Letters : Danger downstream
Bellingen, Australia
The concern in England about drinking water contaminated with
Cryptosporidium
(Letters, 2 August, p 49) is shared by many rural
Australians who rely on rivers for their water.
With cattle faeces being recognised as a major source of cryptosporidial
oocysts (and many other pathogens), it is astonishing that there are no
restrictions on cattle access to watercourses, and that here in subtropical New
South Wales cows spend much of their time wallowing (and defecating) in the
water that people downstream will drink.
Letters : Don't badger us
Holsworthy, Devon
I would like to refute some of the statements made about badgers
(Editorial 23 August, p 3 and
This Week, 23 August, p10).
The National Farmers’ Union survey shows
that our members overwhelmingly welcome badgers on their farms as long as the
badgers are healthy and there are not too many of them.
There are two primary constraints on wild populations: habitat and available
food. For badgers there is habitat in abundance. In fact there are areas that
are ideal for them, where they can expand significantly over the coming years,
as they have so ably demonstrated over the past ten years.
As for food, farms have grown more maize in recent years as a better feed for
dairy cows. Maize is also very popular with badgers as it matures in late autumn
and serves as a food source to build up body fat. Young cubs facing their first
winter benefit particularly, and farmers suspect this is the main reason for the
rise in badger numbers. This rise is not reflected in the north of England and
Scotland, where maize is not generally grown.
Your comment that farmers are demanding mass slaughter of badgers is based on
imagination. We are asking the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to
conduct a controlled and effective removal of badgers where there is a proven
connection with TB in cattle.
We wish to develop ideas to help the badger repopulate appropriate areas. We
must also manage badgers in the few areas where they are spreading disease and
damaging the countryside.
Letters : Targeting terrorism
formby@writeme.com
As one of the people that participated in the “attack” on the Institute for
Global Communications server, I would like to point out that if thousands of
people like myself did so, it was not because ICG “hosts the pages of the Basque
separatist-supporting Euskal Herria Journal”
(This Week, 16 August, p 17).
In Spain there are several organisations with separatist aims and they are
all respected. The pages were actually the home site of the terrorist group ETA,
the criminal organisation that kidnapped a local councillor for 48 hours, the
latest of over 800 victims, before shooting him twice in the head.
Actually, this was not the first “mail attack” to a server hosting ETA’s Web
pages, and will probably not be the last. I am proud of having participated in a
movement organised within hours in many countries around the world to fight
using peaceful means any movement that promotes and justifies the kidnapping,
extortion and killing of innocent people.
Letters : Compromised?
Melbourne, Australia
Craig Loehle gives a convincing argument for scientists to be free to do
commercial research
(Forum, 16 August, p 44).
But what is the position of, for
example, Australian government scientists instructed to obtain 30 per cent of
their department’s income from commercial work and then to represent the
government on national standards committees in the same technical area?
Sitting with their clients, their situation involves a very difficult
conflict of interest. This conflict can affect the quality of national
standards. There are inevitably incentives and expectations when commercial
organisations direct research funds to bodies represented on relevant national
committees.
杏吧原创s in this position need some help from their colleagues, but there
seems to be no publicly available code of ethics for scientists such as exists
for most professions.
Letters : . . .
Wells, Somerset
England’s badger problem is not just the possible spread of TB to cattle. In
the 17th and 18th centuries badgers were routinely culled. In Somerset a dead
badger was worth one shilling (two days’ pay) to a farm labourer.
This is because, for most people in those days, food meant vegetables.
Badgers eat most vegetables and in dry summers they dig up watered gardens for
earthworms. If they raided a poor man’s vegetable plot the weaker members of the
man’s family might not survive the winter.
Until the 1940s, most farms were powered by heavy horses, which could break
their legs in badger setts. Badgers were hunted for their skins, their hair (for
shaving brushes) and their meat (smoked badger hams were a delicacy). For all
these reasons country people harvested badgers and held their numbers down,
until the Badgers Act 1973 stopped them. Now, badgers can devastate our
vegetable plots and flower beds in total safety.
Badgers began exploiting my garden in 1990. Last winter I questioned 53 other
Somerset gardeners, members of the National Gardens Scheme charity. Of these, 44
(81 per cent) feed badgers involuntarily (although six, who are lucky enough to
have walled gardens, have badger-proofed them). In at least 18 gardens the
badgers have arrived since 1986.
Worse, when the badgers moved in they wiped out cherished garden-friendly
wildlife. I found 29 gardens had badgers but no hedgehogs, seven had hedgehogs
but no badgers, and only six had badgers and hedgehogs. Slow-worms are going the
same way, down badgers’ throats.
Badger fanciers whose creed is the more badgers the better, should explain
their contempt for hedgehogs, slow-worms and the nation’s gardeners.
Letters : Wire or weather
Godalming, Surrey
Paul Marks’s report on millimetre-wave digital TV transmissions
(“And now the TV forecast…”, 9 August, p 28)
leaves cable distribution systems as an
also-ran. But isn’t it better if broadband cable is accepted as part of the
normal infrastructure of a community?
Marks appears to overlook the current trend. Published media, once thought of
as “broadcast”, will in future be piped to users. That way access and quality
will be controlled, and the weather won’t be able to interrupt Star Wars
II on the telly.
In any case, even in well-populated suburbs鈥攅specially hilly ones like
ours鈥攖he number of transmitters needed to provide millimetre-wave TV with
line-of-sight to every roof doesn’t bear thinking about. Add them to the
existing proliferation of mobile phone and emergency service transmitters and
you have a visual disaster.
Personal and corporate communications, however, are better delivered to
mobile terminals and so need the airwaves.
Letters : No room for humans
Reine, Norway
Richard Page’s criticism of Fred Pearce’s portrayal of Arctic hunters was an
abuse of scientific facts
(Letters, 19 July, p 52).
Despite the fact that the current best estimate for the northeast Atlantic
minke whale stock is 112 000, Page claims that it is wrong to assert that the
population is healthy. He also claims that the scientific committee of the
International Whaling Commission (IWC) “currently accepts two different
population estimates鈥攐ne of 65 500 and another of 118 000″. The truth is
that the 65 500 figure derives from the analysis of a survey carried out in
1989, while the 118 000 figure derives from a 1995 survey and is considered by
the IWC scientific committee as the more reliable estimate.
But why should Greenpeace bother about estimates and ecological arguments,
especially when its “true intention” is, as evidenced by the rallying cry for
its sponsored walk last month, to “leave the oceans for the whales” .
Other animal rights groups advocate the contraceptive pill as a management
tool for wildlife to, for example, keep elephant numbers down in South Africa,
so taking away a resource from the local people. So it shouldn’t be any surprise
to Greenpeace that small communities around the world living with and from
wildlife are finding common ground. What’s next? “Leave Africa for the
elephants”?
Letters : Reinvent the wheel
Cape Town, South Africa
After reading Pratap Chatterjee’s article about the demolition of old dams
(“Dambusting”, 17 May, p 34),
and watching the television programme The Nature of Things
by David Suzuki, which showed the devastation caused by
the construction of large dams (flooding of extensive areas, and the forced
removal of millions of people throughout the world), I wonder why we don’t go
back to the traditional water wheel and, in effect, use the turbines without the
dams.
I am sure modern technology could be applied to improve water-wheel
technology significantly. The result might still not be as effective as large
dams, but it would not cause the massive devastation and long-term problems
either, and the net impact (advantages minus disadvantages) might be far
superior.
Letters : Digital dishes
Orpington, Kent
Your Technofile column states: “None of the 3.5 million satellite dishes in
Britain can receive digital broadcasts”
(This Week, 23 August, p 11).
In fact, were a consumer to connect a digital receiver to their antenna it
would, normally, receive some digital services, as shown by the growing number
of MPEG2 users in Britain.
It is true that services such as British Interactive Broadcasting will
transmit from an orbital slot that is different to the present BSkyB analogue
service. But that is not to say that all today’s dish equipment will become
redundant. The major impact would be that the antenna would require
realignment.
Letters : Virtual experts
Leicester
As you rightly state, psychologists are being used more and more in the
British legal systems as expert witnesses
(This Week, 23 August, p 16). Gisli
Gudjonsson is quoted as saying that this growth can lead to problems, as not
enough chartered psychologists have direct experience of court work and
especially of actually appearing as a witness.
Beyond granting chartered status to forensic (and other types of)
psychologists, the British Psychological Society has produced an extensive
training package to deal directly with the problem of experience. The package,
called “Expert Testimony: Developing Witness Skills”, is in wide use both within
psychology and within other professions.
While such training packages can never totally replace direct experience,
they can and do provide basic knowledge of due process and witness skills.
Letters : Suck on this
Barry, Glamorgan
Your feature “Eaten alive”
(26 July, p 30) states that mosquitoes can create
suction differentials of “between 1 and 2 atmospheres”. Do they know something
we don’t?
From 0 to 鈥�14.7 pounds per square inch is Nobel Prize territory!
Letters :
You are right. The point was badly expressed. It is not diluted to 1 in
10400 molecules in the pill itself, but rather it is so diluted beforehand that
there is only a 1 in 10400 chance of a molecule of the duck ending up in the
辫颈濒濒鈥抬诲.
Letters : Rust realities
Perth, Western Australia
I hope your readers will not conclude that a natural bacterial biofilm will
protect steel from rusting
(This Week, 16 August, p 21). Quite the contrary, in
normal biofilms, with mixed populations of microorganisms, the removal of oxygen
generally promotes fierce corrosion of steel, made potent by anaerobic
sulphate-reducing bacteria.
Letters : No such south
Sydney, Australia
Michael Grubb of the Royal Institute of International Affairs claims that in
the decade 1985 to 1995, emissions of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide
expanded rapidly in the southern hemisphere due to the explosive growth in the
Australasian, Asian and Latin American economies
(Letters, 9 August, p 50).
In the early 1990s the Australasian economies were in the grip of an extended
economic recession, with the concomitant closure of many inefficient industrial
facilities. The Tiger economies of Asia are all in the northern hemisphere. The
only significant Asian industries south of the equator are those of Indonesia,
and are at the most 10掳 South. Latin American industries north of the
equator may well balance out those south of the equator.
Letters : Slite improvement
Stockholm, Sweden
J. J. Watson suggests that heat output from cement kilns should be used to
generate electricity for national distribution, so reducing carbon dioxide
emissions (Letters, 9 August, p 50).
Another method is to do as Cementa AB does in its major Swedish cement
factory in Slite on the island of Gotland. Excess heat from the kiln heats water
in a municipal heating network. The heated water circulates under the streets
and warms the buildings of the town of Slite (2000 inhabitants) by way of heat
exchangers. A greenhouse for vegetables is also heated.
This system means that very little oil is being used to heat the houses
there鈥攁 small but significant compensation for the emissions from the coal
being burnt to heat the cement kiln. Slite is small and widely spread out. In a
more densely built town, such a system would work even better.
Letters : DIY 3D
New York
About home-made 3D viewing glasses
(Feedback, 2 August and
Letters, 23 August, p 49):
I was able to enjoy the stereoscopic pictures of Mars by getting
a transparency and carefully painting one side with a red marker and the other
with a blue one, which I thought was a quick and dirty solution to the problem
at hand.
Letters : Plug-Schole
Cambridge
Thank you for a fascinating insight into the nebulous world of derivatives
trading in your recent article
(“Calculated gambling”, 9 August, p 36). Of
particular interest was the Black-Scholes equation, which, as was explained, can
be used to estimate the relative value of different options on a particular
day.
However, I think a further insight into the connection between derivatives
trading and money (as exemplified by Nick Leeson and others) can be seen from
the name of the same equation, by removing both the hyphen and the two letters
immediately after it.
Letters : Strike your tent
S.Derrick@biosci.hull.ac.uk
Your report of a device for portable protection against lightning strikes
(This Week, 23 August, p 20)
demonstrates differences between the application of
scientific principle in the laboratory and the field. While the pyramid may
protect you in laboratory conditions, would you wish to handle aluminium poles
during its construction at the onset of an electrical storm and increase the
risk of being struck by lightning?
As for a patent, surely a frame tent would provide a similar level of
protection and keep you dry.
Letters : First and last
SPENCER_K@bgpii.com
In my day the nearest we got to technology was the oil lamp and I was very
apprehensive about all this telephone malarkey, so when we were told that e-mail
was to be installed at work you can imagine my apprehension.
Anyway, I decided to be a bit more 90s and give it a go. However, my fears
were even further heightened when, upon sending my first virtual letter, my PC
retorted: “All e-mail addressses are bad.”
I immediately heeded this warning, put down my mouse and vowed never to use
e-mail again, apart from this time to you, obviously.
Letters : Phoning home
Inverness, Scotland
I would like to add some of my own speculation about the Wow signal
(“Wow! was that ET?”, 9 August, p 46).
Supposing the signal did not originate from a
human source and was not an astrophysical phenomenon, but came from an
extraterrestrial civilisation. If it required a 2.2 gigawatt transmitter, would
that not suggest a civilisation more advanced than our own?
Let’s suppose that the Wow signal was not meant for us, but was transmitted
by Civilisation A to Civilisation B somewhere towards the Galactic centre. The
transmitting power used suggests Civilisation A may be capable of interstellar
spaceflight and B could therefore either be another civilisation or a
colony.
Such a message may have been transmitted hundreds or thousands of years ago,
and only received by us now. Having received it, I believe we should be
returning a signal ourselves, perhaps by repeating the unmodulated blast of
radio noise together with a message of our own.
For all those who say ET has not been in touch, the truth is that we may have
missed our chance to eavesdrop on a long-distance telephone conversation, one
that stretches light years across the Galaxy.
Letters : . . .
plds@vam.ac.uk
So, homeopaths have produced a cold cure where only one of the 10400
molecules in a pill is duck. Well, if they are capable of squeezing “far more
than the total number of atoms in the Universe” into a single pill, I’m more
than willing to believe that they can cure the common cold! Have I
misunderstood, or have you miscalculated something?
Letters : Memories of sewage
Letchworth, Hertfordshire
The most amazing fact as far as I am concerned about the dilution of
homeopathic remedies
(Feedback, 30 August) is not that they work at dilutions
that should mean not a molecule of the active ingredient is present, but rather
that whatever mechanism it is that does this only works for the homeopathic
component and nothing else.
Why does the water not retain a memory of all the rivers and sewage farms it
has been through?