Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Plug-in hybrid cars should be banned from using chargepoints to make way for electrics, says RAC

Hybrid cars are increasingly popular in London. I’m seeing more of them on the streets in central London, I suspect because while they remain more expensive than regular cars they attract other financial breaks like exemption from the congestion charge. Nationally, also, there are twice as many hybrids as pure electric vehicles. That’s perhaps one reason why this week the RAC also started arguing that hybrids should make way at charge points for faster-charging pure-electric vehicles. While I suspect hybrids are charged more often from fossil-fuel power in motion rather than parking and plugging in, it reflects how the charging network, or rather lack of it, is becoming one of the key issues in trying to grow the take-up of electric cars. The French-based cabling company Nexans was this week also explaining to journalists how it is tentatively moving into the charging port market for the UK and Germany. It’s getting enquiries from facilities management at everything from forecourts to supermarkets. It’s going to be a huge growth business. Watch this space – or rather, watch this parking space.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

World will warm by 3°C even under Paris Agreement targets 

It’s gettin’ hot in here, so keep on all your clothes… and commit to reducing the world’s temperature! Alas, it still won’t work, even if all governments got stuck in and achieved their global warming commitments. This sucks. For everyone involved.

Countries like Norway and Costa Rica are doing some good and getting on with decarbonising their transport and renewable energy deployment. Silly billies like China and Brazil aren’t faring as well – China’s coal use rose for the second year running, and Brazil seems to have forgotten about its forest protection policies. Don’t even get me started on Trump and his America.

We need to get a wiggle on with this stuff, otherwise we’re going to have to get our fans out, because it’ll be pretty warm out there.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

AI tools could predict spates of hate crime

According to Newton’s third law, every force has an equal and opposite force. Well, isn’t that the same principle whenever someone comes up with something new in cyberspace? Here we have a team using AI in the fight against online hate crimes. The trouble is that AI doesn’t have a conscience; it’s just a tool. And it’s a tool that I’m sure someone somewhere is using to try and make the hate crimes in question become less onerous for those whose joy it is to spread the hate. It’s not right, of course, but I’m guessing it’s easier to generate hate than it is to counter it. While it moves into delicate freedom of speech territory, wouldn’t it be more useful to use AI to simply identify and censor the online hate, rather than just predict when it is going to happen?

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Home batteries could inadvertently increase carbon emissions, study finds

In a 21st century spin on the old Economy 7 electricity tariff that encouraged households to run big appliances like washing machines in the middle of the night when there’s surplus supply and it’s at its cheapest, companies like Tesla are pushing the idea that we could charge up massive domestic batteries while we sleep, storing energy to use in daylight. Sounds a great idea, but US researchers, while not totally shooting it down, are suggesting it could actually increase emissions. The reason – the cheapest source from which consumers are likely to be charging won’t necessarily be the greenest, and the fact that batteries aren’t 100 per cent efficient means they’d be drawing more energy than they end up using. This sounds like something worth investigating rather than just binning, particularly when there’s scope to charge from local renewable sources. Like much to do with green energy, it’s not a case of going back to the drawing board, but of trying some different approaches with the aim of developing technology that can address current drawbacks.

Mark Ballard, associate editor

Agreement cements commitment to battery trains

When you see the speed these new battery-powered trains do, you can’t help thinking they need a little bit of a push. Much like the policy folk at the Department of Transport, whose sector is responsible for more pollution than any other in the whole of Britain. Get on a train on a line where the timetables are left to market forces as well as the franchise and gawd knows where you might end up. At least you can be sure that in a large part of the country it will involve choking on diesel fumes.

Chris Grayling, the secretary of transport, when he looks out from his national command centre at the immense network of clogged roads and fume-spraying jumbo jets must wonder, for want of anything else to do, how nice it would be to put in for one of those departmental re-brandings that are all the rage, and call it the Department of Self-Assured Planet-wide Extinction.

“What have we done today?” 

“We wrote a memo about a press release from one of our franchisees, saying they had tested a battery train, sir.”

“Oh, well done. Keep up the good work.”

I like to imagine that he has beside his desk a couple of those Children In Need campaign thermometers. The first is filled up to the brink with seething tar. It is always there in the corner of his eye, edging up. The other one is stuffed with dead birds and, every morning, one of his civil serviles takes the top off and stuffs another dead bird in and then, standing on a chair and teetering over, packs it down with a plunger into the towering mush of greasy feathers, bulging eyes and crooked beaks, and gives it a good shove so it gets below the line near the top of the thermometer that reads “too late now anyway”.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

UK rail passengers to be informed of delays via Facebook Messenger

This is all very good news, of course, but I would very much prefer Facebook Messenger to inform me not of the chronic train delays and cancellations, but of those rare, even unique occasions when trains are actually on time! My advice: if you want to protect yourself against the never-ending negativity stemming constantly from the British railway network, erase your Facebook Messenger or, better, the whole of your Facebook account. As for the trains, they are going to get delayed and cancelled anyway.

UK’s broadband speed disparity laid bare in new report

Having read this story, I felt momentarily happy with not residing in Greenmeadows Park in Gloucestershire, where it takes over five days to download a two-hour-long movie from Netflix. As a long-term addict of such Netflix serials as ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul’, normally released on a weekly basis, I would have been very frustrated if by the time I finished downloading one episode, the other episode was already available. So instead of watching the first one, I would have to start downloading the second, and so on, which means I might never come to the point of actually enjoying the series. I would advise the unfortunate Greenmeadows Park dwellers to urgently call Saul (from a good old payphone, not via Skype or WhatsApp, for those could takes ages) and complain.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Plug-in hybrid cars should be banned from using chargepoints to make way for electrics, says RAC

Hybrid cars are increasingly popular in London. I’m seeing more of them on the streets in central London, I suspect because while they remain more expensive than regular cars they attract other financial breaks like exemption from the congestion charge. Nationally, also, there are twice as many hybrids as pure electric vehicles. That’s perhaps one reason why this week the RAC also started arguing that hybrids should make way at charge points for faster-charging pure-electric vehicles. While I suspect hybrids are charged more often from fossil-fuel power in motion rather than parking and plugging in, it reflects how the charging network, or rather lack of it, is becoming one of the key issues in trying to grow the take-up of electric cars. The French-based cabling company Nexans was this week also explaining to journalists how it is tentatively moving into the charging port market for the UK and Germany. It’s getting enquiries from facilities management at everything from forecourts to supermarkets. It’s going to be a huge growth business. Watch this space – or rather, watch this parking space.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

World will warm by 3°C even under Paris Agreement targets 

It’s gettin’ hot in here, so keep on all your clothes… and commit to reducing the world’s temperature! Alas, it still won’t work, even if all governments got stuck in and achieved their global warming commitments. This sucks. For everyone involved.

Countries like Norway and Costa Rica are doing some good and getting on with decarbonising their transport and renewable energy deployment. Silly billies like China and Brazil aren’t faring as well – China’s coal use rose for the second year running, and Brazil seems to have forgotten about its forest protection policies. Don’t even get me started on Trump and his America.

We need to get a wiggle on with this stuff, otherwise we’re going to have to get our fans out, because it’ll be pretty warm out there.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

AI tools could predict spates of hate crime

According to Newton’s third law, every force has an equal and opposite force. Well, isn’t that the same principle whenever someone comes up with something new in cyberspace? Here we have a team using AI in the fight against online hate crimes. The trouble is that AI doesn’t have a conscience; it’s just a tool. And it’s a tool that I’m sure someone somewhere is using to try and make the hate crimes in question become less onerous for those whose joy it is to spread the hate. It’s not right, of course, but I’m guessing it’s easier to generate hate than it is to counter it. While it moves into delicate freedom of speech territory, wouldn’t it be more useful to use AI to simply identify and censor the online hate, rather than just predict when it is going to happen?

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Home batteries could inadvertently increase carbon emissions, study finds

In a 21st century spin on the old Economy 7 electricity tariff that encouraged households to run big appliances like washing machines in the middle of the night when there’s surplus supply and it’s at its cheapest, companies like Tesla are pushing the idea that we could charge up massive domestic batteries while we sleep, storing energy to use in daylight. Sounds a great idea, but US researchers, while not totally shooting it down, are suggesting it could actually increase emissions. The reason – the cheapest source from which consumers are likely to be charging won’t necessarily be the greenest, and the fact that batteries aren’t 100 per cent efficient means they’d be drawing more energy than they end up using. This sounds like something worth investigating rather than just binning, particularly when there’s scope to charge from local renewable sources. Like much to do with green energy, it’s not a case of going back to the drawing board, but of trying some different approaches with the aim of developing technology that can address current drawbacks.

Mark Ballard, associate editor

Agreement cements commitment to battery trains

When you see the speed these new battery-powered trains do, you can’t help thinking they need a little bit of a push. Much like the policy folk at the Department of Transport, whose sector is responsible for more pollution than any other in the whole of Britain. Get on a train on a line where the timetables are left to market forces as well as the franchise and gawd knows where you might end up. At least you can be sure that in a large part of the country it will involve choking on diesel fumes.

Chris Grayling, the secretary of transport, when he looks out from his national command centre at the immense network of clogged roads and fume-spraying jumbo jets must wonder, for want of anything else to do, how nice it would be to put in for one of those departmental re-brandings that are all the rage, and call it the Department of Self-Assured Planet-wide Extinction.

“What have we done today?” 

“We wrote a memo about a press release from one of our franchisees, saying they had tested a battery train, sir.”

“Oh, well done. Keep up the good work.”

I like to imagine that he has beside his desk a couple of those Children In Need campaign thermometers. The first is filled up to the brink with seething tar. It is always there in the corner of his eye, edging up. The other one is stuffed with dead birds and, every morning, one of his civil serviles takes the top off and stuffs another dead bird in and then, standing on a chair and teetering over, packs it down with a plunger into the towering mush of greasy feathers, bulging eyes and crooked beaks, and gives it a good shove so it gets below the line near the top of the thermometer that reads “too late now anyway”.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

UK rail passengers to be informed of delays via Facebook Messenger

This is all very good news, of course, but I would very much prefer Facebook Messenger to inform me not of the chronic train delays and cancellations, but of those rare, even unique occasions when trains are actually on time! My advice: if you want to protect yourself against the never-ending negativity stemming constantly from the British railway network, erase your Facebook Messenger or, better, the whole of your Facebook account. As for the trains, they are going to get delayed and cancelled anyway.

UK’s broadband speed disparity laid bare in new report

Having read this story, I felt momentarily happy with not residing in Greenmeadows Park in Gloucestershire, where it takes over five days to download a two-hour-long movie from Netflix. As a long-term addict of such Netflix serials as ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul’, normally released on a weekly basis, I would have been very frustrated if by the time I finished downloading one episode, the other episode was already available. So instead of watching the first one, I would have to start downloading the second, and so on, which means I might never come to the point of actually enjoying the series. I would advise the unfortunate Greenmeadows Park dwellers to urgently call Saul (from a good old payphone, not via Skype or WhatsApp, for those could takes ages) and complain.

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

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/12/best-of-the-weeks-news-141218/

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