Olga Eizner Favreau
Montreal, QC
A Lost Cause
I am rather stunned that Alex Hutchinson’s “Global Impositioning Systems” (November) completely ignored a major factor in cognitive mapping: gender differences. It has long been held that men tend to navigate quite differently than women do. Hutchinson did begin to address the issue when he spoke of the two major categories of human mapping strategies, but he left out that males tend to favour the spatial strategy, while females favour the stimulus-response approach. We all know this is rich fodder for stand-up comedians, who joke about the husband who refuses to ask directions. But, in fact, there is a solid scientific basis for it. In early human history, females remained at camps, tending to all the other business of life. That “tending” engendered considerable communication among them, which could explain their propensity to adopt the stimulus-response approach. Meanwhile, “back at the ranch,” men were out chasing game; those who couldn’t use an adaptive spatial strategy to find their way home tended to be naturally selected out by hungry predators...
E.M.
Online
“Males tend to favour the spatial strategy approach, while females favour the stimulus-response approach.”
Thanks for the comments — interesting stuff. I just wanted to point out, though, that the above statement is incorrect. Here’s what McGill University researcher Véronique Bohbot had to say on the topic:
“There are sex differences in navigation; however, women and men use spatial and response strategies in equal proportions. In fact, there are many studies that show that women are better than men on spatial tasks that require knowledge about the relative position of objects in an environment. Studies of hippocampal volume in men and women support this: women have bigger hippocampi than men!
So women navigate using objects/landmarks more than men. We showed, in one of our experiments, that if you remove landmarks, women become impaired relative to men. This study suggests that men are better at using non-spatial strategies than women to compensate for the lack of landmarks. Many other studies in the literature suggest that men use Euclidian and polar coordinates (e.g., Go two miles north, then head west for 1.5 miles). So sex differences in navigation show a male advantage or a female advantage depending on the nature of the task.”
Alex Hutchinson
Safer Trip
In “Fly At Your Own Risk” (November), Carol Shaben alerts us to Transport Canada’s dilatory response to questions surrounding the inadequacy of its safety oversight program: an apparently irrelevant $690,000 consultants’ study. Indeed, this is precisely the type of bureaucratic game I discussed some eighteen years ago in connection with the disintegration of the Transportation Safety Board’s sad predecessor, the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, in my book Improbable Cause.
But while Shaben looks to Justice Virgil Moshansky’s brilliant report on the 1989 Air Ontario crash at Dryden for a solution, his analysis was by no means the first. Roll back the clock another decade to the Commission of Inquiry into Aviation Safety, initiated in the wake of a deadly air crash at Cranbrook, BC. Based on exhaustive hearings and frightening case studies, Justice Charles Dubin urged the creation of a long-sought-after independent tribunal to investigate aviation accidents and conduct public inquiries in the interest of aviation safety. Had the resulting casb functioned as intended, Moshansky’s inquiry would have been unnecessary. (Judge C. H. Rolf had, presciently, made this very observation about his own inquiry into the 1984 Wapiti Aviation crash.)
After the CASB’s collapse, following the scandalous investigation of Canada’s worst-ever aviation disaster — the crash of the Arrow Air DC-8 in Gander, Newfoundland, in 1985 — the legislation drafted to replace it didn’t incorporate recommendations from a study (yes, another) by future Supreme Court justice John Sopinka that reiterated Dubin’s call for a truly independent tribunal. Instead, the new multi-modal tsb became “an agency of inefficiency, secrecy and chronic timidity,” according to yet another long-forgotten study — a year-long review of the TSB’s first three years of operation conducted by former Alberta cabinet minister Louis Hyndman.
Do we need yet another inquiry at this point to rediscover Justice Dubin’s remedy? Or should we focus on the record of thwarted reforms and the twice-failed implementation? Remember, every time history repeats itself the price goes up.
Les Filotas
Ottawa, ON
