A copy of The House, Parliament's weekly magazine dropped through my letterbox yesterday.

And there, on page 47, is a glowing review of The New Optimists by no less than Baroness Perry of Southwark who, among other prestigious positions, is a member of the Lords Science and Technology select committee.

Entitled "Reasons to be cheerful", she is "inspired" by the over 80 scientists [our guys!] who have made their "positive predictions about the potential of science to transform human health and wellbeing in the 21st century".

She mentions Professor Jon Frampton by name (although, alas, misspells it!). He runs the University of Birmingham Stem Cell Centre -- and is far from the only person who thinks stem cells have the potential to revolutionalise medicine. Mentioned by name, too, is Dr Kathleen Maitland, a computer scientist from BCU who in "her clear and jargon-free essay . . . predicts that the way young people of today interact with technology wil lead to 'scientific breakthroughs which we could never dram of'."

David Cameron told me once that he had to choose his words very carefully when talking about Birmingham because he generally seemed to end up making life difficult for Tory city council leader Mike Whitby.
The trouble is that journalists keep asking about elected mayors, and Mr Cameron has a habit of speaking his mind on the issue.
His strongly held view is that big cities need big, flamboyant figures as mayors - like Boris Johnson in London, or Ray Mallon in Middlesbrough.
Coun Whitby is dead against the idea, as are most Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour councillors in Birmingham.
But it is looking increasingly likely that Birmingham will be voting for a mayor sometime in 2012, and that gives the Tories well under a year to select a candidate. Judging by an interview Mr Cameron gave to Jon Walker, our Political Editor, Mike Whitby seems unlikely to fit the bill.

Whatever your views the protests tomorrow against the Government's funding cuts and hike in tuition fees, one thing is still clear. The University of Birmingham's School of Cancer Studies is home to world-renown research.

Thus when Professor Paul Moss, current Head of the School, says he is optimistic about cancer being controlled within a generation, we should take note. "When I lecture my medical students today," he says, "I challenge them to think that they can be the first generation to be largely free of the fear of cancer."

The more Simon Cowell wants Wagner to fail the more certain he is to succeed, writes guest blogger Anthony Painter:

In the hit Mel Brooks' Broadway musical, The Producers, two theatrical fraudsters work out how to earn millions from failure. The only problem is that the more they try to fail, the more they succeed. Their grotesque concept is a musical based on the rise of the Nazis, 'Springtime for Hitler: a gay romp with Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden.' It has all the ingredients of a spectacular failure. Instead it's a massive hit.
 
And after Pensnett's own Wagner once again breezed through to the next round of X-Factor, Cowell must know how those two fictional producers felt. The more he wants Wagner to fail, the more successful the Brazilian-born West Midlander is becoming.
 
The issue is not cash. Whatever happens Cowell will be a financial winner in this head-on confrontation. That's not the point. For guys like Cowell cash is not enough - he's got loads already. They want power. The irony is that Cowell was all-powerful. Rage Against the Machine and now Wagner have pierced the mystique.

I write in today's Birmingham Post that Government whips - the MPs who help ensure Commons business runs smoothly and maintain discipline among the troops - are not Ministers.

I've received an e-mail from an aggrieved whip who tells me this is incorrect. I'm told: "We most certainly are ministers, are paid ministerial salary, and hold ministerial rank." My apologies!

I complained recently that the Government had failed to name the MPs appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretaries.

These are backbench MPs - so lowly they are not officially part of the Government at all - who assist Ministers. It seemed to me that we had a right to know who they were.

Downing Street today decided to publish a list. Here they are, along with the Ministers they serve:

New Optimist Professor Ian Nabney is the second of the scientists I'm writing about in this blog.

The first was optometrist James Wolffsohn and about bionic eyes . . . You wouldn't automatically think of Ian when it comes to medical and health issues. For he's a computer scientist, an expert in probability theory and machine learning, so someone you might think of as coming up with tomorrow's data-mining methodologies, or if into today's commercial applications, doing stuff for for city trading, say, or supermarket logistics.

His expertise, however, has proved key in developing a radical new way of measuring the risks associated with obesity.

Comedian Stewart Lee has been on the radio pushing the familiar line that Birmingham City Council was accused of "banning" Christmas.

As he correctly says in his interview, which you can hear for yourself here, "they called the celebrations as a whole Winterval and you were allowed to use the word Christmas, and you were allowed to have a Christmas tree" and to celebrate other religious festivals such as Diwali too.

Birmingham councillor Gareth Compton has been suspended from the Conservative Party after making a ridiculous and offensive comment on Twitter.

It seems to me that this illustrates one of the pitfalls Twitter users need to be aware of. Tapping at your keyboard in your study or office, it can be easy to imagine that you're talking to friends. You're not.

Coun Compton made his remark after journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown appeared on Radio 5 and appeared to question whether Western politicians had the right to take the moral high ground over human rights abuses in other countries.

Tony Blair was ready to resign in 2004, until he was saved by the result of the Hodge Hill by-election in Birmingham.

This is one of many interesting nuggets to emerge in journalist Andrew Rawnsley's book The End of the Party, which looks at the life and death of "new Labour".

In the aftermath of the Iraq War, anger towards Tony Blair was at its height and a by-election seemed like a perfect opportunity for disillusioned Labour voters to make their feelings clear.

Two by-elections were held on July 15 2004. Labour lost Leicester South to the anti-war Lib Dems, who overturned a majority of 13,243.

Last night's news was full of the story of Miikka Terho detecting objects, including letters and a clockface, despite his blindness. Opthalmologist Professor Eberhart Zrenner and his team at the University of Tuebingen in Germany have implanted an electronic chip under his macula, part of his non-functioning retina. This chip sends messages to the visual cortex in his brain.

Revolutionary stuff.

Aston University's Professor James Wolffsohn is an optometrist, so researches what goes on at the front of our eyes, the lens and the muscles. He, too, talks of bionic eyes -- and some that are already part of clinical practice.

The leaders of Birmingham City Council's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition are about to head off on yet another brainstorming away-day to mull over how to cut £330 million from the budget of what is Britain's largest public authority.
To put an obviously a scary figure into some context, it represents almost one-third of what the council currently spends on non-schools services.
This is, therefore, unlike any other cuts exercise ever undertaken in this country particularly because the Government has decided the savings should be front-loaded with more being chopped in 2011 and 2012 than the following two years.
It is hardly surprising that council leaders are taking their time in deciding what to do.

It seems that small businesses are unlikely to benefit from the Government's £1.4 billion regional growth fund.

The cash has been provided to "stimulate enterprise by providing support for projects and programmes with significant potential for economic growth and create additional sustainable private sector employment; an support in particular those areas and communities that are currently dependent on the public sector make the transition to sustainable private sector-led growth and prosperity", according last week's Local Growth White Paper.

It will replace, to an extent at least, the money that regional development agencies used to dish out.