Career on the shelf

Your article about graduates (Gizza job: the new middle-class mantra, News Review, last week) hit a nerve. I’m a solicitor on a career break, looking after my young family. I’d often joked that I could always get a night job stacking shelves if money got tight. Now I need one I can’t find one, as supermarkets are inundated with applications.

Tracyann Tweedie
Bovey Tracey, Devon

Schools specialisms

Chris Woodhead says he knows of “no evidence” that specialist school status lifts standards (News Review, January 18). But Professor David Jesson’s annual study for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust shows it does, in three ways. Schools with a specialism outperform other nonselective schools in GCSE results; they also do better on a value-added basis. Third, academies, which all have specialisms, are improving faster than any other group of schools, a key reason being the bidding process for specialist status, which requires them to set goals and reapply against new ones after three years.

Elizabeth Reid
Chief Executive, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust

Evita’s true beginnings
I was mildly surprised to read last week that Oliver Stone “wrote the film script for Evita, the musical starring Madonna” (Stone brands Evita a prostitute, World News). I thought I did. Every word, bar What a shame that PRS for Music was portrayed so negatively last week. More than 90% of songwriters and about three that either the singers got wrong or the director changed without my knowledge.

Sir Tim Rice
London SW13

The true carbon footprint of going online

In your story on data centers (Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches, News, January 11) I was quoted out of context. What I said in full was: “Data centers are among the very most energy-intensive facilities imaginable, often using 100 times as much energy per unit of floor area (and thus emitting 100 times as much greenhouse gas emissions) as a typical office building. Fortunately, there are scores of technologies and management practices that can improve efficiency. State-of-the art facilities can cost-effectively reduce energy demand by up to 80% compared to typical practice.”

In my view, the article conflated energy used by the searcher’s own computer with that in control of Google or any other search engine and erroneously implied that the alternative means of information acquisition produce no greenhouse-gas emissions, when, in fact, the emissions are higher.

Evan Mills
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA