Can technology save Detroit?

Motor shows aren't my cup of tea. I went to the London show once, and even managed to write a story. It was about some fancy electronic diagnostic system that Volkswagen was pushing out into the dealers that serviced its vehicles.

That was a long time ago. But even then it was pretty obvious that Detroit, the city that gave as the mass produced motor car, was behind the curve when it came to adopting technology.

Japan threw technology at making cars. It also began the arms race of adding technologically inspired bits and pieces to make cars more attractive to buyers.

European car makers were no slouch when it came to technology. Wasn't it Audi that gave us the "vorsprung der technik" slogan?

Detroit simply didn't feature in the technology game, as you found when you went to the USA and hired one of the cars made there. But now we have the leaders of the American motor industry calling for the US government to help to fund the adoption of technology, as I found when writing my latest rant for the IET, Can technology save Detroit?

Much of the enthusiasm for technology hinges on the electric car, which both Chevrolet and Ford talked about long and loud at this years Detroit car show, inevitably labelled the "North American International Auto Show".

Americans generally have more enthusiasm for new technology than Europeans, but when it comes to cars, they don't seem to have the same love of the new, or of the environmentally responsible. So Detroit may have a hard time selling this particular package to customers even if the government buys the sales pitch.

Decongestion is not for Manchester

While many people are happy to proclaim their green credentials, ask them to vote for measures that might actually achieve something and they seem less convinced. Voting for congestion charging, for example, brings out dirtier tendencies.

Working on a comment piece for the IET's "Transport sector," The wrong medicine to clear congestion, turned up evidence that even Swedes, often seen to be greener than many, will reject such proposals.

When asked for their views on congestion charging in Stockholm, there was a narrow vote for the idea in the middle of the city, but suburban Swedes were heavily against the idea.

As an aside, these commuters would not have had a chance to vote under the original plan. It was only when surrounding municipalities decided to hold polls that the rest of the region got a chance to vote on the plan.

In the event, Stockholm got its congestion charge because it was down to the parliament to make the final decision. That should be a lesson to others who want to implement green measures.

As in London, the charge brought positive benefits. But it seems unlikely that this will carry any weight with voters in other cities.

Research in magic circles

It is interesting to see how companies change their models of working with academics. One recent development, most visibly promulgated by Rolls-Royce, is the "university technology centre". UTCs, as Rolls-Royce dubs them, are big university teams with the company as the "sole proprietor". These centres work on specific issues that appeal to the company.

Originally a British phenomenon. RR now has UTCs all over the world. For example, one of the most recent, number 25, is in Darmstadt, where the Technical University in Darmstadt has a UTC that specialises in "the aerothermal interaction between the combustor and turbine".

Now we have a new variation on the theme. Well, GE Healthcare says it is new, but I gather that the late lamented chemical giant ICI did this sort of thing years ago. The new model is the "research circle," which I can across when writing about it for Science|Business, Research in magic circles.

Instead of a fragmented web of bilateral arrangements with dozens of different academic groups the company sets up a club of academics who work on different aspects of a subject. In this case the subject is a promising new way of doing magnetic resonance imaging, bringing it into the realm of "live" analysis of how drags treat cancer, for example.

Today the world, tomorrow New York

When is a World Science Festival not a world science festival? When it is, in reality, the New York Science Festival. So, treat with caution the announcement: World Science Festival: A Universe of Science in New York City, May 28 - June 1, 2008.

It turns out to be the science festival equivalent of the World Series, which is, of course, nothing of the sort, just an obscure ball game run in a country that has had its day.

The World Science Festival "will take place from May 28th through June 1st, 2008 at 15 venues throughout New York City, many in the Washington Square Area of Greenwich Village". Nothing wrong with that. But you will struggle hard to find anything in the proposed programme that yells out "world".

If I lived in San Francisco, or even Boston, north American cities with genuine scientific stature, I would be a bit miffed. Don't even talk about London, Oxford or Cambridge, to pick a few nearer to home.

Science journalism through a telescope

For many years, the excellent Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has spasmodically picked over the entrails of journalism . Science journalism has featured in its pages many a time. this aspect now has a blog, The Observatory, in which Curtis Brainard sets out to "to critique the coverage of science and the environment".

The "manifesto" for this new slot tells us that "The science desks at our nation’s newspapers are shrinking or disappearing, just as the number of foreign bureaus and correspondents, investigative teams, and other costly (and thus “expendable”) facets of the journalistic enterprise have been shrinking to bolster profit margins." In their place we have "a vast array of Web sites and blogs [that have] emerged in recent years to crank out a daily torrent of scientific, environmental, and medical news and information".

Some would argue with the assertion that "To a certain extent, these new gateways are making up for the loss of traditional platforms for science news." As Dave Tebbutt, a writer on IT rather than science has said in his own blog, much of blogdom is "ego-driven dross". Science blogs are not immune to this all too accurate observation.

The propensity of bloggers to drivel, and Brainard's spot on view of the decline of mainstream science journalism, reinforce the need for something like The Observatory. In his note launching the slot, Brainard says that:

"The Observatory will monitor science journalism - covering the coverage - with an eye toward improving the journalism and thereby improving the discourse. It will be a guide to the best and worst of science and environmental journalism; it will tell you where the press excels and makes bold innovations. And it will point out where it falls victim to spin, engages in alarmism, perpetrates false balance, misrepresents the science in peer-reviewed literature, or displays questionable priorities in news judgment."

You have to admire anyone who sets out with such high ambitions as "improving the journalism". To achieve this, if blogs really are taking over from journalism, let us hope that Brainard finds time to criticise them with the same rigour.

It might be nice if CJR also looked beyond the USA. They may have turned science journalism into a recognised profession, and something that you can actually study at degree level, but their style of journalism is not the same as that practised elsewhere on the planet. That's not a value judgement, just a fact of life.

While science journalists in other countries cannot fail to observe, and perhaps learn from, what goes on in the USA,
the insularity of the locals there suggests that this is unlikely to be a two-way process. Perhaps the CJR can bring this home to the locals from time to time.