Yesterday, feeling frustrated with Bristol City Council’s ineptitude at tackling fly-tipping and litter in the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards, despite 18 months’ vigorous campaigning by local residents and ward councillors, I decided to take advantage of Twitter’s poll facility.
The results of the poll are shown below.
That’s right! 90% of respondents believe Hell will freeze over before the local authority gets a grip on fly-tipping.
If anyone spots Satan shopping for ice skates in Broadmead, the Galleries, Cabot Circus, Cribb’s Causeway or any other retail centre in the Bristol area, please provide details using the comments form below. 🙂
Although you may not realise it, Linux is the world’s largest collaborative project in the history of computing. It runs most of the world’s technology infrastructure and is supported by more developers and companies than any other operating system. In addition, it’s ubiquitous; it can be found in your phone, car and office. Besides that, it also powers the internet, the cloud, stock exchanges, supercomputers, embedded devices and more.
The latest episode of the series tries to show us how hard it is to have social connections is a universe without Linux.
According to the Mail, FIFA are investigating claims that a junior member of staff was told to falsify official records of FIFA’s meetings of its Executive Committee (ExCo) between 2001 and 2010.
Former FIFA employee Scott Burnett first worked as a translator and then as an assistant to FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke, who like Blatter, is currently suspended.
Mr Burnett dropped his bombshell via 3 tweets, as follows.
I did not share this information before because I was concerned about the repercussions and I did not know who to trust within FIFA circles.
We linguists – irrespective of whether we work as translators or interpreters or both – deal regularly with privileged and confidential information. This is why I rarely discuss the content of my work in public. As such, I have great sympathy for Mr Burnett since being told to falsify records must clearly have conflicted with that inbuilt sense of integrity which all linguists need to do their jobs.
Mr Burnett is no longer employed by FIFA and currently volunteers to support grassroots football.
At 2.00 a.m. this morning British Summer Time (BST) came to an end, the clocks were turned back one hour and the UK reverted to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and evenings that get dark earlier.
This for me marks the gloomiest time of year – at least until we’re over the winter solstice and the day of least daylight!
However, the changing of the clocks is a major job for some. For instance, for the curators of the Palace of Westminster’s Great Clock (which bongs Big Ben. Ed.), the process involves careful precision and split-second timing. As well as re-setting the time, it gives them an opportunity to make close inspection of the clock mechanism as part of a rolling maintenance programme. The process is described in detail on the UK Parliament website.
On a lighter note, the Stonehenge Twitter account decided to have some fun with the change, as shown by the following screenshot.
There have been some unkind words on social media that all Tidy BS5 campaigners do is moan about the cleanliness of Bristol’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards on social media.
Yesterday those words were once again proved to be a lie (posts passim).
A photo call break during the pick. Picture courtesy of Up Our Street.
In brilliant sunshine a dozen or so volunteers turned up in Barton Hill Urban Park to clear away litter and rubbish. Those volunteers included local residents who saw what was going on and joined in. Others of all ages from those in primary school to pensioners expressed their support.
Bags for collecting the litter were kindly provided by Keep Bristol Tidy, the accumulated litter removed over the weekend by Bristol City Council, whilst the event itself was co-ordinated by Up Our Street.
Amongst those volunteers were local ward councillors Marg Hickman and Afzal Shah, both of whom have been invaluable supporters of the Tidy BS5 campaign.
Barton Hill Urban Park is just in Lawrence Hill ward, with its boundary abutting the dividing line with Easton ward.
The next community litter pick to be organised locally will be held on Saturday, 7th November between 11.00 am and 1.00 pm, with the assembly point being the car park of Masala Bazaar, 382-386, Stapleton Road, Easton, BS5 6NQ (map).
In a move that will put yet another black mark against they city’s undeserved year as European Green Capital, the streets of Bristol are set to get even filthier than they are already.
Today’s Bristol Post reports that the number of street cleaners in Bristol has been cut by nearly a fifth since Bristol City Council took waste management and street cleansing back in-house last month from contractors Kier Group, those well-known supporters of former worker blacklisting outfit The Consulting Association.
Fly-tipping on Pennywell Road, Easton
According to the Post, the council-run Bristol Waste Company (BWC) has notified “30 to 40” agency workers at the Hartcliffe depot that they would no longer be required as of yesterday (Monday). This will cut their numbers by about one-fifth. These workers deal with street cleaning and collecting fly-tipping.
In addition, the Hartcliffe staff claim they have not been consulted on the cuts and accused the council of trying to save money at the expense of cleanliness (Bristol City Council has a long and proud tradition of avoiding and/or messing up consultation. Ed.).
Furthermore, the Hartcliffe depot staff also claim they been provided with inadequate equipment to do the job. One anonymous worker is quoted by the Post as saying:
Some of the guys haven’t been given clean gloves or protective gear, and many are still working with Kier equipment. The protective clothing is not adequate, and we have to deal with needles and dog poo and stuff.
If there are insufficient staff available at BWC for the job in hand, perhaps Bristol City Council could reassign staff from elsewhere: ideal candidates for redployment and kitting out with a fluorescent uniform, safety gloves, boots and a broom would be those working in the local authority’s overstaffed press and PR department.
In other Greenwash Capital news, it would appear that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson couldn’t really care less about the city’s cleanliness according to the tweet below from Kerry McCarthy MP.
Synonyms for unimpressed include apathetic, disinterested, unconcerned, undisturbed, untroubled and unmoved.
If Kerry’s report of her meeting with the Mayor is accurate, that is a most disturbing development in the person whose supposed job is to take care the best interests of the city and its welfare.
According to Wikipedia, Bing Translator “is a user facing translation portal provided by Microsoft as part of its Bing services to translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.”
Or it would be if only it could actually recognise languages accurately.
Twitter uses Bing Translator as an interface ostensibly to help users with languages they do not know.
However, Bing Translator still has some way to go before it recognises languages accurately, as shown by the following screenshot.
Whilst it is understandable that online machine translation tools can occasionally get confused between closely related members of the same language family (Google Translate has been known to confuse Norwegian and Danish. Ed.), this is the first time I can recall such a back end helper being a real tool and getting muddled over languages as distinct from one another as English and Norwegian.
Perhaps any passing Microsoft developers would care to explain this anomaly in the comments below.
This blog has discussed homophones before (posts passim). Homophone corner is a space to which people who cannot distinguish their homophones are banished to consider the errors of their ways – rather like the corner of the classroom to which misbehaving children were exiled during my primary school days.
It now appears as though the curse of the homophone is spreading to the giants of the technology world, as shown by the following tweet from Nix Tran Stories.
I’ve used Microsoft Word/Office since the days of Windows 3.1 and its spelling and grammar checking tools have in my opinion never been particularly good: I’ve always run rings around them; and now it appears that the spellchecker has been coded by an illiterate.
I suppose the least I could do is pat the leader of the MS Office team on the shoulder and mouth the platitude “their, there, they’re!“. 😉
Urban Media Space is described as “a flexible and dynamic sanctuary for everyone in search of knowledge, inspiration and personal development – an open and accessible learning environment supporting democracy and community and is also going to be an example of the library of the future.”
Conference communication channels
The official communication channel during the conference will be the conference mailing list, conference@global.libreoffice.org. All participants will automatically be subscribed to that list, whilst the archives can be browsed at http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/conference/.
Primary Danish conference contacts
The primary conference contacts in Denmark have likewise been announced; they are:
Where litter belongs. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsFor as long as I’ve been going abroad to the mainland of Europe – some 45 years – one aspect that I’ve never failed to notice is just how clean other countries are compared with the United Kingdom. During my first visit to Germany in 1975 the streets – compared to those in UK – seemed clean enough to eat one’s dinner off.
It’s unfortunate that despite the decades of campaign efforts of Keep Britain Tidy and local campaigners throughout the country, the United Kingdom remains the dirty man of Europe. A stroll down any street or road in the country will readily confirm this if readers have any doubts.
A major element in littering is stuff dumped out of cars by the lazy and uncaring. This ranges from small stuff like cigarette butts to discarded fast food packaging from meals eaten on the move, right up to really nasty stuff such as used disposable nappies.
The UK is a very scenic country – why trash it?
Why indeed?
38 Degrees Petition
There are other people equally concerned about the amount of litter in the UK and a petition has just been posted on 38 Degrees.
The introduction to the petition reads:
This petition is calling for local councils in Yorkshire and across England to be given new powers to fine people who litter from vehicles. Littering shouldn’t be a consequence-free crime and enforcement acts as a deterrent as well as a punishment. The Government already approved the necessary legislation in 2014 but Defra has delayed producing the required regulations for over a year. This delay must end.
Why helping councils with enforcement is important
The petition’s explanatory text continues:
Clearing up litter costs Yorkshire councils over £77m a year, contributing to the national figure of over £800m. Clearing roadsides is particularly costly and dangerous, so preventing littering from vehicles is extremely important. Local councils said for many years that they needed new powers to fine people who throw litter from vehicles, as a £75 fine will make most people think twice before throwing litter again.
The existing law, in the Environmental Protection Act 1990, said the council needed to prove which person in the vehicle threw the litter – something that was mostly impossible. The Government agreed to introduce a new law, via the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which meant local councils can issue a fine to the registered keeper of the vehicle, which is what happens when vehicles are caught speeding and or are parked in the wrong place.
To make sure councils know how to implement this new law, the Government needs to provide them with regulations. However, the department responsible – Defra – has delayed these regulations for over a year and councils are no nearer to being able to take action against litterers. This also means there are now two pieces of legislation on litter that are essentially useless.
The Secretary of State must make sure her officials are taking the required action to bring this legislation to life and to prevent further littering from vehicles.
It’s been an open secret for many years that 
This year’s event will be held in 
