Road Repairs in Priestwood and Garth

I am told that the dates for resurfacing roads within Garth have now been finalised. The following will also be advertised in the local paper.

1.         Shepherds Lane, Bracknell – From its junction with B3018 Binfield Road to its junction with Folders Lane. The anticipated start date for the re-surfacing is 10^th August 2010 for a duration of 3 days.

The diversion route for this closure will be via B3018 Binfield Road, A329 Millennium Way and Bull Lane, or by this route reversed.

2.         Merryhill Road, Bracknell – From its junction with Shepherds Lane to its junction with Horsneile Lane. The anticipated start date for the re-surfacing is 9^th August 2010 for a duration of 2 days.

The diversion route for this closure will be via Shepherds Lane and Horsneile Lane, or by this route reversed.

3.         Bull Lane, Bracknell – From its junction with Shepherds Lane to its junction with A329 Millennium Way. The anticipated start date for the re-surfacing is 2^nd August 2010 for a duration of 2 days.

The diversion route for this closure will be via Shepherds Lane, B3018 Binfield Road and A329 Millennium Way, or by this route reversed.

4.         Folders Lane, Bracknell – From its junction with Shepherds Lane to its junction with A3095 Warfield Road. The anticipated start date for the re-surfacing is 3^rd August 2010 for a duration of 2 days.

The diversion route for this closure will be via Shepherds Lane, B3018 Binfield Road, Harvest Ride and A3095 Warfield Road, or by this route reversed.

5.         Dukeshill Road, Bracknell – From its junction with Shepherds Lane to its junction with A3095 Warfield Road. The anticipated start date for the re-surfacing is 2^nd August 2010 for a duration of 1 day.

The diversion route for this closure will be via Horsneile Lane, Shepherds Lane and B3018 Binfield Road, or by this route reversed.

Details of local Road Works can be found HERE
 

And HERE

Unplugging the vuvuzela with a plugin.

I have been following the debate about the vuvuzela on several blogs, including: Blowing the trumpet - Vuvuzelas

The New Scientist asked Trevor Cox, president of the UK Institute of Acoustics and an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, UK, to explain. (more at http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela) Basically he said that our hearing is an early-warning system: we listen out for sudden changes in the sounds around us which might indicate threats, and ignore benign, persistent noise. When noise becomes as loud as a vuvuzela, however, it becomes impossible to habituate to the sound.

If you are watching the match on a computer, you could try a handy application, from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. Here they say that the vuvuzela has been badly received by some television viewers, who have complained that this magnificent pipe, after transmission, comes across as a resonant buzz which the sensitive listener may find hard to tolerate.

The site goes into some complicated stuff about  time-frequency plot and the difference between a voice and the vuvuzela. You can read about all the gubbins at the site linked above.

For Windows users who would like to remove some of the sound generated by these things,  Stardock have made an application which wraps around the above plugin and automatically filters your web browser's audio output. Get it at http://www.stardock.com/labs/devuvuzelator/ .

What shape will the Town Centre of the future take?

Recently, I have been looking around to see if there was any more information available on what is happening to the town centre. “Delicate negotiations are still in progress” I am told. Releasing any information could prejudice any of the schemes envisaged. As we all know it will now be “demand led” rather than a “big bang” build.
Whilst nearly every major town centre redevelopment in the country has been hit by the recession, it seems that Bracknell is in a much stronger position. What I am told is that the council is working closely with BRP who are continuing to spend a lot of time and money on the plans, and is totally committed to delivering regeneration as soon as economic conditions allow.
The Council is well positioned with planning permission and compulsory purchase orders in place. It is now able to look at redeveloping the town centre in smaller phases, rather than all in one go, to make sure that the plans are deliverable. This will also have the effect of making the redevelopment more organic - It won’t all wear out at the same time.
All over the country we hear of projects that are abandoned or are on hold. Some like Hatfield will continue, but at a slower pace.


There is an interesting line in a Telegraph article  by Mick Brown from Rob Hopkins, who  sees the present recession as the first step in the total unravelling of the idea of perpetual economic growth, 'and the beginning of many chickens coming home to roost. The idea that the way we get ourselves out of this economic situation is by doing more of what got us into it in the first place – taking out more cheap credit, buying more stuff we didn’t need in the first place – more and more people are starting to see the flawed logic in that.’
Mick Brown visited both Chester and Totness and found that the recession was biting.  The article was written a year ago, but is still quite informing.

Andy McSmith writing in the Independent 18 months ago wondered  “Does the high street have a future, and if so what shape will it take? “
A big growth area, which is making life harder for high streets, is online shopping. Ordering your weekly groceries over the internet is no longer the novelty that it was less than a decade ago, and has become a popular time-saver. And what about other things like an intelligent fridge which monitors what you are using and draws up a shopping list?

In the original Bracknell plans one of the first buildings to be constructed would have been the new council offices. People would have been justly annoyed if just that had been built, and the rest of the centre put on hold. Yes Easthampsted house would have been freed up, but there would be no returns from the investment. Having to keep using Easthampsted house though, will be providing the council with logistical problems. The new phasing could have many benefits, but also give us a few headaches. Many people are speculating about what future High Streets and shopping centres will look like. We have a pause where we can second guess what the future holds.


Some time back Hannah Fletcher asked “As retail monoliths crumble around us, whither our faithful old high streets?”

By the end of the recession, whenever that may be, what will the retail landscape look like?
She looks at the following:
Pubs and bars - So many are closing…
Pharmacies - Increasingly about health services as much as about products and will offer optical, dental and health facilities?
Supermarkets - fragmentation as discount food shops take their share?
Music, games, DVD shops - Will these disappear from the high street as we turn to the internet?
Charity shops - How will they evolve?
Mobile phone shops - And the like - move out of town?
Off-licences - So many are closing.
Clothes stores - What impact the internet and supermarkets.


Meanwhile, in Bracknell we have seen around £100 million being invested in regeneration projects that are already underway, planned or newly completed in and around the town centre:

- Bracknell Train Station forecourt
- New Garth Hill College
- New Bracknell and Wokingham College
- Berkshire East Primary Care Trust Bracknell Healthspace
- Celsius Housing Development
- Major improvements to the Peel Centre.

Let’s hope that confidence and money to lend improves and we get the next step in the regeneration in place.

Residents of Priestwood will also be hoping that if they are not going to do anything with it yet, that Comer Homes at least make Winchester  House look a bit nicer. Or is it now "The Crystal"?
I blogged about this before: http://alvin-finch.blogspot.com/2009/07/ancient-eyesore.html
Perhaps everyone should write to Comer Homes, and ask them to Remove The Blight of Bracknell?

Country Air, take a good long sniff of that whiff

It appears that smelly country air may be good for you. The Saturday issue of the Telegraph has an article about how Pungent country air does you good .  Researchers fed live bacteria to mice and assessed their ability to navigate a maze compared to control mice that were not fed the bacteria."We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," says Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York.

Mycobacterium vaccae is a nonpathogenic species of the Mycobacteriaceae family of bacteria that lives naturally in soil. Its name is derived from the Latin word, vacca (cow) as the first described strain was isolated from cow dung in Austria. Prof Dorothy Matthews, who led the new research, says it “suggests that Mycobacterium vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals”, testifying to the fact that “we evolved with dirt as hunter gatherers”. In other words, cowpats fertilise minds as well as fields.
Next time I am walking the dog through Larks Hill, and the cows are there maybe I will sniff the air that bit better.

Health, well-being and council spending.

An article in the LGA First magazine caught my attention this week. It was about spending on learning, and the knock on effect of lowering heath costs. We have to meet the challenge of an ageing population. The article goes on to say that local authorities can help by helping people maintain their mental and physical resilience and by building networks within communities, so that the first call for support are friends and family, rather than the state.
Helping people and communities to help themselves extends the independent phase of peoples lives. If successful, it is not just the quality of lives that are improved, but also some of the estimated £77bn that mental illness costs the economy each year.

This followed on from something that I saw on the BBC about green exercise.  Researchers claim that just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health
Study leader Jules Pretty, a researcher at the University of Essex, said "A challenge for policy makers is that policy recommendations on physical activity are easily stated but rarely adopted widely."

All of this fitted in with something that I read in the New Scientist and other places some time back: People who exercise tend to be more socially active, which enhances cognitive activity. When the article was written 2 years ago, it sad that we need randomised trials to establish the relationship, but nonetheless exercise undoubtedly has extensive health benefits" This appears to be born out in the recent research.

This fits well with the Bracknell Forest Council Priorities 2 and 3. “Protecting and enhancing our environment” and “Promoting health and achievement”. It just goes to show how spending a relatively small amount of money in the right areas, can have the knock on effect of not only helping people, but saving money.

Star Trekkie stuff, or reality?

The IET magazine recently celebrated 50 years of lasers. It says that the military and security services are looking to sensing technology to give them Tricorders for finding telltale chemicals that indicate whether the barrel on the road is just a barrel or something far more deadly.
A while back there were flip-up cell phones that looked like Star Trek communicators. We have Bluetooth earpieces that look like the earpiece that Lieutenant Uhura wore. Could we next gat a real Tricorder?

On the subject of cell phones, I read ages ago about the radio waves next to your head being able to produce an image of what was inside your head. It just took some extra modulation of the phone signal. I have been googling for the article, but have not found it yet.

I also read in one of the BCS magizines (I think) about software radios. As its name suggests, the processing of signals both transmitted and received are handled by software controlling any number of radio Integrated Circuits.
One could combine one of the new laser chips, software radio and mobile phone to make the Tricorder. There is already an Android App to use your phone's real sensors to detect magnetic fields, gravity etc.
The instruction say: Use the buttons on the left to select the mode:

* GRAV: monitor the local gravitational field and acceleration
* MAG: monitor the local magnetic field
* ACO: acoustic analysis; waveform, frequency and sound level analysis of the ambient sound
* GEO: display geographical information (enable GPS for full info)
* EMS: scan the electromagnetic spectrum for radio signals -- currently displays cellular and WiFi signals (you have to enable the WiFi to get the latter)
* SOL: display current solar activity data -- downloads current solar data in the background (may take a while) and displays it along with current images

How close could we be to a read Tricorder?

Mathematics, democracy, paradox and pitfall

The New Scientist Editorial refers to an article in the magazine, and says that “The mathematics of democracy turns out to be so fraught with pitfalls and paradoxes that complete fairness is probably unattainable.”

The principle of voting in the UK is currently simple. Each of our electoral divisions/constituencies elects just one representative. The candidate who gained the most votes in the election is the winner. In this system votes for anyone other than the winning candidate are disregarded. In Bracknell the winner was Dr Phillip Lee who gained over 50% of the vote.

In the NS article it points out that if more than two parties with substantial support contest a constituency, a candidate does not have to get anything like 50% of the votes to win. In this case a majority of votes may be considered to be "lost".  Take somewhere like Hampstead and Kilburn where Glenda Jackson got just under 33% of the vote. It could be that 67% of the people there are now quite dissatisfied.

From the NS Article an example by mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California:

Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk (M), beer (B), or wine (W).

6 rank them M-W-B,
5 rank them B-W-M,
4 rank them W-B-M.

In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40%, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last.

Do voters actually prefer milk?

9 voters prefer beer to milk, and
9 prefer wine to milk
Clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile,
10 people prefer wine to beer.

By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M - the exact reverse of what the voting system produced.

Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire. You can read more about systems/anomalies in the article.

Preferential voting comes closer to being fair than plurality voting, but it does not eliminate ordering paradoxes.
Given three candidates, A, B and C, and three voters who rank them
A-B-C,
B-C-A and
C-A-B.
Voters prefer A to B by 2 to 1. But B is preferred to C and C preferred to A by the same margin of 2 to 1.
Every one a winner!

In a proportional representation system each party is awarded a number of seats in proportion to the number of people who voted for them. This may be fairer in a mathematical sense than plurality or preferential voting, but implies large, multi-representative constituencies and central lists of people that may be quite remote from the voter. This system also carries with it the possibly of paradoxes occurring.

The NS article points out that there will always be the possibility that one voter, simply by changing their vote, can change the overall preference of the whole electorate.

It seems that in any system we could end up with a hung result. One way to quantify this is the Banzhaf power index. First, list all combinations of parties that could form a majority coalition, and in all of those coalitions count how many times a party is a "swing" partner that could destroy the majority if it dropped out. Dividing this number by the total number of swing partners in all possible majority coalitions gives a party's power index.There are a number of calculators available that one can Google for.

There is a bit in the article about the word gerrymander, which  was coined by a newspaper editor in reaction to a redrawing of boundaries.  Governor Elbridge Gerry. It included one sprawling supposedly salamander-shaped constituency. This leads me on to the Conservative policy to reduce the number of MPs by 10%, and ensure each vote has equal value by reducing the wide discrepancies between constituency electorate sizes. 

The Guardian says that the adoption of the "alternative vote" electoral system would have had only a minimal impact on the outcome of last Thursday's general election with the Liberal Democrats gaining only an additional 22 seats, according to analysis by the Electoral Reform Society. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives would have benefited significantly from transfers based on last Thursday's vote. Significant regional imbalances would remain between the parties.

The newspaper also has a useful bit on the AV and Plus systems. AV Plus was recommend by the Jenkins Commision. PDF of report HERE. So much for the promises made by Labour since 1997?