February 26, 2010: We’re watching you!

When I was a lad I imagined that Parliament was a place where serious, learned debates took place before the parties voted and new laws were passed. When the first radio broadcasts from the Houses started I was stunned at the rowdy shouting-matches and the width and depth of the ignorance of MPs. When Parliamentary TV broadcasts started the full horror was opened up to me even more.

I wonder how it is that MPs either don’t seem to have woken up to the fact that their brayings are open to scrutiny by all of us. Could it be that the simply don’t care?

And it’s their inactions that betray their nature as well. A couple of nights ago we had TV images of a packed House, with MPs yelling and cat-calling across the floor like an unruly mob of drunken youths. The issue was the reported bulling of  Alastair Darling by Gordon Brown. A while later, when the serious matter of the appalling neglect at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust came up for discussion, the House was virtually empty.

Don’t these people realize that we are watching? Don’t they think that we are shocked that they turn up en masse to watch rival parties engaged in Punch-and-Judy knock-down drag-out scraps that matter not a jot to the electorate, yet can’t be bothered to discuss an absolutely damning indictment of a Government-run organization whose failings had resulted in distress, pain and even death to some of the people whose votes they canvass so earnestly at the hustings?

Do we elect MPs so that they can be entertained by strident name-calling over party-political issues, or do we vote for them because we expect them to pay serious attention to matters that affect us?

If they woke up to the fact that the electorate can and do watch these goings-on, they might act a bit less irresponsibly in front of the cameras, and pay a bit more attention to the things that will gain them votes in the next election.

February 25, 2010: More corporate madness

There’s an optimum size for a group of human beings working together on anything, and I reckon that number is 6. Anything above that and things start to break down: the fall-off in effectiveness is exponential – a slow degradation at first but as the group size increases the errors and inefficiencies escalate wildly.

BT is clearly at the top end of the scale. We originally rented a package that included our telephone calls, broadband and BT Vision, but when we got fed up of the stop-go, stuttering video we cancelled the Vision service, electing to retain the set-top box that gave us Freeview. I explained the reasons to the very helpful chap at the other end of the wire and he set it up for us.

A few months later we received a letter saying they were sorry we had cancelled, but if we wanted to continue we would need to pay for any films we rented on a pay-on-demand basis, for which we would have to pay a processing fee. That was fine, but I rang them to say that I was already paying for all the other services by direct debit anyway so, in the extremely unlikely event of my renting a film, couldn’t any rental fees be added to that? A very puzzled girl apologised and said she couldn’t understand why we had received the letter at all, as our instruction was clear and we were 23p in credit.

Every month after that we received a letter saying our account was in credit to the tune of 23p. We ignored this as an expensive aberration by BT that just added to their costs with no advantage to either side.

Yesterday, we received a curt demand for £10.79 which we should “pay straight away”! When I rang, they couldn’t understand what had happened, but the bemused BT girl said it appeared that we owed them £76 for something. When I asked what that something was, she said she couldn’t tell me because the bill was too recent for the details to appear at her terminal.

We use on-line billing so we looked at our statement and found no such amount (and no £10.79 either).

We were prepared to dismiss this as another aberration when we spotted that they hadn’t collected our last month’s payment, which we pay by Direct Debit. I rang our bank and (after some convolutions which I’ll outline later) I was able to check that the Direct Debate mandate was still in force and we had plenty of funds to make the payment – BT just hadn’t asked for the money, which was by now almost a month overdue!

We began to wonder if BT, finding it hadn’t received any payment from us, had fired off that letter without looking at the account – not that any of the sums in the account relate to £10.79, £76 or even 23p.

The convolutions? Well, the bank wanted to know my “6-digit secret number” before they would talk with me. I said I had never had one, so I had to go through a few security checks before I was able get to my account. ‘Your welcome pack will be in the news!’ the girl announced brightly at the end of this. It appears that, because we do everything on-line, we hadn’t set up a “telephone banking arrangement”, which enables us to talk to them on the telephone. That is now in place, though it’s something I didn’t want and can’t see I’ll ever need to use. (They obviously have well over 6 employees in this department.)

All of this took several hours and BT are no better off financially, and I am no worse off. (I wasn’t worse off simply because I had restrained myself from hurling the telephone through the window.)

Blimey!

February 24, 2010: Paying for broadband

A row has erupted over the proposal to add 50p a month to fixed-line rental terms, to cover for the provision of fast broadband services across the nation. The argument is that the cost of providing fast fibre networks to isolated rural communities would never be repaid by the few people using them, and those people would therefore be marginalised. In justifying the charge, a speaker yesterday said the general gains to the economy would be so huge that the whole nation would benefit.

Now, I agree with this in principle, but I had to laugh when the response to the interviewer’s question was that the benefits would include the ability to stream TV and play games. For the life of me I fail to see how that would benefit the Nation’s economy.

We are fortunate in living in a suburban area with reasonable broadband speeds – our download speed is 3 Mbps and uploads are around a tenth of this – and I make extensive use of this to help me in my work. I remember the days of the old dial-up 56k modem and oh, how painful it was to send out or receive long documents! None of that now: when I uploaded my first novel to the publisher we were getting a much slower service, yet the job was done quickly enough.

Yes, we would like to be able to stream TV – BT’s promises that we can watch films have never quite worked out, but I know the limitation is the cable to my house and I see activity going on to install fibre. I can wait.

But does that wait mean that I am not contributing to the economy? Nah! 

February 23, 2010: Batty science

Imagine that they gave up teaching all maths at school, and said ‘That’s OK, we’ll give out cue cards for every occasion you need maths’. So, for example, when you want to estimate the amount of wallpaper you need for a room, out would pop a card giving lengths and heights of walls, sizes of windows and doors and so on, with a final line saying how many rolls you’d need.

All well and good in some ways, and could perhaps be handy even if you did know how to add, multiply and work out areas, but what a way to carry on! If you had an extra nook or cranny you’d be completely jiggered.

Well, that’s the way our society approaches science and engineering.

‘Need to know how much energy you’ll save by adding loft insulation? Let this simple card work it out for you.’

‘What type of electrical appliance can you use in a bathroom? Look at this simple guide.’

And so on. The problem is that this is like exploring a huge, dark cave with a tiny torch: you see some small bits but you miss the whole picture.

A proper grounding in maths, physics, chemistry and engineering throws a brilliant light into that cave. You don’t have to guess, and you are not at risk of falling into traps.

I was speaking to a builder the other day, a man who had come up through the old school. He was bemoaning the young people who come to work with him and, through no fault of their own, made the most appalling mistakes – because nobody had ever taught them properly. They had no grounding, and relied on simple rules-of-thumb and case studies.

Wandering round the local DIY store, I listen to electricians who are slavishly following rules and who, because they lack that solid foundation, are totally reliant on tables and guidelines.

The people who construct those guidelines, realizing how they’ll be used, have to be extremely careful and prescriptive – so that users can play safe, rather than be sensible. And a whole new industry has arisen, forcing people to attend courses and obtain expensive certificates, all so that they are provided with feeble matches to explore those dark caves.

February 22, 2010: The jester’s taken the throne

On Sunday morning I heard an interview with the Hollies where they spoke of their efforts, in the early days, to break away from the grim world of industry and apprenticeships in the North and enter the bright and exciting world of show-biz. In this subtle way the BBC yet again applied pressure on any young listener to shun a career in industry.

The tradition of having entertainers goes back a long time, way before the court jesters of mediaeval times, and I accept that there’s a place for them.

That place is to entertain and amuse us. What’s happened in our age is that the entertainers have taken over the world, so that attention is focussed on them at every opportunity and their lives appear to be exciting and all-important. Once that principle is accepted, the concept of paying millions of Pounds to the stars follows on naturally.

That probably wouldn’t matter too much, except that people starting off their working lives are drawn to the bright lights and then they begin to shun what appears to be any dull and prosaic alternative.

…. such as engineering. Yet I can remember the sheer exhilaration of seeing a massive project come to life after years of careful work. A civil engineer looking at the graceful sweep of a new bridge would feel the same, and there are hundreds – possibly thousands – of equally stimulating examples in our world. But will anybody pay huge salaries, as they do to bankers, with the words ‘we have to pay these people well, so as to retain their services’?

Not a chance. At least not while the jesters are firmly ensconced on the throne! 

February 19, 2010: Misplaced good intentions

Looking for a ruler yesterday, I pulled out one that had been issued to one of our children while they were at primary school. It was calibrated in millimetres and centimetres only – no inches! I understand the intention: ‘the country is going metric and the sooner we raise a generation that understands metric units, the better. Why teach them something that is obsolescent?’

A good intention, yes, but totally misplaced. Those kids would have to survive in a world that still used feet, inches, yards and miles, and with no knowledge of Imperial units they would grow up to be baffled every time they went to a timber yard to buy wood and were confronted by 4x2s, or  tried to observe a 30 mph speed limit.

It was similar to something that happened to me in the 80s. I was involved with a Government study into the teaching of maths and science in secondary schools. I had been involved with introducing computer-aided design into my company – at a time when this technology was largely unknown in the UK, and systems cost hundreds of thousands of Pounds – and I had organised training for our staff. On this basis the Government felt I would know a bit about what was required. It became apparent quite early on that effective use of CAD required at least some understanding of co-ordinate geometry. ‘Ah!’ said one of the officials of the Department of Education and Science, ‘That’s unfortunate, because we’ve just abandoned the teaching of classical geometry.’

I was aghast! Geometry is far from being just an esoteric subject with no real practical value. It is useful in so many ways. For example: imagine you are trying to fix a screw in the middle of a circular wooden disc. How do you find the centre point?

Easy – if you know geometry. Put a rectangular object (such as a piece of card) down on the disc so that one corner just touches one edge of the circle. Then mark where the edges of the object cross the rim of the disc. Draw a straight line on the disc between these two marks. Repeat with the rectangular object at another point. The centre of the disc is the crossing-point of the two lines that you’ve just drawn.

Why? Geometry has a theorem that says that a triangle whose base forms the diameter of a circle subtends an angle of 90° at the circumference of the circle. Where two such bases cross is the centre of the circle.

Geometry is truly useful in the real world and it shows a cloistered attitude if you make an arbitrary decision to drop it from the curriculum. Equally, pretending that Imperial units don’t exist shows a lack of understanding of the real, practical world outside the school gates.  

February 18, 2010: William Stanton MBE

I read an obituary to William Stanton yesterday. ' Who he?' I hear you ask. Well, the obit says he was a hydrogeolist, caver, demographer and polemicist. But why should he be of interest to us?

Well, let’s take a look at something he wrote in his book, ‘The Rapid Growth of Human Population 1750-2000’. As the Times puts it, his main text was a ‘persuasively gloomy argument: that the only way to stop global warming, massive extinction of species and the onset of anarchy would be to dramatically reduce the human population. The obituary said ‘He argued that resources, including fossil fuels, are in terminal decline and that the British population, for example, must shrink from about 60 million to only 2 million.’

A fellow thinker then! As my regular readers will know, I have consistently argued that, in order to stop mankind’s rape of the planet, the world’s powers would be better advised to cut population growth.

I wouldn’t go as far as he suggested. He advocated allowing women only one child each, banning immigration, putting new arrivals and criminals on chain gangs; and adopting compulsory euthanasia. No indeed! I would certainly not go as far. And I think he was misguided if he was proposing that the issue of cutting population growth should be limited to the developed counties alone. This is a global problem and it needs a global solution.

As long as the greens and the politicians focus all their attention on our carbon footprint, they are diverting all of us away from population growth which, with William Stanton, I proclaim to be the root of mankind’s problems. 

February 17, 2010: Evading the issue

Largely thanks to the Internet, we live in a world where the ordinary citizen is empowered to access information and make opinions heard. Unfortunately the explosion of citizen power is being matched by an equal explosion in bureaucratic obfuscation.

A couple of examples, I recently made a Freedom of Information enquiry to my local NHS Trust about car parking at a nearby hospital. I was trying to find out whether any of the money received from the huge and expensive car park there was fed back to the hospital, or whether some shadowy tycoon was lining his own pockets from the proceeds. I received a reply which answered my question, but managed somehow not to answer it. The two-part reply stated how much the Trust received in revenue overall and what proportion of revenues were for car parking. The second part said how much money was obtained from car parking.

This reply seemed to address my questions, but it simply did not answer them. I don’t think I could have put my question in any simpler or clearer terms, but somehow the reply evaded the issue.

Then there’s the matter of TV programmes carrying the sound levels at one level, but boosting them during the commercials. This particular issue gas arisen in a news report this morning, when the TV station said that the advertisements seemed to be loud, but that was because there were long passages of silence in the programme carrying them. I had raised this issue myself in this blog several months ago, and it seemed that action was going to be taken. Was it?

By heck it wasn’t. (And, by the way, the previous phrase just appears to be in a large typeface because it’s being seen in comparison with the rest of this page.)

And that’s the point I want to make. Somewhere behind these issues (and many like them) there are real human beings who know the point of the questions being asked, but then concoct elaborate subterfuges to avoid addressing them.

They are the concentration-camp officials of these organizations, who say that they are just doing their job. We should empower them to rebel against their orders.

February 16, 2010: Watch your language!

I rarely swear. I was brought up at a time when swearing was generally confined to some workplaces and it was considered offensive to swear in public, in the hearing of our parents and so on. Nowadays there seem to be no such inhibitions: youngsters swear openly in the streets and are not deterred from doing so by the presence of older folk.

Does it matter? I believe it does indeed matter. When swearing is everywhere it’s effects are blunted and when every adjective in your normal conversation is an f**k or s**t, what do you do when you are really p****d off?

I remember once attending a project meeting where one of the participants – an arrogant, self-opinionated s*d if ever I saw one – finally said something so utterly inane that I just exploded. ‘If you think that would work,’ I said, ‘you’re more of a f***ing idiot that I thought.’ It was as if I had put a primed grenade down on the table. Total shock!

Now if I had been known for swearing, that statement would have had little or no effect. But since I was known as someone who never swore, that one word had all the impact of a Cruise missile.

Years ago, on overhearing my own children swear, I decided to shock them by referring to a black person as a n****r. Again the shock effect: dropped jaws, followed by a chorus of, ‘Dad! You can’t say that!’ They didn’t understand that the words they used in routine conversation were as distasteful to their parents as that one word was to them. I went on to say that there had been a time when you could walk into a shop and buy a n****r-brown jumper. Guy Gibson (of Dam-busters fame) had a brown dog called N****r. Nobody was offended by the use of the word.

We can’t blame the youngsters for this situation: it’s the Media’s fault. You don’t have to watch TV for long, or settle down to watch a film in a cinema before you hear the characters effing and blinding like good-uns. And when youngsters hear this they assume it is acceptable, normal – and indeed rather grown-up – to talk like that. There's little or no media encouragement to show that a reluctance to swear at every opportunity is in fact an indication of greater maturity. The newspapers use the asterisk as I have done above: but every young person knows what is meant, and it’s rather pointless to pretend otherwise.

Until the Media understands its responsibilities nothing will change, and we will all be the poorer for it. 

February 15, 2010: Corporate madness

At various times in my life I have worked for organizations whose activities I have sometimes thought to be barking mad.

One of these companies got involved with a madcap scheme to improve its employee’s performance and attitudes. The deal was apparently struck on a golf course somewhere, and the first any of us workers knew about it was when we arrived at the office-block one morning and saw enormous red footprints going all the way up the main tower of the building. These were plastic stick-on jobbies, smaller versions of which we then discovered had been laid on the floor of the entrance lobby, up to and inside the lifts, and all along the corridors. I can’t remember what the purpose was, and even at the time we were all so bemused that any message was lost on us. When anybody questioned this madness we were sharply put down by the yes-men masters above us, and our employment records were probably annotated: “Watch out! This is a trouble-maker”.

What did it achieve? Nothing that I could ever discover.

Another company decided to change its name, and I remember a distraught manager coming to my office with a list of all the things that would have to be changed: letter-headings, business cards, drawing blanks, signage on every vehicle and each product and so on. It was a mighty list and he had made a stab at estimating the cost: it was staggering! He also tried to guess the costs arising from confusing and losing our loyal customers.

In both these companies, if we ever asked for funding for really critical and beneficial technical projects we had to fill in endless forms, provide detailed cost-benefit analyses and attend meeting after meeting with the accountants.

In each case this corporate madness occurred in an otherwise sensible commercial organization (we weren’t civil servants, where this sort of thing seems to be almost a basic requirement). We never saw or heard any rational justification for what were hugely expensive and damaging activities.

Now we are told that the good old National Trust is embarking on a similar exercise. It will now drop the “The” from its name and become just “National Trust”. Why? Will anybody produce cost/benefit analyses for us members? After all, it's our money that's keeping the Trust going. I'd like to think that they're not wasting it!

We seem to live in a world where company directors are in thrall to corporate witch-doctors and when they fall under their spell all common sense is sucked out of the few brains they had beforehand.

February 12, 2010: Man’s Hour

I’m back! … and hopping mad. When you listen to the BBC’s Radio 4 programmes for any length of time you realize how they are dominated by women and feminists. Programme after programme is by written by or presented by women, for women. I was surprised to find that even ‘The Archers’ has a feminist angle – have you noticed how the men are either boorish, gullible or plain stupid, and that if it’s plain old common sense that’s needed, it’s always the women who come up with it?

But then they have the cheek to come up with a programme called “Women’s Hour”!

With so much of the day’s programmes being female oriented, I would have thought there should be one session a day set aside for us chaps: “Men’s Hour”.

Given that there are more house-husbands now, and how many men work from home, I would think such a move is long overdue. 

February 11, 2010: The Muse sleeps

Probably because I’m suffering with a heavy cold, I have absolutely no ideas for today’s blog. If food tastes like cardboard how can I be expected to dream up pithy sayings? Sorry, folks.

February 10, 2010: More “Accountants’ logic”

Our road has seen yet another example of the corporate foolishness of companies run by accountants. I reported a leak in a water main and in due course, Team 1 turned up to mark the spot with blue paint. A couple of days later Team 2 arrived to dig a hole to expose the leak (it was in a corroded old malleable iron main) and fix a collar to stop the leak. Team 3 then arrived to back-fill the hole and a day later Team 4 came to re-Tarmac the road.

In the old, pre-privatization days, the water company’s maintenance crew would have been dispatched to sort out the problem in a single move.

OK, there are days when the crew would have been doing nothing, but when they were called in to deal with a problem they did it efficiently. Being experienced, they knew the right thing to do and, as well as fixing the leak they would have reported back that the water main needed more extensive work – perhaps replacement – or it would burst again. But no, the accountants thought “Let’s farm it out to contractors; that way we can get rid of all these people and cut costs”.

Of course, the accountants who make such decisions are able to point to immediate cost savings; their reputations are enhanced and they can move onward and upward, earning huge fees and bonuses at each move, while the real business suffers.

That main will spring another leak (probably sooner rather than later because the tired old metal has now been disturbed). But that’s not the contractor’s responsibility: he is employed to fix that leak and he’s done it.

The water companies refer to something called ELL – Economic Leakage Loss. What this represents is a loss of water that costs less than the cost of repairing the leak.

You can see some sort of reasoning behind this. It costs hundreds of pounds to repair a pipe (probably thousands – especially if it takes four teams to do the work!) and if the leak is small the money side speaks for itself.

Or does it? What if the leak freezes and a car skids into an accident? Or what if the road becomes undermined and collapses? Not our fault, Gov!

The European Environment Agency estimates that water leakage has increased by 10-35% over the past few years. Part of this increase is possibly due to an ageing pipework infrastructure, but I’m sure a lot of the increase can be laid at the door of the accountants who now run the businesses.

It’s not only the water business that suffers in this way. A friend who retired from the power-generation industry reports that when the accountants came into ascendency ‘they looked at the spares inventories and arbitrarily declared they should be slashed by 60% monetary value. Despite many horrendous arguments about the one-off specialised nature of the parts, manufacturing lead times of years, manufacturers no longer in business, the cost of a Unit outage per day if critical parts were not available, the grey suits won out’.

And who pays for the results of all this foolishness? Got it in one – we do, you and I!

February 9, 2010: Accidents at Middletown and Heathrow

This weekend’s explosion at the Kleen Energy power plant at Middletown in Connecticut bore a couple of similarities with the gas explosion that destroyed the fictitious plant on Kung Tau island that opens my book “Far Point”. Both are combined-cycle gas-turbine plants and in both cases the investigators are mystified about the causes.

The process of burning gas in these plants requires very careful control. The gas must burn only when and where needed, so when the plant is being started all pockets of gas that could ignite in the wrong places have to be purged with air. In “Far Point” the plant’s computers get confused and admit gas when they shouldn’t. I don’t know what went wrong at Middletown, but it seems that the purge process went wrong.

In a case like this, where everything has been seriously damaged, it’s difficult to find out what happened. If the control computers and data-loggers were working and if their data has been preserved it will be possible to follow through the exact sequence of events.

Unfortunately Murphy’s Law comes into its own far too often, and the one thing you need to see wasn’t recorded. For example, when the control computer asks for more fuel it sends a command to a valve, asking it to open. In an ideal world, you’d fit a device to the valve stem that records its movement, and you can then say ‘Here’s the command asking for the valve to open, and here is the valve responding’.

Sometimes however – in order to cut costs or avoid over-complexity – that feedback signal from the valve stem either isn’t there at all, or it feeds an indicator and isn’t actually recorded. In that case you have to look at the gas flow, which will be recorded, and see if it increased. The problem with that is other factors may have caused the gas to not do what was expected.

Today we shall see the report into the plane crash at Heathrow last year. A very similar situation: the engines failed to react to the pilot’s commands – was that because the fuel valve stuck, or did something else happen? After that incident I postulated that the commands were blocked from reaching the valve by some form of electronic interference. The official report blames the formation of ice in the fuel lines. If the official report is right (and it does say that its findings were only “probable”) then the position of the valve stem would indicate that the valve reacted to the pilot’s commands but the fuel flow didn’t. On the other hand, if my theory is right, the position would show that the command signal to the valve didn’t get there.

I wonder if that valve position was recorded. If it was, this issue could be easily resolved; if it wasn’t the AAIB’s conclusions begin to look very speculative.

February 8, 2010: The economics of solar panels

On Saturday, the Guardian carried an article by Ashley Seager on solar panels, headed ‘Take it from me – it’s worth it’. It followed this week’s  announcement of the Government’s new “Feed-in Tariffs”. Under this scheme, anyone fitting a 2.5 kW photo-voltaic system will be paid 41.3p per kWh generated. This payment is amazing enough, and I’ll return to it in a while, but what struck me was Seager’s statement that with the system he fitted to his house almost three years ago, he gets 90% of his electricity off his own roof over the course of the year.

Let’s think about that. Since these panels generate electricity only while the sun shines on them, he can’t be using them to power many of his lights or, unless he’s a real telly-addict, much of his TV. Of course, things like refrigerators and freezers use electricity, but not much. Computers and stereo systems? They don’t consume much either. The power-thirsty machines in his house will be things like washing machines, but how often do they run? Perhaps the Seagers cook electrically and do most of that during the day, but does that sound credible? Of course, it would all be explained if he has an electrically-heated swimming pool, but how many people have one of those? Anyway, it’s like having a gas-guzzling car and then boasting that you run it on cooking oil.

He might be using electricity to heat his domestic water, but elsewhere he indicates that he isn’t doing that, because he says he is looking at ways of ‘fitting solar panels elsewhere to generate most of our hot water.’

No, I don’t know how he gets at that number but the point is that it is typical of the Alice-in-Wonderland stories that are picked up by newspapers like the Guardian. The danger is that some people will believe them.

(Incidentally, it’s not only the Guardian that’s at fault. In Saturday’s Times there was an article by Gryff Rhys-Jones, someone I think is usually quite sensible, about power lines being planned across his beloved Suffolk. Somebody should tell him the truth about the penalties of burying high-voltage cables, the motorway-sized tracts of land that would have to be devoted to them and so on.)

Meanwhile, back to that 41.3p per kWh. In order to remain solvent, any supplier must look at what its product costs it to make, and then charge its customers a bit more. Once its costs exceed what it charges, it quickly goes bust. If that solar panel was put on an equal footing to a power station it would have to charge users more than 41.3p per kWh. Would you pay 41.3p per unit when you currently pay around 10p? Someone is.

Doh! 

February 5, 2010: Toyota, blues and twos

News this morning of Toyota’s recall of its Prius cars follows on my blog yesterday, questioning whether the problem might be electronic in nature. But I had an interesting response to that blog too. A friend said that when he was involved with Air Defence Radar they had instances of cars stopping and refusing to start around the Cowes test sites. (They also had to take precautions to avoid upsetting the tills in the local cash and carry!) He said that the RAF has documented evidence of cars stopping near Filingdales on the Yorkshire Moors.

He goes on to say that when using an old hands-free car kit he found that it had an annoying habit of bleeping twice and shutting of the radio sound even though no call was coming in. He eventually noticed that this always happened in the same places and realised that this was always next to a police TETRA communication mast. TETRA uses similar technology and frequencies to the mobile network but they have put the power specification up by an order of magnitude so they can use less towers and, in his words, ‘PC Plods will always be able to get through so that the kettle is on at the end of their shift’.

He adds: ‘There have been instances of workers receiving RF burns and other health problems by being near the base stations. TETRA do not necessarily go through the painstaking computer modelling done by the phone companies to get the best coverage with minimum powers. They just put the tower where they like and blast out enough power to get the coverage. The NIMBYs, H&S and other lobbies direct all their energies in opposing phone masts which in general are pretty safe, and so don't get to look at TETRA masts which manifestly are not!’

Fascinating! 

February 4, 2010: More electronic culprits?

Those of you who have stayed with this site over the past few years will know that I have theorised that crashes of passenger aircraft and military helicopters could have been caused by faults in their flight-control computers.

Now we have cars being recalled by Toyota (and others) because of ‘sticking of the accelerator pedals’ when there are some indications that it may not be a mechanical problem after all, but one caused by the vehicles’ electronic systems. One case reported yesterday involved a Lexus being driven by an off-duty policeman in the US where, in a final desperate message, he called the emergency services to say that he couldn’t slow the vehicle and the brakes had failed. To me, it seems that a simultaneous failure of accelerator and brakes is extremely unlikely to be the result of a single mechanical failure.

There have been interesting reports lately in the technical press about automotive electronic systems suffering mysterious failures, which seem to have been due to interference. Part of the problem seems to be the fact that the frequency used for some items lies smack in the middle of a band allocated to a wide variety or other applications – including wireless doorbells!

A car is a pretty difficult environment for an electronic system. It has several different devices which are all capable of interfering with each other, and it is a tribute to the vehicle designers that problems don’t generally occur. I have had several years’ experience of designing and commissioning complex electronic systems for industrial applications, where interference from switchgear, motors and so on had to be very carefully guarded against. I once wrote a specification for cabling to protect against pickup (interference), but it was a problem to make sure that it was faithfully followed on site. The burly cabling people were used to the old-fashioned ways and couldn’t understand why we were insisting on earthing and screening methods that were very different from the ones which they had previously followed.

In this respect, automotive applications are simpler, because once the design has been finalised all others are exact copies of the original. But there is still a risk that a poor bond to the chassis could result in malfunction due to interference. I have personal experience of this: after a minor repair a connection had been made to the chassis without scraping off the paint to make a good bond. Fortunately, in my case this merely resulted in all the direction indicators working at random (which made the car look a bit like a moving Christmas tree!). The RAC man recognised the problem, scraped off the paint and all was well.

It could have been much worse, and I wonder if these latest incidents could have been the result of electronic or software malfunctions.

It’s difficult to pin the blame on something which disappears when the power goes off.

February 3, 2010: OFGEM begins to see the light (or dark?)

The Energy Regulator (OFGEM) has announced this morning that the UK faces power shortages and more expensive energy. The Press Release says: ‘The unprecedented combination of the global financial crisis, tough environmental targets, increasing gas import dependency and the closure of ageing power stations has combined to cast reasonable doubt over whether the current energy arrangements will deliver secure and sustainable energy supplies.’

To cut the cackle, the reality is that two forces are responsible for this situation: one of these is the green lobby, the other is privatization.

The former forces us to shut down perfectly good power stations, the latter runs the energy business purely for financial gain. I’ll comment on the financial issue later on this week, but for now I’ll pick up on an interesting part of OFGEM’s statement – ‘the industry should revert to a form of centralised market control’ the BBC says that if this is adopted, it would amount to the biggest shake up in the industry since privatisation.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our energy supplies are too important to be entrusted to accountants. Perhaps OFGEM is at last coming round to see sense. This morning's Press Release says we have a window of opportunity to act now. Let’s hope the Government will respond quickly and decisively to deal with this problem before it’s too late. There’s a thought that it’s too late already, but then it’s a case of ‘better late than never’. 

February 2, 2010: The wonderful world of batteries

There’s a little stall at our local market which sells, among other things, a wide variety of batteries. It’s a small operation, but it moves a lot of batteries because they are much cheaper than elsewhere. (I’ll leave aside the quality or provenance of the batteries; the fact is that the things get sold there.) Now, under new EU rules, anyone selling more than one pack of four AA batteries a day will have to provide ‘in-store recycling bins’.

Can’t you just see “Jack the Lad” who runs the stall providing such a bin?

Fact is, the whole thing about batteries has become ridiculous. I once said that if the Industrial Revolution had started in Japan, we would be blessed with several hundred types of screw threads. Luckily, it started in Britain, and those early entrepreneurs applied sensible standards which made components interchangeable. I have long experience of working with the Japanese and I am always amazed at how they can launch a new product which used bespoke key components which did not fit in with any standard. I’ll remind you if what I said many months ago about at printers, where every model uses a different type of cartridge; or watches and mobile phones, where each type is powered by a battery that is that tiny bit smaller, thinner, bigger or fatter that the next one.

As a result, we end up with mountains of the things being imported, stocked and eventually discarded. An estimated 30,000 tonnes of them are imported every year, with 97% of them ending up in landfill sites, where they can leak toxic chemicals into the soil.

Typically, instead of tackling the problem at its source, the EU has decided to impose unwieldy, expensive and impractical rules to handle the final result. No doubt, all of accompanied by reams and reams of documentation, written in that fascinating new language that I call ‘Eutotechspeak’. I’ll expound on that another day!