The Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK has managed to create a terrible situation which could destroy fundamental research across the country. This would have a devastating impact on not just the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to their fields, and not just to the UK’s reputation, but would be a massive loss for everyone.

One institution, Jodrell Bank (where I used to work), is listed as “threatened” (BBC News), and this story a great showcase for what’s at stake.  What’s really at stake isn’t even visible, so I’m going to use JB to give tiny insights into what this could mean for a broad community of brilliant minds and projects, and what we might lose that we can’t imagine and can’t measure.

In true British fashion, Jodrell is an example of how spectacular scientific endeavour is completely under-represented and unappreciated in the UK.  We have a world-class, thought-leading, inspirational, world-changing, unique facility, and it’s not considered as an imperative to sustain.

Jodrell (with MERLIN) is as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope. It has been for over 15 years. (I believe Nasa spend more on marketing the HST than Jodrell’s entire budget).

I went to visit some friends at Jodrell a few years back and as they we updating me on some of the progress a few nuggets dropped into the conversation - like the fact that more data was flowing across the MERLIN network than the WHOLE of the UK internet. One of the engineers showed me their own self-build multi-gigabit router (because nothing commercial was quite cutting it).

Jodrell was instrumental in Apollo missions. It was the only instrument in the Western Hemisphere that could track Sputnik. It led to the discovery of Pulsars. It helps us map the entire universe. It finds new physics.

The people who work in this field, using instruments like Jodrell,  help not only to literally uncover the mysteries of “life, the universe and everything”, but to create fundamentally new technologies, push boundaries and inspire generations to drive innovation - they do this as a side-effect to their daily work. One colleague wrote 100,000 lines of PERL to help with data processing tasks, so they could carry out their own astrophysics research.  I was part of an international team of about 10 people managing about 1 million lines of Fortran that carried out data and image processing.

While I was there (in 1993-95) I helped to set up their first website. We did this in our lunch breaks, as a means to an end - helping to share information.

Of course it’s not just Jodrell, it’s all the fundamental research that we use to fuel  our innovation, which ultimately fuels our economy, and could help us address the many global issues that we face as a species.

To find ourselves in a situation where this level of innovation is threatened is, at best, atrocious, at worst immoral.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

For (mostly my own) reference, here’s a scan of the printed version

Thanks to Wendy.

Some people are too clever by half.

(to the dopplr, batbit)

Flying with radar, gaming trashes the internet, passively.

“Carbon target is a guaranteed catastrophe”

This was the headline on the front page of The Guardian today.

“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.

It’s fascinating watching the public-facing language around the climate change issue morph into something that is accurate, even though most of the people I know in the scientific community have felt it for a very long time - they’ve also felt that overstating the issue would be alarmist, or that they wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Even though we all have the greatest access to mass communication in the history of human-kind, we’ve also systematically undermined and crippled our ability to communicate. We’ve turned everyone into broadcasters.

“He … was himself one of the architects of a 450ppm target. But he told the Guardian: “I realise that was too high.”

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls “slow feedback” mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.”

I think we all knew this was coming. The scientific method moves slowly, and for good reason, but we already know we are exploiting our resources faster than they can recover. We’ve know this for a very long time - certainly more than my lifetime.

Given what’s at stake, why are we so afraid of communication?

I was impressed with Defra when they asked us to make a minor amendment to the name of AMEE. Originally we’d called AMEE the “Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine”, partly to bring a little bit of a wry smile to everyone we dealt with.

When Defra hired us, however, they took this a little more seriously and, after some considerable deliberation asked if we could amend it to the “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”.

This was impressive government intervention on several counts - firstly they asked very politely if we wouldn’t mind changing the name even though it was our project. Secondly, as they felt that “Extinction” might lead to mass panic, “Extinctions” was a little, well, softer. And finally, they were right, they based their amendment on facts - it’s not going to be one big extinction event - like a meteor - but a build up to potentially many extinction events.

Doesn’t that make you feel so much better. When we look back, assuming we can, with our 20:20 hindsight and question how we’d created a global society where broadcasting is primary and listening is secondary, I wonder what we’ll build to avoid it “next time”.

Billboard says

“CBS Radio and Last.fm, both owned by CBS Corp, have teamed up for closer collaboration on their respective radio initiatives. Under the agreement, CBS Radio will stream all its stations to Last.fm’s U.S. users. This includes KROQ in Los Angeles, WCBS in New York, WXRT in Chicago and WVEE in Atlanta.

The UK Last.fm service already does the same for BBC stations in London.

Listeners on Last.fm can then flip from the radio stream to playing individual songs, and add songs heard via the radio stream to their Last.fm playlist to play later on-demand.”

What does this mean?

If you look at the BBC presence I see no evidence of any “radio streaming”. BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4 all have pages, but there’s no live radio simulcast. They all say,

“BBC Radio X isn’t yet available to play on Last.fm.”

Does “stream stations to users” mean putting a hyperlink on a web page? Embedding a streaming URL in a web page? Exchanging metadata about what’s playing so you can play the same thing? Last.fm providing a relayed streaming feed whereby Last.fm pay for the delivery infrastructure?

I suspect it’s the exchange of metadata, in which case we have a complete mess of jargon being used in the media and really odd expectations being set.

… and if radio stations have an API on their playlists, then this kind of mashup requires no commercial intervention, let alone a press release. It certainly isn’t “radio”.

Interesting coincidence of acronyms:

Gross World Product

vs Global Warming Potential

vs Global Water Partnership

AMEE is in the USA (California and Texas) from 2nd - 13th March.

I’m presenting at

1) ETech talk (8:45am Thursday, 6th March 2008, Marina Ballroom D)

2) SXSW panel (3:30-4:30pm Tuesday, 11th March 2008).

If you would like to meet, please get in touch.

CI (of which I’m a Director) has been shortlisted for the Music Week Award “Distributor of the Year”.

It’s a giant shift in perception that we’re even being considered, and certainly the fact we delivered ~20% of Amazon’s US download store is a catalyst.

CI’s digital distribution service model /has set/continues to set/ standards in how with digital products and web services can work together. CI takes no fees from retailers, and no % of sales (think “DHL for digital products”).

It’s mission is “enable access to markets” by providing easy routes for any rights-owner to distribute to any retailer (160 at last count, including iTunes, mobile operators, China, Korea, etc…). CI’s clients are all in the independent sector, and represent over 2 million tracks. We also have a rather good jukebox in our office.

To be listed up against Universal and EMI (and Pinnacle is one of CI’s clients) is indicative of the shift in the balance of “power” in the music industry.

Fingers crossed!

From TED Talks: Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

I also can’t ignore the other TED themes this month: Music and Rockets, with George Dyson (who provided me wih some useful advice for AMEE) talking about Rockets to Saturn and Pamelia Kurstin discussing the Theremin.

Set course for 2008….

I’ve blanked out the specifics, but each blue box is a meeting… it’s going to be a busy year.