The Economist

A call to reform the IPCC

IF THIS week’s report into the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a council of national academies of science were the sort of report children take home from school, its main themes would be expressed as “could do better” and “needs to show workings”. Stern parents might read it as calling for a Gradgrind-like clampdown; more indulgent ones as an inducement for the little darlings to try a little harder.

At a meeting in Busan, South Korea, this October, the parents in question—the representatives of the IPCC’s member governments—will decide which sort they want to be. Read in detail, the report suggests that if they want credible climate assessments, a firm hand will be required. ...

Graham “Mont” Liggins, investigator of the mysteries of birth and breath, died on August 24th, aged 84

HE FORGOT about the sheep. He had meant to dump it in the incinerator on the way home from work. It was still in the car boot, and starting to smell. When he remembered, and forced it down the incinerator chute, it was already bloating, and the gassy innards instantly caught fire. The force of the explosion sent ash 200 feet into the air over Auckland.

Graham Liggins (grinning, above) was trying to find out what triggered labour. As a New Zealander, he had naturally turned to sheep. But his pursuit led to some of the most important discoveries in obstetrics, and the saving of hundreds of thousands of tiny, struggling lives. ...

Crowdfunding: Artists, musicians and writers are using the internet to aggregate lots of small donations to fund their work

WIKIPEDIA, a giant online encyclopedia compiled by volunteers, is the product of the aggregation of lots of people’s spare time. An example of “crowdsourcing”, it demonstrates that on the internet, as in the real world, many hands make light work. Can the same approach be applied to money as well as time? That is the idea behind “crowdfunding”, in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.

As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed. Millions of dollars, in increments as small as $5, have poured into efforts that connect artists, musicians, writers and others with people willing to fund their projects. Venture capitalists have also shown an interest by investing in start-ups that facilitate crowdfunding. ...

Emergency medicine: Field medicine, for soldiers and civilians alike, gets smarter as medical monitoring technology improves

HALF way through a flight from Mumbai to London, a male passenger complained of a swollen right hand and an inability to bend his fingers. The flight attendants were uncertain about what to do and hooked the passenger up to a small device which took and transmitted vital signs, including his pulse, blood pressure and a picture of his hand, to a ground-based medical team.

As the passenger’s condition worsened, the device was also used to transmit an electrocardiographic (ECG) trace. The resulting information was used to rule out heart problems, and the passenger was stabilised and monitored with the assistance of a doctor on the flight. The decision was made to continue the journey rather than divert to the nearest airport. ...

Jet engines: A nifty new engine design promises to improve combustion efficiency, thus cutting fuel consumption and reducing emissions

IN A world worried about global warming, improving the cleanliness and efficiency of jet engines is a priority for airlines and aircraft manufacturers. It is not just altruism: greener engines also use less fuel, and so cut costs. Incremental improvements over the years have made a difference. Modern jets burn only half as much fuel per unit of thrust as their 1960s counterparts. But some people think it is time for a radical redesign. One of those people is David Lior, the boss of a small Israeli firm called R-Jet Engineering.

Jet engines rely on Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a jet is running, a compressor at the front draws in air and compresses it (see illustration). This air is guided and diffused by static blades to allow for easier ignition when it is mixed with fuel and ignited in a combustion chamber. The reaction comes in the form of rapidly expanding hot gases, which blast out of the rear of the jet and thus drive the aircraft forward. As they do so, they pass through another set of static blades which direct and accelerate the hot gases to turn a turbine. The turbine is connected by a shaft to the compressor at the front, thus turning it and keeping the whole process running. ...

Geothermal power: Deriving energy from subterranean heat is no longer limited to volcanic regions. By drilling deep wells into the ground, it can be made to work almost anywhere. Just watch out for the earthquakes

Correction to this article

OVER the course of the next ten years a company called Geodynamics, based in Queensland, Australia, is planning to drill as many as 90 wells, each 4,500-5,000 metres deep, in the Cooper Basin, a desert region in South Australia with large energy reserves. But the company is not drilling for oil or gas. It is looking for an energy source that is far cleaner and more abundant than any fossil fuel: heat emanating from hot rocks deep beneath the Earth’s surface, a promising emerging form of geothermal energy. ...

Technology and development: A growing number of initiatives are promoting bottom-up ways to deliver energy to the world’s poor

AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones. ...

Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual-reality technology, has more recently become an outspoken critic of online social media

FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?

No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.” ...

Biomedicine: Doctors are rerouting nerves to give patients more natural control of prosthetic arms and bring paralysed limbs back to life

IT IS known as “phantom limb syndrome” or “phantom pain”. But this strange phenomenon feels all too real to the people it affects, and can be agonisingly painful. Amputees and people who have become paralysed may still “feel” a missing limb or a part of their body, even though it is no longer connected to their nervous system. Yet such sensations offer confirmation that even when a limb has been severed or cut off from the nervous system, the nerves that once serviced it remain alive and well. Doctors are now finding ways to put these nerves to good use, by rewiring them to control prosthetic limbs or reanimate paralysed limbs.

Moreover, rewiring the nervous system should allow amputees to gain a sense of “embodiment” of a prosthetic. That is, by controlling and sensing the prosthetic using the same neural pathways and parts of the brain that once governed the real limb, the prosthetic can be made to feel and act like a genuine extension of the user’s body. And by stimulating the nerves in the legs or arms of paralysed patients—nerves that have been cut off from the central nervous system—it is possible to create co-ordinated movement of great subtlety. For example, the hands of paralysed patients have been stimulated to enable them to grasp and turn door knobs. And with careful control and co-ordination of the muscle groups in their legs, patients can even rise from their wheelchairs and take steps. ...

Software: A new approach to speech recognition gives users the chance to fix misunderstandings without having to repeat themselves

THERE is often something sweet, intimate even, about couples who finish each other’s sentences. But it can also be a source of irritation, especially when they get it wrong. A similar irritation (minus the sweetness) is often felt by users of speech-recognition software, which still manages to garble and twist even the most clearly spoken words. Might the solution lie in a more intimate relationship between the user and the software?

Modern speech-recognition programs do not merely try to identify individual words as they are spoken; rather, they attempt to match whole chunks of speech with statistical models of phrases and sentences. The rationale is that by knowing statistical rules of thumb for the way in which words are usually put together—an abstract probabilistic approximation of grammar, if you will—it is possible to narrow the search when attempting to identify individual words. For example, a noun-phrase will typically consist of a noun preceded by a modifier, such as an article and possibly also an adjective. So if part of a speech pattern sounds like “ball”, the odds of it actually being “ball” will increase if the utterances preceding it sound like “the” and “bouncy”. ...

Magnetic levitation: The same technology used to make trains go fast can help identify unwanted substances in food and water

TO MOST people magnetic levitation (maglev) connotes high-speed passenger trains. It is what enables the Shanghai Transrapid to glide over the tracks at speeds of as much as 430kph (267mph). But the same technology has recently found a much more pedestrian use in testing food and water.

One way to identify a substance without resorting to fiddly chemical methods is to determine its density. This will not provide a precise composition but it can give a decent approximation. The purity of minerals is often assessed in this way, as are things like the amount of fat in milk or salt in water. (The less fat there is in milk, the more dense it is; the less salt there is in water, the less dense it is.) ...

Computing: Quantum cryptography is unbreakable in theory. But like any security system, in practice it is only as safe as its weakest link

IT SOUNDS foolproof. One of the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics is that measuring a physical system always disturbs it. If the system in question is a message written as a series of digital bits encoded in the polarisation of light, this means that intercepting and reading the message can no longer be done surreptitiously. The receiver should be able to detect an eavesdropper and take appropriate countermeasures.

To a hacker, though, the word “foolproof” is a challenge. And to prove the point, two groups of academic spies have now shown that whatever the theory says, practical attempts to hide messages this way can still be vulnerable. ...

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Materials: Optical fibres made of piezoelectric materials can turn sound into subtle electrical signals, and vice versa

“GUITAR HERO”, a hugely popular video game, has done wonders to transform the flamboyant strumming of closet air guitarists into at least some approximation of music. But soon even the feigned exertions of fantasy rock stars may become unnecessary because researchers in America have developed an acoustic fibre, like a guitar string, capable of electrically plucking itself.

Electrical signals make the fibre vibrate to produce a sound (although rather quietly, so you must listen to it closely). But the process can also be reversed, which is potentially more useful. When acoustic waves cause the fibre to vibrate, it produces a corresponding electrical signal that can be detected. This means the fibres can also work much like a microphone. In short, the fibres can both sing and hear. ...

Software: A novel approach to generating images of suspects uses a range of tricks to achieve a dramatic improvement in accuracy

THE human brain is hard-wired to recognise faces. Babies learn to identify their parents’ faces within hours of being born, and even in old age people can remember what their childhood friends looked like. But remembering faces is not the same as being able to describe them. This is particularly apparent when witnesses are asked by the police to create a composite picture of a suspect. Even when the result is thought to be a good likeness by the witness, that does not mean that other people will also be able to recognise the face and thus identify the suspect.

Indeed, even when working from a fresh memory, the composite pictures people produce are, on average, recognisable to others only 20% of the time. And this percentage dwindles further if the witness is working from a memory more than a few days old. The problem is that face recognition is a holistic process: people are good at recognising faces as a whole, but struggle to identify or describe individual facial features, such as a person’s eyes, nose or mouth. ...

Software: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful

TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short.

Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network. The ability to retain customers is particularly important in hyper-competitive markets, such as India. Bharti Airtel, India’s biggest mobile operator, which handles over 3 billion calls a day, has greatly reduced customer defections by deploying the software, says Amrita Gangotra, the firm’s director for information technology. ...

Office technology: All kinds of technological tricks are being used to reduce the cost and environmental impact of office printers

THE dream of the paperless office has been around for years, but it has remained just that, despite the rise of e-mail and the web. True, paper consumption in American offices peaked in 2001, but since then it has declined only slightly from its high of around 150 pounds (68kg) of paper per worker per year. In Europe, meanwhile, each worker prints an average of 31 pages a day, seven of which were not even wanted, according to recent research by Lexmark, a printer manufacturer.

The cost of all that paper, toner and ink quickly adds up. Which is why, earlier this year, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay adopted a novel strategy to save money on print supplies: it changed its fonts. Programs like Microsoft Outlook default to Arial, but a thinner-lined typeface such as Century Gothic requires less toner or ink to form its characters. A study in 2009 showed that switching to Century Gothic could save businesses as much as $80 per printer per year. The university predicts that this year it will reduce its $100,000 print-supplies bill by around 10% by making this simple change. ...

Motoring: Spies on the dashboard can teach people to drive more economically—and tick them off if they fail to do so

SOME people always take things to extremes. For those trying to save fuel there is hypermiling, in which the really dedicated try to use less than 4.5 litres/100km (ie, travel more than 80 miles on a gallon) in a car that under normal use might do only half as well. Apart from driving very slowly and trying not to use the brakes (which dissipates energy), hypermilers employ other tricks, such as wiring the fuel injectors up to lights mounted on the dashboard so they can see whether or not they are squirting fuel into the cylinders. Although this is all too much trouble for most motorists, the hypermilers do have a point: driving technique plays a big part in how much fuel a car consumes. Now various devices are being used to help teach more moderate ways of driving economically.

Not surprisingly, companies that operate fleets of cars and trucks are among the first users of fuel-saving “eco-assist” systems. The most popular of these are global-positioning system (GPS) units that use live traffic information and other data, such as weather and past trends, to plot not the fastest but the most economical route to a destination at a particular time. According to iSuppli, a Californian research firm, fewer than 1% of new cars have such “eco-routing” systems fitted, but it expects that by 2020 a third will. ...

Ben Bernanke told economists and central bankers at a meeting in Jackson Hole that the Federal Reserve would resume “unconventional measures” if the economy deteriorated again. The chairman of America’s central bank said the economic recovery was weaker than had been expected, but that deflation was not a significant risk. See article

Purchasing-managers’ indices showed that manufacturing growth in August had accelerated in America and China. The American PMI grew faster than expected, offering a positive note amid worries about the state of the economic recovery. In China, the increase in manufacturing growth came as reassurance that an expected slowdown in economic activity would be smooth and gradual. ...

The first direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in 20 months began in Washington. Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas began talks urged on by President Barack Obama along with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan and Tony Blair for the “Quartet”. See article

In the run up to the talks, four Israeli settlers were shot dead and two injured in two separate incidents in the West Bank. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks. ...