Skip to content

Lights out! For our Climate! For what else?

Lights out! For our Climate! For what else?

Last Saturday, people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland were asked to switch off the lights for five minutes between 20.00 and 20.05. “Lights out! For our Climate!” was the motto. Similarly, on February 1 this year –  the day of the publication of the latest scientific report of the IPCC – people all over the world followed a call of a French initiative to turn off the lights for five minutes. The recent call to arms was widely supported by the German-speaking media, including the internet portal Google.

Luckily, not too many people followed the call. Luckily, not because I want to doubt that present forecasts on the future climate provide a need to worry –  they clearly do! But had 10,000 homes participated in the campaign, then it is likely that the the Power supply system would have broken down – in all of Europe. Hopefully the worries of the power generators will have been heard the other side of the Pond, when the campaign “Lights out in America" calls for a similarly rash reaction to global warming in March 2008.

These campaigns do not seem to be the only hasty reaction to global warming.

Read More »Lights out! For our Climate! For what else?

Race, IQ and James Watson

A couple of months ago, James Watson – who, together with Francis Crick, was awarded the Nobel Prize for deciphering the double helix structure of DNA – claimed that black people are less intelligent that white  He invoked the authority of science to make his claim. Of course, if the claim had simply been that on average (say) African-Americans had lower scores on IQ tests than White Americans (and that this difference was reflected in educational achievement and other socioeconomic indicators), Watson would simply have been citing facts. The controversial part of Watson’s claim was that the difference was rooted in the genes of blacks and whites and therefore fixed. The first part of the claim is (probably) false – the genetic differences between blacks and white are largely skin deep. But even were it true it would be irrelevant to the real question. Watson calls himself ‘gloomy about the prospect of Africa’, because he thinks that ‘genetic’ means ‘fixed’. But ‘genetic’ does not mean ‘fixed’; the fact that the differences between two individuals are explained by differences in their genes has no implications whatsoever about how hard or easy it is to eliminate the difference. Differences rooted in environmental factors (to the –limited – extent to which it even makes sense to separate environmental factors from genetic) may be easier to eliminate than those rooted in the genes, or they may be harder. Genes work like sets of switches, under the control of other genes and environmental factors. These sets can be configured differently to produce very different results; changing a few triggers thereby produces very different products from much the same genes. In any case, the evidence strongly suggests that this particular IQ deficit is remediable.

Read More »Race, IQ and James Watson

Who is your hard drive working for?

Western Digital, a producer of networked
hard drives that enable users to access their files across the net, has blocked customers
from sharing media files from their drives. Needless to say, users are not
amused and hard at work at finding workarounds. The move is possibly a
pre-emptive way for the company to avoid being sued by the content industry for
providing a means for piracy. The block covers most popular media formats,
regardless of who owns the copyright of the contents. This makes it impossible
for users to share e.g. home videos or their own creations. Who really owns the
hard drive – the customer or Western Digital?

Read More »Who is your hard drive working for?

Private genetic tests, and the case for ‘Genetic education’

An advisory body to the UK government, the Human Genetics Commission has called for more regulation of genetic tests that are available for the public to buy privately.

The completion of the human genome project, and the advances (and economies) in genetic technology have led to a burgeoning industry in private genetic tests. In the US especially, but increasingly also in Europe it is possible to order a wide range of tests for genes associated with risk of disease.

It is argued that tests with significant health implications should not be advertised to the public, and should be available only through a medical practitioner. But is this attitude to testing unduly paternalistic? Is greater regulation a realistic response?

Read More »Private genetic tests, and the case for ‘Genetic education’

Restoring Sensation to Amputees’ Lost Limbs

Scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University made two amputees ‘feel’ their lost arms by rerouting to their chest the key nerves that transfer sensations from hand to brain. After several months, stimulation to the area of the nerves would produce rich sensations experienced as if occurring in the missing limbs. Interestingly, the patients could still distinguish between sensory stimulation of chest nerves and that of the rerouted arm nerves.

For a summary, see Yahoo News

For the original paper, see PNAS paper

Read More »Restoring Sensation to Amputees’ Lost Limbs

Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops

In his valedictory speech as Government’s chief scientific adviser on November 27th , David King said there was a "moral case" for the UK and the rest of  Europe to grow genetically modified crops as the technology could help the world’s poorest.

A research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences only one day after encourages this hope that GM crops might offer a solution to word poverty. New drought-tolerant plants are reported to grow with only one third of the usual water.

Nonetheless, antagonists of GM continue to point to the possibly severe side effects of the release of GM crops outside the lab. These unintended side effects might indeed outweigh the benefits, albeit such secondary effects seem very unlikely. But the keypoint overlooked in these debates is that the uncertainty is not only on the side of the harms from GM. The benefits of GM may also be unlikely to be realised – though not on scientific grounds. Overlooking these uncertainties raises an untenable asymmetry as the debate seems to suggest that the benefits are opposed by highly unlikely risks. This stands in the way of a rational evaluation of the use of GM crops.

Read More »Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops

Honest Opinions or Bullying?

Recently the website SpickMich.de that allows German pupils to anonymously rate their teachers defeated a legal challenge from teachers claiming invasion of personal privacy.
This was just the latest of a series of legal victories for the site. German courts have found that freedom of speech trumps teacher concerns about privacy and mobbing. Rating teachers, the court found, is a value judgement protected by law as long as it does not cross the line into "abusive criticism".

Teacher’s unions are however likely to continue criticising such sites. Andreas Meyer-Lauber, chairman of the union GEW in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has complained that pupils have no competence to judge teaching quality. "We need an impartial dialog between students and teacher," he said. "The Internet is not an appropriate medium for internal school feedback and self-evaluation."

But maybe that is exactly what the Internet could be?

Read More »Honest Opinions or Bullying?

Feeling good about the failure of others

The journal Science last week published a study indicating that the reward centres in our brains are highly sensitive to the success of others. In the study, 19 pairs of subjects were presented with a task involving the estimation of the number of dots on a screen, and were then provided with feedback about their perfromance and about a monetary payment that they would receive. They were also provided with the same information about the other member of the pair. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to ascertain the effects of this feedback on blood flow in the midbrain-striatal and midbrain-prefrontal dopaminergic projections – parts of the brain implicated in generating subjective rewards, such as positive feelings, in response to achievement. The researchers analysed the cases in which both members of the pair were successful on the task and found that, in such cases, the reward centres activated more strongly in response to a given payment when the other member of the pair received a lower payment than when the other received an identical or higher payment.

The main conclusion that the authors draw from this finding is that it supports the widely held view that subjective rewards are sensitive to the success of others, at least where success is measured in financial terms. Existing studies claiming to support this view have faced difficulties in, among other things, measuring subjective rewards, but the authors of the Science article suggest they they can avoid this difficulty by using activation of the reward centres as an objective proxy for subjective feelings.

Read More »Feeling good about the failure of others