First computer
The penultimate paragraph of your article on Bletchley suggests that Colossus
was the first electronic digital computer in 1943
(Forum, 29 May, p 50).
In his book Physics in the 20th Century (reviewed by you on 10
April, p 48) Curt Suplee refers to the first version of the modern electronic
computer as having been constructed in the basement of the physics department at
Iowa State University in 1939 by theoretical physicist John Atanasoff.
He also constructed a second version in 1941, which is illustrated in the
book.
Who is telling fibs please?
Marcus Chown writes: According to Station X by Michael Smith:
“Colossus was the first practical application of a large-scale
program-controlled computer and as such the forerunner of the post-war digital
computer.”
Letter
Many New 杏吧原创 readers will have been surprised by the sharp
swing of public opinion in favour of animal testing when the pollsters prefaced
their question with a modest few words suggesting merely that scientists do
animal testing for a reason.
The opinion poll exercise tells us more about polls than opinions. When
approached with a simple polling question such as “Should X be allowed or
banned?”, people appear to interpret the question as “Do you like the idea of
X?”. We find from polls about hunting and shooting that a large majority will
say “yes” to a ban if asked an isolated question, but if the question is given
any kind of context or invites any kind of rational evaluation, the measured
support for a ban drops drastically. Poll research for the Countryside Alliance
has thrown up bizarre contradictions: most people agreed that “animals should
have the same rights as humans”, yet a majority also endorsed killing animals
for food.
Polling organisations such as MORI are free to produce poll results that are
statistically impeccable, but naive and distorted when it comes to finding out
how people really think. The polling industry exists to supply a media product,
not to supply research as understood by scientists.
Letter
I think that the question you missed was: “If your child was dying from a
fatal disease, and you had a medicine available to cure your child, would you
use this medicine even if it had been tested on animals, or would you allow your
child to die?”
In my experience, even the most extreme animal rights activists collapse
under the load of such a question. This exposes the essential hypocrisy: that
it’s okay for their child to live, but not someone else’s.
The people's verdict
We were delighted to read the results of New 杏吧原创’s MORI poll
into views on vivisection, showing that most people were against using animals
in experiments where they would suffer
(This Week, 22 May, p 26). This was in
spite of the loaded preamble justifying their use in medical research. It
appears the only way to persuade people to support such experiments is via
emotive phrasing and the introduction of issues such as leukaemia in
children.
We are convinced that the results would have been more conclusive had an
additional point been made to balance the “warm start” question, along the lines
of “many respected scientists are of the opinion that animals are an
inappropriate model for humans and believe this fact negates findings from
experiments such as those conducted in the study of leukaemia. Do you approve of
such experiments?”
Even when the warm start question was invoked, the majority were against
experiments, even in AIDS research, if pain or suffering of monkeys was
involved.
Last year, Animal Aid commissioned a poll which showed that 50 per cent of 15
to 34-year-olds believe that “the information and results obtained from animal
experiments cannot reliably be applied to people.” This proves that the public
are not only concerned about the suffering involved, but are increasingly
unconvinced of the efficacy of such experiments.
Revolting ritual
Not only are the habits of many native or aboriginal tribes and peoples
revolting to everyone except themselves, such as the whalehunting described in your article
(This Week, 29 May, p 12),
but the alibi these people invoke for
their handling of other species is totally unacceptable from a moral point of
view.
An act such as witch-burning or hacking a whale to death is cruel whether it
is performed according to an age-old ritual or to one invented yesterday. It is
also incredible that these peoples get away with first claiming that their
hunting and harvesting habits represent thousands of years of cultural heritage
and therefore must be respected, and then go hunting with the most modern
equipment.
Natural heritages such as whale populations are global and not local
responsibilities, and the rights democratically bestowed on humans and animals
have to be respected regardless of whether they were different long ago. What
history teaches can usually be summarised as: don’t do it again.
Chimps and us
You say that a 1.5 per cent genetic difference between us and chimpanzees
could affect up to 1500 different genes
(“The greatest apes”, 15 May, p 26). It
seems to me that it could affect a lot more.
If each base pair has a 1.5 per cent chance of being different, then any gene
more than a couple of hundred base pairs long would probably be different. This
would mean that a large portion of our 100 000 genes would be different from
those of the chimps.
Well spotted. We were wrong to say that a 1.5 per cent genetic difference
between chimps and humans corresponds to a 1500 gene
difference鈥攕tatistically speaking every one of the 100 000 or so genes
could differ by 1.5 per cent. However, researchers argue that, because of
selection pressure against deleterious changes and other factors, very few of
those differences would affect how a gene behaves. Comparisons of chimp and
human proteins suggest that the differences that matter may involve fewer than
1500 genes. Researchers are still looking, however, so that estimate could
肠丑补苍驳别鈥抬诲
Ivory at issue
In the article on the resumption of the ivory trade, Michael De Alessi says:
“West African countries withheld their votes in favour of the ivory sale, not
because of reservations about conservation issues but in the hope of securing
additional foreign aid”
(Forum, 8 May, p 51).
As a member of Ghana’s official delegation to the CITES meeting in Harare, I
wish to make quite clear that we and other like-minded West African states did
not “withhold our votes in favour of the ivory sale”. We voted firmly against
it.
Our reason was our conviction (since proved correct) that no matter what
safeguards and limitations are placed on the ivory sale, the ivory poachers of
Africa and Asia would see the sale, after 10 years of banned trade, as a signal
to resume the slaughter.
West Africa has widespread but still fragile elephant populations, despite
considerable recovery during the 10 years of the ban. Our relatively small
elephant populations are too valuable to be exposed again to poaching simply
because other countries want to reopen the ivory trade.
De Alessi’s allegation that West Africa’s objection to resumed trade was in
order to secure foreign aid is not new. It was one of the tactics used at Harare
to discredit any opposition to resumed trade in elephant products.
Another widely used smear tactic was to say that West African elephant
populations are small because we have mismanaged them. Far from being due to
carelessness and incompetence, the limited numbers of elephants in West Africa
is due to more than 500 years of intense hunting ever since the first Portuguese
fort was built on our shores in 1482. Ghana’s neighbour is not called C么te
d’Ivoire for nothing.
We reject De Alessi’s insulting dismissal of the view that policies which may
have some relevance to the interests of a handful of southern African countries
are detrimental to other elephant range states with very different ecological
and historical circumstances and to the long term survival of elephants in
general.
Letter
Contrary to De Alessi’s assertion, the CITES ivory ban of 1989 did not end
culling in southern Africa. Botswana never culled, and Zimbabwe stopped in 1986.
Namibia’s elephant population, rather than being too high, is relatively small
(roughly between 6000 and 10 000, based on 1995 IUCN estimates, in a country of
141 000 square kilometres).
De Alessi claims private ownership is the key to conservation (although the
largest population of American bison, a species he names in support, is in a
Canadian national park). Private efforts, including commercially driven ones,
can be important for some kinds of conservation. But in applying this to the
African elephant, De Alessi ignores history.
Before the ban, CITES allowed a legal ivory trade. If De Alessi is right,
things should have been better for elephant conservation then. Instead they were
far worse. Poaching was rampant over much of the continent, elephant populations
were in free fall in many areas, and effective smuggling controls were
nonexistent. In 1987, the IUCN estimated that 78 per cent of the ivory with
legal CITES permits came from poached animals. De Alessi’s open-market approach
has already been tried. It was a disastrous failure.
Red hot paint
So small boats have been banned from using tributyltin as an antifouling
paint because of its toxicity (This Week, 8 May, p 23 and
Letters, 29 May, p 54).
What happened to the antifouling paint based on essence of hot pepper
reported in New 杏吧原创 (Technology, 22 May 1993, p 21)? Does it not
actually work or is this another case of industrial interests sinking an idea
that they can’t make much money out of? The hot-bottom paint was supposed to
work with no pollution and even last longer than conventional antifouling
paints.
In translation
With regard to symbols lost in the transfer from wordprocessing files to print
(Feedback, 5 June),
a few years ago we used to send MS Word files prepared
on a PC to a printer that transferred them into Word for Mac and then to
QuarkXpress. Our initial problems were annoying, but did at least allow the
correction to be printed under the heading: “Pi Lost in Apple.”
Darkness at noon
What a fantastic collection of articles about the 11 August eclipse
(“The great eclipse”, 29 May, p 28).
Just one crucial missing fact: the phone number
for the National Eclipse Helpline is 0345 600 444.
Perhaps your researchers considered the use of the telephone slightly
old-fashioned in this day and age. I can assure you that we have received
thousands of calls about the eclipse, from those curious to know just what will
happen to those who want advice on safety.
The line is run by Science Line, the educational charity that answers science
questions from the general public and is part of Broadcasting Support
Services.
Before the fish
I would very much like to see Mitsubishi’s pre-Cambrian fish
(Editorial, 29 May, p 3),
as I believe the fossil evidence points to fish being around from
late Silurian times and then really taking over during the Devonian period, when
they got bored and started invading the land.
Pre-Cambrian seas were dominated firstly by the Ediacaran fauna followed by
the Burgess Shale fauna. No fish, only early chordates.
Penguin haze
I read with interest Feedback’s observation about references to penguins in
nuclear physics papers
(5 June).
According to a recent copy of Physics Review the tale is even
stranger. Only a person in a highly altered state of consciousness would
recognise a penguin in the particle diagram in question. Apparently, the term
was coined after a wager over a darts match between two American physicists. The
forfeit for the loser was to use the word “penguin” in his next paper.
This would appear to be the latest manifestation of a long tradition at the
more esoteric fringes of physics. With quarks exhibiting strangeness and charm,
barns being a unit of a minuscule area, and quark/gluon soups, I do wonder if
university physics departments are offering free drugs to entice students in.
Reading curve
With reference to the readability of misspelled words
(Letters, 29 May, p 55),
I have recently spent hours marking national test papers in science. The
exotic spelling of some 13 and 14-year-olds is amazing.
We are allowed some leeway and in many cases I know what the child is saying.
The problem comes where you draw the line between acceptable mistakes and
unreadable gibberish.
As the hours pass during marking, the boundaries seem to move in favour of
the more outlandish attempts as they get easier to read. This is contrary to
what people might expect鈥擨 should become less tolerant as patience frays
and tiredness grows. Your letter and earlier article (In Brief, 1 May, p 27)
explain what is going on.
Middle sex
In an otherwise excellent account of new robots
(“Booting up baby”, 22 May, p 42),
Duncan Graham-Rowe finishes by suggesting that the research team has made a
mistake by keeping their robots sexless. He expects that people will feel
uncomfortable with sexless robots since “we humans…are either one thing or the
other”.
As a counsellor and psychotherapist who has had contact with intersex people,
I challenge this statement. A small but significant number of people are born
with genitals that are ambiguous and are therefore truly intersex. Public
ignorance of this issue causes great distress to them and their parents. One
outcome of this ignorance, and the discomfort it produces, is that such babies
are often prematurely assigned a gender by surgery, without other options being
considered.
I suggest that an improved understanding of gender issues is a better option
than assigning an arbitrary gender to robots.
Web for all
Eng-Siong Tan, chief executive of a plug-in called Third Voice, says: “Up
until now the Web has been one-way communication”
(This Week, 29 May, p 16).
When Tim Berners-Lee and I worked on the design of the Web at CERN in 1990,
one principle was the equality of authors and readers. Only with the advent of
such diminished browsers as Mosaic (1993鈥攍ater Netscape) did the thought
of reader’s power disappear.
But even the Mosaic people knew this and quickly instituted “annotation
servers”, very much what Third Voice seems to do. Except that we could all use
Mosaic’s annotation through the Web, not needing yet another horrible plug-in,
which in this case only works for Internet Explorer and only on Windows. I use
neither, so Third Voice is useless to me.
Once again the “free market” drives towards a monopoly and stifles
communication by introducing proprietary systems, the very antithesis of what
the Web stands for.
Correction:
In the article on HIV management in Africa
(This Week, 1 May, p 4),
it was reported that in clinical trials, Diana Dickinson in her clinic in
Gabarone, Botswana, achieved suppression of HIV production in 70 per cent of the
patients she tested who were receiving the drugs DDI and hydroxyurea. She wishes
to make it known that the figure was in fact 42 per cent.
In other patients who received an additional drug, D4T, the response was
better: 60 per cent had levels of HIV in their blood too low to be detected by
standard assay.
We also regret that in our article about nanotubes
(This Week, 8 May, p 21),
the name of Richard Crooks of Texas A & M University in College Station was
wrongly given as Robert Crook.