What makes youth clubs so uncool?
 Little Richard - definitely not youth club endorsed in the 1950s |
It must have only been a couple of years after my mother finally abandoned her attempts to make me attend mass at St Helen's on Sunday morning that she developed her obsession with youth clubs.
Why was it, she wondered, that I chose to spend my evenings with Vinnie and Den hanging around the chippie in Endbutt Lane rather than following the example of other decent boys in the neighbourhood and enrolling for the twice a week get-togethers at the Brownmoor youth club?
She had a point. Hanging around the chippie was not a stimulating way to spend an evening. There were occasional pleasures to be had: the minor thrill of persuading the man in the shop to add extra scraps to your sixpenny bag of chips, the comfort of finding a doorway which was deep enough to protect you from the wind and cold, the somewhat distant hope that this might be the night when you could catch a glimpse of some of the girls with short red skirts from Streatham House school.
 | FIND OUT MORE  Hear Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 at 1600 on Wednesdays or 0030 on Mondays |
But in truth, the real attraction was much simpler. The chippie was not Brownmoor Youth Club. Vinnie and Den and I were hardly radical teenagers. We wouldn't have known the meaning of the word. But we were bound together by the sense that there was something uncomfortable, even disturbing, about allowing ourselves to be categorised as youth, as suitable subjects for a youth club and a youth leader and youth activities.
Each of us at one time or another had been to Brownmoor Youth Club. Each of us had joined in such youth activities as the table-tennis competition and the general knowledge quiz and the Friday night "youth dance" in which relations between boys and girls were carefully regulated by the youth leader whose periodic blasts on a whistle were a signal that existing foxtrot or quickstep partners should disentangle and choose a new partner from the nearest couple. (Den, who'd read about these things in a medical dictionary, called it the coitus interruptus dance)
|  The sight of such unfettered free movement made me regret every second I spent earning my bronze medal for the quickstep  |
There was, though, one youth club we all rushed to attend. When I was about 16, news came through that somewhere in Queens Drive, there was this place where the leader played all the latest records. There were no waltzes, or foxtrots or quicksteps. You could just stand there and listen or do the sort of crazy dancing that was banned in all the local dance-halls (I can still remember the large sign on the pillar nearest the stage in the New Brighton Ballroom which read "No Jitterbugging".)
Everything we'd heard was true. Our 61 bus dropped us outside a pub and then an arrow led us to an upstairs room which was bursting with the sound of Little Richard. We soon learned that the club's leader only played Little Richard. He'd take Rip it Up off the turntable and replace it with Good Golly Miss Molly and then get Tutti Frutti ready for the next play. And how people danced! The sight of such wonderful unfettered free movement instantly made me regret every second I spent the year before earning my bronze medal for the quickstep.
The place never had a name but it soon became a regular haunt. One night, Den, who had the same sort of trouble with his mum as I did with mine, asked the man who put the records on if this was "a proper youth club". The man, who never revealed his name, came straight to the point.
"If it was a youth club, mate, they wouldn't let someone like me inside."
And with that, he flipped Lucille off the turntable and replaced it with Long Tall Sally.
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A massive, salty filing cabinet
A massive, salty filing cabinet
How a mine is used for storage
| By James Alexander |
During our lives, we all generate a vast paper trail of documents about us that need to be kept and archived. We rely on employers, doctors, councils, banks, the police and others to keep these details safe.
But - with so much paperwork - many filing cabinets and warehouses are full to bursting. So now many of our personal records are being transferred underground - to be stored down Britain's oldest working mine.
| Because we're so deep underground, there's no UV light, there's no insect life and no vermin Steve HolmesDeepstore |
It looks like something out of a science fiction film. At the end of a long dark tunnel, deep beneath the Cheshire countryside, a mechanical monster groans into life.
It judders forward - its skin caked in clay, its menacing steel claws lunging into the rock face ahead.
A wall of salt millions of years old succumbs in seconds. It drops onto a conveyor belt where it's carried away to be crushed into tiny pieces.
It's all masterminded by remote control. Where once teams of miners spent a lifetime hacking at the rock with handpicks and shovels, now the same thing is achieved by three men and a keypad. This is what 21st Century mining looks like.
Cave network
At 130 tonnes, it's thought to be the biggest underground machine in the world. There's no way it would fit in any of the lifts, so it had to be brought down in bits, and assembled where it stands.
 The mine is thought to be the oldest still in operation in the UK |
It's never seen daylight, and never will. Once its life is over, it will be left to be eaten by the salt. The earth will have its revenge in the end.
But for now the chopping and clattering goes on. The noise echoes down a man-made network of tunnels and caves carved out over decades.
This is the oldest working mine in Britain - it supplies around 90% of the salt used to grit the country's roads.
All this mining has left behind an awesome sight - a hollowed-out city the size of 700 football pitches, the roof propped up by vast pillars of rock salt that glisten almost pink under torch light.
But now this emptiness is being filled with millions of boxes. There are bank details, dental records, hospital X-rays - all paperwork that has to be kept, but which offices above ground are running out of shelf space to store.
So vast swathes of personal data are being transferred underground. Chances are something about your life is salted away here.
| FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME  |
"Security is our top priority," says Mike McAuley as he takes me inside one of the specially-built storage rooms.
"Anybody up top needs to go through a scanning gate. They're checked by security guards. They're checked by CCTV cameras.
"If they were to get underground, they could only get inside the storage units with their own personalised access card and they're only issued to staff after in-depth police checks."
As soon as the door opens, the smell of salt is replaced by the smell of cardboard. Each unit houses thousands of boxes, neatly arranged on shelves that stretch to the ceiling.
Some contain irreplaceable historic artefacts. There are records from the National Archives listing the transport details of every convict sent to Australia in the 1800s. There are rare first editions from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. There are paintings, film cans, even a grand piano.
| Over time, the seawater evaporated, leaving vast salty deposits that were gradually covered over. Some are 100m deep, others well over 1.6km - a mile - underground Where does road salt come from? (See link below) |
Everything is barcoded so it can be retrieved within hours if needed.
"If I were an archive document, this is where I'd want to live," smiles Steve Holmes. He's in charge of Deepstore, the company that runs the facility.
"The natural properties of rock salt means the temperature underground is a constant 14C, and the humidity is around 60-65%, which is the ideal environment for the long-term storage of documents. Because we're so deep underground, there's no UV light, there's no insect life and no vermin."
Steve tells me there's no risk of flooding.
"We're protected by five layers of rock salt above us so there's no chance of water permeating through. Also, we've worked with industry experts to make sure there's no way there could be a fire."
Because the mine is still working, with 70 years worth of salt still in the ground, it will be a long time before all the storage space is filled. And despite the predictions of a paperless world, more boxes arrive every day.
While physical footprints fade, here our paper footprint survives.
It is a unique, accidental archive of the way we live - preserved for future generations.
Using pure logic
Using pure logic
| THE BIG IDEA 60 seconds to change the world |
Everyone should think for themselves more, rather than relying on ideology.
Don't ride along with the teachings of your left- or right-wing politics - or even worse, your religion I'd say.
Instead, try to reason out the correct path from common sense and basic humanist principles.
| FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE |
Many of us actually might be already too set in our ways to make this change but we can all train children around us to behave this way.
They have a natural curiosity, which gives rise to a hundred questions for each answer, and it behoves us not to squelch this spirit.
What I mean by that is that rather than getting irritated or invoking God or tradition, we need to patiently show then how to rely on logic to arrive at the best answer.
And thus, trained to not accept notions at face value but to rely on their own reasoning power - they might one day grow up and challenge us to do the same.
Manil Suri is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a novelist.
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Thursday, February 26, 2009
Can you rebrand a bad memory?
Can you rebrand a bad memory?
| By Craig Smith |
What has Abu Ghraib got in common with the Millennium Dome? They've both been shut down only to re-open under new names. But the rebranding trick is a hard one to pull off, especially when bad memories are fresh.
Sellafield, Altria, Sea River Mediterranean, Xe
Are there dangers in breast cancer screening?
Are there dangers in breast cancer screening?
| GO FIGURE Different ways of seeing stats |
 |
Go for a scan and you might end up with surgery you don't need.
It's been argued, with some merit, that NHS information leaflets state the benefits, but ignore the biggest risks.
The latest news shifts the emphasis to what might go wrong. But that can also go too far. We need both sides of the story - how big are the risks compared with the benefits?
| Many of us hate uncertainty - doubt mixed with fear is a horrible combination |
There are two steps to seeing them in proportion. The first is that a test can be wrong. There's evidence that many doctors don't understand the simple maths of this.
Say that routine screening is 90% accurate. Say you have a positive test. What's the chance that your positive test is accurate and you really have cancer?
The surprise is that it's impossible to answer that question correctly with the information given. But many doctors think otherwise. They think a positive test that's 90% accurate means it's 90% likely to mean cancer. Not so.
It sounds puzzling, but a picture makes it clear. First, let's stop talking percentages, and talk about a real number of women. And let's give more information - that if you take 1,000 women randomly, of mixed ages, very roughly 10 will have breast cancer. These numbers are not intended to be precise, but are not far off. We've rounded everything to make it easier. Now for the chart.
Suddenly, we see how most of the positives from routine screening are false alarms, occurring among women who don't have cancer. Of all the women who have positive tests, only about one in ten will truly have cancer, but they won't yet know which.
That's how a test with 90% accuracy can result in only about 10% certainty, and why thinking about it in percentages can leave some people muddled. Our advice is - don't. Think in people instead.
So one risk of screening is anxiety - thinking a positive test means you're almost sure to have it, when in fact you're not - an anxiety that could be lessened if people knew these facts. That they often aren't told this is odd, to say the least.
 The NHS advocates screening |
But don't stop there. Because screening has narrowed the doubt. If you have a positive test, you now have a one in ten chance of cancer instead of one in 100. And if you have a negative test, the chance is now even lower than before.
The next step is similar but more serious. Almost all false positives are cleared up - though sometimes it takes a biopsy to find out - but not all, and some lead to unnecessary treatment.
A small number of cases show an unusual cellular state that might develop into full-blown cancer, but some won't - and again we don't know which. Those that were destined to be harmless but are removed anyway are another kind of false alarm.
And there's a third kind. Some people, even though they really do have cancer, would die of something else before the cancer finally struck. Again, we seldom know which.
Put the doubts together and, according to the critics, the picture is now roughly this for a group of 2,000 women.
We start with 2,000 women this time in order to show up the one case of unambiguous benefit. We've also shown all the uncertain cell states as among the false positives. But all this might be too pessimistic.
For example, screening's critics judge it on the number of people invited to attend, not on the number who do. So some deaths - among people who don't attend - are set against screening's success rate when arguably they ought not to be. According to the NHS, the true picture is better.
And there are two other important caveats. First, judging screening by one measure, survival or death, is crude. There are other benefits of being diagnosed early that don't show up in this analysis.
Second, the older you are, the greater the likely benefit of screening. On these figures, given the number of women who go for screening, the NHS says about 1,400 lives are saved each year.
One statistical campaigner, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute, has been arguing for the information to be shown this way for years. It's not obvious why it isn't. What the technique mostly helps us see is the element of uncertainty.
But perhaps that is part of the explanation. Many of us hate uncertainty. Doubt mixed with fear is a horrible combination, "give me a test and tell me the correct answer", a justifiable hope.
But it is also often an impossible expectation. We can narrow the doubts, sometimes by a large margin, but we can't eliminate them. Should the NHS strive to explain that, or to offer the reassurance most people crave? And what if doctors offer advice having misunderstood the degree of uncertainty?
The decisions are painful enough, all the more reason to be as clear as we can about the balance of risks and benefits.
• Someone has to say it, but it doesn't half get boring trying to change this habit.
Reports this week of the effect of drinking on breast cancer - and other cancers - failed miserably - again - to say how many people are affected. They all simply give percentage increases. A drink every day increases your chance of breast cancer by 12%.
But here's a simple fact that everyone knows - except journalists, apparently. When playing Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, a 100% increase in your money can be worth next to nothing, or a fortune, depending where you start.
A 12% increase can similarly mean a lot, or a little. Did the news reports tell us where any of the cancers starts?
Of course not. Nothing so helpful. The answer, as we learnt above, is that a bit less than 10 women in 100 have breast cancer in a lifetime. So a 12% increase if they all consume one extra drink ever day, takes us to
Journey's end for Flight Simulator
Journey's end for Flight Simulator
 FSX replicates real airports |
It's supposed to be the computer game that grown-ups can own up to playing.
For years, Microsoft's Flight Simulator set the standard. Initially, the bar was low as the processing and graphics power of early home computers - like Sinclair's rubber Spectrum - struggled with the demands of replicating global air travel.
But in the early 1980s, as others were still guiding blips across black-and-white screens playing Pong, the thrill of attempting to land a single-engine Cessna, in colour in Flight Simulator's first iteration, was fun unsurpassed.
Never mind that it looked as if the instrument panel in your plane was cardboard stuck on with superglue and the runway facing you was a single dark strip in a featureless yellow field - and that was supposed to be Heathrow. You just had to use your imagination.
| What every simmer dreams about is being called on to land an actual plane in an emergency. |
Twenty-seven years and many updates later, FSX - Flight Simulator Ten - uses the muscle of today's high-end PCs to reproduce faithfully most of the world's airports in millions of colours in minute detail. Cities and landscapes look exactly as they do from the air in real life and air-traffic control instructions for final approach crackle continuously, and often confusingly, over the cockpit intercom.
And still the appeal remains a mystery to many.
With today's computer games, you can wipe out an entire German Panzer division, navigate Formula One's most challenging circuits and manage your football team in the European Championships, all without leaving the comfort of the chair at your PC. So flying an imaginary Boeing 757 from Stansted to Sarajevo in real-time can seem pretty tame.
But later versions of Microsoft FS do seem to "flight simmers", as we are known, to be just like doing the real thing. And more importantly, those who actually do the real thing say it's like that too.
Passenger applause
As one real-world pilot writes: "As a pilot, I use Microsoft Flight Simulator for training scenarios and often fly to a new airport virtually before flying there for real."
Of course, what every simmer dreams about is being called on to land an actual plane in an emergency. A trembling stewardess announces over the public address that both flyers upfront are suffering debilitating convulsions from the in-flight catering and has anyone flown an Airbus before?
"Er, not really but
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Does University Challenge really test intelligence?
Does University Challenge really test intelligence?
| WHO, WHAT, WHY? The Magazine answers... |
 Gail Trimble - the 'brainiest woman in Britain' |
Gail Trimble has been called the brainiest woman in Britain after steering Oxford's Corpus Christi college to victory in University Challenge, but does the programme really test intelligence?
How to test intelligence is a longstanding debate in academic circles.
That hasn't stopped Britain's newspapers praising Corpus Christi's Gail Trimble as the "cleverest" and "brainiest" ever to take part in University Challenge. But is having a wide range of general knowledge the same as being a "clever" person?
Adrian Furnham is a professor of psychology at University College London and has studied the relationship between general knowledge and intelligence.
He makes a distinction between what he describes as "fluid" and "crystallised" intelligence.
| THE ANSWER University Challenge and similar quiz shows test one form of intelligence - crystallised - very thoroughly Their testing of other forms is debatable |
"Fluid intelligence is analysis, maybe doing Sudoku or a Rubik's cube - speed of analysis with problem solving. You don't have to have had an education."
Crystallised intelligence on the other hand is knowledge you have learnt and then access from memory. Knowing all of the counties in the British Isles is a piece of crystallised intelligence.
Prof Furnham thinks University Challenge is skewed towards this type of intelligence.
"They measure, almost entirely, crystallised intelligence. It is a good index but it is only one branch of intelligence," he says.
He admits they have some analytical questions which test fluid intelligence, requiring contestants to solve equations or process information, but suggests they are by no means the majority.
"They try and have a bit of that for the physicists but they don't have many of those items. They're much more likely to ask you what the capital of Upper Volta is."
Countdown is in general a much better test of this type of mental ability, he suggests.
There are scientists who argue that people with high fluid intelligence will more quickly acquire crystallised intelligence.
 Not all contestants are of equal calibre |
Thomas Benson is the question editor for University Challenge and writes a fifth of the questions on the programme.
"Hmmm... this would be a good starter question," he says.
"We don't set out to test intelligence but I think we do test a certain aspect - the part that is reactive rather than creative."
In other words, most questions are of the knowledge recall, crystallised variety, but he does say this series has featured more "two-step" questions, which do need more than this.
He gives the example of one question which required contestants to make new words from British postal codes (CANE from the codes for Carlisle and Newcastle, a recent example). Contestants both needed to know the postal codes, and be able to creatively re-arrange them to form the new word.
He says there would normally be up to six questions like this which need more than recall in the average edition, as well as one question testing mental arithmetic and are very much in the minority.
"They need to have been through the traditional education system, and have had a thorough academic grounding," he says.
| WHO, WHAT, WHY?  A regular part of the BBC News Magazine, Who, What, Why? aims to answer some of the questions behind the headlines |
"There's a certain type of person who's just really good at absorbing lots of intricate detail, only here it's in the academic world."
And of course, whatever the type of intelligence involved, the contestants have to be quick, says journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, a competitor on the "professionals" series of the show.
"Often I found I knew the answer to the question but someone else got in a nanosecond earlier. [The viewer] can't tell that has happened.
"There are some extremely intelligent and knowledgeable people who are just a bit slower."
Psychologists and philosophers have many different concepts of intelligence, and not all would recognise the fluid/crystallised distinction.
American psychologist Howard Gardner thinks intelligence has eight aspects: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal.
For Gardner, even specially designed psychometric tests don't fully test intelligence, so a television quiz, even of University Challenge's gruelling nature, wouldn't come close.
Prof Furnham says that even if the programme is a not good test of all round mental ability, he is convinced that Trimble is the real deal.
"She would do well on any form of intelligence test," he says.
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The power of words
The power of words
| A POINT OF VIEW |
Subtle nuances in terminology can shift our view of any given debate, says Katharine Whitehorn.
It's not surprising that everyone loathes bankers at the moment, but I wonder if what's put the final edge on our fury is not the one word "bonus".
They think - apparently still think - they deserve an extra payment for doing well, when they've obviously done so extremely badly.
I know the arguments for the defence - that fixed salaries demand a flexible element, to reflect how well or badly the bank has done, and the - to me - spurious one that without colossal incentives you don't get the best men.
|  Words shape the way we think about things |
Hear Radio 4's A Point of ViewMost of them have "guaranteed bonuses" built into their contracts - though if that's not an oxymoron I don't know what is. But it's the sanctimoniousness that gets us, them still patting themselves on the back. It's much the same way that what you really hate about having to leap out of the way of bicycles on the pavement is that they still feel so moral because they're not in cars.
Instead of bonuses, some people in New York are now talking about "maluses", and so should we.
Can a word really have so much importance? The row about Carol Thatcher and the golliwog has more or less died down, but no-one would deny what a flashpoint a racist word can be.
Years ago there was an alleged scandal at Gatwick because the holding quarters for immigrants were said to have golliwog toys. Being on the board of the British Airports Authority at the time (in the days when it was mainly concerned with flying aeroplanes, not running shopping malls), I thought I'd better investigate.
When I saw these toys, it turned out that some of the baby dolls given to the small scared African toddlers were, thoughtfully, simply black baby dolls. It was a false alarm but the word golliwog was enough to appall us all.
Political correctness
But does it really matter that much what words we use? I think it does, because the words shape the way we think about things.
As Christopher Fry wrote in The Dark is Light Enough "I was Richard's wife and though it was only a word, yet still a word stays in the mind and has its children too"
The words we use ought to match what we actually do - yet in spite of all the political correctness people grumble about, in some ways language hasn't quite kept up with social changes.
 A single word put Carol Thatcher at the centre of a media storm |
We have same-sex marriage, but how do you refer to the couple? We've been making do with "partner" for decades, but it means too many things, not just unmarried couples, but so much else - I have struggled often through a sentence about a GP, a lesbian daughter of a friend of mine and her partner, a woman, and her partner as a GP, who is male, and his partner, who is another bloke.
One gay man I know refers to his CP - the man with whom he has a civil partnership - but surely there should be a stronger word.
So why not wife and wife? Or husband and husband? I'm on tricky ground here, but I don't think these work well, because both words are packed with so much history - baggage if you like.
"Wife" has echoes of the helpmeet, sure, but also the one whose rights had to be fought for, whose marriage too often involved a property exchange arranged by her family, or an obligation about continuing the line, bearing sons - "an heir and a spare" - which can be quite irrelevant to a same-sex union.
Diana Athill, in her recent book Somewhere Towards the End, remarked wryly that though she had through all her innumerable sexual encounters utterly rejected the tiresome role of wife, she was now landed with it in old age, since her last partner is old and wambly and needs looking after.
Unisex language
"Husband," too, implies all sorts of things besides love and cohabitation - the breadwinner and protector maybe, head of a household, chap with rights and responsibilities about women and children.
Cleopatra implied something stronger than love alone when, dying, she said: "Husband, I come".
| When you come to dancing, real equality would mean referring to all the males as ballerinas |
Not all well-meaning attempts to make language unisex work too well, either. I don't much like the habit of referring to women in print just by their surnames - the Times obituary of Dame Joyce Bishop, a pioneering headmistress, some years ago referred to her throughout as "Bishop" when all the world knew her as Dame Joyce.
Women don't necessarily get as attached to their surnames, which are apt to change, as to the first names they're usually called by. We feel that using a feminine version of something tends to demean it in English - it doesn't of course, languages, such as French or Italian, in which every word has a gender.
There it's OK for an academic to be called dotoressa, we'd hardly say doctoress. And I disliked it a lot when a crusty old beast on the Observer used to refer to the weekly columns I wrote there as sermonettes.
But sometimes unsexing the word for an occupation - calling women actors, for example - seems to imply that the male "actor" is somehow more the real thing than the female "actress". When you come to dancing, real equality would mean referring to all the males as ballerinas.
Double meaning
I don't, myself, share the indignation of many older people about using "gay" for homosexual when it used just to mean light-hearted and fun.
There are stacks of words that mean two things. Light that you see by, light not heavy, cricket match or matches you light fires with, socks that do or don't match and the double meaning even has its uses. When the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke was asked if he was gay, he would answer: "I am mildly cheerful."
| Words can matter in darker ways - I'm thinking of the incalculable harm done by euphemisms |
And of course there's the way words mean different things in American or Australian English. I knew through the International Women's Forum a woman from Minnesota who was tall and imposing, but had bad feet and always wore trainers, even to a British Embassy party we were invited to in Washington.
I teased her once about wearing her trainers even to that party. a year or two later she joked: "And you said I wore nappies to the British Embassy." It turned out that "trainers" in American English were training pants for toddlers - which she'd translated back into English English as nappies.
All this is fun, but words can matter in darker ways. I'm thinking of the incalculable harm done by euphemisms.
Take, for example, the phrase "honour killings" - which is the polite way of describing what happens when a family kills a daughter or a sister for daring to choose her own mate - or even, in some countries, for being raped, as she's now defiled.
I'm not for censorship and I'm not an editor, but if I was, I'd insist that the only words to be used for such brutality should be family murder.
Insidious processes
And if anyone thinks I'm being politically incorrect to single out what is sometimes thought of as a largely Asian practice, what about the euphemism of the American "extraordinary rendition" which means taking those they disapprove of to countries where they can torture them?
"Waterboarding" - another little habit of our allies - is described in a paper last week as "not as much fun as it sounds".
There's a book called "standard operational procedure" which describes the insidious processes by which, from the vice president down to the humblest GI, such practices became accepted. Without these cheating words might not a bit more reluctance have been shown?
Words matter. We live by them, all of us, even those of us who seem to have a vocabulary of about 20, five of them not mentionable in polite company.
Noam Chomsky thought it was the mark of a human being, that only we, among all living creatures, have such an inbuilt facility.
But that has recently been proved wrong by experiments with highly intelligent chimpanzees who could, by signing, use words, and perfectly distinguish them.
The chimpanzee who was best at it they called, to my delight, Noam Chimpsky. But maybe even we, in our use of words, have a bit more evolving to do.