This ‘state of the ark’ hearing aid from 100 years ago weighed in at over 3 pounds

There’s an interesting TED driven debate here examining the emotional effect of music.  It’s powerful stuff but unfortunately when you have lost more than half your natural hearing it’s quite difficult to relate to some of the comment and sentiment.

As my hearing has continued to decline in recent years I have lost more and more music. Pieces of classical music that I enjoyed 5, 10, even 15 years ago have increasingly lost their attraction.  They become unrecognisable as more and more layers of the music drop away and don’t sound anything like you remember them.

There reaches a point where pumping the sound into your ears at higher and higher volume removes all the subtleness of the music and the type of basic digital hearing aid provided by the NHS does not provide the quality of sound to compensate, making even the heaviest music sound harsh and uncomfortable.

For me, the net result is my musical tastes have retreated to mainly punk and heavy rock that I enjoyed in my youth where quality and subtlety of sound makes very little difference to the end result.

This week I took delivery of a set of new hearing technology the price of which equates to a sparkling new 500cc motorbike – hmmm…. The aids themselves are so small and light they hardly tip the scales at a miniscule 2 grammes each. This is at least 4 times lighter than my old aids and when you wear these things 16 hours a day, every gramme makes a difference. In terms of quality difference I’d say the sound produced by these high-tech little units is at least a factor of 10 better than standard NHS issue.

What then, set the tears rolling down my cheeks? Thinking how much 4 grammes of equipment can cost? Thinking how else that money could be spent?

Err no … It was the very first piece of music I listened to through them – Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.

This is the piece of music made more famous through featuring centrally in the movie Shine about the life of Australian pianist David Helfgott and his battle with mental illness.

My wife and I loved the soundtrack to the movie and played it endlessly when she was pregnant with our eldest daughter back in the mid 90s.

As my hearing has declined since then, the ‘Rach 3′ has become a difficult piece of music for me to listen to as large chunks of the layered high register sound have become scratchy and then disappeared altogether to the extent that it sounded more and more like the sort of off-key plonking sound comedian Les Dawson was famous for making in his shows. Also, with the natural variation in depth and strength of sound throughout the piece it is one that is spoilt further by turning the volume up.

So, the first evening home after receiving the aids I settled down with a glass of red wine, found the Helfgott recording of the ‘Rach 3′ I have on my phone, connected via Bluetooth and settled back on the sofa to listen. Within minutes I had tears streaming down my face as I rediscovered a piece of music I thought I’d lost forever.

These little beauties weigh just 2 grammes but are packed full of cutting edge tech.

This is the first time I’ve ever been able to listen to music through hearing aids and enjoy the experience, which says a hell of a lot for the sound processing technology in these tiny things. The aids help recapture a purity of sound I never thought I’d hear again and this in turn brings the music and all it subtle layers back to life.

Needless to say I am taking any opportunity I can right now to refresh my memory of beautiful music. Hopefully the technology will keep pace with the continuing loss of hearing function that is pretty much a given with this hereditary disorder but I’m afraid that as I get older, the loss is accelerating and the aids are already at the limit of their capability.

However things progress, I feel extremely lucky to be facing this challenge in the 21st century and not 100 years ago. My genealogy research has shown many of my ancestors faced the same issue going back at least 200 years and when I look at the hearing technology that was available during my Grandfather’s life – and indeed for much of my Father’s life – the advances that have been made over the last 10 years are particularly astonishing.

It’s at times like this I remember how tough things must have been for people like my Grandfather. After spending his young adult life from the age of 18 to 25 in the army and fighting throughout the First World War, he came back to the UK already experiencing hearing loss – which he mistakenly attributed to catching malaria. It’s clear that those many years fighting in the trenches and on other frontlines across Europe took a great toll on him mentally and there was no such thing as Post Traumatic Stress counselling in those days. Those who survived the horrors of war returned to a country heading for the Great Depression where work became increasingly difficult to come by and I’m sure even harder for those with disabilities. I also remember tales of how my Grandfather would throw his big box hearing aid across the room in sheer frustration and have to push his ear right to the speakers of old radio sets in order to get any sound when important announcements were made during the Second World War and he needed to know how to protect his family from German bombing campaigns in and around Southampton.

My parents were devastated when they first heard I was losing my hearing and I’m sure I will be too should it happen to my kids. However, when my eldest daughter realised that I was streaming music straight from phone into devices that are barely visible in my ears I’m sure I detected a look that said ‘cool’ With the rate the technology is changing I’m pretty confident that even if my kids do experience ‘the deafness’ it will have nowhere near the impact it has had on previous generations.

Other hearing loss related posts …

Bionic Ear research targets the brain stem

Learning the art of Espionage

From King Bluetooth I to SmartEars V1.0…

None of us is perfect

In that moment I understood – completely…

A love/hate relationship…

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”

I’ve used this classic Bill Gates quote a number of times in this blog over the last 5 years and have certainly witnessed it playing out in technology developments I have been associated with during my career – from desktop publishing, to digital broadcasting, 3G mobile, web-based applications and consumer electronics.

Since entering the workplace in marketing roles in the 1980s, there is no doubt that the processes involved in marketing have evolved tremendously over the last 20 years but I find myself somewhat disappointed and disillusioned with what’s happened in the field of ‘Technology for Marketing’ over the last 10 years.

Things certainly seemed a lot more clear cut when the TFM show was in its ascendance back in 2003 and divided its proposition across marketing, customer service and sales domains. The irrational exhuberance of those heady dotcom days was passed and there was a much more serious focus on the tangible things technology could deliver to the sales, marketing and customer care agendas and processes.

10 years on we have an explosion of acronyms – not just amongst the exhibitors but from the exhibition organisers themselves – TFM&A, OA&A, IDMX and P&ME – err WTF?

I was confused before I even walked in through the doors and the sub categorisation of Digital, Direct, CRM, Data and Online didn’t really help make things much clearer.

Isn’t everything digital and online these days? Aren’t we all dealing ‘direct’ via the wonders of digital channels and isn’t everything we do about data in one form or another?

I remember agreeing with a tweet earlier this year, in amongst the ‘trends for 2013′ commentary that observed “2013 is the year ‘digital’ marketing becomes just ‘marketing’ again” – well if this year’s TFM(&A) is anything to go by it can’t happen soon enough in my book.

My interpretation of this situation is that rather than ‘underestimating’ how far ‘marketing technology’ would move forward over the last 10 years, the marketing ‘industry’ is being hampered and undermined by a confusing mess.

And guess who benefits from this?

Not the marketer, not the customer and certainly not the buyer of such solutions.

It is undoubtedly the ‘marketers of marketing technology’!

How do I know this? Well (coughs) I was one once and based on my visit this week, there are still many familiar faces on the stands and in the seminar theatres of TFM(&A) today – if only a few familiar company names were in attendance from 10 years ago

Here are a few ‘face value’ observations …

1. The number of exhibiters 10 years on is roughly the same (whether the floor areas from Olympia to Earls Court 2 are similar I don’t really know but the show ‘felt’ about the same sort of size as previous years from when I attended as a presenter, exhibitor and/or visitor)

2. Only 4 organisations (less than 2.5% ) with their original names are exhibiting 10 years on – Apteco, Bureau van Dijk, Experian and MediaCo

3. My particular sector of focus – Web Content Management – was not visibly represented in 2003 by names recognisable today. The commonly mentioned CMS vendors only started exhibiting at this event from 2004 onwards and those represented this year were Acquia (Drupal), Ektron, EPiServer, Sitecore, Sitefinity, SDL and Kentico. See how this compares to/validates Janus Boyes latest UK Top Ten CMS Vendors list here …

4. To me, the logical categorisation of marketing technologies that runs across this 10 year period is 1. Awareness, 2. Acquisition, 3. Conversion and 4. Retention. I know in our ‘social media’ CEM/CXM/WEM orientated world it is argued that ‘Referal’ slots into the cycle after Retention and that  ‘Satisfaction’ comes between Acquisition and Conversion but I would argue they have always been in this cycle as fundamental elements of good sales, marketing and customer service.

5. Back in 2003, Alterian was one of the shows main sponsors and realistically at that time contributed structured data through some of the marketing cycle. It then spent much of the following 5 years trying to become an active participant across all parts of the cycle through acquisition of solutions that dealt with the largely ‘unstructured’ part of the cycle. This mixed bag of solutions now sits alongside even more solutions within the SDL stable.

So, 10 years ago I would say the proposition was clear-cut and articulated simply but the technology itself was highly fragmented. Today, the technology is highly converged and simpler to understand but the proposition being put around it is very fragmented and confused.

There is one thing I can say for certain though, pretty much all of those steps in the marketing cycle that I have used a myriad of tools to address over the last 20 years can now be achieved effectively and efficiently across many scenarios using one core solution – namely Drupal, its community and eco-system.

I would happily challenge representatives from that long list of companies below to explain why what they provide could not be adequately addressed by Drupal and its eco-system.

Click to enlarge …

Click to enlarge …

On the fifth day of Christmas 2012, here are some thoughts on the last year …

My enduring memory of these last twelve months will be Danny Boyle’s awe-inspiring creativity with the Olympic rings at the London 2012 opening ceremony.

From the way the idyllic countryside scene was transformed to depict the Industrial Revolution and the hot metal seemingly flowed to form gigantic glowing rings which were then raised above the stadium and fused together was one of the most amazing theatrical displays I have ever seen. It set the tone for what I will always remember as a wonderful golden period for the British people during a back-drop of financial depression and tough times.

Ring of steel

Post 9/11, we have no choice but to think the unthinkable when it comes to how and where the next ‘terrorist spectacular’ might hit. Seb Coe has described the immense pressure and relief that it didn’t happen at London 2012. As so many of us have those images of fully fueled passenger jets being flown into the twin towers engrained in our memories, it’s not hard to imagine the scale of carnage and outrage that could be created by flying a plane or two into an Olympic park. Fortunately London is used to creating a ‘Ring of Steel’ around itself following many years of IRA bombing campaigns and the positioning of HMS Ocean in the Thames and anti-aircraft missile sites around the park made a very visible statement to would-be attackers that any threat from the air or a Mumbai style ground assault would be met with ultimate force.

The killing of Bin Laden last year and the focus on drone warfare to target known terrorists would appear to have made the world a safer place in 2012 but in the same way the Western world has evolved its tactics you can be sure that those determined to cause terrorist atrocities are evolving theirs too and leveraging the hatred generated by the drone operations. The unfortunate result is a perpetual war that is being fought on many fronts, some highly visible like Afghanistan and some completely hidden like increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Ring of life

The ring of life that created fossil fuels and has seen mankind’s addiction to burning them in ever larger amounts looks set to deliver ever-increasing amounts of payback over this century. Seemingly we just can’t get a grip on ourselves and despite all the warnings and talk about the need to take action to prevent catastrophic levels of warming our dangerous emissions get ever higher. The facts, feedback loops and predictions are staring us in the face but we appear to be frozen in indecision like rabbits in headlights. As this article from the beginning of 2012 highlights, we simply do not understand climate physics well enough to be sure that human generated emissions won’t lead to a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect. Predictions for emissions in 2012 have them rising by 2.6 percent which will push us even closer to the upper end of climate change models during this decade.

Ring of destruction

At over 1000 miles wide and moving at over 100 miles per hour, Hurricane Sandy has been described as the largest storm in history and the second costliest hurricane to hit the US after Katrina.

(GOES-13) captured this natural-color image of Hurricane Sandy at 1:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (17:45 Universal Time) on October 28, 2012

Whether or not our world has been subject to such an enormous ‘ring of destruction’ in its turbulent past is debatable but it is undoubtedly the biggest we have seen in our lifetimes and the stuff of Hollywood blockbuster nightmares only on this occasion captured in an all too real form on people’s phones. Trees crushing once peaceful, leafy neighbourhoods, electricity sub stations exploding, whole houses being swept inland and subways filling with water – the sort of things that would take a big chunk of a Hollywood effects budget to create. Although the economic impact of this latest hurricane was very high, the advance preparations kept the death toll to around 100. Elsewhere in the world, another ‘ring of destruction’ in the form of Typhoon Bopha this month claimed ten times as many lives as it slammed into poor and less well prepared parts of the Philippines – If you blinked you would have missed the news coverage of that event …

Ring of power

A steady groundswell of information and commentary during 2012 has built on what started in the US as Occupy Wall Street towards the end of 2011. For me, two things have brought home the sheer level of disparity we are experiencing in the world today, reading a book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt and watching the excellent documentary Park Avenue – Money, Power and the American Dream.

As I have made my way through the world over the last 30 years in relationships and the workplace I have been getting a growing sense of unease that the cards are stacked against the majority of us. It is becoming clear just how successful the 1% have been in exploiting the 99% of us since the start of the 1980s and it will be my generation and those of my children who are going the feel the brunt of it. Hopefully, growing awareness of such inbalance will help drive fairer wealth distribution as this century progresses and, like the climate change prediction models, we will start to see a levelling off and eventual drop in these steep climbing graphs.

Ring of truth

This year has been dominated by the Leveson Inquiry into the murky practices of the British press. Personally, I am on the side of those who say that the press should be stronger not weaker in this country. Some of things that have been coming to light in the wake of financial meltdown beg the question where were all the investigative journalists while our money was being frittered and squirreled away? The US press is far more forgiving than the British press and any idea that our systems should become more like theirs is not a good thing. It seems our press have been overly distracted by the trivialities of celebrity lives and some of it’s more dubious paparazzi techniques have spilled over into other areas of news reporting

Ringing off now …

Speaking personally, this last year has been a bit of a rollercoaster one, with big highs and lows as I have persevered in launching my own venture.

Two major high points are encapsulated in the following video clips. The first is of my daughters riding across a deserted beach in Cornwall in October and the second is a compilation video used to help celebrate the work of my father at an event organised for his 80th birthday in November.

Well, this is the last time in my life that there will be any more interesting date combinations – with perhaps the exception of 02.02.2020 and 30.03.30 – but none so good as 11.11.11, 10.11.12 and 12.12.12.

So here, at 12:12:12 on 12.12.12 is a quick summary of the first 12 months of Webwiser, the venture I launched on 11.11.11 … (with apologies to the Twelve days of Christmas)

In the first month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – some domain names for a small fee - www.webwiser.co.uk and www.webwiser.tv

In the second month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – a business plan and something to talk about at the Christmas party

In the third month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – sleepless nights and increasing anxiety

In the fourth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – some glimmers of hope and some excellent opportunities

In the fifth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – my first big contract and a real chance to make a difference to society

In the sixth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – a busy schedule and many meetings around Hampshire county

In the seventh month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – two more clients and not much time to even take a pee

In the eighth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – a big new site launch and even bigger development plan to oversee

In the ninth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – another client and a return to web development for B2B

In the tenth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – some very varied weeks and a well needed break by the sea

In the eleventh month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – a limited company incorporation number and a fellow director called Debbie

In the twelth month of Webwiser, the venture gave to me – a chance to rework the website and set a course for 2020!

The post itself questioned the importance of social media in the context of the Arab Spring and asked what might happen in the Western world and particularly the spiritual home of ‘social media’ – the US – as financial challenges worsened.

Almost 2 years have passed since that post and I have been revisiting some of the things that have happened since then.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt’ . If you want to continue your days looking on the bright side – then do not read this book!  It is staggeringly depressing.

By way of a brief summary, the book covers the following accounts …

1. Days of Theft – looks at the legacy of the euro-american driven persecution of the indigenous American Indian population and very effectively juxtapositions the ‘belief systems’ of these very different Peoples to get the reader questioning which offers the better way of life.

2. Days of Siege – looks at how once thriving areas of the US and the people living in them have been utterly abandoned by the corporations who once benefitted from them and supported them. It makes it very clear just how ‘disposable’ people are in the pursuit of the American Dream but also how they are essentially ‘medicated’ into accepting their dismal fate.

3. Days of Devastation – this describes in words and illustrations the immense level of destruction in the Appalachian mountains as corporations look to extract fossil fuels in the most profitable way.  Aside from the sheer tragedy of eradicating 500 majestic mountaintops already from the face of the planet and turning them to vast areas of useless wasteland this account spells out in no uncertain terms the level of suffering such rapid and massive energy extraction has had on the local population.

4. Days of Slavery – this is a sobering account for those of us who have enjoyed the hedonistic tourist nirvana of the US sunshine state. If you thought that slavery was abolished in 1833 then this harrowing analysis of the lives of workers on Floridian farms today makes it clear how slavery has simply evolved rather than been consigned to history.

5. Days of Revolt – the main thrust of this section is that the facade of Western capitalism is crumbling as more and more people realise they have been used and robbed. In commentary that echoes a popular post of mine a couple of years back – where I compared Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with George Orwell’s 1984 – the book describes how the configuration of wealth and power in our world today is very much as Orwell described. As the book says, “The largest deficits in human history mean we [in the West] are trapped in a debt peonage system” which, it believes, will lead to a stark form of ‘neo-feudalism’.  It supposes that now the fraud has been exposed we are entering an era of ‘naked force’ where our corporate ‘overlords’ will use the security apparatus established to fight the ‘war on terror’ to control other forms of unrest with increasingly draconian measures.

The last chapter of the book makes a lot of references to the Occupy Movement which first gained public attention in September 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protests. This was the essence of my original blog post at the beginning of 2011 where I questioned if/how the US in particular would use social media to create a groundswell of public opinion.

The Occupy Movement looked promising in the way it was organised and the Wikipedia entry documents its philosophies, approaches and successes since September 2011 very well. It  includes reference to the results of the US Congressional Budget Office report that illustrated “the top 1 percent of income earners nearly tripled after-tax income over the last thirty years”, inspiring the movement’s powerful ‘we are the 99%’  slogan and highlights the following summary of US wealth distribution …

In 2007 the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%. Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country’s wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%

It also has a rather telling and disheartening line in its narrative referring to how President Obama “no longer mentions the Occupy movement by name, which analysts say reflects the fact that by early 2012 Occupy had become a divisive issue, unpopular with much of the public”

One of the repeated themes of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is how, when pushed into austere and challenging circumstances, individuals and communities often turn on those closer to them to vent their frustrations.

This same observation is made in a BBC article today which looks at the Beveridge Report from 70 years ago and asks “How did welfare claimants come to be seen as scroungers?”. It includes an observation by Times columist David Aaronovitch who suggests working people on tight budgets could blame the bankers but they are more likely to round on people who are like them but claiming benefits

“The very rich are not like you – you might resent them from afar. But these people, the claimants are very close to you, you might even know them. You don’t feel you are making enough money so you resent people asking for help”

Having just read such a stark assessment of modern day America it’s easy to sit back and be thankful that the bit of the UK I live in is literally and metaphorically thousands of miles away from such harrowing tales of life in other parts of our 21st Century world – but the warning signs are here too and in this age of globalisation we are undoubtedly all in the same boat. As the BBC article on Beveridge concludes …

“He’d be quite horrified by the current welfare state. His system was designed to support economic activity to the fullest extent. He’d think that was not the case today.”

Cup cakes courtesy of daughter No1

Today we celebrated my Dad’s 80th Birthday at an event organised at Furzey Gardens at Minstead in the New Forest.

Dad spent his early career as commercial artist for the original Selwood company (the plant hire and pump people) and helped design the gallery at Furzey back in the 1970s when the gardens and Minstead Lodge were acquired by the Selwood family.

It seemed a very fitting venue for celebrating his life and work to date and I was delighted when Tim Selwood offered me use of the Gardens and Furzey House for this private event outside of the official opening season. It was fascinating to re-visit a place I remember from childhood outings and also to learn more about the excellent work the Furzey Charitable Trust and Minstead Training project do for those with learning disabilities.

As part of the birthday event I created a small exhibition of Dad’s work from over the years which include a number of paintings he has produced during the last ten years that have rarely been seen outside of the family home. Thanks to my brother’s diligent efforts on a scanner and the masterful photography and album production of Ben Goode, we have captured a selection of Dad’s work digitally that we remember being created over the years.

I have added the output of some of these efforts to a portfolio website to accompany the event and to give exposure to some of the lovely paintings beyond the walls of the family home – http://www.brianhoskins.org.uk/

Thanks again to all those who helped make this a delightful, fun and memorable afternoon and I very much hope to be organising a follow-up event in 10 years time. If Dad has just enough of the family genes that enabled my 98 year old Aunt to attend the event and regale me with tales of how she used tour around the New Forest pubs on a motorbike (as I used to do in my youth) then hopefully I will be writing a similar post in 2022!

Click for larger view

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T minus 13 seconds …

I had a real surprise this week when communicating with an old school friend. He had some pictures I never even knew existed that were taken coming up to 30 years ago.

They are of a space shuttle model that I carved out of balsa wood, painted and then stuffed with parts of dismantled fireworks. It is then apparent from the photographs that we built a metal gantry out of Meccano to hold the shuttle in position and launched it from a friend’s back garden on Friday 12th November 1982 – (which incidentally was the day after the real shuttle programme’s first operational flight when Columbia carried four astronauts and deployed a satellite for the first time)

If I remember rightly, I had created a secondary fuse mechanism that would ignite after take-off which was then designed to blast open the payload doors and release a parachute to enable the shuttle to float back to the ground.

These days we would have captured such teenage experiments on video and posted them to YouTube – as it is I am staggered that this event was even captured on a couple of grainy photographs as I don’t remember any of us using cameras much at all, let alone actually bothering to get the pictures developed.

What happened after the ‘main engine ignition’ is a little hazy but I seem to remember the shuttle flying upwards for a bit then becoming unstable and crashing. After hitting the ground, the subsequent parachute release explosion was a little bit larger than expected and resulted in the model burning rapidly to a cinder

As that classic line from the Italian Job goes – it was “only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”

This is the stark reckoning from onehundredmonths.org who’s countdown process and excellent updates I have been following for a few years now.

Beyond this point, there is steadily growing scientific conscensus that if we have not taken sufficient action to curb greenhouse gas emissions within this timeframe there is the very serious possibility of runaway global warming. The resulting rise in temperatures will turn our planet into quite a hostile place for the vast majority of the human race in its current form and locations.

As usual, claim and counter claim continue from both sides of the climate change debate and without being blessed with a crystal ball or DeLorean time machine we have to decide as individuals which side of the debate we stand or else take no notice at all and carry on with our lives as usual.

Given the unpredictability of Mother Nature, who really knows for sure whether one event will counteract another in the future and the human race has shown it can rise to challenges when the need is strong enough. However, looking around us in the year 2012, it’s clear that things are changing. The wettest summer in the UK for 100 years and record levels of ice melt in the arctic are just two events relatively close to home that we have felt the effects of. A very tangible example of which I have discovered this last month in my back garden.

When looking deeper at climate change issues a few years back it seemed that the UK South Coast could benefit from rising temperatures and develop a Mediterranean style climate. In anticipation of this potentially positive side effect I planted a grape vine – not just any vine but an off-cut from the Great Vine at Hampton Court Palace that has provided black dessert grapes to the tables of British royalty since 1769 (well that’s what it said on the label when I bought it from Homebase anyway …).

The vine has grown well since it was planted in 2008 and it now covers the entire trellis, providing the type of spanish/greek style taverna backdrop over the decking area that I was hoping for originally. I didn’t really know what to expect from growing a vine outside of a greenhouse and was pleasantly surprised when it  produced its first grapes in 2009 – black and sweet as per its stated heritage. In 2010, the grape crop was even better, surpassing anything I had imagined it would produce and providing bunches that were kept and eaten well into the autumn.

The wet summer of 2011 looked like ruining the crop for the year but good sunny weather late August and early September ripenned it well, although they resulting grapes were not as large or sweet as the previous year’s crop.

This year has been an utter disaster. As illustrated in the picture below, the grapes are totally underdeveloped and very few have managed to ripen successfully – the handful that have are extremely bitter.

I was commenting to people a month or so back that if the UK’s wine industry’s vine harvests were as poor as mine then it would be a very bad year for them. Unfortunately, reports over the last few weeks have confirmed that this is the case, with a vineyard just along the coast from us saying that it had abandoned this year’s crop altogether and other reports suggesting that problems have been global too.

The climate change models predicted increases in extreme weather events and over the last decade, in our quiet corner of Hampshire, UK, we have experienced record temperatures, record snowfalls and record rainfalls.

The evidence of change is starting to arrive on our own doorsteps but if it means an increase in the price of wine for some, you can be sure it means a great deal more suffering for others

Fortunately I am surrounded by a thoroughly likeable and dedicated bunch of people who have clearly been going through times of great upheaval and uncertainty with political change and the major cuts in public spending.

It is refreshing to be working within organisations with good information management processes and practices and I admire the folks who work faithfully and tirelessly to keep everything in order and accurate for local residents – often working to maintain approaches that seemed like a good idea at the time but have since fallen out of favour. Quite often those who are supposed to be supporting them are making their jobs even harder.

They also have my sympathies though. Excellent information management is not a glamorous activity, often under-rated and under-resourced. Unfortunately, when you have to spend many, many hours using software tools that should have been updated 5 years previously then the activity can become a real slog.  This excellent article from almost 10 years ago highlighted basic user likes and dislikes and opportunities for improving web application usability. Sadly my colleagues have to struggle with these types of issue daily

I have heard the words ‘clunky’, ‘dated’, ‘frustrating’ and ‘unreliable’ regularly in meetings over the last six months and have complete empathy with the feelings expressed from those times when I have fallen out of love with the tools I have to use extensively.

For me it underlines the danger of getting locked in to proprietary software environments, particularly when there is likely uncertainty over future funding. The real dilemma is that the longer the process of upgrading is put off, the bigger, harder and more off-putting it becomes – the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’.

This particular elephant is pretty big having grown to tens of thousands of pages through the investment of years of editing time. It would appear to be well rooted and entwined with other systems through heavy bespoking too, which will undoubtedly add to the expense and timescales involved in an upgrade. At a time when Local Authorities in particular are needing to be agile and responsive to change being trapped in the past is an uncomfortable place to be.

This unfortunate situation also illustrates well why it is in the interest of software vendors to keep their customers on newer versions of their software. Being trapped on such old software does not do much for ‘brand’ perception.  While on one hand I may know through my own involvement in the CMS market that this particular solution has evolved in new ways over the last 5 years or so and still occupies the furthest top right space in analyst quadrants, the poor folks having to use it day in, day out have their own collection of descriptions for it – ‘Tirdion’ being one of the kinder ones

As an advocate for Open Source solutions however, such a situation makes my job a lot easier and I am pleased to report that on the latest web developments Drupal/Symfony/Apostrophe combinations, deployed in agile ways, are now starting to help free these good people from the utter drudgery of an over complex solution that should have been consigned to the recycle bin and emptied away at least 3 years ago.

via cycling.com

The success of the London 2012 Olympics shows that our enthusiasm for ‘The Games’ has not waned since our earliest civilisations battled to become Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

As the sun sets on the Games of the XXX Olympiad and we head off to XXXI in Rio, the next 4 years have been deemed crucial by some organisations for addressing potentially one of the biggest issues facing our planet – global warming.

We are just 2 short months from the onehundredmonths.org half way point and the remaining 50 months will take us up to the next ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ in Rio 2016.

London 2012 has been described as the ‘greenest games ever’ and this article debates quite nicely just how true this is. Regardless of the efforts that have gone into building the venues from recycled materials and creating new wildlife habitats, the article points out that …

staging the Games will still have a greater footprint than the entire population of any of the boroughs bordering the park. It works out as equivalent to a year’s carbon dioxide emissions from 320,000 Londoners.

As with all of these things, the true emissions impact is difficult to weigh up but I think it’s pretty safe to say that with all the travel and energy consumption associated with the last two weeks of games within London and across the globe, that footprint is big! – Very big!

Ironically, if we all swam, cycled and ran with the effort of the Brownlee brothers in our daily lives we would cover a lot of miles with far less pollution and feel a lot healthier and potentially wealthier for it. Unfortunately though, while we will no doubt take some inspiration from watching these amazing feats of human endurance, we are now more ‘inactive’ as a nation than we have ever been with researchers saying …

the (inactivity) problem was now so bad it should be treated as a pandemic.

So, how could we use lessons from London 2012 to make the most of these next 50 months to reduce carbon emissions and, together, help and inspire the 2016 hosts to address some very serious traffic congestion and pollution issues in Rio?

As readers of this blog will know, I have been become increasingly focused on transport related issues and automotive innovation over the last few years and particularly how convergence of technologies could help address the fact that ‘fuel combustion’ from the energy and transport industries contributes the greatest volume of CO2 emissions in our lives. (The European Environment Agency data at the end of this post shows the impact of road transportation in particular). Technological advance however is only part of the story and is unlikely to have much of an impact without fundamental behavioural change.

Since April this year, I have been working with Hampshire County Council and Southampton and Portsmouth city councils on sustainable transport initiatives as part of the Department for Transport’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF). Central to this is the use of digital technologies to help communicate and support behavioural change.

In the majority of discussion forums and workshops I have attended and/or run over the last few months, the potential for ‘gamifying’ aspects of these initiatives is mentioned frequently and it is an area I am keen to understand how this might work to encourage people to use their cars less on the congested motorways and city centres here in the South and make more/better use of more sustainable forms of transport?

A Google search on ‘commuter challenges’ shows how popular this concept has become and the top return – http://commuterchallenges.com illustrates the types of challenges that have been run in recent years.  I get a sense however that this appeals most to those who already understand the dangers of ‘inactivity’ and the vast majority of us continue to sit back and ‘spectate’, in the way we’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks, rather than become actively involved.

Can you think of a game that would get you out of the comfort of your car on a regular basis and make better use of own feet to get to and from work? – After all, they are the most sustainable form of transport there is?

This table and chart shows the growth of CO2 emissions for the EU since 1990 and particularly the volume of CO2 generated by road transportation. – Source: European Environment Agency, June 2010.

]]> http://2020visions.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/could-games-help-safeguard-our-planet/feed/ 1 JamesH PEDESTRIANS BICYCLES AND CARS CROWD A BRIDGE INTO VANCOUVER EU transportation CO2 emissions