Backing the wind
Ralph Ellis’ letter points out only half the fallaciousness of British government policy relating to wind power (22 March, p 30).
The assumption that a small reduction in carbon dioxide emissions might influence climatic change has been the reason for deploying these machines. However, as spinning back-up is needed to cope with intermittency, the implication is that the back-up itself will generate a lot of CO2. Back-up is provided by fossil-fuel plants running below peak output, and consequently burning fuel inefficiently, so making matters even worse.
In response to the consultation process leading to the White Paper, the Institution of Chemical Engineers told the Department of Trade and Industry that the back-up loss might exceed 50 per cent of the predicted CO2 saving.
We in Britain pay a huge hidden subsidy to wind electricity through the Renewables Obligation and exemptions to the Climate Change Levy. However, if wind power does not significantly reduce CO2 emissions, it will waste huge amounts of the consumer’s money, which would save immensely more CO2 emission by investment in energy conservation.
For the record
鈥� The formula given in the Spambusters features (8 March, p 44) for calculating the chance that a particular email is spam follows from Bayes’s theorem only if two conditions apply: overall, 50 per cent of emails are spam; and among both spam and non-spam, the instances of words such as “rich” and “Viagra” are independent.
Known Maya facts
Are Gerald Haug’s findings about the Maya really news, or just confirmation of known facts (22 March, p 19)?
My copy of Michael Coe’s classic 鈥� and hardly obscure 鈥� The Maya (1999) makes precisely the same case in the last three paragraphs of the introduction as that reported by you. Specifically, Coe cites research by Jason Curtis, David Hobell and Mark Brenner at the University of Florida confirming that there was an unusually severe drought from AD 800 to 1050, peaking in 862 (Quaternary Research, vol 46, p 37).
Coe closes his introduction thus: “Now we have solid evidence from a number of sources that by the ninth century the classic lowland Maya had severely degraded their environment to the point that extremely high populations could no longer be sustained; there were lesser factors which probably played a part in the collapse. But conditions of extreme drought, and year after year of crop loss, must have been the ‘nail in the coffin’ that ended this brilliant cultural florescence.”
View from Baghdad
Terry Allen’s article (1 March, p 25) presents many examples of false perceptions with regard to the effects of depleted uranium (DU) ammunition, yet makes no mention of the significant body of independent work which refutes many of these. In your so-called “battle for truth”, only one side is represented.
Many independent reports have been produced that consider the battlefield effects of using DU munitions. None of these has found a connection between DU exposure and illness, and none has found widespread DU contamination sufficient to impact on the health of the general population. Two reports published by the Royal Society in 2001 and 2002 state: “The inhalation intakes from resuspended DU are considered to be unlikely to cause any substantial increase in lung cancer or any other cancers.” Media reports of DU-induced cancers and birth defects in Iraq are not substantiated with credible scientific evidence.
You leave the reader with the false perception that the use of DU munitions would lead to the belief that biological, chemical and nuclear war had been practised against civilians. In fact no country besides Iraq in recent times has used chemical weapons against its neighbours. Nor has any other killed 5000 of its own civilians and injured 10,000 more with chemical weapons, as the Iraqi regime did in Halabja in 1988.
The Editor replies:
鈥� The article did not claim that Iraqis were correct in thinking that DU is harmful. It set out to convey how strongly some Iraqis believe that the US used DU to intentionally harm them. The point was that the Iraqi public’s perception of American actions will be crucial to prospects for rebuilding the country when the fighting is over.
User-friendly manuals
Emma Young’s article says that software manuals rely solely on information from the computer programmers who write the software (22 February, p 19). This is not entirely true. Technical documentation is developed in two basic ways. One is somewhat similar to what your article describes: the developers hand over a functional specification to a technical writer to turn into a user manual.
But the second, arguably more important, way of developing software documentation was missing from the article. This is where the technical communicator becomes a “user advocate”: he or she learns the application intimately, and finds out as much as they can about what customers are going to be trying to do with it, and then writes the manual to help users do what they want to do.
The mindset of these technical communicators is similar to that of the best teachers and trainers, for that is in reality what they are. At each step of the documentation process they try to imagine what a user wants to know and do next 鈥� and then give it to them. They have to be writers, teachers, trainers and creators, and their work often leads them into improving the usability of the systems with which they work.
The software tool being developed by the CSIRO could be of great assistance to such a “user advocate”. It certainly wouldn’t threaten their jobs.
Software that records the history of a typical user’s actions can never tell you where that user will want to go next, what they’ll be trying to create, or how they’ll want to stretch the bounds of the software 鈥� as they always do. Only a talented human being who knows the software, the hardware and the needs of the users can do that.
BBC mumbo-jumbo
The BBC’s teletext Sci-Tech news item for Thursday 20 March referred to your magazine as follows: “According to the New 杏吧原创 magazine, repair enzymes which heal the body may be able to travel by electrical charge.”
The writer then states: “This would help to explain why acupuncture is able to exploit energy pathways to heal the body.”
I assume the article’s writer was referring to Graham Lawton’s article in your DNA Special of 15 March (p 38). If he or she is correct, have I missed something? Is it really possible to equate the electrical conductivity of the DNA molecule to the so-called meridian pathways of acupuncture “energy”? To do so seems to me to make the false assumption that what happens at the micro level can be assumed to apply also at the macro level.
I get the feeling that the good name of your magazine has been hijacked to underpin some pseudoscientific theory.
Graham Lawton writes:
鈥� The BBC Ceefax report is so far from the truth that it cannot even be described as a distortion. It’s pure fiction.
No researcher I know of has made a link between charge transport in DNA and acupuncture, and I very much doubt that any of them would be remotely interested in doing so. There was no mention of acupuncture anywhere in my story. It is also grossly inaccurate to report that New 杏吧原创 says that repair enzymes “travel by electrical charge”.
Better spam filter
In your article about junk mail and the Bayesian junk mail filter (8 March, p 42) you neglected to mention one of my favourite mail clients: Apple’s Mail ().
Apple’s program uses a filter that combines the Bayesian and Boolean methods, and by this means manages to find 99 out of 100 pieces of junk mail and removes them from my inbox. So far, none of my legitimate emails have been labelled as junk, and for me that is worth the one or two spams that slip past the filters.
Missing 4 per cent
We are told that only 4 per cent of the Universe is made of baryonic matter that we can observe, and that the remaining 96 per cent of the Universe is “missing” (22 March, p 40).
Perhaps someone or something else is sitting out there trying to figure out where the missing 4 per cent is.
SUV accidents
Your article on SUVs was enlightening, and deeply disturbing (8 March, p 12). It also seems incomplete, as there is no mention of injuries and fatalities inflicted on pedestrians and cyclists. It seems probable that being hit by an SUV, at whatever speed, is going to be worse than being hit by a car. Bull bars will make it worse still. There are also fewer places where a walker or cyclist can go that SUVs cannot. Are there no statistics to support this intuition? Can they not also be reported?
Not so successful?
I must take issue with the description of Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE programme as “successful” in your article on the best use of conservation funds (1 March, p 32).
Research on the programme carried out a few years ago by USAID, the US government’s international development agency, concluded that without the millions of American aid dollars that have been poured in to prop up this supposedly sustainable and self-sufficient programme, the entire edifice would have collapsed.
Most of CAMPFIRE’s lobbying effort has concentrated on the international ivory trade, yet the money received from ivory sales when Zimbabwe was finally permitted to sell ivory to Japan fell far short of the donor aid that funded its lobbying effort.
Donor money is still central to the programme. I suspect this is partly because most donor governments’ conservation policy is directed towards “sustainable utilisation” 鈥� a policy that has contributed almost nothing to the conservation of natural resources.
The political situation in Zimbabwe has highlighted another weakness. Some of the worst wildlife poaching in the past two years has occurred in the area where CAMPFIRE had achieved some measure of success, and where money from wildlife hunting and similar activities has been reaching people at village level.
This casts doubt on the theory that receiving money from hunting and other forms of consumptive utilisation provides a strong enough incentive to conserve wildlife. As your article points out, simply providing an injection of cash is no guarantee that people will not take the money and simply carry on as normal.
Knock-on effect
In his enthusiasm for ridding the world of mosquitoes, Oliver Morton seems to have forgotten the simple ecological fact that all species have an effect on the community around them (22 March, p 32). If the mosquito and the diseases it carries are made extinct, there will be an unknown effect on various wild populations.
The extinction of one species often leads to the imbalance of wild populations, especially when regarding a species such as the mosquito, which has so many interactions with various species of mammals, birds and invertebrates. For millions of people across the world the eradication of the mosquito would be an obvious benefit, but would this “final” solution really be the unmitigated blessing it seems?