Is this good news?

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50% of British 13- to 19-year-olds have never written a thank-you letter; 26% have never written a birthday or Christmas card. 58% think writing by hand is too slow to bother with.  9% say they don’t own a pen; by contrast, 74% have a tablet and 89% a smartphone.  (Bic/Daily Mail)

It is the “never having written a thank you letter”  that is disappointing.   Get a group of grandparents in a room and chances are that you will hear complaints that they never get any reaction to birthday or Christmas presents at all, let alone a nice ” thank you”.  Thanking people who are generous to you is the mark of dawning civilisation.  Even if you don’t like the present it doesn’t let you off thanking the giver.  Could it be a sign of the child-centric nature of modern parenting?    Don’t instruct or discipline the little darlings least they stop loving you?  As a matter of fact children end up loving and respecting heir  parents the more for firm, fair discipline, for telling them how to deal with their fellow human beings, and for drilling them (boringly and constantly)  about politeness and thoughtfulness.  Human beings have to be instructed, unfortunately.

There! a thought for 2017.

A small dose of hope this Christmas!

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John Key, New Zealand’s centre-right PM since 2008, stunned his country recently by announcing his resignation. He said that he had “nothing left in the tank” and that political leaders “tend to stay too long”. There was speculation that his wife, Bronagh, had urged him to quit for the sake of their family life; however, he denied that she had given him an ultimatum. Key, 55, a former banker and self-made millionaire, said he had never intended to be a “career politician” and had no idea what he would do next.  (Wellington, New Zealand)

Can we look forward to similar moves by Trump and the American multi-millionaires, appointed by him to run huge, sprawling  government bureaucracies for which they have neither patience or training?  Will they quickly end up realising that “they have nothing left in the tank”?  Unfortunately, the reality is that it is quite quick and easy to wreck good government programs, but let us hope none of these characters hang on and do it for long.  Three weeks would be a suitable tenure.  It probably takes that long to find out where the coffee machine is.

A happy, calm, moderate and Epicurean Christmas to you!

 

Some hopeful news for this day of the year

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Thanks to genetic modification a new strain of wheat is being grown in greenhouses, with yields up by 15 to 20 per cent, a team at Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, UK, recently announced.  The researchers have asked the government for permission to carry out field trials  in the spring.  If the plants produce anything like a 15 per cent increase in yield in real fields, it will be a spectacular result. In the UK, wheat yields have plateaued at around 8 tonnes per hectare. Getting more wheat from the same area of land would have massive environmental benefits – freeing up land to set aside for wildlife or to capture carbon, for example.

The results have been achieved by adding extra copies of an enzyme called SBPase to increase the supply of a five-carbon molecule that often runs short in plants such as wheat. Plants make food by adding carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to this molecule. This modification will also help plants take advantage of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

The team say they have made other genetic alterations that also boost yields in greenhouse tests, although they are keeping the details to themselves for the moment. Several of these yield-boosting modifications could be “stacked” together in a single strain to create superplants. In a world of rising CO2 and with ever more demand for food, they could make a big difference. (New Scientist)

Our hope for the human race could lie in the cleverness of scientists like this, working for the good of mankind, not for the balance sheets of chemical manufacturers. They are heros and offer hope for the future.

 

Honing your intellect

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“At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.” (William Cory, 19823-1892, renowned for being “the most brilliant Eton tutor of his day.” Arthur Coleridge described him as “the wisest master who has ever been at Eton.”)

Are young people having conversations these days?  I mean, real conversations.  I have the impression that life is actually quite solitary for many, alone in their rooms with their TVs. cellphones or tablets.  The reason I ask this  question is that my grandson was telling his father that the kids at school don’t socialise much or discuss serious issues. Unless you do it is difficult to foster the habit of attention, the art of expression, the assumption of a new intellectual position, the entering onto other people’s thoughts, or most of the other skills listed by William Cory. These things need practice.

 

Depleting the soil (no.2): promising news

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Indiscriminate fertiliser use hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty, suppressing the symbiotic relationships between fungi and plant roots, sometimes turning beneficial bacteria against each other.  Long-term use of fertilisers risks turning even fertile soil to desert.

What can be done? One possible solution is being pursued by Carlos Monreal of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and his colleagues. They realised that final price is the driver for farm products – we cannot go back to the natural rotation of crops without a big rise in food prices  (and wretched biofuels in Iowa).  He thinks the answer is to make fertilisers smarter.   Monreal wants to exploit the way plants signal to bacteria by releasing chemicals. The plant tells the microbes they need nitrogen. The microbes then begin working to free nitrogen from organic matter, and the plant soaks it up. In 2011, after nearly a decade of sifting through hundreds of chemicals in soil samples taken from fields of wheat and canola (oilseed rape), Monreal’s team identified five compounds that spike just as the plants take in ammonia – these are the chemical signals plants exude to ask for nitrogen.

The trick behind a better fertiliser is to keep its payload locked up until it encounters a plant’s signalling compounds.  Aptamers are short strands of DNA that bind to specific chemicals, much the way antibodies do. After training them to recognise the five compounds, the aptamers were used as scaffolding around a tiny parcel of fertiliser. In the presence of one of the plant signalling compounds, the aptamers would bind to it, rupturing the scaffolding and releasing its contents.  The results are  fertiliser-filled capsules that open up in response to the appetite wheat and canola have for nitrogen. The technique is undergoing  greenhouse trials.

An alternative approach is to replace synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides with the soil’s own microbiome to maintain their fertility. The idea is to use a “universal recipe” of beneficial bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi and humus that adheres to plant roots and helps them extract nutrients. The mixture causes desert-like test plots to sprout oats and leguminous plants called vetches. The few plants that grow in the control plots, dosed with traditional pesticides and fertilisers, are small and stunted; those treated with the cocktail are not just healthy at the surface, but their roots grow strong and long enough to pierce dirt as hard as rock.

Meanwhile,  UN Global Soil Map project is creating a real-time, highly detailed, digital repository of the condition of soils worldwide: its clay, silt and organic carbon levels, together with acidity and overall density. By 2019, researchers aim to have mapped soils worldwide down to 100 metres. with the results accessible to all.

The problem is to get the attention of governments and the public to the threat.  For soils on the brink, it may already be too late. Several researchers are agitating for the creation of protected zones for endangered soils, although there has been little official movement on the issue so far. One problem is defining what these areas should conserve: areas where the greatest soil diversity is present? Or areas of pristine soils that could act as a future benchmark of quality? ( adapted from an article by Joshua Howgego, New Scientist, October 2015)

Oh, dear! Immortality?

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Even in death, there’s no break from social media. Almost a third of British people plan to name a “social media manager” in their will.  This manager will be responsible for updating their Facebook accounts in accordance with their instructions. More than 10% of people would want a custodian to post items at least once a week. There’s little appetite for vanishing from social media: only a third of people want their accounts to be deleted when they die.

This is nonsense.  What you ought to do is to leave the project to a relative or trusted friend to make of it what they will, if appropriate.  Sell it, if it is commercially orientated, or have it quietly laid to rest (can you actually terminate these Facebook pages, and what is the procedure?).   But have someone operating it in your memory is simply egotistical, if not spooky.  There is too much preening and none-too- subtle boasting, not to mention the misinformation out there.  What we want are more thoughtful offerings on social media, not voices from the grave!

Depleting the soil (Part 1)

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We are losing soil at a rate of 30 soccer fields a minute. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Soil grows 95 per cent of our food and sustains human life in other more surprising ways, so this is a huge problem. “Many would argue soil degradation is the most critical environmental threat to humans,” says Peter Groffman, who studies soil microbes at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

Soils don’t just grow our food, but have been the source of nearly all of our existing antibiotics, and could be our best hope in the fight against antibiotic resistant bacteria. A single gram might contain 100 million bacteria, 10 million viruses, 1000 fungi, and other populations living amid decomposing plants and various rocks and minerals.

Soil is also a surprising ally against climate change: as nematodes and microorganisms within soil digest dead animals and plants, they lock in their carbon content. Even in their degraded state, it is estimated the world’s soils hold three times the amount of carbon as does the entire atmosphere.  Water is also lost when soils degrade. A UK government report published in 2012 suggested soil degradation costs the country £233 million in flood damage each year.

Small wonder endangered soil is making ecologists so nervous. Soil extinction transforms a fecund soil into a dusty, micro-biologically flat shadow of its former self. Once that diversity is gone, it’s gone for a long time. Soil takes thousands of years at a minimum to be productive. Worn out soil tends to form a dense, compacted layer that repels both roots and water. Farmers try to get rid of it.  “Everything we do causes soil to erode,” says Groffman.  In the past farmers left fields fallow or rotated crops that needed different nutrients. Or they grew peas or beans that added nitrogen to the soil via the nodules in their roots that host rhizobia bacteria .  This kept the soil in balance.  But so industrial has farming become, and so mono-cultural, that these good practices have been abandoned .  Instead they cover the ground with ammonium nitrate.   But chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the next rain. This leaches nitrogen into rivers, damaging algal blooms. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate fertiliser use hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty, and suppressing the symbiotic relationships between fungi and plant roots, sometimes turning beneficial bacteria against each other.

As the soil degrades the modern farmer simply adds more fertiliser.  Long-term use of these fertilisers risks turning even fertile soil to desert. In 2003 for instance, researchers found that almost 5% of US soils were in danger of  serious damage or extinction, although this may well be an underestimate. A different group scoured soil survey results in China, and found 17 types had gone extinct, and a further 88 were endangered.  (extracted from an article by Joshua Howgego, New Scientist)

Tomorrow: what is being done about it.

 

Voice recognition- friend or foe?

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Your voice is distinctive , depending on your physical makeup and the language you speak.  The latest machines can tease apart the most minute differences, although changes in a voice owing to a cold or a stressful situation can confuse the listening machine.

The  latest version of Apple’s operating system learns what your voice sounds like and can identify you when you speak to Siri, ignoring other voices that try to intervene.   Voice-identification systems have started to creep into everyday life, from smartphones to police stations to bank call centres. Google has recently unveiled an artificial neural network that can verify the identity of a speaker saying “OK Google” with an error rate of 2 per cent.

For machines, recognising individual voices is different from understanding what they are saying. The recognition software has been fuelled by massive sets of vocal data built into a huge model of how people speak. This allows measurements of how much a person’s voice deviates from that of the overall population, which is the key to verifying a person’s identity.

I have reservations about some tech innovations, but this seems to be a good one. The technology is already being used in criminal investigations. Last year, when journalist James Foley was beheaded, apparently by ISIS, police used it to compare the killer’s voice with that of a list of possible suspects. And the banks JP Morgan and Wells Fargo have reported started using voice biometrics to figure out whether people calling their helplines are scam artists.   A voiceprint gives insight into the speaker’s height and weight, their demographic background, and even what their environment is like. It may soon be possible to detect a person’s likely diseases or psychological state through voice analysis. (Aviva Rutkin, New Scientist, Oct 2015)

Where one can draw the line is if these machines can understand (and report on?) what you are saying, which an altogether different proposition.  Samsung designed their smart TVs to record private conversations.  Now why should they do that?  This looks like another weapon to be potentially used by secret services, foreign hackers  and crooks.

Confirming the fear about anti-depressants

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Earlier in the year a review confirmed a link between antidepressants and suicidal behaviour in children. The researchers looked at 70 studies involving more than 18,500 people, and found that under-18s taking either of two classes of drugs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) – were more than twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts, or attempt suicide, than those taking a placebo. The report stressed that the overall suicide risk was still low, at three in 100 people, but suggested that where possible, under-18s should be offered non-drug treatments such as psychotherapy.

This doesn’t just apply to young people. Some years ago I was put on Paxil, an anti-depressant and SSRI, to help me sleep. A week later I found myself becoming totally irrational and feeling suicidal.  How can they sell drugs for depression that enhance depression? Among other things Paxil has been associated with autism, birth defects and weight gain of up to ten pounds (I put on weight as well, an extra indignity). Paxil is still on the market, and so are other drugs that should be carefully controlled, such as  painkillers oxycodone, hydrocodone, and fentanyl, the most commonly abused drugs, addictive, with horrible  side effects and responsible for an alarming rise in suicides and unintended deaths.

The old pharmaceutical businesses were started by Quakers on Quaker principles. Those were the days of working to improve the health of the community, not simply to make big profits. Now American TV is full of ads for drugs showing beautiful, happy people enjoying full, smiley lives. But  listen to  the side-effects of some of the drugs they are made by law to mention in the ads!  Scary. How did the pharmacuetical industry get to advertise on TV anyway? (silly question- we all know the answer). I used to work for a pharmaceutical company in the days when their products were called “ethical pharmaceuticals”. At some point big pharma must have had  a short burst of moral  self-revelation and dropped the claim.

Too much choice

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Most of us are not, in the parlance of economic theory, “rational utility maximisers”  but, in the words of Herbert Simon, are  “satisficers”,  opting for what is good and easy enough, rather than becoming confused to the point of inertia in front of huge choices of goods in the shops.

Tesco, the very large British grocery chain (in financial trouble through over-expansion – sounds like the EU) decided to improve its situation by scrapping 30,000 of the 90,000 products on its shelves. Smaller grocery chains, like Aldi and Lidl, only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines and are doing just fine.  For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchup,s while in Aldi there is just one in one size.  I can hear huge sighs of relief!

In addition, Tesco is experimenting with a system that makes it easier and quicker to shop for the ingredients for meals:  Basmati rice next to Indian sauces, tinned tomatoes next to pasta.

The standard teaching is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose.

The reality is that less choice means less stress.  It has also created a new problem: the escalation in expectations to a point that we all expect perfect products that we will never get, leaving the buyer disappointed .  As they say:  “The secret to happiness is low expectations.”  In 2002 I wrote the following poem about choice, long before the business schools started to advocate smaller product ranges:

Choice
They think we’ll rejoice, offered infinite choice,
But in fact more is less; indecision means stress.
How did they ever think it was clever
To propose the adoption of every damned option
Under the sun, instead of just one?

Just take the car, where they’ve gone far too far.
Do I have to recap the ten types of hubcap
The number of doors, colored carpets on floors,
The bumpers, the hoods, powered windows, faux-woods?
One mentally cowers in the face of horse-powers,
Different colors and trims and personalized shims,
When on the highways the cars look alike.
Henry Ford, hurry back and offer just black!

Take the cereals on offer: a hundred they proffer,
And do so in aisles stretching out there for miles.
Vitamins added; beware the array
Or you’ll quickly be glutted in C, D and A.
If you read all the labels, ingredient tables,
I very much fear it would be a career.

Hi-tech sort of gear is a category where
They include lots of stuff that you don’t use enough,
Or remember it’s there, or particularly care.
The shops you buy through mostly haven’t a clue;
The instructions are vast, and a whole day has passed
Before you work out what the feature’s about.
And I’ll have a good bet that at once you’ll forget
What buttons to press, and you’ll just have to guess.

Oh, take me back home where the buffaloes roam,
Where you rock in your chair in fresh air with no care,
Where in the boondocks the shops have small stocks,
And you’re settled and done with a “choice” of just one;
And you buy your provisions with no endless decisions,
Just a simple invoice and no multiple choice.

So who’s going to tell the people who sell
That we’re doing just fine without over-design?
Who’s going to complain: “Keep it simple and plain”.
Let it do just one task, that’s all that we ask.”
I have just made a start: “Give us less a la carte!”
Come, you too can rejoice with more time and less choice.

(Aug 2002)


The know-nothing on his way to power

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A massive rise in sea level is coming, and it will trigger climate chaos around the world. That was the message from a controversial recent paper by climate scientist James Hansen. It was slated by many for assuming – rather than showing – that sea level could rise by between 1 and 5 metres by 2100.  But shortly after being formally published, it was backed up by another study concerning massive fresh water discharge to the ocean that includes factors that previous studies omitted. First, floating ice shelves around Antarctica will soon be exposed to above-zero summer air temperatures, speeding their melt, he says. Second, once the shelves are gone, the huge ice cliffs that remain will begin to collapse (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature17145).

The findings suggest that even if countries meet the pledges made as part of the Paris agreement, global sea level could still rise 1 metre by 2100. If emissions keep climbing it could go up more than 2 metres.  Today we’re measuring global sea level rise in millimetres per year, but there is the potential for centimetres per year just from Antarctica. (New Scientist).

We now have a climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, who, if confirmed will become head of the EPA , and a President who can’t make up his mind – also a denier until his children took him aside.

When I was last in the Florida Keys the unusual proximity of the moon had helped the tide wash away tons of sand and the water was close to lapping over the wooden jetty off the beach. This was only a periodic effect, but scary.  A metre rise in sea levels will put much of Southern Florida under water. Apparently, Pruitt thinks that two centuries- worth of burning fossil fuels has had no effect and that the CO2  magically migrates to the moon.  He probably also believes in fairies.

The right to die

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The Dutch government is intending to legalise assisted suicide for people who are not terminally ill but who simply feel that their life is “complete” and wish to end it. The Netherlands was the first country to legalise euthanasia, in 2002, but the law only applied to terminally ill patients who were judged to be suffering unbearable pain. The practice has had widespread backing in Dutch society, and the number of assisted suicides has risen sharply each year: in 2015, they accounted for 5,516 deaths, 3.9% of the national total. The new law will permit assisted suicide for “elderly” people (the age threshold has not yet been specified) who “have a well-considered opinion that their life is complete” and who wish to die in a manner that is “dignified for them”. Opponents say the proposal would lead the country down a perilous ethical path, and it faces several legislative hurdles before it can become law.

I myself sometimes fantasize that at an appropriate moment I will end my life, along with my wife.  I cannot leave her behind.  We will leave impeccable Wills, along with instructions about what happens afterwards, and even a written form of funeral service so that no one has to ask what hymns we liked. I will simply specify that the audience has to sit through all the recorded music, piano, vocal and chamber, of the Hanrotts.  At least we will be original. Thus we will have lived, having bothered nobody, and in death never parted.  I bet the law will not permit it; religion will intervene. But I state it because it is how it should be.

No wonder people distrust some scientists

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If you want to head off regulation arising from evidence that links your product to ill health, muddy the waters by creating the impression of a controversy where none exists.  A US study highlights this approach, suggesting the “manufacture of scientific controversy” casting doubt on the connection between sugary drinks, obesity and diabetes. Of 60 studies analysed, all 26 that failed to find a relationship had links to the sugary drinks industry. (Annals of Internal Medicine, doi.org/10/bsm8).

This comes after a September paper in JAMA claimed that the sugar industry “sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt on  the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in coronary heart disease”.  Earlier studies confirm the influence of industry funding on science in relation to sugary drinks and nutrition research.

It’s not just the sugar industry. There is an emerging and wide-ranging literature on the extent to which science is biased by industry funding in general – including in randomised controlled trials.  In the corporate world, managing science is simply a part of wider strategies to influence government policies to protect profits. Manufacturing scientific controversy is, in other words, part of lobbying by the alcohol, tobacco and sugar industries. This includes establishing or funding seemingly independent “scientific” bodies to manage the way in which their products are regulated or debated.

To avoid the manipulation of science and the manufacture of uncertainty over the need for public health action, we need better, more effective independent regulatory bodies with budgets sufficient to monitor and enforce ethical norms and transparency.  (Based on an article by David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Bath, UK, co-founder of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and author of “Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours”.  New Scientist  ow.ly/Hs60305QI6Y )

For countless centuries sugar in any form was unknown to most of the world’s population.   Once we  had it planted and harvested by slaves and mass produced  (thank you, Tate & Lyle) , the population became increasingly addicted to sugary drinks, cakes, biscuits etc until even soup now has sugar in it.  This wouldn’t matter except that sugar is scientifically and conclusively connected with obesity and diabetes, the biggest growing disease in the world, although fast food is also a co-culprit.  This cannot be dismissed as a matter of personal choice. Some people are genetically prone to be fat. But for a majority it is largely an unnecessary disease, prevented by good diet and exercise. It affects the health services and their funding all over the world, costing huge, unnecessary sums (beds, wheelchairs, aircraft seats, ambulances etc etc have to be adapted for huge weights never planned for originally).  It can  lead to the severing of limbs, a lifetime of self-injection , and early death.   We, the taxpayers should not have to pay extra for a cash-strapped health service in order to assist the sugar (or fast food) industries.  We should fight back against bogus surveys paid by industry.  They are contributing to the lack of faith in science generally, a disaster for our society.    We must be able to trust our researchers and scientists.

I am only allowed one small square of chocolate a day. Sigh!

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But there is good news for chocaholics like me.  Nestlé claims to have found a way of reducing the sugar content of its chocolate by as much as 40% – without relying on artificial sweeteners. The manufacturer says that it has found a way of making “hollow” sugar particles that dissolve faster, and taste as sweet as ordinary sugar.

This is cheering after the almost endless stream of alarming and distressing news we are having to ingest. I would like to give up moderation and all the civilised virtues of Epicureanism and retire to bed and eat Nestlé chocolate for the rest of my life.  We have to have something to live for.

Deeply depressing

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26% of Britons believe it can be acceptable to torture enemy combatants in order to extract information; 50% do not. 46% of Americans think torture in such cases can be acceptable; 30% oppose it. It is also condoned by 50% of Israelis, and 70% of Nigerians.   (ICRC/The Guardian)

Torture is barbaric, usually ineffective, produces an endless stream of misleading lies and half-truths, and undermines or destroys  the morale of those made to carry it out.  That is, unless it is conducted by sadistic thugs who get a thrill out of it; in which case it is even more unacceptable, if possible.

No, torture is un-Epicurean. The people taking part in the surveys were not thinking clearly.