Talking-up Scotland

Along with two other European scientists, Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank, Scottish molecular biologist Richard Henderson has won the Nobel prize in chemistry.

Together they developed new ways of visualizing molecules. Here’s an extract from the Insider magazine report explaining their achievement:

‘Their technique, called cryo-electron microscopy, allows scientists to freeze biomolecules in action and “visualise processes they have never previously seen”, according to the Nobel statement. It means that molecules including bacteria and viruses can be examined in their native, undamaged state. Before the breakthrough, electron microscopes were only suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroyed biological material.’

http://www.insider.co.uk/news/scottish-molecular-biologist-richard-henderson-11286709

This is another impressive example of the recent achievements by scientists and researchers from Scotland’s universities. See:

Scottish scientists part of breakthrough in cystic fibrosis research

Scottish university research to help developing nations remove arsenic from water supplies

University of Dundee awarded £7 million to work in partnership with India to fight diabetes

Scottish Veterinary researchers working to improve the health and productivity of farmed animals in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scottish Association for Marine Science to lead seaweed research to benefit developing nations

Scottish Researchers again!

Punching above our weight?

(c) dfa.ie

Hot on the heels of the announcement that the Scottish Government is to attempt to forge stronger economic, cultural and social links with the Scandinavian and Baltic countries comes the announcement that the First Minister is to visit Dublin again to meet with the Taoiseach and will deliver the keynote speech at the Dublin Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner. Prior to the visit she said:

‘The ties between Scotland and Ireland are more important than ever and this visit is an opportunity to build on the longstanding cultural, economic, and political links that exist between our countries. Ireland is a valued trade partner for Scotland and our sixth biggest export market with more than 100 Irish companies currently investing in Scotland. We see unlimited potential for future development and that is why we established an investment and innovation hub in Dublin last year. I look forward to meeting the Taoiseach to discuss these shared values and interests and further developing business links between our two countries.’

Scotland had £920 million of exports to Ireland in 2014, up 12% on 2013, as against £270 million of imports from Ireland making this valuable for our already quite healthy trade balance.

Once more, we see evidence of a government getting with its job of protecting Scotland’s economic interests as we face the uncertainties of Brexit. Meanwhile the alleged alternative First Minister, even Prime Minister, Ruth Davidson, is off making a right fool of herself at the Conservative Conference. English Tories are laughing up their sleeves at her attention-seeking antics.

Scotland’s Nordic-Baltic Co-operation

http://www.scotsman.com/business/scotland-and-ireland-business-links-growing-in-strength-1-4073307

https://news.gov.scot/news/strengthening-links-with-ireland

After a poor year in 2016, Scotland’s cereal harvest is expected to increase by 12% contributing to our disproportionate production of food and drink within the UK. Did Ruth Davidson have something to do with it as she mocked her leader? I’ve mentioned this more times than, maybe, I should:

With only 8% of the population, Scotland accounts for more than 28% of UK food and drink exports. Too wee to survive on our own?

From the National Statistics for Scotland, we hear:

‘Despite less favourable conditions in September, Scottish farms are estimated to produce 3.1 million tonnes of cereals this year, including 1.9 million tonnes of barley and one million tonnes of wheat. The total is eight per cent up on the ten-year average….Overall yields are expected to average at a record high of 7.1 tonnes per hectare; ranging from 6.2 tonnes per hectare for spring barley to 9.0 for wheat. The yield however is expected to be the highest recorded, at about 6.2 tonnes per hectare. Winter barley likewise saw a 13 per cent increase to 371,000 tonnes, with wheat increasing seven per cent to 988,000 tonnes. Oats saw a third consecutive increase, with record yields for the second year, and the crop expected to top 215,000 tonnes for the first time since the 1970s.’

www.gov.scot/stats/bulletins/01293

In sharp contrast the overall UK picture is bleak. According to Farming Insight, on wheat:

‘Wheat prices have dropped back as the UK harvest ground to a halt following widespread showers.’

https://www.fginsight.com/news/news/harvest-2017-wheat-prices-drop-back-as-harvest-falters-23709

I have to say I’m puzzled as to how ‘widespread showers’ in England caused the wheat harvest to grind to a halt yet ‘less favourable conditions in September’ in Scotland’ still resulted in a 7% increase in the same crop. Can any weather obsessives out there enlighten me?

There is a huge and growing demand for Scottish students graduating with an MSc in Data Science funded by Scottish company Data Lab who work in collaboration with universities who can award the qualification. Three-month industrial placements are a key element of the programme. Here’s how they describe themselves:

‘The Data Lab enables industry, public sector and world-class university researchers to innovate and develop new data science capabilities in a collaborative environment. Its core mission is to generate significant economic, social and scientific value from big data.  With a Scotland-wide presence and Hubs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, it is in close proximity to leading industry and university institutions with world-class research in informatics and computer science.’

So far graduates of the programme have found quality employment with Virgin Money, Royal London, Aquila Merkle, Aggreko, NHS, NSS, Glasgow City Council and North Ayrshire Council. Some have started their own companies.

The total number of students being trained at eleven Scottish universities has gone up this year from 90 to 130 as the value of work in data, for Scotland, is estimated by Data Lab at £20 billion.

The Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science said:

‘Data science is an area of rapid growth around the world and we want Scotland to lead the way in meeting the demand from business for data skills talent. It is encouraging to learn there is a strong uptake among graduates for Masters courses in data science and I very much welcome this news that for 2017-18, Data Lab has almost doubled the number of places available on its MSc programme to further build on that. Improving skills, enthusiasm and knowledge of STEM subjects such as data science at all levels of school, college and university and encouraging uptake of careers in this sector are vital to both Scotland’s society and our economic prosperity – this will be the central aim of our ambitious STEM strategy for education and training.’

This is one of several initiatives making Scotland a leader in aspects of new information and communication technologies and reported here. See, for example:

Glasgow University aims to be UK’s second ‘5G technology demonstrator’

Scotland at forefront of another new technology: Blockchain. Get your ‘high Byzantine fault tolerance.’ here

SNP help further impressive growth in new technology sector as: ‘Number of Scottish games firms grows 600% in five years’

‘University of Dundee is UK’s highest ranked institution for influencing innovation’

Can Edinburgh’s high-tech expertise steal some of London’s financial business post-Brexit?

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/10/02/scotlands-pipeline-data-science-talent-boosted/

 

(c) mullofkintyrecheddar.com (c)marketplace.secondlife.com

It seems we cannot campaign online to have Neil Oliver removed from his new post as president of the National Trust. The campaigning website 38 Degrees, whose petitions I have often signed, said:

‘We removed the petition from the 38 Degrees website as it calls for an individual to lose their job. Neil Oliver was appointed by members of the National Trust, not members of the public. Therefore, the petition breaks our Terms and Conditions.’

The National correctly described this as a ‘fudge’ because the petition to remove the Queen is still up there and it has allowed several other petitions calling for public figures to be removed from positions, including BBC’s Scots political editor Laura Kuenssberg and the former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

You’ll remember Oliver once described IndyRef2 as a ‘cancerous presence’ and is a vociferous opponent of Scottish independence. Kinder voices have described him as ‘divisive’ but he has compared Scotland’s pre-eminent historian, Professor Tom Devine, to a character in the muppets merely because he justifiably questioned Oliver’s academic credentials to present a history series.

I don’t really care I if he is president of the National Trust. I’ve got no time for the organisation in the first place. It largely preserves symbols of Britain’s disgustingly brutal and unequal past and in so doing helps to glamorise and thus justify greed, inequality, opulence and bad taste in the present.

I don’t visit stately homes. I don’t visit castles. I’d knock them down or at least let them crumble naturally and build children’s play-parks or memorial gardens where they stood. In maintaining them and facilitating working people to visit them we’re helping to celebrate historical suffering, brutal poverty and state violence. The stately homes were built often with money from the slave trade and by workers who lived in hovels, whose children died more often in infancy than they lived on to adulthood and who survived on near-starvation diets at times of the year. Often villages of the poor were cleared to avoid spoiling the views from these nauseating symbols of greed. As for the castles, they were, like Fort Apache, placed to keep down the natives. In this case, our Scots, Irish and Welsh ancestors. These were places of lifelong confinement without trial and of horrific torture. The Norman castles in Wales are brutal ugly monsters on the landscape. Fort Augustus and Fort George and the others are reminders of our subjugation and of ethnic cleansing. Nobody thinks its a good idea to preserve and celebrate the buildings associated with Nazism so why preserve these?

If you’ve got a National Trust subscription, cancel it and tell them why.

Me, divisive?

Neutrophils with segmented nuclei surrounded by erythrocytes and platelets. Intra-cellular granules are visible in the cytoplasm (Giemsa stained).

(c) wikipedia.org

Scientists from Edinburgh University working with researchers in the USA and Ireland have made a discovery which could lead to new treatments for cystic fibrosis. They’ve found that immune cells called neutrophils, which normally defend against infection, can sometimes cause damage to the lungs. They are working on drugs that will attack these cells and slow or stop the progression of the disease.

I’ve reported before on other cases of Scottish researchers make an international contribution so it’s good to see another like this. Here are the links to some earlier examples which confirm the high value of our University system and its reputation abroad:

Scottish university research to help developing nations remove arsenic from water supplies

University of Dundee awarded £7 million to work in partnership with India to fight diabetes

Scottish Veterinary researchers working to improve the health and productivity of farmed animals in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scottish Association for Marine Science to lead seaweed research to benefit developing nations

Scottish Researchers again!

Scotland (Edinburgh), Singapore (1) and Switzerland (2) are the only small countries to have universities in the world’s top twenty-rated institutions. Bear in mind how affluent Singapore and Switzerland are. All of the others are in the USA, England and France. Research output is the main criterion.

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2016

(c) wildernessscotland.com

The Office for National Statistics (September 2017) has average UK happiness up from74.8% to 75.1% and according to the Torygraph, they say this is a significant increase. The Torygraph were keen to associate this with Brexit. Certainly, if you look at the map below, several parts of England and Shetland were up 6%. Meanwhile as many others were down 6%. As you might expect us uncomplaining, stable Scots were by contrast mostly only up or down by only 2% except for the Western Isles. The latter seems to contradict a recent survey suggesting they were amongst the best places to live in the UK.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3428730/Western-Isles-happiest-place-live-UK-Liverpool-saddest.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/26/uk-has-got-happier-since-brexit-vote-does-area-rank/

However, The Bank of Scotland’s Annual Happiness Index (October 2017), according to the Scotsman has Scots happiness ‘soaring’ by 8% on average and suggests, for example:

‘Overall, this year’s findings show that people north of the Border are 12 per cent happier than when the survey began in 2015. Those in the Central Scotland area are almost 50 per cent more happy than they were last year.’

50% happier? Whit? Hard to believe there’s not something wrong in the survey methodology. Or have the local authorities been doping the water supply?

The report carried out online by YouGov concludes:

‘Overall, happiness in Scotland has never been higher, with the index showing growth every year since 2015, and increasing by 8 per cent in the last year alone.’

Returning to the ONS increase of 0.7% and comparing it with the YouGov increase of 8%, they seem quite different to me. No doubt the statisticians will tell us it’s complicated.

Either way it correlates with years of SNP government, bus passes and baby boxes, so that must be it.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/odd/scots-happiness-levels-continue-to-soar-1-4575355

Footnote: The Hootsman doesn’t actually credit the SNP but the government of the day gets the blame or the credit for anything usually on their pages.

Footnote 2: in 2014, Wilderness Scotland claimed walking was making us happier but I doubt we’re all walking more.

(c) wikipedia.org

5G is a bit complex for me, so, here’s an excerpt from the Future Scot report yesterday:

‘5G is expected to deliver reliable, ultra-fast mobile connectivity with the ability to process huge amounts of data and support complex applications, such as communication between autonomous vehicles, 3D virtual reality on phones, robotics, and remote surgery. “These applications require ultra-low latency to work,” said Muhammad Imran, professor of communications systems in the university’s School of Engineering, “reducing as far as possible the time it takes for a packet of data to travel between devices. But they will also raise our aspirations about the technology’s  possibilities,  such as in the ‘Internet of Skills’. For example, a surgeon operating remotely would receive haptic tactile [see below] feedback – the sensation of vibration, pressure, touch and texture – in real-time.’

It’s estimated that 5G technology could be worth £173 billion for the UK economy by 2030.

The 5G lab will be part of the University’s planned £1 billion campus extension

http://futurescot.com/glasgow-set-techs-living-lab-part-1bn-university-campus-expansion/

Explanation of haptic tactile:

Tactile Feedback is a type of Haptic Feedback. Haptic feedback is generally divided into two different classes: Tacticle and Kinesthetic. The difference between the two is quite complex, but at a high level:

Kinesthetic: The things you feel from sensors in your muscles, joints, tendons. Weight, stretch, joint angles of your arm, hand, wrist, fingers, etc. Imagine holding a coffee-mug  in your hand. Kinesthetic feedback tells your brain the approximate size of the mug, it’s weight, and how you are holding it relative to your body.

Tactile: The things you feel in your ‘fingers’ etc., or on the surface. The tissue (for example in your fingers), has a number of different sensors embedded in the skin and right underneath it. They allow your brain to feel things such as vibration, pressure, touch, texture etc.

Haptic Feedback is a combination of both Tactile and Kinesthetic Feedback.

https://www.quora.com/Robotics-What-is-the-difference-between-tactile-feedback-and-haptic-feedback

In an assessment by Catalyst Europe, a group which campaigns for gender equality in the workplace, Scotland received high praise.

According to an STV report:

‘In 2015, for the first time, Scottish ministers appointed more women than men to regulated public boards in Scotland, helping to bring the overall percentage of women to an historic high of 42% in December 2015. The proportion of female applicants and appointments continued to increase: in 2016, with 43% of applicants for posts 59% of those appointed being female – an increase of 12 and 20 percentage points respectively from 2012, and a jump of 5% in female appointees in a single year.’

MSPs in Scotland are currently considering a bill to set a 50/50 target for representation on boards by 2022, including university boards, enterprise agencies and those for health and police services.

The director of Catalyst Europe said:

‘I’m very impressed so far with Scotland, but I would have to look and see how many women are in power across corporations, not only in government but corporations. You are poised to be a leader in this region, very much, but let’s see it trickle down into corporations.’

https://stv.tv/news/scotland/1398900-scotland-poised-to-be-leader-in-work-gender-equality/

In my ongoing theme of identifying ways in which the Scots are different enough from the English to justify being an independent self-governing country, I’ve touched on a number of themes including our preference for more inclusive, communitarian, caring, social policies and generally more left-wing politics. See, for example:

1. Free bus pass for the over 60s
2. Free care for the elderly
3. Superior NHS
4. Free HE tuition
5. More GPs per head of population
6. Compensation for the bedroom tax
7. Stronger fire and flood safety regulations
8. Giving all new mothers a baby box of essentials
9. Less child poverty
10. Lower stillbirths and early deaths
11. Better police/Muslim community relations
12. No junior doctor strikes
13. Highest organ donor rate in UK
14. 26% of Syrian refugees taken in by only 8% of UK population
15. First to end period poverty
16. Tories who support the winter heating allowance!

Don’t these add up to evidence of the dominance of a more caring communitarian set of values even in our Tories? If you need the evidence for the above, search my site. It’s all there.

In a recent YouGov poll ‘What do Brits think of the social classes?’ a look at the regional breakdown is illuminating. While the Scots subset respond in quite similar ways to the regions of England and Wales with regard to perceptions of the working and the middle-classes, their views on the upper class are significantly more negative.

In response to the statement ‘Contributes the least to society’, 60% of the Scots respondents choose the upper class with the North closest at 50% and the South at only 42%.

Perhaps most striking, in response to the statement ‘Are the least moral’, 56% of the Scots respondents choose the upper class with the North closest at 47% and the South at only 42% again. That’s quite a strong, condemnatory, statement for so many to go along with and so indicative of a quite deeply-held view.

These are quite large gaps and suggest further evidence of a difference that makes a difference between most Scots and many of those living in, especially Southern England. I’m reminded of my recent piece based on a survey suggesting Scots business people were actually more principled than might have been thought. Listening to Ruth Davidson recently, you might even argue our Tories are less right-wing and more communitarian than many English Tories.

Other sources:

90% of Scottish business people seem to have enlightened values. Another wee difference that would justify being a different country? Don’t we have Phillip Green types north of the border?

Who said Scots were not more left-wing than those in the rest of the UK?

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/gsezxm0ssr/InternalResults_170908_SocialClass_W.pdf