Test integrity
I am sorely disappointed that Stu Hutson fails to acknowledge any scepticism when reporting David Skillicorn’s improbable claim that his algorithm for the statistical analysis of word choice can effectively and objectively quantify the degree to which a political candidate’s speeches are disingenuous (20 September, p 22). Perhaps Skillicorn’s study offers more robust evidence and greater intellectual rigour than Hutson makes clear.
But I am deeply suspicious of the pseudoscientific quantification of subjective qualities such as politicians’ so-called “spin”. Skillicorn’s assumption that the use of the first person plural pronoun “we” signals greater “spin” and therefore less honesty than the use of the first person singular “I” seems to conceal a political bias.
The rhetoric of mass movements and the left will generally make greater use of plural pronouns than the rhetoric of heroic individualism and the right. But is it appropriate to assume, as this article suggests, that it’s intrinsically less honest to speak of politics in terms of collective action than in terms of individual agency?
Moreover, Skillicorn and other researchers cited seem to define “spin” in a way that sloppily conflates rhetorical sophistication with dishonesty 鈥� or, in Skillicorn’s words, “stirring rhetoric” with “dancing around the truth”. Liars can be plain-spoken, too, and oratorical prowess doesn’t necessarily signal deception.
We already have effective means to gauge politicians’ honesty. We can, for instance, compare a politician’s speeches with prior statements for consistency, and we can submit speeches to rigorous fact-checking.
Perceived risk
Michael Bond explains how our emotions can lead us to make bad decisions in risky situations (30 August, p 34) but misses an element that often explains whether we over or underestimate risk. How people learn about a risk 鈥� by description or through personal experience 鈥� can have a profound effect on their behaviour, independent of their emotions.
Take for example a “dread risk” (rare, with serious consequences) like a terrorist attack in the Middle East. Local residents learn about it through their day-to-day experience, while potential tourists from the US or the UK learn about the same risk through media reports such as the television news.
Who is more concerned? Using leisure activities such as a hotel stay in the risky location as a measure, we find it’s the local residents who fill the beds. The number of tourists from abroad drops like a rock (). Remote descriptions of rare events lead to overreaction; day-to-day experience breeds complacency.
This challenges the notion that emotional vividness always leads to more fearful behaviour, since it was those living with the terror threat who underweighted it in their behaviour. In news stories the risk is always very vivid and remains available in memory. What experience teaches us, however, is that rare events are… well, rare. The most available information is that they usually don’t happen. Add memory constraints and you get an underweighting of rare events in decisions from experience ().
In sum, while our emotions may lend insight into what scares us, the role of cognition and how we learn about risk is important.
Food for thought
Bijal Trivedi and Matt Walker discuss ways to make the most of our food (13 September, p 28 and p 18). I suggest two more: to stop the enormous amount of wasted food at every stage of its production and use; and to improve human metabolism, to make the most of food we do eat.
Western ingenuity has been directed to developing ways for people to eat as much as they like while getting minimum nourishment from it.
This is a paradoxical pursuit while others go hungry. Now ingenuity is needed to get maximum nourishment from less food 鈥� and to be able to enjoy many more sources of great pleasure in addition to the great pleasure of eating.
There are many examples of people who are very healthy eating half or less than the average western diet. How do they do it? Babies’ metabolisms appear to adapt to the quantity of food they are given and in many cases this is too much.
From Iain Climie
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 report noted potential benefits from rearing livestock 鈥� if key changes were made. Silviculture and game ranching can combine some food production with carbon sinks and conservation. Feeding livestock on grass, crop residues, household scraps and spent brewery grain can cut waste and landfill. Scottish and Japanese research has showed how to cut methane emissions significantly.
Reducing agriculture’s impact is important but food security is vital. Securing both supplies and habitat conservation needs funding and more flexible consumption, not naive idealism. Bribing western fishermen to catch fewer fish, but not to throw any back, is a far better first step.
Whitchurch, Hampshire, UK
Selfish viral genes
Garry Hamilton argues that the transmission of genetic information by viruses challenges the dominance of the selfish gene as the power behind evolution by allowing a give-and-take of genetic information between organisms (30 August, p 38).
Does it not strengthen the selfish gene argument? Genes spreading independently of the species they originated in confirm their place as evolution’s unit of replication 鈥� a central idea in the selfish gene theory.
Peer preview
Lawrence Krauss’s commentary on editors and the peer review process was interesting 鈥� in particular the comment from an editor that “he would like to publish all articles, but only if the referees’ reports appeared alongside them” (30 August, p 46). We have recently done just that at the journal Angewandte Chemie: a controversial essay by Roald Hoffmann and others on predicting molecules () was published together with the four referees’ reports. In addition, a was set up for further comments.
Incidentally, the same issue included a statistical report on the effectiveness of the peer review process ().
Whose IQ gap?
James Flynn highlights the importance of culture in achievement (6 September, p 48). This reminded me of a remark by Ed Leahy, my former professor at Syracuse University. When he learned that cave art in France was painted with brushes (not hands or skin or anything else to be expected) he was surprised.
At first he wasn’t sure why he was surprised. Cave people had access to animal hair of course, and bunching it up could not have been the biggest technological leap. They used the same “technology” as Picasso and Monet. But their work is vastly different. The culture was what was important.
I read with interest James Flynn’s controversial essay based on his new book Where Have all the Liberals Gone? and I am left wondering 鈥� where have all the gay African Americans gone? Flynn says that of 104 black males six are dead, nine in jail, eight missing, 21 in less than half-time employment and three with a white female partner, leaving 57 “promising” black men to be a permanent partner for every 100 black women. So are those who are gay highly prone to die, go to jail, be lazy, or be missing? Or are they among the 57 “available” males, unlikely to be delivering on their assumed heterosexual “promise”?
It is odd to note that Flynn also seems to imply that of the cohort of 100 girls none has died, gone missing or to jail by the age of 45 鈥� and, apparently, all are looking to have children and male partners.
I live in a rural area of Michigan whose population is almost all white, and includes a subculture whose children drop out of school, hang out, get high and drunk, fight, get pregnant and go to jail more than they go to college. Their poor parents also use a small vocabulary, have no “great mission” for their kids and favour “natural growth” instead of “hothouse” rearing.
Males are in a seller’s market just as Flynn described and there are lots of single moms isolated from other adults in trailers scattered through the woods.
Might the differences between the general groups of blacks, whites, Hispanics or Asians be a measure of how prevalent this subculture is among each group, and not a reflection of the group as a whole?
Money should be spent to change parenting behaviour in this subculture and to reduce unplanned pregnancies for all groups.
Plainwell, Michigan, US
Uranium's undoing
Oliver Tickell states that minute quantities of depleted uranium lodged in the body “may kick out energetic electrons that mimic the effect of beta radiation” (6 September, p 8).
You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to understand that when uranium-238 decays by alpha particle emission, there is a daughter atom. It is thorium-234, which decays by emitting beta radiation 鈥� that is, an accelerated electron 鈥� and has a half-life of only 24 days. The resulting protactinium-234 undergoes further beta decay with a half-life of less than 2 minutes.
This is not mimicked beta radiation: it is beta radiation.
From Nicholas Lloyd
When reporting the hypothesis of Chris Busby and Ewald Schnug, did Tickell overlook the significance of uranium being only 450 times as effective at blocking low-energy gamma photons as calcium?
Calcium is nearly 7 million times more abundant in the human body than moderate depleted uranium contamination, and 13,000 times that of the Royal Society’s worst-case scenario. Should I be cutting down my intake of calcium?
Nottingham, UK
Plutonium PR
Gregg Brunskill writes: “All nuclear-reactor fission nuclides have also been found in the Earth’s geological record, especially in the ancient natural reactor at Oklos in Gabon” (6 September, p 25).
This is a nonsense popular with the nuclear industry’s PR people. It is true that some 鈥� very few 鈥� such nuclides have been found, but almost all the nuclear-reactor fission nuclides have such short half-lives that no detectable trace of them would be left by now, 1.7 billion years after the reactors are supposed to have been operating.
Their ultimate decay products are nuclides normally present in rocks in quantities so much larger than would be produced in the natural reactors that the reactor products would be untraceable.
A in connection with the Yucca Mountain project even claims: “Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost 2 billion years ago.”
No isotope of plutonium has a half-life long enough to be present in detectable quantities after 1.7 billion years, and all such isotopes’ decay products are indistinguishable from materials naturally present in very much larger quantities in uranium ores.
For the record
鈥� Our cover said that a bowl of cereal has the same carbon footprint as a 7-kilometre journey in a 4脳4 (13 September). That was derived from emissions of the best-selling sports utility vehicle (SUV) in the UK; the 6 km figure inside (13 September, p 28) was for the average US SUV. Oops!
鈥� We said that the average US car emits 556 grams of carbon per person-kilometre (17 November 2007, p 34). That was an editor’s arithmetical error: it should have been 215 grams.
鈥� An editing error had us say yeasts ferment hops (13 September, p 17). Beer is made by fermenting malted barley; hops are essentially flavouring.
鈥� Iraq and its marshlands are in south-west Asia (13 September, p 6).
Poo to you
You discuss the global water crisis (23 August, p 28) and various methods to try and reclaim water from sewage (p 14). Since fresh water is so precious, wouldn’t a better solution be to avoid flushing it down the loo in the first place?
Good composting toilets don’t use any water and are cheap to make, hygienic, low energy, completely odourless, and avoid environmental problems associated sewage discharge. They allow easy, safe reclamation of nitrogen and phosphorous.
We have been using a composting loo for 10 years at home now and quite frankly we now find using those gurgling, water flushing things quite disgusting!
Patient remains
You printed a colourful photograph of a copper canister that contains ashes of a patient at the Oregon State Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill (6 September, p 51). It is one of hundreds of tins from as far back to the late 19th century, consisting of those who died in the hospital but whose remains were unclaimed.
The existence of this cache has been something of an embarrassment to state authorities for many years, despite ongoing efforts to locate family members interested in reclaiming the remains. Given that many date back a century or more, few of them can reasonably be expected to be claimed.
The number of the hospital’s residents has declined precipitously during recent decades, with the advent of effective medications and community treatment programmes. Plans now are in train to demolish the century-old main building, which is no longer in use. A small portion at the front entrance, including a decorative cupola, will be conserved as a museum and memorial. There will be provision for a more respectful storage of the hundreds of canisters, comparable to a columbarium and vastly superior to a damp basement.
Alien creation
I think something has been missed in the recent debate over evolution and creationism. Even if the proponents of intelligent design could demonstrate that human development was manipulated or accelerated by some alien intelligence, I do not see how they could determine the motives for this. I certainly don’t see how you can prove it had a benevolent “God-like” purpose.
If I have a choice between believing in the gradual evolution of humans as an integrated part of the amazing diversity of life on this planet, or being created by an unknown alien intelligence for an unknown purpose, give me evolution every time.
Four tribes
It seems to me there are two kinds of religious people. There are those who spend their lives seeking after God, trying to do so without preconceptions, though being guided by the writings of predecessors who have thought deeply about his (or her, or its) possible nature.
Then there are those who have a fixed view of their deity, who have decided that a god has no leeway to be any different from how they view him (or her, or it). They are more often guided by the writings of a single predecessor, or someone currently extant, than by a wider philosophical base.
The former have no difficulty with science, though they may often have moral objections to areas or research which may seem to harm human dignity. The latter have tremendous problems with science, because it threatens their fixed view of their god. The Templeton Foundation seems to me to fall into the first category.
杏吧原创s can be similarly categorised. There are seekers after knowledge, who try to do so without preconceptions, although guided by the writings of their predecessors. And there are those who have fixed views about the all-encompassing nature of science and its ability to answer all questions.
The former have no problem with religion, allowing that there may be a god, but that science cannot prove or disprove his (or her, or its) existence. The latter have a huge problem with religion, because even the possibility of the existence of a deity threatens the foundations of their world view. Happily, for now, the former in both cases are more numerous than the latter. Long may it remain so.