Correction
The Web site address for Stuart Leiderman given in the article “Outcasts from Eden” (31 August, p 24) was incorrect. It should have read (all lower case).
Porcine pranksters
I would agree with Geoffrey Hutson that pigs are none too tractable (Forum, 26 October, p 48), but what connection has that with intelligence? I found the anecdote about the pigs picking up wooden coins and then banking them intriguing but my immediate conclusion was that the pigs were both easy to train and intelligent, which is why they got bored with the rather futile chore and became intractable as a result. Parents will have seen exactly the same behaviour in their (intelligent) children.
I once kept a saddleback pig in my garden. He lived behind an electric fence which he respected at all times unless he heard his chain harness being rattled. He knew then that the fence would be turned off, and that he could walk through it with impunity. The pig had learnt that the rattling signalled that it was time for an enjoyable walk, during which he could rootle in the hedgerows and a nearby stubble field.
He was also conditioned to the command “home” but was a good deal less eager to obey it. Undoubtedly he was self-interested, but he was also definitely intelligent.
And probably a tad brighter than the Americans who tried to evaluate porcine wits using visual stimuli. It doesn’t take long to work out that a pig couldn’t care twopence for what it sees鈥攊ts ears and above all its nose are its way of sensing the world. They would have done better to observe pigs displaying intelligent behaviour rather than performing for ludicrously artificial experiments which most humans would get pissed off with in ten minutes.
I have watched three adolescent pigs that escaped into a field spend half an hour rounding up sheep, scattering them and then rounding them up again. They acted as a team, did the job better than many sheepdogs, and did it apparently out of sheer devilment.
So probably not cute, often intractable, not daft but frequently too perverse for it to be apparent, and maybe could do with a deodorant鈥攊s that a pig or an animal psychologist?
Letter
Hutson is clearly a very rational guy. He eloquently dismantles the popular myth that pigs are intelligent animals.
I have to admit that I have long suspected that I am not particularly bright, but now it has been confirmed scientifically. If you tried to strap me into an apparatus to force my mouth to water when a bell rang, I must confess I’d scream blue murder. I am usually ravenously hungry and, to boot, if I don’t wash I start to smell. Proof then鈥擨 must be a pig.
Tongue-tied tech
If the human beings involved in getting Michelle Knott’s article into print (“Machine minds your language”, Technology, 26 October, p 20) cannot distinguish between “annunciated” and “enunciated”, can we really have high hopes of machine-based speech recognition?
Pens from heaven
In regards to Feedback’s comments about the NASA Space Pen, which “may or may not be the truth” (26 October and Letters, 9 November, p 50), I am sure that the Science Museum will be singularly disappointed to learn that the pen only “enjoyed a brief popularity as a consumer item”, since they are selling the very same item for 拢14.95, as advertised on page 19 of their new Christmas catalogue.
The Space Pen is also alive and well and marketed strongly in the US as a boxed gift. The electrical engineer in our organisation just ordered himself two of them for Christmas from the US.
Now, do you have any idea where I can get boxed sets of Soviet cosmonaut pencils to give as high-tech gifts?
Safe from quakes?
Whether Greenpeace likes it or not, radioactive waste already exists. As the society which has benefited from the processes which produce this waste, it is surely our responsibility to dispose of it properly.
The Greenpeace alternative鈥攅ffectively to do nothing and leave it for our children and grandchildren鈥攊s scarcely credible. Indeed, they have acknowledged that this proposal would lead to increased radiation exposures for workers and the public.
Helen Wallace includes a few half-truths in pursuit of Greenpeace’s arguments (Letters, 26 October, p 53). To take just one example, she describes the Sellafield area as an “earthquake prone” site. The British Geological Survey says: “There has been a long history of UK earthquakes being blamed on individual faults on little better than wishful thinking.”
The key issue for Nirex is, and always has been, one of safety. If we cannot demonstrate that the potential site near Sellafield will be safe for radioactive waste, we will not seek to build a repository there, nor would we be allowed to.
Inventing the future
Your article “Far out forecasting” (12 October, p 36) gave food for thought, but appears to fall into the trap of looking at the future from today’s vantage point, with all the drawbacks that that entails.
The game was given away by the admission: “We exploit everything we know about the basic nature of the problem, together with all the available data鈥攁nd then bring in probabilistic arguments to guide the extrapolation as well.” Then, of course, there is the stuff that we don’t know and, unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know. Forecasting has to include a flight of imagination, inventing and living the future, which seemed to be lacking in the methodology described.
Extreme value theory (EVT) undoubtedly does have many uses, but surely two of the examples given could have done with a little flight of fancy. EVT is almost certainly wrong in setting the upper age limit, which is probably only accurate within today’s parameters. As we learn more about our genetic make-up and biological processes, this upper age limit will edge even further upwards. This may not be desirable, but that is another issue.
Similarly, Wang Junxia’s time for the 3000 metres will almost certainly be improved upon and will eventually beat the 8 minutes 3 seconds limit that was forecast. In time, women will get bigger, stronger, be better trained, eat better food, and inevitably perform better. And, yes, they will know how to use artificial aids, such as drugs, much better than we do now. Again, not necessarily desirable, but inevitable. In both cases, the parameters will have changed, so today’s assumptions will no longer hold.
Imagine those forecasts being made a hundred years ago, and what results they would have given.
Peculiar pest
CSIRO, Hobart, Tasmania & University of California, Santa Barbara
We read with concern the article by Maria Byrne regarding the northern Pacific starfish, Asterias amurensis, and its “bizarre” parasite, Orchitophrya stellarum (Forum, 19 October, p 53). The issues she raises are important because introduced marine pests are causing serious environmental changes. The use of natural enemies for biological control is one of the few options.
Byrne asserts that Orchitophrya is causing a “new disease” in the North Pacific. She says that the starfish parasite has somehow been introduced from the North Atlantic, where she argues it is native. In fact, there is no evidence that the species is new to Japan; the only available evidence is that it is newly discovered.
Few scientists work on starfish parasites, and it would not be surprising if a ciliate parasite which lives in the gonads escaped detection. For example, we recently discovered an apparently new species of parasitic castrating isopod in Tasmanian crabs, which is large, conspicuous and infects some 30 per cent of the population. The species is unlikely to have been introduced and its recent discovery more likely reflects lack of sampling effort.
Our work on the genetics and morphology of Orchitophrya does not support Byrne’s assertion that the ciliate is newly introduced from the Atlantic. Our data suggest that ciliates from the Pacific and Atlantic are different species. And while it is possible that Orchitophrya is having an effect on sex ratios of Japanese starfish, we note that the evidence for this is equivocal鈥攐ur own field samples in Japan do not support this hypothesis.
Finally, Byrne suggests that the effects of Orchitophrya on A. amurensis “will undoubtedly stimulate interest in the parasite for biological control”. In fact, we have been researching this possibility for three years, as well as examining a number of other possible control options.
Volcanic jam jar
The box on “How to build your own volcano” accompanying your cover story (“When volcanoes get violent”, 26 October, p 28) reminds me of an incident from my teaching days.
I was alarmed when a nine-year-old boy brought me some “dry ice” wrapped in a newspaper that smelt of fish and chips. To keep it out of harm’s way I popped it into a jar of water, and discovered that we had modelled a volcano. It would suddenly emit a cloud of vapour, lie dormant for a few seconds, and then erupt again.
Presumably the solid carbon dioxide was encapsulating itself in ice, blowing the capsule apart with the pressure of the gas generated, and encapsulating itself anew.
Knot right
In David Bradley’s report on molecular knots (New 杏吧原创, Science, 26 October, p 18), your illustrator has inadvertently set a problem that must defeat the ingenuity of even the Sauvage research group: how to convert a right-handed double helix into a left-handed trefoil without breaking the molecular thread.
Yes, there was an error. The second drawing in the top row should look as shown鈥�Ed
Tied but unfed
In Nicola Baird’s otherwise good article on tied aid, she used as an example of waste the Goeldi Museum’s research station at Caxiuan茫 (“Tied to the hand that feeds”, 12 October, p 12).
I was there in July 1995 and found it was just the right size for our group. We were on an ecotour arranged by one of the researchers doing fieldwork there. It was a great place to visit, and also for research, exactly because of its remoteness. With no roads around, we had to motor for eight hours by boat from the nearest small town, as does everyone else. So there is much less human impact than in other areas.
With more publicity, the Goeldi Museum could get enough income through visiting ecotourists to fund a fair bit of research, particularly if some of the fieldwork is done for free by visiting students. To help publicise it, I have put our photographs of the ecotour on the World Wide Web ().
What was wrong with the aid was not so much that it was tied, but that our government only paid for the capital, not for maintaining or running the research centre. Having a building there is not sufficient to guarantee that the necessary biodiversity work takes place, although staff from the museum and the Federal University of Par谩 are doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Guy Fawkes effect
Black powder and other fireworks mixtures contain sulphur. I presume that most of this ends up as sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere. Has anyone calculated the likely amount of sulphur dioxide pollution added to the atmosphere by our annual jamboree?
Is it comparable to the amount produced by, for example, the coal-fired power stations? Is there any evidence of increased levels of acid rain or respiratory disorder just afterwards?
Someone who lived in London before the Clean Air Act told me that the smog season always seemed to start on 6 November, as if Bonfire Night had been a trigger. It would be interesting to know if there is any concrete evidence on the atmospheric effects of fireworks and whether any other gaseous products have significant effects.
League of their own
Your article on league tables ranking the success of Britain’s schools reported the argument that institutional performance league tables in education and health are completely useless because their rankings are unreliable (This Week, 5 October, p 4).
The statisticians quoted claimed that it is impossible to rank the performance of individual institutions with any confidence because the confidence intervals of their indicators are too large, leading to overlapping due to their small sample sizes.
However, the article’s own leading example of this claim in the case of education, illustrated in its “Fantasy League” diagram, clearly refuted it. The confidence intervals portrayed in this illustration of Harvey Goldstein’s value-added league table of the A-level performance of schools clearly contradicted any claim that all its rankings were useless. Rather, it apparently portrayed a moderately useful league table.
It showed that every school in this league table could be reliably ranked against some other(s), that a significant proportion could be reliably ranked against more than 15 per cent of the rest, and some against as many as 80 per cent of the rest. Hence the specific claim made that some 70 per cent of schools could not be reliably ranked at all was false.
If not completely useful, like most things in life, this table was far from being completely useless. It was moderately useful and certainly appeared to provide a sufficient basis for investigating “best practice”, for example, which should surely be one of the main practical uses of league tables such as this.
Goldstein’s important caveat that the limitations of small sample sizes and overlapping confidence limits may restrict the reliability of some rankings in some league tables at some confidence levels is obviously not to be ignored. However, it is by no means a global proof of the unreliability of all the rankings of all league tables at all confidence levels.
Goldstein’s observation should not be used to throw out the developing baby with the bathwater, because the wholly negative conclusion drawn from his merely qualifying caveat holds no water at all.
Reasonable question
David Bodanis must be kidding (Forum, 19 October, p 52). The difference between “scientists” and “nonscientists” in the context of “reasonably intelligent” people is simply a difference in exposure to the salient mind-set.
The question “Those nebulae, do they exist between the Earth and Moon, or are they farther away?” is evidently an intelligent question asked by the man or woman concerned, who is familiar enough with celestial space to recognise it as not intrinsically different from terrestrial space (as opposed to inviolate celestial orbs) but is unfamiliar with the last two hundred years or so of astronomical knowledge. After all, the concept of galaxies as independent star systems is only about sixty years old.
At least this person was interested enough to ask, despite presumably having to cope with pressing business requirements which have a much greater relevance in terms of day-to-day survival.
Imagine the public relations disaster for science when each innocent but uninformed question is met with such horror-struck incredulity and condescension. No, we don’t need to imagine it鈥攚e’re all too familiar with this scenario.
Since when was science, which is subject to continual revision and extinction of “outdated” beliefs, such a Camelot of truth to trample down everybody and burn the heretics? To quote Monty Python: “It’s only a model”.
The point about scientific endeavour is not the endpoint of “truth” (whatever that it), but the testability of hypotheses. The question quoted passes this test with flying colours.