Let's Talk About Kevin

by Bob Snowden, School of Psychology, Cardiff University

Work in my laboratory looks at a range of problem behaviours that include violence to others, sexual crime and self injury. In particular, we deal with how we can assess the risks, manage these risk public protection, and help with recovery and rehabilitation. Inevitably such work must also take into consideration mental disorders and their possible effects on these behaviours – these include brain injury, mental illness, and personality disorders. One of the most prominent (and misunderstood) constructs is that of the “psychopath” – inevitably whenever a terrible and violent crime occurs, as those of Kevin in this story, one is tempted to simply label him as “psychopathic” and hope that this “explains” what has happened.

Psychopathy is actually a constellation of personality traits that include grandiosity, callousness, lack of remorse, and shallow affect. These, in turn, may allow for the production of antisocial and violent behaviour. In particular it is thought that most (and nearly all) instrumental homicides (those killings done in cold-blood such as Kevin’s) are perpetrated by psychopaths. Crucially, the psychopath is aware that their behaviours are “bad”, but nevertheless they choose to do them.

Certainly the film suggests that Kevin has these psychopathic traits and would meet diagnostic criteria for psychopathy (such as a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist, PCL-R). However, there appears to be more to him than the unfeeling and uncaring prototype of the psychopath. There also appears to be something akin to “evil” in that from birth he appears to be deliberately going out of his way to inconvenience, upset and hurt people (with little gain to himself). These “sadistic” tendencies have been noted in some psychopaths (but far from all) and such people are known as a “lethal cocktail”.

The crucial question then is “where do they come from”. In the film we are certainly given the impression that Kevin is born this way. Recent research does appear to find a strong genetic influence on psychopathy, but this needs to be put in perspective. First, there is not a gene for psychopathy, but many of the traits (such as callousness) may well have some genetic inheritance. Second, just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it will be apparent at birth (my male pattern baldness, for example, failed to show until my 30s!). It is clear that the expression of many genes is dependent upon the environment. Hence, you may have a bad gene or you may have a bad parent, but what you really don’t want is both a bad gene and a bad parent. I will leave it up to you to think as to whether Kevin had a bad parent……

Space exploration: present and future

by Chris North, School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

Silent Running was released at a time when there were almost no limits on the imagination of science fiction writers and screenwriters. The advent of the space age led to the belief that we really would be travelling through the Solar System in a few decades. Sure, there were technical challenges, but these were thought to be easily surmountable. Other films of that era, such as Arthur C Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", treat the difficulties of space travel with some respect for the science, while others exercise a little more poetic licence. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that - talking about magnetic boots, gravity plating (whatever that is!) might detract from the main story - but the apparent disregard for these things does stick in the throat a little.

By 1972, when this film was released, the furthest we'd reached in terms of unmanned exploration was Mars, and the outer Solar system remained a mystery. The planet Saturn, around which much of the action takes place, has long been a point of fascination, with its majestic ring system setting it apart from the other planets. Since 1972, we've accomplished an awful lot and know an immense amount more than we used to about Saturn. In 1979 Pioneer 11 passed Saturn, and in the 1980s the two Voyager probes flew by and sent back stunning images of the ring system. More recently, in 2004, the Cassini probe arrived at Saturn and is still exploring it today. Some of the most amazing discoveries have been regarding the structure of the rings.

Flying through the rings of Saturn would not be anything like what was seen in the film, though since there had been no observations other than those from Earth this is completely forgivable. The rings are composed of tiny particles of ice, most of which are a fraction of a millimetre in size, though some are huge boulders. The main part of the rings are around 300 thousand km across from side to side, though there are more tenuous rings several times that diameter. What is truly astonishing is their thickness, which was a huge surprise when it was measured. They are one 10 metres or so thick! Flying through them would be fairly damaging to a spacecraft, which would likely find boulders flying towards them at immense speeds, though not for very long. Even the tiny particles are damaging at these speeds which can reach tens of thousands of km per hour.

Of course, manned exploration of the Solar System has yet to begin, with the Moon being the furthest mankind has reached. While there are plans for future missions to Mars and some asteroids, these are still decades away. But we are beginning to understand what the most significant challenges might be, and how they might be addressed. There are some aspects of the film that I think are probably more accurate to manned exploration.

Firstly, everything tends to take place really slowly. That's not because the speeds are low, but because the distances are so immense. It's around a 1.5 billion km (1 billion miles) out to Saturn, and this journey took the Cassini probe 7 years to complete. It didn't go directly there, using gravitational sling-shots of Venus, Earth and Jupiter to give it enough speed to reach Saturn. Of course, in the film they talk about a 6 month journey, but it could be that they have much more powerful engines than we have today. Being so far away causes problems for communication. Radio transmissions, which travel at the speed of light, take around an hour to travel from Earth to Saturn, so meaningful conversation is all but impossible. The fact that they simply get transmissions from Earth is realistic. Of course, the ships would not be controlled from Earth. As indicated in the film, future exploration would rely heavily on computer control.

There would certainly be robots to fix things, as going outside would be a last resort for the people. That's not because of the hassle of donning space suits, but rather the problem of radiation from the Sun. The high energy particles that make up the solar wind from the Sun are the greatest challenge for manned exploration of the Solar System, and any future spacecraft would have to be very heavily shielded. The robots would most likely not look like Huey, Dewy an Louie, though, as there would be a huge range of maintenance robots to do specific jobs, from adjusting components on the outside of the ship to cleaning the waste pipes. I doubt that they will be at all humanoid in appearance, though it's possible that there'll be humanoid robots to help with the ironing and hoovering on board...

Of course, robots need power, as does the rest of the ship. Out at the orbit of Saturn, the Sun is 100 times weaker than it is at Earth, and so solar power really isn't feasible. They don't specify what propulsion method is used on board, though much of the literature of the time assumed we were a few decades off having nuclear fusion power - which is coincidentally how far off we probably are today! Unmanned probes such as Cassini and the Voyager probes use radioisotope thermal generators, which draw power from the radioactive decay of plutonium.

Obviously travelling to Saturn and back requires a significant amount of fuel. The ship seems to be carrying large tanks, so perhaps it was assembled in Earth orbit with large fuel tanks attached. This is possible, but probably not the most efficient way of travelling. Today's spacecraft predominantly rely on normal chemical rockets, though there are other forms of fuel available. The Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres uses an ion drive. Instead of sending the products of a chemical explosions out of the exhaust, Dawn sends a stream of very energetic particles. This produces a very low thrust, but it is very efficient and can burn for a long time. The efficiency is crucial, as a huge challenge for interplanetary travel would be carrying enough fuel to accelerate and decelerate such a large spaceship.

There are other methods of propulsion that are envisaged as well. Rather than chemical explosions, it might be possible to use nuclear explosions to push the ship forwards. Risky, and certainly not advisable in the Earth's atmosphere, but a method that was considered plausible for a long time. Another form of propulsion is a Solar Sail, which only works for very light craft, but requires no fuel. It simply uses the pressure from the Sun's light to push a very lightweight film. It has been demonstrated by both NASA and the Japanese space agency, and may well become the favoured method of propulsion for journeys that do not require high speeds.

In "Silent Running" the ships are meant to be commercial ships which have been used to transport forests, so perhaps they were mining vessels. Maybe they collected fuel in the asteroid belt on their way out to Saturn. Or perhaps they were gong to harvest Saturn's rings to generate fuel from the water ice. I think that the commercial exploitation of space travel is what is really required to make it commonplace. At the moment, Virgin Galactic are offering tickets for 5 minutes of weightlessness for around £100,000, which means it is limited to the very rich and famous. But look at normal air travel, and how quickly that industry has grown in just a century. Things like mining will likely be completely robotic, but I find it hard to believe that we won't eventually have colonies on the Moon and Mars. Perhaps they'll become holiday destinations for the rich and famous, and then eventually build up their own communities. How long will it be before we can get budget flights to Mars with "easyrocket"?

So now the money question: how far off are we? We've proved that we can send people to the Moon, and build laboratories in orbit around the Earth. But for 40 years we've not travelled further than a few hundred kilometres above the Earth's surface. To make matter worse, America's manned spaceflight programme is experiencing a short hiatus after the end of the Space Shuttle programme. They are relying on Russian launches to send astronauts to the International Space Station. In a few years, it is possible that we'll have the first commercial launches of manned spacecraft, from companies such as Space X and their Dragon capsule. NASA are developing a multipurpose crew transport vehicle, which has more in common with the Apollo rockets than the Space Shuttle.

So where to send the next wave of explorers? We've done the Moon, though we could have a practise at setting up a base, possibly near the lunar south pole. China, who are in the process of building a space station in orbit, also have designs on the Moon. Mars is also quoted as being a future destination, though that would involve a mission lasting at least two years and would require many of the current challenges to be overcome, such as the production of fuel on another planet and the shielding from radiation.

The next target for America is currently a near-Earth asteroid. Not necessarily to land on it, but just to "interact" with it. This sounds like an easy challenge, but in fact poses many difficulties that don't exist with missions to the Moon and Mars. It involved operating in deep space, far from the gravitational pull of a planet or Moon. We've shown that people can live and work in Earth orbit, and even on the Moon, but any interplanetary missions of the future will spend the vast majority of their time between the planets. If we can travel to a near-Earth asteroid and back, then perhaps we can send astronauts to the "L2" point, the gravitational sweet-spot where satellites such as Herschel, Planck and (in a few years) the James Web Space Telescope operate. This is a million miles away, and currently well beyond our reach. If we can get to the stage of sending astronauts to work and maybe even live there, then we have a hope of one day building the sort of infrastructure required to taken people to the other planets.

Meghalaya home minister rubbishes GNLA allegation

SHILLONG: Meghalaya home minister HDR Lyngdoh on Thursday rubbished Garo National Liberation Army's (GNLA) claim that the policemen they killed and injured on Monday in East Garo Hills were not on patrolling duty but were extorting money from truckers,
Terming the allegation "baseless", he said the government will take extra precaution to ensure security of police personnel. "Police patrolling will be further intensified," he added. He said the government would not tolerate any such activity by militant organizations in the state. He hinted that more police personal would be deployed in those areas affected by militancy.

Activists demand strong Lokayukta in Meghalaya

Shillong: Anti-graft activists in Meghalaya Monday demanded amendment to the Meghalaya Lokayukta and Up-Lokayukta Act, 2002 on the lines of the ombudsman in Uttarakhand.

"We want the Meghalaya government to either amend or repeal the existing Meghalaya Lokayukta and Up-Lokayukta Act, 2002 since, in the present form, it is toothless and anti-people," Meghalaya Right to Information Movement (MRTIM) chief Michael Syiem told reporters.

Stating that the MRTIM had been demanding an effective anti-corruption mechanism in Meghalaya for the last five years, Syiem said the government was attempting to appoint a Lokayukta in Meghalaya on the basis of a "toothless and anti-people" law.

"This law, which the government had kept in cold storage for more than 10 years, has been suddenly rediscovered as the government knows that the Lokayukta under it would be a powerless body," Syiem said.

Under the present law, the Lokayukta would be a body with merely investigating and recommendatory powers, he said.

It would have no power to initiate suo moto investigation and prosecute or punish corrupt public servants. The ombudsman would also lack financial, judicial and administrative independence, Syiem said.

"The chief minister would be exempted from the purview of Lokayukta and no grievances against ministers, MLAs and high-level bureaucracy could be entertained by this body," he added.

"This act makes it difficult for citizens to file complaints... the law also puts the life and liberty of the complainant in danger by disclosing his name to the accused public servant," Syiem said.

Silent Running: Why Biodiversity Matters

by Lori Frater, BRASS, Cardiff University

Film actors and directors have for a number of years now had a high profile in speaking out about environmental issues. The Earth Communications Office in Los Angeles was a consortium of film directors, producers and actors using their position to raise environmental awareness within the industry and to make the industry more environmentally sustainable. Prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, the Oscar winning actress Cate Blanchett spoke at the World Business Summit on Climate Change, to persuade world business leaders to go beyond mere rhetoric in pushing for action on climate change.

Hollywood isn’t renowned for making the environment a major storyline with perhaps the exception of the disaster blockbusters, like The Day after Tomorrow and 2012 when humanity is pitted against the environment. However, while The Day after Tomorrow was a box office hit, many questioned its scientific basis and so rather than raise awareness about climate change, provided sceptics with the opportunity to challenge climate change science. Small independent films have tackled environmental issues with more success, particularly films like An Inconvenient Truth and the Age of Stupid.

This is not to say that film has not addressed topical environmental issues in the past, just think of Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich challenging big business polluting the environment.

Silent Running was one of the first films with an environmental message. It was produced at a time when the international community were beginning to legislate some of the early international conservation conventions; for example for wetlands (RAMSAR) passed in 1971 and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species passed in 1973.

Like many other films, the future view of the earth is one where people either live in domes away from nature (Logan’s Run) or have left or need to leave the earth (Wall-E or Red Planet). So the question is how accurate is their future premonition of nature disappearing?

In 2002, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge has not been met and some analysts suggest that nature loss is accelerating rather than decelerating. In 2004, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) created shock waves with its major assessment of the world's biodiversity, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans. Some biologists contend that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction - the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts. Scientists now predict that humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve.

Also in 2004, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the work of over 1,000 scientists, demonstrated the rapid decline in all major ecosystems around the world, highlighting that they no longer had the capacity to support human industry and food production indefinitely. This is significant because genetic diversity in terms of an ecosystem is an indicator of the health of that system and its potential to survive.

At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. Increased opportunities for medical discoveries (from genetic resources), economic development (from e.g. raw minerals, water) and adaptation to climate change (forests as sink hubs) all derive from our biodiversity being extensive and healthy. As natural systems such as forests and wetlands disappear, humanity loses the services they currently provide for free. These include purification of air and water, protection from extreme weather events, and the provision of materials for shelter and fire. A large on-going UN-sponsored study into the economics of biodiversity suggests that deforestation alone costs the global economy $2-5 trillion each year. The intention behind this study is the hope that by identifying the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, governments will be encouraged to devote more funds to conservation.

However, at present every day our planet loses more and more species, meaning that the extent of its biodiversity is constantly in decline.

Silent Running: An Ecologist's Perspective

by Rob Thomas, Cardiff School of Biosciences

The world is changing, and has already changed. Global temperatures are rising, weather patterns are altering and evidence for these changes being driven by human changes to the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has (in the view of most mainstream scientists) become compelling.

It is now also becoming clear that the rapid changes to the climate over recent decades have been associated with major changes to the Earth’s ecosystems, species and individual organisms. For example, research at Cardiff School of Biosciences is mapping many of these changes, including case studies as diverse as the impacts of climate change on long-distance migratory birds, disease transmission, interspecific interactions and the structure of ecological communities in rivers, soil and tropical forests. Of course, climate change is not the only ecological issue; the combination of climate change with other human impacts on the environment, such as habitat destruction, pollution and unsustainable harvesting of wildlife (e.g. overfishing) has been described as a “deadly anthropogenic cocktail” which threatens the long-term viability of Earth’s ecosystems.

The film Silent Running is based on the premise that the Earth has already suffered an extreme environmental catastrophe, leading to Earth’s few remaining fragments of forest vegetation being evacuated to a spaceship for safekeeping. This apocalyptic scenario is of course deliberately extreme for cinematic effect, to get us thinking how we would behave in such an unprecedented situation. Yet there is a sense in which we can see Planet Earth itself as a relatively small and vulnerable “spaceship” travelling through the universe, whose fragile and precious ecosystems are the only ones we have left. Indeed, this is one of the great insights obtained by the first astronauts looking down on our home planet from space, seeing Earth for the first time as a tiny yet precious habitable outpost in the vastness of space. The question is; what on Earth can we do to protect it and ensure the survival of its biodiversity, including humanity?

Environmental protection is not straightforward -it is clear that human societies, governments and nation-states consistently fail to act for the good of the planet. Examples of ecologically harmful political and economic structures are innumerable; the Common Fisheries Policy, the Common Agricultural Policy, the abortive Copenhagan climate summit are just a few recent examples, but major human impacts on the environment can be traced back into deep pre-history. These much older examples include the extinctions of native megafauna that coincided with the arrival and spread of humans in Australia and the Americas; the complete deforestation of Polynesian Islands, and the unwitting or deliberate introduction of rats, pigs, goats and rabbits to fragile island ecosystems across the globe.

Case studies of this deadly anthropogenic cocktail of climate change and other human impacts should alarm us; not just because they show us that the biological word is indeed changing rapidly, but because they also highlight how little we currently know about the underlying mechanisms by which climate influences ecosystems, or what we could do to minimise -or even just predict- these ecological impacts. For example, we can describe how ecosystems have responded to climate variability within the historic range, but this does not necessarily let us predict how ecosystems would respond to more substantial climate change in the future. This is because responses of individual species may be non-linear, or community composition and ecosystem function may alter as individual species become extinct. Any or all of these are possibilities, or other, as yet unknown, effects may become apparent; so much is unknown that ecological prediction beyond the recent range of climate conditions remains largely guesswork.

Climate models indicate that even if emissions of greenhouse gases stabilised immediately, the increases in the insulating properties of the atmosphere that have already occurred have committed us to a substantial amount of future warming. Since it is clear that climate change leads to ecological change, substantial ecological changes appear inevitable too. It seems that rather than hoping to prevent climate change, we can only hope to minimise warming as far as reductions in emissions can allow. This means that we need to be pragmatic and focus on how to manage ecological change, for the inherent value of the ecosystems themselves, as well as for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Suggested solutions to the environmental crisis includes “technological fixes” for specific problems, such as “carbon-free” energy from technologies such as nuclear fusion, or by seeding the oceans with iron filings to induce phytoplankton blooms that would act as carbon “sinks”. However, our pragmatism needs to encompass the distinct possibility that humans will accidentally fail to develop workable technologies to achieve these “fixes”, or develop them too late to prevent ecosystem collapse.

This pragmatism also requires a frank appreciation of how human societies, as well as individual humans, behave; our motives as well as our constraints and limitations. For example, we humans are not good at evaluating long-term risk, and we tend to favour our own self-interest, especially over the interests of people we do not know. Similarly, our political structures influence the means by which change is –or is not- possible; governments take a short-term view because they need to be re-elected every 4-5 years, politicians are answerable to their local constituents, or at least to their own nation-state, rather than the global community. Ecologists and conservationists need to acknowledge these human realities (frailties?!) if we are to see meaningful protection of the environment. It is not enough to sigh and wish that humans would be more altruistic –we need to examine the circumstances in which humans have incentives to behave altruistically. The type of incentive may vary; money certainly motivates governments, so our arguments need to be economic as well as moral. Family ties certainly motivate individuals, so our arguments need to encompass our environmental legacy to our own children and grandchildren as well as to the human family as a whole.

The future for Spaceship Earth is uncertain. It does have a future of course, but whether that future includes a healthy environment for humans and for the current diversity of other species, is now largely up to our own generation –in other words, you and me. The responsibility is mind-boggling, and tempting to deny, but there seems no more important issue that the scientific community can address. And despite everything that I have written above, I believe there is room for optimism. Nature is, by very definition, adaptable. And in that sense, nature is resilient. So too is humanity, whose human frailties go hand in hand with traits such as intelligence, morality, and the ability to plan strategically for the future. Climate change may well precipitate the greatest ecological, societal and moral challenges that our species has faced, yet the scientific challenges that lie ahead are exciting, vital and I for one want to be involved!

Business model for sports development proposed

Lamenting over lack of professionalising sports activities in Meghalaya, Indian Institute of Management-Shillong Director Prof Ashoke K Dutta today proposed to set up a business model for sports development and management for gainful employment generation in Meghalaya. Meghalaya has abundance of talent, but there is still much room for professionalising various fields and disciplines of sporting activities, he said during a discussion on Effective Sports Management: A Catalyst for Performance . The discussion was organized by IIM-Shillong through its Centre for Development of North Eastern Region (CEDNER) and attended by various sports associations from the State. Prof Dutta also underscored the need of elements such as responsibilities, mandate, structure, organization, processes and information in Sports association, performance assessment and accountability to be realised as an interactive and interconnected system within the different organisations. Participating in the discussion through live video conference, Prof Douglas Michele Turco of Drexel University, US, highlighted the importance of collaborative academic research in this regard identifying multiple research areas like Market Research, Feasibility Studies etc through tie-ups between sports associations and academic institutions. This way the sports manager gets much better equipped to assess market potential and develop new products and services, Prof Turco, an expert in the field of sports management and research and development, said. Prof Turco had been involved with the Commonwealth Games, US Open Golf Championship, FIFA World Cup, ICC Cricket World Cup and a host of other global sporting events. He also suggested development of off-mainstream sports events for the North East in due consideration of her bountiful natural resources. Attended by leaders of various sporting federations and associations of Meghalaya, the one day meet was well appreciated for providing thought provoking dimensions towards sports and the possible research and developmental aspects, which could boost the functioning of the different sporting bodies. IIM Shillong must continue taking the agenda forward. While we know that there are problems, IIM Shillong can share its expertise through its on ground commitment to help make a difference, Meghalaya Swimming Association president Joe Marwein said. Echoing Mr Marwein, Meghalaya Cricket Association Secretary, Naba Bhattacharya said, It is time various bodies meet regularly and come up with a unified solutions to a unified problems. It is nice to know that we can bank upon the IIM to look for expert advice, and bring in a palpable change in the scenario of sports development.