Petition for a Second Referendum on Leaving the EU

Thr Leave campaign was not at all sure of winning the EU Referendum, and in May 2016, before the vote, one Leave supporter set up a petition on the government website calling for a re-run if certain conditions were not met, ironically by citing an EU regulation.

EU referendum Rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum. We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum.

Following the Leave campaign's narrow majority in the referendum, this was discovered by Remain voters and, since the wording made no mention of a link to the Leave campaign, decided to use it to register their anger and dismay. This became the most successful petition so far, with 3,604,489 votes registered on the 27 June (just 4 days after the 23 June vote) rising to 4,014,235 just two days later. On 9 July, with petition votes at 4,126, 424, the Goverment response was that there would be no re-run as the Referendum Act had received Royal Assent with no threshold or minumum turnout required (in retrospect a disastrous mistake).

As the petition continued to receive votes, a Parliamentary debate was scheduled for 5 September (sadly this was held in a small meeting room attended by a small number of MPs rather than a full debate by the House, and was only broadcast on Parliament TV not broadcast by BBC or ITV). The debate came to the same conclusion as the government response. At the time of the debate, votes had risen to 4,144,422 and though smaller numbers were voting each day, people continued to register their feelings about the result, so that when the petition closed on 25 November, a total of 4,150,259 people had supported the petition.

END

Changing Mobile Phones, Tablets or Computers?

Before you pass on or sell an old device, make sure you clear it of all pesonal information.

iPhone or iPad with an iCloud account? Sign out before getting rid of the device. Go to Settings > iCloud, then scroll to bottom and tap Sign Out. Press Sign Out again from the warning displayed on screen.

Remove SIM card (and MicroSD card if you use one). Run a factory reset; this will remove any files stored on the device, and erase any accounts such as Facebook or Twitter.

• On iPhone or iPad. Go to Settings > General and scroll down and press Reset. From here, select Erase All Content And Settings. If you have a passcode on the phone, you will need to enter that before the resest can take place.
• On Google. Go to Settings > Backup & Reset. From here, select Factory Data Reset, then Reset Phone on the screen displayed.
• On Windows. Go to Settings app and select System. Choose About, and press Reset Your Phone to make a factory reset.
• On a Windows tablet. Go to Settings > Update & Security > Recovery (in options on left hand side of screen). Under Reset This PC, tap Get Started, then Erase Everything from the options displayed.

Computers with hard drives or solid state drives (SSD). These have a type of memory that cannot be wiped as easily as smartphones and tablets. You should remove the hard drive before selling or recycling and smash it with a hammer to ensure your personal data stored on it cannot be retrieved. You can buy a replacement hard drive, or state that the device does not have one when you sell it.

Feature in Good Housekeeping, May 2016

Bacteriophages

Growing numbers of bacteria are becoming resistant to our most powerful drugs, evolving into new strains – often called ‘superbugs’ – that we can no longer kill. Already drug resistance kills over 700,000 people globally every year and could cause an extra 10 million deaths a year by 2050. A completely different approach to killing bacteria is to use viruses.

Naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages (from the Greek meaning ‘bacteria-eaters’) are harmless to people but lethal to bacteria. When a phage encounters its prey, it latches onto the outside and injects its own DNA inside the cell. This reproduces inside the bacterium and then the ‘daughter phages’ burst through the cell walls, before latching onto more bacteria and repeating the cycle until all the bacteria have been killed – and the infection has been dealt with.

First discovered by two different scientists – the Briton Frederick Twort in 1915 and the French-Canadian Felix d’Herelle in 1917, but it was d’Herelle who pioneered phage therapy. Abandoned in the west when antibiotics were discovered and came into common use in the 1940s. In Stalin’s Soviet Republic however, access to antibiotics was limited, so phage therapy continued and a phage therapy centre founded in Tbilisi, Georgia, became a leading centre for phage research.

Unlike antibiotics, which target a broad range of bacteria, each phage kills only one type or strain, so scientists begin by taking bacterial samples from patients and finding a phage from the lab that can kill that particular bacteria. It is much harder for bacteria to develop resistance to phages due to their diversity, their ability to evolve and their sheer abundance. Bacteriophages are actually the most abundant life form on earth – there are far more phages than there are stars in the visible universe. So if bacteria evolve to resist a particular phage, the scientists simply turn to their extensive phage library, or to nature, to find another. They also create what are known as ‘phage cocktails’ – mixtures of different phages that attack bacteria from different angles and make it much more difficult for them to develop resistance.

Currently phage therapy is not approved or regulated in the west and this is the next big challenge. The good news is that the first large scale, western standard clinical trials have now begun, so hopefully in future we see this incredible 100 year old therapy returning to Europe to help us beat the superbugs.

Related links

• George Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages, Microbiology and Virology (www.eliava-institute.org)
• Phagoburn – European clinical study on phage therapy (www.eliava-institute.org)
• Phage research at the University of Leicester (www2.le.ac.uk)

[My note: The pharmaceutical industry has little or no interest in bacteriophages as they cannot be patented.]

Could viruses called bacteriophages be the answer to the antibiotic crisis? BBC 2 Trust me, I'm a Doctor, Series 5, Episode 1 (1 Sep. 2016). 

Loud TV Background Music

Every now and again the Radio Times has letters from readers expressing their problems with overloud background music to documentaries. Here is a response from a reader describing a possible reason for the problem.

The writer works in the field of Applied Psychology, specialising in speech intelligibility,and was previously a programme maker in both TV and radio. "A great deal of robust scientific evidence indicates that theproblem lies with sound processing in the Freeview service, watched in 19 million UK homes. Viewers can hear this ... by comparing programme sound on Freeview to the sound of the same programme played on BBC iPlayer. There is a solution - or at least a simple step forward the broadcasters could take. Their people working on the sound balance should listen to the results of their work after it has gone through the Freeviewprocess. Better still, they could do it without a script in front of them, which is how people listen at home. I have raised this before with the BBC and would like to think that those responsible would address the issue." Chris Rees.

Letter in Radio Times, issue 27 Aug. to 2 Sept. 2016

Rule of Three

Fast, Cheap, Quality - pick any two.

So if you want something fast and good quality, it won't be cheap. If it needs to be cheap and fast, you won't get best quality. And cheap but good quality means it will take time.

Source: I first came across this saying as a library cataloguer but have since seen it applied in other situations.