November 24, 2018

Lonely engineers, Google shop stock, Orkneys hydrogen and more: best of the week’s news

By admin In News, Technology No comments

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Many engineers ‘unable to discuss feelings of isolation at work’

Not just engineers, of course; many people suffer from some sort of mental health issue. We live in fractious times and myriad subtle pressures are affecting the minds of the population in confusing, overlapping ways. If you’re suffering at all – even if you think it’s only that you’re feeling ‘a bit down’ at the moment – open up to someone, at least a little bit. Talking about one’s problems is one of the oldest but most effective forms of therapy. Every little bit more you open up is like a chink of light widening as it comes through a previously locked door, illuminating and brightening the room as it grows. Don’t linger in the darkness alone for too long or make yourself a prisoner to it. It may be difficult or off-putting at first to articulate your feelings without any sense of shame or embarrassment, but you might also be surprised at how receptive and sympathetic your colleagues, friends and family turn out to be.

Google search results to show local shop stock levels in boost to high-street retail

A nice little story from Google about how it’s helping high-street shops and small local retailers by displaying stock levels of a product that someone searches for at locations nearby. The thinking behind this is that said person can then nip out to the local shop and pick up the item immediately, without having to wait two days for the postman or a courier firm to deliver. Great idea.

Of course, this is the same search engine that people have been using for years to find the cheapest price online, having already visited a bricks-and-mortar shop on the local high street to physically handle the product, assess it in the flesh, determine that yes, it is definitely the product they want, but then leave the local shop without buying, instead going home to conduct an internet search to find the cheapest price available online. People bemoan the lack of diversity on the high street, but they still buy everything online from Amazon. We need to stop pretending that our actions don’t have any effect (with shopping, as with everything). Shop local and put your money back into your local community. Don’t just treat these small businesses as display rooms for the stuff you’re actually buying online. Yes, it might mean a few quid on top of the buying price in the short term, but the long-term ramifications of high-street ghost towns or wall-to-wall charity shops is a far grimmer prospect.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

Hydrogen is key to UK’s low-carbon economy, says Committee on Climate Change

In the early summer I visited Orkney to look at the progress being made in marine renewables. Despite a sense of exasperation at a discontinuation of central support, there is a richness in technology on the islands, combined with a vast supply of natural resources. In fact, there is some promising technology starting to prove itself on the marine side, but it can’t compete with the more developed technology and better returns of the wind renewables sector in Scotland. This is true of Orkney in particular, where a cool breeze is the least you could expect on any given day.

Such a surfeit of resources has resulted in the use of electrolysis to recover hydrogen from water (no shortage of that there either), with plant powered by excess wind-generated energy. I say excess because the grid in Orkney, or more particularly the connection to the mainland, is inadequate and once at capacity any extra energy generated is simply wasted. So while electrolysis is an energy-intensive business – the energy gained from the hydrogen as a fuel is considerably less than the energy put in to create it – it uses energy that effectively comes free. It becomes a resource that requires no (finite) resources to create and as a fuel creates both energy and water. What’s not to love? I believe it doesn’t scale up particularly well, but for local operations, local transport, even in powering the inter-island ferries in the Orkneys, there could be a real future. No harm in having a big vision for small-scale technology.

Overexposure to online abuse dulls moral outrage, study suggests

Although there are plenty of people who have been badly affected or even destroyed by online bullying, it is no surprise that most people perceive online offence as a much lighter version of offline offence. Bravery behind the keyboard is rarely replicated in face-to-face conflict. That, I would have thought, is where the useful research would be. Rather than try and see if we are generally desensitised to the vile words of vile people online, we should examine whether this online unpleasantness is making all of us that little bit more unkind. It would be interesting, and possibly a bit depressing, to know if society is shifting downhill in this way.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

Prototype plane with no moving parts completes maiden flight

Silent and deadly. Okay, it’s not deadly, but it could be. Maybe? Engineers from MIT have built and flown the first plane with no moving parts and is actually powered by an “ionic wind”, a silent flow of ions that is produced onboard the plane and generates enough thrust to propel it through the air. Sounds complicated. It doesn’t use any fossil fuels like normal planes and is absolutely silent when it flies. Ion-wind propulsion systems like this one could be used to fly less noisy drones, for stalking and stuff.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Many engineers ‘unable to discuss feelings of isolation at work’

Society is just waking up to the hard truth that many, many people are plain lonely. Engineers, it seems, are far from being an exception, according to research published this week. Before that, I have heard university student welfare officers noting that they hardly ever hear from engineering undergraduates. So why is loneliness so pervasive in engineering? Do they not talk enough? Is it something to do with the work environment or the demographic of the profession? That’s what we need to find out next.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Government criticised for lax attitude to threat of major infrastructure cyber attack

If the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy is to believed, it looks like the British Government’s attitude to cyber security isn’t that different to the majority of the public. Most of us are well aware of the threats, but are happy to ignore them or at least take the minimum measures to safeguard ourselves until we fall victim, when we become hyper vigilant.

Having your bank account compromised or ID stolen is bad enough, but something it’s usually possible to recover from. The problem with the wait-and-see approach that the current administration is said to be adopting is that a hack of national infrastructure by a hostile foreign power would be so much more serious.

Somehow, I’m not reassured by the government’s response, pointing to the fact that among other measures it’s produced best-practice guidance for infrastructure operators. All very well, but how often do we discover in the aftermath of a disaster that guidelines alone, without any compulsion to follow the measures they outline, just aren’t enough?

I’m even less optimistic about anyone listening to the call for future information-sharing and collaboration on cyber security to be prioritised in the current Brexit negotiations, when there are so many other less important but more politically sensitive questions still to be resolved. Ironically, as the committee points out, a recent tightening of the UK regulatory regime wasn’t at the government’s behest, but was a consequence of having to accept EU-wide regulations.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Of topophilia, topophobia and topotechnophobia

I’d like to make one small, yet important, addition to the places “made scary by the technological features, objects or sites they contain” listed in my latest ‘View from Vitalia’ blog post – the legendary American prison Sing Sing, made particularly scary by one smallish technological gadget it used to have.

I visited Sing Sing in the town of Ossining, NY (as a journalist, not an inmate, God forbid) in 2000. “How do I get to Sing Sing?” I asked a solitary, smartly dressed woman at Ossining station. “You’ve just escaped from it,” she smiled and explained that all trains from New York passed through the middle of the prison territory before arriving at the station. She pointed at a grim, oblong hulk of a building overlooking the Hudson, about a mile away. Through morning mist, I could discern the blurred silhouettes of watchtowers. “But don’t even try to get inside. Due to some disturbances this morning, the inmates are all confined to their cells and all visits have been cancelled,” she said.

I was, of course, mostly interested in ‘Old Sparky’, Sing Sing’s ill-famed electric chair, constructed in 1891 by the inmates and finally decommissioned in 1963. The peak of its activity was probably in the mid-1930s: 16 prisoners were electrocuted on it in 1935 and 23 – including one woman – in 1936. Executions (or ’electrocutions’, if you prefer) were normally carried out with surprising punctuality at 11pm on Thursdays.

In an attempt to satisfy curious onlookers like myself and keep them away from the prison, Ossining Community Centre offered a special exhibit. It was a mini-Sing Sing, complete with three authentic cells, sound effects, the smell of burnt prison gruel and a life-size replica of the electric chair, “made by the Building Maintenance Vocational Class in Sing Sing prison in 1992,” according to a plate on the wall.

I couldn’t tear my gaze from it, recalling how it was described by two Russian writers who visited the prison in 1935: “This is a yellow wooden chair with a high back and arm rests. At first glance, it seems innocuous and, if it were not for the leather bracelets with which the hands and feet of the condemned are tied, it could very well stand in some highly moral family home. A deafish grandfather might well be sitting in it to read his newspapers there. But, an instant later, the chair was very repellent to us and especially depressing were its polished arm-rests. Better not to think about those who had polished them with their elbows.”

The inmates had done a good job replicating the chair, for I could see my puzzled reflection in its sinisterly polished arm rests.

The death penalty was abolished in the State of New York in 1968, only to be voted back into law in 1995. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day soon, following another controversial decision of the incumbent and rather unpredictable US President, the hard-working Old Sparky is returned to Sing Sing’s dreaded ‘Death House’, the block that had its own kitchen and exercise yard, plus 23 solitary cells for condemned men and three for women, which has now been converted to a vocational education centre for Sing Sing’s inmates.

Mark Ballard, associate editor

Many engineers ‘unable to discuss feelings of isolation at work’

As the season of kindness approaches, spare a thought for our lonely engineers. Friendless and alone, is how the British Red Cross put it this week. Spare a thought for them as we prepare to face the annual Christmas party.

As one colleague put it this week in our office: can you just tell me what it is we are supposed to do at this thing, aside from standing around without anything to say to anyone, and having to endure that, with no escape, for hours until the bus comes? Or, as Morrissey described a night out in The Smiths’ song ‘How Soon Is Now?’, “So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to die”.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. If they would only take the job of organising the annual Christmas shindig out of the hands of the ‘normals’ in HR, and give it to the techies, so they can engineer an end to this horrible ordeal.

It would be about time, too. The Christmas party format hasn’t changed since the 1970s, when the standard parameters were set: loud wretched disco music, sausage rolls and poor quality wine. And grimaces. And suppressed panic.

One obvious way you would improve the office party format is by including board games, to give asocial people a means and a reason to communicate with one another over something they might actually enjoy. That was the problem implied by the figures the British Red Cross released. Half of all engineers were lonely, it said. And its survey statistics tried to imply the problem was particular to engineering. A third of them said they felt lonely even when they are surrounded by people. Perhaps then, the stereotype is true: engineering is half full of people who would self-describe as, as Ian Dury put it in ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ – asocial people who have no friends, but who get a bit of a gee up at Christmas, when the Christians impose upon them some cheer. Only, they might not mind having no friends; and with normals being generally a vexatious bunch, with their small talk, their irony, their cliques, and their condescension, the asocials might prefer it that way. So one must ask who exactly it was that told the Red Cross they were lonely. It may have been the other half of people who work in engineering – the normals – who despair at being surrounded by people who seem to them to be utterly uninterested in friendship. Who seem uninterested when it’s merely that there are no board games.

That assumes, though, that you can take the Red Cross survey at face value, which you can’t. Notwithstanding the good work it does helping people who really are desperately lonely and stuck at home at Christmas, immobile, who can’t get to the shops, who don’t have transport to get to their hospital check-up. But you can’t take its survey at face value because it won’t release the background data and it looks like a typical survey press release: paper-thin numbers dressed up for some cheap PR.

Half of all people in the engineering sector were lonely, said the press release. It didn’t say who in the engineering sector, like how many of them were in HR. And well, it said, actually, we spoke to 189 people in engineering, half of whom were lonely at least sometimes, if they were not actually lonely often or always. And that’s a bit like saying half of all people are sometimes sad. That’s the survey Ronald McDonald will put on his Christmas press release.