of
psychology, but those with a scientific training in the field are well able to
discern its boundaries.
The reason for what appears to be slow progress in some branches of
psychology is not their lack of investigative rigour, but the sheer complexity
of their subject matter and the number of interacting variables involved.
Psychology has no equivalent of turning a telescope onto Jupiter and suddenly
encountering its moons. That does not, however, make it any less scientific.
While much research remains to be done, there are now well-developed,
scientifically respectable and empirically based theories of a wide range of
perplexing phenomena, including violence, drug abuse, crime and even
genocide.
Finally, let’s not forget that every time an Ariane rocket explodes, a sum of
money is written off that is considerably more than that allocated to the entire
field of psychology in Britain over a period of several years. Of course we are
curious to know more about distant galaxies and so on, but the slow pace of
discovery in psychology compared to, say, radio astronomy, could have something
to do with the relatively small amount of research money invested in it.
Letters : . . .
Huddersfield
It is true that psychology does not have a unifying theory. That, however, is
more a reflection of the complexity of its subject matter than anything else.
Attempts to impose such a theory on psychology have been disastrous. The
behaviourists, who also considered that being scientific equated with having a
single unifying theory, made an attempt to do this. We are still mopping up the
residues of their overly mechanistic explanations for human behaviour, and the
misperceptions these produced.
A century and more of empirical psychology has repeatedly shown us that human
beings cannot be explained on just one level. The value of modern psychology
lies in its ability to draw together multiple levels. We human beings are
influenced by our biology, our habits, our knowledge, our past experiences, our
families and friends, our environments and our cultures. Understanding the human
mind means understanding all of these influences, and probably a few others as
well. They do not all exert their influence in exactly the same manner.
What is important, though, is that insights gathered from these different
areas can come together when necessary. Understanding stress, for instance,
brings together insights from physiological, cognitive, behavioural and social
psychology. The resulting synthesis is both useful and commercially applicable.
The fragmentation of psychology can only work against this type of
development.