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Gale force veering west: BBC Shipping Forecast at 100 - nightly song of the sea
At the same time every night, a curious ritual unfolds across the United Kingdom. As the final strains of Ronald Binge’s Sailing By fade into the ether, a calm, measured voice begins to speak.
“Viking, North Utsire: Northwesterly five to seven, occasionally gale eight later…” For a century now, the BBC Shipping Forecast has been a constant companion to mariners, insomniacs, poets and dreamers alike.
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Tools are at hand to extricate shipping from this one-way world - if well deployed
What world shipping - and most everyone else - must worry about today is not only freedom of access to artificial intelligence (AI), but its objectivity.
Already we have seen what happens when it becomes monopolized by a one world-view and programmed to operate as a partisan Ministry of Truth. One can include Google in this that already exhibits egregious faults one suspects of AI gone bad.
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Efforts to cut the loss of containers at sea appear slow, but show steady progress
While the extent of the statistical loss of containers at sea is tiny - 0.00052 per cent of the 250 million containers shipped - the loss is serious enough to motivate remedial action.
Action comes in the form of the TopTier Project, launched in 2021. It is led by MARIN (Maritime Research Institute Netherlands), and is a joint project involving 40 stakeholders - including national authorities, major shipping lines, classification societies, insurers, and lashing equipment manufacturers.
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When failure advances against success and wins, prospects for world trade are bleak
An ancient truism holds that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. But the saying comes with the corollary that after a while, you must start counting the flies. This contrasts predictions against results.
World shipping - from the shippers' point of view - has applied the honeyed approach with little positive result over the last 50 years. It has led to increasing consolidation with the emergence of fewer and bigger carriers increasingly attached to subsidiary terminal operators. All of which has limited the choice for shippers the world over.
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