Education transformation, Community devastation

I have not met a single person who would not want the best of education for children, Ceredigion Education and Community Services Directorate included!, but as is so often the case there is a lack of cross-cutting innovation and the County Council has taken another step towards dystopia.

Having attended the Council meeting on Wednesday to see whether a plan for a 3-19 school in Llandysul was to be adopted I took some solace that opinions were, at least, exchanged (but not debated!). I would like to thank the 14 councillors that supported our cause to see primary schools retained and secondary education developed in the area. In particular I am grateful to Dafydd Edwards for his stand against the leadership of the Council and to Assembly Members and Members of Parliament that gave us their support. I would also like to thank the 370 members of our Facebook group that have given us courage to pursue our principles. Unfortunately 17 councillors voted for the 3-19 school to be taken forward.

We have never sought to stop a new build scheme and we are in favour of an integrated 3 to 19 network, but with primary schools remaining within the community. Neither are we a single-issue group concerned that we can walk to our local school. The whole being of a community based primary school creates a community cohesion and enables our children to attend other activities and clubs in the area which I do not believe a single out-of-town school will allow. Are the Assembly and the County Council so convinced that a single-site education scheme will deliver all, and that their national average thresholds are fit for solutions in urban as they are in rural areas?

Despite the Council’s vote, we are still a very long way from our primary schools being closed and I urge all parents and community to continue to support our primary schools. I don’t want to see an exodus from our schools whilst they still have good numbers and high quality education. A dystopia may be upon us, but hope for a utopia has not escaped.

Rock pools

It's been a busy week. In Wales the Urdd Eisteddfod in Aberaeron just North of where we live has been running all week, and for various reasons we have been in attendance for a number of days. Between that, half term, managing the smallholding and work I've struggled tyo put fingers to keyboard.

However, in one of these outings I was able to have an enjoyable few minutes with my two daughters (whilst son attended a creative writing class). We went down to the beach at Aberaeron, the tide was going out and the son was shining.

It was glorious listening to the rattle of surf, followed by moments of complete silence, whilst my girls tried to find spots of sand (on a rocky beach) and stones for skimming. What struck me most though was the teeming life everywhere. Periwinkle shells, fish and crustaceans moved around the shallow rock areas. With the sun reflecting of the water like diamonds I was struck by the views that could be had. Considering myself an amateur photographer I used my mobile phone camera to capture some shots.

In those moments I was able to lose myself and just absorb the atmosphere; a vibrant and uncluttered sky, protecting a gentle yet powerful surf, whilst we took on the roles of biologists searching for life hidden amongst the barren land of rocks and pools.

Sadly duties called and we had to bring our explorations to an end, but we all enjoyed those moments and we will return again.

Coalition Maps

Back to writing about visual things now!

Whilst the outcomes of the May Election may stem expenditure on consultancy, they did at least introduce us to other approaches in maps and visualisation. The BBC proportional map was based on hexagons representing each constituency and certainly provided an alternate view of the UK.

So I started to think about how cartograms can be used in my own line of work, and set about generating my own proportional map. I had actually written a MapBasic script 5 years ago, and used this to generate a hexagon outline across the UK. The script controls for hexagon size and grid dimensions, and with a bit of tweaking I approximated the 400 objects that I needed to cover England. Then I needed to relate each authority in England to a single hexagon.

The problem I had then was to convert from the actual boundary file to single hexagons. I could use a centroid approach, but either way I would need to remove hexagons. Instead I downloaded the cartogram application, ScapeToad, a nifty little programme that imports and exports ESRI shapefiles. By applying a standard weight across the England authorities, ScapeToad used the Gastner/Newman diffusion-based algorithm to distort the authorities. Essentially distorting the authority boundaries so that their centroids are evenly spaced. By exporting the resulting cartogram and then overlaying it with the hexagons I could run a spatial overlay to identify the hexagon associations. Then it was a case of moving the hexagon identifiers in turn so that there were no gaps. Once that manual process was completed the basis for the hexagon map is created.

What is the benefit? Well in many analyses the dominance of large rural locations can overpower detail within urban areas, and if an image is to be used at less than A4 scale this detail will be lost. In the example shown the same breakpoints are used, but even at the small image size used, the hexagon map quickly draws attention to details not immediately visible in the true spatial image.

Next time you need a map, consider a hexagon based approach, or the cartogram.

WalesOnline - Business - Business News - Local food campaign for Wales

WalesOnline - Business - Business News - Local food campaign for Wales

Best of humanity

It has been a humbling day. Despite 24 deg C temperatures we have had a dozen people on-site today helping to prepare a polytunnel. Working a good five hours they have collectively cleared and weeded a 30 foot site. They are all volunteers from a gardening club and the group partake in gardening activities for each member.

Giving up time for others is a great thing. Society seems to be driven by the need to make money and spend it and this incessant drive dominates our living and consumes our every moment. I was reading Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, and their review of Richard Mabey's book A Brush with Nature in which Mabey asks "Does anyone go walking for its own sake any more?" It made me wander whether any of us take time to just enjoy what we have and amble without any pressure or need to be somewhere, or doing something. Instead we relax by watching the TV and end up being driven by the celebrity lifestyle thrust upon us.

So back to the best of humanity. Having watched Doctor Who The Hungry Earth in which he asks his friends to be the best of humanity I was reminded of the challenge that we all face. I guess it is whether we choose to be selfish or selfless with our time, and today's gardening crew was certainly giving of theirs. My friend Llinos also needed my help today to recover 4 hours of lost school work, and fortunately I used some freeware to recover most of her work.

Her gratitude was more than enough reward (and besides she gives up her time to run our local Sunday School). Maybe if we all just gave some of our time, and appreciated the time that other's give to us, then we might all make a step towards realising the best of humanity.

Fahrenheit 451

Well our solid fuel Rayburn installation was completed a week or so ago and we have been gradually adjusting to a different way of living. My father-in-law reminded me how, when such devices were originally developed the house wife would be there to manage it from dusk til dawn, nursing it through the day.

Of course these days both my wife and I are occupied with other matters, like earning enough to stay where we are. Into the mix of parenting, working and middle class pressures, we now have to get through the wood felling and splitting and coal purchasing.

My wife is adamant that we do not resort to using our electric cooker or gas hob. We certainly do not use the oil fired central heating anymore, so there is a feeling of return to the good life. But be warned if you are contemplating venturing into this territory. Having stoked up the Rayburn
to a cool 150 deg centigrade, we have been able to heat water and radiators. However, instant cooking is a thing of the past now as we 'wind up' the Rayburn over 2 hours to get to a cooking temperature.

And I haven't yet developed that much foresight. So it was on Tuesday night, after another luke warm meal that we 'banked' the Rayburn for overnight heating at about 9pm: Set the spin wheel to quarter turn open, close the flue chamber, set the boiler to 1 (it's all manual), riddle and de-ash.

Two hours later I was listening to the hot water pipes boiling away... gurgle gurgle. Okay, one circulation is normally just the system blowing some steam off. Within the next hour, this gurgling was becoming a continual annoyance, and so at midnight I set off to examine the Rayburn.

As I waded through the Turkish steam room of our kitchen I was concerned to see the cooker thermostat at 250 deg C, and clearly rising. By 1am the thermostat had reached 300 deg C (600 deg F). Flames licked across the Rayburn and up the flue. A combination of radiators and hot water taps on full gradually brought the Rayburn temp back down.

Since then we have managed to avoid such high temp and have been able to accommodate the additional tasks of Rayburn cooking within our busy lifestyle. There is still plenty to do, but we all contibute. My wife need not be chained to the kitchen sink and cooker, and I can live with the fact that Guy Montag will not be knocking on the door to utilise our furnace.

Explorations in vision

Okay it's a little quirky, but one of my inspirational books is Explorations, by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who find the Titanic. At the time I was reading Geography at the University of Reading and was really into the remote sensing. What Ballard did, aside from deep sea explorations, was to bring the classroom into the deep sea, by using live video feeds between schools in the US and his ocean side explorations. What a great idea!

15 years on (crikey!) and I'm now trying to apply the same principals to sustainable living. Our 40 acre small holding in mid Wales is gradually being wired up to provide visual photos, videos, and live web feeds across our diverse domestic animals and wildlife. The site at www.virtuallynatural.co.uk is trying to provide a forum for discussing how to live sustainably/self-sufficiently/more enjoyably.

Along the way I have founded my own company which specialises in information management, visualisation and map making. Hence I guess the blog title, Explorations in vision.

Well here goes...