About about

Whatever you think about the new innovation investment fund that the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS), you can't admire their use of words. Take their latest announcement, Government’s Uk Innovation Investment Fund Takes Shape.

The press release does its job, but the "Notes to editors" perpetrate one of those crimes against English that can upset pedants. It says:

There are about 1,093 venture capital backed technology companies in the UK employing over 40,000 highly skilled people.

About 1,093? There really is no point in attaching 'about' to something that definitive. Either it is 1,093 or it is about 1,100.

There are several reason why 'about 1,093' doesn't make sense. The first is that the number is current for a very short period, until the next one comes along. Then there is the problem that the number was probably never really that accurate, at least not in terms of the official statistics, which are bound to miss one or two businesses.

Lost in transition

That's it. I have had enough of this mangling of the language. It is time to point the finger at the guilty parties, starting with Frost & Sullivan.

This usually intelligent bunch of people cannot hide their roots in management land, where clear writing has never been the name of the game, as the ever excellent Lucy Kellaway points out every week in the Financial Times.

The latest crime against clear writing comes in the article North American Battery Manufacturing Trends. This item is one of a continuing series of excellent briefs on important subjects that Frost & Sullivan puts out regularly. Any journalist following technology would do well to sign up for access to these free reports.

The service would be a lot better if the articles were written in English. For example, why on earth do they have to write in this short report "Historically, battery manufacturing has transitioned away from the U.S. and Canada towards regions that offer lower production and capital costs, and higher governmental incentives"?

Transitioned? They mean moved. If you want to use a longer word to describe this simple process, try migrated.

Repeat after me, Frost & Sullivan, transition is not a verb. If the word transition is dear to you, and has some special meaning in the world of batteries, the phrase you are looking for is "made the transition".

The trouble with this sort of language is that it makes you look at the rest of the article. So you ask yourself, what can they mean when they say "North America has been cultivating battery innovation and advancement for years"? What sort of fertiliser do they use?

Then you start to look at how the company describes itself. Frost & Sullivan, we read, is "the Growth Partnership Company". What does that mean?

It gets worse. The next bit of the description of the business says that it "partners with clients to accelerate their growth". Partners with? Do they mean "works with"? Or is there something kinky going on here?

It would be all to easy to go on, and on and on and on, about this sort of drivel. (Frost & Sullivan's "services empower clients to create a growth-focused culture that generates, evaluates, and implements effective growth strategies".) Instead, perhaps it would be better to offer them some editorial support, paid for, of course, they are consultants, after all. It wouldn't take a decent writer very long to eliminate the most egregious crimes against the language.

Forgotten travellers are a mental challenge

Ever arrived at a strange railway station or airport terminal and wondered what the heck you are supposed to do? Spare a thought, then, for people "with cognitive impairment and those with mental health problems”. The chaos and confusion can be even worse for them, as I found when working up the item Forgotten travellers for my IET transport slot.

Prompted by a report from the OECD's International Transport Forum, Cognitive Impairment, Mental Health and Transport, the story concerns the design and operation of transport systems in a way that makes them easier to navigate. Information has to be simple and easier to pick out from stuff that doesn't matter.

The real message for me is that make life easier for this segment of the population, one that is growing as there are more older folks around with declining mental powers, and travel also becomes easier for the rest of us.

Useless PDF files

I was looking forward to writing about the CBI's recent survey of companies and their attitudes to R&D tax credits. In the end, the piece I wrote, Would you tax credit it?, over on Science|Business was less than it might have been.

That is because whoever produced the report over at the CBI decided that it was too sensitive to allow anyone to copy text out of the PDF file. This removed the possibility of copying quotes out of the document.
We all know about selective quotes, but this is counterproductive.

Surely the CBI would not prefer to have journalists type the quotes. That is a good way of adding mistakes to reports of your work.

This is not the first time I have come across PDF files with a "chastity belt". Indeed, I have encountered the ultimate here in the shape of press releases that you can't copy.

When you point this out to people, they are often as surprised as the recipient. They did not ask for this level of security, which should be a lesson to anyone responsibvle for culculating PDF files. Check that the audience can get at the content.

EU meddles in transport research

The EU comes in for plenty of stick from the media. One area, though, that has attracted little vilification from the Daily Mail and other Europhobes is its support for R&D. This is surprising given the amount of money that Brussels hands out. For example, over at The IET I have a few details of the €1 billion that the EU has committed to the European Green Car Initiative alone.

It isn't just cars that Brussels wants improved. Trains are in there too, with some signs of significant success.

Take ERTMS, the European Railway Traffic Management System. As I wrote in an earlier piece, by creating a new standard for railway signalling, and supporting development of the technology, the EU hasn't just eased the flow of trains through Europe, it has put the indigenous signalling companies in a position to flog systems to the likes of China and India.