Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

What are the issues that get the public most excited? I’d say Brexit is up there pretty high still – people say they’re sick of it but keep reading because it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion; very slow motion. Plastic is a big public issue right now, and rightly so. Our next issue is all about plastics – from the latest on the size of the problem to the pros and cons of alternatives and what engineering is doing to help with the growing pollution problem. It will also be our first issue to arrive in a compostable, starch-based wrapper, trying to do our own little bit to help.

However, as every local journalist knows, it’s the more down-to-earth, everyday problems that most people get most angry about – from potholes to rubbish. An innovative company this week opened a plant in Scotland that should help to simultaneously tackle at least three of these top issues: plastics, potholes and recycling. Yes, it has come up with a process to recycle plastics to into more flexible road paving material that will resist potholing. It’s killing three birds with one stone. Read about how they do it.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

UK prisons trial facial recognition to tackle drug smuggling

Almost every day we hear about largely futile attempts by the government to improve the appalling conditions in UK prisons which statistics suggest lead only to a further increase in crime. According to this news story, technology is now being regarded as a new and potentially effective deterrent. What can I say? After writing about prisons and penitentiary systems – in the USSR, Australia, USA and Europe – for many years, I came to the conclusion that the only way to tackle recidivist crime is by making prisons more humane.

I often recall my visit to a ‘normal security prison’ in Haarlem, the Netherlands – about 20 minutes by train from Amsterdam – some years ago. Inside, under a huge glass dome, inmates and warders were playing football on an artificial pitch. It was not an inmates versus prison officers match; the captives and their guards were evenly distributed between the teams, and the only way to tell one player from another was the colour of their jerseys. It was almost Christmas time, and the mood underneath the dome was nothing short of festive. Numerous Christmas trees illuminated the corridors, decorated with original paintings and sculptures; according to Dutch regulations, one per cent of a prison budget was to be spent on works of art.

The governor led me through the immaculate kitchen, a gym where a handful of muscled inmates were pumping iron, empty computer-equipped classrooms, and two well-stocked libraries. He told me that only once had he had to ban a book from the libraries’ stock: it was called How to Make a Bomb. “The librarian never forgave me for that,” he added.

With amazement bordering on disbelief, I learnt that prisoners were allowed to keep pets (birds and fish, not German Shepherds) in their cells. They were entitled to make unlimited phone calls, and to take six 72-hour periods of home leave during the final year of their sentence. They participated in prison affairs and could even vote out the governor himself. Members of the prison staff were not allowed to enter the cells, which the governor diplomatically referred to as ‘residential quarters’, unless invited in. And indeed, each cell looked more like a hotel room, with a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, a TV set and the occasional birdcage or aquarium. In stark contrast to Britain’s chronically overcrowded penitentiaries, a one prisoner per cell rule was observed to the letter in Haarlem, which had no communal canteen; each inmate had food delivered to his room.

“You don’t improve people by locking them up,” said the governor as we sat down in his office for a glass of prison-bottled wine (yes, bottling wine was one of the tasks that inmates were paid to carry out). “The construction of new prisons must stop.”

Later, I learned that, despite a relatively high crime rate, the Netherlands locked up fewer people than almost any other country in the world – and the rate of re-offending was very low. Instead of treating the offenders like animals and thus pushing them further towards the brink, Holland they chose to remind them that they were human.

It is probably here, in altering the general attitude to the offenders – and not just in cutting-edge technology – that the solution the UK’s burning issue of rising crime lies.

Jack Loughran, news reporter

Nintendo unveils new Labo VR kit for Switch

Nintendo has successfully carved a niche for itself as a gaming company that isn’t afraid to do things a little bit differently from the rest of the industry. Sometimes this leads to wild success – the Wii for example, or its current console, the Switch. Other times, like the Wii U or the GameCube, it doesn’t fare quite so well. You might not find the latest Call of Duty on Nintendo’s consoles very often, but what you will find are games that manage to surprise and delight in a way that another AAA military first-person shooter cannot.

The VR Labo is a great example of Nintendo doing what it does best, by utilising the already unusual form factor of the Switch and incorporating it into a VR headset. While this probably won’t be the ultimate VR experience due to the relatively limited horsepower of the Switch and its 720p screen, Nintendo gets top marks for trying to mix things up. Even if VR Labo doesn’t sell too well – a scenario that I find plausible – the attitude of doing something a bit different and risky is something that the company should keep doing. After all, for every dud, or cool idea that doesn’t quite work as well as hoped, sometimes they hit gold and come out with something pretty game-changing (pun intended) like the Switch, which was the biggest-selling console in the US last year. More of this please Nintendo.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

Major UK rail operator launches campaign to attract more women drivers

I can only see one answer to this issue – we need to selectively breed more women if we are to come anywhere near meeting the supposed demand for the fairer sex in the future. What I mean is, this drive to recruit women into traditionally male sectors isn’t going to add up. This supposedly unused pool of talent is both finite and being utilised elsewhere.

According to this report a mere five per cent of Britain’s 19,000 train drivers are women. We need more train drivers coming into the sector so it superficially makes sense that the recruitment drive targets women. The engineering sector, as championed by the IET and all other industry bodies as well as repeatedly in the pages of E&T, has a far more significant shortfall in numbers coming into the sector and so is trying all sorts of creative ways to attract girls into STEM. I have also seen attempts to get more women involved in truck driving, general management, plumbing, software, armed forces… just about anything.

There is, in short, a shortage of skills. And it’s about numbers. Ignoring the benefits of having a diverse workforce (something that we will explore in much more depth in the July issue of E&T), we just don’t have enough people with the range of talents and training that we need. To pin our hopes on this skills void being filled by women is fanciful. Why? Because there are plenty of women out there happily doing other jobs. There isn’t a huge pool of competent women sitting at home, distraught at the male-dominated and downtrodden lot that fate has dealt them, just waiting for the opportunity to burst into the workforce.

According to the latest ONS figures (October – December 2018), there are currently 1.36 million people unemployed in the UK. Of these, 617,000 are women compared to 746,000 men. Now, in this PC-friendly world we aren’t allowed to suppose that any of these people are any less worthy as employees than anyone else, which is quite clearly nonsense. Most of those unemployed don’t want to be, but there would still be a proportion who don’t care enough to do anything about it. Certainly not enough to retrain as a train driver or engineer. So, we’re left with pool of maybe a million people who generally speaking do not have the range of abilities that there’s a requirement for. If they did have the skills, or in many cases the ability to develop them, they would be filling the vacant positions that we hear so much about, irrespective of their gender.

To take the female element of this – less than half – and suppose that they are more able to develop the skills than their male counterparts is fanciful. This block of women present the same resource from an employment perspective as the men.

What we have is a skills shortage. Just to attract the best female talent into engineering is only depriving medicine, teaching or any other discipline of its badly needed expert personnel. Diversity, opportunity, stereotyping, career development – they are among the other associated issues in this debate that need to be progressed. But the core issue is skills and the answer to that is education and training, not just ‘women’.

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Cheetah-like robot boasts superior speed and mobility

Robots are now getting faster and can potentially do gymnastics?!

Ever clever MIT developers have created a ‘mini cheetah’ robot that is capable of trotting over uneven terrain and can move twice as fast as an average person’s walking speed. And get this, it can also do a backflip! Talk about parkour.

Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design also enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic manoeuvres and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs. As well as its ability to trot like a cat, its three degrees of freedom allow the machine to walk to the side and back with ease and even plonk and spin around like a dog chasing its tail.

When I first caught a glimpse of this, it somehow reminded me of the footstool that’s actually a dog in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Don’t ask… It was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Volvo trials autonomous electric bus ahead of public release in Singapore

Urban bus routes seem tailor-made for the autonomous, electric vehicle revolution coming over the 2020 horizon. Vehicles that traverse the same streets, on the same route, stopping at the same designated points along the way – this is exactly the sort of need and use case for which the technology is being perfected. Of course there has to be sufficient testing, including taking into account varying local weather and traffic conditions, but these Volvo trials paint a positive picture for the future of urban mass transit systems.

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

Another urban transport story, this time involving plastic waste turned into road-paving material. Slowly, the collective consciousness of the world is coming to realise that we don’t have to persist with the old, ingrained behaviours and practices any more. We can simply stop doing what is unsatisfactory and start doing whatever makes a real difference. It only takes someone to question the status quo and then – more importantly – propose a viable alternative. Roads made from recycled plastic – why the heck not? It’s not like we’re short of either waste plastic or pothole-ridden tarmac roads.

Smartphone app launched to promote rural cow-nnections

Nasa ‘gravelly’ concerned about Martian rocks blocking InSight’s probe

Two of our finest pun-based headlines from this week, promoting solidly sensible stories. Sometimes, even tech journalists need to have a little fun, too.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

A new factory in Scotland is using plastic waste to pave our roads. A much better way of disposing/reusing plastic than burning it or throwing it in landfill.

MacRebur wants to tackle ocean pollution by opening its new plant in Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway. The rubbish is granulated, mixed with an activator developed by the company and then distributed to asphalt producers.

If the idea was taken on by other companies, it could greatly help the problem of ocean pollution. Huzzah! I’ve had enough of seeing turtles choking on plastic bags. The melted plastic could also help with Britain’s problem of potholes – they never seem to go away, no matter how much we refill them. Perhaps the plastic will be more solid. And then I don’t have to fear for my tyres all the time.

The company says the plastic in the roads created by MacRebur makes them better equipped to deal with weather changes, reducing cracks and the dreaded potholes. They are more flexible, with the plastic improving road strength and durability. In January 2019, the UK Government invested £22.9m into plastic road tech, and on a 1km stretch of road, about 684,000 bottles or 1.8 million single-use plastic bags would be used. Great news all round!

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

NHS trials smartphone ECG recorder to increase diagnosis rates and lower costs

I haven’t seen any statistics recently for the number of people who turn up at accident and emergency with chest pains and have to admit that they’ve had concerns for a while but put off seeking help until things have reached a potentially critical level. I suspect that it’s significant though, and that a lot of them are men.

The problem is often the fear of embarrassment when symptoms like heart palpitations can subside en route to hospital, resulting in normal ECG readings and the prospect of return visits if they recur.

Medics in Scotland have come to the rescue with a potentially lifesaving device that in tests helped doctors to diagnose the cause of palpitations in over 40 per cent more patients than standard tests alone. What’s more, the gadget, which sticks to the back of a smartphone, can be given to a patient to take home and monitor their condition without them having to return to hospital.

Including technology like this in mainstream gadgets like the Apple Watch is taking the stigma out of keeping an eye on your health before you end up in the back of an ambulance. And for those with symptoms that turn out to be harmless, it can provide rapid reassurance that all is well.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

What are the issues that get the public most excited? I’d say Brexit is up there pretty high still – people say they’re sick of it but keep reading because it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion; very slow motion. Plastic is a big public issue right now, and rightly so. Our next issue is all about plastics – from the latest on the size of the problem to the pros and cons of alternatives and what engineering is doing to help with the growing pollution problem. It will also be our first issue to arrive in a compostable, starch-based wrapper, trying to do our own little bit to help.

However, as every local journalist knows, it’s the more down-to-earth, everyday problems that most people get most angry about – from potholes to rubbish. An innovative company this week opened a plant in Scotland that should help to simultaneously tackle at least three of these top issues: plastics, potholes and recycling. Yes, it has come up with a process to recycle plastics to into more flexible road paving material that will resist potholing. It’s killing three birds with one stone. Read about how they do it.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

UK prisons trial facial recognition to tackle drug smuggling

Almost every day we hear about largely futile attempts by the government to improve the appalling conditions in UK prisons which statistics suggest lead only to a further increase in crime. According to this news story, technology is now being regarded as a new and potentially effective deterrent. What can I say? After writing about prisons and penitentiary systems – in the USSR, Australia, USA and Europe – for many years, I came to the conclusion that the only way to tackle recidivist crime is by making prisons more humane.

I often recall my visit to a ‘normal security prison’ in Haarlem, the Netherlands – about 20 minutes by train from Amsterdam – some years ago. Inside, under a huge glass dome, inmates and warders were playing football on an artificial pitch. It was not an inmates versus prison officers match; the captives and their guards were evenly distributed between the teams, and the only way to tell one player from another was the colour of their jerseys. It was almost Christmas time, and the mood underneath the dome was nothing short of festive. Numerous Christmas trees illuminated the corridors, decorated with original paintings and sculptures; according to Dutch regulations, one per cent of a prison budget was to be spent on works of art.

The governor led me through the immaculate kitchen, a gym where a handful of muscled inmates were pumping iron, empty computer-equipped classrooms, and two well-stocked libraries. He told me that only once had he had to ban a book from the libraries’ stock: it was called How to Make a Bomb. “The librarian never forgave me for that,” he added.

With amazement bordering on disbelief, I learnt that prisoners were allowed to keep pets (birds and fish, not German Shepherds) in their cells. They were entitled to make unlimited phone calls, and to take six 72-hour periods of home leave during the final year of their sentence. They participated in prison affairs and could even vote out the governor himself. Members of the prison staff were not allowed to enter the cells, which the governor diplomatically referred to as ‘residential quarters’, unless invited in. And indeed, each cell looked more like a hotel room, with a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, a TV set and the occasional birdcage or aquarium. In stark contrast to Britain’s chronically overcrowded penitentiaries, a one prisoner per cell rule was observed to the letter in Haarlem, which had no communal canteen; each inmate had food delivered to his room.

“You don’t improve people by locking them up,” said the governor as we sat down in his office for a glass of prison-bottled wine (yes, bottling wine was one of the tasks that inmates were paid to carry out). “The construction of new prisons must stop.”

Later, I learned that, despite a relatively high crime rate, the Netherlands locked up fewer people than almost any other country in the world – and the rate of re-offending was very low. Instead of treating the offenders like animals and thus pushing them further towards the brink, Holland they chose to remind them that they were human.

It is probably here, in altering the general attitude to the offenders – and not just in cutting-edge technology – that the solution the UK’s burning issue of rising crime lies.

Jack Loughran, news reporter

Nintendo unveils new Labo VR kit for Switch

Nintendo has successfully carved a niche for itself as a gaming company that isn’t afraid to do things a little bit differently from the rest of the industry. Sometimes this leads to wild success – the Wii for example, or its current console, the Switch. Other times, like the Wii U or the GameCube, it doesn’t fare quite so well. You might not find the latest Call of Duty on Nintendo’s consoles very often, but what you will find are games that manage to surprise and delight in a way that another AAA military first-person shooter cannot.

The VR Labo is a great example of Nintendo doing what it does best, by utilising the already unusual form factor of the Switch and incorporating it into a VR headset. While this probably won’t be the ultimate VR experience due to the relatively limited horsepower of the Switch and its 720p screen, Nintendo gets top marks for trying to mix things up. Even if VR Labo doesn’t sell too well – a scenario that I find plausible – the attitude of doing something a bit different and risky is something that the company should keep doing. After all, for every dud, or cool idea that doesn’t quite work as well as hoped, sometimes they hit gold and come out with something pretty game-changing (pun intended) like the Switch, which was the biggest-selling console in the US last year. More of this please Nintendo.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

Major UK rail operator launches campaign to attract more women drivers

I can only see one answer to this issue – we need to selectively breed more women if we are to come anywhere near meeting the supposed demand for the fairer sex in the future. What I mean is, this drive to recruit women into traditionally male sectors isn’t going to add up. This supposedly unused pool of talent is both finite and being utilised elsewhere.

According to this report a mere five per cent of Britain’s 19,000 train drivers are women. We need more train drivers coming into the sector so it superficially makes sense that the recruitment drive targets women. The engineering sector, as championed by the IET and all other industry bodies as well as repeatedly in the pages of E&T, has a far more significant shortfall in numbers coming into the sector and so is trying all sorts of creative ways to attract girls into STEM. I have also seen attempts to get more women involved in truck driving, general management, plumbing, software, armed forces… just about anything.

There is, in short, a shortage of skills. And it’s about numbers. Ignoring the benefits of having a diverse workforce (something that we will explore in much more depth in the July issue of E&T), we just don’t have enough people with the range of talents and training that we need. To pin our hopes on this skills void being filled by women is fanciful. Why? Because there are plenty of women out there happily doing other jobs. There isn’t a huge pool of competent women sitting at home, distraught at the male-dominated and downtrodden lot that fate has dealt them, just waiting for the opportunity to burst into the workforce.

According to the latest ONS figures (October – December 2018), there are currently 1.36 million people unemployed in the UK. Of these, 617,000 are women compared to 746,000 men. Now, in this PC-friendly world we aren’t allowed to suppose that any of these people are any less worthy as employees than anyone else, which is quite clearly nonsense. Most of those unemployed don’t want to be, but there would still be a proportion who don’t care enough to do anything about it. Certainly not enough to retrain as a train driver or engineer. So, we’re left with pool of maybe a million people who generally speaking do not have the range of abilities that there’s a requirement for. If they did have the skills, or in many cases the ability to develop them, they would be filling the vacant positions that we hear so much about, irrespective of their gender.

To take the female element of this – less than half – and suppose that they are more able to develop the skills than their male counterparts is fanciful. This block of women present the same resource from an employment perspective as the men.

What we have is a skills shortage. Just to attract the best female talent into engineering is only depriving medicine, teaching or any other discipline of its badly needed expert personnel. Diversity, opportunity, stereotyping, career development – they are among the other associated issues in this debate that need to be progressed. But the core issue is skills and the answer to that is education and training, not just ‘women’.

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Cheetah-like robot boasts superior speed and mobility

Robots are now getting faster and can potentially do gymnastics?!

Ever clever MIT developers have created a ‘mini cheetah’ robot that is capable of trotting over uneven terrain and can move twice as fast as an average person’s walking speed. And get this, it can also do a backflip! Talk about parkour.

Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design also enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic manoeuvres and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs. As well as its ability to trot like a cat, its three degrees of freedom allow the machine to walk to the side and back with ease and even plonk and spin around like a dog chasing its tail.

When I first caught a glimpse of this, it somehow reminded me of the footstool that’s actually a dog in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Don’t ask… It was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Volvo trials autonomous electric bus ahead of public release in Singapore

Urban bus routes seem tailor-made for the autonomous, electric vehicle revolution coming over the 2020 horizon. Vehicles that traverse the same streets, on the same route, stopping at the same designated points along the way – this is exactly the sort of need and use case for which the technology is being perfected. Of course there has to be sufficient testing, including taking into account varying local weather and traffic conditions, but these Volvo trials paint a positive picture for the future of urban mass transit systems.

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

Another urban transport story, this time involving plastic waste turned into road-paving material. Slowly, the collective consciousness of the world is coming to realise that we don’t have to persist with the old, ingrained behaviours and practices any more. We can simply stop doing what is unsatisfactory and start doing whatever makes a real difference. It only takes someone to question the status quo and then – more importantly – propose a viable alternative. Roads made from recycled plastic – why the heck not? It’s not like we’re short of either waste plastic or pothole-ridden tarmac roads.

Smartphone app launched to promote rural cow-nnections

Nasa ‘gravelly’ concerned about Martian rocks blocking InSight’s probe

Two of our finest pun-based headlines from this week, promoting solidly sensible stories. Sometimes, even tech journalists need to have a little fun, too.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

Plastic waste converted into road paving material at Scottish factory

A new factory in Scotland is using plastic waste to pave our roads. A much better way of disposing/reusing plastic than burning it or throwing it in landfill.

MacRebur wants to tackle ocean pollution by opening its new plant in Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway. The rubbish is granulated, mixed with an activator developed by the company and then distributed to asphalt producers.

If the idea was taken on by other companies, it could greatly help the problem of ocean pollution. Huzzah! I’ve had enough of seeing turtles choking on plastic bags. The melted plastic could also help with Britain’s problem of potholes – they never seem to go away, no matter how much we refill them. Perhaps the plastic will be more solid. And then I don’t have to fear for my tyres all the time.

The company says the plastic in the roads created by MacRebur makes them better equipped to deal with weather changes, reducing cracks and the dreaded potholes. They are more flexible, with the plastic improving road strength and durability. In January 2019, the UK Government invested £22.9m into plastic road tech, and on a 1km stretch of road, about 684,000 bottles or 1.8 million single-use plastic bags would be used. Great news all round!

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

NHS trials smartphone ECG recorder to increase diagnosis rates and lower costs

I haven’t seen any statistics recently for the number of people who turn up at accident and emergency with chest pains and have to admit that they’ve had concerns for a while but put off seeking help until things have reached a potentially critical level. I suspect that it’s significant though, and that a lot of them are men.

The problem is often the fear of embarrassment when symptoms like heart palpitations can subside en route to hospital, resulting in normal ECG readings and the prospect of return visits if they recur.

Medics in Scotland have come to the rescue with a potentially lifesaving device that in tests helped doctors to diagnose the cause of palpitations in over 40 per cent more patients than standard tests alone. What’s more, the gadget, which sticks to the back of a smartphone, can be given to a patient to take home and monitor their condition without them having to return to hospital.

Including technology like this in mainstream gadgets like the Apple Watch is taking the stigma out of keeping an eye on your health before you end up in the back of an ambulance. And for those with symptoms that turn out to be harmless, it can provide rapid reassurance that all is well.

E&T editorial staffhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/03/best-of-the-weeks-news-080319/

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