Engineering contributes a third to our overseas revenues

The message on Labour's serial failures is starting to get through to trade journals, as the editorial (extract below) by Les Hunt for DPA magazine shows. Remember these are the hard headed people who only pay attention to measurable reality and bottom lines, and are immune to Labour spin and announcements.

In my view its particularly significant that Gordon Brown's relationship with his "Banker friends" is so clearly identified. We have enslaved ourselves in debt to save the bankers, but the engineers offer a large contribution to our economy. How do we get repaid - with a dumbed down and disastrous education system ( see GCSE Physics and weep ), no credit to small companies (despite the announcements ), and large helpings of bullshit about the green economy whilst not even taking the measures to keep the lights on over the next few years.

The political class in general needs to wake up to reality, as dealt with on a 24hr basis by UK Advanced Engineering plc.

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

12 March 2009

Engineering – to be more precise, advanced engineering - was in the news last week as trade & investment minister, Lord Davies of Abersoch reminded us that our advanced engineering exports accounted for a whopping third of the UK’s total annual overseas revenues – some one hundred and nine billion pounds, in fact, according to 2007 figures.

Speaking to an invited audience gathered at the great hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, the recently ennobled Lord Davies (a labour peer and a member of Gordon Brown’s coterie of ex-banker friends) was launching yet another government initiative to promote British engineering prowess overseas.

So, was this yet another plate of sops proffered to our floundering engineering sector and a lot of expenses-paid trips for company executives to exotic climes (apparently including Brazil, Russia, India and China, this time around)? It is clearly important that we undertake these trade missions and one hopes for positive outcomes, but it is difficult not to be cynical about their promotion, particularly at a time when manufacturing infrastructure remains in such a precarious state back home.

Lord Davies mentioned companies like Rolls-Royce and Jaguar Land Rover as leading the drive overseas. He also said that many companies in the UK sector are small and medium sized businesses that form a vital part of the global supply chains for firms such as Boeing and Airbus. Quite so, but aren’t these businesses also currently those that are now crying out for help, simply to keep afloat?

Perhaps Lord Davies would be better off going back to his masters to persuade them that charity, first of all, begins at home, and that unless the government is minded to put some fiscal measures into effect now to shore up the Jaguar Landrovers of this world, not to mention their many suppliers, that is the erstwhile viable, hi-tech companies that have simply become victims of circumstance, then we’ll have little advanced engineering to peddle at home, let alone overseas.....

Les Hunt [ The rest is avialble at DPA Magazine "Buddy can you spae a dime" here ]

An engineering puzzle

Lost a lot of working time over the last two days involved in depressing but confidential duties that I'm not allowed to explain. ( That what comes of volunteering for anything ). No time for the usual blast at the evil of socialism today - unless they do something really stupid before 5pm. Instead let me leave you with an Engineering question a friend sent yesterday. If your not an Engineer have a brief think about it then skip to the answer - that what the rest of us have done straight away ;-).


ENGINEERING PHYSICS CALCULATION ( As not appearing in Ed Ball's Mc'A'Levels )

Problem: A backhoe (American for mechanical digger I suspect) weighing 18 tons is on top of a flatbed trailer heading east on Interstate 70 near Hays, Kansas. The boom and dipper stick is made of 80,000 psi high strength steel and the approaching overpass is made of 4,000 psi concrete, reinforced with 2 layers of 1 inch steel rebar spaced 6 inches each way in both the road deck and bottom of the box-beam bridge section.
Solve: When the boom and dipper hits the overpass, how fast does the trailer with the backhoe have to be going to slice the bridge in half? (Assume no headwind and no braking by the driver who is oblivious of the situation . . . )
Extra Credit: Solve for the time and distance required for the entire rig to come to a complete stop after hitting the overpass at the speed calculated above .

Answer here.

Large cuts in science and engineering research in Britain made by NuLabour.

Just wondering over at my old haunt at Slashdot when I came across this headline "British Government Slashes Scientific Research" .

Hold on a minute I thought - why didn't we hear about that ? No clues over at the dumbed down BBC Science news site - ( yet more surveys of Antarctica and the MOD employing psychics make the headlines there ). A search of the BBC news site revealed nothing - choosing their web option you get this search ...

Which suggests no one else was much interested either. The cuts - as reported on the Research Councils Web site are:

Arts and Humanities Research Council: £5.3 million
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council £6.7 million
Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils £0.5 million
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council £29.0 million
Economic and Social Research Council £3.0 million
Medical Research Council £10.7 million
Natural Environment Research Council £9.7 million
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council £3.1 million

To my mind the £29.0 million from EPSRC stands out most starkly. Remeber British workers could be about to loose their jobs as we have fallen behind in some areas of materials science ( wait for the EADS Airbus announcment in a few days).

EPSRC are saying:
EPSRC is now assessing the impact that this announcement will have on funding of research and postgraduate training in the engineering and physical sciences in the UK. The forthcoming Council meeting in March will consider options to find the necessary savings and remain within its financial allocation.

Think on this next time you see one of the arts graduates who make up our government going on about high tech jobs and how Britain has to compete against India and China in the future.

It is also a sign of the growing fiscal panic in government at the moment.

Now in fairness I have some strong doubts about how useful much government funded research is - and I have a PhD in Engineering so have some idea of what I'm talking about. But my points are:

1) No mention, that I could find, on the BBC - why ?
2) How does this fit with the public pronouncements of government ?
3) The money is being saved to fund the DTI - why ?

Michael Kenward writes for Science Business a good article here .. extracts below..

Exit stage left Lord Sainsbury, Minister for Science, enter stage right mandarins bearing hatchets. They then wield these to take lumps out of the budget of the Research Councils (RCs).

....

Not being an expert in bean counting, we can't be sure that we've divined the entrails accurately, but following a link from the Treasury web site we reach a PDF file of Spring Supplementary Estimates 2006-2007 Section 2, Department for Trade and Industry. Within this we see that £27 million went from the science budget for the "Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive". Nice irony there. The number is just £2 million shy of the amount taken from the EPSRC, the research council that supports research into electronics and electrical equipment.

Update: [Hat tip to komadori - see comments] The BBC has an article on this from 22nd Feb and it blames the Rover bail out at the DTI. The irony here is that Rover was doomed anyway - but to bribe reassure the electorate just before a general election the government was happy to spend millions of tax payers money. Now they won't get the science and engineering base they were told about at that election.