Affluenza influence
I was interested to read Andrew Oswald’s review of Oliver James’s book Affluenza, in particular his criticism that it was “closer to a sermon than science” (27 January, p 44). The implication that Oswald hardly leaves hanging is that, compared with James’s writings, Oswald’s own work is evidence-based and scientific. Indeed he refers to it, complete with a bar chart, in his second paragraph.
I therefore found it somewhat strange that when Oswald approvingly refers to another piece of research, in this case by Jonathan Gardner at consultants Watson Wyatt Worldwide, which claims 鈥� against James 鈥� that “people gain emotionally from divorce”, he fails to mention that he was co-author. He does note that on this point “we need much more research”. Indeed we do.
The editor writes:
鈥� Andrew Oswald provided a full list of references for his review which we were unable to print for reasons of space. They are accessible through the web address printed at the end of the review: .
Terrestrial intelligence
Michael Brooks puts forward a strong case for supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and points out the enormous scientific and cultural implications that positive evidence would have for humanity (27 January, p 18). I am sure this view is shared by many who welcome it as a way of engaging the public in science via the SETI@home project, in which people use their own computers to process SETI data.
There are, however, other ways in which the public can engage in scientific discovery, many arguably more relevant and likely to produce tangible results now. Grid computing projects such as FightAIDS@home enable spare time on personal computers to be used to number crunch molecular dynamics calculations, looking at drug-protein interactions and protein folding in the search for new drugs to fight disease.
Though SETI is laudable, wouldn’t most, given the choice, prefer to donate spare time on their computers to cure cancer, AIDS or malaria on planet Earth?
Policy paucity
Your article on geothermal energy in the US brings into focus this country’s lack of a thought-through energy policy (27 January, p 4). The Salton Sea geothermal field in California could satisfy all of California’s electricity needs for at least a millennium. With geothermal, solar, wind and other clean energy sources we certainly could switch from an oil-based economy and end our growing reliance on overseas oil.
What is becoming painfully obvious is our lack of political leadership in making that transition. Our existing energy policy consists of junior executives in oil companies bidding against each other for oil in tankers on the high seas. Meanwhile, we continue to drive gas guzzlers.
Save our spring!
Was the article “Born under a bad sign” trying to make an insightful point about climate change (27 January, p 42)? You pull out the quotation “A winter birth significantly increases the risk of schizophrenia” 鈥� but the wheel diagram on the following page has February, March and April highlighted as risk periods for schizophrenia. I know there have been many casualties of climate change, but I don’t think spring will disappear so silently.
The editor writes:
鈥� It’s a fair cop. The quote started out as “late winter” 鈥� we had in mind February in the northern hemisphere 鈥� but it didn’t fit.
Ever-expanding unit
I felt rather clever when I asked my company’s IT manager to convert office network transfer rates from megabits per second to bibles per second, anticipating numbers that I could relate to.
However, I found myself beaten when reading about the soon-to-be-started Large Hadron Collider at CERN (27 January, p 36). The article says that during its expected 20 years of operation the giant particle smasher is likely to produce an amount of data exceeding the total of all words ever spoken in the world.
I propose to call this amazing unit a wowospoke, or wws for short. I think the CERN physicists should be careful about making promises in such terms, as this unit is a dynamic one, always growing. Will they actually catch up with it? Its continuous increase means we may feel a bit less outrun by the advancing technology, and our grandchildren will perhaps not laugh when they learn about the communication rates in our days.
By the way, an office network of 100 megabits per second will deliver about 3 bibles per second.
Sarcastic design
With regard to intelligent design, David Prichard writes: “Had some super intelligence designed everything, it would have been far simpler” (20 January, p 19). This is a non sequitur.
First, an intelligent designer can make a universe as unnecessarily complex as s/he likes without it having a bearing on her/his intelligence, since there is no reason why s/he should have to follow Occam’s razor by implementing the simplest version of anything.
Secondly, “random events” do not constitute a logical explanation because random events by definition conform to no logical process.
From Chris Bartram
I am increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the scientific community to see the blindingly obvious. God created the universe and in the beginning things were quite simple and consisted only of what we can see and feel. Unfortunately for Him, He gave us not only free will but also curiosity. So for many thousands of years now, every time we get beneath the surface of a subject he has had to invent a new layer. In other words He is desperately making it up as He goes along.
If we can accept this, things will settle down and we will be able to save an awful lot of money and time in useless research.
Marsham, Norfolk, UK
Infinite improbability
Apparently 1042 grams might be named a sortagram (13 January, p 52). Surely it should be named a luegram in homage to Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything, in which the “answer to everything” was 42.
Immaculate illustration
I enjoyed the irony implicit in your cover illustration to “When evolution runs backwards” (13 January). The figures appear to lack reproductive organs, suggesting that their evolutionary path in any direction would be rather short. Or have you been infiltrated by believers in immaculate reproduction?
For the record
鈥� The application for patent protection for jokes has US Patent Office number 20060259306, not the one given in Feedback, 3 February.
Speaker sense
Talk of directional cables always makes me see the and Feedback’s mention is no exception (27 January). In order for any coil-driven speaker to produce sound it has to push the cone out 鈥� and then pull it back by an equal amount.
So the current that drives the speaker is alternating: there is no such thing as a “negative” or “positive” connection. We have red and black connectors on speakers only to make sure that both speakers are connected “in phase” so they push and pull at the same time, and the air pressure waves generated don’t cancel each other out.
Any asymmetry in this push-and-pull process would mean that the loudspeakers would very quickly “bottom-out”, inducing distorted sound as a result of cumulative travel in the direction of supposed directional bias.
Precognitive cameras
Feedback mocked the camera which can take pictures before the button is pressed (3 February). The recent BBC series Life in the Undergrowth showed, in the “making of” section at the end, how such a camera is used to capture film of insects which have just done something interesting.
Normally you’d miss the action, but the camera records 15 seconds of video from before you press the button. Of course, this is simply done, as you say, by constantly buffering images.
Unfree will
John Searle says “if you believe that free will is an illusion, you cannot live your life on that basis” and “we cannot shake off the conviction of free will” (13 January, p 48). Then Tim Sprod insists that we “cannot do without the language of free will” (20 January 2007, p 19).
It sounds to me as if we have no choice in the matter.
From Tony Clifford
Jetse de Vries reminds us that chaos and complexity theories demonstrate that large-scale phenomena can be indeterministic, even if they are built from lower-scale components that are determinstic (3 February, p 20). But, doesn’t this just suggest that our behaviour is intractable and indeterministic and so gives the illusion of free will, even though it is still ultimately determined by our nature, nurture and context?
London, UK
Intelligent collaboration
Douglas Axe and others say that, given acceptance of intelligent design, “Maybe systems biologists would start hanging out with systems engineers. We don’t know where all this would lead, but we are confident that good science would come out of it.” (13 January, p 18).
Perhaps they should spend less time cloistered in the Biologic Institute and get out a bit more. Systems and software engineers, having realised the limitations to the traditional “designer” solutions to real-life problems, have already collaborated with biologists to produce adaptive software solutions 鈥� such as neural networks and genetic algorithms.
In genetic algorithms, software engineers deliberately introduce: non-specific mutation; inheritance; multiplication of all variants and non-survival of unfit algorithms. This powers optimistion 鈥� indeed, evolution 鈥� of the better algorithms. After setting up the evolving system, the engineers do not design anything: they simply add time. They find in the optimised algorithms “vestigial” and “throwback” code that does not disadvantage the algorithm. These mirror such things as vestigial organs in the real world.
Nutrition 脿 la carte
Your leader and article on nutrigenomics accurately summarise the inadequate state of play (20 January, p 3 and p 34), and are in line with the consensus position of most researchers in the field: the science is complex, applications are premature. But this conclusion should be put in two contexts.
First, for better or worse, scientists do not always determine what happens in the world. Food companies, consumers and healthcare providers all have material interests in nutrigenomics. They are likely to force the pace.
Second, this is a rapidly changing field. Genetic tests will improve in their scope and relevance, allowing dietary advice to become more specific. A benchmark for progress will be laid down this year with the publication of Personalised Nutrition, a compendium of current developments and future prospects, both scientifically and socially. It is a progress report, carrying the story well ahead of your article.
I hope you will continue to report on nutrigenomics. This is a science that will eventually make a real difference to public health and individuals’ lives.
Graph grief
I was a little surprised that you published the misleading bar chart that illustrated Andrew Oswald’s review of Affluenza (27 January, p 44). It was only after I had carefully adjusted my reading glasses that I realised that the apparent 215 per cent rise in psychological ill health from 20 years ago and the 13 per cent rise from a decade ago are in fact nothing of the kind.
The actual rise from the 1990s is about 0.23 percentage points. If the graph had been drawn correctly from the origin at zero on the scale, the appropriate description would have been that which coincidentally occurs in the text alongside the graph’s title 鈥� referring to a different parameter 鈥� “which indicated that the incidence… is flat”.
Andrew Oswald replies:
鈥� Though the change appears small, the rise in psychological distress in Britain as measured by the General Health Questionnaire is statistically significant on a two-tailed test at the usual 95 per cent confidence level.
Forecast set fair
Recreational sailors have anticipated Michael Brooks’s article on measuring the accuracy of weather forecasting (27 January, p 32). I recall an article in a sailing magazine in the mid to late 1990s in which the author set up his own study to measure the accuracy of aspects of the UK Met Office’s forecasts, as relevant to pleasure boaters.
I believe this compared the wind speed predicted in the shipping forecast for his local area against that measured and reported by the local weather station, over a period of a few months. It concentrated on predicted wind speeds of 4 to 6 knots, these being desirable for day and weekend sailors like himself, and noted the incidence of actual wind speed being either higher (in some cases, dangerously so) or lower than predicted.
As I recall, this study found a respectably high probability of accuracy in the shipping forecast, though not quite as high as that claimed by the Met Office for the general forecast.
I imagine that this is not the only example of the accuracy of weather forecasts being studied by a person external to the profession. It provides a fair example of how an assessment of accuracy may be more trusted by users when its definition relates to a measure of “usefulness” relevant to them. I hope research into this will lead to more specific measurements of accuracy that the public can understand, rather than dismiss as being “too vague”.
From John Harvey
I note that the Met Office graph showing forecasting improvement over the years fails to include any units on the axis labelled “forecast accuracy”. It is therefore meaningless.
In the UK several national newspapers include in their daily weather forecast a brief Met Office summary for up to five days ahead. These take the form of five small outline maps of the UK with graphic symbols added for cloud, rain, sun and so on. Each day, one map drops off the end and a new one is added, and often there are changes to the forecasts for the days in between.
I have kept a record of these changes for the past six months. The headline finding is that for the 189 days covered, on only 20 occasions did a day’s forecast remain constant throughout its five-day appearance. On average forecasts changed 1.9 times between their first appearance and when they became the forecast for “tomorrow”.
To put this another way: nine times out of 10, the Met Office amended its five-day forecast as the day in question got closer. I wonder what those units of “forecast accuracy” were?
Rodmell, East Sussex, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� The measure of forecast accuracy on the graph is an abstract number with no units. Elaborating on this would not explain much, so mention of the units was omitted. In any case, it is the trend in the Met Office data that is the key to this graph.