Letters : Dreaming of victory
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey
Your recent list of discoveries revealed in dreams
(“Get real, Siggi”, Mind Travellers supplement, 26 April, p 21)
did not pick up one of some significance to Britain.
In the spring of 1940, Nazi forces were advancing through Belgium and France,
leading to the isolation of the British army at Dunkirk. At Bell Laboratories in
New York, a young engineer called D. B. Parkinson was, like everyone else,
extremely anxious about the fate of the Allied forces. Knowing little about
weapons, he was designing a carded potentiometer for a civilian telephone
application.
In a dream he found himself among the beleaguered armies on the Continent and
close to what looked to him like a piece of artillery equipment. But the
remarkable thing was that every shell brought down an enemy airplane.
In his own words: “After three or four shots one of the men in the crew
smiled at me and beckoned me to come closer to the gun. When I drew near he
pointed to the exposed end of the left trunnion. Mounted there was the control
potentiometer of my level recorder. There was no mistaking it. It was the
identical item.”
In a remarkably short time, Bell people saw the significance of the dream and
designed, developed and manufactured the M9 gun director, an analogue computer
control for firing antiaircraft guns.
It did great work in the Second World War, but its finest achievements were
in August 1944. Nine out of ten V-1 buzz bombs headed for London were shot down
over the cliffs of Dover. In a single week in August the Germans launched 91
V-1s from the Antwerp area, and M9s destroyed 89 of them.
Letters : By a whisker
Sydney
Organising an international meeting is something a right-minded scientist
should only do once in a professional lifetime. The cost in professional time
(and private time in working across time zones) is considerable. Budgeting is
stressful and in Australia it is exacerbated by the tyranny of
distance鈥攚ill anyone come?
Believing that we’d make it seductively easy for people to sign themselves up
for the 17th international meeting of the World Federation of Neurology resource
group on Huntington’s disease (phew!), one of us wrote an abstract submission
form to add to the meeting’s Web page. The abstract submission deadline was 25
April. Delegates had 12 weeks to submit their abstracts.
By 21 April we had received 12, mostly by disc which was the alternative, but
not preferred, mode of submission. Despondency set in. Would we have to cancel
the meeting? What about the money spent (aagh!) if there was to be no income?
Should we contact our lawyers?
“Just-in-time learning” on the Net has its counterpart in just-in-time
communication. 24 April: as the sun rose over Moscow, then Prague, Bochum,
Leiden, Cambridge . . . so the computer started chirruping incoming mail. By the
end of 25 April (at its westernmost point) we had exceeded the number of
abstracts presented at the 16th international meeting. A happy ending.
Is there a lesson for the conference convenor? Well, trust human
nature鈥攚hen did you last send in an abstract well before the deadline? The
advent of Internet submission keeps that exquisite uncertainty lingering right
until the last minute. Literally.
Letters : Time for a change
Oxford
I work in the field of crystallography. By the end of this summer my group
will have run down to just one or two research students because I have been
unable to attract funds for my subject. This has little to do with science
quality鈥攊t’s more to do with the organisation of the British research
councils.
Crystallography crosses the boundaries between five colleges of the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, but is not mainstream in
any. The result is that no matter how strong my application for funds, it is
never in a core subject in any of the colleges, and so is unlikely to be
strongly supported by sufficient members of the prioritisation panels.
I have no doubt that there are many other researchers who, like me, are
facing scientific extinction principally because of the internal organisation of
the funding bodies.
Research funding has been traditionally handled by applying for funds in
advance of the work. Originally this worked reasonably well because a well-made
proposal usually resulted in the grant being awarded. But in the last couple of
years or so, with tighter budgets and more top-down direction by government and
its officials, this is no longer true. Today’s scientists have to submit a
constant stream of applications in the hope that at least one of them will be
successful. So, when is there time for science?
I propose that the bulk of the British science budget be divided between all
the various departments, based on existing quality criteria and past research
income. The research councils’ job would then be to monitor performance so that,
say, every four years, decisions on further funding would be based on the
success of the department’s research activity. The emphasis then will be on
results rather than on the silly idea that good science can be predicted.
This scheme would, at a stroke, cut administration costs and, more
importantly, free researchers from the current “proposal” rat race and enable
them to concentrate on science, so encouraging more speculative and
unpredictable research.
It would be nice to think that the new government might be persuaded to
institute a radical change in the way we manage the science budget.
Letters : Masterful
Manchester
Although I can recognise much of what was addressed in your
Editorial (10 May),
I take exception to the statement that the Master of Research degree has
proved unpopular. This sweeping statement does not accord with the initial
reviews by the research councils.
In biological and biomedical fields, the Master of Research programmes have
proved to be very successful. Our experience in Manchester over the first two
years of the programme yields these statistics: more than 180 applications per
year, 30 per cent of students on the programme have gained first-class honours
degrees, nine students have been sponsored directly by industry and all students
have found positions in industry or at universities. The degrees have been
highly sought after by both sectors.
A significant number of students on the programme have turned down PhD
studentships to take the Master of Research programme. The scheme is recognised
by both students and the end-user community as an important development that has
given students the skills and knowledge to pursue successful research careers in
industry and academia.
This degree is a major innovation in postgraduate training. It should, in the
long term, become an integral part of the path leading to a PhD.
Letters : Evolving free
Leicester
If the workings of the mind are entirely deterministic, as Todd Collins
implies (Letters, 10 May, p 57), what evolutionary purpose does conscious
self-awareness serve? We certainly do experience our own existence and
environment, but if this experience is merely a passive process, and cannot
influence the decisions we make, then it is of no benefit to us whatsoever.
The theory of evolution implies that there would be no reason for any feature
to develop if it did not provide some advantage鈥攁nd what advantage would
an illusion of free will, that merely deceives, provide?
On the other hand, in a nondeterministic system, one can clearly see how
self-awareness and free will would give a conscious entity an evolutionary
advantage over an unconscious one.
Letters : . . .
London
Collins presumably has no control over the letter he wrote. I in my turn
cannot help disagreeing with his statements.
Letters : . . .
by e-mail
If we were unable to make choices, to determine events, then the consequences
would surely be dire. For example, we couldn’t be held responsible for our
actions and due legal processes would be a nonsense.
Standard physics appears to rule out free will since it allows only strict
determinism or random events. But we know that it is incomplete and are unsure
as to the applicability of the “laws” of physics to complex neural systems. In
any case, why give more weight to theory than to our own everyday
experience?
The claim that free will is illusory is a conjecture that runs contrary to
the evidence but fits in with popular theories of mind such as epiphenomenalism
(we are merely spectators) and computational functionalism (we are merely
computers). Since intensive research is currently under way into the nature and
mechanisms of consciousness, I suggest that your correspondents are premature in
their pronouncements.
David Concar writes: Of course everyday experience tells us that choice and
free will are real. In fact, for all practical purposes, including legal ones,
it makes no sense to define them as anything but real.
The important question is surely this: does the “real” experience of free
will begin life in the brain as a series of unconscious molecular/synaptic
processes? If it does, then there is a sense in which free will can be rightly
called illusory.
However, the illusion is perpetrated at such a deep level in the brain/mind
that one might as well ignore it. It is of no practical significance.
Letters : Cookie phobia
Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territory
Fear of cookies is fast becoming the new religion of the Web
(This Week, 19 April, p 12, and
3 May, p 4).
Might I suggest that New 杏吧原创
publish a hype-free article about cookies, explaining what they can and can’t
do?
A typical anti-cookie Web site will impress you by telling you which version
of browser you have or what country you are in. I suppose one is meant to assume
that such information came from a cookie. That isn’t the case. It is just part
of the normal chatting between a browser and a Web site. If I am writing a
program that dynamically creates super-duper Web pages in response to a user’s
query, it is very handy to know what type of browser is being used in order to
tailor the page for maximum legibility.
Your article on 3 May adds to the confusion about cookies by saying that it
is easy to gather information “thanks to small data files called cookies”. A
cookie is just one line of a file on your computer that contains all your
cookies. The entire file is not transferred鈥攐nly the cookie corresponding
to the particular Web site is transferred with each request to that site. And
where, one should ask, did the information in the cookie come from in the first
place? Why, from the Web server of course. Whatever is stored in your cookie
file by your browser came from the Web server.
Cookies provide a very convenient way for a program writing Web pages to
remember the user’s choices from one request to the next, and also one session
to the next. This would appear to be the big sin.
Cookies provide a way to differentiate between users with the same IP address
(computer zip code) and in that sense they provide an advantage over using the
Web site’s log file to collate information about a particular person. Such
information refers to what they have done during their visits to that site, not
what they have done at other sites.
Letters : Random riches
Winchester, Hampshire
I couldn’t believe my eyes when reading Ian Stewart’s article on ordering
randomness
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 10 May, p 22).
The very last sentence surely deserved headline status: “Interestingly”, says
Pincus, “in the 1987 to 1988 time frame, there was a unique single two-week
period in which ApEn was nearly maximally irregular鈥攑recisely the two
weeks immediately preceding the stock market crash of 1987.”
It would be interesting to know whether or not Steven Pincus’s algorithm
reveals similar levels of randomness immediately preceding other major market
crashes. If so, then surely this discovery could make Pincus the richest man in
the world. What merchant bank wouldn’t give its right arm to know precisely when
its holdings are about to nose-dive?
Of course, if Pincus’s methods do become widely used, and the markets start
reacting to ever shorter periods of pre-crash randomness with widespread
selling, this would not exactly bode well for the future stability of the world
economy.
Letters : Doubtful deaths
Ipswich, Suffolk
Katie Alcock’s comments on suicides in Africa prompt me to point out, as a
member of the Samaritans organisation, that statistics for suicide are always
unreliable
(Letters, 3 May, p 54).
In Britain, coroners are reluctant to give a
verdict of suicide and often give verdicts stating “death by misadventure” or
that “the balance of mind was disturbed”. Concern for friends and relatives,
religious considerations, as well as the implications for insurance life
policies that do not pay if death is by suicide, also make coroners reluctant to
give a suicide verdict.
In many cases, it is impossible to determine the cause of death. Was that car
crash deliberate or caused by a moment’s inattention created by the undoubted
stressful situation the driver was experiencing? Was that death caused by drugs
an accidental or deliberate overdose?
There are also an unquantified number of what might be termed quasi-suicides.
These include those whose lifestyle leads to an early demise. Who has not heard
of someone drinking themselves to death, or the recluse found dead after years
of self-neglect? I don’t suppose a broken heart is a medical condition but there
are plenty of examples, such as the surviving partner of a long and happy
marriage who rapidly fades and then dies.
Collecting statistical information on suicides is very difficult and any
figures can only be viewed with the above considerations firmly in mind.
We prefer to remain anonymous, so I sign myself:
Letters : Unnatural tunes
Llandovery, Carmarthenshire
I hope that Charles Lucy succeeds in his attempt to reconstruct John
Harrison’s experiments in tuning
(Letters, 19 April, p 55).
However, two quite different questions are involved.
An alternative basis for deriving musical intervals may be of great
acoustical and mathematical interest in itself. But its musical significance may
be slight. Music as it has developed over the past five centuries has become an
entirely artificial system with an elaborate logic of its own. This depends on a
hierarchy among pairs of related keys in which each key is regarded as being on
an equal footing to all the others as a starting point, it being only the
direction of departure from it that matters. To make this equality physically
possible, all intervals other than the octave are very slightly “cooked”.
For most of us, the difference between the “cooked” and the “natural” version
of any interval is so slight that it becomes quite lost in the idiosyncrasies of
performance.
I rather suspect that, whether one considers Harrison’s or any other
alternative basis for tuning, the same may prove to be true.