A change in the wind, perhaps? It was 1959, perhaps a little earlier, in my final days at school, that we aeromodellers witnessed a decline in the school's understanding of craft skills. In the fourth and fifth forms at the age of 14 and 15 a few of us were designing and building large competition model aircraft from scratch and competing in National Championships with every reason to hope for a result. I still remember the shock of seeing First Prize at the school's annual hobbies exhibition awarded to a clutch of AirFix plastic aircraft assembled and painted - not that well, as it happens - by someone who could afford to buy them in the first place, and had no design skills in the second. We all knew then that a new batch of teachers had already lost the plot: And so it has proved, with a forty or fifty year decline in UK manufacturing. While a few industries such as motor manufacture and aerospace - albeit sadly shrunk in volume - are still producing the world's best (eg Land Rover, Rolls Royce, BAe), it has been the confidence - and money - of owners and investors from elsewhere that has kept the UK boat afloat. Or, when you look at the trade balances including 'invisbles' declining for years, perhaps 'reducing the rate of decline' might be a better description. This year - 2012 - it looks as if the penny might at last have dropped in Government circles. Manufacturing is VITAL for our future prosperity. With workers in the old low-cost countries now wanting a better return on their efforts combining with a re-think on how Banking should work, maybe we'll see a return to manufacturing in this country. That need is already showing up the deficiencies of much of our education establishment. Change is badly needed. Whether it will happen will depend on parents demanding more for their hard-earned money. We'll see if it actually comes.

The young unemployed (2)

A great tragedy of our time is the failure to recognise that education is more than book-learning. Boys in particular need to DO things. Engaging them is crucial. Not everyone is academic, and giving them hand/eye skills while they are enjoying themselves has probably more value in turning them into useful citizens than compelling them to stay at school while switched off from learning: The sad current state of affairs for many.

We shouldn't underestimate the ability of our children, but we must fire them up.  My father (or your grandfather) probably left school at fourteen, possibly knowing more arithmetic and better able to read and write than some of those we see coming out of too many of our schools today.
  In Lithuania, one specialist aviation school teaches nine-year-olds to fly gliders - using the highly adventurous solo method. The kids lap it up, and most go on to become proper engineers. 

Day-release from work to go to college worked for my generation. Why not day release to go to work for fourteen-year olds? Working hands-on as, say, an apprentice joiner soon shows the lad (or ladess) the utility of geometry when they help set out their first circular bay window, or wreathed and scrolled handrail: An aspiring mechanic (fitter, more like) needs to appreciate the difference between a force-fit, a running fit, and slop, in a mechanism.

We need to see a return to vocational training at school as another route into industry, as a stepping stone to better things. That's the REAL advantage of an apprenticeship.

Youth unemployment

My younger readers won't perhaps be aware that we've been here before: the present situation is a repeat of the early eighties (heard of the YOP scheme) and again of the late eighties.

I was building a joinery business through those years, and while skilled labour was increasingly hard to find, the growing pool of unemployed youth was becoming increasingly hard to employ. Why was that?

1. Bad attitude was all too common. Resentful and truculent is never good, especially when you want a job. Attacking your employer (physically or verbally) does not go far in securing your employment.
2. Lack of ambition. All too often the ONLY thing in these lads minds was "football".
3. Too high in expectations.
It was so sad to see these young men, the flower of our nation, desperate for jobs, but virtually unskilled despite years of useless government courses one after the other, expecting the wages of a skilled man. The competitive demands of the business made it impossible to accede to their demands.

Perhaps one in twenty, when asked "where do you want to be in five years time" would point to one of the skilled machinists and say "I want his job". Needless to say, these were the ones who got the job, and invariable made a success of it.
Those days were HARD for anyone in industry, as our government was intent on exporting jobs. We said so at the time, but no one was listening. Now, everyone recognises the folly. 
Guess what! We told 'em so.

I have to do some work now, but I have more to write on this subject.

Demolish or rebuild

There are many hundreds of thousands of old sub-standard terrace houses across the UK in many of the big cities, all waiting demolition thanks to the the policies espoused by the last Labour government.  Earlier this week, Charles Clover wrote a great piece in the Sunday Times suggesting that rather than "demolish and grass-over", the councils should give these blighted properties to individuals to refurbish at their own expense.
This proposal immediately rang a bell with me, as it echoed a similar policy espoused by speakers at the Building Research Establishment three years ago. One company was doing a deal with local authorities and renovating, not one house at a time, but whole streets. The effect was brilliant: Marooned owners suddenly found themselves with new neighbours instead of boarded up wrecks: First-time buyers found themselves with affordable homes in perfect condition with all mod-cons and insulated to a high standard. The LA saw its income restored and shared the profit on values with the company.
What happened? There's no sign of this happening now. It's likely the collapse in property values and the drying up of mortgages killed it in the intervening period. Whatever, this idea needs reviving, and Charles Clover puts a new spin on it.
Read Charles Clover's full article at www.supasash.com ("Affordable homes" link on the left). It deserves shouting about.

What I HATE about my i-Phone

The way the text prompts are automatic instead of optional drives me MAD!
I know I can turn it off, but that's NOT what I mean. it's the assumption that I want the alternative word offered, and have to say "no" if not. I seem to have a wider technical vocabulary than Apple. That means, if I'm writing fast I'm constantly having to go back and correct the "corrections". 
Maddening. Grrrrr!

It's not the spelling function I'm concerned with. That works well. The thing that drives me mad is the feature that offers an alternative word and asks me to say "no" if it's not what I want. It means that most of the time I get it whether I want it or not.
The obvious solution, of course, is to offer a choice of protocol from "auto replacement" to "optional replacement".
If it thinks it knows better than me, it should have the courtesy to let me ignore it. That's what I call "product development".
Simples.

It's the assumptions wot get you.

No one doubts the mathematics underlying subjects such as engineering or particle physics, but the assumptions on which they are based sometimes turn out to be flawed, and thereby wreck the consensus of the standard theory. The historic belief in the existence of phlogiston - a mysterious substance or property of elements that enabled combustion - was sunk without trace once modern chemistry explained the true state of affairs.

So, what lies behind the shocking discovery that neutrinos can travel faster than light (if true). Does the assertion underpinning all of modern physics - that nothing can travel faster than light - fall? If so everything changes.  Genius Fred Hoyle was ridiculed for standing by his Steady State theory, but what if the red-shift explained by receding galaxies has another explanation: Some 80% of the mass in the universe can't be found: the so-called Dark Matter. Light travels more slowly through dense material than through a vacuum. If this dark matter is spread uniformly throughout 'empty' space, however thinly, could the red-shifted light from distant galaxies show not that they are receding, but that the light from them has travelled through something less than a perfect vacuum. Dark matter perhaps?
Will someone explain why not, please.

Quad glazing: the next big thing? Or not.

There's a new kid on the block: Quadruple glazing. It's been around for years in curtain-walling systems, but is now being presented as the next development for the domestic market.

However, efficient though it is in preventing heat-loss, quad glazing is not without an environmental cost: Glass manufacture (melting sand at very high temperature) takes a great deal of energy. A member of the West Midlands Manufacturing Advisory Group once described premature sealed-unit failure as "an environmental disaster". Quad glazing will, at a stroke, double the environmental cost.
Somewhere, there is a point of diminishing returns, and my gut feeling is that that quad glazing is over the top. I tend to prefer the Heat Mirror approach which achieves much the same result for a far lower environmental cost. I would be very interested in seeing the embodied energy cost of the two systems set against notional energy savings.

The best energy-saving measure is still another layer of clothing with the thermostat turned down, and there's vast scope for the future in intelligent heat-mapping and distribution inside buildings.