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.
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!“. 😉
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.
Yes, that’s right! Men get to scoff tortilla, bacon, sausages, 2 token items of fruit/vegetables (tomato and mushroom), Cheddar cheese, ham roll and butter, whilst women are supposed to pick their way daintily through muffin, poached egg, smoked salmon, salad leaves, cherry tomatoes, avocado, red onion, blueberries, yoghurt and pumpkin seeds.
Men can obviously let their figures go to pot (and blood cholesterol levels too. Ed.), whilst women are automatically assumed to be on a diet; women have “gotta stay slim for our men obvz” in the scathing words of one on social media.
This isn’t the first time that sexism has emerged at breakfast time (posts passim).
Peregrine falconYesterday it was a joy to discover that the peregrine falcons which nested on the old generator house by St Philip’s Bridge were nesting there again (posts passim). Talking to a gentleman on the bridge who’d been watching them through binoculars, it would appear our urban peregrines are also adapting to our urban environment and are also learning to hunt after sunset using the city’s streetlighting.
A couple of weeks ago, my attention was caught by peregrine calls when walking down Redcliff Street. They weren’t emanating from a falcon at all, but it’s taken your correspondent until now to track down their source. Looking up at the roof of the old, soon to be redeveloped Patterson’s building, I saw the sight below.
Note the electric wire and turntable. It’s a plastic peregrine which looks very realistic to the local gull population. It rotates on its turntable, flaps its wings and also calls like a real falcon from time to time. It won’t fool me again.
Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual international celebration of open formats and open standards and an opportunity to promote their use.
The use of open standards is definitely gaining ground, particularly where it matters, such as in dealings with government bodies. This was amply illustrated last year by the UK Cabinet Office’s announcement of the adoption of open standards for collaborating on government documents.
Why do open standards matter?
Open standards are vital for interoperability and freedom of choice. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the accompanying vendor lock-in. This makes open standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.
What is an open standard?
An open standard refers to a format or protocol that is:
Subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
Without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves;
Free from legal or technical clauses that limit its use by any party or in any business model;
Managed and further developed independently of any single supplier in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
Available in multiple complete implementations by competing suppliers, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
How do open standards affect you?
April, the French open source advocacy organisation, has produced a handy graphic in English to illustrate the difference between open and closed formats. Click on the image below for the full-sized version.
Examples of open standards
Many open standards are in wide use. Here are 3 examples:
ODF, the default file format of free and open source office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ODF can also be handled by Microsoft Office versions from Office 2007 onwards.
Document Freedom Day is being promoted on social media by the use of the #DFD2015 hashtag.
A week ago yesterday, there was a meeting of the TidyBS5 task force with council officers and Councillor Marg Hickman at the offices of Up Our Street.
It was a good opportunity for the officers to update community volunteers on what the council has done, is and will be doing.
Jane Street in Redfield earlier today
For Stapleton Road a deep clean is planned for this year; this will mean giving the footways a thoroughly good scrub and removing chewing gum from their surfaces. In addition, hanging baskets will be provided on approx. 30 lamp posts to help make the street a bit more colourful and attractive.
The city council’s streetscene enforcement team has now moved into the area and has already had some success: 5 traders have been issued with £300 fixed penalty notices for abusing the communal bins intended for household waste only. In addition, some minor offenders have been fined smaller amounts.
Turning to communal bins, task force members have been invited to assist in devising the communal bins consultation that the council is organising for the Stapleton Road corridor. Two task force members, Hannah and myself, informed officers that we were monitoring clearance times after fly-tipping had been reported. From my own monitoring since then, communal bins seem to be implicated in some 60% of sites notified to the council.
After the update from the offices, it was pointed out to them that, while all this attention being lavished on the Stapleton Road area was appreciated, it should not detract from equally bad problems along the Lawrence Hill/Church Road corridor, home to the infamous Jane Street (see above).
During my discussion on social media with BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect Gavin Beckett about open standards (posts passim), he invited me to submit feedback on using the council website; this will be done from the aspect of reporting street cleaning matters, where the website still has a couple of interesting foibles.
Up Our Street is organising a community litter pick on Saturday 28th March from 11 am to 1 pm. Volunteers are asked to assemble at Lawrence Hill roundabout (map). For more details, contact Lorena on 0117 954 2835.
Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light.
It was all sparked by a discussion on Twitter between myself and Alex, a leading member of the Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG).
It all revolved around what was really meant by the phrase “not fully digital” in respect of PDF files.
My speculation was that if text documents are scanned, these are usually converted to image-based PDFs with which the screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people can have problems.
It turned out this was a good point, but not the real reason.
The latter was supplied by Gavin Beckett, BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect, who actually responded to my FoI request. It seems Gavin’s main reason for describing PDFs as “not fully digital” is that PDF is basically an attempt to make electronic files emulate paper. The move by the council away from PDF to HTML when responding to citizens is that more mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) are now being used by the public to communicate with the local authority and the latter wishes to provide the same – i.e. “fully digital” experience to all.
Finally Gavin promised to follow up with his colleagues my gripe about using MS formats for responding to FOI requests. He conceded this was one example where PDF would be better.
Today is 
Following the post on Friday on