Pod Academy

The role of large corporations in lobbying for policy change was the subject of a workshop at Medact's recent conference.

A number of Government appointed expert committees have recently made recommendations on pressing health issues, including minimum pricing of alcohol and food labelling. But their proposals have been kicked into the long grass by government after intensive lobbying by the food and drinks industry.

David Miller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath explained how companies have a number of different ways of exerting influence on policy at a national and European level, including the presence and popularity of their brands, think tanks, lobbying groups, 'partnership bodies' where EU civil servants and industry representatives together advise the EU on policy, charities (funded by the industry) which purport to represent 'consumer interests', sophisticated PR, and 'the revolving door' through which civil servants move from Government departments straight into related jobs in industry.

Here are links to, or about, some of the organisations mentioned by Professor Miller:

Business Europe

Food Industry Lobby Group

European Snacks Association

Elite Policy Planning Groups

European Policy Centre

Scotch Whisky Association

Spirits Europe

Europe Transport Safety Council

World Federation of Advertisers

European Sponsorship Association

European Forum for Responsible Drinking (note their former web address www.efrd.org now defaults to Spirits Europe

EU Alcohol and Health Forum

International Center for Alcohol Policies

Cancer United

TOAST (The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust)

Scientific Alliance

Social Issues Research Council

Professor Millier is a co-founder of Spinwatch, a public interest investigations organisation.

Medact is an organisation of health professionals working for a 'safer, fairer and better world'.

Research is changing the way we think about energy efficient electronics.  This podcast, from the coalface of electronics and materials research, is produced and presented by Dr Radu Sporea of Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute.  It looks at the work currently being undertaken on the new generation of energy efficient lighting - used not just in lighting rooms, but in screens for our electronic devices.

This is the fourth in Radu's occasional series from the Institute.  See also:

New frontiers in electronic engineering

Solar technology: harnessing the power of the sun

The future of electronics is flexible

Dr Radu Sporea:  A great advantage of podcasts and audiobooks is that you can still enjoy them after lights-out. But light is an essential ingredient for most active human pursuits. Early members of our species prolonged their hours of activity by burning things in order to imitate sunlight. Even back then they kept an eye on energy efficiency as some things burned less well than others. In the 19th Century pioneers like Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison successfully harnessed electricity and used it to heat up materials until they glowed white hot. For more than a century, incandescent bulb technology has been *the* way to light a supper (and for that matter a fancy dinner soiree).

But in 2011, the L-Prize for efficient lighting showed that we can do a lot better. The winning design by Philips, a long-standing expert in all things lighting, is six times more efficient than a conventional bulb and a third more economical than energy-efficient bulbs.

By heating up materials  or burning them in an attempt to produce light, we waste a lot of the energy as heat. Efficient light generation, as the prize-winning approach shows, relies on semiconductors. Dr Lynn Rozanski is a Research Fellow working on efficient energy conversion. She explains:

Lynn Rozanski  Semiconductor materials have a property that allows them to emit light when electricity is passed through them in a certain way.

Light emitting diodes or LEDs are electronic devices which allow us to control the intensity of the light coming out by the amount of electrical energy we feed into them.

They are efficient because a larger proportion of the energy gets converted to light than in conventional bulbs.

Wavelength. Depending on material properties we get certain colours of light.

RS:  Efficient generation of coloured light is all well and good, but rare are the instances when a deep red ambiance is all that’s required. White light, which resembles the sun’s rays is the most versatile and most desirable. So how do we create white light?

Lynn Rozanski  White light is in fact composed of a multitude of colours. The sun’s white light contains all colours of the rainbow mixed together. But we can cheat and create good-enough white light by mixing yellow and blue.

So a trick we sometimes use is to use a blue LED together with a material called a phosphor which converts some of the blue light to yellow. The yellow mixes with the remaining blue to appear white.

RS:  Organic semiconductors can be much cheaper to make into electronics through their ability to be processed from a liquid state. Are they any good at producing light?

Lynn Rozanski  Some materials  are very good at producing intense, coloured light. We can definitely use them as light emitters.

But they are not terribly energy efficient, so the amounts of light they produce are not great. There’s a way still to go until they can be used in general lighting.

One could envisage, though, ambient or mood lighting which can change colour subtly - made on large area flexible panels like wallpaper – very cheap.

It's official, the world's longest echo can be heard at an oil storage complex at Inchindown, near Invergordon in Scotland.  Hear it by hitting the play button above.

The 1970 Guinness Book of Records holds the last claim for the longest echo. When the solid-bronze doors of the Hamilton Mausoleum in Scotland slammed shut, it took 15 seconds for the sound to die away to silence. The Inchindown echo is a full minute longer.

Professor Trevor Cox of Salford University discovered the Inchdown echo while working with Allan Kilpatrick, an archaeological investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

Allan fired a pistol loaded with blanks about a third of the way into the storage tank, and Trevor recorded the response picked up by the microphones about a third of the way from the far end - a standard technique used in concert hall acoustics.  At 125 Hertz, a frequency typically made by a tuba, the reverberation time was 112 seconds. Even at the mid-frequencies important for speech, the reverberation time was 30 seconds. The broadband reverberation time which considers all frequencies simultaneously was 75 seconds. They had discovered the world’s most reverberant space

 

All of this was just part of Trevor's research on his new book, Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound, published by Vintage Digital, part of the Random House Group.  It is an exciting journey for anyone who delights in audio treats, and a passionate plea for a deeper appreciation of, and respect for, our shared sonic landscapes.

 

 

 

Some of the other sounds can be heard here:

Sonic Wonderland – The Great Stalacpipe Organ

Sonic Wonderland – Bearded Seals

Sonic Wonderland – Burping Sand Dune

Sonic Wonderland – Kielder Forest, most tranquil place in England

Sonic Wonderland – High-Tide Organ

Sonic Wonderland – Musical Road

And as a footnote on that echo - here are some typical reverberation times at mid-frequency:

·         Living room: 0.4 seconds

·         Opera house: 1.2 seconds

·         Concert hall for classical music: 2 seconds

·         St. Paul’s Cathedral: 9.2 seconds

To ensure their future food security, rich countries are buying up land in poor countries. Ah, that's China, you may think!  But as Stefano Liberti, author of  Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, explains to Craig Barfoot, China is a minor player in this land grab - the truth is much more complex.  Our pension funds, European corporations, and countries like Saudi Arabia are all getting in on the act.

The food crisis of 2007/8, resulting from poor harvests and propelled by the movement of capital into corn, soya beans, rice and wheat, was the tipping point. Since then, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become  ever more intense.  Stefano calls it the new colonialism.

But it is not without contradictions. Many African countries are very keen to get this investment and send trade missions to rich countries to 'sell' their land. A country like Ethiopia, a major aid recipient, now exports large quantities of grain.    And under UN laws, if there is famine in a country, they can legally shut down the export of foodstuffs (which means that in another global food crisis, rich countries could not benefit from their investments).

But it is in exploring the plight of poor farmers, thrown off their land as the big corporations move in, that Stefano is at his most eloquent.

 

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 350 million people of all ages, suffer from depression.  Indeed it is a growing cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease.

This podcast looks at what is depression and at the latest research on mindfulness. It is made up of excerpts from two conversations between Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University and journalist, Dr Danny Penman.   These conversations are part of an Oxford University series, The New Psychology of Depression, formed of 6 podcasts:

What is depression*

How is depression treated

Can treatments such as cognitive therapy help

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: A new approach to treating depression*

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on trial

Mindfulness and the brain

[The conversations we have drawn on are starred.  They were published by Oxford University under a Creative Commons licence].

Depression is different from usual mood fluctuations and short-lived emotional responses to challenges in everyday life.

Especially when long-lasting and with moderate or severe intensity, depression may become a serious health condition. It can cause the affected person to suffer greatly and function poorly at work, at school and in the family. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide.

There are, however, effective treatments.  One treatment that is currently attracting a lot of attention is 'mindfulness' which draws on ancient Buddhist teaching, and is supported by developments in Neuroscience research.

In this podcast Professor Williams explains what mindfulness is and how it can help those suffering from depression. He also talks us through a couple of mindfulness exercises.

Notes:

Mark Williams and Danny Penman are the authors of  Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world

 

 

 

Oxford University has a Mindfulness Centre, which hosts courses and suggests books, audio and video resources on mindfulness..

Watch Professor Mark Williams's Ted Talk on Mindfulness

You may also be interested in Pod Academy's podcasts on Children's mental health, and Yoga and mental health.

The term ‘ethnomusicology’ was coined in 1959 by Dutch academic, Jaap Kunst.  Put simply, it is the social and cultural study of music – whether that is gamelan, hip hop, British folk or any other kind.

A Spanish translation of this podcast is set out below the English transcript.  We are very grateful to Héctor Pittman Villarreal for producing it for us.

Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to interview Dr Noel Lobley, the museum’s ethnomusicologist to find out more about ethnomusicology and hear about his personal experiences working particularly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Jo and Sarah have produced 2 other podcasts from the Pitt Rivers collection:

Pitt Rivers Collection: Louis Sarno and the BayAka

Pitt Rivers Collection: Reel to Real

Noel Lobley:  What is ethnomusicology?  That’s a good question and it has been debated and argued about for at least the last 60 years. Ethnomusicology was coined as an academic term in 1959 by Jaap Kunst, a Dutch scholar working mainly in Indonesia.  Before that ethnomusicology was known as comparative musicology.

Simplistically, it is the social and cultural study of music.  It’s very interdisciplinary, it was originally a divergence from more traditional musicology, which was very much about wertern art music, about the cannon, German composers,  this is the only music that matters. Ethnomusicologists were those who started to be interested in Indian music, folk music - just the variety of musics that are out there in the world- and realised that the musicological approach (transcription, score based analysis) doesn’t necessarily apply or doesn’t work anything like what we understand as harmony.

Musicologists realised they needed different methods of dealing with different musics, so they started to say it is the study of music in culture, music as culture, the study of all the human processes that are important in the making of music eg psychology, biology, what happens in the cells.  But the most important threads are still the anthropological approaches to music.  This means participant observation, fieldwork, long term immersion with a culture.  Ethnomusicology used to be defined by what it studied, but it isn’t any more because Ethnomusicologists study techno, hip hop, noiseart.  I don’t think there is a genre of music or sound that Ethnomusicologists don't look at now.  It's not just traditional music from Africa or India.  It's the social and cultural study of music, trying to find interdisciplinary ways of understanding what enable us to make music.

Sometimes that involves non-human processes.  There is research into the relationship between insect sounds, bird sounds and whale sounds, and our music. The natural environment and our music.

So it is a very vibrant and exciting area of musical study.

Jo Barratt: Does this mean recorded sound is your primary source?

NL: In the development of ethnomusicology recording has been hugely influential. , - the making of ethnographic recordings, where scholars/researchers/travellers/ anthropologists went somewhere and made their recordings. As soon as the invention of the phonograph in 1877, it has probably been the central method, alongside participant observation.

Ethnomusicologists used to do analysis just through recordings, which might not have bee made by them, so they could listen to the recorded objects and they might get it worng, through not understanding the context - not knowing what went into making the recording.  If the recording is too fast and there is no picture reference you can make mistakes.

But the recorded object has been hugely influential. We've made millions of hours of these ethnomusicology recordings, piled them up in sound archives or private collections.

The financial and ecological costs of driving, and the time we waste sitting in traffic jams, is leading many people to think about a more 'walkable' city.  The man who has thought and written most widely on this is city planner and architectural designer Jeff Speck, the author of ‘Walkable Cities - How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time.  Craig Barfoot interviewed him for Pod Academy.

In rural, tribal societies with no technology, people move on average at three miles per hour because they are walking everywhere.  In most developed countries, if you add up the costs of driving a car, the time you spend earning that money and the time you spend in traffic, it has been estimated that we, too, move at about 3 miles per hour!

Building new roads is no answer because the extra capacity is absorbed within 2 or 3 years by new car journeys.  A better solution might be to price driving at its true cost to society, and Jeff points to London’s congestion charge as one of the successes of this approach.

But his big idea is ‘the walkable city’. We have learned that we have a smaller carbon footprint and a healthier population if we live in walkable cities. More and more young professionals (brought up on Seinfeld, Sex in the City and Friends) are opting to live in city centres, as are empty nesters who want to be able to get out and about even when they can no longer drive.  As Jeff says, “Downtown has become the new place of choice for those who have a choice.”

Edinburgh, Scotland - a very walkable city (especially during the Festival)

But those who don’t have a choice are pushed towards the suburbs and transport costs they can ill afford, where ‘they require hyper-mobility just to buy catfood!’

So city centres are changing fast. They are increasingly seen as desirable places to live.  The next question is whether the young professionals in their twenties will stay in the centre, or move out to the suburbs ‘for the schooling’ when they have children.

Jeff Speck's Ted Talk about walkable cities is here

And you might also want to listen to our podcast on Walking tours of London, Is London like it used to be?

The UK government has just announced tax breaks for companies fracking for shale gas. Is that a sound investment in our future energy security, or a misguided waste of public money?  Should the money have been allocated to renewables? Are fracking protesters just 'scaremongering'? Are these tax breaks just another example of business as usual for the big fossil fuel companies?

This podcast records the fracking debate in The Rational Parliament, which explored all sides of the argument around hydraulic fracturing for shale gas.

The Rational Parliament, founded by science journalist Adam Smith, aims to have rational debates on hot topics of the day, debates that are not subject to unchallenged wild claims, debates that balance views and values alongside research evidence.  The Parliament even has a 'rhetoric officer', Johnny Unger who comments on the rhetorical devices used by speakers in the debate.

Members of the Rational Parliament relax before the debate

The first debate of the Parliament, earlier this year, was about GM food.  This, the second debate, looked at 'fracking' (hydraulic fracturing). Chaired by science writer, Michael Brooks, and overseen by Alice Casey (the process officer of the Parliament),  it was kicked off by Joseph Dutton, Research Associate, Global Gas Security Project, University Of Leicester.

"The development of shale gas in the US has caused a stir across the globe for both good and bad reasons. Many countries hope to develop shale, seeking to replicate the US’s employment and financial gains, along with low domestic energy prices and natural gas self-sufficiency. But there are also those that worry about the negative impacts that shale gas development might have on the environment, both locally and nationally and also globally in terms of climate change. In the UK, the opponents and proponents of UK shale gas development point to the US experience for evidence of both the benefits and threats that fracking and shale gas can bring.

Before considering the differing points of view, it is important to note that fracking has already been carried in the UK. Over 200 conventional onshore oil and gas wells have been fracked in the UK, including horizontal wells at the Wytch Farm oilfield in Dorset and Beckingham oilfield in Nottinghamshire and vertical gas wells in Lancashire, geothermal development in Cornwall, and coal bed methane projects in Scotland. However, fracking for shale gas is different to conventional gas, both geologically and from a technical and engineering standpoint.

Opponents of fracking in the UK base many of their arguments on the experiences of shale development in the US, using alleged incidents to highlight the risks and damage that may occur should development begin in the UK. However, false comparisons have been made between the two countries. For example, there are assertions that the patchy regulation of fracking in the US (including a number of legislative exemptions) will be mirrored in the UK. It is the case that all parts of the fracking process are covered by existing UK legislation, while the final decision on development rests with local planning authorities, not national government. Those arguing against development based on environmental impacts point to studies from the US detailing alleged groundwater and aquifer contamination, water usage issues, air pollution, and fugitive methane emissions.

Shale development and fracking do have impacts, as all industrial processes do; however, further study has shown impacts to be less than initially claimed, or in some cases unrelated to fracking. For example, water usage for fracking a well appears to be high, but overall that shale gas sector’s water use is lower than that of mining industries and agriculture. Nonetheless, the development of shale gas in areas that are already subject to water shortages is cl...

Professor Carol Propper, Professor of Economics at Imperial Collect Business School and the Economics Department of Bristol University has just completed a major study on levels of physical activity in Britain which suggests that most adults do so little exercise that they are risking their health.

Lee Millam went to talk to her.

Most work in this field has involved small scale studies, but Professor Propper’s research involved a million people over 5 years, across Britain, and questions included 400 plus sports.

When you have so much data it is possible to  look at the individual correlations of exercise with class, income, ethnicity, geographical location, family size etc.

The study was not about attitudes to exercise, so it did not look at why people do or don’t do exercise.  It simply described who does what.

And from this we know that education levels appear to have a major influence on exercise.  Only 12% of people with degrees don't do any exercise (so 88% do), but for those who left school with no A-levels, the involvement in sport is much lower. .

As Professor Propper says, 'What people don't do enough of are the inexpensive everyday activities.'  Exercise gurus  and academics know know about this, but the scale of the study enables us to say with certainty that

80% of us don't hit government activity target 

Walking is the most common form of exercise

Ethnicity is a major factor e.g. women of South East Asian heritage tend to take less exercise than others

Richer people do more exercise, particularly they do the 'more expensive' sports that require equipment and time.

 

 

 

Children develop language and literacy skills in all sorts of settings, but perhaps one of the most overlooked settings is the church, the temple, the mosque -  especially for communities who have recently settled in the UK.

Focusing on four groups who have come to London in the last 50 years - the Ghanaian Pentecostal community, the Polish Catholic community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community - the three year long ESRC funded BeLIFS project (Becoming Literate in Faith Settings) of the Education Department at Goldsmiths, University of London found that the places of worship, services, classes and home lives of the children, centring around their faith, were important not just for literacy, but for the children's multi-lingual identity.

In this podcast, anthropologist Dr Sarah Winkler Reid talks to  Professor Eve Gregory, who headed up the project.  [You can also see and hear Eve Gregory talk about the project in this video]

Here is the Transcript:

Becoming literate in faith settings: Language and literacy learning in the lives of new Londoners (BeLIFS)

Sarah Winkler Reid: Faith plays an important part in the lives of many children in Britain, but as Eve Gregory, Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Goldsmith’s University told me, very little research has focused on language and literacy learning in faith settings. Eve’s three year long project aimed to find out about the sorts of learning that happens as children take part in faith activities in places of worship, in faith classes or at home.

The project focused on four groups of ‘New Londoners’, communities of shared origins and faith who have come to live in London in the last fifty years. The Ghanaian Pentecostal community, Catholic Polish community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community.

The project was a collaborative ethnography, Eve’s team of eleven conducted participant observation in the faith settings and the children and their families had video cameras so they could record their activities at home. Having recently completed the project Eve told me what had surprised her and her team most about their research findings.

Eve Gregory:  Generally we were very surprised by the scope of learning going on in children lives, we were surprised that in many families, because we’re convinced that our families were not exceptional that actually faith permeates children’s everyday lives. Not only are many children involved in regular worship at the Temple or Mosque or the Church, but they are on a daily basis referring to their faith, using text, narratives, hymns, songs, art work from their faith. So we were surprised at the extent of learning and the way in which faith does interpenetrate lots and lots of different learning.

We were surprised that you couldn’t really separate language and literacy learning. Although the original intention of our project was to focus on language and literacy learning we realised you couldn’t separate them from cultural learning, from aesthetic learning, artistic learning, creative learning and moral learning as well. And all of the formed becoming part of a community, because that was the crucial thing, all of that gave children a framework, a sort of guide book for their lives actually.

[Audio of children singing as part of Children’s day at the Ghanaian Pentecostal Church].

The Ghanaian Pentecostal setting

SWR: Can you give some descriptions of the settings the children were learning in?

EG: Yes there were lots of different contexts; maybe I could just take a couple of contrasting ones. The Polish children were all very fluent Polish speakers.

[Audio of Polish children speaking in Polish in their Catholic faith class]

Polish Catholic setting