Secret agents on fire and Microsoft feels the love

Another day, another eBay scam:

In light of this news, eBay should have ‘value’ ratings for buying and selling, along with the feedback. It shouldn’t show the amount, but a score based on the value of the goods purchased or sold. It would go some way in giving an indicator of the type of eBayer. This way, scammers would have to buy/sell much more expensive items, leading to higher fees, making it pointless.

Cheers John

One simple way to remove the 1c feedback issue is to weight feedback based on the amount of money exchanged - feedback for a good £1000 purchase is generally worth more (but maybe not linearly more - that's another scam waiting to happen) than a £1 one.

Peter

Counting the true cost of nuclear waste:

"The cost to the taxpayer of storing the waste, both short and long-term, is likely to be around £70bn over the next 40 years."

I wonder if they have factored in the cost of instituting and running a monitoring system for the next 100,000 years or so that it will take the radioactive waste to become safe. We wouldn't want it leaking into groundwater after 10,000 years because the gradual depredations of water corroded the containers and no-one noticed.

Tricky to cost though, I suppose. To get a sense of the time spans we're talking about, consider that 100,000 years ago Britain was buried beneath an ice sheet during (if memory serves) the last but one glacial period and modern human beings hadn't evolved yet.

Devising a storage facility that will be safe for that time period poses one or two technical challenges. Have we considered the geological changes that will be wrought by the next ice age and the implications for any post-glacial civilisation that will colonise Britain. Can we make warning signs that will last that long, or that will be intelligible to whatever intelligent species is around then?

Richard

A reader objects to Dr Juan's assertion that leaving a baby to cry is tantamount to child abuse:

Here are the references that Dr Juan alluded to without giving:

De Bellis MD, Keshavan MS, Clark DB, Casey BJ, Giedd JN, Boring AM, Frustaci K, Ryan ND, "Developmental traumatology Part II: Brain development." BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY 45 (10): 1271-1284, 1999 (not 2004 as stated)

Teicher MH, Dumont NL, Ito Y, Vaituzis C, Giedd JN, Andersen SL, "Childhood neglect is associated with reduced corpus callosum area." BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY 56 (2): 80-85, 2004

Now, the DeBellis study examined the brain development of maltreated children diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder compared to a control group and found differences to be present. But the definition of maltreatment used was typical of real abuse, not of being left to cry it out after all other possible causes of distress have been eliminated.

The Teicher study included a group that had suffered neglect and concluded that neglect alone could affect brain development. But here, again, neglect was not defined as leaving the child to cry it out after all other etc. To quote from the methods section of their paper "Neglect was the chronic failure of a parent or caretaker to provide a minor with basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, medical care, educational opportunities, protection, and supervision.".

Of course I'm not saying that crying out is undeniably without side-effects, but the studies referred to by Dr Juan simply don't support the conclusion that he tells us Professor Sunderland has drawn and for which he has appointed himself such an enthusiastic cheerleader. Of course his way leads to a dramatic headline and the chance to self-righteously denounce a new kind of 'child abuse'. But it may also have led parents of babies who won't stop crying (they do exist) to feel unnecessary guilt, shame and alarm on top of the distress they already feel. A scientist such as Dr Juan has a responsibility to do better than this.

Matthew Wright University of Southampton UK

And the heatwave causes James Bond to spontaneously combust. Oh, all right. It wasn't James Bond, and he didn't spontaneously combust. And it probably wasn't caused by the heatwave either. But still, stuff burned down:

>The cause of the blaze remains unclear.

It's simple. Someone in the disassembly crew leaned on the big red self-destruct button, causing the nuclear reactor hidden in the volcano to go critical. We're lucky that whole end of London weren't destroyed.

Jim

"Hideous spectre" indeed! A white cat was seen strolling away from the scene... (just kidding)

Alex

Enjoy le weekend. ®