Our Technology Category
Since its adoption as part of the Rio Declaration in 1998, and its repeated use by the European Commission in various fields, the Precautionary Principle has quickly become lodged in the language of business and consumerism as one of those phrases that everybody pretends to understand but probably cannot precisely define.
The most common definition of the Precautionary Principle is as follows: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.
There is a principle in German environmental legislation known as the “Vorsorgeprinzip” (principle of prevention), which is applied to situations where there is a known cause-effect relationship and therefore a clearly defined risk. This is not the same thing. The Precautionary principle does not, as is sometimes implied, mean that industry must provide evidence that a product or process is “risk-free” for it to be accepted or licenced. Such a situation would mean an end to any innovation at all, and the European Commission is well aware of this. But it does suggest that reasonable doubt could be enough to justify the application of the approach. By the same token it should also follow that reasonable evidence should be enough to avoid it, though this happens far less often.
There is a continuing risk that the precautionary principle is becoming a victim of its own rather meticulous application. In this sense a considerable extension of the precautionary principle is happening simply because of instances in which the public demonstrates non-scientific concern about a controversial product.
In supporting the Precautionary Principle, we must be aware that the device should always be, as the European Commission proposes, proportionate, coherent, temporary, non-discriminatory and should always be based on as scientific a risk assessment as possible.
It is a fact of life that there will always be some scientists prepared to suggest that practically anything could constitute a risk to people, consumers or society as a whole. It is not a fact of life that regulators, politicians or other public officials have to believe them.
The Precautionary Principle is a good one and is of considerable benefit to society and consumers. The industry and those who regulate in good faith must continue to co-operate to ensure that the principle remains relevant and appropriate and that it is not used as an excuse for restriction or prohibition. There is certainly no shortage of official and authoritative channels for these options.
“What’s more dangerous, pesticides or horse manure?” The answer may surprise. Researchers await the first human death from pesticide residues, fifty years after DDT was introduced and thirty years after its use was banned in the United States, but horse manure is claiming lives daily through the bacterial contamination of organic food.
We take our health for granted and it is natural that we do. We do not examine the whys and wherefores of living longer, on average, than our grandparents and their grandparents, but with a current life expectation of between 75 and 80 for the average European, no less than 30 years have been added to this average total during the course of the 20th century. It’s a miracle of science, so they say.
If it is, then science has been regularly and consistently performing miracles on our behalf for several generations. Some might say even here that it has been playing God. What right have scientists to indulge in research that will result in people living longer using ‘artificial’ drugs and medicines? Modern pharmaceuticals, as well as processed food, have been stretching our life expectancy despite the fact that we did not directly ask for it.
What did people do before pasteurisation? What did people do before fluoride was added to water?, before the widespread use of food additives, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides? What did people do before penicillin, iodine, chlorine?
Well, to be completely and brutally accurate, they died, often wracked by a very painful disease such as TB, rickets, smallpox, polio or some other disease now extremely rare in the developed world. It’s an uncomfortable but telling fact, informing us that science has indeed made major strides on our behalf in this century and that virtually all of these have benefited humanity and especially human health, in one way or another.
There has been a reaction to many of these advances. Organic farming, in particular, is just such a reaction in the most precise sense. Before the introduction of pesticides and other synthetic additions to the crops, all farming was organic, in the sense that organic matter was used for crop protection and fertilizer.
There has been controversy about the degree of toxicity in organic crops. Organic farmers have been forced onto the defensive and have stated that organic produce is no more toxic that conventional produce. This may often be the case but I doubt it as a general rule. Many will be surprised to hear that organic farming can be toxic at all but therein lies one of the confusions that beset this debate and that makes new agricultural technology so easy to criticise. I have no objection to organic farming at all. But I would not insist upon feeding it to my children. Here is why.
Essentially, organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. Animal manure is the biggest reservoir of the bacteria that are making so many people ill.
In truth, until the last few years the threat of food-borne bacteria was relatively mild in the U.S. It was prudent to refrigerate one’s food and to wash one’s hands before preparing food or eating, and those simple procedures kept food-borne illnesses to a minimum. On occasion, neglect of these rules would cause a family to suffer severe stomach aches. And every year a few weak individuals — the very young, the very old, or those who were already quite ill — would die from exposure to food-borne bacteria.
As these lethal new bacteria spread, organic foods have become a more risky food choice.
Organic and “natural” food consumers also face an increased risk of illness from toxins produced by fungi — and some of these toxins are carcinogenic. Refusing to use artificial pesticides, organic farmers allow their crop fields to suffer more damage from insects and rodents, which creates openings through which fungi can enter the fruits and seeds. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly tests samples of various foods for such dangers, and it routinely finds high levels of these natural toxins in organically grown produce. It found, for instance, that organic crops have higher rates of infestation by aflatoxin, one of the most virulent carcinogens know to man.
The organic-food sector stresses the natural production of foods and beverages — even to the point of refusing to pasteurize milk and fruit juices. As a result, many people become seriously ill after consuming products they mistakenly believe are purer than other foods. For instance, in 1996 E. coli 0157 sickened more than seventy people who contracted it from unpasteurized apple juice produced by the Odwalla Juice Company. One young girl in Colorado died because of this. Odwalla was fined more than $1 million in the case and now pasteurizes its juice. But more than 1,500 other companies still cater to the “natural means raw” idea by selling unpasteurized beverages that can prove deadly.
Even without pesticides and pasteurization, producers could render their organic and natural foods safe through irradiation. Irradiation uses low levels of gamma radiation to kill bacteria, and the process also preserves the freshness of foods such as strawberries and chicken. But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently proposed an organic-food standard that would have allowed irradiation, the plan drew more than 200,000 angry protests from organic farmers and caterers.
According to recent data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC), people who eat organic and “natural” foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157: H7). This new E. coli is attacking tens of thousands of people per year, all over the world. It is causing permanent liver and kidney damage in many of its victims.
“Natural food” proponents claim that organic farming is “earth-friendly,” but it’s not. The ugly secret of organic farming is that its yields are only about half as high as those of mainstream farmers. Approximately one-third of the average organic farm is not planted to marketable crops at all; it is planted to green manure crops (such as clover) to build up the nitrogen fertility of the soil depleted by the previous crop. If the organic farmers gave up animal manure as a nitrogen source, the percentage of land they keep in green manure crops would have to become even higher. Mainstream farmers take their nitrogen from the air, through an industrial process that requires no land to be taken from nature. Also, the organic farmers suffer higher losses from destruction by pests. They expect it. Books on organic farming tell their readers to live with it.
For all these reasons, widespread organic farming is simply not a viable option at this time, unless you can afford it. The first consequence of a global shift to organic farming would be the plowdown of at least six-million square miles of wildlife habitat to make up for the lower yields of organic production. That is more than the total land area of the United States.
Agriculture already takes up 36 percent of the world’s land surface. (All the world’s cities cover only 1.5 percent.) A world with a peak population of 8.5 billion affluent people in 2050 will need at least 2.5 times as much farm output as we have today.
In fact, the worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea are leading the biggest surge in demand for meat and milk the world has ever seen. It is now probably too late to save wildlands by preventing people from acquiring a taste for meat and milk, and there is certainly no sign of mass conversions to vegetarianism around the globe. It is becoming uncomfortably likely that disasters will have to happen before the world wakes up to the realisation that organic farming takes us further away, not closer, to sustainability and feeding the world’s hungry millions.
If the world does not triple the yields on the high-quality land currently in farming, we will pay the price not in human famine but in forests and wild meadows cleared to produce more meat, milk, and produce.
Giving up pesticides would mean the certain destruction of millions of square miles of wildlands, much of it in the species-rich tropics. Because much of the world’s biodiversity is in those lands, a move toward widespread organic farming would cost nature far more than the careful use of today’s safe, narrowly targeted pesticides, high-powered seeds, and factory-produced fertilizers.
To most of us agriculture is a deeply conservative sector, inspiring notions of constancy rather than progress, of stability and assurance in a shifting and uncertain world. That ploughman seems to have been plodding home wearily for generations before and since the image was so magnificently evoked by Thomas Gray.
For urban and sub-urban dwellers, agriculture can also present a confusing impression: of muck and machinery counterbalanced by laboratories, white coats and test tubes.
This dissonant impression makes the sector seem complicated. In turn, it produces misunderstandings in the media as with the general public. The impression needs to be challenged. We could start with the erroneous prevailing assumption that our food is generally of lower quality now than fifty years ago because much of it is grown with the help of synthetic chemicals.
The astonishing fact about agriculture in the developed world over the last few decades is the unprecedented increase that has taken place in both quality and quantity, increases that would have been impossible had we rejected the chance of using all currently available agricultural technologies.
With an area of farmland more or less unchanged, production per acre has trebled in most areas in the past couple of generations with the remarkable result globally that despite a doubling of the world’s population, the same acreage of land feeds double the amount of people. In 1950 the world’s 611 million hectares of cropland produced 692 million tons of grain. By 2000, the world planted 700 million hectares of cropland producing over 2,000 million tons of grain. In other words, in just 50 years, three times less land is required to produce 100 tonnes of wheat. Without crop protection, the production of the six most important crops in the world (rice, wheat, barley, corn, soya and potatoes) would be more than halved. (Enquete OMS)
The quality of fresh and processed foods has risen substantially in the same time. Dairy products more generally have benefited from various improvements including, in particular, pasteurisation, and diseases such as tuberculosis, caused by impurities in milk, or rickets, caused by vitamin deficiency, have now virtually disappeared from this country.
Staples such as corn, wheat, rice and barley are all stronger, healthier and more wholesome by several multiples than a few decades ago. Improvements in plant science have revolutionized the nutritional content and freshness of foods as well.
On top of all this the average price of fresh food has actually declined considerably in real terms in the past three generations, due to the lower prices paid for agricultural produce. These achievements are essentially due to hard work as well as to all that muck and machinery.
In addition to this, farmers are considered not only as food producers but also – just as importantly – as stewards and guardians of the land. Farmers’ knowledge and experience help to sustain the land and keep it fertile, using a mixture of experience generated and inputs bought in. This is the best guarantee of sustainable agriculture: unrestrained access to whichever inputs are the most appropriate for the continued assurance of quality and sustainability.
These changes and many others have amounted to a revolution, not just a change of scenery, possibly more spectacular in scope and significance than the first agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century.
In short, everything has changed about agriculture in two or three generations. In all these upheavals, farmers have quietly taken on the changes and continued to be as prodigious and as focussed as ever in the production of good quality food.
They need more support and better choices if they are to continue to be prodigious in the future.
“A lie can travel halfway ’round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain once said.
The desire to be first with the news, even at the risk of being wrong, is nothing new. But social networks and Internet accessibility have combined to contribute more errors into the newsfeed than ever, now that everyone has become a journalist.
With speed at a premium, some websites have built a following by actually trafficking in rumors and uncertainties. The ability to post quickly means that misinformation can be initiated and spread quickly, and although it can also be corrected quickly, few notice the correction, as they might have done more often in the printed press. In many cases no-one bothers even to retract, finding an excuse in the defense that rumor is itself newsworthy.
When bad drives out good..
For those seriously and professionally involved in news and information, these developments are a menace. It is better to delay until you have the facts right, or you risk adding to the flood of misinformation and error. But you don’t get the headline and indeed your story may be spiked beyond retrieval by the time you have perfected and checked it.
So the bad drives out the good; the careless drives out the accurate and lies chase out the truth. It’s a truism that certainly predates the Internet.
The danger for us news and info addicts is similar to the fate that faces most of the world’s currencies (and their users). If currencies go on devaluing and pretend that they haven’t (the pound sterling is a perfect example of this over the last century), then in the end the whole system becomes totally devalued and therefore completely worthless.
A similar fate awaits people’s trust in news and information, especially from traditional outlets. There may be a collapse of credibility that will see news replaced entirely by entertainment, and information replaced by fiction. Should we be worried about this?
The signs have been increasing for some years, and there is some evidence that people are becoming more sceptical and even cynical. But I fear that in practice and overall the opposite is true. People are actually becoming more gullible, trusting and over-sensitive. Exaggerated fears, not large yawns, are the scourge of those trying to communicate directly, honestly and realistically.
When people believe nothing they will also believe anything. This is why we should all try to restore respect to dialogue, and value to communications in business, politics, economics, society and culture. And we must do it quickly, robustly and with settled determination. We must put on those shoes before the lie closes the circle.
April 13th, 2012
Regressing in agriculture and technology: the new conservatives
For some people, agriculture has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Not with farmers, but with the general public and politicians, especially those who live in urban and suburban areas.
Most farmers have had no trouble over many years understanding and trying new technologies, but all too often they have been prevented from applying them, surprisingly, by some of the most conservative force of public opinion.
Generations ago, many opposed and regretted the replacement of horses with mechanized tractors, and before then, the replacement of “night soil” with chemical and artificial fertilizers. Today’s anti-technologists are probably even more conservative than in the past, since a selectivity has developed in the modern conservative taste.
There is one policy when shouting at regulators, politicians and scientific companies; there is another when pushing a cart or trolley around in the supermarket. At once deploring Monsanto, Bayer and agribusiness in general they will take care to buy themselves the cleanest and best looking vegetables in expensive supermarkets.
Some anti-technologists, of course, do not suffer from any hypocrisy on this score. They prefer fallen fruit and will pick out the most mis-shapen vegetables and the dirtiest greens from organic markets. They put the conserve into conservatism. Good luck to them.
Understanding and employing new technology has always proved crucial not only for some farmers to continue to meet growing food, feed and fuel demands but also for other less fortunate farmers to move from subsistency to profitability and this is no less true now that the world population is accelerating upwards.
But modern conservative anti-technologist opinion cannot bring itself to relate to the economic development arguments for the application of technologies in agriculture (the only safe path out of poverty). The anti-technologist claims that you have to sort out the unfairness of modern global food distribution flows before the short term and, in their view, the lesser problem of people starving right now in empty marketplaces.
If there is any genuine concern about current and future hunger in the world, then we must allow modern science and technology to help with food production, whether this be to breed improved varieties of food plants with higher and better yields, or to generate new and more cost-effective production methods, or develop yet more effective fertilizers and pesticides.
Genetic modification can be used to achieve disease resistance or herbicide tolerance or other traits in the future that may be of even more direct benefit to people. But biotechnology is not the only issue in the overall debate about technology in agriculture. It is one technology among many, but it attracts much of the opprobrium.
In many respects the most crucial debate in agricultural technology really concerns the threats to ban products that currently work well in assisting food production, not those that face innumerable obstacles to getting approved for sale and use for the first time.
For the conservative anti-technology activist it is all the same, but many developed countries, especially in Europe, having helped to ensure that GMOs will never be approved, have now turned their attention to an even more conservative task, that of rolling back the years and banning technologies that had already been approved, licensed and successfully used, sometimes for several generations, and which are still vital to farmers in countries with low levels of food security. How sustainable is that?
These are not just conservatives, these are the policies of reactionaries, hypocrites and bigots. The agricultural and rural communities know this, but lots of clever people don’t.
March 31st, 2012
From Intercourse to Onan: how the email has ruined communications
How often do you send someone an email asking a question or making an inquiry when you might better have phoned them and had a conclusive conversation?
I once sat opposite someone at work who would regularly invite me to lunch with him that same day. By email. We were bleedin’ well opposite each other. But after a while I felt I was also too busy to talk so I too started replying by email.
But we seem to be starting to lose, not only the art of conversation, but the art of communications overall.
For all the world’s obsession with emails, one point is salient and striking (albeit a whopping generalization). Within the last 20 years people in the industrialized and developed countries have changed their principal mode of collective communication from audio telephony to email and text. From communal to solitary.
From two way to one way. From discussion to declamation. Video conferencing hasn’t caught on yet but tapping out text while walking along the pavement has.
And a steady stream of people are regularly dying as they tap out their texts while walking across roads, into walls, off cliffs, or while driving.
And yet the telephone is interactive – you can say ‘hello, what’s up?’, and you can hear the other person respond ‘hi!, I’ve got a bad headache, what are you doing?’ etc. And you dont have to wait for the answer to the question ‘Hey, shall we go for lunch later?’
The email/text can only ever be an unmoderated statement, encouraging people to get used to waiting for an answer when they ask, something they are not particularly used to in live conversation.
Of course they don’t have to wait nearly as long as they would have to if they had sent a letter through the post, but my basis for comparison is not the post but the telephone or live speech.
This extraordinary development from phone to email is an unprecedented technological example of people opting against a more advanced, more immediate and more available communication exchange to a primitive transmission; from an interactive form of intercourse to one way, onanistic comment into the void.
Aristotle would have rejoiced at this stunning confirmation of his transmission-reception dichotomy. It is as if our stone age ancestors took a look at two way radio and collectively decided to stick with ululation in order to communicate.
The advantages of email in the business context are many times more, but few of them reflect well on actual business use. And yet it’s obvious just why the email has caught on and stayed.
Email appeals to and encourages our worst instincts. It allows rest to the wicked and cover to the shy. It turns a conversation into a code, and it turns leadership into disembodied commands, suiting the tens of thousands of appalling bosses who prosper through opting not to communicate properly or clearly in business environments. Email is Pontius Pilate, it comes supplied with a bar of soap and hand towels.
Email is also perfect for the business vice of ambiguity. Are you one of those who do not reply at all if you find the response difficult or too sensitive to make? Do you pray that you do not meet them as this will expose you to that old fashioned face to face where, yes, you really do have to reply to a straight question? It’s the first and surest evidence of cowardice. Nothing enrages people more than the knowledge that someone has got the email that was sent to them and that needs an answer but has decided not to answer it at all.
This cowardice represents the purest expression of ambiguity because there is always that flickering possibility that the intended recipients have not read the email or that it has been ‘lost’ in the ether. Letters really did get lost in the post in the past but we continue to lie to each other about emails that somehow apparently never made it despite being properly addressed and sent.
Rather than reduce ambiguity by appearing to facilitate the yes/no conundrum, email actually increases ambiguity, as even if you do respond you can get away with lazy, gnomic and target-missing answers that would be picked up and corrected immediately by any interlocutor in a live conversation.
Email allows us to send an email saying we are too busy, and fail to understand the irony. Email has brought the practice of interactive meetings to a standstill, as all around the meeting table the small sounds of barely audible clicks and sidelong glances show that no-one is actually participating in the meeting. They are all there but barren in original thought; only their blackberries are fruitful.
Email makes cliches look reasonable and validates the worst excesses of business-speak, making it the favorite communication method of internal communications programs. But above all, it allows secrecy, pretense and pseudo-confidentiality to flourish and copiously rewards those who are engaged in these for a living.
For personal communications, the crimes are more innocent. It means you don’t have to move from your seat in order to conduct a conversation, stilted as it may become.
Because for many people it is less challenging to write on your own than to talk in company, email has the huge benefit of not betraying your feelings, so the recipient has to guess them without being able to look deep into your eyes.
No, despite its many obvious advantages, email has overall been an disaster for communications. It has turned us from social communicants to corner-loving losers with keyboards and RSI.
Let’s hope it is just a passing phase, otherwise companies and individuals will soon stop communicating meaningfully with each other altogether.
Imagine how extraordinarily difficult it must be to cover the Syrian uprising as a news story. Of all the Arab Spring stories this has to be the most difficult for any journalist to tell with any accuracy or authority.
Foreign journalists have not been underrated by the Syrian authorities, as they have so often been elsewhere. (Remember the Iraqi Information Minister in 2003 denying that the US invaders were in Baghdad when evidence to the contrary could be viewed right behind him?).
Overall, the Syrian regime understands how important the global media is and has illustrated this amply by treating it as much the enemy as the insurgents themselves, many of whom risk and lose their lives protecting the journalists because of that very same importance.
Social media is playing its growing role, but with this comes a widening imbalance between the transparency of the offering and the networks’ need for relevance, realism and immediacy.
The assault on Homs by Syrian government forces has generated a news wave of video journalism by amateur filmmakers, determined to record what is happening, and what is happening is sometimes not what can be recorded. Just as reality is not always the same as the truth.
Since the beginning of the uprising, those behind the uprisings have used social media as a key means of distributing the news to media outside the country.
The Syrian regime knows how influential the videos are. But it’s important to be realistic. Something is always going to be wrong in the communication of the truth. Somewhere along the line it will occasionally be sacrificed for the better communication of the reality, and upholstered as necessary to gain the audience it needs for political and, doubtless, economic reasons.
Literally thousands of videos have been uploaded to video sharing platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube in the past few weeks that seek to illustrate Syria’s agony and it would not be surprising in the least to discover that some of these have been faked in one way or another.
Social media has become one of the key tools for telling the outside world the modern story of Syria and of the desperate attempts of those in the uprising to publicize the destruction, violence and damage being wrought upon them by government forces.
Sometimes the sensory impact that is necessary simply cannot be produced from the truth. The camera misses everything when it is in the wrong location or being used at the wrong time. In other words the picture, the gunshots, the explosions to illustrate the narrative, go missing and cannot therefore satisfy a prurient audience, ever ready for the instant gratification of the authentic pictures of war. Hard-faced as the buyer is, these news goods have to look appropriate to the story.
It’s not the first time that pictures have been faked to make a valid point (take a bow, Piers Morgan) and it will not be the last, but some people – mostly sensitive souls – have been genuinely shocked and even outraged to hear that some of the videos and reports have been faked to ensure that all the authentic sounds of battle ring true in viewers’ ears.
Some of the artifice will not be so shocking. For instance, activists are also circulating advice online on how to take pictures of the killed and maimed and of torture victims for use in any future trials.
There will be many, especially Syrians, who quite legitimately wonder what the fuss is all about. Both sides will try to present events from a perspective favorable to them and will resort to fabricating the news for their purposes.
This should not be surprising because this is not living room entertainment, this is war, genuine war without quarter given, no rules, no mercy, and nothing less than the battle for civilization in Syria.
From this perspective, manipulating certain pictures and sounds is hardly the main issue. For others, including the comfortable viewing public in other countries, it is information and they prefer it to be scientifically authenticated and correct. So the battle rages and the videos continue to upload. Nowhere better than during such conflicts is the ongoing struggle between the great principles of truth and reality so well illustrated.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, not just in the social media but in modern social life generally. Not to put too fine a point on it, the doors of perception are both swinging open and getting a lot more difficult to walk through.
As communication channels proliferate, people are passing more data but communicating less with each other, and they are reverting to a hand flutter as they pass each other instead of stopping to talk.
Where is this all going? It is very difficult to peer through the rolling gloaming but while our eyesight improves, our lines of sight become more encumbered, and get refracted. We are declaiming and talking more, and we are debating and listening less.
As the US Presidential elections loom in the shadow glitz of the future, and recent elections in Europe are analysed and digested, we are realizing that people are starting to believe nothing. They are assuming that everything they are told is dubious, unlikely or just counterfeit, a product of spin, misdirection and lies.
When a company claims that they are a people business, it is more than likely that they are quite the opposite. If you are told that customers come first, you will be put on hold for more than ten minutes or referred to a web site (how irritating is that?) If a company claims to be a thought leader, you can be sure that they are near the back of the elephant trail and waiting for the next idea to be prattled back down the line. The only certain outcome of this behavior is the graveyard.
Some tabloid newspapers have given up with the truth altogether because the truth doesn’t sell. Unfortunately this is true whether it is the media, second hand cars, third hand policies, corporate responsibility or snake oil. If something sells that does not necessarily give it value. It simply confirms a price.
But when people believe nothing, they will believe anything. One might be forgiven for suspecting that for this reason alone it is in the interest of all propagandists to keep people ignorant and suspicious, because like this they can be manipulated with the greatest of ease.
The way back is through genuine and committed communication, a communication that waits for an answer, that explains and illustrates, that is patient and painstaking.
For companies, the best way back to the foothills of corporate reputation would be the banning of all internal email messages within sites and a training course on how to use that dusty thing hidden by the books called a telephone.
But to be realistic, the indiscriminate use of email is adding to the growing communication problems that companies have with their stakeholders and especially with their employees.
Also, they should stop grabbing the tail of the company in front..
With all the available communications resources cheaply obtained and even more cheaply used, our generation probably communicates less meaningfully or intelligently amongst ourselves than any generation past, literate or not. I say this because the evidence grows every day that most people do not read more than two lines of text before they press the like button, or make a one brief comment and maybe three lines are needed before they even think of sharing.
Fewer of us are reading, and those who are, are reading less. But we are not slow in coming to a conclusion about what we have glanced at. Even on the hallowed pages of Linked-In, it is fairly clear that many, perhaps most, readers do not even click past the headline before they either move on (acceptable) or start to tap out a quick reaction (unacceptable).
And we just don’t know too many companies “by reputation” although we know many companies as consumers and customers and when they are in the news. Sometimes we think that familiarity and favorability might be enough to be called reputation. This describes reputation as a remarkably thin line.
But to have a good reputation, companies need more than a few thousand likes on their Facebook page, cheaply collected through some misleading promotion. Companies need the relationship itself to enable current social collaboration and future social commerce.
Once companies understand that reputation has to be earned primarily by actions and commitments and not just by good social media engagement, likes, blog endorsements and online members, then the reputation line will get bolder and wider and will cross the declining brand line for sure and soon.
The reason for the skepticism is, I am sure, the ‘like’ button. This allows me. you and millions others to express our views publicly in a split second.
It is a blessing to those who claim to be able to measure reputation as it allows them simply to count the ‘likes’ and pretend that this is also a valid way of measuring reputation.
But it is deeply misleading to equate the like button with any sort of social or political activism, and still less as a measurement of reputation.
I don’t like the Like button
There is a generally held perception that current risk assessments in product safety are not informing the risk management process as well as they could be.
Evidence-based risk assessment is not only at the heart of protecting human health and the environment, it is equally at the heart of the license to operate and of regulation enabling market access for products. However, difficulties of understanding between risk assessors and managers can threaten product development, quality assurance, market access and consumer choice.
The outputs of risk assessment need to be more relevant to policy and management functions and more qualitative and facilitative dialogue is necessary in the assessment stages between those concerned with socio-economic elements and those primarily concerned with an exclusively scientific consideration.
Risk assessment must continue to rely on scientific evidence and upon experts’ judgments of risk, but in the sphere of socioeconomic analysis, value judgments have to be made.
This is because risk assessments have not always expressed the reality of the overall environment in which a decision needs to be made, even though they are truthful and accurate risk assessments. Truth, in other words, is not reality.
This startling conclusion is prompted by the following: risk assessment reports do not often directly address or consider a balance of competing risks or, even where it may be possible to express risk and benefits by an appropriately scientific metric, a real risk-benefit balance or a multi-criteria assessment in the issues or products involved.
While the increased focus afforded by a socio-economic perspective might allow other potential impacts on a wider scale to be considered, and some of these impacts might not be considered relevant by some, there is still no reason why this would not be acceptable.
Additionally, this would allow a genuine risk-benefit comparison which would result in many cases in a more accurate and therefore fairer overall assessment.
Whether a given, objectively estimated risk is considered acceptable or not will also be affected by how the risk is perceived by the public, and the appreciation of this risk is therefore conditioned by social, political, ethical, institutional and economic environments. A risk assessment system that moves too far away from what may be regarded as an average public assessment becomes difficult to justify, despite the occasional evidence that people can be badly misinformed in their perception of risk due to a misunderstanding of the science involved.
These misunderstandings may even be reduced when risk assessment outputs become more compatible with an economic valuation established between people and their various environments, in other words, between scientific and socio-economic evaluations.
Part of the achievement of this task will be generated by the improved exchange of information between risk assessors and risk managers. It is nevertheless inevitable that there will be new variability and a degree of uncertainty in socio-economic valuation.
This is partly because while risk assessment is a matter for direct calculation, the output is not a certainty; it is used as an informed prediction about the future. It can be incorporated into an economic evaluation by attributing probabilities to possible outcomes, and thus estimating the expected value of costs and benefits or their equivalents.
The prospect of a still wider application presents itself in this respect as the implications of including socio-economic assessments are fully accepted and other considerations related to socio-economic perspectives come to the fore.
The separation between risk assessment and risk management is even more important as (and because) the precise relationship between the two undergoes a significant re-evaluation. A blurring of the functions would be damaging to all parties and unacceptable.
While extra clarity and purpose may be generated through a fuller evaluation of different possible scenarios and of a full characterization, for example, of whole populations or ecosystems at risk, this entails also the equally wider perspectives of producers and the food chain alike.
While scientific analysis is the most accurate basis for risk assessment, with the objective of the analysis in mind it is also the case that the basis may include an even larger and wider range than the relatively limited extra elements afforded by socioeconomic perspectives.
Since such perspectives can express risks as impacts on human health and ecosystems integrated across sources and targets and that explore spatial, lifecycle and temporal variability, then producer and food chain views on the same subjects need to be brought just as fully into the revised bases of the assessment.
The distinction between the responsibilities of risk assessors and risk managers is clear at least in principle. Assessors apply best available science to working out connections between likely exposures and effects. Managers have to take values into account in making decisions about interventions to alleviate effects by managing likely causes.
The science tries to exclude as far as possible value judgments; the management should not be biased by the values of the scientists. This has led to a proper separation of the scientific activity from the management process. Not for the first time in scientific communications, the key priority is to understand that what is true may not always be acceptable, usable or appropriate for the challenges of the future.
