Editor's pick: Empathy versus compassion
Thank you for the interesting article about empathy, and the mention of training caring professionals in compassion techniques (14 May, p 33). It did seem, though, to miss out two important considerations.
The first is the effect on patients. If a sick person looks for empathy and instead receives compassion, does it have the same effect on their health? The question needs careful scientific examination.
Received wisdom is that people who have support from family and friends recover more quickly than those who do not and, on the whole, such support is likely to be based on empathy – that is, on a feeling of individual connection or attachment – rather than a generalised compassion. This could be wrong, but it needs to be checked before advocating replacing empathy with compassion.
Secondly, you describe the symptoms carers can feel when their capacity for empathy is exhausted. Conversely, it is a common complaint that many jobs offer no opportunity to express empathy. In my experience with charities, volunteers commonly say that though they know intellectually their main job produces benefits for other people, they miss the face-to-face emotional contact that would makes these seem tangible.
Sleep interrupted by age and youth
As mum to three children born within five years of each other, I always marvel at research on sleep patterns (28 May, p 31). I wonder how the test subjects were selected. Newborn babies like to wake up every 2 hours to be fed. Once they have settled into a routine a parent's sleep pattern is driven by that of the child.
None of my kids was a good sleeper and each would typically wake up at least once a night (usually just after another had gone back to sleep). My youngest child never slept through the night until they were more than 2 years old, and even then woke up more nights than not. I estimate that I did not get a solid night's sleep for nearly a decade.
Sleep interrupted by age and youth
I may have nodded off, but I missed any reference to the effects of frequent interruptions to natural sleep cycles. Ageing bladders plead to be relieved every few hours.
Many of us would love to learn the best way to return to sleep and pick up where we left off.
First class post
It is maddening that it takes the death of a celebrity to bring attention to the problem of opiate addiction
Tanya Bolduc that Prince died of an overdose of prescribed fentanyl (see page 20)
Shale gas can replace coal
You say that coal replaced in the UK by shale gas would be burned by other nations (28 May, p 7). Of course no one is going to take a shipload of coal “bounced” from the UK by shale gas and throw it in the sea. It will be shipped, at increased cost and lower price, to consumers elsewhere.
But lower prices and a reduction in the number of customers will mean that the mining companies will not expand production, and may reduce it. Shrinking demand for coal will inexorably shrink the supply, eventually.
Of course we should increase renewables as fast as possible. But there will be, for the foreseeable future, a need for a backup during windless, sunless periods. Gas is better than coal for that, both because of its lower carbon dioxide output and its greater flexibility. Even when we have dumped coal, we should use the best supply of gas, whatever that may be. At the moment, we do not know whether fracking is better or worse than other sources. Careful pilot projects with maximum transparency are the way forward.
How do we protect health data?
Keith Appleyard stresses the importance of pseudonymising NHS patient data being supplied to third parties (Letters, 21 May). Back in 2000 Latanya Sweeney and colleagues demonstrated that 85 per cent of us can be uniquely identified with just three pieces of information: sex, date of birth and postcode ().
UK postcodes refer to an average of 15 households, and some to a single property. Patient data should contain only the first segment of the postcode if sex and date of birth are also recorded.
How do we protect health data?
Before I retired I was responsible for information governance in a medical practice. I would have insisted that any data transferred to Google should have identifying information replaced with a unique key reference. If a program flagged patients for follow-up, clinicians could then identify the patients on the hospital's clinical system, while minimising the amount of identifiable data.
More to sketch search than that
There is more research on doodle-matching than the James Hays paper Aviva Rutkin reports (21 May, p 22). Its contribution is its large dataset of sketches.
Sketch-based retrieval is a very difficult recognition problem: off-the-shelf algorithms, such as the one used by Hays, match a sketch to a photo only 37 per cent of the time, while humans get it right 54 per cent of the time.
Earlier work at Queen Mary University of London paved the way to achieve “beyond human” sketch recognition, as Hays acknowledges. Earlier this year published a sketch-based retrieval algorithm which outperforms earlier efforts on common datasets.
This interstellar probe is non-stop
Your report of plans to send an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri (16 April, p 9) omits an important limitation. Assuming the probes can be launched at the claimed 60,000 kilometres per second, they can reach their target in good time. But they have no way of slowing down.
At that speed a probe would cross a space the size of the orbit of Jupiter in just 7 hours: not a lot of time to discover and map any inner planets. There would be no way to change course and take a closer look, and certainly no way to land.
Ian Payne suggests such probes may pass through our solar system from time to time (Letters, 14 May) We can't rule that out, because there is no way we would be able to track them. We don't even know where all the asteroids are, and they are bigger and slower. Any probes' signals would be aimed at their origin point in as tight a beam as possible, and it is unlikely we would intercept a signal like that.
Many suns don't make life work
MacGregor Campbell's article may be the best I have read about the role of various star types in possibly encouraging or discouraging life on their planets (21 May, p 26). But I am doubtful that Alpha Centauri is a strong candidate for intelligent life.
It is a multiple star system, with the largest two stars orbiting each other every 80 of our years and coming as close to each other as the distance between our sun and Saturn. Based on our earthly experience, a relatively stable climate is necessary for intelligent life to arise.
I suspect any planet in the Alpha Centauri system will feel much more drastic “seasonal” changes than Earth – perhaps too drastic for a civilisation to emerge.
How do we avoid those superflares?
Hiroyuki Maehera says 148 solar flares capable of eviscerating the atmosphere of a habitable planet have been observed among 83,000 “sun-like” stars over 120 days (21 May, p 31). That suggests such a star should, on average, experience one such flare every 184 years. Either we are very lucky, or our sun is different from the sample – and if so, how?
An evacuation league table
You reported that the evacuation of Fort McMurray was the largest of its kind in Canada (14 May, p 7). Much depends on what you mean by “of its kind”. In 1979, over 200,000 people were evacuated from Mississauga due to burning propane rail tankers and leaking chlorine tanks.
Does rain in fact follow the plough?
You report research suggesting that ploughed land throws up dust particles that seed clouds and bring rain (7 May, p 10). You have also reported that Pseudomonas bacteria drift skywards, where they crystallise ice particles out of water vapour in clouds at only -1.2 °C, instead of the usual -14 °C (16 April, p 34). In the late 19th century, US railway companies encouraged settlement of the dry high plains with the promise “Rain follows the plow”. Then came the Dust Bowl. Do drought-stressed plants accumulate an overload of Pseudomonas and seed clouds, after all?
Orgasm difference is due to culture
I think neither Jessica Hamzelou (12 March, p 27) nor Anthony Castaldo (Letters, 30 April) gives enough prominence to a key factor in the greater variability of orgasmic ability and physical libido in the female population compared with men: the role of culture.
Throughout time and in many different societies, women have been required to have sex whether they felt desire and experienced orgasm or not. Women without desire or orgasm still become pregnant, whereas the male has to be aroused in order to ejaculate and impregnate the female.
Logically, males with low drive and absent ejaculation and orgasm will contribute little to the gene pool; by contrast, women ranging from absent to high libido, no orgasmic ability to very responsive, intra-vaginally or otherwise, will all contribute to the gene pool. Thus the laws of evolution apply more strongly to males, not so much for females.
For the record
• Duck! The Andromeda galaxy is approaching at 110 kilometres per second (4 June, p 26).
• We have sinned. The 17th-century phallic drinking vessel found in the City of London would most likely have come from a Restoration boozer (21 May, p 38).