Broadband and WIFI Speeds

According to OFCOM the average broadband speed in UK households is rising steadily. In 2008 it was 3.6 Mbit per second but by 2013 it had risen to 14.7 Mbit per second:

Source: OFCOM Figures

Those are quite old figures now. BT Infinity are currently offering up to 76 Mbit/s and Virgin Media are currently offering 152 Mbit/s - that's over 42 times the average speed in 2008!

Meanwhile, once your internet connection has made it through your door, you're typically going to want to beam it around your house to your various gadgets, and that's where WIFI speeds come in. 

Since the first WIFI standards were agreed in 1997 maximum speeds risen from a frankly useless 2 Mbit/s to the whopping 6,912 Mbit/s (or 6.75 Gbit/s) offered by Samsung's latest 8.02.11ad standard:

Source: Wikipedia

At that speed you can wing videos and files around your house 45 times faster than you can get them through your front door!

Winter Deaths are a Fifth of 1950 / 1951 Levels

The BBC News website is reporting that the winter of 2012 / 2013 resulted in the least number of cold weather related deaths since records began. Such deaths are typically due to heart disease, stroke and respiratory illness affecting the elderly during the cold winter months.

A quick analysis of the ONS Statistics behind this shows that today's winter mortality rates are less than a fifth of the 1950 / 1951 winter rates, mainly due to better home insulation:

Source: ONS Figures

Benefit Fraud, Immigration and Europe are Not Bankrupting Britain - Not Even Close

An excellent info-graphic on government spending in The Guardian website from 2010 / 2011 (so from before the government austerity cuts kicked in) shows the breakdown of spending by department, and then broken down further by what each department was spending on. Yes, I know it's The Guardian, but these are UK Government's own Institute for Fiscal Studies figures.

We have stories about dole scroungers, people unjustly claiming disability allowances and immigrants constantly rammed down our throats by the red-top tabloids, and the 'respectable' media seems blindly to follow whatever moral panic they create.

So, it's worth delving a bit into some context on exactly how big a deal spending on these items actually is to see if it really is a problem worth devoting so many rabid column inches to or not.

Source: The Guardian

You have to click on the link to the original info-graphic to explore it properly, but let's do a bit of digging by theme, taking each one as a proportion of that total £669.26bn spend:

• "Dole Scrounging is Bankrupting Britain"Job Seekers allowance (£4.5bn) and Income Support (7.8bn) made a total of £12.3bn which is just 1.8% of the total spend. Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% of this was claimed illegally, that would be 0.18% of government expenditure. And that's from before the cutbacks kicked in!
• "Malingerers 'On The Sick' are Costing Taxpayers Dearly"
  Disability Living Allowance (£17.2bn) and Incapacity benefit (£7.8bn) made a total of £25bn which is just 3.7% of the total spend. Again, if we say for the sake of argument that 10% of this was claimed unscrupulously then that would be 0.37% of total spend. And that's from before the DWP's Fit For Work assessments kicked in and forced a load of people back into the job market.
• "Immigrants on Housing Benefit are Bleeding us Dry"
  Housing benefit cost us £21.6bn which is 3.2% of total expenditure. Assuming 10% of that was claimed by Johnny Foreigner and their brand new flat screen TVs then that would be 0.32% of total government expenditure.

If we add all those speculative 10%'s together, then these much hyped scandals that are supposedly bleeding us dry cost us 0.88% of our total spend at just under £5.9bn. And bear in mind those 10% figures are totally speculative, nobody's suggesting anything like that is really claimed fraudulently.

On the subject of Europe, which is very much in the news thanks to UKIP:

• "The European Commission are Milking us for Every Penny"
  Nice try Mr Farage, but payments to the EC came in at £1.3bn which is 0.19% of our total expenditure. We spend almost as much on the World Bank at £926.7m (0.14%) but oddly that never makes the headlines. Incidentally, the spending on our MEPs in the £570m Cabinet Office budget is so small it wont even display in the info-graphic.

So where is the money going? Well £69.8bn (approx 10%) goes on our pensions, £58.3bn (approx 9%) goes on education, £105.6bn (approx 16%) goes on healthcare, £39.5bn (approx 6%) on defence and so on.

To give it some further perspective, we spent more on the Welsh Government than we did on 'dole'. And we spent more on giving ourselves tax credits than we did on disability and incapacity benefits, but you don't hear anybody calling for cutbacks there do you? Strange that....

Vinyl Sales Highest Since Mid-Ninties

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) have released sales figures for vinyl records which show that sales are at their highest in 2014 since 1995:

Once written off as an archaic medium in a digital era, vinyl has staged somewhat of a comeback in the last four years. 

A brief scan of the vinyl charts reveals the upsurge is thanks to some familiarly old-school names, such as Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Oasis and the Stone Roses:

Official Vinyl Albums Chart – year-to-date top 10 artist albums (up to & incl. w/e 22 November 2014):

Position	Title	Artist
1	AM	ARCTIC MONKEYS
2	LAZARETTO	JACK WHITE
3	THE ENDLESS RIVER	PINK FLOYD
4	ROYAL BLOOD	ROYAL BLOOD
5	DEFINITELY MAYBE	OASIS
6	THE STONE ROSES	STONE ROSES
7	THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON	PINK FLOYD
8	LED ZEPPELIN	LED ZEPPELIN
9	LED ZEPPELIN 3	LED ZEPPELIN
10	LED ZEPPELIN 2	LED ZEPPELIN

Source: BPI

Air Pollution Peaked Around 2003 and is Starting to Reduce

DEFRA released a report in April 2014 called Air Quality Statistics In The UK, 1987 to 2013 measuring air pollution since 1987 to the present day.

It's a mixed bag of results, but in general air pollution in the form of particulates (PM10) and Ozone peaked around 2003 and is slowly being reduced. The main exception being urban ozone levels, which have continued to rise:

If we measure that in terms of the number of days per year when air pollution is 'moderate' or 'high' then we can see a steep decline since 2003 to levels below where we were in 1987, despite there being many more cars on the road than there was back then:

Particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide are down hugely since 1992:

One of the reasons for this is that cars are vastly cleaner than they used to be. The amount of CO2 released by cars has reduced by 15.1% since the year 2000, despite the overall number of cars increasing:

Source: Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

The following graph from the Department for Transport (DfT) shows how CO2 emissions from all cars in use have declined relative to the total number of miles being driven by Britain's cars. Driving style, vehicle maintenance and road conditions also strongly influence total emissions:

Source: Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

Another view of this is from DfT figures released in December 2013 which show that the average CO2 emissions of a newly registered car has reduced from 177.8 g/km to 128.4 g/km:

Source: DfT Statistics

Urban Rivers Cleanest for 20 Years

As a result of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, urban rivers in the UK often contained completely unregulated discharges from metal working, chemical factories, household sewerage, mining, dye works, textiles, potteries and polluted rain water run-off.

As detailed in the following Environmental History website, in the first half of the 18th century, London, the largest city in Europe apart from Paris, which had one million inhabitants by 1850, experienced a series of recurring epidemics of cholera and typhoid. London experienced terrible Cholera outbreaks as a result, caused by increasing amounts of sewage dumped into the Thames.

The tide started to be turned, so to speak, by public drainage works like the Thames Embankment in response to the Great Stink of the summer of 1858. But urban rivers remained horribly polluted well into living memory, with industrial effluent often being pumped into rivers largely unchecked as recently as the 1950's.

Various acts of parliament were passed to tackle the issue, such as the Control of Pollution Act (COPA) 1974, the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Water Resources Act 1991 and the Environment Act 1995 and things gradually began to improve.

Source: BBC News

But the good news is that things are continuing to improve. According to a study by Cardiff University's School of Bio-Sciences, reported on the BBC News site in June 2014, urban rivers are the cleanest they have been for 20 years.

According to DEFRA stats from 2010 UK rivers are increasingly clean of chemical and biological pollutants, showing improvements even from as recently as 1990:

Source: DEFRA River Quality Indicators

These days, there are many encouraging indicators from the return of salmon spawning to industrial rivers, the return of otters to every county in England, and the increasing popularity of wild swimming.

Source: The Guardian

The ICT Development Index

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) ran a report in November 2014 on the global state of information and communications technology (ICT) called the Measuring the Information Society Report 2014.

Whilst it's hardly on a par with things like access to clean water, nutrition, education and sanitation etc. it's easy to forget from a Western perspective just how revolutionary and democratising communications technologies are. So it's pleasing to see that measures like internet bandwidth are increasing across both the developed and developing world:

Likewise, the number of households with internet access is increasing across all regions, with 31.2% of even developing world households now having internet access:

The global nature of the internet can be seen here in a measure of the growth of Wikipedia articles in English and non-English languages, showing how other languages dominate the number of articles on the site:

From a UK perspective, the UK has also happily jumped from 7th to 5th place globally in the ITU's ICT Development Index (IDI), above countries like the US, France, Germany and Australia, based on things like ICT access, ICT usage and ICT skills:

The Rise of the Co-Operative

Co-operative businesses are owned and run by and for their members, whether they are customers, employees or residents. Whereas normal businesses work towards giving a return on investment to shareholders, necessitating taking a slice of value from their own customers and employees, a co-operative business works in a more equitable way.

In a world where corporations are increasingly seen as money-grabbing, cost-cutting and even downright dishonest, an organisation built for mutual benefit seems like an attractive proposition. Some famous examples include John Lewis, the Co-Operative Bank and The New Internationalist, but there are co-ops in every sector of the UK economy.

The co-op trade association Co-Operatives UK shows that the co-op sector has continued to grow throughout the recent economic woes:

Source www.uk.coop

And the number of co-operatives registered continued to grow during the downturn:

Source www.uk.coop

Whether or not the rise of co-ops and the democratisation brought by the Internet really brings about the death of the traditional capitalist corporation, as was postulated in the Guardian by political and economic advisor to the EU Jeremy Rifkin remains to be seen, but it's interesting times for equitably organised co-operative model business.

Amazing Photo of Jupiter's Moon Europa

Jupiter is 390 million miles (630 million kilometres) from Earth, so that makes the following photo of its moon Europa all the more amazing:

Click HERE for an extra large, zoomable version (source The Register)

Its an old picture taken by the Galileo probe, stitched together from separate pictures taken between 1995 and 1998, but it has been enhanced using near-infra-red green and violet filters for the first time.

It's thought that Europa has a 100 km thick watery layer to it, the upper part being a frozen crust, and the lower part is thought to be a liquid ocean. Magnetic detections suggest a salty conductive watery layer, and it appears to be mobile, so it's not frozen to the sea floor. The massive gravitational pull of nearby Jupiter is likely to be causing tidal flexing of the ice and keeping it from freezing solid. It occasionally kicks out 200 km tall plumes of water too.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is a planned European Space Agency mission to fly by Jupiter's icy moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede to probe them further for possible signs of life.

Tobacco Smoking is Becoming Extinguished

If you've ever watched a loved one dying from lung cancer then it's not something you'll be able to forget in a hurry. It may be of some comfort to you to know that the practice of smoking tobacco is fast becoming a thing of the past, though.

According to a report in The Guardian, Tobacco industry figures in the 1940s showed well over half the over-16s in the UK were smokers, with the proportion rising to nearly two-thirds of men. The proportion of women smokers did not peak until the late 1960s. When the ONS started collating figures in 1974, 45% of Britons smoked, 52% of men and 41% of women.

If we take a look at the statistics in a 2014 report by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSIC) published by the ONS then we can see the following trends since 1980.

The first graph shows smoking by age group in 1980 (light blue) versus in 2010 (dark blue) showing that smoking in adults overall has dropped from 40% to 20% during that period.:

The second graph shows the number of smokers dropping from about 35% in 1982 to under 20% by 2010, whilst the number of people who have never smoked rises from just over 40% to about 55%:

The HSIC report sites several possible reasons for this, not least being the increasing unaffordability of tobacco products, but today the BBC News site contained a story showing the number of countries that now enforce the displaying of health warnings on packets of cigarettes:

Plus also the rise of the size and prominence of health warnings on packets of cigarettes from being tiny almost illegible text to full packet sized horror show pictures:

And there's one further piece of encouragement in those HSIC stats, namely that young people in the 16-19 age bracket are in fact now less likely to smoke than all other adults age groups, excepting those over 60 who have perhaps realised that life is very finite and worth keeping hold of and started quitting in their droves:

Design of the Year Awards - Volkswagen's 313 mpg super-efficient car

The Design of the Year Awards winner was Volkswagen's new XL1 super-efficient car which uses just 0.9 litres per 100 km, or 313 mpg, and this high mpg figure correlates to a very low carbon dioxide emissions value of just 21 g/km.

For comparison, a VW Polo 1.2 TDI BlueMotion, which is considered a green super-mini, does a comparatively wasteful 74.3mpg.

The story is somewhat blighted by the fact that the XL1 has been effectively banned from the US because it's too efficient! If that's true, then it's pretty scandalous.

Time Magazine's 25 Best Inventions of 2014

Time Magazine has released its 25 Best Inventions of 2014 list.

Among the entries are:

• The Real-Life Hoverboard
• The Supersmart Spacecraft
• A Reactor that Could Realize Nuclear Fusion
• Wireless Electricity
• 3-D-Printed Everything
• Watches that Redefine Smart
• The Smartphone that Puts Privacy First
• The Cooler that Powers Your Party
• The Chip that Stops Your Slouching
• The Car that Makes Electric Enticing
• The Tablet that Replaces Laptops
• The Ring that Alerts You in Style
• The Pillbox that Gets Personal
• Bananas that Prevent Blindness
• The Wheel that Gives Bikers a Boost
• The Seamless Sign-Language Translator
• The Filter that Fights Ebola
• The Selfie Stick (and Hairbrush)
• The AC that Lowers Your Energy Bills
• The Prison Room that Helps Inmates Relax
• The Tablet Toy that Gets Physical
• The Coaching Basketball
• Wrappers You Can Eat
• Screens that Showcase Digital Art
• Action Figures that Empower Girls

Twenty Years Since the IRA Ceasefire

It's twenty years since the IRA's historic ceasefire. If you think that the threat to life in Britain from terrorism is an issue today, cast your mind back to the dark days of what became euphemistically known as The Troubles.

The Troubles began in the late 1960s and is deemed by many to have ended with the Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement of 1998. Atrocities were committed on all sides, by the Irish republican IRA, the Unionist loyalist paramilitaries and the British forces stationed in the province.

A breakdown on Wikipedia lists an estimated three and a half thousand deaths from The Troubles during this period. Whilst there are sporadic outbreaks of violence today, casualties in these sorts of numbers are thankfully now a thing of the past:

Responsibility for killing
Responsible party	No.
Republican paramilitary groups	2058
Loyalist paramilitary groups	1026
British security forces	363
Persons unknown	79
Irish security forces	5
Total	3531

Source: Wikipedia

A story on the BBC News website shows some harrowing 'before' images of Belfast during the conflict, alongside some mercifully peaceful 'now' images from today's Belfast streets for comparison:

Source: BBC News

Meanwhile, it is now 40 years since the Birmingham Pub Bombings in 1974, in which 21 people were killed an 182 people injured, in what remains the worst ever terrorist attack on English soil. Another BBC News article shows some harrowing images and tells some of the stories of those who survived that night:

Source: BBC News

Whatever threat you believe is posed to us by terrorism today, it pales into insignificance by comparison to the dark days of the 1960's, 70's, 80's. and 90's. If somebody tells you that these are violent times compared to a safe and secure yesteryear, be sure to point this out to them. We're light years away from where we were back then.

Cancer Survival Figures 'Double' Since 1970s

Cancer Research UK announced in 2010 that Survival rates for some cancers have doubled over the past four decades. People with breast, bowel and ovarian cancers, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now twice as likely to survive for at least 10 years than in the 1970s. Cancer Research UK's figures show leukaemia survival is now four times as high, although the charity warned there was still much work to do.

Source: Cancer Research UK 2010

And that improvement trend is continuing. As of October 2014, the Office For National Statistics (ONS) reported that most people diagnosed with cancer in England in recent years are surviving for longer, according to the latest statistics. Eighty per cent of those with breast, prostate and skin cancer are living for five years after diagnosis. The figure is 90% for testicular cancer.

Meanwhile, Cancer Research UK's current projections for the mortality rates from all cancers also shows a promising trend, namely that whilst mortality rates were relatively stable between the early 1970's and the early 1990's, they started to decline in the early 1990's and the current projections suggest that this decline in mortality rates will continue:

Source: Cancer Research UK

It's by no means party time yet, of course. That's why we should all be ploughing everything we can into charities like Cancer Research UK and individual causes that are rasing money on behalf of them, such as the wonderful Tash's Bashes from personal experience. 

And here's why:

Always Look for the Helpers

The Gender Pay Gap is Slowly Being Closed

The gender pay gap, the difference between men and women's wages for the same role, is slowly being closed. Whilst it's scandalous that there's a difference at all, the trend is at least positive.

The UK Government's Department for Culture Media & Sport's report on Secondary Analysis of the Gender Pay Gap - Changes in the gender pay gap over time (March 2014) shows that for young women in particular the gap is almost zero, with one age group actually earning slightly more than their male counterparts.

The pay gap for older age groups remains much wider, but even the pay gap for the largest disparity group (age 40-49) dropped from 24% to 15.7% between 1997 and 2013:

Source: UK Gov

Staggering Progress in Technology - LEDs

The progress of LEDs from little blinking power indicator lights on electrical devices to fully-fledged replacements for the power-hungry incandescent light bulb is truly astounding.

In the late 1990s, the brightest LED lights you could buy produced around 10 lumens of light. By 2005, you could get LED packages that produce 100 lumens. Recently progress has accelerated, so that you can now get LED packages that produce 1,000 lumens of light. If current trends continue you'll be able to buy 10,000-lumen LED lights in a few years.

For comparison, a 100-watt incandescent light bulb produces around 1,700 lumens. So LED lights are becoming nearly as bright as conventional lighting sources. This could be a huge deal for energy efficiency, as LEDs have always converted energy into light more efficiently than conventional lighting technologies. This could be a huge boon in the developing world, where people might be able to capture energy with solar panels during the day and then use it to light their homes at night.

There's a formula known as Haitz's law which says that every 10 years, the power of LED lighting packages will increase by a factor of 20, while the cost of these packages, per unit of illumination, will fall by a factor of 10.

The solid dots represent the number of lumens — a unit of illumination — produced by an LED lighting package. And notice that this is a logarithmic scale — each time you go up from one notch to the next, the amount of illumination (or the cost) goes up by a factor of 10.

Source: Vox.com

UNICEF Millennium Development Goals Snapshot 2014

In September of 2000 the largest gathering of world leaders in human history convened for the Millennium Summit at United Nations headquarters in New York. In that pivotal year, representatives from 189 Member States of the United Nations met to reflect on their common destiny. The nations were interconnected as never before, with increased globalization promising faster growth, higher living standards and new opportunities. Yet their citizens’ lives were starkly disparate.  As some States looked ahead to prosperity and global cooperation, many barely had a future, being mired in miserable, unending conditions of poverty, conflict and a degraded environment.

The The Millennium Development Goals Report 2014 was launched in New York by the Secretary-General on 7 July 2014. With around 500 days away till the Millennium Development Goals deadline, several important targets have or are close to be met by 2015 in many regions and sub-regions.

That means we still have 500 days to intensify actions to improve the lives of millions and establish a stable foundation for our development efforts beyond 2015. Global action needs to continue to reduce hunger, decrease undernutrition among young children, improve the health of mothers and their children, expand access and use of antiretroviral therapy, provide more support for women’s participation in secure jobs, further increase the number of children who attend primary school, ensure environmental sustainability and much more.

Watch UNICEF's 500 day countdown snapshot update video here:

Algae Farm Designed To Suck Up Highway Pollution

A highway overpass might seem like an unlikely place for a garden, but if you're growing algae, it's ideal: All algae need to thrive are sunlight and CO2. The pollution from cars driving below is actually an asset.

In a prototype built above a busy Geneva highway earlier this year, architects from The Cloud Collective tested a system for growing algae in tubes on the wall of the overpass. Though the tubes could be used on any wall, the designers wanted to take advantage of the abundant CO2 from the highway—and the symbolism of the location.

The algae can be harvested by draining the tubes, and filtering the green goo inside. The material can be used in food supplements, since it's high in protein, or to make products like cosmetics. Algae can also be used to make biofuel or turned into green electricity; algae produce five times as much biomass as plants.

Source: fastcoexist.com

Africa's Largest Solar Farm Opens

The Jasper solar farm, located near Kimberley in South Africa, is now the continent's largest solar power project. Construction was completed in October, and it is now fully operational. With a rated capacity of 96 megawatts, Jasper will produce about 180,000 megawatt-hours of clean energy annually for South African residents, enough to power up to 80,000 homes.

Source: TreeHugger.com

Britain's First Bio-Methane Bus

The UK's first bus powered entirely by human and food waste has gone into service between Bristol and Bath.

The 40-seat "Bio-Bus" runs on biomethane gas generated through the treatment of sewage and food waste.

The eco-friendly vehicle can travel up to 300km (186 miles) on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of about five people to produce.

Source: BBC News

Global Access to Clean Drinking Water is Increasing

Between 1990 and 2012, access to drinking water across the world improved as follows:

• Number of people with water piped on premises increased from 45% to 56%
• Number of people whose water supply was improved in other ways increased from 31% to 33%
• Number of people whose water supply did not improve dropped from 17% to 9%
• Number of people forced to rely on surface water dropped from 7% to 2%

Source: UNICEF Millennium Development Goal (MDG 7)

Access to the Internet is Growing Hugely

More people have access to the internet than at any other time in history, and that percentage continues to grow. And the developing world is slowly catching up too.

(Source: Business Insider)

Staggering Progress in Technology - The Hard Disk

In 1956 IBM released the first commercial hard drive, the massive IBM 305 RAMAC which weighed over a ton and cost $160,000. It had fifty 24-inch disks (cost per megabyte being $11,364):

By the early 80's you could buy this beauty of a hard disk for a mere $3,398, storing a whopping 10MB (cost per megabyte being $340):

Today you can buy this very unremarkable 36GB hard drive, considered tiny by today's standards, for $4.99 (cost per MB $1.66):

Or even this little fingernail sized 8GB micro SD card for $0.99 (cost per MB $0.000120849609375)

Here's a nice side-by-side comparison of the progress we've made since 1979:

And here's what a gigabyte looks like 20 years ago versus today:

Two Potential New Planets Discovered in Our Solar System

The possibility of a planet lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system has gained new ground, based on the orbits of recently discovered objects. There is a new twist to the latest evidence, however, with suggestions of not one but two large planets at mind-bending distances from the Sun.

Source: IFLScience

Diseases That Have Been Eradicated

Eradicated

• Smallpox
• Rinderpest

Global eradication under way

• Poliomyelitis (polio)
• Dracunculiasis
• Yaws
• Malaria

Regional elimination established or under way

• Hookworm
• Lymphatic filariasis
• Measles
• Rubella
• Onchocerciasis
• Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_diseases#Other_eradicable_diseases

Murder Rates are Declining

There's a myth that today's society is more violent and murderous than it was in the past. People will tell you they're more frightened to leave the house than they used to be, based on a fear of violent crime. Apparently, we're told, this violence is a modern phenomenon.

Only it isn't. In fact, murderousness used to be more much more prevalent in history than it is today. Back in mediaeval times, the feudal system meant that the peasantry was duty bound to fight and die for their feudal lord in the frequent conflicts which arose between lordships and kingdoms. Life was, for most people, brutal and violent.

Fast forward to today and you find that most people are pretty tame and sedentary by comparison to their forebears. The result is that murder rates are lower now than at any time in recorded history: