Andrew Lansley and Jamie Oliver

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley and media personality Jamie Oliver are on a collision course, if you read the headlines. But they’re both right.

Jamie Oliver headed a campaign a couple of years ago, the thrust of which was that we shouldn’t be feeding children junk, and school dinners were a prime example of junk. Andrew Lansley said it wasn’t the business of the establishment to go lecturing people, and to do so was counterproductive. This isn’t the same as saying Oliver’s point was wrong.

Statistics are now being bandied about, the latest being that the uptake of school dinners has risen slightly. Very slightly. Yesterday’s statistics were used to suggest that less children were eating school dinners than before the campaign.

This is missing the point – it’d still have been a success if the numbers had halved. Apparently about 40% of pupils have school dinners. This means that over the last couple of years, 40% of pupils have stopped eating junk and are now eating something decent. Result!

Lansley is also right – there’s no point in lecturing idiots. Intelligent people can, and will, review the evidence and make a good choice. You don’t need to lecture them. We will always have idiots, too, and they’ll always fly in the face of the facts – more so if you keep mentioning them. Whatever the solution to the junk food problem is, lecturing idiots is not the answer.

Speaking of statistics, I’ve recently heard the one about life expectancy being much reduced for lower social classes being trotted out, especially by New Labour types. It’s true. Someone living in an inner-city dump in Scotland lives on average 10 years less (in rough terms) than someone classed as “affluent” and living in London. However, if you look at these figures alongside the smoking and alcohol consumption rates in the same areas you’ll see it has nothing to do with disposable income or educational level. More people die young in Glasgow because more of them smoke. This is nothing new, but it’s not mentioned by “social” politicians trying to get a bigger handout for their part of the country. Attenuate these statistics with diet too, and I suspect the death rate disparity will disappear altogether.

Low Energy Lightbulbs are not that bright

Have you replaced a 60W traditional tungsten bulb with a 60W-equivalent low energy compact fluorescent and thought it’s not as bright as it was. You’re not imagining it. I’ve been doing some tests of my own, and they’re not equivalent.

Comparing light sources is a bit of art as well as science, and lacking other equipment, I decided to use a simple photographic exposure to give me some idea of the real-world performance. I pointed the meter at a wall, floor and table top. I didn’t point it at the light itself – that’s not what users of light bulbs care about.

The results were fairly consistent: Low energy light bulbs produce the same amount of light as a standard bulb of three to four times the rating. The older the fluorescent, the dimmer it was, reaching output of a third at a thousand hours use. Given that the lamps are rated at two to eight thousand hours, it’s reasonable to take the lower output figure as typical as this is how it will spend the majority of its working life.
This gives a more realistic equivalence table as:

CFL
Wattage
Quoted GLS
equivalent
Realistic GLS
equivalent
8W 40W 25-30W
11W 60W 35-45W
14W 75W 40-55W
18W 100W 55-70W

Table showing true equivalence of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) vs. conventional light bulbs (GLS)

So what’s going on here? Is there a conspiracy amongst light-bulb manufacturers to tell fibs about their performance? Well, yes. It turns out that the figures they use are worked out by the Institute of Lighting Engineers, in a lab. They measured the light output of a frosted lamp and compared that to a CFL. The problem is that the frosting on frosted lamps blocks out quite a bit of light, which is why people generally use clear glass bulbs. But if you’re trying to make your product look good it pays to compare your best case with the completion’s worst case. So they have.

But all good conspiracies involve the government somewhere, and in this case the manufactures can justify their methods with support from the EU. The regulations allow the manufactures to do some pretty wild things. If you want to look at the basis, it can be found starting here:

For example, after a compact fluorescent has been turned on it only has to reach an unimpressive 60% of its output after a staggering one minute! I’ve got some lamps that are good starters, others are terrible – and the EU permits them to be sold without warning or differentiation. One good thing the EU is doing, however, is insisting that CFL manufacturers state the light output in lumens in the future, and more prominently than the power consumption in Watts. This takes effect in 2010. Apparently. Hmm. Not on the packages I can see; some don’t even mention it in the small print (notably Philips).

However, fluorescent lamps do save energy, even if it’s only 65% instead of the claimed 80%. All other things being equal, they’re worth it. Unfortunately the other things are not equal, because you have the lifetime of the unit to consider.

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A standard fluorescent tube (around since the 1930’s) is pretty efficient, especially with modern electronics driving it (ballast and starter). When the tube fails the electronics are retained, as they’re built in to the fitting. The Compact Florescent Lamps (CFL) that replace conventional bulbs have the electronics built in to the base so they can be used in existing fittings where a conventional bulb is expected. This means the electronics are discarded when the tube fails. The disposable electronics are made as cheaply as possible, so it may fail before the tube.

Proponents of CFLs says that it is still worth it, because the CFLs last so much longer than standard bulbs. I’m not convinced. A conventional bulb is made of glass, steel, cooper and tungsten and should be easy enough to recycle – unlike complex electronics.

The story gets worse when you consider what goes in to the fluorescent tubes – mercury vapour, antinomy, rare-earth elements and all sorts of nasty looking stuff in the various phosphor coatings. It’s true that the amount of mercury in a single tube is relatively small, and doesn’t create much of a risk in a domestic environment even if the tube cracks, but what about a large pile of broken tubes in a recycling centre?

So, CFLs are under-specified and polluting and wasteful to manufacture, but they do save energy. It’d be better to change light fittings to use proper fluorescent tubes, however. They work better than CFLs, with less waste. I don’t see it happening though. At the moment descrete tubes actually cost more because they fit relatively few fittings. People are very protective of their fittings. The snag is that with CFLs you need at least 50% more bulb sockets to get enough light out of them.

Standard bulbs produce less light than they could because a lot of the energy is turned into heat (more so than with a CFL). However, this heat could be useful – if your light bulbs aren’t heating the room you’d need something else. This is particularly true of passageways and so on, where there may be no other heating and a little warmth is needed to keep the damp away. The CFL camp rubbishes this idea, pointing out that in summer you don’t need heat. Actually, in summer, you don’t need much artificial light either, so they’d be off anyway. Take a look at document “BNXS05 The Heat Replacement Effect” found starting here for an interesting study into the matter – it’s from the government’s own researchers.
But still, CFLs save energy.

Personally, however, I look forward to the day when they’re all replaced by LED technology. These should last ten times longer (100,000 hours), be more efficient still, and contains no mercury anyway , nor even any glass to break.  The snag is that they run on a low voltage and the world is wired up for mains-voltage light fittings. I envisage whole light fittings, possibly with built-in transformers, pre-wired with fixed LEDs which will last for 50 years – after which you’d probably change the whole fitting anyway.

Ah yes, I hear the moaners starting, but I want to keep my existing light fitting. Okay, sit it the gloom under your compact fluorescents then.

 

Electric Cool-box (or Esky) review

We’ve all seen them and wondered. Every gadget suppler has a small electric fridge or cool-box, usually supplied with a cable to run it off a 12V vehicle supply. I’ve even seen some very favourable reviews of these devices, from people with no credentials. Then, last week I needed to cool down various perishable foodstuffs whilst on a road trip, so I bought one. This is a review of this particular unit, but the principles will apply to the whole family of products.

I opted for the Halfords 8-litre cool-box, largely because I knew where to find a Halfords and I knew I’d seen cool-boxes there. I chose the 8L version because I knew the cooling principle they all utilise isn’t very energy efficient; I didn’t want to cool more space than I needed.

The Halfords 8L cool-box is certainly well-made and insulated. It’s very solid, with a hinged lid and catch that suggests quality. This is only to be expected; the Halfords models are not cheap.

Cable storage compartment in Halfords Coolbox
The cable storage compartment is a thoughtful touch

One nice feature of the 8L box is a fitting to hold it securely between two rear seats of a car using the lap belt, allowing it to double as an arm-rest. It’s also small enough to tuck away easily on one side of a boot. After fitting the supplied strap it’s also easy to carry and in another thoughtful touch there’s even a small compartment to store the power cable.

The power lead itself is long enough to reach from the dashboard to the boot without too much trouble and is fitted with a standard lighter plug on one end. The cool-box end of the lead has a proprietary connecting plug fitted, which might be tricky if a replacement is needed. Halfords do sell spare leads, but they’re not cheap!

Halfords 8L Coolbox
Coolbox (with test supply and thermometers)

Halfords also sells a mains adapter for something like £25 – ouch! This is one of the most expensive 12V adapters I’ve seen, but the cool-box is rated at 3A so you do need something a bit chunky. I decided against this purchase.

So far so good – the food was loaded into the cool-box and off we went with the cooler running while the engine was on. 3A is no problem for a car’s alternator but I didn’t want to drain the battery. The instructions also made it clear that running of the battery alone wasn’t a good idea.

However, at the end of the day’s driving, which amounted to several hours, it wasn’t at all clear that the inside of the box was any cooler than the outside. On our return I decided to test it properly to see what was going on.

Theory

These coolers all work using a thermoelectric effect. If you really want to know /how/ this works try looking up the Peltier or Seebeck effects in a good physics textbook. The short story is that if you take two plates made of different metals and place them together you can make a heat pump. As heat passes from the hot plate to the cold plate it generates a potential difference (voltage) between them. This is one of those electrical effects that works both ways, so if the plates are the same temperature and you pass a current across the plates they’ll drag heat from one plate to the other. In other words, is you pass a current through the two plates one gets hot by taking heat from the other, which gets cold.

This sounds very useful! All you need to do is place the plate that’s getting cold inside the box, and cool the plate that’s outside the box with a fan. This gives you a fridge with no moving parts apart from a fan, and as moving parts go, fan’s are a lot easier to manage than compressors and the associated plumbing for the coolant. Unfortunately there’s a snag – it’s not a particularly efficient process. Just how efficient it was in practice, I decided to find out.

Testing

Using a lab power supply and a several thermometers with remote probes to measure temperatures inside and outside the box I left the subject running while empty, after sealing down the lid. The inside and outside temperatures were recorded, with the inside being measured by the temperature of the plate.

Graph 1: temperature over time when empty
Graph 1 – Temperature over time (empty)

The manufactures claim that it can reduce the temperature of the contents by up to 20C compared to the outside. With the normal summer temperature tending to be 20-25C and a reasonable fridge temperature being 5-10C this would certainly be a suitable performance even allowing for a margin implied by the ‘up to’ preceding the actual figure stated.

The actual performance is shown in Graph 1. As you can see, after about an hour the temperature inside dropped from the ambient 22C outside to just 3C inside, where it stabilised; a drop of 19C. Pretty impressive! But remember the 3A current drain – it turns out it needs 3A constantly so you definitely can’t run this without taking power off the engine. Sill, once cooled it should stay cool for a reasonable period, right? Actually, wrong. Take a look at Graph 2.

After disconnecting the power it returned to room temperature in about 20 minutes. Very disappointing!

Graph 2 – Temperature restored when empty

However, this isn’t really a good test, is it? Who needs to cool down a empty box – you really need to cool the contents, and what matters is how long the contents then stay cool once the power is removed. To test this I chose to use 1.5L of water in a sealed plastic box as the payload.

Test payload in Halfords Coolbox

This choice was largely governed by the sealed plastic boxes I had available. There wasn’t space for 2L of water, so 1.5L was a compromise to make calculations easer – and besides, 1.5L or 1.5Kg of food is a reasonable payload for an 8L box. The results can be seen in Graph 3 below.

Graph 3 – Cooling effect when full

As you can see, after a full hour the temperature had only fallen by 3C – not much good to anyone. I decided to keep the experiment running for a further eight hours, during which the payload’s temperature eventually stabilised at 10C below ambient. The graph shows the measured temperature a bit lower, but by this stage the outside temperature had also dropped, so it was 10C less.

This isn’t really much good for cooling food down; even after running it all day it’s unable to reach ‘refrigerator’ temperature; your food wouldn’t last long. The only useful thing you can do with it is put pre-cooled items in it and hope they stay that way due to the insulation, because even with the power full on it’s only going to stabilise at about 10C . Graph 4 shows what happened.

Graph 4 – Warming up when full

As you can see, thanks to the insulation of the box it does at least manage to keep its contents cool. The tests were carried out away from the wind and sun – ideal conditions, but only sensible.

Conclusion

This is a nicely made piece of equipment, but its real-world performance makes it completely unsuitable for its intended purpose. The best you can say is that if you place cold items in it, it’ll keep them cool as long as you keep it supplied with a lot of power. If you don’t use the electric cooler it’ll work almost as well thanks to its insulated construction.

If you are looking for a workable solution to the problem, and insulated box and a block of ice will easily out-perform this arrangement, at far lower purchase and running costs. The low-tech conventional cool-box (Esky) and freezer pack still has a lot going for it. Don’t waste your money on one of these.

Halfords refunded my money very quickly.

I was wrong about the airlines

At the weekend I said it’d be two weeks before they decided that the risk from the volcano wasn’t that substantial when weighed against profits, and that political pressure would lift the flight ban before the cloud had lifted in about two weeks. It’s actually taken them less than one.

Engines stop and show signs of wear from time to time, but this time it’s going to be reported and a load of concerned hacks who know nothing about aviation will get very excited.

So queue the flying scares – engines stopping, or nearly stopping and one almighty row.

Safety is paramount

So the Icelandic volcano makes it impossible to fly in UK airspace. Hmm. The idea is that the volcanic ash, containing silica, turns to glass in jet engines and causes them to stop spinning.

Well I wonder how this one’s going to play out? Let’s see…

I’m sceptical that the ash is that much of a threat – jet engines do fly through dusty and sandy air. This dust seems to be fairly well dispersed (i.e. you can’t see it and radar, apparently, can’t see it). But even it does increase the risk, the “safety is paramount” argument just doesn’t hold water. If it really was the primary concern they’d stay on the ground instead of flying. Flying is more of a risk than staying on the ground, whatever the weather. They’re taking a risk by taking off.

So just how much risk is acceptable? Well when balanced against airline profits I’d say quite a lot. The volcano, by all accounts, shows no sign of slowing down and the weather system we have at this time of year aren’t likely to disperse the ash any time soon. Anyone who knows anything about weather isn’t going to put money on it, I assure you.

I’d give it two weeks – I doubt the cloud will disperse but by then the airlines will have put so much political pressure on NATS and the government (before an election) that they’ll decide that safety really isn’t paramount and start flying again regardless.

There’ll also probably be a big row.

There’ll also probably be a big scare as soon as someone finds a jet engine with glass in it, followed by an even bigger row.

Council surveys immigrants for BNP

Your local council is collecting the names and addresses of all non-English residents and passing them on to the British National Party. What a great idea!

That isn’t the intended plan, as far as I know, but most PC councils are doing it in the name of “diversity monitoring” or some such nonsense. Whether this is a justifiable use of taxpayers’ resources is one matter, but the fact remains that the databases they’re compiling will be making it in to the hands of every anti-immigrant group both now in the future. The government can’t keep a database like this secret for long – it requires the cooperation of every single council employee and councillor with access to the data, including the BNP councillors.

I was asked to fill in one such form today, when attending a council Easter-holiday event for kids. My usual response is to refuse to fill in this information on principle and explain, at length, why they shouldn’t be asking. I’ve never had any argument with this approach. Today, when I pointed out that this would tell the BNP where all the Muslims in the area lived, who was in the house and where their kids went to school, one of the ladies with the forms went quite pale.

Ted Relf – local hero

Ted Relf from Shadoxhurst (near Ashford, Kent) has got himself into a spot of bother with the local plod. His crime? Well he put up a sign warning people about potholes in the road outside his house.

Potholes are lethal. They’re bad enough in a motor vehicle, but for someone on a bike they’re murderous. If you can see them you swerve to avoid them and hope following traffic reacts accordingly. If they’re filled with water or it’s dark you’ll probably be thrown off, and you have to hope that following traffic will stop.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wiltshire/8594682.stm

Mr Relf’s sign was a public service, but according to Kent police, someone complained. Why is it that police and council officials feel the need to act when someone complains? If anything, this guy deserves a commendation protecting the public. Face with a complaint about the warning sign, the police should have told the complainant where to go in stead of wasting time and putting the public in danger by taking action against Mr Relf.

The police claim they’re under-funded; this proves the opposite – they’ve just lost their way.

I wonder if they were acting on orders from the local council, who may not have wanted attention drawn to the quality of the roads.

It is safe to allow your kids to use Fronter?

Fronter is Pearson’s commercial LMS; basically Moodle, but you pay lots of money for it. It quite possibly does more, but I’m not in a position to pay for a copy to find out. However, this isn’t a review of Fronter. In fact it applies to the concept of an LMS rather than Fronter, as an instance of an LMS.

An LMS (or LCMS) is a CMS that has been developed, or optimised for learning (hence the acronym). It’s currently being pushed in to primary schools for use by children as young as six, and it’s security is far from certain.

An LMS is also known as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in marketing-speak. Ask any academic computer scientist and they’ll tell you Moodle is the one to go for these days. WebCT in the past; but the open source nature and sheer power of Moodle makes it king of the castle – and it’s free. So why does half the world use Blackboard (they purchased WebCT in 2005)? My best guess is that most schools don’t have the technical ability to support anything in-house, and by outsourcing you get a commercial product, sold with smiles and soothing words. It’s just not realistic to expect many primary or secondary education institutions to have the knowledge to manage its own IT – the 20% of the world using Moodle are the clued-up tertiary sector. And the folks able to use Moodle are the same folks that are likely to understand the security implications. Primary schools are unlikely to have security skills in-house, and it’d be surprising to find that level of knowledge in a secondary (high) school either, so in order to use an LMS it has to be outsourced and made simpler.

Enter Pearson with Fronter. Pearson is a large media conglomerate with an education division, best known for brands such as Prentice Hall, Longman, Addison-Wesley. Ah, THAT Pearson. So you can see they’ve got a good ‘in’ to schools, and they appear to be pushing Fronter hard in to the primary sector. It’s being used for children as young as six, and this raises significant questions when it comes to security. Would you let your child use Facebook? Of course not; so why is Fronter, with its social media features any better?

Leaving aside whether it’s appropriate to introduce very young children to any form of social networking, a close look at the security aspects of any LMS is vital. Latterly I’ve been looking at Fronter, and this is used for examples in this article, but the comments apply to any LMS – they can all be configured in a dangerous way.

Fronter is obviously keen to allay concerns, and has just hired Logica (completed March 2010) to get it through ISO 27001. Fronter will doubtless wave this badge around saying “Okay – we’re now safe and secure to international standards”. This will be true, to at extent, but ISO-27001 is so vague it can mean anything. Like ISO-9000, it basically means it can be audited within the parameters set, and potential stakeholders can review the documentation and see if it meets their requirements. Even when these parameters are available, I doubt I’d be allowed to review it (Fronter – are you listening?)

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not knocking ISO-27001 any more than I’d knock ISO-9000. At least not per se. It’s a framework, and as such, can be used to promote good or to conceal evil. Neither do I question Fronter’s commitment to keep intruders out of its system, if for no other reason than because any breach would have a disastrous effect on its business. I’m as confident as I can be that they’re taking the matter very seriously indeed, as do any other serious LMS developers.

But the developers can’t make an LMS safe. It’s infrastructure might be secure, but its users are always going to be the weak link. Schools really don’t know about who has access to their LMS, or don’t care because it’s too difficult a problem to find out.

When your child reads something posted by another Fronter user, who actually wrote it? Much is made of ensuring that everyone in contact with children has a CRB check, but a Fronter account for a child is given out to its parents with no checks made on them whatsoever.

Have you ever wondered what the likelihood of a randomly selected parent failing a CRB check might be? Well I reckon it’s about 1 in 5; in other words not much better than 50:50 that one adult in the house has a criminal record of some sort. (Figures aren’t compiled; I have extrapolated this from an answer in Hansard 25 Apr 2008 : Column 2328W). Worrying? So How many are likely to be on the “Sex Offenders Register”? Currently the English notification system lists 48,000 adults. It’s widely realised that most don’t appear on this because they haven’t been caught, and dodgy teenagers don’t figure in the stats at all, but certainly exist. Projecting this to working age parents (or guardians) you end up with an average of about three sex offenders being parents at a school of 1000 pupils. In other words, you can say pretty safely that there are probably registered sex offenders able to control accounts on most Infant and Junior schools using an LMS.

This leaves schools with a bit of a dilemma. If parents realised that they children were using a social media site shared by CRB failures and sex offenders they’d insist the plug was pulled. But at the very least, schools need to ask for informed consent from the parents before exposing their children to this risk – or turn off the ability to communicate in the LMS software (the safe option) and simply use it for staff to pupil communication. What schools often claim is that their staff monitor all content and messages. This will be done with the best of intentions, but will it be kept up long-term and how effective will it be on a large volume of traffic? If you’ve ever moderated a forum, you’ll understand the difficulty. However, teachers are smart people and usually have a sixth sense about where to watch for trouble.

Monitoring is undoubtedly good thing compared to a free-for-all, but does fail to address the fact that multiple channels are often used for nefarious purposes. A message posted on the LMS might seem innocuous in itself, but could easily be key part of an external conversation. Anyone who thinks children don’t routinely use code words adults won’t understand simply doesn’t know children.

So far I have considered login details falling in to the lap of undesirable elements via children in the household. But supposing an unconnected local paedophile wished to target a LMS directly. Is this possible? Of course, and here’s a scenario to make the point.

A fair number of schools now use outsourced emailing systems such as ParentMail, inTouch and CallParents to contact parents, and may simply use the mechanism to distribute attached files rather than proper text messages in the email body. Parents tend to trust emails from these services as they believe they know the sender (i.e. the their child’s school), and are conditioned into opening file attachments. It’s trivially easy to forge a ParentMail email, sending any file attachment the attacker pleases. Stealing login-in credentials in such circumstances would be almost child’s play, but if a key logger was too much trouble then a phishing email should work just as well. Assuming some effort is being made to target a child, an email to the parents saying “Please click here to log in to Fronter”, using context information from the school’s web site and parent details from Facebook is trivially easy. I haven’t heard of this happening, but I can’t believe it hasn’t.

Assuming the LMS developer has any sense of responsibility or desire to stay in business, it’s pretty clear that the security measures against infiltration of a LMS such as Fronter depend on policy rather than technology. If children are allowed to exchange messages with each other the only thing that will stop an infiltrator will be the vigilance of the monitoring staff. Supervision whilst using the system, whilst at home and at school, is just common sense. But there are still technical issues to address.

Some LMS require certain insecure features to be enabled on web browsers, such as Java. For security reasons, many people have risky technologies disabled. You certainly wouldn’t allow them in a secure commercial environment, so why take the risk at home? And worse, how much more of a risk is it if you allow a naïve child to use client-side code? Yet this is exactly what schools using an LMS are asking parents to do – drop the security on their home computers to allow access to attractive interactive features. There’s probably little risk that the LMS will contain compromised code unless pupils are allowed to develop their own content, but it’s not impossible especially using a targeted attack.

An LMS is an attractive vehicle for delivering malware for various reasons. In junior schools particularly, the inexperience of the pupils could allow things to be activated that adults would normally be suspicious of. Also, there’s a temptation for the institution to consider the LMS part of the Intranet and give it trusted status on local endpoints, meaning anything injected in to the LMS is likely to run with trusted privileges even when the Internet is locked down. This isn’t logical – if the endpoint is vulnerable to Internet-based web pages and LMS users can upload content, it’s not actually any more secure.

Many LMS allow file uploads for assignment submission, which provides a route to compromise the PCs used by the academic staff. Given that criminals will have access to some pupil’s login details by virtue of the fact they’re also parents, uploading a trojan to a staff computer is a real threat. For example, Fronter reassures users on its web site that uploads are scanned using Clam-AV. Commendable, but they are inadvertently giving the criminals the intelligence needed to bypass this specific scanner.

Another issue with file uploads concerns endpoint security software. If the endpoint has been secured, file transfers from the browser or elsewhere will be disabled. In order to use the LMS, this often has to be globally enabled. For example, using Ranger to block file upload/download dialogues with Fronter appears impossible because it uses the generic object selector. Ranger detects the window title and either blocks it or lets it through for every web site. Discrimination isn’t possible.

Whilst I’ve used Fronter in many of these examples because it is to hand, I am talking about general issues of security when allowing young children to use an LMS. The developers of such systems take good care to make sure the platform is inherently secure, but dangers remain from at least two sources. Firstly, there may be only a thin veneer of control over who has access to the system if pupils have access outside of school. Secondly, in order to run an LMS it is often necessary to disable endpoint security measures in such a way that it becomes venerable to threats from wider sources.

Dangerous killer still behind wheel

Yesterday Tracy Johnson walked free from a court after driving into two cyclists at a roundabout and killing one of them; mother-of-three Sharon Corless.

Newspaper reports make much of the fact she was driving a particularly expensive Chelsea Tractor and had just come off a mobile phone. You get the picture – totally irresponsible on all levels. However, her defence claimed that she might have fainted, and the prosecution couldn’t prove she hadn’t – although their medical examination had been unable to recreate the conditions.

David Porter described the events for the prosecution:

“For reasons that defy any reasonable explanation, the defendant’s vehicle began to accelerate towards the roundabout. The vehicle began to drift from the carriageway and then collided with the verge and drove along the vergeway(sic) with the near side wheels on the verge.

“It travelled along the vergeway for approximately 50 metres. Having collided with the verge the vehicle then collided with Mrs Corless who was dragged underneath the wheels of the Range Rover. She suffered fatal injuries and died later in hospital.

“Moments later there was a second collision with Peter Corless, who was thrown clear of the vehicle but nevertheless sustained serious injuries.

“The vehicle then carried on to the roundabout where it collided with a further vehicle – a Peugeot which was being driven by a young lady with her daughter.

“Fortunately they suffered no injuries. The vehicle then collided and came to a stop with a lamp post on the roundabout itself.

“Witnesses behind the vehicle said at no stage did they see brake lights come one; rather it appeared to accelerate.

“The defendant emerged from the vehicle in a shocked and dazed condition saying something along the lines of ‘what’s happened.’ Moments later she was asking for her mobile telephone, which she later said was to call her partner.”

Now, from what I’ve been able to read about the court case, it is certainly possible she fainted. However the family whose mother was killed have thus been denied a proper trial to prove this, and anyone wealthy enough to employ a good lawyer can just keep driving for a bit after killing someone and then claim they’d fainted in the knowledge that it won’t even go to court.

Either she’s lying, or she isn’t, and we won’t ever get to find out. However, one thing is telling – she was not banned for driving. This woman claims she’s prone to randomly losing conscious, and by all accounts, is still behind a wheel. Holders of a driving license have a duty to report various medical conditions to the DVLA, including anything that causes loss of consciousness, so that their license can be revoked.

Chelsea Tractor of type used (stock photo)

So anyone in Mrs Johnson’s home town of Warrington spotting her behind the wheel would do well to call the police – she’s driving with a medical condition that makes her unsafe. She said so herself in court.

It may be that Mrs Johnson has surrendered her driving license; this wouldn’t make everything aright but would stop her looking guilty. I’d be pleased to hear from anyone who knows this to be the case.

Snow cycling

Today I finally had a go at snow cycling, as there’s a thaw on its way. It had to be done, and I set off across the snow-covered fields behind my garden.

Now I know why snow cycling isn’t popular as an extreme sport. It’s boring. If you peddle hard enough you can get a bit of wheel spin, but you have to try. Normal knobbly mountain bike tyres gave me a surprising amount of traction, even on sheet ice. Once moving you’re as stable as anything – no sliding sideways at all. I wasn’t expecting that. Deviating from a straight line when on sheet ice probably wasn’t going to be easy, but I though I’d leave the laws of physics unchallenged.

However, cycling in snow is too much like hard work; like trying to cycle through dry sand. I had thought the wheels would squash the snow flat with no trouble at all in much the same way as a heavy boot punches through the powder, but it really slows you down. It’s probably twice as fast as walking if you can cope with the looks you get that say “What’s that idiot doing riding a bike in these conditions?”. Luckily this doesn’t bother me.

The highest speed attained was 8mph, down hill with the wind behind me. I dare say I could have got more speed on a hard surface, but I was cycling through several inches of snow.

Apparently you can get special studded tyres and even snow chains for riding mountain bikes above the snow line – at least in the USA. I don’t see studs being much use on snow, but they’re bound to make difference on sheet ice.

So, while there’s still some snow around, get out there. I can’t guarantee you won’t hurt yourself but it’ll be a lot more stable than you might think.