http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/index.cfm?forumid=17 en-US FuseTalk Standard Edition 3.2 Build 80405 Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=52509 2013-05-16T12:19:21 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=52509#comments 0
The tragedy, perhaps, for the well-meaning designers of Europe is that the groups most likely to take advantage of these flexibilities - the young, the adventurous, the footloose, and the unsettled, often ethnic, are not a powerful bloc at the ballot box. It is precisely because they are not so established in their home society that they move in the first place.

The few percent who are mobile in the European sense do not provide a lobby national politicians need cater to. Unlike the grumbling, settled, hard working stay-at-homes who stay a fixed address for long enough to get onto the local electoral roll.

If Britain left the EU, about which there is much debate at the moment, will, in the future, the last thirty years be seen as an unusual period of free movement? That is one way of looking at it. To be fair to the grumblers, this freedom of movement was always likely to have asymmetrical effects given that, while EU mobility is international, the welfare state is still a national project. Taxation is a national affair. So is most politics. And those with a fixed address, and on the electoral roll, are more easily taxed...and therefore have something to grumble about.

You can see this in higher education. The EU's freedom to settle also means the freedom to study on the same terms as locals, and residents of those countries where higher education is free or low cost could reasonably ask why they should be subsidising the flocks of young Europeans coming from countries where higher education is of poor quality and/or is not subsidised by the local taxpayer. It is sort of a problem in England.

It is true that English universities charge tuition fees. Unlike Germany and Scandinavia, where it is mostly free, or France and Belgium, where the costs are a in the hundreds of euros. These countries are therefore more generous to EU students than the UK. On the other hand, an English university education remains highly in demand, and EU students pay the same capped tuition fees as domestic students, and are eligible for student fee loans on the same terms as English students. The fees are only repayable once they have got a job. The BBC reported a few days ago that foreign EU students owe £50m to the Government in non paid fees. Hard to track down when they have returned home...And who is to know, when they are back home, that they do have a job that compels repayment? So it is sort of a subsidy to EU students.

A benefit if Britain leaves the EU is that it could free up university places for domestic students as the number of EU students arriving on UK shores is likely to fall. The reason: with Britain outside the EU, fees for EU students would rise to the levels currently paid by overseas students, those from India and Saudi Arabia, and the like, and they would not be eligible for loans.

A researcher at the LSE, Gill Wyness, has looked at the costs and benefits to British education if the UK leaves the EU. She thinks there would be less competition and easier for British students to get into the university of their choice. There are currently 74,000 EU students studying here, the equivalent of seven medium-sized British universities.

In addition, university funding shouldn't suffer. If you went by current demand, at 1.3 students per place, UK students could easily fill the places vacated by the EU students, paying the same rates - and the money might more easily be chased up.

On the other hand, there are costs too, argues Gill Wyness. The EU students who displaced British students presumably got their places because they were more academically able. Their absence would lead to a "fall in the quality of the student intake", argues Wyness. Since EU nationals make up not a small proportion of the teaching and research staff at UK universities, the university environment as a whole would lose out if it was made harder for them to work here. Three of Britain's last five Nobel prizes went to Europeans active at British universities.

One of Britain's few remaining areas of true excellence is its science base, which surely draws on its culture of openness to international recruitment. Britain has the best universities in Europe, a reputation that continues to make Britain the destination for the brightest minds in research. It is the envy of other EU countries, and in fact Germany, Britain's main science competitor in Europe, has just launched a new research initiative, Zukunftspakt 2022, aimed at, by additional funding, getting a couple of universities to the top of the European league, currently occupied by Imperial and Cambridge.

The recommendations, apparently backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, tipped to win this autumn's German national election, include the funding of 250 additional professorships at German universities. A scientist herself - unlike the arts graduates at the top of British political life - she seems to understand the value of science spending. George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, is cutting British public science spending in real terms, but that's another, and sad, story..

It's a hard call, Britain receives many thousands of EU students a year. Some of these may be a net drain to the tax payer - although it must be emphasized they are not eligible for maintenance loans, only fee loans. On the other hand, among those many, a large minority raise the academic tone by virtue of the greater competition they introduce. And there are a few who go on to make a great contribution to British life. Hard to know which ones, in advance, will do so.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51888 2013-04-04T11:12:20 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51888#comments 0
The German-Swedish historian Christoph Andersson's Operation Norrsken (Operation Northern Lights) tells us some new things about East German Swedish relations by digging in Stasi archives and talking to ageing protagonists on both sides of the iron curtain. Some of his findings are new; others are better known but put here into a better context, Most of the material came from the Stasi archives BStU In Berlin. The Swedish archives have not been quite so open.

The context was Reagan's campaign to win the Cold War one of whose aspects was strangling Soviet Union's and its allies' access to western high technology without which the USSR would even more rapidly lose the economic race with the West.

Sweden's background was that, as part of policy of neutrality, it had one developed one of Europe's most powerful military defences from the 1950s to the late 1970s, with a surprisingly large arms industry developed as a measure of independence from the two opposing blocs, NATO and Warsaw Pact. The Social Democrat governments which totally dominated Swedish politics for thirty years after the war were quite hawkish, right wing and anti-Communist. All that changed with the election of the left wing Social Democrat Olof Palme in 1969. He was pacifist and did not believe in military expenditure, which the faltering Swedish economy hit by the oil crisis of 1973 anyway found increasingly hard to afford. Through Olof Palme's defence procurerment cuts, the large domestic arms industry was left without a domestic market and desperately cast abroad for new customers while abiding by Sweden's policy of "moral" arms exports - which excluded countries at war or belonging to a military bloc. Which left rather a narrow field.

Then you had the middle men, Germans, Swedes, or German Swedes (some of who had been anti Nazi exiles who fled Germany before 1939) looking to make a fast buck through helping Swedish arms companies circumvent export restrictions by using East Germany as a conduit or secret destination in return for generous commissions. And then you had the East German state, desperate for western and Swedish technology and arms as well as hard currency to be earned from reexporting Swedish materiel to regimes like Iran.

In some cases, the ruses seem transparent to us now. Leading defence firm Bofors transported trainloads of gunpowder from Sweden via West Germany to neutral Austria, which was legal. But the rail carriages were then redesignated with a new destination - Finland, via East Germany this time. The rail carriages got "lost in transit" through East Germany, courtesy of Stasi in a secret deal agreed with Bofors. The gunpowder cargo was shipped out of Rostock to Iran, which was an illegal destination for Swedish arms exports because it was at war with Iraq at the time. The smuggling was exposed when West German customs officers got suspicious that the same railway carriages returned to West Germany from Austria, the fake destination, with full cargoes and a new destination only an hour after leaving the country. Still, the smuggling went on for three years.

More serious for Sweden's relations with the United States was how, in the 1980s, Swedish businessmen took advantage of Sweden's freedom to import American high technology, Vax super computers, and re-exported them to the East bloc. When the Swedish authorities found out, unpaid taxes on the enormous commissions from Communist regimes seemed to bother the Swedish authorities much more than illegal smuggling of American high technology to the East bloc. Sweden famously, in those days, had the world's highest taxes.

How many of these cases were unknown to the Swedish government? It is still unclear.

But one final instance of goods transfer worth mentioning was legal, indeed sanctioned, by the Social Democrat government of Olof Palme. The Swedish engineering firm ASEA was allowed to export isostatic presses to East Germany, ostensibly for making tape machine recording heads, but the presses also had a dual use as nuclear weapons production technology.

Twenty years on, the author, Christoph Andersson, tracks down one of the presses to an abandoned factory in former East Germany, complete with posters of East German nudes and dusty coffee cups. But the other three presses he is not able to trace. The author thinks the Palme government was too trusting of Erich Honecker, the East German leader
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Andersson shows that both overt and covert relations between Sweden and East Germany were closer than suspected. Sweden's neutrality in the Cold War was more complex - and less pure - than thought.

The Americans took Swedish technology smuggling to the East bloc very seriously indeed. And the whole story affected relations between the right wing Reagan administration and the left wing socialist one of Olof Palme which "preached peace in the morning " but which seemed to have a cavalier approach towards American security and technology interests at the same time.

Whether the factual Swedish East German revelations will lead us any nearer the solution to Olof Palme's murder is anyone's guess. The investigation is said to have been reinvigorated by the renewed public interest. The fictional TV series, penned by a former academic at the Swedish police academy, said the killing was carried out by the Swedish security forces, who thought Sweden's relations with the East bloc were far too close. Of course, that is just fiction.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51421 2013-03-14T08:07:24 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51421#comments 0
The Spanish data protection authority is presenting a number of cases before the European Court of Justice where damaging information about Spanish citizens appear on the net, affecting their careers or livelihoods. In one case, a surgeon complained that a malpractice charge in a local newspaper appeared high up in the search results when his name was googled, when the news that he was in fact acquitted of the charge didn't appear at all. Guess what potential clients are likely to think as they google him?

Another case relates to the auctioning of a man's property relating to non payment of social security charges. In this case, the information was not wrong, but old, and likely to haunt the man's reputation.

The Spanish data protection authority Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) sided with these complainants - and about 200 other cases of embarrassing or misleading information. After being through the Spanish courts, with Google at the losing end, the issue has now been referred upwards to the European level.

Google's argument is it is merely a conduit of the information which it indexes and that it is up to the publishers to remove the information from their website. The search engine's lawyers told the 15 judge panel at the ECJ last month that the world's largest search engine isn't a "data controller" but just an "intermediary in terms of the data which it indexes".

Requests to remove information from Google when it was put online by a newspaper would mean a big shift in responsibility from the publisher to the search engine and that would amount to censorship.

Google's lawyers added that "Only the publisher can take the view to remove content. Once removed from the source webpage, content will disappear from a search engine's index. Of course, there will be times when information is published online that is subsequently found to be incorrect, defamatory or otherwise illegal, Such content can be removed from the source website and from search engines. But search engines should not be subject to censorship of legitimate content for the sake of privacy or for any other reason."

A preliminary decision from the EU's advocate general comes in June,and a full decision by the ECJ later. Its decision will apply to the entire 27 nation bloc. The European Commission will be looking at the decision closely when framing its "right to be forgotten" privacy directives later this year. The Commission's lawyers argued to the ECJ that Google does control data, thereby contradicting a conclusion by the group comprising the EU's national data watchdogs, saying it doesn't.

My prediction is that the ECJ, steeped in the more limited Continental European tradition of free speech and more extensive concern for privacy than the US where Google is based, will side with the Spanish data protection authorities. In that case, it would appear that Google becomes responsible for the information it indexes.

It is a tricky and hugely important question, and I am conflicted..

While one fully sympathises with people who can't live down their pasts because of something published on the net they can't persuade the publishers to take down - perhaps because the publishers have a legal obligation to list it, or is out of jurisdiction, for example - it would place a huge onus on Google to police the net. And it may pave the way for an avalanche of claims from powerful actors and individuals to remove information about them which they find disobliging.

Where to draw the line between unfair harm to a vulnerable individual's reputation and just censoring free expression of opinions actors happen not to like? The internet has been a revolutionary and very free place, Now it may become more reined in - and that may not be a good thing.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51144 2013-02-28T08:44:21 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=51144#comments 0
The Green Deal is also under threat from Brussels, which has threatened to take the British Government to the dreaded European Court of Justice.

The Green Deal programme unveiled a few weeks ago grants loans of up to £10,000 to homeowners to improve their homes. The government claims the eventual total savings on the energy bills will make the renovations a worthwhile outlay for most homes..

So what is the fuss? As part of its plan, the British Government has set a lower VAT rate for "green" building materials to lower the costs further for the homeowners. They will be charged at a VAT rate of 5% rather than the usual 20%.

The European Commission is objecting. In retaliation, Tory MEPs think the EU is mad, in its worst prawn-cocktail-crisp-ban mindset. After all, isn't the commission devoted also to greening the planet? The EU says that lowering VAT rates for products for socially redistributive purposes -for instance, on baby foods to help young mothers - is okay under single market rules, But not building materials, Because they come under environmental regulations.

Moreover, its officials argue, it won't actually have the desired effect, Most buyers of building materials are not private consumers but the construction industry, and the EU says, in effect, "we all know they never pass on their lower costs to the customers".

Ironically, two weeks ago one EU regulator approved the Green Deal, saying that there is no distortion to competition in the single market. But the tax directorate overruled this, saying building materials are outside the list of goods and services that can be eligible for a reduced rate VAT drawn up by EU governments in 2009. If Britain starts breaking the rules, who knows where it will end?

The Commission has passed on the case to the European Court of Justice. If the Court rules against David Cameron, the UK will face a growing series of weekly fines unless he withdraws the legislation. That would be a blow to his environmental ambitions. .

In this typical Brussels spat, green lobby groups are insisting the UK stand its ground and argue that, of course, double glazing your home could be regarded as a social policy since low income groups are less likely to have this installed.

In an interesting development, the European Commissioner for tax issues, Algirdas Semeta, has promised to have another look at the possibility of lowered interest rates later this year, So does that mean he really is in fact okay with lower VAT on ecological building materials after all - provided the Commission and not the British Government is the body that comes up with the idea? A matter of prestige.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50872 2013-02-14T20:06:40 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50872#comments 0
Ironically, as Gaddafi's departure was largely due to the efforts of the West, his regime is now regarded as having been a bastion against terrorist extremism.

The French intervention now looks to be a success. A few weeks' worth of airstrikes have apparently left the Islamic militants in disarray, and an African force from the African Union is now beginning to take over on the ground. But France also has economic interests in the region. Admittedly Francois Hollande, the French president, says France currently has no major economic interests in Mali itself. The country's chief export product is gold which France does not import. But it may soon have economic investments to protect.

Several companies, including Total, are prospecting for oil and gas in the Taoudeni basin in northern Mali. Another regional economic interest ithat France has is that Mali is a neighbour of another desert state, Niger - separated from Mali by just a line in the sand - and Niger is a key supplier of uranium, amounting to 30% of French needs. The loss of the uranium mines at Arlit and Akokan (a third is under construction) in northern Niger would be a disaster for Areva, the French-based multibillion euro energy giant. As it would be for the Nigerien government, which earns 140 million dollars a year from these mines, representing 30% of the country's export income.

The French press are reporting that French commandos are now guarding the mines at Arlit. The decision was made in the wake of the dramatic hostage incident in Algeria on 16 January, which followed the French intervention in Mali, which began on 11 January. In the Algerian incident, several hundred gas workers were taken hostage, and 69 people died, including 39 hostages and 29 Islamist kidnappers after the Algerian army intervened in a heavy-handed way. The Arlit site has also seen a hostage incident. Seven plant workers, including five Frenchmen, were taken hostage in September 2010. Four of these workers are still being held hostage somewhere in northern Niger.

French soldiers currently guard the French space port in French Guyana, and French marine soldiers are statined on ships in the Indian Ocean to protect against Somalian piracy. But the presence at Arlit marks the first time soldiers from the French army have actually been sent to guard a private installation on land.

Two young Frenchmen, Antoine de Léocour and Vincent Delory, were kidnapped in plain daylight in the centre of Niamey - the capital of Niger - on the 7 January 2011. They were then taken to the terrorist bastions in the north of Niger, just on the border with Mali. They were then killed in a failed rescure attempt by French special forces.

According to Le Monde, quoting Algerian security sources, the Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists in Mali/Niger haves earned 150 million euros in ransom for hostages in the last couple of years. The region is increasingly becoming a highly dangerous place to work]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50775 2013-02-07T16:40:53 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50775#comments 0
The Eurosceptics have some attractive arguments. Repatriating the common agricultural and the common fisheries policy could save the UK a lot of money. Employment legislation - such as the equal rights for temporary workers - seems to have had the unintended consequence of there being a fewer jobs of that kind to go around, and temp jobs were a way into the job market for many unemployed. So that could be repealed. As could the working time directive, which has cost the NHS billions, because it bureaucratically interfered with doctors' hours,

A most important benefit would be the ability to strike deals with the emerging powers of the East to open up the market for British services with these countries in return for various levels of access to the British market. Britain is the world's second largest exporter of services. And yet, because Britain currently negotiates as a member of a bloc, the deals struck don't necessarily benefit Britain's unique strengths in this area, say Eurosceptics. The free trade agreement with Singapore struck recently concerned mostly rules of origin rules for Champagne.

There is very little of an international market in services in Europe, either, incidentally, countries like France and Germany putting up barriers about special professional qualifications requirements for UK companies that wish sell their services abroad. Just try get a job as a teacher with British qualifications in France.

As in all services, there is an information barrier. (Also known as buying-a-used-car problem.) People can't be bothered to change bank accounts, so why should they go through of finding out enough about legal services being sold on the basis of another country's rules? Britain has agitated for many years about this in the EU. Since Britain can't make headway here, in an area of its greatest relative strength, it might as well bail out and try to strike deals alone with Asian countries that are willing to open up their markets.

The services argument for me, is one of the strongest reasons for leaving the EU. Euroscepticism appeals to a certain kind of young man, striking out in life, typical of the new Tory Eurosceptic intake. I agree that the argument about staying in the EU because otherwise there will be barriers to British goods is unlikely. Set aside the facetious argument that repatriation of the Common Agricultural Policy will save Britain so much money it can afford to pay the tariffs imposed upon any British exporters to Europe. Britain is likely at the very least to be able to get the "Norway solution" - access to the single market, albeit without any say-so in its formation. (Yes, as Britain cannot prevail on a single market in services, why bother one might ask?) Britain is Europe's biggest export market for goods, so if they chose to punish Britain for staying out, they would be punishing themselves. Anyway, the very worst back stop case is that British goods would pay World Trade Organisation rates for goods entry, which is four percent.

And yet I think it is too early to head for the exit, following the young rakes of the Tory party making arguments like these. The City of London is vulnerable to legislation concerning trade of the euro, while currently it has protection under the single market rules.

One thing in life to consider is what one's worst enemy or rival wishes upon you - and then do precisely the opposite to that. France wants Britain to leave. They still have hopes of shaping Europe in their own image, now that, in the wake of the euro crisis, a set of reforms are getting underway that will mean much closer fiscal, and possibly political union. Why give the French that pleasure, to enable them to reverse the humiliations of Waterloo? Plus, there is still the full opening up of the telecoms and energy markets, which Britain could push for.

I am minded to say that what Britain should do is overcome its old prejudices and take the outstretched hand offered by Angela Merkel and build a solid alliance with Germany. (Sweden has apparently offered to act as a bridge.)

She wants Britain in Europe - agrees on same free trade issues, and needs help resisting calls from Southern Europe to use Germany as a cash machine. According to press reports she is willing to give a number of concessions as long as his does not mean a painful reopening of the treaties. But the "stay in" argument has to come up with stronger concrete arguments that will appeal to the average voter. Bringing those Common Agricultural Policy expenses home would save an agreeable amount of money.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50359 2013-01-17T13:19:17 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50359#comments 0
Other leading innovators are Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, and perhaps surprisingly Portugal and Ireland. Only companies with at least 10 employees were covered and the sectors in the survey included manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation, financial and insurance activities, wholesale trade and publishing.

The UK lies below the EU average of 53%. At least it's better, though, than the bottom ranked countries in the survey. The laggards, the least innovative countries, include Bulgaria (27%), Poland (28%), Latvia (30%), Romania (31%) and Hungary (also 31%).

The survey also found that cooperation over innovation with other institutions or enterprises was rare, and international cooperation over innovation rarer still. Only 27% carried out joint efforts with other companies or universities, while the remainder fell back on their own resources. The leader here was Cyprus, with a figure of 62%, with Austria at 51% following behind. The lowest proportion of co-operation among enterprises was in Italy (12%), Malta (18%) and Portugal (20%).

Only one in ten EU companies has carried out innovation cooperating with a partner in an EU state. Leaders include Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus, not surprising perhaps as these are small countries. Italian enterprises are bottom of the list here in terms of cooperation with European partners (4%), only a little less than Spain (5%), Germany (8%) and Portugal (9%).

Finland (12%), Sweden (11%) and Slovenia (8%) had the largest shares of innovation co-operation with partners in the United States, and Finland (9%), Sweden (7%), Luxembourg and Slovenia (both 6%) with partners in India or China. Britain, admittedly, has failed to supply statistics over international cooperation innovation, but what it has supplied - on overall innovation activity - does looks gloomy, does it not?]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50198 2013-01-10T01:33:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50198#comments 0
In Germany there is Vroniplag, which examines people's doctorates in minute detail for signs of plagiarism, where Google is their friend. But actually the most written about recent case happens to be one that was not exposed by volunteers, but by the graduate students of the golden boy of Dutch science.

It is the case of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. Three graduate students who studied and took notes of his behaviour for months finally exposed him. He had fooled dozens of national and international journals. Science, America's premier science journal, retracted and apologised for publishing his work. Stapel wrote an open apology in which each blamed the pressure on ambitious scientists to publish frequently, and in top journals, to get ahead.

He may be on to something. If fraud is indeed on the increase - and some leading journals are reporting a tenfold increase in retractions - experts seem to agree that part of the problem is the structure of science careers and their link to scientific publication. There is enormous pressure on scientists to publish lots, publish flashy stuff, and publish early. In a badly paid profession, with late career development, to pass through the eye of the needle and get that professorship by forty, the pressure is enormous.. It is not surprising that some, like Stapel, cut corners in a very fraudulent way. But there is a whole spectrum of more or less dodgy practices. For instance, the common custom of successful scientists or form "citation cartels" where they put their names to what essentially is each other's papers to up their citation count.

It is partly the consequence as I explored last year I think in a blog post on John Ioannides, is the very nature of the interaction between grants, citations, and publication driven science which biases towards false positives and works against checking and replication.

The ideal of science, the one they teach you in the textbooks, is that it is a self- correcting mechanism. That if you get it wrong, someone behind you will correct, refine or expose the fraudulence of your result But that is a myth. Results are not often verified - as in independently replicated after publication. The elegant-sounding prepublication peer review is a much more casual process than outsiders imagine. And then, after that, the results are not often verified because the truth is scientists are much keener to produce their own new result that will catch the eye of the science journal editor than to verify someone else's work.

Not only is it ungratifying to the ego but it is also hard. In a recent survey, 47 out of 53 attempts to replicate high end medical science findings failed!. It is not necessarily a question of fraud. Scientists are seldom as explicit they ought to be when writing about methods. That process ought to be much more explicit.

Other reforms? Less importance attacked to getting flashy results in elite journals. Instead journals ought to encourage solidity by publishing new results that failed to prove something dramatic but still managed to tell us something. Brave tries. Without publicising failures, you get an incomplete picture of science, like a gambler who counts only his winnings. Failure can be just as educational, and those who lucked out but made genuine productive effort should also be rewarded. The problem of the unwillingness to verify other scientists' results could also be solved. Citations should be shared between those who got an original result and those who replicated a result, linking them electronically in the journal, to give the verifiers a share of the glory. And there are yet more things that could be done, say experts.

More collaboration between science teams. There is less pressure from the public and politicians on scientists to come up with the goods. The media play an important, and often negative role, raising the bar for what counts as exciting, and always looking for a new story.

A few weeks ago, in December 2012, the Dutch authorities published an extremely detailed report on Stapel's activities, which had outed the year before. At an early stage in his career he was appointed a fellow of the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and collected large funds from the Dutch science foundation NWO. They found that in at least 55 publications the data were fully or partly fabricated and that this went back to at least 1998. The report called Stapel a narcissist and schemer. As if to live up that description, Stapel wrote book about his own cause and was, the week the report came out a few weeks ago, busily promoting it by giving signing talks at an academic chain of bookshops in the Netherlands.

The Dutch report was very self critical. It said there was a lot wrong with Dutch research culture. On cue, the Erasmus university of Rotterdam said it had its very own case of fraud looming, with six hundred papers of one suspect scholar being given the read through again. Yet the Netherlands has one of the best science traditions, and some of best universities, in Europe. It's a problem elsewhere in Europe too, of that I have no doubt.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50042 2013-01-03T13:50:19 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=50042#comments 0
In a week where many others digested their Christmas excesses in front of television reruns, five thousand visitors attended the four day festival of unrestrained geekiness between 27 and 30 December.

The Chaos Communications Congress started in 1984, in West Berlin, with a handful of enthusiasts. Now it has moved to Hamburg and several thousand visitors listened to talks in three parallel auditoria. The geeks apparently drank alcoholic cocktails mixed with mate (mate is a kind of Latin American shrub tea; very good for you), handed out a yellow-green-red card decks to prevent the few women present from receiving
inappropriate male behaviour. (Google the name "Creeper Move Cards": looks impeccably politically correct). They flew remote-controlled model helicopters that buzzed around in the air above the regiments of working activists. their laptops laden with the usual stickers. It was an event to meet and discuss big ideas.

There were numerous little sectioned off areas where impromptu and not so impromptu meetings between hackers could take place, where they could hold workshops or small lectures.

Serious matters of cyber politics were discussed in the larger meeting halls, reported the German media. Russian hackers expressed concern about the growth of the Russian surveillance state, assisted by the adoption of the technique known as deep packet inspection originally used by the large mobile providers to prevent customers from file sharing or using Skype over the mobile network, but now modified and used by the Russian authorities to monitor, and ban, inappropriate content. An example: instructions for committing suicide.

Russian hackers warned things could get worse, and that the secret services' monitoring of content was running rampant.

Germany, which has a developed civil liberties tradition relating to internet issues, is also at risk, warned a German hacker activist. The difference between the situation between Germany and that of Russia or China is a single configuration file. You can change that in a few minutes and have a good censorship machine.

Denying that they are crying wolf about the surveillance state, the activists warned that the copyright industry may be at the forefront of exploiting the deep packet inspection technology to prevent the dissemination of copyrighted works. Which may not be a bad thing actually, if you are a copyright holder or content provider.

That fact, that there are arguments both for and against some of the most cherished beliefs of hackerdom, may be one reason why the German Pirate Party, the world's most successful of its kind, a sort of spiritual-political outgrowth of the Chaos Computer Club, is collapsing in the German polls.

Its programme of anti state cyber surveillance and free software and movie sharing appealed to many young people, as did its vaguely leftist idealism. Germany had a large green party before the rest of Europe got mainstream green parties (excepting the UK). So there was hope that this would pave the way for cyber issue party in many other national legislatures too.

But after a high in national polls of 13% in the summer of 2012 and a couple of state (länder) election successes they are now down to below 5%. They may therefore fall to achieve the vote threshold for seats in the federal parliamentary elections held in September this year. It is interesting and good for Germany, though, that it has such a lively hacker scene, and that Berlin is fast growing as a start up scene, benefiting from the city's reputation for anarchy and creativity.

And the CCC are certifiably on the ball, for who else would host a congress between Christmas and New Year?]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49926 2012-12-27T13:28:20 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49926#comments 0
European telecoms companies certainly seem to be gearing up for it. In November, Britain made a leap into the 2010s when a joint venture between Orange (ultimately owned by France Telecom) and T-Mobile (Deutsche Telecom) called EE launched Britain's first 4G, or fourth generation, mobile broadband network.

November also saw France's SFR launch that country's first high speed network in Lyon. A number of other French cities will get joined up to the 100Mbps speeds in the spring, though Paris will have to wait until the autumn of 2013, not earlier, because of the planning difficulties of erecting new mobile phone masts in the City of Light.

Sweden has actually had a 4G network, courtesy of TeliaSonera, since December 2009, and claims this was the world's first ever 4G network, a year before the US rollout, usually claimed as the pioneer. Most usage of the ultrafast Swedish network has come from not from people surfing on their phones, however, but laptop users surfing with USB "dongles", modem attachments especially adapted for 4G use. Like everyone else, Swedes have been hampered by a lack of 4G adapted handsets, although the provision of 4G-compatible handset models is expanding changing now as we move into 2013. Belgium launched its first 4G services this autumn. So Britain is a little bit behind in this race, but not by much.

European telecoms companies are paying a lot for all the infrastructure, masts and suchlike, on top of the licence fees to operate the new network paid for in auctions held by national governments. Norway's Telenor's chief executive recently complained to Reuters that the high costs of these licences are limiting the ability for expansion. One Dutch telecoms company, KPN, on winning its licence, announced it would be cutting dividends to shareholders this year. The huge costs incurred on British mobile companies when they bid for 3G licences a decade ago must be fresh in many executives' minds.

German's Deutsche Telecom has also announced it won't be paying dividends, at least to the German government, a major shareholder. Angela Merkel is known to be very keen on upgrading the German network to 4G, and actually Germany has gone further than most. By September this year, 40% of the German population had access to 4G services, and the figure is growing by the week. The figure rises to 80% or higher in business hubs like Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, despite German media reports of delays in the processing of licences.

In the poorer eastern and southern European countries, it is altogether a starker picture, and when the EU budget for the next seven years is finalised next spring, the Connecting Europe Facility - EU funds for 4G expansion - is the item experts think is most likely to be cut in late night haggling when faced with the immovable rock of French and Polish farming interests.

Still, the European Commission a few weeks ago did its best to help move 4G development forward by increasing the amount of spectrum available for 4G, at the expense of 3G. Europe now has about 1,000MHz available for 4G use, which is twice the amount of spectrum available to it compared to the United States. While Europe's northern tier will be thankful for this, it may be years before the poorer southern and eastern states have developed their 4G infrastructure enough to benefit.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49832 2012-12-20T12:54:16 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49832#comments 0
The airline industry is also furious, since the dog leg routes they are forced to follow as a result of the effective preservation of national systems raises fuel costs and increases carbon emissions at a time when airlines are under pressure from the European economic crisis.

With jealously guarded airspaces, Europe has more air traffic controllers
employed than the US - covering about the same airspace, around 11
million square km, but far less traffic a year, 10 million flights a year in
Europe compared to 17 million flights a year in the US, according to figures supplied by Lufthansa.

Lufthansa, which has ruthlessly cut running costs since 2009, argues one of the reasons there has been no incentive for national governments to reform their air traffic control services is because they have been able to pass the full costs of their services on to the airlines - and, ultimately, the passengers. Lufthansa's chief executive
Christoph Franz told the Association of European Airlines earlier this year that he was "furious that the largest EU member states are simply not delivering on their commitments".

IATA, the International Air Transport Association, which represents airlines' interests, says governments are just paying lip service to reforms. "They have turned this key administrative reform into a box-ticking exercise and continue to operate their air navigation service providers in silos," said Tony Tyler, IATA's director general, in a statement on 4 December.

The guiltiest member states are France, Germany and the Mediterranean states. Britain, in contrast, does quite well. Consolidating air traffic control systems may represent the kind of sensible European reform Britain can actually live with.

Under the commission's plan, the 38 national airspace organisations were to be consolidated into nine so-called FABs, or functional airspace blocks. Some of these are actually up and running. The FAB covering Ireland and Britain has been operating since 2008, while Denmark and Sweden have gone a step further and formed a joint company for integrated air traffic control services. But elsewhere progress has been patchy.

To be fair,the UK-Ireland FAB, dealing with only two member states, was
probably easier to implement than some other FABs.

The complicated central European FAB, covering Belgium, France, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Germany, is only "partially ready" - which may be a bit of a euphemism. While some countries, such as Spain and Portugal, which are due to share a FAB in southwestern Europe, have not even signed a cooperation agreement yet.

The commission has promised it will launch letters of formal notice against non compliant states. Siim Kallas, the EU's transport commissioner, said: "Fragmented airspace has imposed extra costs of €5 billion a year. That is an appalling waste of time and money and puts an unnecessary extra burden on the environment."

However, it is the member states that are ultimately in the driving seat, and the European Parliament's monitor of the aviation reform, Georg Jarzembowski, says that "transport ministers don't take the issue seriously". Questions concerning sovereignty of airspace are the main concern, while the powerful air traffic controllers' unions resist efficiency drives that would put air traffic controllers out of a job.

Governments are also reluctant to allow foreign air controllers potential
control of airspace above their military installations. The airlines, though,
will continue to emphasize the costs of delayed reform to the overall
economy.

"Cost efficient air transport infrastructure is important to the 7.8 million
jobs and €475 billion in European business supported by the air transport industry," said IATA's Tyler. "Only a lack of political will is getting in the way."]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49582 2012-12-05T14:43:57 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49582#comments 0
Poland is more politically to the right than many European countries - the Polish right, in its social conservatism, is closer to the US right than are the British Tories. And with that follows greater natural sympathy with the US Republican scepticism on climate change than nearly every other European country.

But there is not just scepticism about the science but genuine reasons of realpolitik for a stance that threatens progress on climate talks in the EU. Poland is unusually dependent on domestic lignite coal for its supplies, with a politically powerful coalmining lobby that puts pressure on parliamentarians to preserve those jobs. That´s one thing. Further, politicians are sensitive to the energy security issue. Poland has no nuclear power plants and is extremely reluctant to become overly dependent on natural gas from Russia, for fear of becoming dependent on Russian whims to cut the gas off or not.

Poland has pioneered European fracking efforts, in order to source its
energy domestically - so far, with several licences awarded for
prospecting, it is early days.

Russia is an extremely sensitive issue in Polish history - the country
dominated Poland for much of the last century and when Russia and Germany signed the Nord Stream Baltic gas pipeline agreement that would allow Russian gas to bypass Poland and be piped to Germany without using Polish pipelines - and therefore become an instrument of Russian pressure on Poland - the current foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, then defence minister, did not mince his words. The Oxford-educated rightwinger compared the deal to a "Molotov Ribbentrop pact" after the agreement that partitioned Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War 2. Harsh words that reflect a historic strong sense of national insecurity, a legacy of being at the whim of other, larger countries.

Well, these days an independent, EU-ensconced Poland has more leverage to use against other nations than perhaps at any time in its modern history, and regarding climate change it has several points of leverage. First of all, Poland is currently refusing to go along with other EU nations in extending the union´s 2020 renewables targets. The regular Energy Council meeting in Brussels yesterday, attended by environment and industry ministers from the 27 EU states, ended in a deadlock, with Poland in opposition to most other states.

The 2020 goals require member states to source at least 20% of their energy needs from renewables by the year 2020. The European commission, supported by northern eco-pioneers like the Netherlands and Denmark, want to plan ahead and set new, tougher targets for 2030. Poland, for the moment, does not.

And Poland is saying no elsewhere too. The world's environmental actors are currently meeting in Doha, Qatar, for the latest round of global climate negotiations and are looking for a replacement to he Kyoto treaty, which expires at the end of this year. Another point of blockage concerns Poland's glut of pollution allowances, allowed under the Kyoto treaty, which Poland has been able to hoard since the baseline level of pollution permits was set in 1990 before the deindustrialisation and closing down of inefficient factories that followed the end of communism. Several states, including the
European commission, want to take these hoarded permits away from Poland once Kyoto expires. Poland wants them to be rolled over to the next period. Poles see it as their "strategic reserve" to enable them to continue to play catchup with western Europe untrammelled by environmental commitments. They also sell the permits to other countries, a nice little earner. The Polish economy is currently one of the fastest growing in Europe and they don't want the EU
to put a stop to that - especially as fast developing Asian countries that
are squeezing EU growth are not signatories to Kyoto.

To that end, because the commission wants "bad boy" Poland to toe the EU line in Doha, Poland has threatened to push back on a related issue. The EU's own pollution control mechanism, the Emissions Trading Scheme, which suffers from its own glut of permits that threatens its viability. It is a separate scheme and Poland has threatened to veto the commission proposal to withdraw permits from sale to raise their all time low price that make curbng pollution more difficult. Partly as a result of Polish opposition, an EU vote, originally planned for 13 December, has been delayed until next year.

At the extreme end of the Polish debate, there is talk of the EU as the new USSR, based on the bankrupt ideology of "warmism"- global warming alarmism - to sustain bureaucratic jobs - just as the USSR was based on the bankrupt ideology of Communism. Polish workers, as everyone remembers, were instrumental at engineering the fall of the East Bloc....

While the Polish government is much more mainstream European in its approach, and has the main newspapers behind it, global warming sceptics form a lobby in the Polish parliament, the Sejm. All ths plays to Polish people´s self image as individualists who do their own thing. Next year's global climate change summit will he held in Warsaw - a diplomatic coup by the Polish government - which will perhaps offer opportunities for the Polish coal mining lobby for an interesting "exchange of views" with the bevy of international delegates.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49471 2012-11-29T08:34:46 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49471#comments 0
What the science heads were on about was the EU budget for the years 2014 to 2020, which was discussed at a summit of EU leaders, including David Cameron, in Brussels last week. These summits, discussing all sorts of things, are becoming increasingly common. A few years ago there were three a year. These days David Cameron has been getting on the Brussels Express every month, it seems. Usually it's been Greece and the rescue of the eurozone that
has been on the agenda. This time, as said, it is the EU budget, which covers EU spending on science, administration, agriculture, cohesion funds and some smaller items.

Let us be fair-minded. The European commission likes and understands the value of science. For the next seven year science spending programme, Horizon 2020, it originally proposed an 80bn euro spend. That proposal actually marked a 29bn euro, or 55%, increase over the previous seven year science programme, covering the period 2007 to 2014. (Ie, we are still operating under the old science programme.) The European parliament, which in this instance is one of the "good guys" - if you appreciate the importance of science, that is - proposed an even bigger science spending hike, 100 billion euros. Britain ought to be grateful to this as, being Europe's arguably top science nation, the country is a great beneficiary of EU science spending.

For instance, the UK is host to the largest number of European Research Council (ERC) grants - which fund usually young scientists at the innovation frontier - clearly having the universities where frontier resarch is most profitably conducted. A lot of these teams coming to the UK with their generous ERC grants are not actually from the UK originally, but from the rest of Europe, so they must find the UK a good place to do their research - with the EU money they bring with them a welcome addition to their British host university's coffers.

The commission's overall budget proposals - covering everything, from
agriculture to transport, was set at a five percent increase. So while
science spending makes up a small proportion of overall EU spending of one trillion euros over seven years, it was the field which was proposed for the biggest hike in funding.

However, the EU of course does not have its own funds. It is not EU money. But money from the EU member states. They are the paymasters. And government leaders from the prosperous northern countries, the net contributors, those who by and large pay more in than they get out of the EU, and that includes the UK, are slightly outraged that the commission proposed a five percent increase at a time of austerity when governments elsewhere are slashing their spending.

There is a lot about the EU that is incredibly wasteful. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which swallows 40% of EU spending - it once took 70% - has its critics.

It effectively pays farmers to overproduce food. Critics say the surplus is bought up by corporations very cheaply and sold less cheaply - but still very cheaply - so they make a profit selling to consumers in the Third World - devastating Third World agriculture, which cannot compete with the low prices. France, or its farmers, is and always has been the main beneficiary. France gets much more out of CAP than the UK gets out of EU science spending. The CAP has been the European Economic Community's main spending ticket from the start in 1957. The CAP has been called "disguised war reparations" from West Germany to France, the prize West Germany had to pay to be let into the club of civilised nations after 1945. Of course, it was designed before the UK became a member so when the UK applied to join in the seventies it had to like it or lump it. Greece is another major beneficiary of the CAP.

The second big item of the EU budget is the cohesion funds, regional funds to poorer regions which have also been subjected to abuse. There is a lot of material on this. A fascinating article in the New York Times last month about corruption and unfinished motorways in southern Italy finds local analysts arguing that it increases corruption. The newspaper argues this kind of "financing has yielded little of the productive investment that might now be helping southern Europe as it tries to climb out of an economic ditch".

Then there's the third big ticket item of EU funding; administration costs,
including the cost of new EU buildings - most recently a visitors' centre for the European parliament - and the low tax salaries of well paid commission staff. All these three items - CAP, cohesion funds and administration costs - all much bigger than science spending - were ripe targets for cuts, and Cameron suggested taking an axe to several of them.

The unsurprising obstacle to this has been the beneficiaries of these funds, led by France, which is backed by many of the southern and eastern European states, which have flatly refused to accept any cuts to the Common Agricultural Policy. So last week, during the summit, EU president Herman van Rompuy who, despite his grand title, is more of a kind of go-between between national leaders, came up with a compromise budget - which accommodated some of Cameron's calls for cuts but directed these cuts at the next science programme, since science, with a weaker lobby than farming, is the most painless item to cut. Also badly hit was a fund for the expansion of next generation broadband. These may, if implemented, warns the chairman of the ERC council, Helga Nowotny, actually lead to real term cuts in the EU's science budget, compared to the 2009-2010 baseline figure, not just a smaller rise.

That is how positions stand after last week's meeting broke up without any final agreement. The talks will resume early next year. But a science lobby is belatedly gathering strength: scientists from all over Europe, including some Nobel prize winners, have signed petitions and have started lobbying the commission and member state governments. Cameron wants rightly to slash the EU budget but, faced with the immoveable object of the farming lobby, will science and technology spending be hit instead? In that case, Europe is surely cutting off the route to its own prosperous future.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49345 2012-11-21T16:13:09 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49345#comments 0
Nanotechnology is one of his examples. His frustration was obvious, and I happen to think he is largely right, but let us cross the Channel to grey Brussels, a city where the institutions we know - commission, parliament and council - are just the very tip of the politicking pyramid. In offices in the institutional quarter, there are hundreds, maybe more, interest associations and organisations.

Every kind of lobby is represented. Many of these are on the left, representing church, environment, health or labour organisations, and march to a very different philosophical drum than the actors in British politics. In Britain, the commissions gets the blame for red tape. On the Continent, the commission is blamed for being a Trojan horse for British "liberalism" (always a bad word) and market force interests that always takes insufficient account of the "little guy", the worker or the health consumer.

And so it was with the commission's latest communication on nanomaterials, its first since 2008. Aforementioned groups cried out "extreme disappointments" and "deep concerns" over the fact that the commission, with an eye to its watchwords of innovation and economic growth, chose not to propose specific regulations regarding nanomaterials or evaluation of their risks. These hostile groups said it will give a free hand to manufacturers who are now able, without legal sanction, to put more and more toxic products on to the market.
Nanotechnology is everywhere, in sunscreen lotions, odour-free clothing, dressings, medical equipment. More than two thousand products in the EU contain nanoparticles, which are less than a billionth of a metre in diameter and as a result of their small size have special and interesting physical properties - which can include greater strength, conductivity, adhesiveness. The problem, though, claim opposition groups, citing French studies, is that they can penetrate the skin or lungs and disperse in the water, soil and air.

The commission, and the British government, says it is enough that nanoparticles are included in the current chemicals regulation called REACH, which tests the properties, monitors the quantities of and finally authorises every chemical used on the EU market. But nanomaterial sceptics say REACH only covers materials whose usage is more than a tonne a year in the EU, and many nanomaterials are produced in lesser quantities than that. Plus, the reporting schemes do not account for the fact that nanomaterials come in different forms but the same chemical makeup.

Some of these may be toxic; others not. The European parliament's Greens have protested and the European Consumers' Association says the commission has its "head in the sand": specific nanomaterial legislation is necessary. However, some nanofriendly insiders in the European parliament fear that nanomaterials may go the way of GMOs if public opinion gets behind this. Despite their widespread use in much else of the world, without apparent harm, only two genetically modified crops have been authorised for European use, and of those two varieties, one, a potato, has been virtually given up while the other is banned unilaterally in many member states.

What chills the bones of those who see the potential of nanotechnology is France's unilateral decision to impose reporting requirements for nanomaterials in France starting in January, which may be just the beginning. Recently, France and 12 other cautious member states put in a petition that called for specific legislation on nanomaterials. something the British government is absolutely hostile to. Willetts says there is already a substantial regulatory regime in place and the REACH regulations are sufficient:

"It is vital that a plethora of separate approaches with different interpretations of the precautionary principle do not stifle the development of nanotechnologies," he added at a recent speech.

In contrast, you hear voices from France stating proudly that it is good that "France is leader among nations" at securing the health of EU citizens by seeking to impose regulations on nanomaterials.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49236 2012-11-15T14:04:42 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49236#comments 0
Yesterday it proposed legislation that aims at attaining the goal of a 40% female complement on company boards.The rules would apply to publicly listed companies; small businesses would be exempted. Viviane Reding, the EU's justice commissioner, called it a "historic day for justice and equality". The rules would apply to the 5,000 publicly listed companies in the EU.

The rules would be "binding" but it is not clear what, if any, sanctions would be applied. It all has to go through the European parliament anyway. According to insiders, the key phrase in this intensely ideological area of legislation has shifted, from the original "quota" requirement to an "objective", a weaker idea. It may end up being the kind of legislation that, while overtly insubstantial, if nothing else puts the issue on the agenda and moves the positions forward - a little anyway. EU legislation is fought in campaigns where victory is not achieved at one fell swoop.

Several of her female colleagues in the commission are resolutely opposed to quotas.They include the Brit Catherine Ashton, in charge of foreign policy, and Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate action commissioner. Opponents of legislation tend to argue that companies must not have their hands tied when looking for candidates that have the "vision, skills and experience" to attain company aims.


UK does not want EU involvement


Nine countries, including the UK, have written a letter to the commission saying they would block any vote at the EU council level. (The council is one third of the EU legislative set up, the part consisting of the member states.) The letter recognises that "there is a problem ... that there are too few women and there must be efforts to promote women but these should be national approaches."

At the moment, in the EU, on average, men fill nine out of ten executive positions on company boards, eight out of ten non-executive positions. This despite the fact that women make up sixty percent of university graduates in the EU. Reding said that the proposed legislation aimed at "smashing the glass ceiling" that kept women out of top jobs. Olli Rehn, the commissioner for financial and monetary affairs, co-hosted the press conference. He argued that research shows more gender diverse companies performed better in the market.

Eleven EU countries have passed laws to ensure gender balance on boards, with France leading the way among the bigger EU countries, with fines for companies that don't comply. Pan European legislation would "export" these standards to the 16 EU countries that have no legal provisions in this area, including the UK.

France is the country that has improved the most in terms of proportions of women on the board in the last two years, thought women still only comprise 20% of the total in France. Other leaders are Latvia, Sweden and Finland. The UK is above the European average, with about a quarter of non-executive positions on boards held by women.

The picture as regards executive positions is a very different one. France and Sweden, good performers when it comes to companies having women in non-executive roles, do unusually poorly regards women in executive boardroom positions. Ironically, the UK does better than many countries in this regard; better than either France or Sweden - in the UK, 7% of executive roles on boards held by women. The EU says it has no plans to set quotas for executive positions as this would interfere with companies' rights to run their businesses.

While Rehn argues that diversity improves company performance, the findings are not unequivocal, however. A pan-Scandinavian study* on this subject by a group of Scandinavian business schools shows that board diversity does not positively influence profits. On the other hand, gender diversity does not negatively influence profits either.

The authors summarised their study by saying that enhanced board diversity, as a deliberate choice or as forced by law, can be achieved "without a negative effect on firm performance and shareholder return".

This report from Canada** says something pretty similar. While the performance question is still open to discussion, says a third report***, the issue may also be framed in terms of ethical considerations, that it is right in terms of ethics to have more women on boards.

* http://bit.ly/QIMm2T [PDF]

** http://bit.ly/SsbLc5 [PDF]

*** http://bit.ly/PWe1fc]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49118 2012-11-08T09:29:58 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49118#comments 0
Let me first say I think he is largely right, though it would be wrong to blame the commission, which is quite innovation friendly. (Even more so now that the chief scientific adviser is a Brit, Anne Glover, formerly Scotland's chief scientific adviser.) Don't shoot the pianist! The commission is under pressure from several member states, each a bit superstitious and retrogressive in their own way.

Indeed, in my view, it is strange that the Germans sneer at the American penchant for creationism when they have their own skeletons of irrationality in their closet, such as an overpowering hostility to nuclear power and GM crops.

So what is Willetts on about?


Moral values


The British government has just published its new technology policy, looking at areas where the UK stands a chance of being a world competitor; also which areas are worthy of government support. At the same time, separately, Cameron has asked ministers to help inventorise the advantages and disadvantages of the EU in their area of departmental responsibility. So, for his part, Willetts has been looking at whether EU membership is good or bad for Britain's science and technology sectors.

There are definitely some bad things. Many EU countries have a moral objection to stem cell research. Which is their right, but the EU common legislation means impositions on the British way of doing things. The recent Brustle judgment at the European Court of Justice has led to a ban on stem cell patenting in Europe, which could deter companies from investing in bringing therapies to market.

Stem cell research uses derivatives or lines derived from long ago discarded embryos not used in IVF procedures. These early embryos were only five or so days old. But still many Catholic member states objected, talking of the sanctity of life. It is a thorny moral problem. But you could argue the Catholics are making an overly big fuss, since most European countries, including Catholic ones, permit abortion of far more developed foetuses.

The problem as concerns innovation is that it may lead to a ratcheting process. Encouraged by the ban on stem cell patents, which has already alleged to have driven British research to non EU states, there is a political pressure building to ban EU funding for stem cell research in Europe altogether.


Precautionary principle


Willetts also has problem with one of the mainstays of European legislation: The precautionary principle which says, basically, better safe than sorry. Just because we don't have proof it's harmful doesn't mean we should not take as many precautions as possible. But, the minister says, the law has to be applied proportionately and reasonably, setting off costs and benefits, and not be allowed to prevent all innovation just because the risk factors are not all known. In 2004, the Physical Agents directive set such a low level for accepted occupational exposure that some MRI scanning procedures, standard throughout Europe, suddenly became technically illegal. If the directive had stayed on the books, more patients would have had to revert to more hazardous X-ray procedures. Further, innovation in MRI technology - an area which the British pioneered - would have been hampered.

The British health and safety executive in fact concluded that this "directive has no health benefits for Britain". The directive was put on hold while the scientific facts were looked at again. Years on, upper limits have been accepted as safe. It took years of lobbying to raise the levels to more sensible limits.


Out of date legislation


The third issue Willetts is that some legislation not constructed for purpose. As the situation is now, for example, there are no laws that allow aircraft to land from space. This could hold back Richard Branson's plans to build a space port either in Kiruna, Sweden, or in Lossiemouth, Scotland. At the moment his spacecraft will be taking off from one of the six certified "space ports" in the United States.

Judging by these examples, it is easy to see the New World and Old World living up to their usual old narratives: in the left corner, the forward looking optimistic America that lands men on the moon, and, in the right corner, a Europe that is concerned with banning curvy bananas or prawn cocktail crisps. Because of "unhealthy" flavouring ingredients.

Britain does the best science in Europe (though Germany is not that far behind, and catching up.) So I sympathise greatly with the coalition. The question is whether it is better to stay inside - and add Britain's weight to the not insubstantial number of science nations that exist. Besides, Germany and France have their own separate prejudices and are not united on everything. Or leave and find themselves closed out from a single market that applies even more restrictive rules than Britain would like.


It's the culture, stupid


One observation is that it shows just how persistent European cultures are. The technocrats failed to account for this nebulous quality when designing a political Europe. Religion is important; so are national cultures. The Greek crisis happened because Greece is Greece and Germany is Germany. They are countries with different approaches to work, solidarity and paying one's taxes. Thirty years ago, the Dutch anthropologist Gert Hofsteede carried out research on different nations' approach to individualism, hierarchy and what he called uncertainty avoidance. The French and Germans were very into uncertainty avoidance (where the French in addition had a high hierarchy index - the boss is king.)

That means fear of change, fear of loss of control in their lives. While the Brits, Scandinavians and indeed, to take a non European example, the Chinese were very tolerant of uncertainty in their lives. You see those differences played out today in the EU's very strong backing for the precautionary principle in certain parts of Europe. Northerners are sceptical of the EU's precautionary principle, continental Europeans more embracing of it.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49025 2012-11-01T17:46:34 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=49025#comments 0
It ranks Britain thirteenth in the global prosperity league, a composite of subjective-seeming measures of governance, health, education, personal freedom, economic growth and social capital. Not so good on economic growth, true, but high on entrepreneurialism, governance and personal freedom. So what? you may say. But look at the rivals. France 21st place, Italy 33rd. USA 12th, even mighty Germany 14th. Germany - less prosperous than the UK! At least according to Legatum.

The countries doing better than the UK are all the usual suspects, small northern countries like Norway, Netherlands and Canada. The UK is the best scoring large European country.

Then there's the other report in my inbox, This time from the European Commission, it paints a very different and more familiar picture. It's the annual European Competitiveness report. Its headline statistic - in a very big report, with dozens of tables - is this one: exports. It looks at how much each EU country exports compared to other EU members and finds that Germany is by far the EU's biggest exporter, at 26 percent of the total EU export share, looking at both global and intra-EU exports. And that this share has grown over five years. France and Italy have held their share. While the UK has dropped from 10% to 8% of total EU goods exports, that is less than a third of Germany's figure, and puts the UK in fifth place behind Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, a country, need I remind you, with one quarter the UK's population. No other country has performed as badly as an exporter compared to five years ago, when the UK was almost level with France.

Another headline statistic from the report. Access to bank lending for SMEs. Britain was near the top five years ago, and is now near the bottom, above only Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland. The commission's report then looks at each country's strengths and weaknesses. Britain has an excellent business climate, a reasonably well educated work force, scores okay at innovation. But is terrible at productivity. And companies are very bad at buying new equipment.

If the commission's report had been published before Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson's recent book went to press, I am sure they would have included its findings. The two economics journalists recently published a book about Britain's economic weaknesses*. The summary of what they say is. It is not good enough to have niches of excellence like the BBC, a pop music industry, a few good universities, and a few world class manufacturers. Britain doesn't have the depth of manufacturing capability that Germany has.

Britain hasn't run a current account surplus since 1983, and its successive hopes - North Sea oil, deregulation, finance driven capitalism - have all failed to ensure long lasting means to help Britain pay its way in the world. Their response? Stop feeling good and focus honestly on the whole picture. Britain should "recognise the problem" in the same way as an alcoholic who has hit bottom.

Recognise that, and you can start looking for solutions. It should cease its pretensions to be a world player and take a good look at its strengths and weaknesses. The two authors admit they are better at creating wake up calls than diagnosing how Britain can get ahead. There are no quick fixes, but improved education for the "working class" is part of the recipe. They tentatively suggest two models, that the UK should either sail the high seas of globalisation, like Singapore, a giant free enterprise zone, immensely flexible and competitive and lean. Or become social democratic, an egalitarian, high innovation welfare state, like Sweden. But they conclude that the UK is probably too big for either option.

Not everyone might agree with them, and say Britain has always been good at talking itself down, indeed self deprecation is part of the country's charm - although these are exactly the kind of blithe optimists the two authors target. The optimists, though, could always point to that Legatum report, which puts Britain ahead of Germany in terms of prosperity...

*Going South: Why Britain will have a third world economy by 2014. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99



EU competitiveness report 2012

Legatum report]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48931 2012-10-25T07:42:45 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48931#comments 0
Smart move by the Nobel foundation. It is always good to have maximum publicity for science.

There will be the usual congratulations at the actual ceremony that will be taking place, as it always does, in Stockholm in December. In the meantime there is the Nobel Prize Foundation's excellent website to click through. Lots of statistics on things like how many women have won prizes, how many scientists have won two prizes. One statistic I didn't see was this one. Nobel prize winners have been getting substantially older at the time they made their great discovery. In the early 1900s the average Physics winner was 37 when did his ground-breaking work, on average. Today he'll be nudging 50. The trends have are less extreme with the Medicine and Chemistry prizes, but they are there.

Various sociology and history of science researchers have looked into this phenomenon - which repeats itself through science - and are worried. If the trend continues like this scientists will be dead by the time they do their best work. Of course you can't produce when they are dead, but it suggests that they will produce suboptimal science because age sets an upper limit.

Benjamin Jones of the Kellogg School of Management, in a paper*, had has some ideas about why this is the case. And his thesis is this. The expansion of human knowledge in especially the physics field, but also the other natural sciences, means more has to be taken in and absorbed before one reaches the knowledge frontier, the coal face where new discoveries are made. Does it matter? Well, yes.

Because scientists are reaching the so called innovation frontier later they have less time on the innovation frontier and thus produce less useful science than their predecessors, given that active lifespans and careers have remained relatively constant. Apart from having a shorter time at the top of science, they also start being actively contributing to the science corpus when their brains are less sharp, when they are in their fifties rather than their thirties as was the case before. Statistics back all this up. Over the decades there has been a long-standing decline in the per capita output of R&D workers both in terms of patent counts and productivity growth.

It seems many scientists, instinctively or not, realise this. One thing scientists to do to resolve the issue of the longer distance to the innovation frontier is that they specialise over a narrower field. Jones gives an example: when faced with a choice, a chemist might choose to study, say, just the synthesis of metal alloys rather than both alloys and organics, because he knows he will reach the innovation frontier quicker if he specialises in just the one area. As a sign of this, science papers with multiple authors are becoming increasingly common in scientific publishing as scientists pool their increasingly narrow areas of expertise in a manner of compensation.

Team sizes for taking out patents is also increasing. That is one solution but scarcely an optimal one: the best innovation comes from the combining of specialisms within a single scientist's person, arguably rather then residing in different persons working in a team.

So what to do? Jones's proposed solution is to look at the early "training period". Make sure you would be scientists do not have any interruptions in their education (for many Nobel prize winners, the second world war service delayed careers.) There is a remarkably constant span of time between the age of taking one's PhD and coming up with one's best work. So take you PhD earlier, you will be younger when your great ideas comes along.

Okay. But there are limits to how much education you can cram in at a young age. And if all interruptions are removed what then? Is the natural human lifespan an unbreachable barrier to new science in say 100 years' time when the science frontier has expanded yet further?
Perhaps there is one consolation in all this. There could be fewer and fewer of those annoying science prodigies around that make us feel even more inadequate than we already are. But does it not also suggest there is a biologically defined upper limit to where mankind can go with science?

*http://www.mitpressjournals.or...0.1162/rest.2009.11724]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48727 2012-10-10T17:08:21 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48727#comments 0
With 225,000 employees and 75 billion euros in revenues, the combine group would have been bigger by half than Boeing. But it needed the go-ahead from the governments of France, UK and Germany - plus the green light from private shareholders. The British government has a so called Golden Share in BAE while the other governments have direct or indirect shareholding interests: in BAE for the British government, and EADS for the French and German governments.

An EADS company spokesman said it was primarily the fault of the German government, according to the news agency AFP. But actually the story is more complicated than that. You could argue that the root of the problem was this.

The French government did not want to sell its 15% stake in EADS (which would have been nine percent of the merged group). and even talked of extending it by buying the 7.5% share owned by the French media conglomerate Lagardère. But because Germany did not want to lose its political influence in the group, it refused to renounce its intention to buy Daimler's 15% shareholding in EADS. Meanwhile, EADS's chief executive Tom Enders wanted a European aerospace company without any political involvement. So did the British.

Berlin might have had other motives. While dirigisme is in fashion again, the truth is Germany's experience with capitalism is that their companies have grown best without political interference. Their "interest" (via Daimler) in the current EADS share set up mainly to check the French instincts for fidgeting with the running of EADS and putting Frenchmen in a disproportionate number of company positions. Further, in recent international mergers with the French, the Germans see themselves as having drawn the short straw.

Many Germans are convinced that the 1999 Franco-German merger between Germany's Hoechst and France's Rhone Poulenc to create pharma giant Aventis was to France's advantage. One merger later France had a national pharmaceutical champion while Germany was left with nothing at all. What happened was this. In 2004, the Franco-German management of Aventis called for a merger with Swiss pharma giant Novartis, perhaps the world's best run pharma company. But the French government, pushed by then finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy, opted for a "French solution" to create a French pharma champion: merging with French pharma company Sanofi Synthelabo, without any mention of German interests.

In doing so they created a national French pharma champion. As German commentators saw it, the German government was ignored and reduced in role to a spectator.

The Germany CDU party's economic spokesman said today that his country ploughed billions of euros in developments costs for EADS and was deeply uncharmed by the current proposal to site the headquarters of the new group jointly in London (for the military division) and Paris (for the civilian division). According to a leak to Der Spiegel, the German counterproposal to make Munich the new headquarters was flatly rejected by the British and French governments. Maybe the Germans remember how earlier this year the European patent court was divided up between London and Paris - Paris getting most of the business - despite Germany having the biggest patent industry in Europe.

Nor was the commercial logic all that appealing to the Germans. BAE,a defence company suffered from the defence spending downturn in the UK and the US.

EADS has, through Airbus, ten years' worth of orders in backlog, but still had a desire to diversify unto defence in a big way and also crack the US market.

The Pentagon is said to be hostile to any EADS merger with a US defence giant so BAE it had to be - except it not clear whether the new Franco-German-British group would find the same profuse access to Pentagon contracts than a purely British company had and has. The new merged EADS BAE might find doors closed to it in Washington that were open to BAE, that access being one of BAE's strengths and attractions, ironically, for EADS. Put bluntly, the Pentagon may have some trust problems with Paris; just as Berlin does.

However, it is Britsh BAE - lacking EADS's surfeit of orders - that may suffer the most from the failure to merge.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48475 2012-09-20T08:58:53 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48475#comments 0
The tiny Baltic country of 1.3 million has long led the way on issues like e-government and e-health. When Estonia won its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, its economy produced very little and its people literally went hungry with the collapse of the Soviet economy and food and goods distribution systems.

The factories of capital Tallinn were like museums of obsolete Soviet industrial technology. Fortunately, Estonia had a very westward- looking population, with access to Finnish TV and many emigres living in Sweden and Finland. The country had a very youthful leadership - ministers in their twenties and early thirties - who were determined to make a fresh start.

The country set out to become as positive to technology and innovation as Scandinavia, added to a little more resourcefulness. The Estonians could draw on the advantage of having been brought up in a society where improvisation and do-it-yourself skills became important when dealing with Soviet bureaucracy and frequent Soviet equipment breakdowns.

So, within years of independence, Estonia streamlined its bureaucracy to make it easy to start up new firms. A flat income tax was introduced to encourage entrepreneurs. A programming/entrepreneurial culture evolved which eventually led to KaZaa and Skype. (Skype may have been cofounded by Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs - but it was built by Estonian engineers, an intense source of pride )

But e-government and e-services were pushed too. The government went online early, and the country pioneered electronic signatures, online banking services, mobile phone payments for car parking and voting in national elections by internet. They introduced an e-health system which allowed people to read their health details and order health prescriptions online. Finally the government introduced the e-school platform, which offered a 24-hour classroom where students could check their test results and do other school-related stuff.

Next step

Now the Tiigrihüppe (Tiger Leap) foundation, which has been involved with e-initiatives since 1996 , is piloting the ProgeTiigri project; teaching seven-year-olds to code as part of the regular curriculum. The project is being trialled in a small number of schools starting this term in Grade 1, and expects eventually to cover the whole country and every single of the basic school's nine years. The coding will initially be taught by the regular teachers, so we will see how that goes, and private firms will also be involved as it is they who stand to benefit.

Bigger European countries will surely be watching the Estonian experiment closely. Most governments and experts are convinced the development of proper computer skills among the population are a key to 21st century prosperity. Coding teaches people an important life skill - how to think analytically - even if they don't become computer programmers in later life. But just taking Britain, for instance, the percentage of students studying Computer Science has dropped from 5% to 3% of the annual intake in a decade - and it has become ever more male dominated.

Some argue that programming skills among youngsters at large are worse than they were two decades ago. Today it is argued teenagers are content consumers, enjoying a surfeit of music and film on their Ipads and smartphones. In contrast, two or three decades ago they messed around with their Vic 20s or BBC Micros and learned proper, if basic, programming: content production of sorts.

In British schools at GCSE level, ICT studies is available, but the subject has been criticised for focusing on teaching just word processing and spreadsheet skills - "Microsoft 101" - rather than how to program computers.

One American wag joked on seeing the Estonian coding announcement, "Great, we'll just bring these Estonians to America in 20 years' time", but I suspect most countries will look to copy Estonia's educational innovation for their own schools rather than one day steal their programmers.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48379 2012-09-12T21:32:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48379#comments 0
The European commission has therefore decided to do some spring cleaning, to knock heads together and to get users to utilise the spectrum more efficiently. In a memo published last week, it called for a new approach. Sharing is going to be the way ahead.

There will be two ways to go about this. One, several operators sharing the same spectrum at the same time, or, two, the operators that are the "haves" being forced to sublet the parts of the spectrum they own to the "have-nots". Either way, some companies may not be very happy about this.

To be more specific, in the future a growing number of operators will find themselves having simultaneous rights of access to the same spectrum bands - and the commission, in a memorandum published this week, wants to create the regulatory environment to make spectrum sharing easier to happen. There will be attempts to try and make sure that technology is developed to the point that operators can coexist within the same spectrum with a minimum loss of service to each. The way users share wifi networks currently may show the way forward.

An alternative is to allow licensed holders of the part of a spectrum to sublet their frequencies exclusively, this time, for a fee to new operators. So - either sharing or subletting the spectrum, either way allowing the have-nots to have a piece of the action.

In some countries a kind of subletting of the spectrum already takes place but the commission wants each country to monitor its local usage patterns with a view eventually to harmonising European standards according to the practice of the countries that harnesses its total spectrum most efficiently. What the commission calls "adopting best practice".

Like many commission memoranda, it's hard to be concrete about this in way that journalism usually demands. Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes's proposal on Monday last week seems to be the usual kind of kite flying. It is very early days yet, and the commission has yet to submit a proposal, let alone set any dates for the European parliament and council to act. They are waiting for the IT industry to respond.

The commission cannot easily force governments to disband their telecoms champions. But one wonders whether the commissions's ultimate dream is if there were, in every member state, a functional separation between the radio spectrum and the users of it similar to the arrangement that has taken place in landline communications in some countries.

The UK here is the model. BT, for instance, long ago had to split its infrastructure and consumer businesses, letting rivals onto their networks in return for a fee. So the whole radio spectrum could ultimately be turned into a field on which everyone can "buy" space. Exclusive ownership will be a thing of a past. As said, this is just speculative.

Governments might be less than pleased with this, since it brings some kind of single market - which the EU champions - to the radio spectrum. The very word "single market" famously makes some southern EU nations see red. And it may reduce the prices for the 4G licences they hope to profitably sell. Anyhow, the bigger picture is that, when space gets scarcer, everyone has to squeeze in that little bit more tightly, and start sharing.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48269 2012-09-06T17:47:39 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48269#comments 0
When there is a hold-up, the two rival airports can use one of their spare runways to ease aircraft movement congestion. Heathrow lacks that luxury, which is why Westminster has been having this discussion about building a third runway at Heathrow. Both coalition parties are currently refusing to consider a third runway. It's in both parties' manifestos as well as in the Coalition Agreement.

Both parties fear losing marginal seats in west London if the runway goes ahead and increases jet noise among residents. Yet various think tanks and MPs have warned of the economic cost to trade, tourism and inward investment if Heathrow loses its European top airport status to, most probably, Charles De Gaulle (CDG).

London's mayor Boris Johnson has proposed, as alternative to a third runway, a totally new airport in the Thames Estuary, while a secret consortium has proposed a kind of Heathrow West located in Oxfordshire. Both options would take decades to build. Even a third runway when the planning process is taken into account would take a decade - amazing, really, for what is just a strip of tarmac.

But how likely really is that Heathrow will be displaced and the British economy suffer as doomsters predict? Along with CDG's fewer delays, the British media cites the greater number of flights a day CDG has and offers almost 50% greater number of destinations. But Heathrow's advantage in passenger numbers over CDG, about 13%, has remained completely steady for about half a decade. And an anti Heathrow expansion lobby group has calculated that this larger number of destinations can partly be explained by Charles De Gaulle's superiority in short haul European connections and by links to economically marginal former African colonies.

When looking at the major international business centres, Singapore, Hong King, Riyadh, Dubai, Sydney and the North American cities, London has more, and often far more, weekly connections than Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle combined. It is true that Amsterdam, CDG and Frankfurt have slightly more frequent links to some emerging market cities that Heathrow lacks, or lacks enough weekly flights to for instance Jakarta, Beijing,and Sao Paolo, but none of the European hub airports have frequent links to any of these and none of the European cities have links to all the emerging market cities.

At any rate their superiority in links to, say, Beijing is far less than say Heathrow's crushing superiority in links to the USA and South East Asia.

The picture is not as bad as it first seems.

While Heathrow - "Deathrow" - is not exactly popular, Charles de Gaulle seems more unpopular still. CNN's travel site CNN Go recently crowned CDG the world's worst airport, citing grimy toilets, toilets without seats, broken scanning machines, overall lack of signage, staff that only spoke French and confusing layouts among the older of its ever growing number of terminals. Another survey, conducted by rhe airport assessment site Skytrax, awarded Heathrow 11th best airport, CDG 78th and near bottom.

Still, on balance, though, there is no reason for complacency. CDG is built on a greenfield site that seems infinitely expandable, adding a terminal every few years, most recently the state-of-the-art S4 satellite hub, which is an architectural showcase of French design and flair. It has oval-shaped departure boards, walls of water, wooden decks and a Parisian "boulevard" comprising a row of indoor trees.

More importantly, perhaps, is that CDG remains an unrivalled hub for the A1 motorway which links easily to the whole of France, and for national and international TGV rail connections. Paris's geographical centrality is something London can't do much about. CDG is already Europe's largest cargo hub and near what is claimed to be "Europe's largest business park", Paris Nord 2.

And the big threat, according to ADF, is if high speed rail grows to become a continent-wide phenomenon, replacing short haul flights. CDG could drop its European short haul slots and really start competing with Heathrow on the long haul business routes, using high speed rail as feeders.

Heathrow, build that third runway.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48083 2012-08-22T07:14:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48083#comments 0
To be a Doktor is a very prestigious thing in a country that can be surprising in its formality. Work colleagues call each other by their surnames. For people with two higher degrees it is not unheard of to see references to the full title, Herr Professor Dr Dr Muller, for example. In the private sector, doctorates confer prestige, high status and sometimes higher salaries. Business leaders and politicians crave the Doktor title, which can be inscribed in their passports and become part of the name.
Perhaps it was inevitable that their attractiveness should prompt people to plagiarise other's work to get their doctorates, and Germany has recently been rocked by a number of plagiarism scandals - first in politicians' doctorates, latterly in the doctorates of scientists and engineers. The plagiarism has been "outed" by volunteers working through the internet.

The campaigns have become a German media phenomenon. The first doctorate to be exposed was that of the minister of defence, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, last year. Suspicions were first voiced in an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Readers then copypasted bits of his dissertation into Google and found further large sections copied. The number of volunteers quickly grew into the 100s, and collaborative "wiki", based on a Wikipedia-style collaborative platform, was set up involving a complicated structure of moderators, admins and editors. They sliced up his thesis and checked it line by line in Google, in a more thorough approach than current antiplagiarism software is capable of. The final product came in the form of a barcode (see picture) representing the whole thesis, the intensity of lines and colours indicating the parts where plagiarism was heaviest. The once popular minister lasted a few weeks in the face of media outrage and has now left politics.

Organisers fend off criticism that it is a witch hunt and say it is necessary to maintain a high level of academic honesty in the country. Many of the anonymous volunteers rooting out plagiarism are themselves young academics struggling to complete their own theses.
Inspired by the Guttenberg case. a more permanent project looking at other politicians, and scientists and engineers, now exists as Vroniplag*. Suspect doctorates are submitted anonymously, and are "taken apart" by volunteers. About half the plagiarism cases dealt with have resulted in the withdrawal of the doctorates. Careers have been affected. One instance where nothing changed, however, was one senior manager at a large power company, who was cleared by the issuing university despite clear evidence of plagiarism. The power company is a big donor to the university.

Overall, universities have felt very discomfited by this new scrutiny towards doctorates. However, the whole thing is a sign of the times and the anti plagiarism movements are here to stay, according to Prof Dr Barbara Weber Wulff, a Berlin academic involved with Vroniplag. You could compare it to the Arab Spring - where Twitter and Facebook were used to mobilise demonstrators - in that modern technology empowers the "little people" against the elites that rule them. As long as the anonymous tipoffs about suspect doctorates keep rolling in to the Vroniplag site, it is likely there are people in Germany, in good positions, living in anxiety.

**http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Home]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48010 2012-08-16T09:43:11 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=48010#comments 0 Homage to Catalonia, and I quote from memory, about the heavier coins, the flower covered railway cuttings, the red letter boxes with tattered jubilee posters (George V's silver jubilee, that is), the gentle crowds that were easier to push into the gutter than in any other country.

I always thought the pin sharp descriptions in his book about the Spanish civil war among the best stuff he wrote. It operated as an effective counterpoint to his exciting account of the chaos of the war in Spain. The red chorizo sausages that gave you diarrhoea, the empty streets with deserted trams when Barcelona erupted in gunfire. I suppose the descriptions of "England in deep, deep sleep which would not wake up until the roar of bombs" are one of the best known bits of English literary reportage. At any rate John Major evoked it when he spoke of England being a country of long shadows on cricket grounds and invincible green suburbs. It is the only thing people ever remember John Major saying.

No matter how often I go back and forth between Britain and Europe, I always have a George Orwell moment, as I describe it to myself. The shock of one's home country (ie England) having been defamiliarised by foreign travel or a foreign sojourn. I make observations and tot up the score. Europe v England.

About many things, but not everything, England comes off worse. Though when I say England I really mean London so perhaps England gets unfairly included in an assessment that does not really apply to it. England has better, brighter poster advertising. Always has had advertising ahead of its time. I remember looking over some slides recently of London in the 1970s from the excellent nostalgia website called the Retronaut. The cars are old and unshiny, the pedestrians are wearing bell bottomed trousers, there is still the odd bowler hat about, But the advertising, for Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges is brilliant and innovative, and would not be out of place on a poster billboard 35 years later, today. (Except of course, because of an EU directive, tobacco advertising is forbidden.)

English advertising is superior then and still wins the prizes at the annual advertising festival at Cannes. (And the same goes for the other entertainment and information industries, but it is the advertising you notice immediately on coming in from abroad.) Another bright spot, in recent years, is that there is a better and faster service mentality in the UK compared to the Continent. But much else gives a shabby appearance.

You notice the poor quality of the motorway driving out of Dover to London, compared to the French motorway coming into Calais. At London's airports you notice the worn carpets. Coming into London there are the depressing shop fronts, increasingly likely to be boarded up. I write this from Sweden, where everything is spotless and efficient. Everything just works. There are long white beaches without a scrap of rubbish on them. Buses in rural areas are both frequent and efficient, arriving on the minute, and connecting seamlessly to the local railway network. Malmo, where I spent a few years of my childhood, has undergone a fantastic regeneration programme. Modern office buildings, with no weeping concrete, line the harbour basins where once shipyards provided 5% of the world's shipping.

It is all incredibly stylish and has none of the almost fascistoid monumentalism - perhaps it is the Chicago style - that you find at Canary Wharf. Even the multi-story car parks look good, as their purpose has been completely disguised by exterior lighting designs that reflect in the water at dusk. It is not just the boldness of the designs but the attention paid to the little things, to detail. And older constructions are not neglected. Every single facade I have seen looks newly painted, no flaking in sight. Sweden is of course helped by a growing economy and because it is so underpopulated.

South East England is groaning under the strain of its population boom brought about, in part, because it acts as a magnet for the whole of the EU. I know what I will be thinking when I get back. How can England regenerate its infrastructure when there is just so much to be done?]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47911 2012-08-09T11:38:11 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47911#comments 0
But how ahead of time they were. Launched in 1982, the Minitel eventually allowed users to read the newspapers, buy shares, do your banking, book a rail ticket, check live tennis scores, rent an apartment and above all chat and flirt on the unprepossessing little terminals with primitive graphics and a 1200 baud throughput rate. The Minitel was simplicity itself. You just plugged it into the phone socket with one cable and that was it.

The Minitel was part of the French telecommunications revolution of the 1970s. France had until then one of the worst telephone services in western Europe, with just four million subscribers. Those above a certain age might remember camping or holidaying in France where the difficulty of making long distance calls home was, well, part of the charm.

The grumpy bar or cafe owner presiding over the village's only phone was part of tourist folklore. But president Giscard D'Estaing launched a campaign to get France connected and put all the organisation and capability of which the French civil service is capable behind it.

Digitised phone exchanges were rolled out at high speed and waiting time for a new phone was cut from two years to a matter of weeks. Phone boxes were constructed everwhere Overnight, it seemed, Paris was overrun with phoneboxes that took the innovative chip cards.

The Minitel boxes, valued at about £150, were given free to every household and the initial selling point was that these were electronic telephone directory covering the whole of France at a tine directories became rapidly out of date with a drastic expansion of the number of French phone subscribers. And directory searches indeed remained a core function for the Minitels for most of their existence.

Apart from the electronic phone number directory, the main early driver for Minitel users was text sex chat. There were many services, but the advertising was inevitably similar. Posters with the access code 3615 followed by some woman's name and glamorous picture were everywhere in France for a long time. Billing was based on time connected. Many households with a male component suddenly began getting skyhigh bills.

By 1990, other services like news and online banking - primitive but functional - became relatively more important and by the mid 1990s, the cusp of the internet era, a third of the French population was regularly using Minitel. The internet meant Minitel was ultimately doomed, even though actual service use did not peak until a few years into the internet era, 2002. Conversely French internet uptake was slower than other countries because the French found their needs satisfied by Minitel. Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, was one of several US computer figures who studied the services pioneered on Minitel carefully.

France was unable to export the Minitel itself to any great extent, except to its cultural satellite Belgium. Historians of the subject say the French were too pushy when trialling their system abroad.

They wanted to export their whole package, without compromises, and were insufficiently flexible to local conditions. One common notion, though, that France Telecom only offered a walled garden environment to developers, was unfair. Setting oneself up as a service provider (news, gambling, chat), and getting a listing in the printed Minitel guide was incredibly easy. At its height Minitel offered 23,000 services.

There seems to have been surprisingly little reproach and resentment at the passing of this French icon in the French press. Most - but not all - Minitel users have happily migrated over to the internet, The technology is nearly 35 years old, so it has had a good run. The simple. monochrome Minitel had, of course, none of, say, the Ipad's, bells and whistles, but surely developers even today have something to learn from the Minitel's usability, adopted by French farmers and pensioners alike with equal enthusiasm.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47364 2012-07-06T10:26:17 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47364#comments 0 le boson de Brout-Englert-Higgs.

Many inventions and discoveries - eg the telephone - have multiple fathers, and the Higgs boson, the particle that endows other particles with mass, is no exception.

The particle is named after theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the 83-year-old professor emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh university. Theoretically proposed by the Newcastle-born grammar school boy in the early 1960s, other physicists have spent nearly 50 years trying to prove its existence by smashing different particles together in high speed accelerators. In the Large Hadron Collider, which was completed in 2008, scientists finally had a machine powerful enough.

If CERN's latest finding - and they are pretty confident - does prove to be the Higgs boson, it will be more of a tool than an end in itself. With further experiments, scientists hope to find out more about the Higgs boson's associated field, the Higgs field, in order to find the reasons as to why fundamental particles have different masses. The Higgs field is sometimes described, in layman's terms, as a field of snow or a pool of molasses. It impedes the motion of particles, slowing them down, giving them mass, without which they would all speed around the universe at the speed of light and never clump into the matter that we know today.

Prof Higgs's paper, Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons, appeared in the prestigious Physical Review Letters on 19 October 1964, having been submitted on 31 August 1964.

In fact that very day, 31 August a paper, broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons, submitted on 26 June, was published in that same journal. The authors were Robert Brout and Francoise Englert, two physicists at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. The means of the two theoretical papers were different. Higgs used the simplest and most direct argument, while the same model was considered in a quantum mechanical way by the two Belgian scientists. But the conclusions of Higgs and the other two were essentially the same.

In an interview from 2008, Higgs says he is always careful to give ample credit to the two other theoreticians. He said he was "apprehensive about meeting them at a conference because they had reason to be aggrieved." Now he insists "relations are friendly."

Brout died in 2010, but Englert, now 79, was present at the CERN seminar. Englert still has an office at the ULB, and active in theoretical physics. When asked about CERN's finding a boson consistent with the boson particle he told Belgian press: "Maybe they don't have everything yet but it is like you are looking for a lost cat and you hear a cat's miaow, and you are likely to find the cat there. There is a good chance this is it."

He said his and colleague's paper had precedence - antériorité - and that Higgs recognises this. "Let us say we are codiscoverers, in independent but complimentary ways. Our mathematical approach was different. We did not know each other. People started calling this the Higgs boson but scientists know that this is the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson and the field BEH. I prefer to call it the scalar boson, and scalar field." In terms of citations, the Belgians' paper and the Higgs paper are about the same. Englert said he "wouldn't mind a Nobel prize at all".

There is only one problem. Three further scientists later that year - Gerlad Gralnik, CR Hagen and Tom Kibble - published a paper on the subject, so could count themselves also codiscoverers. That makes five living scientists with a claim. The Physics Nobel prize, by tradition, is awarded to a maximum of three people. The committee could always wait for age to take its toll.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47247 2012-06-28T10:08:13 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47247#comments 0
They want their parents' cash, but then want the parents to make themselves scarce. Money without obligations or responsibilities.
But Mrs Angela Merkel is using the beckoning forefinger. Not so fast, son. In the technical lingo, Germany refuses to agree to joint liability of eurozone debts unless there is further fiscal, banking and monetary union.

We will know more after the summer's regular EU summit today and Friday, but the German proposals represent a truly great leap forward and could lead to a new relationship between the union and the nation state. There could be years of squabbles before everything is settled through national referenda, as treaties will have to be torn up. The United Kingdom may vote to leave and London could face its greatest ever threat as the potential of new rules restricting trading with the euro to eurozone members might move that business to Frankfurt.

Chancellor Merkel told the German parliament this week that her proposed political union would be based on four supervisory blocks controlled from Brussels to ensure the money lent to the ailing southern nations would not just disappear down a black hole. German commentators are at pains to point out their economy is not an endless pot of gold and that, if Germany were dragged into the mire, everyone would lose.

The German solution will include budgets balanced in Brussels and even encroachments on the holy cow of national sovereignty, national tax rates. Merkel is also expected to call for a competitiveness pact and structural reforms to make southern Europe more like Germany. The Germans believe they are realists and want everyone else to be. Europe does not have any other option faced by the manufacturing juggernauts of the Far East. Germany is prepared to support the southern nations: to stick with them, but as a form of tough love, and only after tough controls are instituted against backsliding.

The European commission appears to be on the same page, having just published a seven page document arguing for the 17 country eurozone to have its own treasury office and pre-emptive supervision of banks. But the German proposals are going to be deeply problematic for Paris which has greater clout than the southern nations and has become their spokesman.

Pooling sovereignty has always been a problem for this proud nation which prefers its position to be sovereign and leading Europe rather than ensconced in a federal democracy within it and yet France wants solidarity payment structures - preferably in the form of eurobonds - as soon as possible to stop a train of southern defaults that would damage not least heavily involved French banks.

One difficulty is that the new French president, Francois Hollande, has not exactly got his relationship with Mrs Merkel off to a good start by lowering the French pension age to sixty.

It gives ammunition to the kind of claims expressed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper two weeks ago."Hollande hasn't given up the dream of life in a hammock financed by German tax money".

This is the most exciting time in European politics in ages. Money problems give an urgency to the discussion about political union that was not there at the time of endless debate about the EU constitution, which was essentially about the same thing, but ended up watered down. The choices are stark but completely comprehensible.

What worries me is that Britain had not really thought things out. Where it wants to be and what it wants to do in the new Europe. There is a lack of trust between the leaders of France and Germany, but the French and Germans have always managed to thrash out a compromise in the past. And when they finally make their deals, Britain often loses out.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47014 2012-06-14T10:58:26 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=47014#comments 0
For instance: tiny nano landscape "moulds" 100,000 times smaller than the tip of a pencil, could convert stem cells rapidly into a cell of choice. The topology structuring the stem cell as it is placed into the three dimensional mould modifies its behaviour and ultimate fate. Work on this is being done at Northwestern University in the US.

Another example. Half the world's population lacks clean drinking water. In one project, "biodegradable teabags" are being made of a mesh of water soluble polymer nano fibres that have been impregnated with antimicrobial agents that kill 99% of all bacteria. The "teabag" occupies the neck of a water bottle and could change water consumption in the developing world, researchers say.

Nano technology is also being touted for space-based applications. Because of the expense of bringing things into orbit, nano-sized sensors providing analyses and diagnoses in space could become vital. More efficient solar cells based on nano technology could make large panels on spacecraft redundant.

There are numerous other examples. But what are the drawbacks of nanotechnology? Back on Earth, the prosaic matter of using silver nano particles to remove sweat odour from sports clothes has come under criticism

Researchers in Sweden are finding that the amount of silver in sewage works sludge is rising.

And this is a problem, claim researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Silver ions kill bacteria yet they are toxins, at least as poisonous as mercury. And silver nano particles are quickly washed out of the clothes they originally impregnated. According to the Swedish chemicals inspection authority, after ten washes the stuff is gone. The toxic silver makes bacteria in the sludge antibiotic resistant, because the toxic stuff thickens cell walls in an attempt to resist penetration from the heavy metal.

Unfortunately these are the same cell membranes that antibiotics pass through to kill the cells. When the sludge is spread on fields as fertiliser there is risk of spreading the resistant bacteria as well as the silver itself enters the wider environment. Worse, the odour-killing nano particles do not make clothes smell less even while they are still in the garments, according to tests by the Textile University at Borås. The Swedish Water Association now wants the Swedish government to raise the issue at EU level, where the new biocide convention is currently being negotiated.

The executive of a company manufacturing antibacterial silver for clothes says that there is not enough cotton for the world's population in the future, set to grow by two billion by 2050. The problem of artificial fibres, that they absorb sweat smells, has to be dealt with in some way.

The amount of silver in the sludge is much less than it was two decades ago and that a lot silver is used for water purification. Less than one percent of silver is used for odour-free clothing. The problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria caused by silver is so marginal the EU, which recently published its strategies on antibiotic resistance, does not even mention silver.

So does that mean the Swedish water inspection authority is being unduly alarmist? Well maybe not. The problem with current chemicals conventions is that they do not cover nanomaterials. The chemical convention REACH, the EU's biggest piece of legislation when negotiated through in the early 2000s, was aimed at identifying "substances of very high concern" and then replacing them with safer alternatives.

REACH is run from a big bureaucratic machine based in Helsinki and all chemicals used in industry have to undergo an authorisation process. But science often moves faster than legislation. And there is no doubt that some chemicals - the organic compounds that have been termed Persistent Organic Pollutants, for instance - do affect health.

Prof John Turnidge at the Australian Society for Microbiology argues that a lot of these materials are being wheeled out without much public discussion. The problem is resistance takes a long time to develop and the picture is hard to determine by which time it could be too late. On the other hand there is the danger of being overly alarmist and silver undoubtedly has many uses in hospitals as bacterial killer. Some surveys show that no resistance has yet been developed.

Scientists have to get in early on the public debate on this, else there is a danger of the issue being seized by activists, as has happened with GM and nuclear. It would be terrible if yet another useful bit of science were removed out of irrational fears.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46913 2012-06-07T11:57:38 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46913#comments 0
So many businessmen, tourists and decision makers from Paris, Brussels and locations beyond walk through the area. St Pancras is better than London's airports because it is much smaller and more focused. Plus, it makes up a far greater proportion of travellers' traffic from Paris and Brussels than does aviation even if you lump all four London airports' statistics together. You get more bangs for your buck marketing yourself at St Pancras. More eyeballs with less effort.

There is just one main concourse. The airports are such chaotic and stressful bazaars of sense impressions that you would think marketing efforts find it hard to stand out. Marks and Spencer seem to have understood with a very well stocked shop full of British foods that can be taken on one's travels ', sweets, union jack tins with biscuits. Lots of sandwiches and crisps but also their main food lines, which they resist charging location premium prices for .Other leading retailers have also made sure to have a presence on the public shopping area, as much as for marketing presence purposes as anything else. Unfortunately this may just contribute to the idea of Britain as a retail heaven. But we knew that already.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy said during the recent election campaign that Britain has "no real industry left". Yet the Kings Cross/St Pancras area (King's Cross is next door) could turn out to be a real "Where Britain meets Europe" knowledge and entertainment hub. The new King's Place arts centre. The British Library is right next door and the Francis Crick biomedical research centre also being constructed next to that.

The life sciences is the area where Britain is still indisputably outstanding. A lot of scientists and people from industry will be making the 50 metre stroll from the station when the international research centre opens in 2015. And now the engineers have caught on.

Dyson has set up a stand for its new bladeless fan, surrounded by stationery shops and sushi bars. However, the advertisement for French engineering is the Eurostar trains at the platform level above. While Gare du Midi in Brussels and Gare du Nord in Paris are much less welcoming, shabbier, places than St Pancras, the two hour journeys on these high speed operations give plenty of time for the traveller to reflect on the differences between Britain and France.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46713 2012-05-24T13:19:35 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46713#comments 0
He has his country with him. Only 31% of the French believe that the free market economy is the best economic system available. In no other country polled is the figure that low. In another survey, 80% believe that globalisation is bad for their livelihoods, and want less foreign investment. Catching the mood, Nicholas Sarkozy, the outgoing president, called on the European commission a few weeks ago to erect trade barriers against non-EU companies seeking to participate in the EU's public procurement market, the world's largest.

And yet - French business has been one of the main beneficiaries of globalisation, this system so many of them affect to despise. Londoners will tell you. They pay their electricity bills to EDF energy, the British subsidiary of 80% state owned Electricite de France. Their rubbish is collected by Veolia Environnement. Many of their bus routes are run by RATP, the Parisian transport authority whose logo, a stylised image of the river Seine meandering through Paris, now sits on the side of red double decker buses on the Old Kent Road. The Pendolino trains that whisk passengers across England's Green and Pleasant Land are built by France's Alstom. The list goes on: Brits eat their canteen food from Sodexo and make their phone calls on Orange and T-Mobile, networks co-owned by France Telecom/Deutsche Telekom. France has more Fortune 500 companies than either the UK or Germany.

French voters seem uniquely hostile to these companies which have helped maintain France's position as the fifth largest economy in the world. Anglo-American economic liberal commentators blame this disconnect on an opinion forming elite of journalists and politicians based in the posh parts of Paris who all went to the same universities and have had beliefs about the evils of the market drummed into them. At the same time these Anglo-American commentators say France is riding for a fall. Their companies might be global, but domestic labour costs that are higher than Germany's and the state devours a high 56% of GDP. The French should learn to love capitalism and slim down their state, seems to be the British economic liberals' message to the new socialist president Hollande. Well, maybe.

But I can't help thinking that, if the French have their delusions about globalisation, so do the British, but in a different way. If the French are too critical of the process, the British have not been critical enough. That in fact seems to be thesis of a new book* by Alex Brummer, a financial journalist. Britain has sold more than half its assets now to foreign owners - and at a growing rate, £54.5bn just in 2010.

Nearly 40% of UK patents are owned by global firms, triple the EU average figure. Brummer blames the cheap costs of borrowing in the 1990s and 2000s, takeover friendly legislation, and the presence of City investment banks able to make the rules for themselves. Foreign companies took advantage and bought up British companies at bargain rates, on borrowed money, helped by rules that allow interest paid on loans to be deducted from their tax bills. He blames British executives who often had their share option deal in their contracts rewritten so the shares could be immediately cashed in when their companies were taken over, rather than wait some years. It was like winning the lottery, a cash bonanza that was hard to resist.

For sure, these sell offs have injected cash into the British economy, but it is all very short termist. Tax revenues migrate and domestic supply chains and R&D skills are lost when control passes to a headquarters abroad. The French have a developed strategy to prevent key technologies from falling into foreign hands. They range from nuclear power - to yoghurt. Control over home markets has undoubtedly facilitated their international expansion. Rather than be superior about the French, see where they are being canny and smart.

*Britain for Sale, Alex Brummer, 2012]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46613 2012-05-17T12:34:42 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46613#comments 0
The Royal Navy will now be buying STOVL (short take off and vertical landing) F-35Bs, which are cheaper, but less well-armed, than the more potent, longer range F-35Cs, conventional jets which require expensive electromagnetic catapults and arrestors ("cats and traps").

This puts Britain back on the track for the option favoured by Labour. Cameron reversed Labour's jump jet choice after he came to power in 2010. One big reason: he wanted to make British capabilities compatible with French carrier fighters, which also use the catapults.

One of Cameron's main foreign policy goals was to get closer to the French in foreign policy and defence issues. As fading world powers, the reasoning went, they were better off sticking together and sharing the burdens of their force projection.

In 2010, after signing the Anglo-French agreement on extensive closer military cooperation at Lancaster House, he said:
"The last government committed to carriers that would have been able to work properly with our closest military allies. It will take time to rectify this error but we are determined to do so."

The Royal Navy is building two aircraft carriers, the 280 metre, 65,000 tonne sister ships HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales - the largest British naval ships ever constructed - and at least the former of these should be ready before the end of the decade.

According to the British media, British service chiefs unanimously support Cameron's move. The ostensible reason is to save money and to bring the completion dates of the carriers forward. The defence secretary who made the decision, Liam Fox, estimated the cost of the catapult conversions to a billon pounds. His successor Philip Hammond has tallied the cost at twice that. According to the BBC, around £100m has already been spent on design work on the project. There are also expected to be some exit costs to the US contractors. But at least, defence chiefs say, the whole cost of the catapults and traps will not now be incurred.

The British U-turn has brought forth the usual French complaints about the perfidious British, acting, they say, against the spirit of Lancaster House deal.

The French media also take the opportunity to argue, citing US analysts, that the F-35, in whatever, is an inferior plane, in fact, a calamity, and yet it is planned to be the workhorse for the next half century of not only the Royal Navy , but the United States and eight other allies. The full excoriating article here. The costs of this most expensive project in Pentagon history has ballooned to 400 billion dollars and rising.

The series of tests is just 20% complete and there is much more in prospect. It swallows nearly 40% of the Pentagon's procurement and the testing programme will be continuing until 2019, nearly a decade after the first deployment was supposed to take place in 2009.

The costs of operating the plane, not just building it, are expected to be
higher than the gross domestic product of all but the nine largest economies in the world. Critics have called it a "flying piano", all things to all customers, a compromise which lacks the air combat characteristics of the F16 or the bombing capabilities of the F15. Its most important innovation was stealth capability, which put severe constraints on design and armament, but this is not what it is cracked up to be. It could also spend a lot of time being grounded for maintenance, like its fifth generation sibling the F22.

What do the French see as an alternative to the F35, in either variant? Bien sur, their own sleek Dassault Rafale, the plane that will not now be able to land on the new British carriers because the carriers will lack catapults.

The Rafale is a light. inexpensive fourth generation fighter that flies off on their own aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, and which, gallingly, has just bested another BAE project, the Eurofighter Typhoon, to win a huge export order to India.

Peter Collins, Flight Global magazine's test pilot, a former Red Arrows team leader, said, here, that "If I had to go into combat on a mission against anyone I would without question choose the Rafale. It is quite simply the best combat aircraft I have ever flown." While the F35 is expected to be available in around 2018, a few years earlier than the conventional variant, the Rafale is of course available now for purchase/leasing should the Royal Navy wish to do so.

But the F-35 has considerable BAE participation as a contractor and the F-35B is the only F-35 option with Rolls Royce engines. Rolls Royce might have an unparalleled product portfolio, but one French commentator believes BAE are stuck with poor designs, and that BAE have to be supported somehow. One French commentator said "Let us not accuse the British of treason, let us feel sorry for them." To be fair, others say the F-35B is a better aircraft than people think, and will of course be able to land on French and US carriers, even if their aircraft will not be able to land on British ones.

Supporters of Cameron's strategy to buy the flag might say he is just shifting to the French approach of going with national preferences. And who, in the long term, can say that has harmed the quality of French technology?]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46558 2012-05-12T14:10:34 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46558#comments 0
The ambitious idea - with significant British input - is to build Europe's most modern intelligent wired city, with smart sensors embedded in roads and walls and networked through the catchily named Urban Operating System.

It's a potentially big business opportunity for the project's partners, who include Formula One's McLaren Electronics - which puts intelligent sensors in its high speed racing cars; award-winning UK engineering firm Buro Happold; Hitachi Consulting and Phillips. One billion people are set to move into cities over the next 30 years.

The site for PlanIT Valley project is a eucalyptus tree-scented valley near Paredes. 30km from Porto, Portugal's second city, once a run down, if charming, industrial centre, now reinventing itself for the 21st century. Porto has a UNESCO-listed old harbour area painted in pastel colours and the cheapest beer west of Prague. But the city also links to several motorways and an international airport, and a local government which has given the PlanIT project special development status.

The 1700 hectare project, planned for 2015 in its 50m euro initial phase. is ultimately planned is to be a city of over 200,000.

What could be done in a city where many thousands of sensors are embedded iin buildings, in the roads. in lamp posts and in walls?

Cars would be directed to parking spaces. Smart lamp posts would increase their lighting levels when cars are coming. In smart buildings, air conditioning systems could switch themselves off when someone left the room. The Urban Operating system can fix leaky taps remotely - or if it can't, it will call the plumber.

Office buildings could listen in on meetings and alert users to similar conversations being held elsewhere in the building. The project's cofounder, Steve Lewis, who used to be a development manager at Microsoft, says corporations buy into different packages that analyse the enormous amount of data from the smart city in the way Iphone users buy"apps".

Living PlanIT - the company behind PlanIT valley - also plans to introduce IT into the construction phase, thereby cutting out the waste prevalent at many building sites. Applying the tech industry model to construction could cut costs by 50% and make some jobs like quantity surveying and construction management redundant. The construction industry is notoriously IT resistant.

Some issues raise their head. Other cities are exploring crowdsourcing alternatives. Drivers' vibration sensitive smartphones could detect potholes and sending the information to City Hall. There is a pilot project in Boston. The website SeeClickFix. which allows people to report on local infrastructure faults, with a facebook "like" tally determining the most urgent repair, is another low cost idea. The Iphone has eight sensors, and millions carry them around. These options certainly help build the community spirit - and city chiefs don't have to bet the bank on them..

PlanIT Valley will have a science park, and hopes to be an innovation hub, as well as a wired up community, but this raises other questions. Can you build truly a city that generates spontaneity, creativity, and innovation in a top down electronic fashion? Well, let us hope you can. The team behind Living PlanIT are also working on a project in London's East End ahead of the Olympics as a showcase for what they hope to do on a larger scale in Portugal.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46301 2012-04-26T10:10:02 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46301#comments 0
A trio of European parliament committees - environment, transport and internal market - is considering a piece of draft legislation presented by the European Commission last December to reduce noise levels in traffic. They will vote on it in June and the legislation could take effect in two stages, 2014 and 2017. The maximum noise level produced by new cars and vans would have to fall by four decibels, and that of new buses by three decibels. Since the scale is logarithmic, a three decibel drop is equivalent to halving vehicle noise.

But the impacts of quieter new cars may not be felt for another 15 years or more. The standards would not affected cars already on the road, and the sale non compliant noisy vehicles would not be restricted until 2019.
The cost of complying with the directive would mostly be borne by industry, according to a commission Working Paper. They would have to change their "engineering, development and testing" methods. A separate directive deals with tyre noise, and quieter tyres will be compulsory after 2016.

The estimated cost to the European motor industry could be up to 4 billion euros over 10 years. But the paper estimates substantial savings in health costs, and savings on noise abatement measures like sleeping policemen and noise barriers. It will also give a hard-to-measure improvement to Europeans' sense of well-being, it says.

As a 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) report illustrates, noise exposure leads to sleep disturbance and stress, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disorders. According to another report, by the European Environment Agency, 55% of Europeans living in towns with a population greater than 250,000 suffer noise levels in excess of 55 decibels, a WHO determined threshold value for greater risks to health.

Brussels has regulated on vehicle noise before.The most recent amendment to noise legislation in 1995 admittedly led to a steep drop in noise coming from cars as well as lorries. Unfortunately, the actual road traffic noise reductions have been much smaller. It is true that new cars are quieter, but this has been compensated by increases in the volumes of traffic. Cars are using wider tyres with different noise characteristics.

And the test conditions have not reflected actual realistic traffic situations. The new legislation will look at all noise sources from vehicles, from the air intake, to the power train and the exhaust. Test procedures will be made more realistic.

To some green groups, these proposed changes are not ambitious enough. Because the current proposals may not have an impact until the 2020s, environmental organisations are beginning to lobby the European parliament and commission to bring forward the dates of the changes to 2013 and 2015. They want new provisions, such as a legal requirement for car makers to provide consumers with noise emissions information at all points of sale.

The Transport & Environment green pressure group, for instance, suggests full information disclosure on noise emissions would empower the uptake of quieter vehicles. One suggestion is that local authorities could give preferential access to quieter vehicles at certain times of day, or reduce road user charges for quieter vehicles.

For its part, the car industry puts the blame on tyres, saying these cause the most noise pollution. Green groups counter that this may be true of free flow driving but it is not true in urban driving, where overall actual vehicle noise - from axles, engines, exhaust - is more relevant.

The car industry further argues that an "integrated approach" is needed, including better insulation by homeowners or further noise barriers. The T&E, in contrast, argues that "100 times more people can be protected from road noise if the same amount of money is spent on developing and producing quieter vehicles instead of on noise barriers".

One further potential benefit is a potential boost to property values, since roads in noisy areas tend to be less attractive to buyers.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46216 2012-04-19T09:51:45 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46216#comments 0
The ferry was on its way from post-Soviet Tallinn to Stockholm; many of the mostly Swedish passengers were on the return leg of a two night cruise. The disaster deeply affected the small city of Stockholm. Multiply the death toll by eight and you'll understand the equivalent impact on a city like London.

These cruises are traditionally popular with Swedes. People could picture themselves trapped in the cabins, or in corridors, of those caught below deck, and everyone seemed to know someone who had died. My best friend's sister drowned. She was attending a ship-based conference with her company, and her cabin was situated below the waterline. The accident happened at 1am on a stormy autumn night in the middle of the Baltic; many of the 137 survivors were those who were staying up drinking late at the night club on the top deck.

Officially the bow door visor, connected to the car deck ramp, broke open under the force of oncoming waves as the ship kept up top speed in the face of the storm. Great volumes of water then sloshed in and filled the car deck, sinking the 157 metre, 15,000 tonne vessel.

However, some Swedish journalists argued that, had the accident happened as thus described, the ferry would have capsized and floated on the trapped air in the lower decks, as happened when the Polish ferry Jan Heweliusz sank in 1993. Or as the Herald of Free Enterprise would have done when it sailed out of Zeebrugge with its car deck doors open in 1987 - had the water been deep enough. In the event, the British ferry turned rapidly - in 90 seconds - over to its side when water entered and came to rest sideways in the shallow Belgian waters.

The Estonia, in contrast, sank slowly and at an increasing angle, over the course of an hour. Could there have been another cause of the Estonia's sinking: perhaps a hole below the waterline?

In addition, two Estonian crew in the engine room reported that the inner car deck ramp was only partially open, and not letting in huge amounts of water. The Swedish government refused another round of diving investigations, even though the Estonia was located only 80 metres down, saying that the "watery grave" should not be disturbed.

But bowing to public pressure, in 2006 the Swedish government appointed two teams. One of these included the Glasgow based company Safety at Sea, which has participated in several extensive investigations into ship sinking with the aim of knowing how to build the ships of the future in a safer way. A detailed four metre model of the Estonia was used to simulate scenarios of the sinking in a large lab tank of water.

After two years of deliberations, the consortias concluded that the Estonia had sunk more or less along the lines that the original accident commission had set out in 1997. Still, the Safety at Sea consortium's final report called for at least some further checks of the hull. It would be a few days' work with dive teams and ROVs, and cost maybe 3 million kronor (around £300,000).

I worked as a journalist in Estonia in 1992 and 1993.

Just after the Soviet collapse, it was pretty chaotic, and you could buy a Kalashnikov for 50 dollars. There is no reason to doubt the findings. But conspiracy theories about bombs planted by the Russian mafia below the waterline continue to flourish. That's the nature of conspiracies. The accident remains a traumatic mental wound for Estonians and Swedes.

History Channel TV documentary http://bit.ly/IGaiK5


Accident report: (link removed 09/07/12 as document no longer available at this location)

Post-Estonia ferry safety regulations: http://bit.ly/IxB7U4


Recommended reading: The Hole, Drew Wilson, The Outlaw Sea, William Langewiesche
http://amzn.to/HxdTtE]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46124 2012-04-12T10:23:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46124#comments 0 Life of Brian reference in the title presumably to win the Brits over. There will be rulers, stickers, badges with the EU logo, maybe even glossy, and free hardback books like, "50 years of European Food Safety policy", well written, if a bit insubstantial. All the material has ultimately been paid for by the European taxpayer.

There will be a smiling person, and she will probably not have very much to do. I will probably bring a lot home, anyway. Then read it, then reflect a little: what is effective public communication? I mean, just considering it in their own terms. Public communication that attracts attention, then derision, can hardly be called successful.

Anyway, I have been reading an interesting but short book about the European Union from Palgrave where the author has interviewed a hundred of the European commission's top officials on conditions of anonymity. It's an enormous job, and George Ross's book* - a departure from the usual EU studies in that it is more journalistic in nature - makes for fascinating reading.

In the 2000s, a big focus on science and environmental policy was supposed to convey legitimacy to the European commission - but events in Greece and the financial crisis have put the member states, particularly Germany, firmly in the driving seat.


The Commission's golden age


Many Eurocrats think commission's the golden age was 1985-1995, the Delors era. Jacques Delors: technocrat, Catholic French socialist, red rag to the British bull. "Up yours Delors", said the Sun but the Single Market Act happened under his watch. He laid the ground work for a foreign and home affairs dimension, for monetary union and greater powers for the European parliament. It helped that Margaret Thatcher was isolated by her shrillness and the Club Med could be bribed with regional funds. The Germans were reluctant but then came the fall of the Wall, when they traded European Monetary Union for European acceptance for European unification and insisting that EMU would look as much like German monetary policymaking as possible.


The Commission's eclipse


When Delors's term ended in 1995, the Eurosceptic British pushed for an unknown Luxembourger, Jacques Santer, who would do fewer things but do them better. The federalist were in retreat, or in process of self destruction. The biggest supporters of federal Europe, the Italian Christian Democrats, collapsed in domestic corruption scandals. The European leaders who had pushed the European bicycle forward in the 1980s were replaced by the Eurosceptic chancer Jacques Chirac in France and German social democrat chancellor Gerhard Schroder, whose devotion to Europe was lukewarm.

While the reforms plotted by Delors like came to fruition, like monetary union, three weak commissions have followed. The Jacques Santer commission collapsed in a corruption scandal of its own, the Romano Prodi commission (1999-2004) was weak at communicating and Jose Manuel Barroso, who has been in charge since 2004, is a tactician who sees what the member states are prepared to put up with and plots a middle course. The member states and general public were suspicious.


Do we need Europe?


Eurocrats quoted in confidence have a host of reasons. The general public have no experience of war and have forgotten the community as a peace preserving construction; they take peace and prosperity for granted. The commission has not moved with the times either. The single market, which insiders call the EU's biggest success, increase intra European trade by a factor of several, has raised fears about the effect of neoliberalism and hot money on loss of jobs and security, Actually the tariff advantage of being "inside" the Union are much reduced with the advent of globalisation, as tariffs between countries are reduced to very little anyway. The virtues of free mobility have been turned into public fears about mass immigration. The social dimension to Delors's single market never really happened. The member states pulled in their horns when the commission extended its powers to issues that lie at the heart of sovereignty, like justice and home affairs issues. Former commissioners lament that the European commission gets involved in deciding the size of swimming pools. The commission stopped launching as many ideas as it did and the European parliament, described as being "full of itself" with its new powers, has less to do than before.


Rallying around climate change


In the late 2000s, the commission starting working on a new raison d'etre, constructed on promoting research, the knowledge economy, and combating climate change.

In the late 2000s the German EU presidency launched a package of an integrated climate change and energy policy. Climate change resolution would not only be a solution to the globe's problems, but the EU's institutional legitimacy problems. Climate change is a common threat all Europeans can agree on, and the perspectives cross borders and are too big to be handed by a nation state. It is a uniting project: the single market, on the hand, has been a fragmenting move, as EU states find themselves racing to the bottom on corporate taxes as they compete for global investment.

The Americans have their head in their sand about global warming and their militaristic approach to the world has failed; the EU meanwhile can export its multilateral DNA to the rest of the world. The EU could do what it did best, bestriding the world stage by acting differently, more virtuously, than an ordinary great power. But the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 was a huge setback for the EU's goals to be a soft power, coordinating the global climate change struggle. The EU's bargaining strategies were inadequate, and the common European mandate provide much higher standards than any emerging market country would be prepared to accept. "The EU and its grand plans disappeared in the chaos of the Copenhagen conference hall," Ross writes.


A German Europe


The stage we are now in seems to involve a still weak commission, but less sovereignty for the nation state as well. The great recession of the last two years, and the attendant Eurozone crisis, has been described as the greatest crisis in Europe's history, and many Eurocrats believe the EU always moves forward in a crisis. The solution - the competitiveness pact , to which Britain is not a signatory - may be a substantial loss of sovereignty, but the deal is chiefly intergovernmental, with the commission having little say. Pension reform, new rules to control debt, standardised rules on corporate taxation. National budgets will henceforth be reviewed n Brussels by voted in in national parliaments. There will be new sanctions for deficits. There are few mechanisms for Eurozone solidarity; everybody is being obliged to be German. It's Angela Merkel calling the shots; Germany is no longer content to be in a state of semi sovereignty under French tutelage in return for being accepted into the EU "community". The guilt about the war is truly over.

Fifteen years during which a loose Anglo Saxon approach to Europe has prevailed has crumbled with the loss of prestige of Anglo Saxon market liberalism. The French have not regained the ascendancy they had until the mid 1990s. The commission has become a servant to the member states. And Germany is the most powerful player.



*The European Union and Its Crises, George Ross, University of Montreal, Palgrave 2011]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46012 2012-04-04T20:54:09 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=46012#comments 0
In the press, commentators are proposing that, from primary school, children from all backgrounds should have to learn some of the key ideas of compter science, understand computational thinking and learn to program. This is a dramatic, revolutionary and exciting proposal, a big vision idea to make coding central to English education. "ICT education in the last two decades has been all too much focused on teaching how to use software products that will soon become obsolescent - instead of actually educating children about the most revolutionary technology of our time."

It is a sophisticated menu that Open University prof John Naughton proposes: to make kids understand computational thinking; understand machine intelligence - so to understand how Amazon predicts your preferences - and know to work with such concepts such as recursion, and heuristics. As he explains, recursion is a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem; and heuristics is about experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery

What is a European angle on this?

According to a survey by Eurostat, the EU's statistics arm, the British are above the European average when it comes to using computers.


Over 90 percent of 16-74-year-olds in the UK have ever used a computer. That compares to 50 percent in Romania, and 61 percent in Italy. It is a little higher than France's 85 percent and about the same as Germany's 89 percent. However, it is lower than Sweden's 96 percent and Finland's 93 percent. Hundred percent of British 16-24 year-olds have used a computer.

The figures for the young everywhere in Europe are generally extremely high; one exception is Italy, where only 90 percent of adolescents surveyed had used a computer.

When you look at the proportion of a particular nationality that has ever written a computer program, the results are also illuminating. In Germany, 18 percent of adolescents have written one, the figure is 17 percent in France and 12 percent in Cyprus. The UK does quite well here: 25 percent. But who tops the table? The Finnish teens and twentysomething, an impressive 37 percent of whom have written a computer program.

I don't think the Finns have focused on creating IT geniuses. Rather, they have an excellent all round education system that gets the basics - the base aspects of the knowledge pyramid - right, especially reading skills.

In the recent PISA international educational comparison survey, where reading, science and mathematics skills are compared across the developed countries, Finland not only has the best European results but lies ahead of several East Asian countries. Finland not only scores highly, but exceptionally evenly, with few weak pupils. And yet the education budget is lower than many other countries. Is it because Finland has few immigrants. Apparently not. Iron discipline in the classroom? Nope.

The basic school in Finland has a very down to earth teaching plan expressional reasonable goals in concrete terms, Teachers clearly understand what pupils have to learn in different subjects in different school years. In the lower school, there is huge emphasis on reading comprehension. There is a big emphasis on understanding one's strengths and weaknesses, and pupils receive traditional marks on a scale from 4 to 10. There is also a developed support system for weak pupils to help weak pupils help catch up with their groups fast.

There is a well developed system of practical education possibilities for the less academic after the end of compulsory schooling at 15; those who remain in the theoretical high school system have a huge choice of courses and subjects, some lasting as little as five weeks.

Finnish high school pupils design their own education programmes. They have to write at least four student essays and choose subjects from groups in such a way that cannot study just science subjects or just arts subjects as in England: they have to straddle the "two cultures". There is a lot of support at basic school level and a lot of freedom at high school level, plus the expectations that students will have to work hard. But discipline is rather mild.

Another factor in Finland's education success is the high standard of teachers: it is a prestigious profession, and attracts some of the brightest people in the country. High marks are required for entering even primary level teaching training schools.

The teachers are confident and the pupils know their teachers have well known for their abilities. Teachers are relaxed in class rooms and know their stuff; they do not constantly chop and change teaching methods. Finnish studies have shown the importance of reading for pupils' academic success, especially the reading of fiction.

Helsinki University had 900 applicants to its teacher training course for chemistry teachers last year. Finland also has a unified school system where all the schools produce good results. Looking at the whole school system picture might just as important as turbocharging IT education when it comes to getting pupils to go more programming - at least if you look at the Finnish example. If 20 percent of a pupil population cannot understand a newspaper headline, how will you expect them to understand a concept like heuristics?]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45913 2012-03-29T09:06:14 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45913#comments 0
He thinks hardware is a static market; and the companies able to change the rules of the game are those specialising in online service provision. Examples could be internet-mediated education, and smart phones to monitor the exercise habits and heartbeat rates of an ageing population.

Zennström and his partner Janus Friis sold Skype to Ebay for $3bn in 2005, then bought it back and sold it to Microsoft for $8.5bn in 2011. He is the most successful tech entrepreneur in modern Sweden - but not the only one. Other well known Swedish innovations include MySQL, sold to Sun Microsystems for $1bn in 2009; Spotify, the streaming music service; and DICE games, which developed the successful Battlefield series.

New inspirations

These Swedish successes, in turn, have been a source of inspiration for a new, younger internet entrepreneur generation, now being highlighted in the media at home and abroad. Ten years ago, if you said the words "Sweden", "internet" and "retail", you might have come up with the name Boo.com, the apparel retailer whose three young founders burned through $135m of venture capital in just 18 months. The problem with "one of the greatest busts in internet history" was overstaffing and bandwidth intensive graphics at a time most people were on dial-up. Cofounder Ernst Malmsten later wrote about his experience in a book entitled Boo Hoo.

The new companies have names like IZettle, Wrapp and Soundcloud and are in the process of being launched in the UK and the US. IZettle is a small gadget you attach to your mobile phone that allows card payments to be taken on it. Perfect for small businessmen, couriers, deliverymen. Wrapp is an online gift card service, Facebook based, that enables the voucher sent to your friends' or lover's mobile to be taken to the retailer, who scans it off and permits the purchase.

Sweden has always been a technology-oriented country. Alfred Nobel pioneered dynamite in the 19th century, Ericsson was a leader in phones; today it is one of the world's largest telephone equipment manufacturers. Sweden has produced two volume carmakers, Volvo and Saab. It is sometimes said the long, dark winters turn the Swedish male into a tinkerer. In a small country, entrepreneurs have to think internationally from the start.

Some of the entrepreneurs have benefited from international venture capital from companies like KPCB and Greylock; others, like Scrive, a service that allows contracts to be signed digitally, started out self funding. According to the FT, quoting Thomson Reuters, Stockholm tech firms got nearly $200m in US venture capital funding last year and $308m in 2010, less than London but more than either Paris or Berlin.(1)

All this is important.

Stockholm meeting


David Cameron has talked about Scandinavia and the lessons the region can teach Britain in terms of equality and high living standards coexisting with open economies and technological innovation. A few weeks ago Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt brought together UK and Nordic/Baltic leaders in Stockholm for a relaxed, informal two day policy-making seminar.* It was doubtless a morale booster for Cameron after the spectacular snub by the French and Germans in Brussels last December, when he vetoed a new euro pact. Reinfeldt, a fellow conservative, has long been a supportive political friend. Neither France not Germany were invited to the Stockholm meeting.
.
But Cameron seems genuinely curious about the Scandinavian way (2) - which may make him suspect in traditional Tory circles.

Last year, the same Nordic-UK grouping of prime ministers met in London, and Zennström and other tech leaders attended to help showcase Scandinavian technology and social policy.** At the annual conference of the global elite in Davos a few days later, Cameron used Spotify as an example to describe how big ideas flourish in free societies. (3)

Arctic discussions?

Incidentally, I would not be surprised if issues other than IT technology were discussed, although this was absolutely not on the official agenda. For example, the Arctic, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. A Norwegian military transport plane crashing in Northern Sweden (4), killing five, highlights the fact that a big NATO exercise has just taken place in the region. (5) Sweden, for instance, chairs the Arctic Council (of which Britain is not a member) this year.

When you are jockeying for position in the Arctic, as Britain surely is, it must help to have Scandinavian friends.


(1) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6cb4...00f-00144feab49a.html
(2) http://www.conservativeeuropeg...eshow.aspx?id=9&ref=2
(3)http://www.politics.co.uk/comm...-davos-speech-in-full
(4) http://www.flightglobal.com/ne...-c-130j-crash-369650/
(5) http://www.tnp.no/norway/panor...in-norway-provocative
*2012 Stockholm seminar http://www.sweden.gov.se/nff
**2011 London seminar http://bit.ly/xJ1cPd]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45816 2012-03-21T09:37:05 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45816#comments 0 here, asked whether science journalists should be able to read a science paper or not

Most science curious twitterers say yes, in that author's informal survey. Another recent post, from a well known science blogger, argues that journalists in the field have a huge responsibility.

"We are meant to be the final filter that parses information for the reader - the final bastion of accuracy. We're meant to do the necessary background research, fact-checking and reporting that exposes dodgy information. We're meant to be immersed enough in our beats to have finely tuned bulls**t filters."

This is a bit of a tall order, since science is such a huge area, and people on the rockface specialise in just a narrow area. It is journalists' fate to be amateurs; there is just not enough time to read through everything. Are we supposed to do the peer reviewers' job? To some extent you have to trust the scientists, bearing in mind that there is a bias in science publishing towards false positives. as excellently explained in John Ioannidis's paper, Why most published research findings are false. Here.

Well worth a read; apparently the most downloaded paper in the Public Library of Science's history.

What journalists can bring to the table is cultural context. It's the old question. How can you know anything until you know everything? Some scientists seem to be live in mineshafts, as they probably must, since the advance of knowledge has forced them to dig deep and be vertical. It is much harder to be a renaissance man today. Yet that specialisation creates a sparseness of language, even when stripped of jargon and argued logically.

Some science reporting seems to be guilty of that. A well stocked journalist's mind can be the antidote. So in a way asking whether you can have read a science paper or not, then accusing those who fall away from the path of virtue of "malpractice" is a witch hunt that will strip away science coverage of its variety.

There seems to be considerable naivete in this particular debate regarding how journalism actually works these days. There is doubtless a lot of bad science journalism about, but I think you have see the wider picture: it is not just about poor scientists being misunderstood by an ignorant public of who journalists are just examplars. But journalism, all journalism, is suffering from a systemic problem.


Mass production of ignorance

Guardian journalist Nick Davies has written a very critical book about journalism, Flat Earth News. The introduction says what it does on the tin: he decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule to investigate his own colleagues, and found that the business of truth has "slowly been subverted by the mass production of ignorance".

In better days, news reporters walked their beats, meeting real people, later, usually, they became specialists with contacts and experience. Journalism was hierarchical and the best stories from the huge undergrowth of local and regional and specialist journalism was sold onward, upwards to Fleet Street. Today, however, local news agencies and freelancers who once populated the UK provinces and covered every aspect of local life, from courts to coroners, to city hall meetings, have become all but extinct or gone into other fields - often public relations. Local newspapers have been taken over and consolidated, and staffed with trainees to save money. There is a similar trend in London: the parliamentary press gallery is empty but for the sketch writers. Back in the 1980s, a broadsheet like The Times could have 20 reporters covering parliament, Davies writes.

News has replaced by so called "churnalism" as a press corps under commercial pressure rewrites stories as fast as their fingers bleed, from new suppliers, the PR firms. Sixty to seventy percent of home news stories in the top five broadsheets on any given day according to an extensive study by Cardiff University's prestigious journalism programme come either from PR or from the overworked Press Association, which itself is now often a route for PR releases.

The government's own PR machine, which has grown manifold in 25 years, is another source of stories. It is helpful that, under English law, nothing cited from government - or EU - press releases can be a source of a libel suit. Play safe and go with what they say. The Press Association's news list becomes the template for the broadsheets' news lists and the BBC's - and the effects reinforce each other over the course of the day. So a small number of stories flare up and become huge for a couple of days - more light than heat - only to fade away, while huge swathes of what is going on on the planet are ignored by the mainstream media.

Davies cites the politics of countries like New Zealand or Canada, plus "virtually the whole of science". And, of course, EU politics. What I have found in the EU is a kind of continuous distortion is being fed into law making by misreporting of committee meetings. How can this possibly make for good democracy?

Some critics have accused Nick Davies of exaggeration and selection - exactly the sins of journalism he decries in his book. But much of what he writes feels very true. But even if the problems dealt with through better staffing, more time to fact check stories, less fear of "touching electric fences" that anger powerful lobbies, less consultaton between editors of rival newspapers to establish "the line", an inbuilt hostility to complexity to me seems to be the insuperable problem, whether the story comes from PR agencies or one's own work. So the problem is not just science.


Need for generalists

But to go back to the original issue, there is a role for good non specialist coverage of science issues from an informed non scientist's perspective. An interesting blog post comes from an editor at Scientific American, who regrets the hard core science approach in a single topic issue on energy and climate change he edited for the magazine. The technical stuff is the easy part. It is the social engineering that is the problem:

"I would scale back on the nuclear fusion and clean coal, instead devoting at least half of the available space for feature articles on psychology, sociology, economics and political science. Since doing that issue, I've come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It's the social engineering that's the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child's play compared to needed changes in the way we behave."

I would say the corollary of that is: we need writers with one foot in both science and the humanities, and who can write well. Science writers who can step back from the science itself.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45707 2012-03-15T01:32:38 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45707#comments 0 year before. Another record: the first supertanker traversed this route, the northern sea route between Europe and Asia, an area completely covered in ice all year long when we were children. The ice is melting.

Most people with half an eye on the story may well have thought that, after the alarm of record low ice levels five years ago, which prompted massive headlines, minimum ice levels had recovered a little. Indeed, after record lows of 4.2 million square kilometres the ice cover grew in 2008 and 2009 before falling a little in 2010 and 2011, but still up on 2007. (Data from the NSIDC.)

Alas, ice extent does not tell the whole story, and the ice statistics that support the background the news of increasing traffic is this: another graph, calculated by the Pan Arctic Ice Modeling and Assimilation system (PIOMAS) at the Polar Center of the University of Washington shows an even gloomier picture.

It looks at total volume of ice making up the ice cap floating on the Arctic Ocean, rather than the area; see this graph of daily Arctic ice volume and this graph showing minimum Arctic sea ice volume between 1979 and 2011. The numbers for September 2011 (the month when ice is at its minimum annual extent) is 4,000 cubic kilometres. That is almost 40 percent below the 2007 figure, that otherwise bad year, and - for reference's sake - 75% down on September 1979. That is drastic. It reflects the decline of thicker multiyear ice, and the thinning is speeding up.

Axel Schweiger, lead scientist in the PIOMAS programme, told me: "We have checked our simulations fairly carefully against pretty much every available observation of ice thickness to volume there is.To be sure, there is some uncertainty in the volume trends, that's what we tried to quantify. However, this uncertainty isn't large enough to allow for any conclusion other than that the volume loss has been dramatic."

New alliances

What are the Arctic states doing? Tentatively cooperating, and trying to keep non Arctic states out. In 2010, Russia and Norway signed a treaty that agreed to divide a 145,000 square kilometre disputed area of the Barents Sea between them after a 40 year standoff. Last May the Russian and Norwegian navies went on a joint military exercise involving 10 vessels, three helicopters and units from their coast guard. They practised search and rescue, oil spill prevention, air defence, communications protocols, and boarding exercises. There is another one, Pomor 2012, coming up between the old Cold War adversaries in May. (Norway is still close to the US, "knows which side its bread is buttered on", says one insider.) The oil company Chevron is in Moscow eyeing a deal with the newly re-elected president Vladimir Putin after he recently promised to open up Russia's offshore resources for modernisation and western investment.

Just a few weeks ago, Putin met a group of Canadian journalists with a proposal that Canada and Russian jointly assemble scientific teams to help peacefully determine the border of the continental shelf so resources can fairly divided up by the Arctic-facing ations. The United States Geological Survey estimates that up to 25% of the world's remaining oil and natural gas resources, and mineral resources, might reside in the Arctic.

Prof Rob Huebert, an expert in Arctic policy at the University of Calgary, points out that Russia has started flying nuclear armed aerial patrols and carried out submarine missile launches under the Arctic ice cap; but a study by the Norwegian Defence Research institute (here, in Norwegian) said Russia has enough on its hands guarding the borders with the Caucasus and China to go big militarising the Arctic.

Canada's conservative premier Stephen Harper has often warned about the Russian military threat in public but, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable, in private he told NATO's secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen there was no likelihood of Arctic states going to war, but that some non-Arctic members favoured a NATO role in the Arctic because it would give them influence in an area where "they don't belong".

Huebert told me Harper was referring to the EU, Britain and France, which are not Arctic nations but are trying their best to get involved. "France is giving their whole navy Arctic training, while both Britain and France have revived their polar submarine capacity." He added: "Harper is firing a shot across their bows."

The European commission is eager to get a seat on the Arctic Council, on which the Scandinavian states are represented, and which is rapidly acquiring practical competences such as search and rescue. So far, the EU has been rebuffed. This is a political story that is going to grow and grow - as the ice cap gets smaller and smaller.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45560 2012-03-07T05:39:51 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45560#comments 0
The groups defaced media organisation webpages (including blanking parts of today's FT), stole intelligence analyst company email and pinged various websites. But, somewhat behind the scenes, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have been dreading something much bigger.

In February 2011, Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, now Secretary of Defence, warned that the next Pearl Harbor could be a cyber attack; while US cyber czar Richard Clarke warned of electronic catastrophes of a size that would make 9-11 pale in comparison.

Meanwhile, the EU last month decided to step up the EU's cyber defences by increasing the powers of ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency.

The European parliament vote, 52-3, to extend its mandate was greeted by Nellie Kroes, Digital Agenda commissioner, with the remark that cybercrime may now be "bigger than the drugs trade".

A report published by the Brussels think tank Security and Defence Agenda found that, in Europe, the UK, Estonia, Sweden had the best cyber defences - Romania and Italy worst. In a poll of 250 cyber security experts, the think tank found that by far the biggest concern was the destruction of infrastructures like power stations.


Sense of proportion, please


Cyber security, then, definitely seems to be an issue of the moment. But just how big are the risks? Cyber attacks on corporations and governments have become increasingly commonplace, but are the US fears of a giant conflagration justified? Thomas Rid, a researcher at King's College's famed institute of War Studies, thinks not in an interesting paper from the Journal of Strategic Studies.Here.

He argues that there have been no examples of cyber warfare in history, and most unlikely won't be, and explains why. Instead, cyber attacks will most likely be variations of old techniques of war: espionage, sabotage and subversion. Why is this? Because wars have to involve violence, be instrumental - that is, with the practical aim of imposing one's will on the opponent, changing their behaviour towards your ends.

And because wars are, ultimately, political, following Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Further, in order to be political, an entity has to have a form - an intention that is at some point transmitted to the adversary. There is no example in history of a war without attribution. You cannot have a war without an opponent with goals that he puts across to you.

Rid then argues that no cyber offences so far have met all three criteria, and very few have met even one of them. An often cited cyber attack was the alleged "logic bomb" of 1982 that created an explosion in a Siberian pipeline equivalent to 3 kilotons, or a small nuclear device. The cause of the attack was supposedly computers containing control software purchased from Canada by the Soviets which had had malicious software inserted by the CIA. This software supposedly manipulated pump speeds and valve pressure to a level far beyond that which the pipeline welds and joints were designed for.

A former National Security Council aide described the incident in a 2004 book, At the Abyss.

However, it draws on only a single document and the CIA's declassified account of providing defective technology to the USSR, the so-called Farewell dossier, doesn't mention it.

If the explosion did happen, it's not clear there were any casualties - so may not even have met the violence criteria. The Soviets, for their part, said an explosion happened at around the same time but 50 km away in Tobolsk and were caused by the shifting of pipes under the melting tundra. The evidence is pretty thin on the ground, and since that example is wheeled out as the strongest case, Rid concludes "no known cyber-attack unequivocally meets Clausewitz's first criterion, violence, where people have been killed".

Another oft quoted example of cyber warfare is the series of attacks following the move of a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier, in Tallinn, Estonia, in the spring of 2007. Thousands of ethnic Russians rioted at the removal of the war memorial to another location, and in due course Estonians government and commercial websites were hit by simple ping floods and later more sophisticated denial-of-service attacks using botnets.

The country's biggest bank was off the net for a total of three and half hours on two occasions, Estonia is famously one of the most networked countries in the world; NATO set up its cyber defence centre in Tallinn in response, but even they were not able to pinpoint the attacks as having come from Russia. The Estonian prime minister said it was the equivalent of a warship blocking a harbour, and another senior figure talked of botnets "gathering like armies".

Rid says the analogy is incorrect: there was no implicit threat of violence, no tactical objective and no clear political force behind the attack. Not even the comparison to demonstrators showing up outside government buildings is a good parallel: as people would have to show up for those; while botnets are easier to launch.

Similar arguments pertain to a series of cyber-attacks on Georgian government websites a year later during the Georgian-Russian war, which forced the Georgian foreign minister to set up a site on Google's Blogger service. The inconvenience was rather small, Rid says. The biggest effect on the Georgians was the recommendation not to use electronic banking for ten days.


Sabotage


There are instances of cyber sabotage, though, on occasion in conjunction with conventional attack. On 6 September 2007, Israel F16 jets bombed a nuclear reactor building project in Syria after Israel's cyber warfare unit had disabled the Syrian air defences, one of the world's best. Another instance of sabotage is the Stuxnet virus which infiltrated itself into the control systems of Iranian reactors through thumb drives and a field laptop that connected to the system. The goal was to change the output frequencies of motor and thereby physically damage the reactor turbines.

Because the final target was not networked, all functionality had to be included in the executable file. Tens of thousands of computers were infected around the world on Stuxnet's long journey into the heart Iran's nuclear systems, but Stuxnet activated only on reaching its targets.

It was highly sophisticated in that it provided fake input from sensors to fool Iranian plant operators into complacency while the real processes were manipulated. And it was probably preceded by an earlier virus that infiltrated the programme to find out details about the reactor design so it could be targeted.

Large numbers of developers spending a lot of time on this belies the claim that cyber-attacks will become more common and cheaper, Rid says.

Again, cyber-attacks are not quite harmless - but they are not war.


Espionage


Espionage is another growing area. Twenty-five terabytes of data were stolen by hostile intelligence agencies relating to the American F-35 fighter programme, and MI5 in 2007 warned hundreds of British companies that they were targeted by hackers.

A project called Ghostnet was a sophisticated spy network, possibly of Chinese origin, that infiltrated NGOs, government organisations and news media in over 1,300 host computers was sophisticated enough log keystrokes and download documents.


Subversion


Subversion, like the Arab spring connecting via Facebook, is powerful only if there is a strong cause in the mainstream of societies with a rapidly growing following backing it. Loose hacker affiliations such as Anonymous, with their Guy Fawkes masks, will always find a stream of support in cyberspace but are limited by lack of clear leadership, organisation and mass support.

Some of their goals are really quite specific such as defacing the website of internet security companies that threaten to expose them. Internet anonymity makes internet activism easier to enter into than before the internet, but the cost of withdrawing from activism is also lower, another self-limitation to the movement unless supported by larger social changes.

Still, it's worth observing that, in Brussels SDA think tank poll, only 25% of experts polled thought the term cyber war was considered "scaremongering or outright inaccurate" by respondents; while 45% thought it was accurate.

Mind you, maybe all professions talk up their importance...]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45508 2012-03-02T07:38:56 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45508#comments 0
On 1 March, Google combined all its 60 different privacy policies for the different services the company runs - Blogger, Youtube, Calendar, Google docs, etc - into one, so that all the data it gathers from its different sites are put into a single dossier for each user.

The Californian company, which gave users ample warning, says it wanted to create a beautiful, intuitive user experience with its simplified rules. Youtube could have video selections for you based on what you typed into the main search engine - or why not something you wrote to a friend about a favourite musician on Gmail?

More information means better service. And it means better targeted advertising, Google's big income earner. The cost lies in reduced privacy.

Google says it consulted extensively with EU officials before the roll-out; but Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has told BBC Radio 4 and other outlets the new rules may not comply with European data protection laws.

While the Commission examines Google's case, it's worth noting that there are things the user can do improve his privacy. Don't log into Google's services, like iGoogle, or Google Plus, or Gmail, while using the search engine. Watch your clip on Youtube - without signing in.

Another option is to try a different search engine.

When the website About.com recently asked users for their favourite search engine, Google was way ahead of Bing and Yahoo, preferred by 45% of users against a few percentage points for those others. But Google itself was trumped by a small, spare, upstart with a score of 48% and an unusual name: DuckDuckGo. (Here.)

Started by a young MIT graduate and entrepreneur called Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, DuckDuckGo's traffic has grown fivefold in the last year alone and was described by TIME magazine as "feeling like early Google, with a stripped down homepage....Meaty and straightforward."

It relies heavily on crowdsourced sites such as embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb and so it is a kind of metasearch page which also filters out non useful results. It gives a summary "zero click" answer at the top of its search results page. It might not be able to compete with Google's legendary precision, but, spending half a day on it, I found it useful enough.

Where DuckDuckGo claims to seriously score is in its privacy policies. Even if you are logged out of Google, Google is still able to track the user, albeit less accurately, using IP addresses. And then there is "Search leakage", where the search term that led you to a website as well as your IP address is passed on to the new website by Google, which could be compromising.

DuckDuckGo does none of that, and explains the potential consequences of search leakage, and its hardcore privacy approach. There is also the argument that Google's growing understanding of your search preferences might lead to better targeted searches - but it also leads to narrower perspectives. Since DuckDuckGo does not customise search results, you will get a more diverse set of links related to your search term.

Which can be useful sometimes.

With surveys of internet users showing lukewarm attitudes towards personalised search, anyway, Weinberg may be on to something that users will like. According to Wired magazine, many of DuckDuckGo's users are alpha geeks, the tech set who were early adopters of Google in the 1990s.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45470 2012-03-01T04:14:03 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=45470#comments 0 third (link) on their annual aggregate favourites list - but which did not win any Academy Awards had a slightly scientific, well, call it pseudoscientific, theme.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia features a planet 20 times the size of Earth colliding with our terrestrial home. The supersize wandering planet is also called "Melancholia" and some critics have speculated that it is a metaphor for depression: big, overwhelming, darkens the sky. The main character in the film, although she is getting married, is deeply depressed. You can tell by her behaviour and visible anguish during the wedding.

When she walks out on the manor lawn and sees an orb in the sky that is not the moon, which then grows in the course of the film as the guests party and relax in the ensuing days, is she really seeing a planet or is she only imagining it - a concrete manifestation of her own blues? A symbol of how her depression will ruin her marriage? Well, to her sister and other wedding guests it soon seems real enough.

The comedy bit is presumably the triviality of the bride's parents' old quarrels being aired again when the world is about to end. The bride, played by Kirsten Dunst, lies naked on the lawn one night as the planet is big in the sky. Is it a symbolic self sacrifice? The fact that what can obliterate you can also be intensely sexual? The film does end with the world in flames: but calmly so. So, no TV helicopters or last minute nuclear counter missions led by an air-punching president. This is not a rousing American popcorn movie

It is nevertheless so over the top you can cackle with laughter. Or, if you are in the mood for it, think of it as a useful contribution to the taboo and off-putting subject of mental health. But von Trier is also riffing on one of the internet memes of last year: that the world will end in 2012 after a collision with a giant wandering planet. There is no mention of "Nibiru" in the posh papers or the BBC website. But the internet is full of videos and writings about it. There are nearly 60,000 mentions on Youtube, fewer than "Einstein", but more than "climate change". NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist" scientists report being deluged by worried and angry letters, including death threats: hundreds a week, and it is getting worse.

Many of the videos on Youtube purport to show filmings of Nibiru as a ghostly orb close to the setting sun.

In fact, these apparitions are obviously just the common optical consequence of pointing a camera lens at the sun. The space agencies have even set up websites that calmly explain scientifically why the world will not end this year. But explanations, of course, are seen as part of the fiendishly clever cover up. An alarming recent Eurobarometer poll shows widespread estrangement from the general public towards scientists.

The irony, of course, is that that there is growing scepticism to global warming, a real threat to the world.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44736 2012-01-19T01:38:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44736#comments 0
A Guardian headline reads "Viktor Orban has crushed Hungary's 1989 dream" while the Telegraph's most read article today is "Hungary faces ruin as EU loses patience".

The European commission is suing Hungary over recent reforms to its judiciary, which the EU calls "undemocratic".

Hungary's science community is not in great shape either. R&D spending has just been overtaken by Romania, the EU's poorest member state, and researchers say there is very little money to build a team for cutting edge research unless they get European Research Council grants. One researcher said the level of debate and competitiveness is very much lower than, say, Heidelberg or Oxford: "No one is brainstorming," complained one who did his PhD at Oxford. Post docs dream of going to the United States, Germany or England.


It must be galling for patriots since Hungary has such a fantastic science legacy.


Their names are Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Edmund Teller, Theodore von Karman and Leo Szilard (pronounced Sillard). They made amazing contributions to engineering and nuclear physics, which helped change the course of world history.

They had a lot in common, secularised Jews, some converting later: attending Budapest's two top high schools - the Minta and the Lutheran school - all born in the Hungarian capital's golden age within a few years of each other in the 1890s. Budapest was a rapidly modernising city, with large hotels, modern fashions, elegant boulevards, the largest parliament in the world; the biggest telephone network and the first underground railway on the continent.


Budapest was a melting pot of races - Croats, Poles, Ukrainians, from the vast Austro Hungarian empire. Jews had full civil rights, and integrated easily. Hungary's feudal history made for a vacuum in the emerging fields of science which Jews could easily occupy. The German-influenced school system was extremely competitive.

After the first world war, all five men went to Germany to continue their university studies and or their early academic careers. Von Karman helped the Junker factory develop aircraft. Wigner, von Neumann and Szilard spent time in Berlin, the capital of Physics, where they sat in on seminars hosted by Einstein or Walter Heisenberg, the father of quantum theory.

Hungary had had a revolution in 1919 and numerus clausus regulations limiting Jews' presence in the professions had been passed by Admiral Horthy, Hungary's dictator from 1920 - 1944. Hungary lost its liberal air; but the Weimar republic, in contrast, was unprecedentedly liberal and free. That changed when Hitler came into power and the five sooner or later found themselves in Britain or the United States.

Szilard was the great scientific political visionary of them all, though indifferent at lab work.

He patented the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and foresaw the enormous potential of the nuclear weapon. He apparently had his insight walking down Southampton Row - not so far from the IET's London offices - while seeing the traffic lights change from red to green.

Ernest Rutherford, the father of atomic theory, told Szilard anyone who thought nuclear energy could be harnessed, for either civilian or military purposes, was a lunatic.

Szilard managed to get some experiments going at Barts, the London teaching hospital. He published two celebrated papers in Nature, but was criticised by its hospital director who warned the unorthodox young Hungarian not to violate the rules regulating the use of isotopes. He underlined the importance of following rules and made Szilard aware of the fact that "these walls have stood here for 500 years". Szilard replied: "They might not stand for another 10". He was literally right: the Germans bombed Barts a few years later.

But what Szilard really metaphorically meant was the danger Germany would get the atom bomb first. They had the best physicists. The British just didn't seem to get it.

Karman went straight to the United States where he helped modernise the US air force. His fluid dynamics equations were applied to the famous wobbly Tacoma Narrows bridge and his later work was less known but highly appreciated by those who know aviation history. Von Neumann went to the States, was naturalised, got a job at Princeton, and returned to Britain with Eisenhower where his formidable mathematical skills were put to good use during the war. (He later invented game theory.)

Wigner was the only one to win the Nobel prize; while Teller helped invent the hydrogen bomb.

Szilard did not have an academic post, but he flitted from lab to lab, interviewing anyone interesting going, and was quite unpopular for his pushiness. But he successfully persuaded Einstein to sign a letter for president Roosevelt to tell America to get its act together. Szilard was crucial in that he was the first to realise the important of high purity graphite to work as the moderator in the fissile reactions, which had their first practical demonstrations in 1938 under the leadership of another exile - this one Italian, Enrico Fermi.

The letter took six weeks to reach Roosevelt through an intermediary and eventually a very modest 6,000 dollars was granted to pursue atomic fission - immensely frustrating to the Hungarians as they realised their German former colleagues were racing ahead with nuclear research. The Hungarians continued their opinion-forming work, while Fermi and Szilard constructed the first "atomic pile" on a University of Chicago squash court in 1942 to produce a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

By now the British passed on their work on nuclear physics which had progressed fast in the intervening seven years to Washington and Roosevelt was finally persuaded to take the threat seriously.

While Szilard was sidelined from the Manhattan project because he was too pushy, the others all did work on the subject, spread over various areas across the United States. Wigner, who introduced group theory into quantum physics while in Germany, went on to head the Clinton National Laboratory in Tennessee; while von Neumann invented the implosion theory allowing the plutonium bomb used at Nagasaki to be built. (There wasn't enough enriched uranium to allow more than one bomb of the gun-model Hiroshima bomb to be constructed.)

Teller, who worked at the Los Alamos laboratory (and later headed the Lawrence Livermore) focused on the next step up - the hydrogen bomb, where he was a leading light. His legacy is more controversial: he also supported Reagan's Star Wars programme much later, in the 1980s; but others think his efforts allowed the US to keep nuclear parity with the USSR which independently developed the hydrogen bomb after the war. All five were convinced anti Communists.

The distinguished Hungarian science historian Istvan Hargittai* thinks the insecurity of exile, the energy it induced, the luck of having been in Berlin at the right time, the solid education in Budapest and their aristocratic Jewish backgrounds all helped. This combination of features would be hard to replicate in Hungary today, though you'd think Orban is hardly an Admiral Horthy, even if you accept the idea that bad politicians can surprisingly induce "good science".

Hungarian science has also suffered from 40 years of Communism, even though the Hungarians did invent the Rubik's Cube and the first hologram. Between the wars though, a slightly later generation of Hungarians did come up with such achievements as the Biro and the BASIC programming language. Andrew Grove, the founder of Intel, has Hungarian origins. Von Neumann was instrumental in the development of the first computer back in 1944.

An interesting fact is that many of the Hungarians trained as engineers: physics was hardly a recognised profession in the early 20th century. Several of the so-called Martians, which they sometimes called themselves - the joke being that Hungarian is unrelated to any Indo-European language - were pacifists, though Teller was unrepentant.

They were democrats and strong believers in freedom, so may not have liked Orban very much, I speculate. But I would have loved to hear what, if they were alive today, they thought of the EU.

*The Martians of Science, Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44617 2012-01-11T22:52:29 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44617#comments 0 Google Scholar and Google Books.

Google is also under attack from competitors who allege its search algorithms discriminate against them, and now the European commission is on Google's tail.

Last year was on the whole a good one for the California-based company. Its browser, the excellent Chrome, overtook the popular Firefox browser in several markets. Notebooks with Chrome-based operating systems were launched and received good reviews. The company launched a social network competitor to Facebook; and its Gmail free VOIP calls service was launched in the US - with predictions of launching it in Europe in 2012. The company acquired more than a score of companies last year to add to the more than a hundred since 2001.

But then there is this anti-competitiveness issue brewing.

Companies that duplicate Google-type services such as the price comparison site Foundem have alleged that Google operates a "White List" that mysteriously takes them off the search ranking list completely, without any explanation, and without any possibility of appeal.

A second allegation is that, anyway, Google's Universal Search algorithm always seems to put its own services at the top of the search listings. The European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia launched an investigation in November 2010, and has been taking consultations since.

According to some analysts, the time taken suggests its Statement of Objections, expected in weeks, will be a swingeing attack on Google's practices.

If changes to pits practices are called for, the company will have two months to respond or it may face fines of up to 10% of its annual turnover in Europe. The issue is not that Google is market dominant. It is, especially in Europe, with over 80% of search requests, while its share the search engine market in the US is down to 65%. The issue is whether abuse of that market dominance is taking place.


According to industry body ICOMP, Google has 80% of European search-related advertising. Google's spokesmen complain that they have been misunderstood, and that it does not operate white lists. But it is no secret that some in the Commission and some member states want to push their own decidedly inferior equivalent of Google Books, Europeana, which has only a smattering of English language texts.

A few years ago there was the Franco-German search engine project Quaero which was supposed to be Jacques Chirac's legacy, but then the Germans pulled out and the project continues in a skeleton form.

Quaero won an IEEE Spectrum magazine award for worst internet innovation of the year. The citation said it tried to succeed where even mighty Microsoft had failed - in beating Google at its own game - and joked that the Plebeians outside the Elysee palace, without the benefit of a classical education, wouldn't even be able to spell "Quaero".

So will the commission get political? It is interesting that the commission has not yet given the green light to Google's big business deal of the moment, the takeover of Motorola Mobility. Last year Motorola split into two, and it is the mobile phone division that Google has purchased, allowing it to acquire 17,000 patents which would help cement its dominance in the mobile search market.

The commission says that this particular delay is "normal" and that the commission is just gathering information on this ostensibly separate case, but you do wonder.

Google's chairman Eric Schmidt, who visits Brussels, and recently opened flashy new offices in Paris, always says "Competition is just a click away". Some of its competitors think that's too blithe a statement.

We'll soon find out what the commission thinks.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44423 2011-12-29T15:22:17 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44423#comments 0
So it is interesting that some of the most high profile science stories of the year have involved European facilities and/or European scientists. It has also been a good year for European space activity - if you compare it to the travails of NASA that is...


Soyuz-ESA collaboration


In July, NASA flew its last shuttle flight, leaving the American space programme up in the air for the first time since Nixon ended the Apollo lunar programme in 1972. Nearly ten thousand jobs are being wound down in Florida. America was supposed to have had the Constellation back-to-the moon programme in its place; it was launched by President Bush to great fanfare in 2004; instead, President Obama cancelled it when he came to power to save money. The future now lies in private consortia developing spacecraft - whose services will be bought by NASA. None of these are based in Florida, so it is uncertain times ahead for the Space Coast.

For the moment, if the Americans want to launch satellites or send their men to the International Space Station they have to use the expertise of rivals. The European and Russian space agencies have, to cement their current advantage, started collaboration: In addition to their usual launch pads in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, Soyuz rockets are being launched at ESA's facilities in French Guiana. The first joint mission, to put two European Galileo satellites in orbit, took place in October. The second joint mission took place earlier this month when six satellites were launched. ESA will be charging $50m to put an astronaut of any nationality on to the space station. And it is reckoned they will have three years to build up their commercial advantage before the American private alternatives come on stream.

Now, on to the science discoveries.

Higgs particle

There is cautious optimism at CERN, that they may finally found the most elusive particle in physics - decades after it was first hypothesized.

The Higgs particle is the missing jigsaw piece in the standard theory of particle physics, or Standard Model, conceived in the 1960s. Thousands of experiments in particle accelerators have confirmed the existence of all the other articles in the menagerie of particle physics: proton and neutrinos, quarks and muons, all connected to each other in a rather elegant way. But the Higgs particle, while it has been predicted conceptually, has not been detected. In a way it is the most important particle of them all.

The basis of the whole Higgs idea - named after British physicist Peter Higgs - is that there is an all-pervasive, all-encompassing field - a Higgs field - that is the "stuff" that resists the movement of elementary particles in such a way to give them the mass we can detect in the real world. Because of the wave particle duality of quantum physics, fields have an associated particle. If the Higgs field exists, an associated Higgs Boson should also exist.

Twenty-six kilometres of doughnut-shaped metal tubing under the Franco-Swiss Alps may have put an end to the 40-year search. The Large Hadron Collider works by accelerating protons in opposite directions to almost the speed of light before smashing them into each other.

The hope was that the collisions would help "chip" a Higgs particle off the Higgs field.

One problem is that its expected existence is only a fraction of a millionth of a second before decaying into other particles, such as photons. Add to this that the proton collisions produce a huge number of extra particles, so it is extremely hard to detect. Scientists have spent decades of their lives working on this.

The reason why CERN is so tentatively optimistic is that two separate teams, working on two separate detection apparatuses, believe they have a result. Another year's work could settle the question.


Super-fast neutrinos

About this time last year, scientists at CERN in Switzerland generated neutrino beams and fired them south, where they were detected 731 km away at the Gran Sasso laboratory near Rome. The amazing finding, which they spent six months checking, was that some of the neutrinos travelled faster than light, thus breaching Einstein's theory of relativity. The neutrinos consistently arrived a few billionths of a second faster than if light had travelled the same distance in a vacuum. This caused shockwaves in the world of science. Nothing can travel faster than light, right?

There is a good explanation of the experiment here:


http://cosmologyscience.com/cosblog/?p=1878

The finding would qualify as the science story of the decade, as it would upend most of what we know about particle physics. But, as with any bold conjecture, other scientists are analysing it and trying to confirm the results or knock them down. Just this week, a brace of Indian scientists came up with an objection, based on theoretical calculations: that the claims contradict the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Here is how: neutrinos are generated at CERN through the collision of protons with each other. This produces muons and neutrinos. But the energy calculations show that if the neutrinos did indeed travel faster than light, they would have had much lower energies than observed. The Indian scientists are calling for a second independent experiment to see how neutrinos behave.



Virus mutated in lab

Earlier this year, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier revealed that his research lab, at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, had produced a variation on the H5N1 virus, better known as the bird flu virus, which was transmissible through the air, rather than just physical contact, massively increasing its threat potential. The experiments were conducted on ferrets, a species said to mimic human responses to influenza. There was no direct genetic modification, merely a lot of repeated passaging between the ferrets.

That is, they injected the virus into the ferrets, then passed the viruses on from the sick ferrets through the noses of healthy ferrets, and, doing the same thing over and over again, allowed the virus to mutate inside the ferret's body. After doing this ten times the scientists had a virus that could kill healthy ferrets in a neighbouring cage. Five genetic modifications it seems were needed to make the virus airborne: two happened naturally, three were added deliberately before the experiments, but experimenters believed that all five mutations in the same virus might occur naturally given time.

The revelation, which has only now become a big story, has prompted scientists and policymakers to weigh in on the question of whether the full details of the experiment should be allowed to be published in full in Nature and Science, the two premier science journals.

After all, it could get into the hands of terrorists, fears the US Biosecurity Agency, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB),which plans to issue a statement shortly. However, critics have said a clause that allows up to 1,000 public researchers access to the full material makes censorship moot. "If ten people know, it's already out on the street." Some scientists say it is already too late: the research should never have been made in the first place, and there ought to be a special prior review process for controversial research even before it is carried out.

The public has become a bit cynical about scientists' "cry wolf claims", especially pertaining to bird flu, which researchers have talked of as a pandemic-in-waiting for years, without it actually really happening. There is talk of exaggerated threats so pharma companies can sell more drugs to third world through a vaccine that is notoriously hard to get right.

However, officially over six hundred people have been infected with bird flu in Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt - people living in close proximity to farmyard hens and chickens, so spread through contact with the animal's faeces, usually. More than 300 officially have died, although some scientists have predicted millions if the virus ever mutated a transmission mechanism from human to human - which has now happened.

To some, the Erasmus experiments show that H5N1 truly does pose a risk - but the risk from the virus itself, and that the added terrorist risk from this publication is overstated (there are easier ways to conduct bio terror), and that once it is out, it's out. You might as well publish the data so WHO reference laboratories can identify and stop the new variants.

-

The ethics of publication is one of many issues that will be debated well into the new year. Reading the newspapers, you'd think there is nothing more to the world than economic crisis. In fact, it has been an intriguing year for science.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44322 2011-12-19T10:19:31 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44322#comments 0
Actually I am not going to talk so much about the much vaunted stability pact, in part because many of its details are being thrashed out. It will be further discussed at the end of January, with Cameron in attendance, with a fnal vote in March. It is speculated that several British allies, including Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary and maybe Ireland are pulling back from the 26-1 paper they signed last week that led to headlines about Britain being isolated in Europe.

The northern three have successful economies; proud nations, all of them balk at the endpoint of having budgets ticked off and maybe eventually even taxes set at a European level. For what it's worth, my view is that Britain should also get closer to Germany - which extended an olive branch last week - on a bilateral basis, and stop its obsessive love-hate obsession with the French, despite the new military cooperation deal with Paris.

In my opinion, Britain spends too much of its diplomatic attention on France, and takes the Germanic nations, especially the smaller Scandinavian ones, for granted.

So on to the main issue of this blog post. Is the City really under threat from EU regulations and continental rivals, as many seem to think?

Anthony Browne certainly seems to think so. A senior adviser to Boris Johnson, the London mayor, he made some far reaching claims about a French government "Project Spartacus" to remove the City of London from its financial pedestal and elevate Paris. The financial industry, he says, is Europe's crown jewel and others want it. In his article, for the Conservative Home website, he does not present evidence beyond saying some French bankers told him and said the issue was never discussed openly. Still, it's meat for the investigative journalist...

He wrote:

British political leaders have long wondered behind closed doors whether the French and Germans really do want to take control of the City. It's the crown jewels of the European economy, and they want it, was the secret fear. No mainstream politicians ever dared say it in the open, although many thought it. Whispering quietly, ministers have said to me that they believe the French are determined to do down London.

One very senior French financier now based in London once came to me and asked why the British couldn't see what was happening - it was called Project Spartacus, and it was an attempt, co-ordinated across French government departments, to do down London and make Paris the financial capital of Europe. Because he was French, he spoke about it openly with French officials and ministers, but he said they never speak about it in public because the didn't want to arouse the British.

Is this true, or does paranoia stalk City Hall? There are plenty of French media attacks on the City, with much spewing of bile.

Last week the big news magazine Le Point called London "the den of vipers"; while Le Monde's financial blogger said "London is even more fraudulent than Wall Street". "Bringing London under the heel of the European Union is an issue of great importance," it added. There was even irritation that the French state had funded the brilliant maths and economics graduates who leave on the Eurostar as soon as they have graduated from France's top schools. .
"Our education taxes are funding the City," one article raged.

Conspiracy theories abound in the French press, for instance, when London-based Standard and Poor's accidentally cabled a drop in France's AAA credit rating in November but later said it was a mistake, one French commentator wrote that it was a deliberate ploy to harm the French economy. (France's credit rating may yet in fact truly be downgraded - this time for real.)

French is the second language of Brussels, its media influential. No one had any time over for Cameron's rather technical defence of the City at last week's summit - though, for the record, he did not opt out of regulation, merely insisted that regulation be moved from qualified majority voting to unanimity, not quite the same thing. Although the British veto plays into French hands, as they wanted an intergovernmental agreement (Paris too wants to be in control, not subject to the EU institutions), the European parliament, which has an important sayso on financial regulation, is also angry at Britain, perhaps because Cameron's veto precluding the use of the European institutional framework for the new pact actually prevents the EP from being involved in a potentially exciting (from the parliament's point of view) extension of its area of responsibilities.

As many have pointed out, hostility to Britain for the current crisis is misdirected. The problems of he euro are caused by a design flaw in the union. Yet Joseph Daul, head of the centre-right European People's Party, suggested Britain should be stripped of the rebate won by Margaret Thatcher - without which Britain's net contribution would be much larger. More concretely, there are fears that the second most powerful British figure in Brussels, Sharon Bowles, who heads the hugely influential economic and monetary affairs commitee, will fail to keep her post in a vote in January simply because she is British.

There are 49 pieces of European legislation affecting the City in the European pipeline, but, so far, Britain has used its qualified majority vote in alliance with a few of the smaller states to some success. The much talked about financial transaction tax, which would be ineffective unless imposed worldwide, is not actually a real cause for worry: the member states retain the veto on tax measures.

But a more important challenge comes from outside the institutional legislative framework. A proposed European Central Bank ban on clearing houses from dealing with euro-denominated financial products could mean that clearing houses would have to move to Paris or Frankfurt unless a legal challenge from the Treasury against the ECB wins.

The Treasury claims that the ECB ruling goes against the EU rules on freedom of establishment wherever you like in the Union for business purposes. It seems a reasonable point, yet if the challenge fails, it could be a big blow to the City. Hundreds of jobs will be lost. And it could be a harbinger of things to come - from the regular EU legislative process, where the hostile European parliament has a say, the new europlus grouping who are up for the stability pact and are designing their own rules with Britain on the outside, and extra-institutional drives like the ECB's - all driven by amazing media hostility. The Common Agricultural Policy - France's own monstrosity - never faced this kind of vituperation.

There are things that make a move from London less likely: it is not that easy to shift infrastructure overnight, and London has an unprecedentedly open and dynamic business and intellectual culture. A recent Le Figaro poll of French expats shows that they love the British capital for those reasons. According to the Dow Jones Financial Centre Development index, Paris and Frankfurt have some catching up to do: London is the second financial centre of the world, while Paris is seventh and Frankfurt eighth. In another ranking, by the World Economic Forum, Britain's financial system is third while France is 12th and Germany is 14th.

What next?

Howard Davies,formerly director of the Financial Services Authority and a professor at Sciences Po in Paris - so ears close to the ground on French policymaking, says; "The game - London versus the eurozone - has only just begun. It will make for fascinating viewing in the months and years to come."

Goodness knows Britain has lost its lead in industries before - at a massive cost..

*At the end of this week,: a roundup of the year's European science.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44277 2011-12-15T07:46:28 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44277#comments 0
As most people know, the Cloud is a means to allow companies to outsource all their activities on platforms and infrastructure on to the internet. It promises productivity boosts. However, take up has been lower than it might have been. One big concern is the integrity of data held by cloud providers.

Users - businesses and individuals - may be right in their concerns. In a recent Queen Mary university project study, researchers examined the terms and conditions (T&Cs) of dozens of Cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft 365 and Apple, and found they left something to be desired. Reading the small print carefully, researchers found that compensation is paltry and there are powerful get out clauses if things go wrong.

Another worrying finding: Every single Cloud service provider they investigated reserved the right to disclose information stored by their customers in certain circumstances. Some require a court order, but other Cloud providers base disclosure on a perception of their business interests or what they regard to be the public interest.

That means that they can give up data to law enforcement agencies that ask for it if, for instance, they want to keep in good standing with a government.
Claims about encrypted data should be taken with a pinch of salt. The popular information storage service Dropbox was embarrassed earlier this year when it had to admit its claim that "our staff are unable to access your information" was not quite true. The clarified formulation goes "Staff are prohibited from accessing information". In fact, a few key executives can indeed access customer data - precisely to comply with emergencies like law enforcement agency requests.

There are fears in Brussels that the long arm of US law enforcement, armed with the Patriot Act, will put political pressure on the US Cloud providers (which dominate the market on this side of the Atlantic too) to give out information on European citizens on very easy pretexts.
It has definitely affected the willingness of, for instance, Dutch local authorities to use the Cloud. T-Mobile and other European providers are making hay with the anxiety and are lobbying Brussels for a certification process that would favour them over US providers when bidding for European government cloud contracts. The claim is that Europe-based providers would be more resistant to the US authorities.

So far so good. But are Eurocrats blind to some intrusive legislation in their own backyard?
In fact, another paper by Queen Mary outlines the new European Evidence Warrant and the proposed European Investigation Order could be just as great threat as US initiatives ever could be. The European Arrest Warrant, which has been in use since 2004, has already led to much criticism: that people are being automatically extradited on trivial offences committed in other EU countries.

One carpenter was tracked down in the UK and sent back to Poland because he had fitted wardrobe doors and then removed them when the customer refused to pay him. In another case, a man was extradited for the suspected theft of a dessert. Under EU law, British police cannot refuse the requests on grounds of disproportionality. Military planes fly back to eastern Europe every week.
Will the new warrants mean cops being asked by their EU colleagues to carry out data server seizures on their behalf, no questions asked?

All in all, the Queen Mary reports confirm that users of the Cloud might be quite vulnerable. Of course, users could always take a "accept as is" attitude to the services and, for security, encrypt the data themselves before putting it in the Cloud.

Ultimately the challenge may not be not America, much as Brussels tries its usual game of rallying the troops against it - but extensive EU legislation that is not debated properly, and the informalisation of justice that results from complex legal issues over multiple jurisdictions.


QMUL Cloud Legal Project


http://www.cloudlegal.ccls.qmul.ac.uk/]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44203 2011-12-12T12:05:14 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44203#comments 0
This is not strictly speaking an engineering or science story, but it affects Britain's economic future so I have decided to write about it. Science and technology legislation does not take place in a vacuum, so it would be strange if I did not from time to time write about the larger trends.

Newspapers, politicians and commentators have called last week's summit a showdown moment, the most significant turning point in the EU for years. Strangely, the bust up is not directly concerned with the main issue of the summit - about saving the euro from collapse - which the summit outcome actually did little to advance. It was about the future EU more generally. France has been unhappy with the direction of the EU for at least a decade, and the conflict between Britain and France is, of course, as old as the hills.


German development


Let us look at the economic background to the euro crisis, which is a tale of two economies: the German and Mediterranean. Back in the early 2000s, Germany was still known as the Sick Man of Europe. The economy was flat; the labour market was rigid and the country was still reeling from the costs of paying for the restructuring of East Germany.


Then, a change:


A number of reforms, named Hartz reforms, were put in place. They lowered compensation for the unemployed and put into place several schemes to get them back into work. The unions promised to moderate their wage demands while governments promised employment security. Germany also held back from introducing minimum wage legislation. The result of these reforms was that Germany became increasingly competitive. The growing economic success of India, China and other developing economies also helped Germany - even though these, too, were export economies.


Germany succeeded by complementing China in the export market, not competing directly with it. Germany's Mittelstand - small and medium sized family enterprises - specialise in the machine tools that the developing markets need to produce their own manufactures for export. The other jewel in Germany's crown is the car industry, responsible for 20% of GDP. They sell extremely well even at very high prices to the global market, because they command a brand premium and because of their extremely superior quality. A further reason has been Germany's extremely internationalist approach: managers speak English while, as I found researching a feature on German engineers earlier this year, companies are actively combing the world employment market for Indian and Chinese engineers they can employ to help them understand these cultures and ways of doing business.

The Club Med

So that is the German story, according to the Germans themselves - a story of backs-to-the-wall hard work to compete in a tough world. The story of the Mediterranean member states is familiar by now. Entry into the euro allowed firms and governments in these countries to borrow at low "German" interest rates. In the first half of the 2000s, there were huge sums of investors' money sloshing around the globe, looking for yield.

Much of this money came from China, which had lots of money to spare because of its export success but whose own financial system was too underdeveloped to channel investors' money. The southern European markets looked like a good bet. Their bonds offered low interest rates, but still higher yields than offered by German or US Treasury bonds. (US treasuries being the traditional safe haven.) They also seemed risk free because these countries were part of the "unbreakable" euro.


An additional benefit was the ability to park the Club Med's bonds with the European Central Bank as collateral in return for cash paid for at a lower interest rate than the yield offered by the Greek and Spanish bonds: the perfect arbitrage opportunity. You pay X euros for the Greek bonds, get X euros from the ECB by placing it as collateral there, and get a free income from the higher interest that the Greek bonds pay out, minus the lower interest from the ECB loan.

The Greek government therefore attracted a bonanza of funding, and lavished the money on benefits for cronies and loyal voters.

Corruption, as everyone knows by now, is pretty common in Greece. The ease-of-doing business index is below that of Bangladesh or Paraguay. The Common Agricultural Policy has long been a siphon of funds from the European taxpayer to the Greek farmer, claiming for tobacco fields he did not actually farm. In fact, a few years ago journalists were given a presentation of a European satellite that would zoom in and ensure Greek farmers had not cheated on their land claims. I am not sure it was successful: it is said that one agricultural county in Greece has the highest proportion of Porsche Cayennes in the world. Cohesion funds for wind farms are another ruse, as detailed in a recent BBC documentary. Most such technology projects require cofunding from national budgets before a matching sum from the EU is awarded. So what local entrepreneurs would do would be to switch the same funds from project to project, saying it was different sets of government money, and getting EU cofunding for each of these projects. This also goes on in Italy: there, inevitably, the mafia is involved.

In Spain and Ireland, it was the private sector that borrowed heavily, mainly funding construction projects. Households also took out big, cheap loans to buy consumer products and cars, many made in Germany. In normal times, these would have been unaffordable for Club Med consumers, as their currencies would constantly have been readjusting downwards to cope with their lower competitiveness than the German economy.


We all know what happened next: the Greeks admitted they had a far larger budget deficit than they had earlier claimed; Greece had a new government, and it had decided to come clean. The high deficit raised doubts about the Greek government's ability to service and pay back these debts. As the perceived risk of default grew, the cost of borrowing for the Greeks rose.


This further exacerbated the Greek situation, making them even less likely to be able to refinance their loans. The Greek government instituted a widespread austerity package: lower salaries for government workers, reduced welfare benefits. It promised more efficient and honest tax collection. The sharp reduction of demand this has entailed is proving to be very damaging for the Greek economy. European loans at lower rates than the market currently offers have tidied Greece over, from its refinancing problems; further, European governments are now forcing the international banks that have lent to Greece to write off some of their loans.

Ireland and Spain meanwhile suffered from private sector property busts, and soaring unemployment, leading to increased state outlays and severe liquidity problems.

If Spain (and Italy) left the euro and redenominated their currencies, domestic savers would lose out, as the new currency would fall like a stone against the euro - so even the fear of an imminent exit would trigger a cascade of withdrawals that alone would make the exit more likely. With exit would probably come defaulting on foreign loans, as these would be much harder to pay off with the very weak new peseta, the new drachma.

The loss to French, German and British banks that have invested very heavily in Spain and Italy would then be very great, sparking off a cascade of loan redemptions elsewhere to finance the losses in way that could cause a crash similar to the one in 2008.

The controversial under-the-counter insurance policies known as CDSs, that were set up to manage risk, could just make it worse by spreading large costs to banks outside the immediate circle of lenders. That is what happened in 2008. And nobody wants this cascade of defaults to happen again.

Summit problems

All this brings us to last week's summit. The EU has promised to back up the Club Med's needs for refinancing their loans at reasonable interest to rescue them from the spiral of increasing borrowing rates linked to a reduced ability to pay but also making the ability to pay even worse - thus averting a cascade. There is a short term problem with this in the fund set aside for this may not be enough for the big Club Med economies, designed as it was for Greece alone. And it wasn't boosted at the summit.

In fact, last week's pact may have done little to save the euro in the short term - and, as of this article being written, indeed little to save it in the long term.


The long term future of the Club Med in the euro requires them to make their economies much more competitive, lower their salaries relative to Germany, or to receive permanent, continual transfers from the richer countries in the same way richer regions permanently subsidise poorer ones within the member states. Some of this already goes on, mind, you, in the cohesion funds and the agricultural policy.


The possibility of these transfers of this was not on offer in last week's Stability Pact, a German-inspired thing that would require EU countries to put their budgets before Brussels and have them signed off, with automatic penalties if they breach the budget commitments. In return, the loans will open to them.

Cameron rejected this pact, even though Britain would not have been affected by the budget constraints, as it is not a member of the euro. (The pact would also apply to countries planning to join the euro - so six more non euro states are opting in, while non euro Sweden almost definitely and non euro Czech Republic possibly will be staying outside.)


But we have to be careful to qualify what it was he rejected. The deal will still go ahead, through without British and others' participation, and outside the European institutions. That means the European Court of Justice and the Commission will not police the national budgets. The EU 23 will have to set up a different structure. There has been talk that Cameron might even veto the use of the EU buildings for this purpose - though it would probably be diplomatically suicidal for him to do so.

Why did Cameron do it? It might not have done anything to save the euro, but if it was insufficient, it was not directly harmful, and the Germans wanted it. It would have been a cost-free exercise.

The British negotiating team's story goes I believe something like this. All countries have their red lines. The French their agricultural policy, the Germans, the independence of the European Central Bank. The British wanted a guarantee, a hand brake, that the legislation currently passing through Brussels would not harm the City. The City is unpopular in Britain, as many of you know. But changing City practices is a generational project. Dismantling it too quickly is manifestly not in Britain's interest, as it is one of the country's remaining world class industries and a major generator of national income.

But Cameron did not connect with other European leaders. Sarkozy was apparently behaving demagogically at the meeting, and many of the Continental leaders would have lent a sympathetic ear, so great is the unpopularity of the City on the Continent. It was 2.30 am when Cameron started making his rather technical speech about City regulations, and attention from other leaders was weak. Perhaps Cameron had an emotional moment after the hectoring French president had provoked hm.

Anyhow, the Germans are said to be upset. They appreciate British pragmatism and concern about the lack of budget discipline elsewhere. The friendship between France and Germany is not as close as politically correct official wisdom goes. Nor is Germany as willing to lead the world as British commentators with their stupid Fourth Reich demagoguery seem to think. They mainly want to export. Merkel is annoyed that, thanks to Cameron's move, the new stability pact will have be on an intergovernmental basis, not anchored in a European framework, making it harder to enforce.


French joy

However, judging by the French media and the blogs, and Sarkozy's smile on the morning, the French are overjoyed: their dream is of a closer European union with a quiescent Germany that provides the economic heavy lifting and France calling the political shots on behalf of Europe as a player on the world stage.

Even some German commentators believed that Merkel played her hand badly, and the French played well. With the Brits out of way the French could be hoping that Eurobonds, guaranteed effectively by the German taxpayer, will be easier to push through at a summit in the future.

Perhaps the new grouping of 23 (ie EU minus UK, Sweden and one or two others) will go much further and indeed decide to go ahead and pass decisions on tax raising and tax spending to a new central authority, though that big step that faces deep problems with the European electorates. Even if federalist reform will be difficult with the electorates, it will be easier without the Brits as an additional obstacle.

The French have long been irritated by the influence Britain gained in Europe when Scandinavia and then the East Europeans joined, in 1995 and 2004, as these were more sympathetic to British culture and way of thinking than France's traditional Mediterranean allies that were already members of the EU.

As for the City of London? The comments on Friday from various City types suggest many are worried: and with reason. London will still be susceptible to the wave of legislation coming its way from within the EU framework, passed with qualified majority - that is, 72% of votes in the Council of Ministers. Britain used to have a blocking minority with some allies such as Finland, Sweden or the Netherlands, but there are fears these countries will move away because of Britain's weakness after the Cameron veto.

New threats

And the new debt pact structure may evolve into an EU-within-an-EU that makes its own rules on financial regulation. So; a possible two pronged attack. Things may change - the euro may still collapse over the next few months, as British analysts point out, as, as said, all the measures the Europeans are introducing are medium to long term. The seriousness of intent though may satisfy the bond markets. But, anyhow, never has the rationale been stronger for the UK to diversify itself beyond a finance based economy.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44149 2011-12-07T18:12:56 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44149#comments 0
The system operated using a trust method, and a few random checks. The experiment received international attention and high school teachers and pupils told the BBC the trust system would work "since the consequences of being caught cheating in spot checks are so great".

There have been two related developments in the last month or so. One is the announcement that the trial for mock exams will be extended to real final exams as of next summer. The reasoning is that, since pupils have been using the internet throughout the year, it would be a denial of the lessons learned to close them off from this during a three or six hour exam. Finding the right information on the net is a skill in itself. In the real world, people will have access to the internet during problem solving anyway.

That's one development. Another is that Danish schools are starting to take delivery of classroom management software developed, incidentally, by a Danish company called Netop. In the beginning it will be installed in the schools' own computer systems. Eventually, pupils will be required to install the software on their own laptops that they bring to school and use during normal lessons, according to the Jyllandsposten newspaper.

The classroom management software allows complete real time interaction between the desktop of the teacher's computer on one hand and those of the pupils on the other.

So, whatever the teacher has on his screen simultaneously shows up on that of the pupils.

In a way, it can be seen as a replacement for the blackboard or the light projector - the place where he presents the information. The teacher can also send files, instructions, links to web pages to the pupil's own computer desktops.

But then there is the other function. When the pupils are working on their own, the teacher's computer desktop is divided into a grid where he can see, in real time, visualisations of the activities of every single one of his 20 or 30 students' desktops. The company talks about the huge teaching benefits this entails. He can zoom in for a close up version of every single pupil's computer desktop at any time he wishes.

And in doing so, he can see whether the pupil is "having trouble finding the answer" by surfing the wrong websites.

The teacher can see whether the student is playing games, checking Facebook, or simply looking up information the teacher thinks is wrong- headed or inappropriate. These activities can be blocked by a simple push of the button at the teacher's computer. What shows up on the student's screen is a large red STOP sign, and the link to the website the student was surfing is broken.

Further, the system allows the teacher to offer one-to-one mentoring to pupils through instant messaging, which "won't embarrass the pupil in front of the whole class". The teacher can also remotely "take over" the student's computer, either surfing on the student's behalf or editing the student's document exercises while continuing to sit at the pulpit.

The instant messaging function also allows the teacher to take questions without leaving his desk. The waved hand and the "please sir, please sir" will be a thing of the past. Silence and peace will reign. A Netop classroom management corporate video says: "The teachers love it. The students love it." But a student wrote in the comments section below: "Actually, we hate it".

When I grew up 30 years ago in southern Sweden, 20km across the Oresund straits from Copenhagen, Denmark was regarded as the acme of liberalism and outspoken freedom, compared to cautious and consensual Sweden. The mild oppression of Swedish socialism was always contrasted with Danish free living and hippy pacifism.

Sweden had government liquor stores with restricted opening hours while Denmark had free publishing of bestial pornography, 24 hour night clubbing , easy rules on prostitution and a hippy commune covering a whole district in the centre of Copenhagen.

But Denmark seems to have undergone a cultural shift since I left Scandinavia - a lurch to the right. Very strict rules on immigration, enthusiastic participation in controversial NATO missions - the biggest per capita participant in Afghanistan and Libya. And, as last week's Politiken newspaper revealed, Europe's highest density of CCTV cameras - more in proportion to the population than the UK, the article claims.

The cameras are popular and Denmark claims a lower crime rate than Sweden. As for the "classroom management software" some Danish websites claim it offers superior learning outcomes, since pupils are not distracted. In these circumstances, maybe pupils' privacy matters less.]]> Pelle Neroth http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44094 2011-12-02T10:48:52 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=368&threadid=44094#comments 0
Fact two: A report published last week found that, at peak times, BT throttles its web service, meaning lower connection speeds for all its users, because of congestion problems that are already emerging.

And, fact three: the European parliament has just passed a laudable proposal against users being discriminated against on speed, worth quoting: It calls on member states to "guard that Internet Service Providers do not block, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any content, application, or service of their choice irrespective of source or target."

Slow lane?

Sounds good, but is this really a charter of fairness it sets out to be...or is it in fact the opposite? Internet service providers want varying pricing mechanisms. They say premium rate high speed services for the bandwidth hogs could discipline use and at least users of the slow lane would know what they are getting. That could be under threat. "No discrimination" could after all be interpreted as "no differentiation".

The idea of a two lane internet, with separate lanes for band hogs, could be argued as reasonable. No one would dream of telling the post office to disallow express mail services. Give those what they want who are prepared to pay. Set aside video gamers and their frivolous activities for the moment.

Hospitals monitoring patients' heartbeats remotely in the home need a no-stutter service. That is what the ISPs seem to be saying: give us a chance to offer a less congested service.

The main argument opposing this seems to be this. The European parliament says small startups could not afford the access fees to the high speed services. Tomorrow's innovators will be forced to remain on the internet's "dirt track", while established content providers - for payment could be extracted from content providers not just premium users - could take advantage on the fast services to get their web pages (and that all important advertising) across to the user faster. The user will prefer the faster service and channel his surfing likewise.

Yet the level playing field - the chance to shine on equal access basis- was what gave Google its first leg up as a tiny company in the 1990s.
Allowing different charging mechanisms may pave the way for oligopolistic practices by the giants. The wonder that is the internet - stumbling upon that small website with the new killer idea - would be diminished if the differential charging becomes standard, the parliament says.

Fair or not, the ISPs insist on the importance of the freedom to establish new business models for expanded services to give them the cash to further develop their networks. And they will be waiting for decisions made by EU ministers at the telecoms council on 13 December. Neelie Kroes, the digital agenda commissioner, more commerce friendly than the parliament, is expected to pronounce on the issue in January, so the ISPs will be looking closely at that too.

In another development, here is something the EP and the ISPs could both feel positive about. .

ECJ Ruling

In the same week as the European parliament vote, a ruling by the European Court of Justice prohibited requirement national governments from forcing ISPs to install wholesale filtering that would catch out copyright-infringing downloaders using peer-to-peer technologies. The music and publishing industries will be less happy, but the ECJ said it violated individuals' fundamental rights. The ECJ ruling was based on an eight year long battle between a Belgian ISP and the Belgian copyright industry body. The ISPs might be relieved it will save them the expense and responsibility of installing blocking technology. Thoughts were mixed on whether the ECJ ruling holds out the possibility of specific website blocking, a block on Pirate Bay, for instance. It depends on how you read the ruling.

An interesting and complex analysis of here]]>