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Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, has
a reputation as something of a political bruiser. In his dealings with the
media, he cultivates a knockabout atmosphere in which he delivers blunt
home truths to vested interests on all sides. And to get his message across
to electors he frequently gives interviews on the virtues of, for example,
traditional teaching methods. So why is he so reticent when it comes to
science?

Although Clarke has been in charge of £2 billion of research
spending for over a year now, he has yet to give to interview on science.
Indeed, it is noticeable that the s-word passes his lips as rarely as possible.
Could it be that on science Clarke is frit?

* * *

Brussels gets more and more important. Now Thai Airlines is starting
nonstop flights to the Capital of Europe. ‘We can accommodate all parties
heading for the European Parliament in Brussels,’ boasts its announcement,
under a hilarious picture of passengers ranged across a row of airplane
seats, and across the range of discernable political sympathies, from a
hippy (‘extreme left wing’) to a country-club type (‘extreme right’).

Unfortunately, no one has told Thai Airlines that the European Parliament
is not based in Brussels. Well, not always. Sometimes it’s in Strasbourg.
Then again, sometimes it’s in Luxembourg. Then again, given the fog and
traffic that afflict Brussels’s severely overburdened airport, maybe Thai
Airlines expects its destinations to vary somewhat as well.

* * *

They have long known in Brussels that acronyms just don’t translate.
Hence, BEUC is BEUC and ECLAIR is ECLAIR in all official languages, even
though the words that form the acronyms are respectively French and English.
You’d think they would also have learned this at the UN, even though it
has, oddly, fewer official languages than the European Community. But they
haven’t-not even the UN Industrial Development Office, which ought to be
sensitive about acronyms, given all the jokes about UNIDO (I need a what?).

UNIDO recently conducted a conference on ESID – Ecologically Sustainable
Industrial Development. Unfortunately the French words for that abbreviate
to DIED. Well, at least that’s sustainable. And sometimes, even industrial.

* * *

At some point, every large company that computerises its offices sends
out for experts to tell it why automation is creating more work, not less.
A recent report for a large international agency in this fix is typical.
Some power-hungry bureaucrat bought a centralised machine, with too much
capacity and archaic software. ‘Single-vendor mindset narrows options and
increases costs’ – yes, they bought IBM machines and hired IBM people. ‘Forms
which are typed by secretaries are introduced to the system by other people
who retype what is already typed.’

We all remember when automation was supposed to destroy jobs. But what
is the agency? UNIDO, of course, the very people who advise Third World
countries on how to compete in the modern world of high-tech industry and
automation. Explains a lot.

* * *

Ely Glatstein, a researcher from the National Cancer Institute in the
US, didn’t mince words when he spoke at a conference in Melbourne this month.
He told delegates that he was shocked to see many of them smoking what he
labelled rotten, stinking, filthy cigarettes. He said: ‘It is a filthy habit.
What can I say?’ About 20 per cent of the 1200 delegates were smoking in
the corridors outside the conference rooms, according to Glatstein. And
the conference? It was on cancer – an international conference on lung cancer,
naturally.

* * *

Britain’s safety watchdog, the Health and Safety Commission, has been
wrestling risks. Under scrutiny are such inscrutable concepts as individual
and societal risk, and assigning a figure to them is, well, difficult. And
explaining the methodology can lead to inscrutable prose, too.

The commission has just published a tome on major hazards on the railways,
on roads and at ports. (The reference to Canvey might need explaining. Canvey
Island contains arguably Britain’s biggest concentration of hazardous industry
– not far from a lot of homes. Now, read on.

‘A ‘local scrutiny level’ for societal risk for each port can be derived
in a similar manner to that used for the ‘national scrutiny level’. The
difference being that for a local scrutiny level for any one port the risk
level per tonne of cargo is scaled by the volume of trade (in tonnes) handled
at the port rather than the national volume. The risks at Canvey were judged
‘just tolerable’. Consequently the local scrutiny level for a port with
a volume of trade less than Canvey will be below the local intolerability
level.

‘Conversely for a port with a volume of trade greater than Canvey the
local scrutiny level will be above the local intolerability level. If the
assessed risks at a port with a volume of trade less than Canvey are at,
or approaching, the local scrutiny level for that port they would still
be tolerable, but they would signal a priority need for further assessment
and possible risk reduction.

‘Such a test might also point out those components of trade with a disproportionately
high risk in relation to their volume or value. ‘For ports with a volume
of trade greater than Canvey the local scrutiny level is not a relevant
criterion since risks at or approaching this level would already be above
the local intolerability level. In these circumstances a comparison of the
actual estimated risks at the port with the local intolerability risk criteria
would be the only appropriate approach.’ Quite so.