For every £ they are paid, tax accountants destroy £47, waste recyclers generate £12

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid. It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy. They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn.

Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to "create stress". The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption. And tax accountants damage the country by devising schemes to cut the amount of money available to the government, the research suggests. By contrast, child minders and waste recyclers are also doing jobs that create net wealth to the country.

The Foundation has used a new form of job evaluation to calculate the total contribution various jobs make to society, including for the first time the impact on communities and environment. Eilis Lawlor, spokeswoman for the New Economics Foundation, said: "Pay levels often don't reflect the true value that is being created. As a society, we need a pay structure which rewards those jobs that create most societal benefit rather than those that generate profits at the expense of society and the environment". She said the aim of the research was not to target individuals in highly paid jobs, or suggest people in low paid jobs should earn more. "The point we are making is more fundamental - that there should be a relationship between what we are paid and the value our work generates for society. We've found a way to calculate that," she said.

A total of six different jobs were analysed to assess their overall value. These are the study's main findings:

* The elite banker -- "Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse Paid between £500,000 and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate".

* Childcare workers -- "Both for families and society as a whole, looking after children could not be more important. As well as providing a valuable service for families, they release earnings potential by allowing parents to continue working. For every pound they are paid they generate up to £9.50 worth of benefits to society."

* Hospital cleaners -- "Play a vital role in the workings of healthcare facilities. They not only clean hospitals and maintain hygiene standards but also contribute to wider health outcomes. For every pound paid, over £10 in social value is created."

* Advertising executives -- The industry "encourages high spending and indebtedness. It can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress. For a salary of between £50,000 and £12m top advertising executives destroy £11 of value for every pound in value they generate".

* Tax accountants -- "Every pound that a tax accountant saves a client is a pound which otherwise would have gone to HM Revenue. For a salary of between £75,000 and £200,000, tax accountants destroy £47 in value, for every pound they generate."

* Waste recycling workers -- "Do a range of different jobs that relate to processing and preventing waste and promoting recycling. Carbon emissions are significantly reduced. There is also a value in reusing goods. For every pound of value spent on wages, £12 of value is generated for society."

The research also makes a variety of policy recommendations to align pay more closely with the value of work. These include establishing a high pay commission, building social and environmental value into prices, and introducing more progressive taxation.

Whale poo could help oceans absorb CO2, scientists say

SYDNEY, April 23 — Whale droppings have emerged as a natural ocean fertiliser which could help combat global warming by allowing the Southern Ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide, Australian scientists have have found.

New research from the Australian Antarctic Division suggests whales naturally fertilise surface waters with iron-rich whale excrement, allowing the whole eco-system to send more carbon down into deep waters.

“The plants love it and it actually becomes a way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere,” Antarctic scientist Steve Nicol told Reuters, adding the droppings appear as a plume of solids and liquids.

A larger population of baleen whales and krill would boost the productivity of the whole Southern Ocean ecosystem and could improve the absorption of carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming.

Iron is a limited micronutrient in the Southern Ocean, but recent experiments have found that adding soluble iron to surface waters helps promote much-needed phytoplankton algal blooms.

Iron is contained in algae in the surface waters where plants grow, but there is a constant rain of iron-rich particles falling into deep waters.

When krill eat the algae, and whales eat the krill, the iron ends up in whale poo, and the iron levels are kept up in surface waters where it is most needed.

“We reckon whale poo is probably 10 million times more concentrated with iron than sea water,” Nicol said.

“The system operates at a high level when you have this interaction between the krill, the whales and the algae and they maintain the system at a very high level of production. So it’s a self sustaining system.”

Nicol said the idea to research whale droppings came from a casual pub chat among Antarctic scientists in Australia’s island state of Tasmania.

He said it was not yet known how much poo it would take have a significant impact on the Southern Ocean. — Reuters



http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE63M0PG20100423

Resolving Our Water Woes

 The preservation of water resources includes protection of raw water resources, efficient management of rivers, ensuring water needs of flora and fauna are met and ensuring that water catchments are gazetted as permanent reserves.

He also stressed that managing surface water, which was mostly rivers, was vital as it contributed to almost 95% of raw water resources for consumption.

“The protection for these resources is still lacking in Malaysia. For example, Sungai Labu which is a combination of Sungai Batang Nilai and Sungai Batang Labu, is subjected to pollution from industries, commercial activities and individual septic tanks.

“This river is the raw water intake source for the Salak Tinggi Water Treatment Plant in Selangor.

FOMCA: Develop Both Urban And Rural Public Transporation

PETALING JAYA, Feb 24 (Bernama) -- The Federation of Malaysian Consumer Associations (Fomca) today called on the government to develop the urban and rural public transportation systems simultenously to achieve substantial savings on fuel subsidy.

So far, the government had only unveiled the programme to improve the urban public transportation system and had been quiet on the rural sector, said its president, Datuk N. Marimuthu.

He said that in some rural areas there was no public transportation at all and even if there was, it was with irregular timing with old buses and taxis.

He told Bernama that at present only 20 per cent of Malaysians were using public transportation because of irregular timing, insufficient buses and trains and generally poor service.

In the next 10 years or so, if 50 per cent of Malaysia could use public transportation, the country could gain tremendously by reducing carbon dioxide emmision and traffic congestion and saving in fuel subsidy, he added.

He suggested a cross-subsidy to operate public transportation, where the more profitable urban sector could subsidise the rural areas, and urged the government to study the models available in the world, especially Japan's and Singapore's systems, to come up with a suitable one for Malaysia.

-- BERNAMA

How many friends can you have?

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar says human beings can have no more than 150 friends – that’s the upper limit the brain can absorb.

His conclusion comes from studying the social group size of monkeys and apes and how that size might relate to the brain.

Initially Dunbar was examining why primates groom each other. If the reason involved sexual bonding, it should correspond to “the social brain hypothesis” that the reason primates have a large brain is because of their social complexity.

In other words, you need a large brain to keep track of your relationships. Humans, he says, are no different.

Known as “Dunbar’s number,” the idea of an upper limit to friends is bound to cause some people – especially teens and young adults -- to raise their eyebrows, particularly in this era of social network sites where some people boast of having thousands of friends.

(more...)

How Big is Africa?