Primary education

In praise of facts

“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” How horrible for the pupils at Professor Gradgrind’s school; Charles Dickens pulled out all the grim stops in describing it. No one today really thinks that school, especially in the early years, should consist of nothing but dreary rote learning.
But children do love learning real things—why trees have leaves, how two minuses make a plus, the number of wives’ heads Henry VIII removed. Only if they begin to build up a core of knowledge can they develop the habits of mental discipline that must last them a lifetime. You cannot look up on Google something you do not know exists; and the ability to hold facts in your head is a prerequisite for many careers—the law, say, or engineering. It is not enough in primary school to learn about learning; children need to learn actual stuff.

So it is a particular disappointment that the interim version of the biggest review of British primary schooling in decades nudges the country a little further down its path toward factfree education (see article). The existing curriculum is not without its faults: repeatedly re-engineered since it was set in place 20 years ago, it is now cluttered and prescriptive. And Sir Jim Rose, once Britain’s chief inspector of primary schools, was dealt some marked cards for his review: computer skills had to be ranked alongside literacy and numeracy (though employers complain not that young job-seekers are clueless online but that they are illiterate); room had to be made to teach a modern foreign language (thank heavens); and a gaggle of personal-development goals (learning not to set fire to your friends or trash the classroom) were to be emphasised.
The report suggests that everything be mashed into six “learning areas”. The titles alone appal. History will be part of “human, social and environmental understanding”, where it will compete for airtime with geography and, no doubt, global warming (is it any wonder that Gordon Brown has to scrabble about for a recognisable definition of national identity?). Britain’s increasingly fat children will presumably cut back what limited running around the playground they do now and sit, rapt, through lessons in “understanding physical health and well-being” (rumoured to include “happiness” lessons too).
Sad but true
Sir Jim is no fool, and he talks the talk better than most. There is to be “challenging” subject teaching as well as “equally challenging” cross-curricular study, the report insists; nothing will be lost. This is disingenuous. Maths looks safe; and reading and writing reasonably so (although English has to share its “understanding” area with other languages). But other hard, fact-filled subjects—history, geography and so on—will be compressed to make room for the sloppy, politically correct mush.
So, children, here are some crunchy facts. Spending on education has more than doubled in a decade, but standards have stalled as New Labour has conspired with its friends in the teachers’ unions to dumb down exams and meet performance targets. One in five pupils still leaves primary school unable to read and write effectively. Britain is sliding down the world’s literacy league tables (it does better at maths, which thankfully remains ringfenced). You cannot teach children everything. But that is no excuse for teaching them nothing much at all.

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Sleep

Restless

A strang case raises the
question of what sleep is for

THE function of sleep, according to one school of thought, is to consolidate memory. Yet two Italians have no problems with their memory even though they never sleep. The woman and man, both in their 50s, are in the early stages of a neurodegenerative disease called multiple system atrophy. Their cases raise questions about the purpose of sleep.
Healthy people rotate between three states of vigilance: wakefulness, rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. But all three are mixed together in the Italian patients. The pair were initially diagnosed by Roberto Vetrugno of the University of Bologna and his colleagues as suffering from REM behavioural disorder, in which the paralysis, or cataplexy, that normally prevents sleeping people from acting out their dreams is lost. This can cause people in REM sleep to twitch and groan, sometimes flailing about and injuring their bedmates. These patients, however, soon progressed from this state to an even odder one, according to a report in Sleep Medicine.
One of the principal ways to measure sleep is to monitor brainwave activity, which can be done by placing electrodes on the scalp in a technique known as electroencephalography (EEG). Non-REM sleep itself is divided into four stages defined purely by EEG patterns; the first two are collectively described as light sleep and the last two as deep or slow-wave sleep. When the Italian patients appeared to be asleep, their EEGs suggested that their brains were either simultaneously awake, in REM sleep and non-REM sleep, or switching rapidly between the three. Yet when subjected to a battery of neuropsychological tests, they showed no intellectual decline.

Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota Medical School, whose group first described REM behavioural disorder in 1986, thinks memory consolidation is still going on in the brains of the two Italian patients; hence their lack of cognitive impairment or dementia. What needs to be revised in light of their cases, he says, is the definition of sleep.
Dr Mahowald suspects that sleep can occur in the absence of the markers that currently define it, which means those markers are insufficient. What’s more, the Italian cases lend support to an idea that has been gathering steam in recent years: that wakefulness and sleep are not mutually exclusive. In other words, the human brain can be awake and asleep at the same time.
That evidence takes the form of a growing list of conditions in which wakefulness, REM and non-REM sleep appear to be mixed. An example is narcolepsy, in which emotionally laden events trigger sudden cataplexy. When the dreaming element of REM intrudes into wakefulness, which can happen with sleep-deprivation, the result is wakeful dreaming or hallucinations. Since such dreams can be highly compelling, Dr Mahowald thinks they might account for some reports of alien abduction.
But there is another possible explanation of the Italian puzzle: that sleep is not necessary for memory after all. Jerry Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles, has studied the sleep habits of many animals and thinks that could well be the explanation. All of which gives researchers something new to keep them awake at night.

Fishing and Conservation

A Rising Tide

Scientist find proof that
privatising fishing stocks can avert a disaster

FOR three years, from an office overlooking the Atlantic in Nova Scotia, Boris Worm, a marine scientist, studied what could prevent a fishery from collapsing. By 2006 Dr Worm and his team had worked out that although biodiversity might slow down an erosion of fish stocks, it could not prevent it. Their gloomy prediction was that by 2048 all the world’s commercial fisheries would have collapsed.
Now two economists and a marine biologist have looked at an idea that might prevent such a catastrophe. This is the privatisation of commercial fisheries through what are known as catch shares or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs).

Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines (the biologist) of the University of California and John Lynham of the University of Hawaii assembled a database of the world’s commercial fisheries, their catches and whether or not they were managed with ITQs. As these fisheries were not chosen at random and without having any experimental control, they borrowed techniques from medical literature—known as propensity-score matching and fixed-effects estimation—to support their analysis. The first method compared fisheries that are similar in all respects other than the use of ITQs; the second averaged the impact of ITQs over many fisheries and examined what happened after the quotas were introduced. Whichever way they analysed the data, they found that ITQs halted the collapse of fisheries (and according to one analysis even reversed the trend). The overall finding was that fisheries that were managed with ITQs were half as likely to collapse as those that were not.
For years economists and green groups such as Environmental Defense, in Washington, DC, have argued in favour of ITQs. Until now, individual fisheries have provided only anecdotal evidence of the system’s worth. But by lumping all of them together the new study, published this week in Science, is a powerful demonstration that it really works. It also helps to undermine the argument that ITQ fisheries do better only because they are more valuable in terms of their fish stocks to begin with, says Dr Worm. The new data show that before their conversion, fisheries with ITQs were on exactly the same path to oblivion as those without.
Racing to fish
Encouraging as the results are, ITQ fisheries are in the minority. Most fisheries have an annual quota of what can be caught and other restrictions, such as the length of the season or the type of nets. But this can result in a “race to fish” the quota. Fishermen have an incentive to work harder and travel farther, which can lead to overfishing: a classic tragedy of the commons.
The use of ITQs changes this by dividing the quota up and giving shares to fishermen as a long-term right. Fishermen therefore have an interest in good management and conservation because both increase the value of their fishery and of their share in it. And because shares can be traded, fishermen who want to catch more can buy additional rights rather than resorting to brutal fishing tactics.
The Alaskan halibut and king crab fisheries illustrate how ITQs can change behaviour. Fishing in these waters had turned into a race so intense that the season had shrunk to just two to three frantic days. Overfishing was common. And when the catch was landed, prices plummeted because the market was flooded. Serious injury and death became so frequent in the king crab fishery that it turned into one of America’s most dangerous professions (and spawned its own television series, “The Deadliest Catch”).
After a decade of using ITQs in the halibut fishery, the average fishing season now lasts for eight months. The number of search-and-rescue missions that are launched is down by more than 70% and deaths by 15%. And fish can be sold at the most lucrative time of year—and fresh, so that they fetch a better price.
In a report on this fishery, Dan Flavey, a fisherman himself, says some of his colleagues have even pushed for the quota to be reduced by 40%. “Most fishermen will now support cuts in quota because they feel guaranteed that in the future, when the stocks recover, they would be the ones to benefit,” he says.
Although governing authorities are important in setting up ITQs, so is policing of the system by the fishermen themselves. In the Atlantic lobster fishery a property-based system has arisen spontaneously, says Dr Worm. Families claim ownership over parcels of sea and keep others out. Anyone trying to muscle in on the action risks being threatened; their gear may be cut loose or their boat could vanish.
Jeremy Prince, a fisheries scientist at Murdoch University in Australia, has been involved in ITQs since they were pioneered in the early 1980s by Australia, New Zealand and Iceland. In Australia they are only one way of managing with property rights, he says. Depending on the nature of a fishery, other methods may work better. These might divide up and sell lobster pots, numbers of fish, numbers of boats, bits of the ocean or even individual reefs. The best choice will depend on the value and underlying biology of each fishery, and in some places they may not work at all. In a fishery with a large, unproductive stock that grows slowly, fishermen may prefer short-term profit to the promise of low long-term income and catch all the fish straight away. Nevertheless, Dr Prince believes that, overall, market-based mechanisms are the way forward.
The most difficult place to introduce market-based conservation methods is in international waters. Attempts to do so have ended in failure. One problem is that there is simply too much cheating in the open ocean. Some scientists think a renegotiation of the law of the sea through the United Nations is the only way forward—or a complete ban on fishing in international waters. Although a dramatic course of action, the effects may not be so huge. Dr Worm reckons that 90% of the world’s fish are caught in national waters.
So, if Dr Costello and his colleagues are right and the profit motive can drive the sustainability of fisheries, why do the world’s 10,000-plus fisheries contain only 121 ITQs? Allocating catch shares is a difficult and often fraught process. In America it can take from five to 15 years, says Joe Sullivan, a partner in Mundt MacGregor, a law firm based in Seattle. The public, he says, sometimes resists the privatisation of a public resource and if government gets too involved in the details of the privatisation (rather than leaving it to the fishermen to work out), it can end up politically messy. But evidence that ITQs work is a powerful new hook to capture the political will and public attention needed to spread an idea that could avert an ecological disaster.

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Global Warming

A Changing Climate of Opinion

Some scientist think climate
change needs a more radical approach. As well as trying to curb greenhouse-gas
emision,they have plans to re-engineer the Earth.

THERE is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. The Venusian atmosphere is too thick. It creates a large greenhouse effect and cooks a planet that is, in any case, closer to the sun than the Earth is to even higher temperatures than it would otherwise experience. Mars suffers from the opposite fault. A planet more distant from the sun than Earth is also has an atmosphere too thin to trap what little of the sun’s heat is available. So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.
It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future. Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.

Tinkering with the atmosphere or the oceans on the scale required to do this would be highly risky and extraordinarily complex. But the alternative, getting the world’s population to give up fossil fuels, is proving exceedingly hard. Geo-engineering, as it has come to be known, may be a way of buying time for the transition to a low-carbon economy to take place in an orderly manner.
In the past, geo-engineering was taboo because many felt that the very possibility of fiddling with the climate would create an excuse to avoid the hard choices a low-carbon economy would impose. However, the feeling is now growing that if politicians came to scientists for advice on the matter, it would be a good idea for them to have some to offer. To that end, the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options, and suggesting a few experiments to test whether they would work.
Transactional analysis
Broadly, these ideas fall into two categories. One is to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The other is to compensate for the climate-warming greenhouse effect this carbon dioxide and other gases cause, by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the ground.
The most plausible way to remove carbon dioxide is to increase the amount of photosynthesis going on. Photosynthesis creates plant matter out of carbon dioxide and water. But rotting plant matter returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, if the gas is to be removed permanently, that rotting has to be avoided.
One widely discussed idea, which the Royal Society’s correspondents re-examine, is to fertilise the oceans with iron. The growth of plankton in the sea is always limited by something. It may be light, or a familiar nutrient such as nitrate or phosphate. In some places, though, iron is the limiting nutrient. Adding iron to such places should cause a bloom of planktonic algae, thus sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Several preliminary experiments have shown that plankton do, indeed, bloom when iron is added. What is not clear is what happens to the carbon. For the idea to work, some of it would have to sink to the ocean floor and stay there.
One reason to think this might happen is that during recent ice ages the cold, dry conditions caused a lot of iron-rich dust to blow around. Supporters of the iron-fertilisation theory believe this dust produced blooms of oceanic algae that then sank to the seabed, taking large amounts of carbon with them, which helped to reduce temperatures still further.
Victor Smetacek, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and Wajih Naqvi, of India’s National Institute of Oceanography, therefore propose conducting experiments that look not only at how much carbon dioxide is sucked up, but also at what happens to it. In particular, they are interested in the fate of diatoms. These are single-celled algae which seem to absorb almost all of the extra carbon dioxide captured when the ocean is fertilised with iron. The crucial question is what happens to these diatoms when they die. If enough of them sink to the ocean floor and stay buried there, the idea should work. If they do not, it won’t. By reviewing studies of the ooze at the bottom of the sea (which is often made of the shells of diatoms) Dr Smetacek and Dr Naqvi reckon the best rate of burial is to be found in the south-west Atlantic, and they propose to carry out an experiment there next year.
The advantage of fertilising the oceans is that it could be done with existing technology. The disadvantage is the unknown knock-on effects. Planktonic algae are at the bottom of the food chain. If more of them are around, the rest of that chain will be affected. This could be a good thing, of course. More algae might mean more krill, and that might mean more whales and other large sea animals. On the other hand, shallow-water blooms caused by nitrate and phosphate pollution often swamp the local environment.
A second idea for scrubbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, alluded to in the Transactions but not much discussed, is to plant more trees. In principle, any old trees would do—although they die and rot, more forest cover would lock up more carbon dioxide. However, genetically modified trees might grow faster. Such trees are being developed to help the lumber, pulp and biofuel industries. But fast-growing forests could also be planted in order to capture carbon dioxide quickly.
Another possibility that the Royal Society’s writers consider is recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into fuel, by reacting it with hydrogen. Of course, that would require a supply of hydrogen, and producing hydrogen takes energy—which would have to be generated in a way that produces no carbon dioxide.
Perhaps the most intriguing idea—which was published last year, though not discussed by the Royal Society—is to eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the Earth’s poles, using the planet’s magnetic field. This may sound absurd, but oxygen already leaks out this way (the phenomenon is the subject of a paper just published by Hans Nilsson of Swedish Institute of Space Physics). Alfred Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, proposes that a system involving powerful lasers and finely tuned radio waves could encourage carbon dioxide to take the same route. His calculations suggested that using lasers to ionise molecules of carbon dioxide, and radio waves to get them to spin at the correct rate, would cause those molecules to spiral away from Earth along the lines of magnetic force until they were lost for ever in space.
Reflecting on the future
Space is likewise the destination in the other set of approaches. Reflecting sunlight back into outer space (increasing the Earth’s albedo, as it is known) would also cool the planet, and the Royal Society’s authors consider two ways of doing so.
One, which has been widely touted in the past is, perversely, to increase the amount of pollution in the atmosphere. Governments have spent the past half-century trying to reduce the amount of sulphur compounds in the air. These compounds are the main cause of acid rain. They also, however, have a tendency to form tiny particles that reflect sunlight back into space. That effect is most noticeable when a volcano erupts explosively, as Mount Pinatubo did in 1991, or Tambora did in 1815. Those eruptions put sulphate particles into the stratosphere, and because that is above the part of the atmosphere where weather occurs, these particles tended to stay there rather than being washed out by rain. That cooled the whole climate. The year after Tambora’s explosion was known for a long time as the “year without a summer”.
The reverse is also true. When civilian flights over the United States stopped in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the lack of sulphur-laden contrails led to a perceptible rise in temperature. Philip Rasch, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues are therefore exploring the idea of deliberately polluting the stratosphere with sulphate in order to reflect solar heat back into space.
To offset the rise in temperature expected by the middle of the century if things carry on as they are, the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface would have to be cut by just 1.1%. That is still a lot of energy in absolute terms, but the sums suggest it is within reach. It would require the addition of about 10m tonnes of finely divided sulphate particles to the stratosphere each year. These could be sprayed out of special aircraft-borne injectors, or produced by burning high-sulphur aviation fuel.
If aviation fuel were used in this way, and was 5% sulphur (between ten and 100 times today’s levels), it would require 1m flights a year to the middle of the stratosphere (between 15km and 25km up), assuming an average flight was four hours. Those flights alone would use up half as much fuel as civil aviation now consumes. However, you could achieve part of the effect by making civil aviation use dirty, high-sulphur fuel. It would not be a perfect solution. Civilian jets cruise at an altitude of 10km, the bottom of the stratosphere, and any sulphate they released would thus fall to earth faster. But it would be a lot cheaper than flying 1m special missions.
Besides polluting the stratosphere, there is another way of changing the atmosphere to make it more reflective. This is to tinker with cloud cover. One person working on this idea is Stephen Salter, a marine engineer at the University of Edinburgh best known for seeking to replace fossil fuels with Salter’s duck, a device for turning ocean waves into electricity. He has also been working on the geo-engineering end of climate change.
Dr Salter and his colleague at Edinburgh, Graham Sortino, together with John Latham, one of Dr Rasch’s colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, have been looking into how clouds might be made more reflective. Their answer is to spray them with seawater. Particles of salt formed by the evaporation of ocean spray act as nuclei around which the droplets of water that form clouds can condense. Increasing the number of particles increases the number of droplets. That does not change the total amount of cloud (which is controlled by the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere). But having more, smaller droplets does increase a cloud’s reflectivity.
A drop in the ocean
Dr Latham led a team of climate modellers who wondered whether, in principle, this phenomenon might be used to increase the planet’s albedo enough to compensate for projected global warming. Their answer was that it could, but it would require 1.4 billion tonnes of seawater to be converted into spray each year.
Dr Salter and Dr Sortino then joined Dr Latham in trying to work out how to manage this. Their answer is a fleet of specially designed ships. These would be wind-powered—not by sails but by Flettner rotors, which are giant, rotating cylinders that extract energy from the wind using the Magnus effect. (This is the effect that causes cricket balls to swing in the air, among other things.) The ships would drag turbines through the sea to provide electricity that would both drive the cylinders and power pumps that sprayed the atmosphere with seawater, suitably broken up into droplets.
Such ships would weigh 300 tonnes. A fully operational system would require 1,500 of them. And it would have the advantage of an almost instant off switch. Stop spraying, and things would revert to normal within a couple of days.
Cui bono?
That reversibility is important. Many scientists are understandably nervous about tinkering on a grand scale with the atmosphere and the oceans. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a scientific body appointed by the United Nations to assess the risks of a changing climate—has described geo-engineering as “largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side-effects”.
Broadly, there are two types of fears. The first is of technological hubris. History is littered with plans that went awry because too little was known about complex natural systems. As with irrigating Soviet cotton fields from the Aral Sea in Central Asia or introducing rabbits to Australia, modifying the climate will have both physical and biological consequences. Some of these will be unpredictable and some of them may be worse than the harm they were intended to treat. Critics point out, for instance, that carbon dioxide does not just warm the atmosphere. It also makes the oceans more acidic. That is bad because many marine creatures rely on shells made of calcium carbonate to protect themselves. As every schoolboy knows, if you drop calcium carbonate (limestone, for example) into acid, it dissolves. The sea would not become so acidic that shells would actually dissolve, but the extra acidity would mean making them was harder work, which might upset the oceanic ecosystem quite badly. For this reason, approaches to geo-engineering that merely reflect heat back into space need to be viewed cautiously.
The other fear is of moral hazard—the possibility that people would see the promise of geo-engineering their way out of trouble, despite its risks and uncertainties, as an excuse to continue to pollute the atmosphere as usual.
It would be a mistake to think of geo-engineering as a substitute for curbing carbon-dioxide emissions—not merely because of the acidification of the oceans, but also because if you ever stop fertilising the oceans or spraying the atmosphere or whatever, the problem will rapidly return. Nevertheless, Brian Launder of the University of Manchester, who edited the Royal Society papers, argues that the sort of geo-engineering schemes they describe might buy the world 20 to 30 years to adjust. That breathing space would be useful if something really bad, such as the collapse into the sea of part of the Greenland ice-shelf, was in imminent danger of happening, and the realisation of the danger led to a political agreement that climate change had to be stopped rapidly.
So what now? The answer is probably to carry out preliminary trials of the sort proposed by Dr Smetacek and Dr Naqvi. Correctly done, they should help to indicate what could work, what would not, and what the financial and environmental costs might be.
Local schemes, particularly ocean fertilisation, need not be that expensive. They would be well within the budget of a small country, a large company or even a tycoon. Richard Branson, a British businessman, is already offering a prize of $25m for a workable way of removing a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. And at least one private firm has come in for criticism for attempting to sell carbon credits based on ocean fertilisation. And yet, the effects of geo-engineering would rarely be restricted to a single country—that is, after all, the whole point.
For this reason, if geo-engineering is to be done properly, it must be regulated properly. The world needs a way of deciding the size and scope of any project, who takes responsibility for any mistakes, and whether and how to compensate losers—of whom there will be many. Schemes designed to cool the climate could harm countries such as Canada and Russia. Global warming may make their northern wastes more habitable and allow them to exploit oil and gas located under what is now an ice-covered Arctic Ocean. Meanwhile a country such as Panama would prefer a cooler world in which ice continues to seal off the North-West Passage and to prevent competition with its canal.
Some tinkering to suit local needs may be possible. Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, another of the authors, reckons that it may be feasible to place sulphates in the stratosphere near the poles and thus cool the Earth in a place where global warming manifests itself most strongly, though that would scarcely please the Russians and the Canadians. Nor does it answer the question of how to decide whose interests such tinkering should serve.
Even its advocates think geo-engineering is not to be approached lightly. Nor, though, is it something to be ignored completely. Global warming is such a threat that all the options deserve to be explored. It would be a big experiment, but it would at least be a planned one—unlike the equally big, but unplanned experiment that is now being conducted by motor cars, power stations, cement factories and logging companies all across the planet