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20 July 2011
From Carina Hoorn, Geologist and former lecturer at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
The article on the arrest and detention of meteorite hunters Michael Farmer and Robert Ward reads more like an adventure story than an account of how scientists would collect samples in foreign fields (2 July, p 28) . They did not seem to have engaged in partnership with academic or government authorities in Oman. There, …
20 July 2011
From Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh
Jim Giles and Zena Iovino described abuses of outsourcing website Mechanical Turk by those offering online jobs (9 July, p 20) . Abuse frequently occurs in the opposite direction too. Researchers paying turkers to fill in multiple choice questionnaires find that a large proportion try to bend the rules. In order to maximise income, they …
20 July 2011
From Colin Jowett
In talking of the post-shuttle era (9 July, p 3) , one would have to question the point of crewed low-Earth orbit missions – low-Earth orbit being up to 2000 kilometres from the Earth's surface, and including the International Space Station. This is probably what the US administration has figured out. Other than an extremely …
20 July 2011
From Nigel Sawyer
In your "Instant Expert" on intelligence ( 2 July ), I was surprised at the uncritical acceptance of g, the general factor of intelligence. Author Stephen Jay Gould has dismissed it as an artefact of the mathematical method used to calculate it. Readers who want a more sceptical view should read Gould's 1981 book The …
20 July 2011
From Richard Horton
When Alex Bellos was asked if any strange suggestions came up in his exploration of favourite numbers (25 June, p 29) , he said 73, because a character in the comedy show The Big Bang Theory had described it as the "Chuck Norris of numbers". There may be another explanation for its popularity. In Morse …
20 July 2011
• Pharmaceutical firm Lundbeck, which has stopped supplying pentobarbital to US death row prisons (9 July, p 5) , is based in Copenhagen, Denmark
Issue no. 2822 published 23 July 2011
