current affairs, environment

Beavers

I’m coming to like the idea of beavers. And no, I don’t mean those, I mean the animated furry kind. Oh maybe not that either … the animals what build dams in rivers, m’lud.
I used not to think much of these animals, but research seems to be showing that they really do have a beneficial effect on water management, otherwise known as flood control.
And beavers are back on the agenda (well, maybe) because a large part of southern England is under water thanks to a record breaking deluge over the last 2-3 months. December and January rainfall has been the heaviest in England and Wales since records began 240 years ago — and it looks as if February is about to join them.
According to New Scientist the rains have been exacerbated by the weather in Indonesia and the tropical west Pacific — no I don’t get that either but then I’m not a meteorologist. But regardless, we’ve had several oceans of rain recently and consequently there is much flooding in southern England.
There is an argument going on about whether rivers were dredged sufficiently, and whether if they were it would have made any difference. On the one side we appear to have the UK government who say rivers must be dredged more and they’ll pay — mainly because they’re trying to appease agribusiness. On the other hand every hydrologist being quoted is saying dredging would, at best, have made no difference and would likely have made things worse.


I think I might just trust the hydrologists rather than the politicians.
Joining in with the hydrologists is environmentalist and thinker George Monbiot. His piece in the Guardian at the end of January mocks the politicians’ unseemly positions but also makes many salient environmental points which the politicians appear to have missed (or ignored).
Quoting from an Environment Agency report, Monbiot says:

“Dredging of river channels does not prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change.”

He then says:

Is that not bleeding obvious? A river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge … If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems.
Among these problems, the Environment Agency points out, are:
1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, “it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again”.
2. More dangerous rivers: “Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation.”
3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: “If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, ‘Pinch Points’ at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure.” That means more expense and more danger.
4. Destruction of the natural world: “Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles.”

Yep, that’s right: dredging is a tool for improving navigation not land drainage. If you want to prevent flooding you need to do things like:

• More trees and bogs in the uplands — reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood …
• Making those floodplains rougher by planting trees and other deep vegetation to help hold back the water — lowering the banks and de-canalising the upper reaches, allowing rivers once more to create meanders and braids and oxbow lakes. These trap the load they carry and sap much of their destructive energy.

So how should all this be done?
Well one answer appears to be beavers!


Yes, beavers. The pesky furry critters what fell trees and build dams.
We used to have beavers in this country but they were hunted to extinction here several hundred years ago — they lasted until Tudor times in Scotland but disappeared from England long before that.
Why beavers? Well to quote from a Wild Wood Trust document:

Beaver are considered to be a ‘key-stone’ species because they have the ability to create and maintain wetlands by building dams and digging ditches. They also create coppice, selectively felled areas of woodland. In doing this they provide essential habitat for many other species of plant and animal. Wetland areas and coppice must currently be maintained artificially, at significant cost to the public. Beaver damming activity has also been observed to filter pollutants out of the water, leaving streams cleaner.
Wetlands are … fragile ecosystems, but they can also act as a flood defence and could protect homes across the country. After heavy rainfall, wetland areas and flood plains act as a sponge, holding excess water and releasing it slowly, preventing sudden rises in water level and flash floods …
Beavers have been reintroduced across Europe, and have not caused any serious ecological problems. Reintroductions have been extremely successful as long as the population density is low enough that the beavers do not come into conflict with human activity.

There’s a fuller report, by Natural England and People’s Trust for Endangered Species, on reintroducing beavers to England here.
Sure, beavers likely aren’t going to do a lot of good actually on the Somerset Levels. But they will help if they are present on the uplands which drain into the Levels. One of the keys seems to be the need to manage water flow much higher up the valleys than the actual areas currently being flooded.
But of course that’s counter-intuitive both to the affected residents and to politicians. And of course neither trusts the experts who they employ. If you’re not going to listen to experts — insisting instead on a DIY fuck-up — then don’t waste money employing them.
So the bottom line is we need to reintroduce beavers.
What a great idea!
Meanwhile I’ll leave you with George Monbiot’s final salvo:

Cameron’s dredge pledge is like the badger cull. It is useless. It is counter-productive. But it keeps the farmers happy and allows the government to be seen to be doing something: something decisive and muscular and visible. And that, in these dismal times, appears to be all that counts.

words

Word: Cataphract

Cataphract
1. Defensive armour used for the whole body and often for the horse, also, especially the linked mail or scale armour of some eastern nations.
2. A horseman covered with a cataphract.
3. The armour or plate covering some fishes.


The word is derived from the Latin cataphractes, Greek καταϕράκτης, a coat of mail; also from Latin cataphractus, Greek κατάϕρακτος, clad in full armour.
Surprisingly the OED gives the first recorded usage in 1581.

food+drink, personal

Ten Things #2

Here’s my February list of Ten Things.
10 Fruits & Vegetable I Like:

  1. Jerusalem Artichokes
  2. Avocado
  3. Pink Grapefruit
    (such a shame I can’t eat it)
  4. Fennel
  5. Garlic
  6. Butter Beans
  7. Purple Sprouting Broccoli
  8. Victoria Plums
  9. Chard
  10. Aubergine

There are lots more, but they’ll do for now!

sexuality, thoughts

Why Monogamy?

I’m dipping into (“reading” is too organised a concept for my random excursions) This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, edited by John Brockman. This is a collection of almost 150 short essays written in response to the Edge question of 2012: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautify explanation?
The answers cover the spectrum from particle physics through psychology to the social sciences. Authors include luminaries like Susan Blackmore, Leonard Susskind, Stephen Pinker, Carl Zimmer and Jared Diamond as well as a whole host of people I’ve never heard of.
One essay I read last evening stood out for me, and I am naughtily going to reprint it here in its entirety.

The Overdue Demise of Monogamy
Aubrey de Gray
Gerontologist; chief science officer, SENS Foundation; author, Ending Aging
There are many persuasive arguments from evolutionary biology explaining why various species, notably Homo sapiens, have adopted a lifestyle in which males and females pair up long-term. But my topic here is not one of those explanations. Instead, it is the explanation for why we are close — far closer than most people, even most readers of Edge, yet appreciate — to the greatest societal, as opposed to technological, advance in the history of civilization.
In 1971, the American philosopher John Rawls coined the term “reflective equilibrium” to denote “a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgments.”* In practical terms, reflective equilibrium is about how we identify and resolve logical inconsistencies in our prevailing moral compass. Examples such as the rejection of slavery and of innumerable “isms” (sexism, ageism, etc.) are quite clear: The arguments that worked best were those highlighting the hypocrisy of maintaining acceptance of existing attitudes in the face of already established contrasting attitudes in matters that were indisputably analogous.
Reflective equilibrium gets my vote tor the most elegant and beautiful explanation, because of its immense breadth of applicability and also its lack of dependence on other controversial positions. Most important, it rises above the question of cognitivism, the debate over whether there is any such thing as objective morality. Cognitivists assert that certain acts are inherently good or bad, regardless of the society in which they do or do not occur—very much as the laws of physics are generally believed to be independent of those observing their effects. Noncognitivists claim, by contrast, that no moral position is universal and that each (hypothetical) society makes its own moral rules unfettered, so that even acts we would view as unequivocally immoral could be morally unobjectionable in some other culture. But when we make actual decisions concerning whether such-and-such a view is morally acceptable or not, reflective equilibrium frees us from the need to take a view on the cognitivism question. In a nutshell, it explains why we don’t need to know whether morality is objective.
I highlight monogamy here because, of the many topics to which reflective equilibrium can be usefully applied, Western society’s position on monogamy is at the most critical juncture, Monogamy today compares with heterosexuality not too many decades ago, or tolerance of slavery 150 years ago. Quite a lot of people depart from it, a much smaller minority actively advocate the acceptance of departure from it, but most people advocate it and disparage the minority view. Why is this the “critical juncture”? Because it is the point at which enlightened thought-leaders can make the greatest difference to the speed with which the transition to the morally inescapable position occurs.
First let me make clear that I refer here to sex and not (necessarily, anyway) to deeper emotional attachments. Whatever one’s views or predilections concerning the acceptability or desirability of having deep emotional attachments with more than one partner, fulfillment of the responsibilities they entail tends to take a significant proportion of the twenty-four hours of everyone’s day. The complications arising from this inconvenient truth are a topic for another time. In this essay, I focus on liaisons casual enough (whether or not repeated) that availability of time is not a major issue.
An argument from reflective equilibrium always begins with identification of the conventional views, with which one then makes a parallel. In this case, it’s all about jealousy and possessiveness. Consider chess, or drinking. These are rarely solitary pursuits. Now, is it generally considered reasonable for a friend with whom one sometimes plays chess to feel aggrieved when one plays chess with someone else? Indeed, if someone exhibited possessiveness in such a matter, would they not be viewed as unacceptably overbearing and egotistical?
My claim is probably obvious by now. It is simply that there is nothing about sex that morally distinguishes it from other activities performed by two (or more) people collectively. In a world no longer driven by reproductive efficiency, and presuming that all parties are taking appropriate precautions in relation to pregnancy and disease, sex is overwhelmingly a recreational activity. What, then, can morally distinguish it from other recreational activities? Once we see that nothing does, reflective equilibrium forces us to one of two positions: Either we start to resent the temerity of our regular chess opponents playing others, or we cease to resent the equivalent in sex.
My prediction that monogamy’s end is extremely nigh arises from my reference to reproductive efficiency above. Every single society in history has seen a precipitous reduction in fertility following its achievement of a level of prosperity that allowed reasonable levels of female education and emancipation. Monogamy is virtually mandated when a woman spends her entire adult life with young children underfoot, because continuous financial support cannot otherwise be ensured. But when it is customary for those of both sexes to be financially independent, this logic collapses. This is especially so for the increasing proportion of men and women who choose to delay having children until middle age (if then).
I realize that rapid change in a society’s moral compass needs more than the removal of influences maintaining the status quo; it also needs an active impetus. What is the impetus in this case? It is simply the pain and suffering that arises when the possessiveness and jealousy inherent in the monogamous mind-set butt heads with the asynchronous shifts of affection and aspiration inherent in the response of human beings to their evolving social interactions. Gratuitous suffering is anathema to all. Thus, the realization that this particular category of suffering is wholly gratuitous has not only irresistible moral force (via the principle of reflective equilibrium) but also immense emotional utility.
The writing is on the wall.
____________________
* A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971).

Friends with benefits. Or just friends. Or just benefits. Where’s the problem?
As one of my university friends used to observe: why should sex not just be an expression of friendship; we have sex just because we’re friends and feel like it; no more, no less? How is this actually different from having a drink, listening to records, or playing tennis together?
I’ve always struggled to see why anyone has a problem with this.

natural history, photography

Weekly Photograph

This week a photograph from the archives; it was taken in October 2011.
I see a Green Woodpecker going through the garden a couple of time most years. But this guy (yes, probably male) was on our next door neighbour’s lawn and back then this was the third or fourth time I’d seen him visiting over a period of 2-3 weeks. One day I watched him for 45 minutes, quartering the same area repeatedly, so it must be very rich in ants. Taken at a range of 20-25 yards from the study window with my biggest lens and still this is a small crop from the middle of a frame.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Green Woodpecker
Green Woodpecker
Greenford, October 2011

words

NHS Communications

Every week someone somewhere in the NHS sends out an email bulletin called NHS Networks News. It is intended to provide a channel of useful information and articles on the happenings in the NHS for clinicians and similar. For some reason I seem to be subscribed, so I see a copy.
And each week this email starts with a short piece called “Editor’s blog”. Sometimes it is useful. Sometimes it is humorous. This week’s was undoubtedly supposed to be humorous. But in actual fact all it has done is highlight the appalling levels to which the NHS culture and NHS communications have sunk, because it is far closer to the truth than I think the anonymous author realises, as you’ll know if ever you have tried reading any NHS documentation. (Although the same is equally true of most corporate cultures.)
Just for your edification, I shall reproduce here the full item.

The gas and air principle
All NHS staff must learn a second language before they can be truly proficient communicators: they need to be able to speak NHS.
In the latest in our occasional series of tutorials, we offer further tips for the aspiring NHS speaker.
Verbs
In most languages, verbs are “doing” words. In NHS they are “actively considering” words. Saying that you will “do” something may make you appear brash or over-confident. Acceptable alternatives include “aim to”, “take steps toward” and “formulate a vision and strategy for”.
When you have practised each of these, you can use them together to convey the desired nuance or level of obfuscation.
So while “aiming to tackle the causes of health inequalities” could still be mistaken for a commitment, “aiming to take steps towards formulating a vision and strategy for tackling health inequalities” avoids the risk of embarrassment and disappointment when nothing happens, but demonstrates very strong active consideration.
Nouns
In English, nouns – or naming words – denote a person, place or thing. In NHS, nouns are used to create the impression of something tangible.
For example “stakeholder” is a useful term meaning someone who is not involved and you have no intention of involving, but who cannot be ignored. A patient is a good example of a “stakeholder”.
When you have mastered “stakeholder”, you can start to introduce “ownership” into your everyday conversation. Here are a few phrases to practise, with English translations in brackets.

  • “I’m going to give you ownership” (“It’s your problem now”)
  • “We don’t have ownership” (“Nothing is our fault”)
  • “We are working with stakeholders to establish full ownership” (“No one knows what’s going on”)

Adjectives
Adjectives in English are used to describe things, usually to make them clearer. Adjectives have a slightly different role in NHS, which is to make statements more emphatic. Simple ones to start with include “key”, “core”, “vital”, “meaningful”, “strategic” and “high-quality”. In NHS it is mandatory to use at least one of these words in front of any noun.
“Increasing” is among the most useful adjectives in NHS. Describing all problems as “increasing” helps to explain why they continue to get away from us despite the steps we have taken to formulate a vision and strategy for aiming to solve them.

Putting it all together
Once you have grasped the different parts of speech, you will soon be ready to try out your new skills. Here are two superb examples of written NHS, taken from a report published this week by the Local Government Association* and Public Health England. Don’t be disheartened if your first attempts are not up to this standard.
“A history of joint working has ensured that health issues are built into planning policies. Healthy urban planning is now high on the council’s priority agenda and a toolkit is being developed to embed health issues further into planning.”
“A number of partnerships and a strategy involving a parallel inter-linked range of initiatives have been set up to tackle the increasing problem of alcohol misuse in the city. Pioneering use has been made of the council’s traditional functions in the service of health. Involving the public and service users has been a key component.”
Note how the sheer density of each sentence creates a sense of meaning without allowing any actual meaning to escape. This is the effect you should aim for in your own written and verbal communications.
All of which leads us to the first rule of NHS, known as the gas and air principle: the purpose of words is not to bring ideas to life but to render them unconscious as swiftly and safely as possible.
(*Not an NHS organisation, but an accomplished NHS speaker in its own right.)

Oh dear! If it wasn’t quite so true it would indeed be amusing.

uncategorized

Oddity of the Week: Larks & Owls

Seriously, though, people vary in the times they like to sleep and wake—this has been the case throughout history. What’s new, however, is the recent discovery that the tendency toward being a lark or an owl is genetically determined in a similar way to the tendency to have blue or green eyes. The gene that governs sleep/wake predisposition is called Period, or PER for short. Like the gene for eye color, it comes in two different types (let’s call them PERI, which causes people to have larkish tendencies, and PERo, which causes them to have owlish tendencies). You probably know that we have two copies of all our genes, which means we have two copies of PER as well. The trick, however, is that these copies don’t have to be the same: If you have two copies of PERI, you’ll be a lark. If you have two copies of PERo, you’ll be an owl. But if you have one copy of each (which is what 50 percent of the population has), you’ll be somewhere in between. This works for eye color too, by the way: If you have two copies of EYE-COLORg, you’ll have green eyes. Two copies of EYE-COLORb you’ll have blue eyes, and a copy of each you’ll have brown eyes.
From Penelope A Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep (2013)

current affairs, medical

Transforming the NHS

1 Comment

As regular readers will know, transforming the NHS so that it can provide excellent healthcare to people in the UK at an affordable cost is something which has exercised my mind for a long time (see, for example, here and here). And I am involved, at a local level, in trying to help unlock this.
Now don’t get me wrong. Many parts of the NHS are excellent. In an emergency they generally work brilliantly, at least in the short-term. And many of the doctors and nurses care deeply about looking after the patients.


However whenever I walk into any NHS hospital, clinic or office** there are several things which immediately strike me:

  • the obscene level of waste
  • the absence of appearing professional
  • the number of staff who seem to spend their lives wandering around doing little or nothing
  • the appalling environment
  • the apparent lack of both money and the will to put any of this right.

And that is despite the fact that the NHS should already have shed-loads of money to do everything we would want it to do if it used it wisely.
The other day I had to visit a local private hospital, and the contrast with the NHS was almost as stark as it has always been. No, it wasn’t perfect. For a start it was far too hot, but it was clean and looked professionally welcoming. Yes, there were plenty of staff around, and they all appeared to be doing something with a purpose. You had a degree of confidence that everyone knew what they were doing and why and that they cared about their patients.
This is more what the NHS should be like. But how to get there?
I keep thinking about this and here’s my three step plan for the paradigm shift which the NHS requires, from top to bottom.
Step 1. Get someone at the top who can successfully run a large, quality, profitable corporation and who is able and willing to tell the politicians to butt out and stay out. Someone like Richard Branson, or perhaps Alan Sugar (no, I don’t care that you dislike them; they’re good at what they do). Someone who will have a vision of how the organisation should be and will implement it regardless of push-back from any level — if you aren’t going to do the job, get out.
Step 2. Tackle the appalling level of waste. This includes finding efficiencies — improved ways of doing things — at all levels. And that means everything from reducing bloated layers of managers and administrators, through cupboards full of medical supplies which have to be thrown out because they go out of date while other departments can’t order the very same thing, to turning down the heating.
Yes, really! Turn the heating down! NHS hospitals, clinics and offices are always far too hot; when people who are usually cold tell me it’s too hot then you really are wasting money! Just this one thing could save the NHS millions.
And while you’re saving money, fix the buildings: even if you can’t build new hospitals (because of time, money or space) you can at least make the ones you have into a habitable environment. Fix the leaks etc. Stop the draughts. Buy some paint. Because they will save you even more money in the long run.
Do those two things and you will start to see a culture change. But to complete the paradigm shift you need to do something just as fundamental the the outlook and attitude of all the staff — from the most world renowned consultant surgeon to the lowest lavatory cleaner. So that means …
Step 3. Everyone needs to take on board four basic beliefs and habits:

  1. Cherish the patients. They are why you are doing what you do. They’re not just important they are your whole raison d’être. They deserve the best.
  2. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, whether they’re a consultant, GP, patient, nurse, administrator or ancillary worker. Think what effect things will have on them. And then treat them as you would like to be treated.
  3. Work as a single team. Everyone is equal but everyone has different skills. It doesn’t matter if you’re a patient, the most renowned surgeon or the ward cleaner, everyone has an important role which has to be valued as important to the patient’s recovery. (And part of that means valuing people and paying them decently.)
  4. Be empowered. If it is right and needs doing, do it. This has to come from the top by giving everyone freedom (not bullying), and it has to come from the bottom with people grasping that freedom. Unless there is an over-riding reason not to do something, just do it.

No, I don’t pretend it will be easy. That’s why you need the right person, with the right attitude, at the top. Without that one person it will never work because the politicians will keep meddling and the all the vested interests will see the top as weak and keep playing their own games. And then the patient (remember him/her?) is forgotten.
Yes, initially there will be a lot of scepticism and probably a morale hit. But as time goes on, as it begins to work and people start to buy-in, morale will increase and you’ll win lots of crusaders.
But it will take time. I went through this in a multi-national corporation in the 1990s and it took the best part of a decade, lots of head-banging, a lot of people being retrained and several rounds of redundancies for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust. So I’ve seen it done; I was looking up from the bottom wondering WTF was happening; after a couple of years the penny dropped and I too changed. I know it can be done.
So David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, do you have the balls to do this?
I’m not holding my breath.
____________________
** This also applies to some GP surgeries although most are better as they are small stand-alone businesses which have to keep afloat.