麻豆传媒

IT HAS been a record year for Britain鈥檚 water industry. The newly privatised
water companies are expected to disclose a record 拢2 billion in profits
this year. At the same time, a record 4 billion litres a day of drinking water
leaks away through the companies鈥� poorly maintained pipes. Nearly 40 per cent of
the water that Thames Water supplies never reaches its customer鈥檚 taps. And all
this while Britain is locked in the worst drought for 200 years.

No wonder that John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister and Environment
Secretary, told the water companies at a summit meeting last month that they had
to plug the leaks.

But the water companies鈥� pipes are not the only source of leaks. Prescott has
a problem closer to home. There has been a spate of floods at Eland House, the
tower block near London鈥檚 Victoria Station that houses the Department of the
Environment.

The problem, say insiders, is that the pumps that circulate the water are too
powerful for the ordinary plumbers鈥� joints in the cold-water mains. The high
pressure makes the joints leak. And because Eland House is a high-technology
building, every time a few bucketfuls of water escape, the department鈥檚 computer
networks blow a fuse.

OF COURSE, this is a problem that Prescott inherited from the previous Tory
administration. The Tory environment secretary, John Gummer, masterminded the
move from the crumbling towers of Marsham Street to the sodden wiring of Eland
House. Gummer鈥攁ppropriately enough鈥攊s on the wet wing of the
Conservative Party.

But Labour鈥檚 new ministers are less than happy with the move. MPs鈥攁nd
that includes ministers鈥攈ave to be ready at short notice to vote in the
House of Commons. And although Labour may seem safe enough with its majority of
179, some votes are quite unpredictable. MPs have exactly eight minutes from the
time the division bells start ringing to cast their vote, and latecomers are
locked out. This wasn鈥檛 a problem for environment ministers when their
department was on Marsham Street, only a short walk from the Houses of
Parliament. But Eland House is two stops away on the Underground. So ministers
are looking for lodgings within walking distance of Westminster.

SOMEHOW the buffet lunch didn鈥檛 seem the same after Feedback鈥檚 reporter at a
conference on the Arctic environment in Troms酶, Norway, read the following
phrase in a Russian paper on marine pollution: 鈥淓nvironmental damage is highly
influenced by technology of bowels development.鈥� What have those Russkies been
getting up to in the remote Siberian nights? Are they in secret training for the
next Olympics? Only slowly, with references to 鈥渦ncontrolled drilling for gas
and metal mining鈥�, did it emerge that Tatyana Gorokhova of St Petersburg State
University, had in mind the bowels of the Earth. At least we hope she did.

POLITICAL parties all over the world want to appear technologically hip. Even
nerds have votes. It was in that spirit, during the general election in Ireland
earlier this month, that the Fine Gael party published the personal e-mail
addresses of all its senators, members of the national parliament and party
hopefuls to encourage voters to get in e-contact.

The Irish Research Scientists鈥� Association circulated all the Fine Gael
addresses together with those for Fianna Fail and the Irish Labour Party to all
the country鈥檚 scientists. Unfortunately, anyone who took the time to write was
rewarded with a 207-line error message in reply. No messages got through. The
association eventually discovered that the service provider had neglected to
switch the system on.

But there was one way to reach the candidate you wanted, says John Donovan,
the executive secretary of the association. You could e-mail a central address,
where a kindly person would receive the message, print it out and fax it across
the country to the candidate in question. It may be technology, but it sure
isn鈥檛 progress.

IN BRITAIN, the Department of Trade and Industry has a 拢10 million
scheme called Biotechnology Means Business. The scheme acts as a broker, quietly
putting companies that have problems in touch with other companies that can
solve them.

The Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, for example, joined the scheme because it
wanted help coping with foaming in its sewers, caused by excessive grease from
its kitchens. A small Kent firm called Bioproduction joined the scheme because
it makes a grot-busting product called Bioclear, a solution of enyzmes that
digest starch and protein. Only the scheme didn鈥檛 put the two companies in
touch.

Both companies had been members of the scheme for several months. But
Bioproduction鈥檚 technical director only found out about the hotel鈥檚 problems by
reading about them in a splendid, entertaining publication called Putting
Biotechnology to Work, which was published this month. It was funded by the
DTI鈥攁s part of its Biotechnology Means Business scheme.

ALMOST four out of 10 people in New Orleans are overweight, according to a
hefty report from the American Coalition for Excess Weight Risk Education. The
citizens of Dallas cause the least trouble to their scales鈥攐nly 22 per
cent of them are overweight.

But the report does not just rank American cities by how overweight their
burghers are. It also explores the reasons for their hypernutrition. Restaurants
are to blame for obese New Yorkers. But the report finds it harder to pinpoint
the reason why the citizens of Phoenix, Arizona, are so slim, with less than one
in four overweight. It is too hot to jog for much of the year, reasons the
report, so it must be that 鈥渉ot weather clothing makes it difficult to
camouflage fat鈥�.

FEEDBACK was rather startled to read a Sony ad in the current issue of
Smithsonian magazine. The ad has a photo of two little girls, with a
copyline running: 鈥淭heir great-grandmother鈥檚 first kiss was in front of a
transistor radio.鈥� So how many people have a great-grandmother who was a young
girl in the 1950s? The rest of the advert was less startling. Their grandmother
kissed in front of a black-and-white television, and their mother in front of a
car stereo. That chronology seems less farfetched. Or was Sony鈥檚 copywriter
thinking of those crystal radios from the 1920s 鈥攈ardly the transistor
variety?