Throwing good money…
Perhaps there are other ways of looking at the behaviour of people who fall
prey to the “sunk-cost” or “Concorde” fallacy鈥攖he tendency to judge
options according to the size of previous investments rather than the size of
the expected return
(“Call it quits”, 23 May, p 40).
Measured in monetary terms and using the British taxable population as the
reference system, the production of Concorde was not financially useful. Using
the engineers who designed and built Concorde as the reference system, the
project was very successful in that it pumped money out of general circulation
into their pockets as wages.
However, in cultural terms (feelings of national self-esteem, stored
technical expertise and so on) the British taxable population may consider that
the building and running of Concorde is a culturally useful activity.
Perhaps the real fallacy is the reasoning that says, “If it can’t be
quantified it needn’t be considered”. It is hard to put a monetary, social or
any other numerical value on cultural activities.
Letter
Since the 1920s or earlier, serial identifiers on military equipment of all
kinds have been allocated in disjointed batches with irregular gaps. This
defeated the analytical approach that Matthews asserts could have been used to
monitor Israeli production of the Merkava tank in the 1980s.
In the Second World War, the Allies’ technical intelligence agencies were
frustrated by this precaution, as were the Germans.
Serial deduction
Robert Matthews describes a means of estimating an unknown total population
by capturing, releasing and then capturing again a sample of that population
(“Hidden truths”, 23 May, p 28).
He states that the proportion of recaptured
individuals in the second set gives an estimate of overall numbers. The smaller
the proportion recaptured, the larger the population is likely to be.
However, it seems this method relies on the assumption that each individual
has an equal chance of being recaptured. Is it not likely that there will be a
range of abilities when it comes to avoiding capture? Less adept individuals
could therefore be expected to be over-represented in the second captured sample
and would tend to give an underestimate of the overall population.
Alien lettuce
Fred Pearce talks of “attempts to ease one plant’s stranglehold on Lake
Victoria” but in fact, as the accompanying photographs clearly show, there are
actually two species of exotic floating plants on the lake
(“All-out war on the alien invader”, 23 May, p 34).
Both the picture on the contents page and the one in the main article
featuring hippos and lily-trotters are of water lettuce,Pistia
stratiotes. Everything I’ve read recently on the problem in Lake Victoria
refers only to water hyacinth, ignoring water lettuce.
Has the presence of the two plant species been adequately considered in the
various control strategies being explored?
Letter
Data sleuths may be able to tell us how many butterflies we have never seen,
but could they not go one step further and tell us where to find that damned
Amazonian butterfly which is responsible for all those hurricanes?
Letter
The funnel plots in your article misrepresent an important point. The plots
as they are printed on page 31 suggest that it is mainly large studies with
negative results that are likely to go missing through publication bias. In
reality, as is aptly illustrated in the cited article by Givens et al, small
studies with negative or neutral results are more likely never to get
published.
This would create a gap in the lower right part of the funnel plot rather
than the upper right. Since the results of smaller studies will spread much
wider than those of large studies, this gap will be even more conspicuous than
the one illustrated.
Letter
There is one application that several readers might already be familiar with.
Suppose you have some text that is being copied manually from one medium to
another (handwriting to typescript, typescript to publisher’s proofs). You read
through the copy carefully and note any mistakes. A colleague reads through an
unmarked copy independently, and also notes any mistakes.
Some of these mistakes will be found by both people, while some will be found
by one and not the other. From these results you can estimate how many mistakes
were probably missed by both people.
It's hot to shop
Mick Hamer is right to be thinking of ways that we can reduce vehicle
emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants
(Forum, 30 May, p 53). But he
is clearly in the minority when it comes to shopping.
Yes, online shopping and home deliveries could have a little benefit in terms
of saving trips to the supermarket for some people, but will the effects be
measurable? That I doubt.
You see, people actually like shopping. They like to go out and touch and
feel and smell the produce. You only have to walk around a big supermarket to
see that food shopping, for instance, is a real family affair: the kids and even
grandparents can come along for the ride, be entertained, have a snack and get
the feelgood buzz from “retail therapy”.
But even if shopping wasn’t the top leisure activity in Britain, people would
still be thronging the supermarket aisles rather than leaving it to computers
and hard-pressed staff to select their goods. It is still the only way to
guarantee getting what you want.
The mental processing power required to do a weekly shop would, I suspect,
defeat most computers.
For starters, have you ever watched how long it takes some people just to
select a bunch of bananas? How many shall I have, is this bunch too ripe, is one
of those ones bashed or is it just a natural marking, are they too big or could
I get more for my money by picking a bunch with slightly smaller ones, and what
about the bunches at the bottom of the pile鈥攈ave they sat there longer or
are they fresher because no other shopper has mauled them, oh, look, conference
pears are on special offer, I’ll have some of those instead…
It will take more to reverse hands-on behaviour of hunter-gathering in the
supermarket than a little tax on parking spaces.
Letter
The Concorde fallacy concept has been predated by many years in old
Czechoslovakia. “Saving at all costs” is an old Czech saying.
Further correspondence on “Call it quits” can be seen on
https://newscientist.com/ns/980620/letters.html
Letter
The article seems to have overlooked reputation. This must be of considerable
value in social (and antisocial) animal confrontations as it extends the period
of time over which optimisation is achieved.
Letter
The authors of “Call it quits”, Peter Ayton and Hal Arkes, found that what
psychologists call sunk-cost fallacy is known as the Concorde fallacy by
ethologists. I write to report another variation, this time in the field of
retail microeconomics, which I have for years referred to as “the leverage
purchase”.
When shopping in my local supermarket I sometimes put a lemon into my
trolley. Having thereby “invested” all of about 20 pence, I invariably feel
compelled to purchase a bottle of gin to justify buying the lemon.
Similarly, selection of a small bottle of Scottish spring water “leverages” a
somewhat larger one of single malt whisky, and a simple carton of tomato juice
necessitates Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and a bottle of vodka.
I am greatly comforted to know that there is a scientific explanation for my
actions.
Letter
The article on the Concorde fallacy implies that such reasoning in humans is
always faulty. However, surely some cases can be explained by a version of
Dawkins’s and Brockmann’s explanation for the behaviour of digger wasps: that
the wasps are using a reasonable strategy given incomplete knowledge.
For example, it is suggested that people who pay more for theatre season
tickets attend more plays. This may be because a more expensive ticket hints at
better things to come, even if the plays so far have been poor.
Realising that our own knowledge is incomplete may lead us to behave in ways
which only appear fallacious. What wasps perhaps do instinctively, we may do
logically.
dig@it
I read with interest your article about allowing students in Australia to
experience an archaeological dig on Efate Island in the South Pacific via the
Internet (This Week, 9 May, p 15).
Although this is the first project to use satellites for this purpose, it is
not the first to provide real-time archaeology by uploading daily images and
text onto the Internet. In April/May of this year, researchers from the Center
for Indigenous Research in El Paso, Texas, uploaded daily digital images and
text of an excavation of a Columbian mammoth that took place near Ruidoso, New
Mexico, onto our website at http://www.virtualelpaso. com/archaeology.
In addition to the 100 young people who participated in the excavation and
more than 1000 local schoolchildren who toured the site, more than 10 000 people
visited the excavation on our website. Hundreds of people around the world
e-mailed questions to our researchers in the field.
As our Virtual Mammoth Project demonstrated, and as Mark Ward notes in his
article, the general public, young and old alike, are genuinely interested in
archaeology.
Letter
Here in The Hague I have been cybershopping since 1996 and find it very
restful.
We are a three-person family and for the past nine years have functioned
easily without a car. Public transport and bikes do the job. Whenever we do need
a car we hire one. This is in any case cheaper and more hassle-free than being a
car owner.
Nukes not guilty
What is the probability that a series of nuclear tests in northwestern India
and northern Pakistan could trigger a major earthquake in Afghanistan?
The probability is essentially nil, according to seismologist Paul Richards
of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. There is simply not enough
energy in test explosions. Even back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the nuclear
tests were hundreds of times bigger than those in India and Pakistan, they only
generated a few small aftershocks, within a few kilometres of the
蝉颈迟别鈥抬诲
No go with flow
Your article on flow in medieval stained glass
(In Brief, 16 May, p 25)
caused me no surprise, but some satisfaction.
When I was 12, I asked Peter Gibson, then Master of the Glass of York
Minster, about the phenomenon. In his charge was some of the country’s oldest
window glass, including some from the 12th century, so I believe his answer.
He confirmed that individual pieces of glass tend to be thicker at the bottom
than at the top. However, they have not changed shape鈥攖hey were always
that way.
Unlike modern float glass, stained glass was made by dropping molten glass
onto a potter’s wheel, which spun the glass into a flying saucer-shaped disc.
When that disc was broken into pieces to make a window (in the form of a jigsaw
held together with lead), each piece was, of course, thicker at one end than the
other.
And why is the thicker end always at the bottom? To make it more stable and
less likely to fall out of the leading.
My O level physics teacher would have none of it. My grievance can now be
laid to rest.
Rich pickings
The article by Bennett Daviss referring to Ediacaran fossils
(“Cast out of Eden, 16 May, p 26)
brought back memories of their discoverer Reg Sprigg. One
fine day in 1946 he flew me in a light plane to a rocky hill slope on the
western slopes of the Flinders Ranges.
He told me how as a student, his revered professor Douglas Mawson had told
him how it was possible the world’s earliest fossils might be found in those
unchanged sandstones.
We walked along until Sprigg picked up a piece of rock. “What do you think
that is?” he asked me. “Certainly a fossil,” was my reply.
It took Sprigg years to convince his fellow geologists it was a fossil, later
to be named Mawsonia spriggi in honour of both teacher and student,
though even the teacher dismissed it as merely a “fortuitous quirk of nature”.
Sprigg told me it was only through the visit of two Russian geologists to an
Adelaide conference that this incredible fossil series was made known to
science.
Sprigg worked hard to have the slope鈥攐ver which I walked to pick up my
own specimen of Mawsonia鈥攄eclared a geological reserve, saving it
from casual “picker uppers” like myself.
Arresting technology
You published a story that detailed the recovery of a stolen lorry using a
satellite positioning system
(Feedback, 16 May).
A single lorry? We do much better than that in South Africa, where this type
of stolen recovery system is used extensively. The system called Tracker is
installed in 32 000 vehicles. New installations are being carried out at a rate
of between 2000 and 3000 per month.
Sixteen helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft of the South African Police
Service have been fitted with the system, along with 360 highway patrol vehicles
in Gauteng Province alone. All of South Africa border posts have been equipped
with Tracker systems to spot stolen vehicles as they approach the border.
And the result of all this? Some 1200 Tracker-fitted vehicles have been
stolen in the past 18 months. Of these, more than 1000 have been recovered.
Quarks and quarts
Quark is pronounced “kwork” by physicists everywhere, not just by
Americans鈥攁t least that has been my experience
(Feedback, 23 May).
The word, in its physics context, was coined by Murray Gell-Mann, and he has
always insisted that this was the correct pronunciation. In his book The
Quark and the Jaguar, he says:
“In 1963, when I assigned the name `quark’ to the fundamental constituents of
the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been
`kwork’. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegan’s Wake by
James Joyce, I came across the word `quark’ in the phrase `Three quarks for
Muster Mark’.
“Since `quark’ (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly
intended to rhyme with `Mark’, as well as `bark’ and other such words, I had to
find an excuse to pronounce it as `kwork’ . . .
“I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry
`Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be `Three quarts for Mister Mark’, in which
case the pronunciation `kwork’ would not be totally unjustified. In any case,
the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”
The correct pronunciation “kwork” is well known, even if not always
observed.
Papers galore
Melanie Oxley seems to think that we are not getting on with research into
complementary medicine
(Letters, 23 May, p 56). At present we are carrying out
more than thirty complementary medicine research projects and hold 14
grants.
In the past five years the Department of Complementary Medicine has published
more than 200 papers. Anyone interested should look up our websites
(http://www.ex.ac.uk/pgms/ and http://www.ex.ac.uk/FACT/)
or contact us directly.
Patently clear
In your patents column on 9 May
(This Week, p 9) you state that UNION, a
committee of 700 European industrial property lawyers, “wants the European
Patent Office to rule that a computer program cannot be patented because it is
already protected by copyright”.
I attended the UNION Round Table on Patenting of Computer Software in Munich
on 9/10 December at the EPO and I have seen the press release provided by UNION.
It states: “The EPO was requested to update its Examination Guidelines and to
consider defining the term `computer programs as such’ in a new implementing
Rule as `source and/or object code of the computer program’ which is not sought
to be patented and which is anyway protected by copyright.
What UNION really wanted was to urge the EPO to clarify the current practice
and to make it clear that patents can be and are granted by the EPO for software
inventions.
Correction:
In the Focus article: “A wasted chance”
(30 May, p 22),
the figure of 16.9 million cubic metres of waste was
wrongly printed as 16.9 cubic metres.
Bless you
I can confirm your item in Bizarre Tales from New 杏吧原创 (21
March, p 27) concerning the antidepressant drug clomipramine, which made some
people have an orgasm when they yawned.
A friend of mine had a similar reaction to the drug. She had an orgasm each
time she sneezed. When I asked what she was taking for it, she answered
“pepper”.
Joining the department
Despite years of research, study and some begging, my university refused to
grant me a “Chair”. So I learned carpentry and damn well made one
(This Week, 16 May, p 20).
A little less of the “humble carpenter”, if you please.