Eiffel Over

Tag: Institution of Civil Engineers

  • When government bans protest against our projects, engineers must put down their tools

    When government bans protest against our projects, engineers must put down their tools

    The cornerstone of our democracy is the right to protest. At the moment the government is pushing through amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that would make it illegal to protest at a range of infrastructure sites.

    The Government is intending to use the latest amendment to

    introduce a new offence of interfering with the operation of key infrastructure, such as the strategic road network, railways, sea ports, airports, oil refineries and printing presses, carrying a maximum penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both

    George Monbiot citing in the guardian a private letter to members of the House of Lords

    This is on top of the existing authoritarian measures in the bill. For instance, named individuals can be banned from protesting. If I write a post encouraging readers to attend a protest, I can be individually banned from protesting. If I turn up anyway, under these new measures, I can be sent to prison for 51 weeks.

    Why is the government doing this?

    Well, I suspect it is because they know that protest works, as demonstrated by the success of the protests to stop fracking in the UK. A sustained campaign of protest by a small dedicated group halted one of the most illogical of engineering projects: fracking for more fossil fuels while committing to reducing our carbon footprint.

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  • The Rise and Fall of Civil Engineering – courtesy Google’s amazing ngram viewer

    I read an astonishing article this afternoon titled ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books‘, published early last year in the journal Science. Based on Google’s effort to digitise all books in all languages, researchers have carried out computational analysis on a corpus of over 5 million books – approximately 4% of all books ever published – to give access to vast amounts of data on word use.

    The availability of this data allows researchers to observe cultural trends and then subject them to quantitative investigation – the study of ‘culturomics‘. The paper illustrates fascinating changes in language size and use, and shows how the data is used to draw more socio-cultural conclusions.

    Best of all, Google has a nifty tool for presenting the data called the ngram viewer, which has allowed me to do a little culturomics of my own for the field of engineering.

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