Lindsley’s blog

The current anti-US riots in Afghanistan highlight the care that nations need to exercise in this Internet-enabled world. It is easy for so-called sophisticated states to ignore how their actions are seen as being offensive to others. The fact is that there are many people and countries who are disgusted with images and videos that are freely available on the internet. We in the West may well smile and shrug our shoulders, but that is not the way in some places. We may well laugh at cartoons that lampoon religious figures, but others are horrified. In a world without boundaries, things that happen in one country are easily visible to anybody - anywhere in the world.

Every government needs to recognise this, as does everybody who puts anything on the Internet.

Still seething over the EU stupidity I recorded in January, I looked up the price of those tendon hammers in the USA. Guess what? Those dinky little bits of plastic and rubber that cost our hospitals over £5 each cost the Americans between $1 and $2. That’s £1.26, tops at today’s exchange rate. And some would have even closer ties with this overinflated behemoth? Grrrr!

With all the razzmatazz over the BAFTAs the showbiz world once again tries to convince us that only their profession enjoys such moments of achievement and public acclaim. They’re possibly right about the acclaim, because the interface between them and us - the media - is absolutely fixated with “celebs”. It’s a great pity, because many other professions have equally stunning  hearts-in-mouth moments. Just think about the completion of a major bridge-building project, or the switching-on of a complex plant. It such cases teams have laboured together for months or years and that final moment is when the fruits of their work are opened up for the benefit of humanity. Such moments are much more meaningful, important and long-lasting than those bows to the audience at the footlights.

The engineering profession needs to bring this fact to life, so that schoolchildren appreciate that it will be worthwhile, interesting, stimulating and rewarding to study maths and science.

In all the debate over the bonus offered to Stephen Hester, and then refused by him, the main issue to my mind is this: what is a given job worth?

Is the Chairman of a major banking group worth more than the surgeon who operates on somebody and saves their life, or more than a soldier who risks his life for the country? And what about the financial traders? They say that their salaries and bonuses are a small fraction of the value of the commodities they trade every minute of the day. But then what about the engineer at the National Grid’s control centre whose actions regulate the flow of electricity to towns, factories, hospitals and so on? The second-by-second flow of electricity is like the flow of electronic gold. If it’s OK for a financial trader to skim off a tiny bit of the money that passes through his or her keyboard, isn’t it equally justifiable for the Grid Control engineer to demand free electricity?

On a recent visit to a local hospital, and in a fit of boredom while I waited for hours for something to happen,  I picked up a tendon hammer to look at and play with. This is one of those little gadgets with which they tap your knees and elbows, to judge your reflexes. Closer examination showed that this ’simple gadget’ bore the CE stamp. This is applied to a product to show that it meets defined safety and conformity requirements of the European Union. Should you have a month or two to kill, visit the EU’s website and prepare to have your eyes glaze over. And when you’ve got bored with that, look up the many organizations that offer CE assessment services.

Now think what all this costs. The quirky little video on the website http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/single-market-goods/cemarking/facts/index_en.htm has to be paid for and this can only be done by adding cost to the devices that are given this mark. The result? A thing that ought to cost the NHS a few pennies ends up costing £5 plus.

Now, I can well understand the need for careful testing of complicated gadgets or things that have to meet safety and performance requirements - but a hammer?

We need the UK (or what’s left of it after the Scots leave) to have a niche market that makes the world beat a path to our door.

To some extent we already have it: technical excellence. Look at Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Bentley and the like, but don’t forget the excellent graphics people like Ardman and Jacquie Lawson, and remember that Apple’s success is in no small way due to the skills of a British designer. Given half a chance we’re good it these things and we need to build on these seemingly innate skills so that, in due course, anybody in the world who wants something that is truly beautiful, reliable and efficient will turn to us. To achieve this we need our government, financiers and managers to recognise and reward talent.

As a first step we should develop methods that help banks to understand, recognise and encourage true genius.

From bitter experience I know how hard it is to persuade banks to support technology that they themselves cannot begin to understand. You can see how they support businesses that they can understand - just look at the proliferation of cafes and clothes shops in our high streets - but when anything really clever and technical is brought to them they really struggle to cope. I suspect that this is why we’ve lost so much of our engineering industries. More often than not when banks are asked to support high-tech ventures they turn for advice to big, expensive consultancies who may be very good at promoting themselves and dazzling their clients with glittering PowerPoint presentations, but who are themselves technologically challenged.

I suspect that if another Microsoft, Google or Apple tried to start up the the UK they’d have no chance. And it’s not just because our market is smaller (though that is a real factor) but because our political and financial leaders are so inept when it comes to technology. I challenge them to address this weakness, which will otherwise shackle us to mediocrity.

These days everybody can get to China easily. It was very different a few decades ago.

In 1973, two years before the death of Chairman Mao, I took part in a major exhibition in Peking (as we called it then), aimed at improving East/West relations. All sorts of things happened (of which more another day) but at one point large groups of us Brits were taken by coach to a massive cinema to see a long, colourful and convoluted epic about how a young Chinese girl, a soldier in the Red Army, had saved her village from a severe flood. It was all in Mandarin with subtitles and after a couple of hours most of us were fast asleep. But as the (beautifully orchestrated) music swelled towards the denouement we woke to see the heroine march up to the camera. Now, she had a very boyish figure and close-cropped black hair under her khaki cap with its distinctive red star. She spoke up, and her words appeared in the subtitle: “The pride of my achievement makes my chest expand!”

The auditorium exploded in loud and raucous cheers as the evil minded Westerners took this in a way that was quite unintended by the producers. This elicited huge smiles from our hosts, who all thought that our response indicated great approval of this masterpiece.

We kept quiet of course, and in this way probably contributed greatly to improving Sino-British relations.

Today’s Sunday Times has an article on the Stuxnet worm. This was a malicious way of attacking industrial processes and rumour has it that it was developed by the CIA and/or Mossad. One of the first attacks was on an Iranian nuclear installation. The Stuxnet worm infiltrates industrial process-control systems - in this case one manufactured by Siemens. In “The Darkfall Switch” I postulated a broadly similar device which was accidentally deployed when an American teenager triggered the system controlling London Underground’s power system.

In fact, Stuxnet is a comparatively crude device; the trick I described in my book is much more sophisticated. Stuxnet merely disables the computers controlling the industrial process whereas mine allows somebody to make the computers do something very serious.

No doubt somebody will at some time get to work ro develop a scheme that works in the way I described!

There was a discussion on the radio recently about apprenticeships and internships. I am a great believer in the former, but I consider the latter to be little more than exploitation of a pool of cheap labour. But that’s immaterial for my present purposes. What I was thinking was how these training schemes showed up the vast distinction between the engineering business and many other types of operation. (Not that I think of engineering as unique - the same considerations apply to many other professions, such as medicine.)

My point is that, while it may be perfectly feasible to bring a trainee in to an office to work a word-processor (for example), you just could not let a raw trainee loose on a big plant like a power station - not unless you wanted to run the risk of him/her injuring or killing himself/herself as well as others.

News this morning that a water company in the US has had its computer control systems hacked into brings a wry smile to my lips. My predictions in “The Darkfall Switch” were pretty accurate, albeit the victim there was a power company. The principle’s pretty much the same; the results equally dangerous.