The revolution the countryside needs: Christian Wolmar says Britain is lagging behind in setting up ' telecottages'
By CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
THE information technology revolution has left large swaths of rural Britain untouched.
The only computers in many villages are those owned by the teenage boys of the affluent to play their wham-bam games.
Ashley Dobbs, an engaging young entrepreneur, is setting out to change that by creating a nationwide network of ' telecottages'.
This clever name, with its neat evocation of new and old, describes a concept which was developed in Sweden and is spreading to rural areas across the world.
In Mr Dobbs's words, a telecottage is' a room in a village filled with computer communications that can be used by local people to learn and work '.
The equipment consists of, perhaps, four word processors, a modem, a laser printer able to produce artwork-quality output, a fax and a photocopier.
Software programmes for desk-top publishing, word processing, accounting and business planning are also essential.
Mr Dobbs, who is chairman of Telecottages UK, warns possible users not to get bogged down with the technology: ' The equipment is a tool to overcome what needs to be done.
People mustn't think that because there's a computer, they've got to think of a use for it. '
He reckons there are no shortages of possible uses  farmers can use it to do their accounts, women with child-care responsibilities can work in their own time on the word processors, publicity material for local craftsmen can be produced and so on.
This may sound utopian, but it has been borne out by the experience of existing telecottages.
So far about 100 have been established, mainly in Scandinavia but also in Japan and several third world countries.
As the network expands, so do the uses.
The first was opened in the village of Vemdalen in the remote forests of Sweden in September 1985.
The impact, according to Henning Albrechsten, president of Telecottages International who has been involved in their development since the outset, was immediate.
' By holding open meetings for children and having the telecottage above the local store, people of all walks of life came in - small-scale entrepreneurs and their spouses, shop assistants, craftspeople and children.
Now, 15 per cent of the village regularly uses the telecottage and at least 20 per cent has taken courses there. '
Britain is lagging behind.
No telecottages have been established, but there are several initiatives in the offing.
The most advanced is a plan for five in the north of Scotland which will be funded by the Highlands and Islands Development Board and British Telecom.
Colin Pavey of British Telecom hopes that they will be running by the end of the year.
' Two would be business-orientated and three would be community-orientated and located in schools.
We are most interested in the idea of networking, sharing skills such as translation and using them for distance learning. '
Telephone cables in the region are being upgraded to ensure they are capable of handling faxes.
Mr Dobbs's more unlikely allies are the Women's Institutes.
Most of the workers in telecottages and many of the users are women.
He says: ' In villages there are many women with skills who aren't using them because of child-care problems.
But they are interested in working.
Users of telecottages are given the key and people can use them at any time, which means that women can come in during the evening, early in the morning or whatever. '
He is working on a scheme with the National Federation of WI to organise a competition to celebrate next year's 75th anniversary by offering 10 telecottages as prizes for its 9,000 branches and he is hoping the WI will establish a pilot telecottage near its college in Denman, Oxfordshire.
While telecottages should become self-financing once established, they do need initial subsidy.
The cost of providing the start-up equipment is in the order of 10,000 and Mr Dobbs thinks space is not much of a problem: ' There's usually the village hall or an empty shop. '
Henning Albrechsten reckons that it takes three years for a telecottage to be able to function without subsidy.
In Scandinavia, with their mixed economies, money is always available, after a bit of persuasion, from both local and central government.
In Britain, the tight financial regime imposed on local councils and the reluctance of central government to take on any new expenditure makes it necessary to seek funds from the private sector.
The only government support so far has been a recommendation by the Rural Development Commission, part of the Department of the Environment, to establish a pilot scheme.
Mr Dobbs sighs: ' This is a typically British bureaucratic response.
It's been proved elsewhere that they work.
We don't need pilots, we need telecottages. '
As for the private sector, while BT may be happy to provide pump priming for five telecottages in the north of Scotland, it is not about to bankroll a nationwide network.
Nor, it seems, is anyone else.
There is more at stake here than just bringing boxes of sophisticated equipment to remote areas.
As Mr Dobbs, who runs a country house restoration business from his home in Micheldever, Hampshire, says: ' Villages are good places to live and work.
The village is a fantastic institution and they make people happier. '
But the villages are dying, becoming suburbs or dormitories where few people work but many sleep.
Employment in agriculture, still the main rural industry, fell from over a million in the mid-Sixties to under 100,000 now.
The aim of telecottages is to create well-paid, flexible employment which will provide new jobs and make existing rural industries more competitive.
The emphasis on high wages is important.
Villages are expensive to live in and if they are to become vibrant communities again, local people must be able to earn enough to be able to continue living in them.
There is a wider impact, too.
The abstract talk of commuting by rail or road being replaced by information technology finds a concrete expression in the idea of telecottages.
Once people overcome their fears about computers and begin to use them in telecottages, they acquire their own equipment.
Many may eventually be able to work from home rather than commute to an office.
Henning Albrechsten says: ' Modern information technology has given people in remote regions the opportunity to overcome their worst handicap; their distance from the centres of learning and development. '
He sees them as not only strengthening small communities, but also as actually beginning to reverse the population flows from the countryside to the towns.
Britain, with its growing traffic problems, seems an ideal place for the onset of this revolution.
Despite Mr Dobbs's tireless efforts, this is another revolution which Britain is likely to be viewing from the sidelines.
The busy sex life of the nice male: Chris Barnard explains why patting children on the head could help a man curry favour with their mother
By CHRIS BARNARD
I REMEMBER once seeing a small girl remove a tin of soup from halfway down a display stack in a supermarket.
The predictable, and very satisfying, result attracted the attention of a nearby assistant, who strode towards the offending infant with an expression of undisguised anger on her face.
Suddenly she caught sight of the child's mother.
Immediately, her expression and pace of approach changed and instead of the lambasting, or worse, she had seemed about to deliver, she gave the child a tolerant smile and began to pick up the scattered cans.
Most of us have experienced similar examples of such ' audience effects' on behaviour: playing a game to perfection (or otherwise) when the team selector is present, for instance.
What you do depends very much on who might be watching, often with good reason.
Prudently taking cognisance of onlookers also turns out to be important in the social behaviour of other primates.
Frans de Waal, in his book Chimpanzee Politics, relates a number of instances among groups of captive chimps.
One of the most striking concerned a male called Yeroen which was hurt in a fight with another male, Nikkie.
For nearly a week after the injury, whenever he was in Nikkie's field of view, Yeroen would hobble pitifully, generating an air of pain and dejection.
As soon as he moved out of Nikkie's view, however, his demeanour changed and he walked normally without discomfort.
What Yeroen hoped to gain by his play-acting is not clear, though it may have helped to defuse further aggression.
What is clear is that his behaviour was geared to the available audience.
Some recent work on green vervet monkeys shows that audience effects can be important in other contexts in which their functional significance is a little easier to identify.
Anne Keddy Hector, Robert Seyfarth and Michael Raleigh at the Universities of California and Pennsylvania have been studying parental behaviour among captive vervets to see if males' parental ability affected the females' choice of mate.
Their argument was that a male's potential quality as a parent might be important because, in many species of Old World monkeys, males form strong protective relationships with females and their young, which are crucial in reducing the amount of harassment and competition the young suffer from other members of the group.
In a number of species, bonds between males and infants within a group may influence the chances of males mating with certain females.
In baboons and Japanese macaques mothers resuming their sexual cycle are more likely to mate with males who have formed a relationship with their offspring.
Demonstrating parental behaviour towards infants may be a ruse by which low-ranking males are able to gain mating opportunities.
If this is true, then males should respond differently towards an infant depending on whether or not its mother is around to be impressed.
Keddy Hector, Seyfarth and Raleigh tested this in an ingenious experiment.
They looked at the behaviour of a male and infant under one of three conditions.
In one, the infant's mother was placed behind a clear screen so that the male and infant could see her and she could see them.
In a second, the screen was replaced with a one-way mirror so that the mother could see the interacting pair but could not herself be seen.
In the final condition, the mother was hidden behind a metal screen so that she could neither see nor be seen by the pair in the observation room.
After half an hour in each case, the mother was released to join her infant and the accompanying male.
The experiment revealed a complex interaction between male and female dominance rank and visibility of the mother in determining male responses to infants and female behaviour towards males.
Males of all dominance classes (alpha, subordinate and newly introduced) were less aggressive towards infants when the mother was in sight.
Alpha males were consistently friendlier than others towards male infants but were particularly nice if there was a chance that the infant was their own.
Subordinate males, on the other hand, were friendlier towards the infants of high-ranking females, perhaps because their own rank might increase if they managed to associate themselves with such females.
They were also friendlier towards female infants and those not fathered by the current alpha male.
Newly introduced males were the least friendly to infants.
If being nice to infants is a way of currying favour with females, the benefits ought to be discernible in the way males were treated once the observer females were let loose.
This seemed to be the case.
Overall, females were friendliest and least aggressive towards alpha males, regardless of their treatment of infants.
Since females reap substantial protective benefits from associating with alpha males, this is perhaps not surprising.
When it came to subordinate males, however, there was a strong relationship between how nice males had been to infants and how likely they were to be attacked by the female: nicer males fared better.
In the one-way mirror treatment, when males were unaware they were being watched, they were more aggressive towards infants than in the clear screen treatment and as a result they received a drubbing from the female.
The experiment thus suggests that while alpha males can trade on their superior competitive ability to obtain mates, subordinates may have to wheedle their way into favour.
Judiciously patting junior on the head when mum is watching may be a useful way of doing it.
Dr Chris Barnard works in the Department of Zoology at Nottingham University.
Cool solutions for hot climates: David Spark looks at tropical temperature controls for vaccines
By DAVID SPARK
WHEN smallpox was wiped out by a campaign led by the World Health Organisation, the campaigners were fortunate in that smallpox vaccine remains effective even when stored at relatively uncontrolled temperatures.
Vaccines against measles, polio, whooping cough and other killing infections prevalent in the third world are much more sensitive, however.
On behalf of WHO and Unicef, the Consumer Research Laboratory (CRL) at Harpenden, Herts, has set up a special facility to test the equipment used to carry and store vaccines.
CRL is allocating the equivalent of one person working full-time to the programme.
The CRL's main task is testing products for the Consumers' Association, publisher of Which? magazine.
Since 1978, it has also tested equipment used in the ' cold chain'  the succession of insulated containers which ensures that vaccines and other sensitive materials reach their destinations, often isolated villages without electricity, in good condition, on which WHO's immunisation campaign depends.
In 1983, CRL helped to set up a test facility at the University of Cali in Colombia.
With more equipment coming on the market, WHO decided that Cali should concentrate on long-term research and that a full-time test facility was needed in Europe.
Other laboratories test particular products, but CRL is probably the only one which can cover the full range of equipment needed in the cold chain.
The range is wide.
Manufacturers dispatch vials of vaccine  along with frozen carbon dioxide for cooling  in large, insulated cartons which must be tested for both strength and the efficiency of the insulation.
From the cartons, the vials are unloaded into freezers and refrigerators.
The Harpenden test facility will show how these stand up to the high temperatures of the tropics.
Thermocouples at critical points in each fridge or other piece of equipment will show, through a computer print-out, how the temperature varies inside it.
Other items on test include the cold boxes in which vaccines are carried to villages, sterilisers for the syringes, stoves for the sterilisers and thermometers.
The outcome of the tests is to be a book of approved equipment, with details of performance, published by WHO and Unicef.
An obvious snag is the power cuts which are common in third world countries.
The CRL tackled this problem a few years ago, developing ice-lined refrigerators: tubes of water surrounding the fridge compartment freeze; if the power fails, the tubes keep the vaccines cool until all the ice has melted.
Designs are now being considered for small ice-lined cabinets for doctors' surgeries, so that doctors can have vaccines at hand to immunise any child who comes for treatment.
A drop in voltage can be more serious than a power cut.
Below a given voltage, the compressor in a refrigerator burns itself out.
So there must be a voltage control unit to cut the power supply if the voltage fails, and these units must also be tested.
Ken Mills, manager of external projects at Harpenden, says that in some developing countries the control units themselves were blowing up.
It was thought that people tapping into the power supply illegally were sending high-voltage ' spikes' down the line.
So control units must be designed to withstand these spikes.
' We have to create the spikes here, to see how the units withstand them, ' he says.
Last year, WHO presented CRL with another problem: disposing of used syringes.
' You can't just dig a hole and bury them.
After use, the needles can be infected.
Kids dig them up and can scratch themselves. '
CRL worked with a box-maker, Cundell Decorprint of Somercotes, Derbyshire, who produced a box in which discarded plastic syringes can be burned.
The box had to be flat-packed but assembled without glue; it had to be portable and reasonably waterproof.
When the box is full, you drop in a burning match.
The plastic of the syringes catches fire and the fire kills any infection on the needles.
Science and Technology Viewpoint: Checks for man-made genetic time bombs
By TOM WILKIE
PLUTONIUM, more than any other element in the periodic table, is capable of arousing strong public emotion, bordering at times on hysterical fear and loathing.
Yet plutonium has been intensively studied, is well understood, and it decays away into harmlessness with a half-life of about 240,000 years.
Consider instead, living creatures.
They interact with the natural world in complex, ill-understood ways  ecology is the youngest science.
Individuals may die, but plants, animals, and micro-organisms, are capable of reproducing and increasing their numbers.
It is surprising therefore, that there has been so little public interest in this country in proposals to release into the environment living, man-made creatures.
Genetic engineering has reached a point of such sophistication that there are clear benefits to be gained by releasing from the laboratory living organisms upon which have been conferred characteristics they could never have acquired through the normal processes of evolution or selective breeding.
For example, it is possible to snip through the genes of the vaccinia viruses (one of which is the basis for the vaccine against smallpox) and stitch in some threads of DNA from the rabies virus.
To the immune systems of the animals that it may infect, the resultant mutant virus will look as if it is rabies and so will trigger antibodies and generally stimulate immunity against the disease.
But because the virus is' really ' vaccinia, the infected animal will suffer none of the ill-effects of rabies while becoming proof against infection by any ' real ' rabies virus.
We stand to derive immense benefits from such releases of genetically engineered organisms into the environment  providing they do what we expect them to.
But there is a risk.
What if, by some unforeseen mischance, the vaccinia-rabies hybrid turned into an organism that actually spread rabies - a disease that has always been comparatively difficult to catch  with smallpox-like contagion?
This scenario is unlikely in the extreme.
But research over the past 40 years or so has revealed some great surprises in the natural world.
Genes - for resistance to antibiotics, for example  can be swapped between micro-organisms of completely different species naturally, in the wild.
There are almost certainly other surprises out there which, by definition, we can not speak about today.
We must try to ensure that, as a result of our own genetic manipulation, they do not turn out to be unpleasant surprises.
So the civil servants in the Department of the Environment are to be congratulated.
They have recognised that the laws to protect our environment need to be extended and revised to cope with the situation genetic engineering presents.
They have, sensibly, realised that the benefits from proceeding with caution outweigh the risks and there is no case for banning the practice outright.
They have recommended that anyone who intends to release a genetically manipulated organism into the environment should first seek consent of some ' competent authority ' which must be satisfied that the proposed release is as safe as reasonably practicable.
Release without consent will be a crime, regardless of the innocuousness or otherwise of the organism.
So far, so good.
But the civil servants have been vague when it comes to the detail of who is to be the competent authority, who is to foot the bill for its work (and any extra studies it may require before giving consent), and how much of its deliberations are to be made public.
Moreover, it seems as if the Thatcherite revolution has still not penetrated the dark towers of Marsham Street.
For there is no mention of how capitalism or the consumer can play their proper roles in determining the future of genetic engineering.
This is a serious omission, redolent of the old habits of thought that if only the public will trust Whitehall, all will be well.
One of the first commercial products to derive from this biotechnology is likely to be genetically engineered tomatoes.
By manipulation of the tomato's genetic blueprint, scientists can alter the rate at which it ripens.
This reduces the wastage due to damage in the journey from greenhouse to supermarket shelf.
There is a dual benefit to the consumer: because there is less wastage, the genetically engineered tomatoes ought to be cheaper; and they ought to taste better too.
Well then.
Let the consumer make the choice.
Let us make sure that the law to be put before Parliament this autumn requires genetically engineered products to be clearly labelled as such.
All the submissions to the Government from the biotechnology industry have called for greater public information about genetic engineering, so no one can object to giving consumers the chance to make informed choices as they push their supermarket trolleys.
It is also right that consumers should pay the full price of the advantages they will enjoy as a result of genetic engineering.
The market has a mechanism for ensuring even that the potential risk of damage to the environment can be costed.
It is called insurance.
Before the ' competent authority ' sanctions any release into the environment it should stipulate that the releaser has to take out an insurance policy that will cover it for any consequential damage to the environment and necessary clean-up operations.
The cost of the premiums would, of course, be passed on to consumers in the price of the products.
After all, I am not allowed to drive a motor car without having proved my ability to a ' competent authority '  the driving test examiner.
But once I have passed my test, I am not allowed out on the road without insurance.
If such stipulations are made for so mundane a practice as motoring, they would seem to be reasonable precautions for protecting our environment for the rest of time from possible damage by man-made creatures.
How hot summers brought us stripped pines: Scientists now believe a dramatic loss of conifer needles which struck West German forests may have been caused by the weather, rather than pollution.
Martyn Kelly reports
By MARTYN KELLY
IN THE mid-1980s press stories about coniferous trees in German forests losing their needles were at their peak.
Half a decade on, global warming has become the biggest environment story.
However, the cause of tree blight has remained the subject of intense speculation, being variously attributed to ' acid rain', ozone, a mystery disease, or any combination of these.
But now scientists believe the root cause of Germany's problems could simply be drier weather, albeit aggravated by acid deposition and by the growing tendency for forests, like farmland, to be planted as monocultures.
In German forests, there was a consistent pattern of damage to Norway spruce, the main species affected, beginning with a yellowing of the upper surface of older needles and progressing to the death of the needle and a marked thinning of the crown of the tree as dead needles dropped off.
The colour change from green to yellow suggested that the key may lie in chlorophyll, the compound responsible for photosynthesis.
They followed this up to show that affected leaves had lower concentrations of magnesium, an important part of the chlorophyll molecule.
The disease theory was discounted early on by Reinhart Huttl of the University of Freiburg, who grafted affected shoots on to otherwise healthy trees.
The mystery virus, it was thought, would spread into the healthy tree, causing that too to become diseased.
In fact, the opposite was the case; the grafts became green.
If disease was not responsible, then perhaps the answer lay with a physical cause such as air pollution.
There were two contenders for this: acid deposition (in all its various forms) and ozone.
Bernard Ulrich and colleagues at the University of Gottingen had proposed that deposition of sulphur and nitrogen compounds (originating from industrial activity and power generation) led to the release of aluminium from minerals in the soil.
This, in turn, was toxic to the tree roots responsible for uptake of nutrients such as magnesium.
Meanwhile, in laboratories in Essen, Bernard Prinz was suggesting that forest decline was caused by damage to foliage by ozone, another gas produced as a by-product of industry.
However, Siegfried Fink, a colleague of Huttl at Freiburg, found that needles exhibiting the symptoms of forest decline showed changes initially in the vascular cells of needles, which transport nutrients from the roots.
From here, damage spread to the cells responsible for photosynthesis.
A needle exposed to gaseous pollutants such as ozone, on the other hand, showed signs of damage first in the more exposed photosynthetic cells and only later in the better-protected vascular tissues.
Scientists working for Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board also found flaws in the experimental techniques used by Prinz and his colleagues.
The Germans used a machine which converted oxygen in air into the ozone which they used for their experiments.
However, Drs Keith Brown and Mike Roberts found that nitric acid was produced from atmospheric nitrogen at the same time and that this was responsible for most of the damage.
When they repeated their experiment with ozone produced from pure oxygen they found very little effect.
Mike Roberts and colleagues at the CEGB's research laboratories now think that air pollution plays only a minor role after all (Forestry, vol 62, pp 179-222).
They agree that yellowing needles are caused by magnesium deficiency.
However, they are not convinced that the primary cause of this is toxic concentrations of aluminium released into the soil as acidity increased.
Instead they see low concentrations of magnesium as a natural phenomenon exacerbated by air pollution.
The prime cause, they believe, was a succession of dry summers in the mid-1970s.
Drought resulted in decreased root growth and slower breakdown of soil litter, an important source of magnesium for forest trees.
A further factor complicating the story is the trend towards monoculture of timber trees such as spruce.
This increases soil acidity, and encourages trees to form shallow roots, which are less efficient and more prone to the effects of drought.
It was a slowing down of the spread of forest decline in the late 1980s that first pointed the CEGB scientists towards climate as the cause.
In 1984, foresters found that 20 per cent of the Norway spruce in West Germany's forests had lost more than a quarter of their needles.
By 1988 this had dropped to about 15 per cent of spruce, and other species such as pine and fir showed similar improvements.
In other words, the symptoms were at their worst during the hot, dry summers of the early Eighties and started to improve in subsequent wet summers.
It is, cynics might say, exactly the conclusion one would expect from scientists in the pay of the CEGB.
However, Mike Roberts, now director of the Natural Environment Research Council's Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (South), is quick to point out that acid deposition does exacerbate the problem, in particular by washing magnesium from an already nutrient-poor soil.
Deposition of nitric acid in particular may contribute to the equation as a fertiliser as well as a pollutant per se.
This is because the increased supply of nitrogen may encourage tree growth at a faster rate than the amount of magnesium in the soil can support.
The mechanism which Roberts proposes might be expected to work anywhere that spruce is grown.
However, forest decline was far more extensive in Germany and continental Europe than, for example, in Britain and Norway.
This he attributes to our oceanic climate.
Proximity to the Atlantic means rainfall in Britain contains quite a lot of dissolved salts from the sea.
So although the wet climate in the west of Britain causes more magnesium to be washed from the soil than in Germany, this amount is far less than that added to the soil each year from rainfall.
The conundrums surrounding forest decline were many.
Why was it so regional in character?
Why did pollution-sensitive lichens survive on affected trees?
Demonstrating climate to be the primary cause clears up many such problems.
At the same time, it gives foresters and the power industry a much clearer picture of how their activities are affecting the trees.
Ironically, Mike Roberts is one person who welcomed the drought earlier this summer.
The extra stress that it will have caused to forest trees in Britain and the continent will provide one of the first tests of his new ideas.
