Online perils
Barry Fox quite rightly draws attention to the problems facing newcomers to the Internet and World Wide Web (Review, 17 May, p 47) and goes on to compare four online systems. But the newcomer, for whom the article is presumably intended, would be forgiven for thinking that the only way to get access to the Internet and the Web is to use an online system such as those discussed.
In fact, using an online system purely for Internet and Web access is usually a waste of money. If you actually want to pay for the extra services these companies provide, fine; but for pure Internet access (including e-mail, the Web, newsgroups and the rest), a dedicated Internet Service Provider (ISP) is usually a much better bet.
Letter
Many thanks for the timely article on the perils of online systems. For some time CompuServe has had me convinced that I was the problem when they failed to get their 3.0.1 version of WinCim to work. I experienced exactly the same difficulty as Fox, but without the eventual solution and no hope of further help from CompuServe. Caveat emptor!
Cars can wait
Mick Hamer points out that the illuminated green figure at crossings that tells pedestrians it is safe to cross the road often stays lit for only a few seconds in Britain (Technology, 17 May, p 21). As a result, he says, crossing the road can be a nightmare.
Soon after I arrived in Melbourne, I noticed that the road laws and the culture favoured pedestrians over vehicles. For example, the green figure is lit for a length of time that appears to be determined by the width of the road and the walking speed of an elderly person. As a result, all pedestrians manage to cross the road without undue difficulty.
The drivers of the waiting vehicles often have time to watch able-bodied pedestrians cross the road in front of them and continue along the footpath for a further 25 metres or so before the traffic lights turn green and allow the vehicles to proceed. During this time, the drivers wait patiently, even when on a three-lane section of a dual carriageway in an 80 kilometres per hour zone.
Perhaps this low-tech, fail-safe solution should be tried in Britain and tested against the smart traffic lights described in the article?
Digital does
If Vanu Bose really believes that the high cost of upgrading to advanced cellular technology is a disincentive to growth, maybe he should have a quick look at the mushrooming market for digital PCS systems on his doorstep and the growth of GSM networks from Finland to Fuji (“One set fits all”, 17 May, p 26).
Bose’s assertion is simply untrue: in Britain there are now four “newfangled” digital networks supporting far more customers than the two insecure, low-capacity analogue networks.
Cellular networks are astronomically expensive, but the free market model applies very well to cellular telephony and the public gets what the public wants.
Letter
The claim that “all-purpose” digital signal processing (DSP) radio will prevent obsolescence is commendable, but as I write this I consider one of our old 286 PCs and wonder how to read a Microsoft Word 7 document on it. What happens if someone adopts, say, an error correction system that demands more performance than the existing DSP system allows for?
Digital radio is coming, but I doubt if it matches the approach in your article.
Water power
Drinks machines which “make” water (Feedback, 31 May) to order are small beer.
The drinks machine here at college insists that you choose the strength of your water鈥攎ild, medium or strong鈥攂efore dispensing it.
Mythical balloonist?
by e-mail
The real reason why Larry Walters should not receive the 1996 Darwin Award is that he almost certainly never existed, or if he did, his amazing feat did not take place in 1996 (Feedback, 24 May).
The story appeared in The Return of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pile about 10 years ago, where it was then described as one of those stories which “eluded research or verification” (in other words, it’s probably apocryphal). The story, slightly enlarged, subsequently appeared in The Big Issue, where the sunbather was named as “Waylon Fructose”.
Tutte's titles
Bill Tutte, when he came to Bletchley, was not “a young mathematician from Cambridge” (“Colossal adventures”, 10 May, p 38), but a postgraduate student of chemistry without formal mathematical training鈥攚hich makes his achievement all the more remarkable.
I remember that during the war I was cycling down Trumpington Street in Cambridge when I passed Patrick Duff, Bill’s college tutor. He shouted “Stop! Stop!! STOP!!!”
I wondered what disaster might have happened, but he explained: “Some people came to us and said that we ought to elect Bill to a college fellowship. But they would not say what he had done, nor even where he was living, so we can’t send him a telegram of congratulation. Do you know his address?”
Since the war Tutte has become a distinguished professor of mathematics, a Fellow of the Royal Society and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which shows what you can achieve by studying chemistry.
Murky map
I was very pleased to see the recent article by Charlie Pye-Smith, which gave an excellent overview of the need for forest information (“Seeing the wood for the trees”, New 杏吧原创, 24 May p 14). Unfortunately, the article was marred by an abysmal map of global forest cover purporting to be derived from data supplied by the WCMC. Not only was the map too generalised, it was also clearly inaccurate.
As you know, the WCMC is an information centre which aims to provide high-quality information about the state of the world’s natural resources. Readers can view the correct version of the map on our Web site () or that of the World Wide Fund for Nature ().
Romanticising Monty
Your correspondent, Richard Peto, seeks to escape the nonintuitive truth of the solution to the Monty Hall problem by trying to project human motives onto the games host (Letters, 24 May, p 52).
Unfortunately for his endeavour, the rules given do say that Monty is “bound to open another box that does not contain the prize” every time; Hall has no discretion in the matter, leaving the odds in favour of the swapping player at 2/3.
It is significant that the attempt to build room for human fuzziness in such an absolute game appears in the same issue of the magazine when Feedback notes the lack of a human override in the computer system controlling the new Rotterdam floodgates. “Research at Leiden University has apparently shown that a human in such situations will make a wrong decision once every 1000 times, whereas the computer is trusted to fail only once every 100 000 times,” Feedback wrote.
Certainly, Peto’s romanticisms are warm and friendly, but reason and tide leave little room, it seems, for humming and hawing.
This correspondence is now closed鈥攂ut see Biteback at for much more on this鈥擡d
Old boys' network
by e-mail
Further to your leader and article on the bias found in research grant committees (Editorial, 24 May, p 3 and This Week, 24 May, p 4), I don’t think there were many surprises in the Swedish researchers’ results鈥攅xcepting the fact that they got funding to do the study in the first place.
Talking to colleagues (male and female) in “new” British universities, I find there is general embitterment at the apparent correlation between grant awards and particular people/institutions. One of the biggest gripes of young(ish) academics is the difficulty of breaking into the circle鈥攊f you can’t get money to do the work, you can’t make your name to become one of the favoured, so you will stay “unknown”, so you won’t get any money.
Despite protestations that there is no bias, members of awarding committees retreat remarkably quickly when it is suggested that proposals should, in the first instance, be submitted anonymously. Perhaps we should push for a trial of this system鈥攊f examination boards can manage it, shouldn’t grant bodies?
Letter
The Swedish study made one thing uncomfortably clear: despite making a conscious effort to be utterly fair and unbiased, we are not. Furthermore, as long as we are human we probably never will be.
So rather than another round of hand-wringing, accept the fact and act pragmatically. The remedy for funding agencies is that if they are serious about combating sexism they should specify that the first names of authors of grant proposals appear as initials only.
Let's be irrelevant
Why should we try to make science education relevant (Forum, 17 May, p 48)? Surely the significance we place on the irrelevant is the defining image of being human (something that the humanities have long known).
At any time the amount of relevant science is tiny compared with the whole body of scientific knowledge. And what will be relevant in the future is unknown. All the most interesting developments in science are or have been deemed irrelevant at some time.
The teaching of science is undoubtedly in need of a radical change of direction, but to push for more relevance is wrong. We should encourage students to revel in the importance of the irrelevant.
Case for care
Oiled wildlife must be picked up, if for no other reason than to remove them as a continuing source of contamination to other animals (conspecifics, predators or scavengers), people and the environment. The only question is whether they should be routinely killed or cared for (“A drop in the ocean”, 3 May, p 40).
Frequently the best and most compelling evidence that the environment has been damaged as the result of an oil spill are the photographs, stories, treatment records and other evidence gathered from affected birds and mammals. This and other evidence is used to make a case proving damage and seeking money for restoration from the polluter.
Critics of caring for oiled wildlife, who argue that money would be better spent buying habitat, fail to understand that the case for buying habitat and other forms of restoration is made, in part, by documenting the damage to and the suffering of oiled wildlife.
It is not a matter of choosing whether to care for oiled wildlife or restore the habitat, it is a matter of doing both.
It should also be pointed out that the care of oiled wildlife is paid for as part of the overall cost of the response to an oil spill, usually by the insurance companies of the polluter. Habitat restoration is paid for separately, usually directly by the polluter, after a legal settlement has been reached. These are entirely different pots of money that cannot be exchanged. The cost of caring for oiled wildlife averages 1 per cent of the total cost of cleaning up an oil spill. Our experience in California is that the actual cost of caring for an oiled sea otter is about $4000 and for marine birds is $600 to $750 apiece, about 1/20th of the figures you presented.
I can only hope that Dee Boersma, Daniel Anderson and Brian Sharp will eventually recognise that caring for oiled wildlife does make sense, and that there is no conspiracy with industry, nor any attempt to delude the public by those of us dedicated to reducing the effects of oil on wildlife and improving wildlife care.
Dangerous donors
I cannot agree with Tam Dalyell that an opt-out system is the correct way to ensure donor organs are available for transplant (Thistle Diary, 24 May, p 50).
I used to carry an organ donor card and would dearly like still to be able to do so. However, having had treatment for cancer I have been advised not to (but only when I asked, about two years after treatment). Had I died suddenly in the meantime it is quite conceivable that my organs would have been used for transplant.
How many people, like myself, would not opt out because they do not realise that their own medical history makes their organs unsuitable for donation because of the risk to the potential recipient?
An “opting-in” system, however, requires a conscious decision, so perhaps the donor card should carry a series of questions about the potential donor’s state of health and medical history, like those asked of people intending to donate blood.
The authorities should concentrate more on raising awareness of the need for people to carry organ donor cards, rather than introducing an opt out system which many, myself included, would see as an infringement of personal liberty.
Taste for freedom
I would argue that the debate between free will and determinism is as fruitless and ill-founded as the one between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry that exercised mathematicians at the end of the last century (Letters, 31 May, p 51).
Papers and whole books were written to “disprove” the ghastly, counterintuitive geometries of Bernhard Riemann and Nikolay Lobachevsky鈥攑ointlessly, because these geometries, like Euclid’s, were based on arbitrarily chosen axioms: a matter of taste, not fact.
As for the question of which geometry most accurately described nature, the science of the day was powerless to discriminate. That of our present century suggests that reality is weirder than any of them, depending on how closely you look. Even so, at least 90 per cent of scientific work still uses the Euclidean model, because it is easier and so close to reality on everyday scales so as not to matter.
So it is with free will versus determinism. Either can be the starting point for a valid philosophical structure; which you choose depends on taste. But our curiosity still demands: which is “really” true?
Well, determinism asserts that “in principle” the state of a system at time t can be used to determine the system’s state at time t+1. Yet quantum theory tells us that, on a very small scale, it is not possible “in principle” to know perfectly any real-world system’s state at time t.
Furthermore, chaos theory tells us that in many systems, almost certainly including the human brain, very small-scale uncertainties can be translated into large-scale indeterminacies. Consequently, determinism is “in principle” inapplicable to chaotic systems.
Not only can human beings be treated as having free will, so can higher animals, the weather, the stock market, traffic flows and countless other phenomena. So perhaps science will, in the end, bring us back to where human culture started: to animism, to pantheism, to a world composed of many entities to be known as wholes, not picked to pieces like broken clocks.