Bristol

  • The importance of local knowledge

    Steve WoodsBristol

    Bristol, for its sins, is afflicted with The Post as its (ahem!) newspaper of record.

    Yesterday’s online edition carries a glowing report of the opening of “a new £7 million care home which will treat patients with dementia has opened in south Bristol. Private firm Brunelcare has opened the new home in Whitehall after years of planning”.

    However, there’s one major problem with this story: Whitehall is a district of east Bristol, not one south of the river, a mistake which even the much-maligned Wikipedia manages to avoid.

    Needless to say, this absolute howler drew some very pointed comments from readers, of which this is perhaps the most sarcastic and biting:

    I suppose we must be grateful that the Post didn’t describe it as being in Plymouth. What a truly dreadful “newspaper”!

    Another comment drew comparisons with BBC Radio Bristol:

    Radio Bristol’s just as bad.

    Every weekday morning their travel woman tells of us of traffic queues IN KEYNSHAM on the A4 between Hicks Gate and Emery Road.

    This means that the Brislington Park and Ride, St Brendans College and the Brislington cricket and football grounds have all moved out of Bristol into Keynsham.

    Hicks Gate to the city boundary is a distance of 400 metres; city boundary to Emery Road is over 1200 metres.

    Another Radio Bristol presenter told us that Shirehampton is near Bristol and they all seem to believe that Avonmouth is outside the city too as it’s described as ‘near Bristol’ routinely on Radio Bristol and on the local ITV and BBC news programmes.

    Where do they think is it? North Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Gwent, Greater London?

    Oh for the days of Roger Bennett and John Turner, two highly competent broadcasters with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bristol. Nowadays we get people who aren’t very professional (with one or two exceptions) whose knowledge of the local area is nil.

    Clearly the Post hacks are no different.

    Of course, both The Post and the BBC have shed staff in recent years and the wealth of local knowledge that former staff or those with long service has vanished, as a result of which the quality of local media has clearly suffered.

    To conclude here’s a bit of free advice for Bristol Post journalists: just because the paper’s now printed in Didcot, don’t make it look as if it’s written there too! 🙂

  • Turnip Prize awarded

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    News can sometimes travel slowly in the West Country, so it’s only this afternoon that I’ve become aware of this year’s Turnip Prize – the antidote to the better known Turner Prize.

    The magnificent Turnip Prize trophy
    The magnificent Turnip Prize trophy

    The Turnip Prize is awarded annually at the New Inn in Wedmore on the Somerset Levels, far away from the glitz of metropolitan London.

    This year’s winner was midwife Sarah Quick, from Clutton, who was presented with the award’s customary winnner’s trophy of an old turnip mounted on a six-inch nail, as seen above. Sarah’s winning entry was entitled ‘The Three Tenas’ and consisted of a pack of women’s Tena incontinence pads with three sticking out of the top.

    Three Tenas - thias year's Turnip Prize winner
    Three Tenas – thias year’s Turnip Prize winner

    Competition must have been more intense this year with 86 entries, 17 more than last year. Popular rumour has it that Bristol’s famous son Banksy has entered in the past, but has been disqualified for making too much of an effort!

    Hat tip: Rich Higgs

  • News from the (male chauvinist) pigsty

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    Q: What do the Bristol University Christian Union and the village of Suderbari, in the Indian state of Bihar have in common?

    A: They both treat women as second-class citizens.

    The Bristol University Christian Union has passed a ruling that women are not allowed to teach at its main weekly meetings, as well as making it clear that women will only be able to teach as principal speakers at away weekends and during its mission weeks if they do so with their husbands, according to a report posted today on Bristol 24/7.

    This action has since led a Christian Union committee member to resign and prompted one CU member to write to Bristol University’s independent student news site Epigram, saying:

    On a personal note, I believe that Jesus was a feminist and that women should be allowed to teach.

    Up in its Clifton eyrie, the University of Bristol Union is examining whether this move by the Christian Union falls foul of its equality policy (hint: it undoubtedly does. Ed.)

    However, it’s not just the Abrahamic religions that are treating modern women as second-class citizens.

    In Suderbari, as today’s Guardian reports, women in the village have been barred from using mobile phones since mobiles “pollute the social atmosphere” by encouraging women to elope. If women are caught using a mobile, they risk a fine of Rs. 10,000 if they are unmarried and Rs 2,000 if they are married (so much for equality before the law. Ed.).

    The reason given by the village’s leadership was summarised by Manuwar Alam, president of the local social advisory committee, who stated the following:

    Unrestricted use of mobile phones is promoting premarital and extramarital affairs and destroying the great institution of marriage. We are extremely worried.

    However, the real reason is likely to be that traditional male authority in India is now being challenged due to improved education for women and, as Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army used to say: “They don’t like it up ’em!”

    Update 06/12/12: An item has now appeared on Epigram to the effect that Bristol University Christian Union has issued a statement which says they will extend invitations to both women and men to speak at any of their events without exception. However, this might just be a little too late to save their reputation.

  • Snooper’s Charter – my letter to my MP

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    Below is the text of an email I’ve written today to my constituency MP, Stephen Williams, regarding the coalition Government’s vastly invasive draft Communications Data Bill, also known as the Snooper’s Charter.

    Dear Mr Williams

    Subject: Draft Communications Data Bill

    I am writing to you express my concerns about the draft Communications Data Bill, also known popularly as the Snooper’s Charter, and how I regard it as harmful to the interests of the UK population in general. I understand that the joint Lords and Commons Parliamentary Committee examining the draft Bill will be reporting shortly.

    At this point I wish to point out that I’m also the Company Secretary of Bristol Wireless, a community co-operative that functions as a small ISP (which resells bandwidth to clients who are our network) and telecommunications provider (supplying VoIP telephony services) which is based in Bedminster. I have already written to Bristol Wireless’ constituency MP, Dawn Primarolo, to make her aware of the concerns of the co-operative.

    The draft Communications Data Bill raises significant issues connected with human rights, privacy, security and the nature of the society in which we wish to live. These issues are raised by the draft Bill’s fundamental approach, not its detail. Addressing them would, in our opinion, require such a significant re-drafting of the bill that the better approach would be to withdraw the bill in its entirety and rethink the way that internet security and monitoring are addressed.

    According to Liberty, the draft Bill will turn a nation of 60 mn. citizens into a nation of 60 mn. suspects. It won’t matter if citizens have never got so much as a speeding fine, personal information about them will be stored just in case it may prove useful one day. Put in another way, would you – as an upright, law-abiding citizen – be happy if the police popped by tomorrow to install a CCTV camera in your living room just in case they one day suspect you have committed a crime? Crime prevention arguments must not unquestionably trump the privacy of law-abiding citizens.

    The general public has been misled by the government and the mainstream media as to the purpose of the draft Bill. It is not about tackling serious crime, paedophilia or terrorism. Access to communications data is granted to local authorities and hundreds of other public bodies for a wide range of purposes that have nothing to do with crime fighting.

    The Government assumes too much in assuming it has an automatic right to keep track of all of citizens’ electronic communications with each other: what we’re looking at online and who we’re emailing, talking to on Skype or texting. It doesn’t. If this is HMG’s logic, why does it not demand that we all report to it every day, telling them who we’ve met for lunch?

    Stockpiling large amounts of data indiscriminately simply amounts to blanket surveillance. Experience shows that amassing large databases of personal information inevitably leads to discrimination. The retention process lends itself to the great temptation of “data mining” – fishing expeditions based on clumsy stereotypes rather than reasonable suspicion of individual wrongdoing. In addition, there are already problems with unauthorised access to sensitive information with existing systems such as the Police National Computer DVLA database and local authority and health records. These problems would be multiplied many times over with the amounts of stored data envisaged by the draft Bill.

    Furthermore, any increase in the level of surveillance would inevitably result in an increased use of encryption (and other circumvention techniques too) by ordinary internet users, thus rendering the surveillance useless, unless public sector technicians are skilled in the art of cracking encryption. Moreover, those alleged terrorists and organised criminals – if they are using the internet at all for their nefarious activities – are probably already using encryption and other security measures to obfuscate their activities.

    Finally, I’d point out that given the technology that’s likely to be needed, the Government may well end up building the technical infrastructure to intercept all our communications.

    I would be happy to discuss these matters in further detail with you should you so wish. In addition, there is plenty of other information available via the Open Rights Group website (http://www.openrightsgroup.org).

    Yours, etc.

  • Introducing Vinux

    Steve WoodsBristol, Linux, Open Source

    Yesterday evening I was down Bristol’s City Hall attending an event to launch Accessible Bristol (read my account of the event for Bristol Wireless).

    Vinux logo

    While there I was talking to the City Council’s Stephen Hilton and happened to mention Vinux – Linux for the Visually Impaired – which Stephen had never heard of, despite being visually impaired himself.

    Vinux is a remastered version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution optimised for visually impaired users. It provides a screen-reader, full-screen magnification and support for Braille displays out of the box! It can be run from a Live CD on an existing machine without making any changes to your hard drive. It can also be installed to a USB pen drive or to a hard drive; as a hard drive installation this can be done either alongside Windows (dual boot) or as a complete replacement for the Hell of Gates. 🙂

    The system requirements for the main (as opposed to the command line interface) version of Linux are:

    • 1 GHz x86 processor;
    • 1 GB of system memory (RAM);
    • 15 GB of hard-drive space (although this can be split onto 2 drives, a 5Gb / and a 10Gb /home partition fairly easily);
    • Graphics card and monitor capable of 1024 X 768 resolution;
    • Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB socket (or both);
    • Internet access is helpful though not vital.

    Vinux 3.2.1 is the current experimental release and disk images of various vintages can be downloaded from the Vinux project’s downloads page.

  • Bristol Festival of Economics

    Steve WoodsBristol

    It’s nigh on four decades since I was taught basic economics by Lew Davies at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the first year of my degree. Lew, who always described himself as a ‘labour economist’ (by which I’ve always understood to be related to toil rather than anything partisan), didn’t have an easy job, trying to instil an understanding of economics into a diverse bunch of freshers who’d never encountered it before; and let’s face it, economics can be terribly dry and dusty.

    However, Lew did a splendid job. For instance, he taught us all about the law of diminishing returns with an anecdote about a favourite nephew and his love of strawberry ice cream! I still have a collection of his more outrageous sayings from his lectures; even nowadays these raise a wry smile.

    Since those undergraduate days economics has not featured largely in my life. Until now.

    Tonight the Bristol Festival of Economics starts and I’ve been kindly offered a season ticket by organiser Andrew Kelly (thanks Andrew!). The first session starts at 6 pm tonight with a panel session entitled ‘The Future of Capitalism’.

    I shall be covering the festival live on Twitter, using the festival hashtag #economicsfest.

  • Trains of thought

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language

    As I never learnt to drive, I’m reliant for getting around on my own motive power or the use of public transport, particularly trains.

    To the best of my knowledge I’ve been using the railway for some five decades now, starting from my earliest recollections of junior school trips in the early 1960s to Whipsnade Zoo and London Heathrow Airport hauled by steam locomotive.

    Train travel has changed immensely since my early days. Trains themselves no longer carry mail or parcels and there’s no such thing as the guard’s van either, where the mail and parcels were stowed along with wicker baskets of racing pigeons.

    Train announcements have likewise mutated. Nowadays, they are bland and sound like they’ve been cobbled together in a studio, rather than delivered live by a live human being. My all-time favourite was that of a now long-gone male announcer at Bristol Temple Meads. When on duty, he announced the impending departure of any service with the words: “The X train on platform Y is now ready to depart. Close the doors and stand clear, please!” Announcements of this kind have now been rendered redundant by the introduction of centralised carriage door locking, which is activated some 30 seconds or more before departure.

    The language of the railways has changed over the decades too. The guard – a member of the proletariat – has been superseded by the modern ‘train manager’; presumably letting British management, a well known industrial disease, have charge of trains is a continuing reason for their failing to run to timetable. 🙂

    If you go looking for refreshment, the good old buffet car has gone, replaced by the bland, utilitarian ‘shop’. Who’s there to serve you? Not the steward: he or she has been replaced by a lumpen, jargon-ridden creature called the customer service host. How appetising. Talking of food, when was the last time passengers (sorry, ‘customers’ in the shiny newspeak of the train operating companies) saw a restaurant car?

    When on the train one can always spot the ‘train managers’ who started their working lives as guards or ticket collectors by their announcements over the speaker system: these are the ones whose trains “arrive at” the station, rather than the grammatically incorrect “arrive into”(on this side of the Atlantic at least; US aircraft frequently do this at their destinations).

    Bon voyage!

  • Forbidden food

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Throughout human history there has always been forbidden food – the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Old Testament, the various dietary restrictions imposed upon devotees by religion (e.g. kosher, halal, etc.) and the like.

    In addition to these there are other prohibitions imposed by other considerations, such as the cost of getting something to market. Other factors include whether something is (or is regarded as) a local speciality and is hence doesn’t travel – or not very far anyway. One such English local speciality is not available as far south as Bristol*, although it does travel north into Lancashire (it’s available in Sainsbury’s in Darwen by Blackburn. Ed.); and that’s the North Staffordshire oatcake.

    Staffordshire oatcake before filling
    North Staffordshire Oatcake awaiting filling

    According to Wikipedia, a North Staffordshire oatcake is a type of pancake made from oatmeal, flour and yeast. It’s cooked on a griddle or ‘baxton’. The oatcake is a local speciality in the North Staffordshire area of England. They are normally referred to as Staffordshire oatcakes or possibly Potteries oatcakes by non-locals, because they were made in this area. In and around Staffordshire and Cheshire they are often simply known as oatcakes.

    North Staffordshire exiles are fortunate that they can now order this local delicacy online from such companies as Newcastle’s North Staffs Oatcakes Ltd and Biddulph’s Povey’s Oatcakes, to name but two.

    As regards the location of oatcake shops in the Potteries and surrounding area, My Tunstall has helpfully provided an oatcake shops map. Earlier this year, a legendary oatcake shop, the Hole in the Wall closed due to a council compulsory purchase order. It was so called because the oatcakes were served to customers in the street via the front window and Stoke City Council should hang its head in shame at its destruction of the area’s heritage. Vic, my late stepfather, used to buy his oatcakes at the Hole in the Wall.

    The furthest recorded oatcake shop from the banks of the Trent can be found in Auckland, New Zealand, where an expatriate Leek resident has set up business.

    My oatcakes were bought from TJ Oatcakes & Sandwich Bar of 589 Leek Road, Hanley, ST1 3HD (map), just a short walk down the hill from my mother’s place. At TJ’s the oatcakes come in half dozen packs and are packaged in unbranded, anonymous clear plastic bags.

    Turning to the oatcake’s history, the oatcake is believed to date back to at least the 17th century when the oatcake was the staple diet of North Staffordshire people. It is thought that due to long hard winters, farmers grew oats instead wheat; the farmers’ wives would then bake the milled flour mixture on a bakestone for family members and farm workers. At that time oatcakes were quite likely to be eaten with lard, fat or cheese. During the 19th Century a cottage industry sprang up, with oatcake makers often making more than was needed and taking them in baskets to sell in the markets and streets. In the 20th century the more successful bakers built brickrooms in their yards in which to bake oatcakes from. Their front rooms would then serve as the the shop front, selling oatcakes through the sash windows, as in the Hole in the Wall above.

    Oatcakes are traditionally served with fillings such as cheese, tomato, onion, bacon, sausage and egg, plus brown or tomato sauce. They can also be eaten with sweet fillings such as golden syrup, jam or banana, but this is less common and is frowned upon by traditionalists. Mine were consumed in traditional manner, but with mushrooms added to the sausage/bacon filling. 🙂

    * = If anyone does find anywhere in Bristol selling North Staffordshire oatcakes, please let me know. Thanks!

  • Italy’s Emilia Romagna prefers open source for smart city projects

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source

    Emilia Romagna flagI was recently invited to take part in some smart city sessions organised in Bristol by Knowle West Media Centre, so I was most interested to learn of recent smart cities developments in part of Italy.

    According to the EU’s Joinup open source news site, open source software is a key element in many of the Smart City projects developed by a group of IT specialists and researchers for Italy’s Emilia Romagna region. Lucia Mazzoni, an IT project manager involved the region’s smart city projects said: “We prefer to use open source modules. This type of software allows scalable and easy to configure combinations.”

    The group is building applications to monitor atmospheric conditions and air quality and collect and present data on surface waters. They are also working on IT solutions to increase energy efficiency and are building software to monitors the condition of cultural monuments and help preserve them.

    Mazzoni gave a presentation on Emilia Romagna’s smart city research projects at the Smart City Exhibition held in Bologna between 29th and 31th October last.

    One application presented was ‘Smart Catcher’, a location-aware Android phone application which allows users to locate useful urban objects, such as bookshops, filling stations, hospitals, restaurants and hotels.

    The smart city developers are also involved in building middleware software for use in vehicle to vehicle communication. The idea is to create smart vehicles that can use the information to plan their routes more efficiently. Other projects are working on using smart sensors, video cameras and personal sensors.

    NB: This is an edited version of a post originally appearing on the Bristol Wireless site.

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