A

We launched Plain English Campaign in 1979 with a ritual shredding of appalling government and municipal council forms in Parliament Square, London. We had become so fed up of people visiting our advice centre in Salford, Greater Manchester, to complain about incomprehensible forms that we thought we ought to take action. At the time the shredding seemed like merely throwing sand in the eyes of the charging lion, but it briefly caught the public imagination and left an impression on government and business. Although we’re pleased with the new plain English awareness in government departments, many local councils and businesses maintain a stout resistance to change. One council began a letter to its tenants about a rent increase with two sentences averaging 95 words, full of bizarre housing finance jargon and waffle about Acts of Parliament. The London Borough of Ealing sent such an incomprehensible letter to ISO residents that 40 of them wrote or telephoned to complain and ask for clarification. Many were upset and frightened that the council was planning to imprison them if they didn’t fill in the accompanying form. In fact, the letter meant nothing of the sort, and the council had to send another letter to explain.

B

Plain legal English can be used as a marketing tactic. Provincial Insurance issued their plain English Home Cover policy in 1983 and sold it heavily as such. In the first 18 months, its sales rocketed, drawing in about an extra £1.5 million of business. Recently, the Eagle Star Group launched a plain English policy to a chorus of congratulatory letters from policyholders. People, it seems, prefer to buy a policy they can understand.

C

Two kinds of instructions give us a lot of concern – medical labels and do-it-yourself products. With medical labels, there is a serious gap between what the professionals think is clear and what is really clear to patients. A survey by pharmacists Raynor and Sillito found that 31% of patients misunderstood the instruction on eye drops ‘To be instilled’, while 33% misunderstood ‘Use sparingly’. The instruction ‘Take two tablets 4 hourly’ is so prone to misunderstanding (for example, as 8 tablets an hour) that we think it should be banned. Unclear instructions on do-it-yourself products cause expense and frustration to customers. Writing the necessary instructions for these products is usually entrusted to someone who knows the product inside out, yet the best qualification for writing instructions is ignorance. The writer is then like a first-time user, discovering how to use the product in a step-by-step way. Instructions never seem to be tested with first-time users before being issued. So vital steps are missed out or components are mislabeled or not labelled at all. For example, the instructions for assembling a sliding door gear say: ‘The pendant bolt centres are fixed and should be at an equal distance from the centre of the door.’ This neglects to explain who should do the fixing and how the bolt centres will get into the correct position. By using an imperative and an active verb the instruction becomes much clearer: ‘Make sure you fix the centres of the pendant bolts at an equal distance from the centre of the door.’

D

Effectively, the Plain English movement in the US began with President Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12044 of 23 March 1978, that required regulations to be written in plain language. There were earlier government efforts to inform consumers about their rights and obligations, such as the Truth in Lending Act (1969) and the Fair Credit Billing Act (1975), which emphasized a body of information that consumers need in simple language. But President Carter’s executive order gave the prestige and force of a president to the movement. All over the country isolated revolts or efforts against legalistic gobbledygook at the federal, state and corporate levels seemed to grow into a small revolution. These efforts and advances between the years 1978 and 1985 are described in the panel ‘The Plain English Scorecard’.

E

The Bastille has not fallen yet. The forces of resistance are strong, as one can see from the case of Pennsylvania as cited in the Scorecard. In addition, President Ronald Reagan’s executive order of 19 February 1981, revoking President Carter’s earlier executive order, has definitely slowed the pace of plain English legislation in the United States. There are there main objections to the idea of plain English. They are given below, with the campaign’s answer to them:

F

The statute would cause unending litigation and clog the courts. Simply not true in all the ten states with plain English laws for consumer contracts and the 34 states with laws or regulations for insurance policies. Since 1978 when plain English law went into effect in New York there have been only four litigations and only two decisions. Massachusetts had zero cases. The cost of compliance would be enormous. Translation of legal contracts into non-legal everyday language would be a waster of time and money. The experience of several corporations has proved that the cost of compliance is often outweighed by solid benefits and litigation savings. Citibank of New York made history in 1975 by introducing a simplified promissory note and afterwards simplified all their forms. Citibank counsel Carl Falsenfield says: ‘We have lost no money and there has been no litigation as a result of simplification.’ The cost-effectiveness of clarity is demonstrable. A satisfied customer more readily signs on the bottom line and thus contributes to the corporation’s bottom line. Some documents simply can’t be simplified. The only legal language that has been tested for centuries in the courts is precise enough to deal with a mortgage, a deed, a lease, or an insurance policy. Here, too, the experience of several corporations and insurance companies has proved that contracts and policies can be made more understandable without sacrificing legal effectiveness.

G

What does the future hold for the Plain English movement? Today, American consumers are buffeted by an assortment of pressures. Never before have consumers had as many choices in areas like financial services, travel, telephone services, and supermarket products. There are about 300 long-distance phone companies in the US. Not long ago, the average supermarket carried 9,000 items; today, it carries 22,000. More importantly, this expansion of options – according to a recent report – is faced by a staggering 30 million Americans lacking the reading skills to handle the minimal demands of daily living. The consumer’s need, therefore, for information expressed in plain English is more critical than ever.

H

What is needed today is not a brake on the movement’s momentum but another push toward plain English contracts from consumers. I still hear plain English on the TV and in the streets, and read plain English in popular magazines and best-sellers, but not yet in many functional documents. Despite some victories, the was against gobbledygook is not over yet. We do well to remember, the warning of Chrissie Maher, organizer of Plain English Campaign in the UK: ‘People are not just injured when medical labels are written in gobbledygook – they die. Drivers are not just hurt when their medicines don’t tell them they could fall asleep at the wheel – they are killed.’

A

THE scientific study of twins goes back to the late 19th century, when Francis Galton, an early geneticist, realised that they came in two varieties: identical twins born from one egg and non-identical twins that had come from two. That insight turned out to be key, although it was not until 1924 that it was used to formulate what is known as the twin rule of pathology, and twin studies really got going.

B

The twin rule of pathology states that any heritable disease will be more concordant (that is, more likely to be jointly present or absent) in identical twins than in non-identical twins – and, in turn, will be more concordant in non-identical twins than in non-siblings. Early work, for example, showed that the statistical correlation of skin-mole counts between identical twins was 0.4, while non-identical twins had a correlation of only 0.2. (A score of 1.0 implies a perfect correlation, while a score of zero implies no correlation.) This result suggests that moles are heritable, but it also implies that there is an environmental component to the development of moles, otherwise, the correlation in identical twins would be close to 1.0.

C

Twin research has shown that whether or not someone takes up smoking is determined mainly by environmental factors, but once he does so, how much he smokes is largely down to his genes. And while a person’s religion is clearly a cultural attribute, there is a strong genetic component to religious fundamentalism. Twin studies are also unraveling the heritability of various aspects of human personality. Traits from neuroticism and anxiety to thrill – and novelty-seeking all have large genetic components. Parenting matters, but it does not determine personality in the way that some had thought.

D

More importantly, perhaps, twin studies are helping the understanding of diseases such as cancer, asthma, osteoporosis, arthritis and immune disorders. And twins can be used, within ethical, for medical experiments. A study that administered vitamin C to one twin and a placebo to the other found that it had no effect on the common cold. The lesson from all of today’s twin studies is that most human traits are at least partially influenced by genes. However, for the most part, the age-old dichotomy between nature and nurture is not very useful. Many genetic programs are open to input from the environment, and genes are frequently switched on or off by environmental signals. It is also possible that genes themselves influence their environment. Some humans have an innate preference for participation in sports. Others are drawn to novelty. Might people also be drawn to certain kinds of friends and types of experience? In this way, a person’s genes might shape the environment they act in as much as the environment shapes the actions of the genes.

E

In the past, such research has been controversial. Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor working at the Auschwitz extermination camp during the second world war, was fascinated by twins. He sought them out among arrivals at the camp and preserved them from the gas-chambers for a series of brutal experiments. After the war, Cyril Burt, a British psychologist who worked on the heredity of intelligence, tainted twin research with results that appear, in retrospect, to have been rather too good. Some of his data on identical twins who had been reared apart were probably faked. In any case, the prevailing ideology in the social sciences after the war was Marxist and disliked suggestions that differences in human potential might have underlying genetic causes. Twin studies were thus viewed with suspicion.

F

The ideological pendulum has swung back; however, as the human genome project and its aftermath have turned genes for abstract concepts to real pieces of DNA. The role of genes in sensitive areas such as intelligence is acknowledged by all but a few die-hards. The interesting questions now concern how nature and nurture interact to produce particular bits of biology, rather than which of the two is more important. Twin studies, which are a good way to ask these questions, are back in fashion, and many twins are enthusiastic participants in this research.

G

Research at the Twinsburg festival began in a small way, with a single stand in 1979. Gradually, news spread and more scientists began turning up. This year, half a dozen groups of researchers were lodged in a specially pitched research tent. In one corner of this tent, Paul Breslin, who works at the Monell Institute in Philadelphia, watched over several tables where twins sat sipping clear liquids from cups and making notes. It was the team’s third year at Twinsburg. Dr Breslin and his colleagues want to find out how genes influence human perception, particularly the senses of smell and taste and those (warmth, cold, pain, tingle, itch and so on) that result from stimulation of the skin. Perception is an example of something that is probably influenced by both genes and experience. Even before birth, people are exposed to flavours such as chocolate, garlic, mint and vanilla that pass intact into the bloodstream, and thus to the fetus. Though it is not yet clear whether such pre-natal exposure shapes taste-perception, there is evidence that it shapes preferences for foods encountered later in life.

H

However, there are clearly genetic influences at work, as well – for example in the ability to taste quinine. Some people experience this as intensely bitter, even when it is present at very low levels. Others, whose genetic endowment is different, are less bothered by it. Twin studies make this extremely clear. Within a pair of identical twins, either both, or neither, will find quinine hard to swallow. Non-identical twins will agree less frequently.

I

On the other side of the tent Dennis Drayna, from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, in Maryland, was studying hearing. He wants to know what happens to sounds after they reach the ear. It is not clear, he says, whether the sound is processed into sensation mostly in the ear or in the brain. Dr Drayna has already been involved in a twin study which revealed that the perception of musical pitch is highly heritable. At Twinsburg, he is playing different words, or parts of words, into the left and right ears of his twinned volunteers. The composite of the two sounds that an individual reports hearing depends on how he processes this diverse information and that, Dr Drayna believes, may well be influenced by genetics.

J

Elsewhere in the marquee, Peter Miraldi, of Kent State University in Ohio, was trying to find out whether genes affect an individual’s motivation to communicate with others. A number of twin studies have shown that personality and sociability are heritable, so he thinks this is fertile ground. And next to Mr Miraldi was a team of dermatologists from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. They are looking at the development of skin disease and male-pattern baldness. The goal of the latter piece of research is to find the genes responsible for making men’s hair fall out.

K

The busiest part of the tent, however, was the queue for forensic-science research into fingerprints. The origins of this study are shrouded in mystery. For many months, the festival’s organisers have been convinced that the Secret Service – the American government agency responsible for, among other things, the safety of the president – is behind it. When The Economist contacted the Secret Service for more information, we were referred to Steve Nash, who is chairman of the International Association for Identification (IAI) and is also a detective in the scientific investigations section of the Marin Country Sheriff’s Office in California. The IAI, based in Minnesota, is an organisation of forensic scientists from around the world. Among other things, it publishes the Journal of Forensic Identification.

Photovoltaics on the rooftop

A natural choice for powering the family home

A

In the past, urban homeowners have not always had much choice in the way electricity is supplied to their homes. Now, however, there is a choice, and a rapidly increasing number of households worldwide are choosing the solar energy option. Solar energy, the conversion of sunlight into energy, is made possible through the use of ‘photovoltaics’, which are simple appliances that fit onto the roof of a house.

B

The photovoltaics-powered home remains connected to the power lines, but no storage is required on-site, only a box of electronics (the inverter) to the interface between the photovoltaics and the grid network. Figure 1 illustrates the system. During the day, when the home may not be using much electricity, excess power from the solar array is fed back to the grid, to factories and offices that need daytime power. At night, power flows the opposite way. The grid network effectively provides storage. If the demand for electricity is well matched to when the sun shines, solar energy is especially valuable. This occurs in places like California in the US and Japan, where air-conditioning loads for offices and factories are large but heating loads for homes are small.

C

The first systematic exploration of the use of photovoltaics on homes began in the US during the 1970s. A well-conceived program started with the sitting of a number of residential experiment stations’ at selected locations around the country, representing different climatic zones. These stations contained a number of ‘dummy’ houses, each with different solar-energy system design. Homes within the communities close to these stations were monitored to see how well their energy use matched the energy generated by the stations’ dummy roofs. A change in US government priorities in the early 1980s halted this program.

D

With the US effort dropping away, the Japanese Sunshine Project came to the fore. A large residential test station was installed on Rokko Island beginning in 1986. This installation consists of 18 ‘dummy’ homes. Each equipped with its own 2-5 kilowatt photovoltaic system (about 20 – 50 square meters for each system). Some of these simulated homes have their own electrical appliances inside, such as TV sets, refrigerators and air conditioning units, which switch on and off under computer control providing a lavish lifestyle for the non-existent occupants. For the other systems, electronics simulate these household loads. This test station has allowed being explored in a systematic way, under well-controlled test conditions. With no insurmountable problems identified, the Japanese have used the experience gained from this station to begin their own massive residential photovoltaics campaign.

E

Meanwhile, Germany began a very important ‘1,000 roof program’ in 1990, aimed at installing photovoltaics on the roofs of 1,000 private homes. Large federal and regional government subsidies were involved, accounting in most cases for 70% of the total system costs. The program proved immensely popular, forcing its extension to over 2,000 homes scattered across Germany. The success of this program stimulated other European countries to launch a similar program.

F

Japan’s ‘one million roof program’ was prompted by the experience gained in the Rokko Island test site and the success of the German 1,000 roof program. The initially quoted aims of the Japanese New Energy Development Organization were to have 70,000 homes equipped with the photovoltaics by the year 2000, on the way to 1 million by 2010. The program made a modest start in 1994 when 539 systems were installed with a government subsidy of 50 percent. Under this program, entire new suburban developments are using photovoltaics.

G

This is good news, not only for the photovoltaic industry but for everyone concerned with the environment. The use of fossil fuels to generate electricity is not only costly in financial terms, but also in terms of environmental damage. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels in the production of electricity are a major contributor to the greenhouse effect. To deal with this problem, many governments are now proposing stringent targets on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions permitted. These targets mean that all sources of greenhouse gas emissions including residential electricity use will receive closer attention in the future.

H

It is likely that in the future, governments will develop building codes that attempt to constrain the energy demands of new housing. For example, the use of photovoltaics or the equivalent may be stipulated to lessen demands on the grid network and hence reduce fossil fuel emissions. Approvals for building renovations may also be conditional upon taking such energy-saving measures. If this were to happen, everyone would benefit. Although there is an initial cost in attaching the system to the rooftop, the householder’s outlay is soon compensated with the savings on energy bills. In addition, everyone living on the planet stands to gain from the more benign environmental impact.