Letters : Puerile polls
London
Your otherwise excellent article on “voodoo” polls (Technology, 18 January, p
20) somewhat compounded the confusion by its headline. Please don’t call them
“telephone polls”, but “phone-in polls”, to differentiate them from legitimate
telephone polling. And please do not call these telemarketing people who have no
training in stats or polling “pollsters”, confusing them with those of us who
spend a vast amount of our time in social survey or market research work, who
are trained for the job, who know that “random” does not mean “haphazard”, but
equal probability of selection, and who abhor these travesties of democracy as
much as Barry Fox.
These voodoo polls, now dwindling and discredited in the US, distort
democracy and are merely a measure of how effective pressure groups are in
mobilising their forces to ring in over and over again in an effort to bandwagon
their candidate for, for example, the BBC Today programme’s so-called
“Person of the Year” contest, the BBC Radio 5 Live phone-in on Prince Philip’s
remarks about the banning of handguns, and this huge fiasco of a programme on
the monarchy.
Like you, I tested their phone-in system, telephoning 10 times. Seven times
counted, according to the recorded voice, and the other three times were
disenfranchised.
Letters : Worm wars
Perth, Western Australia
Your article about emperor moth caterpillars (“Hold the turkey…”, 21/28
December, p 58) was most enlightening. Ellen Bartlett reports that the
caterpillars, or mopane worms, sell for up to 拢15 per kilo in the markets
of South Africa, and that they are so highly prized by indigenous gourmands that
armed gangs in Zimbabwe have robbed rural women of their caterpillar
harvest.
Add to that the environmental consequences of unregulated overharvesting of
the moth larvae and it dramatically highlights the dangers inherent in
laissez-faire caterpillarism.
Letters : . . .
Canterbury, Kent
This joke very closely follows one that I heard on a systems analysis course
some years ago.
A man was in a hot-air balloon, and, being lost, came down to ask the way (a
tip for Richard Branson here?). He found himself hovering over a golf course and
called down to the player below to ask where he was.
The golfer replied that he was in a hot air balloon hovering 6 feet over the
ninth hole. The balloonist asked if the golfer was a systems analyst. Surprised,
the golfer replied that he was and asked how the balloonist knew. “Easy,” came
the reply, “your answer is 100 per cent correct and absolutely bloody
useless.”
It seems that some things never change.
Letters : Hoary story
Maidstone, Kent
The joke about Microsoft and a lost helicopter pilot has a familiar ring
(Feedback, 11 January).
In 1938 I was in the civil service and there was a story circulating about
two very senior civil servants who were motoring in the remote countryside when
a thick fog descended and they became hopelessly lost. Through the murk they
spied someone they took to be a local inhabitant. Winding down the window they
inquired, “Can you please tell us where we are?” to which the local replied, “In
a motor-car in a fog”, and promptly disappeared into the gloom.
The two civil servants sat silently for a few minutes and then the more
senior one remarked, “That was the perfect example of an answer to a
Parliamentary question. It was short, absolutely correct and left the questioner
no wiser than he was before.”
Tam Dalyell should appreciate that.
Letters : Modest encounter
Folkestone, Kent
I would like to add a small postscript to Chris Boyce (Letters, 18 January, p
48) regarding the prior mention of von Neumann space probes in the book
Extraterrestrial Encounters.
Modesty apparently forbade Boyce from mentioning that he was actually the
author of this fascinating book but I am under no such constraint and wish to
give credit where it is due.
Letters : Ecstatic panic
London
Your well-informed editorial on ecstasy (25 January, p 3) was a welcome
contrast to the offerings from the rest of the media.
The conflict of opinion between users and nonusers is due to ignorance of the
benefits. Most regular users believe the drug has improved their quality of
life, or, as the unfortunate Brian Harvey of East 17 said, it “makes you a
better person”. The experience is often profound and many regard it as
spiritual.
I can add a little more to the toxicity issue. First, a study is now taking
place at the University of California at Los Angeles comparing dosage and
methods of administration of MDMA (ecstasy) used in animal studies, with doses
taken orally by humans. The result should establish a threshold for toxicity in
humans.
There is no lack of research into ecstasy. Over 600 papers appear in the
bibliography of my last book, yet few provide useful lessons for users. For
instance, all the toxicity research has been done on MDMA alone, not on the
cocktail of drugs generally used in Britain. I suspect that some casualties are
due to interactions with other drugs such as amphetamines, or even
over-the-counter medicines. This should be studied as a matter of urgency.
Instead of agonising over possible long-term effects, why not test some of
the thousands of people in the US who have been taking MDMA for 20 years or
more?
Letters : Glowing future
Norway
Your article on research cuts mentioned three international research
facilities (at Risley, Garching and Halden鈥攚hich was spelt as Holden) and
gave the impression that there was a concern for their future existence (This
Week, 11 January, p 6).
I am happy to say that in the case of the OECD Halden Reactor Project, as the
full name is, there is no reason to be concerned.
The Halden Project is supported by more than 100 organisations in 19
different countries. The man-machine systems research division comprises around
40 researchers and makes use of an advanced ergonomics laboratory, called
Hammlab, which includes a full-scale nuclear power plant simulator and an
advanced control room.
This facility is probably the leading international laboratory of this kind
and is presently being extended to meet the research needs of the 21st century.
The Hammlab has for more than 15 years contributed to improving the safety and
efficiency of nuclear power plant control, and we all look forward to continuing
to do so for a very long time.
Letters : Wired up
by e-mail
If your readers K. C. Gale (Letters, 30 November, p 54) and Julian Coleman
(Letters, 18 January, p 48) would like to buy Electronics World,
incorporating Wireless World, for December 1996 and January and
February 1997, they will find a full technical and theoretical study of speaker
cables and their various effects. This may solve all the problems.
Letters : Cheap cleanup
Margate, Kent
There are effective technologies available for cleaning up land contaminated
with organic chemicals for less than the price of removal (“The other big
issue”, 4 January, p 12).
Residual liabilities are often deemed by developers to be one of the deciding
factors when establishing remedial measures and subsequent risk. However, there
are, as yet, no statutory cleanup criteria used, and there is, as stated by
Nottingham Trent Universities Centre for Research into the Built Environment, no
monitoring or validation carried out on the vast number of “remediated” sites.
The use of new technologies will go on being hampered until they are universally
recognised as being effective in the schemes in which they have been utilised.
However, there is no way of establishing just how “clean” is clean.
While the Environmental Industries Commission argues that landfill tax on
contaminated soil would increase awareness of technology-based remediation
options, this will not occur until the government takes note of what the EIC has
been saying and makes landfill a less attractive option.
Letters : Mainly rain
Birmingham
Fred Pearce states: “John Thornes of the University of Birmingham told the
Royal Meteorological Society that the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s
forecasts has fallen from 80 to 65 per cent over the decade since the 1987
storm” (This Week, 4 January, p 5). This implies that the accuracy of all
weather forecasts has fallen in the last decade, which is certainly not the
case.
What I actually stated was that the percentage accuracy of Limited Area Model
24-hour forecasts for rain in London had fallen from 78 per cent in 1986 to 65
per cent in 1994. I speculated that this was due to the dry weather that
Southeast England has suffered over the last decade. In other words, rain
forecast for London by the Met Office’s Limited Area Model did not materialise
on more than a third of occasions.
However, these computerised forecasts are slightly improved upon by the Met
Office’s Central Forecast Office (now called National Meteorological Centre NMC)
before issue. The CFO forecasters achieved an accuracy of rain forecasts for
London of 79 per cent in 1986, falling to 74 per cent in 1994.
Letters : SATAN'S offence
London
Anyone tempted to replicate Dan Farmer’s experiment on Internet server
security (This Week, 18 January, p 4) should be aware that this experiment might
be illegal in Britain.
According to Section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, a person is guilty of
an offence if he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure
access to any program or data held in a computer, and the access he intends to
secure is unauthorised. On successful conviction this could incur a six-month
prison sentence. People should not use SATAN to probe sites unless they have
formal permission to do so.
According to the Computer Crime Unit at Scotland Yard, although it may not be
an offence to use SATAN to gather information about how secure a computer
network is, if a person used that information to hack into a computer, then that
would be an offence鈥擡d
Letters : Toad warning
London
So the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has agreed to fund the introduction of
beetles to control the spread of introduced Mexican thorn on Ascension Island
(Letters, 18 January, p 47)?
Just as the cane beetle was introduced to control the spread of prickly pear
in Queensland, then the cane toad had to be introduced to control the beetle? So
far, nothing has been found to control the spread of the cane toad.
What a way to restore the unique indigenous island ecosystem.
Letters : Flying time
Godmanchester, Huntingdon
F. G. Grisley’s suggestions concerning our sense of the passage of time
(Letters, 4 January, p 45) sound plausible, but there may be other mechanisms
contributing to the sensation of time passing faster as we age.
As children, we cope with many new learning experiences within a
comparatively short time period, some of which require radical rethinking of our
model of reality. As we age, we settle into a routine with a fairly stable view
of the world.
I have noticed that when this routine is broken, for instance when
encountering a new country for the first time, my time sense seems to slow down.
It is as though the number of fresh experiences encountered per unit of time
affects the sense of time passing. This may be reinforced by a
neurophysiological effect. Perhaps as we age, our brains just aren’t paying
attention as continuously as when we were younger. The stream of consciousness
may become somewhat intermittent.
The moral may be that contrary to popular belief, time actually slows down
when you’re having fun.
Letters : . . .
Chard, Somerset
Proper scientific research has been undertaken into cannabis showing that it
is not a dangerous drug, but it didn’t make any difference鈥攁t least, not
in terms of law or media censure.
The same will apply to ecstasy. If it were proved tomorrow, beyond a shadow
of a doubt, that all previously recorded instances of ecstasy death were in fact
caused by drink, and that use of the drug causes a reduction in all other
conceivable causes of death, publication of the findings would be greeted with
howls of outrage from antidrugs campaigners. And promises to step up the war
against ecstasy would still be made by politicians seeking re-election.
Condoning the use of drugs is, to the media and many of our public, heresy,
and it is irrelevant whether they can be shown to be harmful or not. This is not
national panic鈥攖his is idiocy.
Letters : . . .
It is encouraging to see New 杏吧原创 take the calm and rational
position concerning illicit drugs. Yet asking our governments to do the same is
a request they simply cannot honour. The root of the problem lies with the
prohibition of some drugs deemed “harmful”: it has as a supporting axiom the
idea that society can or should be made “free” of these products by force, even
when their dangers are quite possibly inconsequential compared with our
permitted drugs, alcohol and tobacco. As long as prohibition reigns,
irrationality must accompany it.
The prohibition of illicit drugs, which accomplishes no “control” of drugs
whatever but surrenders control to criminal enterprise, must be replaced by a
policy of carefully regulated availability before hysteria will be quelled and
meaningful research can be accomplished. Until then we may be sure that
governments will continue to refuse to see or search for truth on this
issue.
Letters : . . .
Bembridge, Isle of Wight
Who does Cranialjax think he is to say he is too busy to remember who
originated a theory?
When he is a little bit older he will come to realise that today’s account of
how it works will be superseded tomorrow. It is extremely convenient to have a
shorthand name to identify the failed theory. This makes it much easier to
identify if a conclusion is based on obsolete thinking.
Letters : . . .
East Grinstead, West Sussex
What a sad lad Cranialjax must be, to prefer dry facts to the stories of
those who discover, reveal or conceal, invent or publish them and thereby make
them known. Scientific facts seldom win hearts and minds, yet Cranialjax claims
to study the mind (whatever that is) without presumably relating it to
motivational psychology (what makes Crick tick?), industrial psychology, and
certainly not to clinical psychology, which involve emotions and people.
Encouragement to make and sustain a reputation is a powerful incentive and
reputation management is precisely what science and scientists need more than
ever before.
As Alexander Pope observed, “the proper study of mankind is man” and that
means warts and all鈥攁nd credit where it’s due.
Letters : Mystery men
London
Your anonymous psychology undergraduate and e-mail correspondent “Cranialjax”
supports anonymity in scientific publication on two grounds (Letters, 11
January, p 45). First, the authors would cease to be “scared of losing
reputations” and all the remembering of the names of inventors and innovators is
“a waste of my valuable time”.
What wastes valuable time is trying to find out even the most basic
biographical information on many historic individuals who changed our lives but
about whom, seemingly, next to nothing is published.
Examples one could cite include John Browning, inventor of the wind tunnel in
1871, R. W. Brownhill, patentee of the much hated coin gas meter in 1877,
Benjamin W. Maughan, inventor of the gas geyser in London in 1868, Percy Paget,
assistant to Marconi on his epic and groundbreaking trans-Atlantic radio signal
of 1901, Samuel Da Costa, the first to surpass an altitude of 1 kilometre with
his three-inch rocket in late April 1750, and Alan Turing’s coauthor, the late
John Ronald Womersley (born in 1907).
No French general reference source gives any details on Jolly-Belin, who
invented dry cleaning in 1849 or Gustave Bemont, the codiscoverer of radium in
1898. One might have thought that the American Albert Berr, pioneer of
parachuting from a plane in 1912, would be well chronicled, but even the St
Louis Library cannot help.
A last hope in many cases is that New 杏吧原创 will eventually
replace the long-running Last Word with a First Word feature, in which fellow
readers could throw light on biographical black holes.
Letters : . . .
Auckland
Regarding the celebrated paper by Vincent, Van and Goh, those of us who work
with ultrafast lasers are well aware of a paper by W. H. Knox, R. S. Knox, J. F.
Hoose and R. N. Zare on the “Observation of the 0-fs Pulse”.
The paper appeared (significantly) in the April 1990 issue of the Optical
Society of America publication Optics and Photonics News. Its authors
are real.
Letters : Who's there?
Reading
All three of my improbably named coauthors on the Quick, Browne, Fox and
Hollins paper (Feedback, 30 November and Letters, 4 January, p 45 and 25
January, p 51) are in fact real. Vince Browne and Shaw Fox were two quite
excellent research students who worked with me in the late 1980s, and their
names appear together on four other publications.
The subsequent arrival of an undergraduate named Tony Quick proved too
tempting an opportunity for a lazy dog like myself, and I suggested to him that
he might like to assist (admittedly not in a very major capacity) with one of
their projects.
Following publication of the paper, we received an extraordinarily large
number of requests for reprints, including one from Bill Gadzuk of the US
National Institute of Standards and Technology, who explained that he was
inquiring on behalf of three colleagues. His reprint request card was signed
“Big, Bad, Wolf and Gadzuk”.
Letters : . . .
Ewell, Surrey
Two potential options for replacing mouse balls:
Letters : . . .
by e-mail
One source of (small quantities of) mouse balls is a computer retailer. We
often get mice that have failed for one reason or another, so we sell a new one,
keeping the ball from the old one for our school customers. Schoolkids steal the
balls.
Letters : Neutered mice
Surrey, BC, Canada
Here are some suggestions for Glasgow Museum, which has a problem with people
“emasculating” its computer mice by stealing their balls (Feedback, 4 January
and Letters, 18 January, p 48).