Diversity on the Titanic
23rd March 2004
In his piece on rap (March) Nick Crowe states that there were no black passengers or crew on the Titanic. This is wrong. There was a Haitian passenger, Joseph LaRoche, and his family, travelling first class. LaRoche went down with the ship but his wife and children apparently survived.
Maggy D Fouche,
Chicago Dept of Cultural Affairs
Gandhi's challenge
30th March 2004
Bhikhu Parekh's imaginary dialogue between Gandhi and Bin Laden (April) brings to mind a piece from Young India of 11th August 1920, in which Gandhi writes: "I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... But I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment."
Raj Kothari
Bridport, Dorset
Bitter Lemons remembered
2nd April 2004
Annabel Freyberg's valuable article on the British Council (April) was mistaken about one thing. Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons is a memoir, not a novel.
Peter Crawley
Hertford
35-hour week and the left
28th March 2004
Tim King's account (February) of France's 35-hour working week tells only half the story. The scheme was concocted by Martine Aubry, while in opposition, in discussions with business leaders. Pushed through as the centrepiece of the Jospin government's programme by her as a minister, it entailed tax breaks for participating employers and a wage freeze and overtime ban for their employees. It was criticised by the left as a handout to business and an attack on working-class living standards. In the Socialist party's subsequent electoral debacle, Aubry was defeated in her solidly working-class constituency of Lille.
John Roberts
Labastide-Paumes, France
Science and public fears
29th March 2004
Dick Taverne (April) argues that the Stewart inquiry into the health risks of mobile phones "illustrates the danger of taking irrational public fears too seriously." His concern about safety quackery is a valid one, although he crudifies the anti-GM argument by focusing solely on its scientific inconsistencies. There are those of us who are less worried about "Frankenstein crops" than about the ways multinational corporations seek to control agriculture. The lesson of Taverne's article, however, is to be found in its repeated references to the harm done by the BSE debacle. The Tory government, faced with awkward questions about matters beyond its competence, responded with bluster, ignorant grandstanding and lies. Now the Labour government, faced with awkward questions about Iraq, is doing likewise. The public may be irrational in its mistrust of the MMR vaccine, but it is impeccably rational in its mistrust of politicians.
Michel Faber
Ross-shire
Choice for the left
13th April 2004
Philip Collins (April) makes an articulate case for the squaring of the left's circle with respect to choice and equality but seems to jump ahead of himself when talking about using professional help to harness state resources for those unable to play the system. Such helpers would be sure to become a focus for charges of waste and nanny-statism. Anyone in today's climate who argues that resources be diverted away from the front line towards "enablers" is too easily dismissed.
John Stapleton
Sevenoaks, Kent
Too diverse?
18th February 2004
David Goodhart's "progressive dilemma" (February), the supposed conflict between diversity and solidarity, stems from the belief that taxpayers will not finance a welfare state unless they "think that the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face." But how could British taxpayers ever think that, when the richest tenth pays half of all taxes and the richer half pays nine tenths? Middle-class taxpayers fund many benefits that they never claim. Their willingness to do this must derive from enlightened self-interest or altruism. They are not likely to change attitude on account of greater ethnic diversity; they do not see this as an economic threat and they are mostly too well educated to be xenophobic. It is, rather, some of the net recipients of welfare who see immigrants as unfair competitors for benefits and jobs.
Charles Scanlan
London NW8
Indian IT genius 1
25th March 2004
In her article on the Indian software industry (April), Cheryll Barron rightly praises Indian mathematical achievements. But she is unfairly dismissive of Greek mathematics. The Greeks discovered irrational numbers around 500BC and Theaitetos classified algebraic irrational numbers 100 years later. They had the concept of zero by about 300BC. Eudoxos dealt rigorously with limits and the concept of the infinite; Archimedes extended this knowledge profoundly.
In contrast, Vedic mathematics is almost exclusively concerned with mensuration and geometry. Indian number theory, including its decimal positional system, was only developed centuries later.
The unique contribution of the Greeks was the concept of proof. While other cultures developed methods of calculation and described them by example, the Greeks introduced axioms and theorems, and deduced facts by proof. No other culture in the world has developed this concept, which is at the heart of the verification of computer programs.
Oliver Pretzel
Imperial College
Indian IT genius 2
13th April 2004
Cheryll Barron is so enthusiastic about the benefits of bureaucracy-led software development that she misses other critical points. Rote learning is not unique to software - I prefer my doctor to remember where my bones should be. More critically, the corollary of rote education is often a deferential culture where those below are not allowed to ask questions or report bad news. This can be catastrophic in software, where low-level detail is as important as high-level architecture. For this reason I have seen many businesses bring work back in-house because the results of moving offshore were so bad.
Steve Freeman
London W1
Indian IT genius 3
16th April 2004
Cheryll Barron attributes the recent success of Indian software companies to "an emphasis on learning by rote in Indian schools, and a facility and reverence for abstract thought." As evidence, she states that "Indian firms dominate a world elite of over 120 companies recognised for producing outstandingly accurate software having earned a CMM Level-5 tag."
Having worked as a software engineer for ten years, I have to disagree. Learning by rote may have its uses but it is of no particular benefit in software programming. Barron claims that "many details of computer languages and their rules - and variations of these for different contexts - may be usefully memorised by computer programmers." But the constructs of good programming languages are designed to be orthogonal - that is, not to vary in different contexts. More crucially, learning a computer language involves grasping the concepts involved, and these cannot be memorised. Modern tools can teach you the rest of what you need as you work.
CMM is not an industry standard for measuring the ability to produce accurate software. CMM accreditation establishes that you adhere to a process. The higher the level, the more demanding the process, and the more errors the process will eliminate. However, process is not the only, or the most important factor in programming accuracy. This makes it invalid to compare two companies by their CMM level. CMM-5 is highly labour-intensive; the high number of CMM-5 companies in India may merely reflect the fact that labour is much cheaper there than in the west.
Indians do place a high value on abstract thought, and this may make them natural software engineers. But, in practice, western companies outsource IT work to India for the reason they outsource call centre work - because the country has a pool of cheap, educated, English-speaking labour. Alphabets other than Roman are a big disadvantage when using a computer, hence the relatively poor performance of Japan and China in software which Barron notes.
David Ireland
London WC1
Ignoring Rwanda
9th April 2004
Most of us who write about Africa acknowledge that we failed to do justice to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. My old friend Richard Dowden did better than most in covering the catastrophe; he should be well equipped to analyse this failure. But his article (April) did little more than point out the familiar fact that many Africa correspondents were in South Africa at the time, distracted by the country's first non-racial elections.
Richard, who was Africa editor of the Independent at the time, tells us something of his own harrowing experiences, but they provide few insights, and he draws no lessons. We read that on a visit to Rwanda in January 1994, he is warned by the Red Cross official in Kigali of impending genocide. He decides that it would be "irresponsible" to write about it on the basis of a single source. A few weeks later, on the night of the presidential plane crash which triggered Rwanda's massacre, he discusses the implications of the crash with his foreign editor. Notwithstanding the knowledge gained during his January visit, he decides to fly to South Africa.
Having begun his article by saying that he did not intend to pass judgement, he then singles out the Financial Times for criticism: "The press could not cover more than one Africa story at a time. Some did not even try. The Financial Times did not send its Nairobi correspondent to South Africa, but neither was she sent to Rwanda until a week after the country had collapsed." There was no reason for the FT to send her to South Africa. We had two correspondents based there. If by "collapse" Richard means the start of the killings, the FT correspondent got there two weeks before him. And as he tells us: "Getting (to Rwanda) was not easy." Whatever the reasons, most of us failed Rwanda. Our collective inadequacy deserves a more rigorous, dispassionate analysis than the one offered by Richard.
Michael Holman
Africa editor, FT 1984-2002
HMS Useless
5th February 2004
To judge by Hansard, Lewis Page's article on the shortcomings of the Royal Navy (February) touched a nerve. It rang true for me, because for the last decade I have worked as a computer systems expert for the main company making the command systems for the UK's warships. I no longer work for them because I am an open source expert and the new warships under development are doomed to run on Windows. I have yet to meet a systems engineer who thinks this is a wholesome idea. Windows may have its uses but providing a safe and reliable foundation for command of a ship at sea isn't one of them. Many other countries' navies have grasped this. Why Geoff Hoon and his ministry have embarked on this imprudent procurement is beyond me.
Gerald W Wilson
Ottershaw, Surrey
