Queen gives IP boss a bath in Honours List

Science and technology got a respectable shout out in the Queens Birthday Honours List, amid the usual celebs, civil servants and lollipop ladies.

Top of the heap, for their contribution to the cultural fabric of Britain, are the MBEs for Dr Frank Duckworth and Dr Tony Lewis - the statisticians who invented the Duckworth-Lewis method of calculating the target score for a team batting second in interrupted one-day or Twenty20 cricket matches.

There was an Order of the Bath for civil servant John Alty, Chief Executive of the Intellectual Property Office at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. “For me, the IPO’s work is at the heart of the UK’s future prosperity," Alty said. "Knowledge creation and exploitation will deliver the high value added business we need in the UK.”

John Carr got an OBE for services to Children Protection on the Internet. He is the Secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, comprising all of the UK’s major professional child protection and child welfare organisations. He was previously the Head of the Children and Technology Unit at NCH, now know as Action for Children.

Carr has been a defender of Operation Ore, the police investigation in which many of the 7000 plus child abuse download suspects snared were probably innocent victims of credit card fraud.

Professor Athene Margaret Donald, Deputy Head of the Cavendish Laboratory and Director of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, University of Cambridge becomes a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to Physics.

Professor Brian Cox, physics poster-boy and former keyboard maestro in pop combo D:Ream, got an OBE.

Padraig Canavan, MD of Singularity, got an OBE for growing his business process software platform business in Northern Ireland. Karen Hanton, who started toptable.com, got an MBE for services to the Restaurant Industry.

Fred Dinenage, responsible for firing interest in science for many 70s kids through the TV gold of How!, got an MBE for services to Broadcasting.

And for fans of Spooks, John Gale Hambly, Deputy Technical Director of QinetiQ got an OBE for services to the Defence Industry.

Best of all, former Velvet Undergrounder John Cale got an OBE. He always liked to use a bit of tech in his post Velvets career, and even made an album called Artificial Intelligence (although apparently it's not much cop). ®