wikipedia page on 'air quality in oxford'

i started created a page in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quality_in_Oxford

All writing is catharisis

I am sure someone has said this before!

And links to external cognition and Creativity (see M. Boden)

Air quality in Oxford, England

I'll use this thread to keep a history of my activities and research into the dire pollution problem in Oxford. I am starting this slightly after the event and want to capture everything, so first an update:

1. Here are the banding targets for different airbourne pollutants.
2. Tried to use the DEFRA wiki but to no avail (email'd support email address, but no reply)
   
3. I have read up on pollution and respiratory diseases and rather satisfyingly the DEFRA web site does not avoid the issue but states that pollutants like NOx and Ozone (O3) do worsen diseases like asthma. I have found medical research articles that state that these and other pollutants may actually cause the onset of these and other diseases. But there is obviously nonesense like this flying about.
   
4. Finally I have surfed and downloaded the PDF nightmare that is government websites and found a report that provides the direction and summary of the situation in Oxford in the 'A Breathe of Fresh Air (ironic name)' report.
5. I have written to the people who maintain the Oxford airwatch website:

In response to your queries, in turn:-

1) We are aware of this, it is being dealt with, following changes to the site structures.

2) Yellow dots are passive monitors (diffusion tubes) giving an average result over a month; green dots are automated monitoring stations providing continuous hourly data.

3) We are listed on pages linked to the DEFRA website, but under Midlands, not the South East

http://www.stanger.co.uk/siteinfo/

http://www.stanger.co.uk/siteinfo/MonitoringSite.asp?ID=77

4) http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/standards.php#band

the above link gives you explanation of the banding system

5) We think it's unrealistic to publish long documents as anything other than pdf. With respect it's nothing to do with keeping material hidden, but everything to do with keeping the web pages manageable.

I hope these brief comments are helpful, if you have any other questions please do not hesitate to come back to me,

best wishes

deleted contact details

---

---

Posted At: 18 August 2006 19:27
Posted To: feedback@oxford.gov.uk
Conversation: hello
Subject: hello

just using your web site and i have the following:

1. the last link on your general information page is broken
2. i wanted to get data for a recording station that is close to where I work but don't seem to be able to (one of the yellow dots on your map). i generally do not understand the difference between the green and yellow dots. how many recording stations are there in oxford, 3 or nearly 100?
3. i also do not understand why on the DEFRA site Oxford is not sited as a city where recording is being done and forecasts are available. according to your own 2005 report it seems oxford should be as it appears to have pollution levels well above the average (in all 5 categories) and seems to be on a par with marylebone high street in london - very bad news!
4. lastly could you point me towards a document that shows me how DEFRA arrived at the bandings and so decided what levels are save. i am particuarly concerned that targets are being set based on mean rather than peak or maximum levels since this would seem to have more medical significance (the body tends to work on chemical triggers or switches rather than mean levels).
5. your web site would be a lot easier to use if you published directly to the web i.e. using HTML or wiki markup rather than PDFs. HTML is more accessible, easier to search, easier to cite sections. PDFs generally come across as a medium people want to hide data inside of and discourage readership and analysis.

I am sorry to be so succinct here and please don't see this as discouraging because i think your service is a giant step in the right direction. i am chasing this because I think an aweful lot more needs to happen though.

6. Finally I have written to my local MP using the writetothem.com website:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

                                      Sunday 20 August 2006

Dear Evan Harris,

I am writing with many years of frustration at Oxford's seeming
inability to deal with its severe air quality problem. I like many
millions of people am an asthmatic and suffer greatly when the
pollution levels are high. Before coming to Oxford I had my condition
pretty much under control but over the last three years the summer
months have been hell with me being on the border of being admitted to
hospital and having to take steroid pills.

According to the central government's own statements NOx and Ozone are
major contributors to respiratory diseases along with the three
pollutants that are supposed to be under control as sanctioned by
DEFRA.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching what Oxford is
doing (or supposed to have done) to improve air quality and I am
extremely disappointed. From my readings then I think there are a
number of failures that need addressing and this is where I would like
your support:

1. Targets must be adhered to and if they are exceeded the responsible
bodies must pay. It is the buses that the councillors reports say are
causing the problems. The bus companies must be set emission targets
and they should pay if they exceed them.

2. Ensure the costs to the NHS are being factored into the
calculations. It may well be cheaper to have a diesel powered bus fleet
and to allow tourist buses to not install exhaust technologies BUT the
knock on effect is greater costs to the NHS in the form of time with
GPs, hospital beds and drugs. (This is not mentioning the economic
argument that surrounds loss of productivity in the workplace caused by
illness).

3. Ensure the ethical argument is made. The government's primary role
is to protect its citizens. It is not acceptable to support an economic
framework that puts transport to shopping streets in the centre of town
above the health of what is not even a minority (MILLIONS of people
suffer from respiratory problems that are worsened by pollution AND
there is even evidence that pollution CAUSES disease).

4. Promote MUCH greater clarity in communications as to what our local
government is doing. It is not acceptable to just throw PDF documents
of minutes and reports onto an already confusing website. All the
general public like myself cares about are the statements that show the
services they can expect to receive. In this case it means the
decisions that have been made written in a form that we can measure if
they have been achieved. To my reading the only measurable targets that
have been set have been (1) to encourage shared ticketing between bus
companies (2) to encourage adoption of exhaust technologies on all
buses and taxis. Unfortunately I could not find any evidence that these
objectives set in 2004 have been met.

What I suggest is the local government adopts a Wiki and forum approach
in much the same way that central government has begun to do:

http://wiki.defra.gov.uk/Environmental%20Contract%20pages

This is well established technology, easy to install and maintain,
free, and well accepted by millions of the general public. It also
allows the public to comment more easily than they currently can.

Like many people this is an enormously important issue for me. Policies
towards environmental sustainability are ones that I measure a
political party by as they are not only the most important but also
demonstrate a political party's ability to show innovation and
leadership of the form that is admirable (rather than say Tony Blair's
war mongering).

Thank you for your time and I look forward to reading your response in
the near future.

Yours sincerely,

(deleted my details)

5d702165f6ee8624c0c2/60e7ecd654d5cdd13e14
(Signed with an electronic signature in accordance with subsection 7(3)
of the Electronic Communications Act 2000.)

So lets see where I get to...

Take 2

This is the moment when six weeks of rehearsals at the kids summer camp in Andalucia should have born fruit. Here you can see three witches (they were actually just little terrors) just after the curtain had been raised and they were s'posed to start chanting their incantations...in english. Giggles turned into hysterical laughter and we had to lower the curtain, unleash some consternation and basically try again. Ode to being a eighteen year old english teacher.

Abraham Maslow

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Plato, 427-347 BC in The Republic

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Socrates, 469-399BC in Plato, Dialogues, Apology

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Complete publishing is free

It is becoming incredibly easy for anyone to publish text, images (drawn or photographed) and movies for a global audience. Publishing at this stage is free but what will happen when there are people who want to be prominent but who want to do it the fast way i.e. by paying a distributor to be highlighted. Then we're back at Square One again: evil pubisher pays best authors to own their articles and make them artificially prominent...other writers are then forced to pay.

The Blogger payment model is interesting as it is a new form of curruption, prominence is gained through product placement i.e. blogs that well read need to compromise readership with mentioning products. Of course this is the age old problem of selling out but famous products will gain readers.

But seriously at the moment we are living in a golden time, anyone can put their words, images and movies online for free. Through creating links and posting comments we can build up a community network around ourselves. There are big bloggers with reputations and small bloggers adding numbers. All the elements of traditional knowledge amplification are evident.

Acerbic but...

So far the postings have been acerbic but nevertheless writing them has been therapeutic, it is weirdly pleasant ranting to theoretically, the rest of the online world. Well that brings up one sore point, no one is reading my postings! The is probably due mostly to my blog being very small, the quality of the postings is pretty poor still but mostly because I am not interacting with other bloggers. As with flickr I need to link to other blogs and comment on other postings, kind of tit for tat but this is as would be expected in a community of practice.

When I started out I thought I should be anonymous (pseudononymous?) so that I could feel free to post whatever thoughts were on my mind. Now I think this is a bad approach as thoughts posted in this manner tend to be sloppier and less well-formed. When a writer feels scrutiny then their brain will work harder. So I am happy with the identity of my blog although I wish it wasn't called diuretic (in the domain name)...but I have just changed the domain anyway.

One of the ways I can use my blog is to document the communications I have with politicians through www.writetothem.com so maintain a public record of how our wonderful democratic system operates. I will be able to post the letters I send along with replies and provide links to the research I have been doing on air quality or pollution.

The vanity of strife

There is a lot of hype sprouting from the news corporations about Muslim fundamentalism. The Muslims claim the UK is targeting their 'brothers' and the Islamic faith by defending the actions of say Israel's disproportionate attack of Hizbollah in Lebanon.

This is all just extreme vanity. We know the Muslim terrorists are driven primarly by vanity because of the types of attacks they make e.g. trying to do things on anniversaries, in airports...ok, can't be arsed to make the point here.

What is astonishing is how quickly everyone thinks this is a social problem i.e. caused by some religion or political system. All these problems are caused by excessive competition for scarce resources. Oil comes out of a small hole, the fastest and strongest and best equipped surround it, defend it and then sell it to get rediculously rich. The rest get poor. These poor are the ones screaming at now, not for more Islam just at the injustice of this monority who may well have been very skillful at getting the oil out of the hole but this skill level is not proportionate to the wealth and power they gained. Of course this rich want to sit on continued revenue streams so they go political and currupt democracy e.g. Bush Dynasty and its poodles.

The ultimate hypocracy though is that we all buy this oil from these people we hate so much. It seems easy to say stop buying oil, or at least don't buy it from unethical companies but everyone needs to do that otherwise the only ethic that will exist is price, the lowest price wins and that will be the company that cuts all the corners, the least ethical.

Water is next, and we really do need that so cannot afford for it to become scarce and controlled by tyrants. We have to tackle these people sooner rather than later, personally I'd love to see Bush and his cronies cleaning the streets outside my house instead of living in the lap of luxury. They can't get rich without our business, cut their bottom line and heads will role and the free market will shape to create the companies we need.

Clean air

Now here's a topic that makes me hot under the collar. The irony that we all shove air conditioning units on full blast when it gets slighly warm, consuming all that extra energy when we should know that this is going to contribute to global warming. Then the sheer bloody-minded short sightedness of seeing car use in isolation of every other aspect of society, especially health.

Pollution causes complete misery to millions of people every year and even fatalities. It contributes to and even causes a plethora of diseases (consider hay fever, asthma and other allergic conditions). Of course this is good news for the drug companies as they can pump us full of steroids and anti-histamines, a very lucrative trade. It is bad news for the rest of us though, especially the people who have to live in areas of bad air quality.

Why do the bodies charged with the regulation of transport fail to take control of the situation?

• The health and transport departments don't work together
• Lack of funding for the types of research that would prove that pollution needs to be cut for health reasons
• Lack of funding the proves the cost to individuals and the economy of dealing with the health issues and not the pollution issues
• Corrupt politicians making money out of the transport industries
• Stupid politicians maintaining mantras like more roads = economic growth
• Hypocritical people who drive everywhere but demand cleaner air
  
• Unfortunate people who are so asthmatic they can't walk or cycle around

So what can we do?

• We have to cut the emissions caused by vehicles, it is that simple
• The reduction needs to be proportional to air quality, no other metric is relevant. We should ignore bogus political arguments that try to skew the real debate
• We should only allow pollution that is necessary i.e. disabled access. Private access to cities is entirely replaced by clean, efficient public transport, bikes and walking.
• We should stop forcing people to travel. Many people could work from home for instance, managers should be more secure in themselves and realise they don't need to drag their employees into an office to make them feel in control
• Public organisations, especially those regulating tranport should set the lead
• Its not about just personal tranport but infact mostly about the transport of good, we need to cut our consumption to reduce the need to move around so much stuff.
  
• The public transport and haulage industries should lead in using the most efficient and clean vehicles

Last, just a reflection, this blog reminds me why I write this blog and probably why most people write blogs of this type: we feel powerless to change things and the people in charge, those with the Bush Syndrome seem to be driving us all in the wrong direction (excuse the pun).

Sustainable economies

The trouble with building a sustainable economy is that we just can't imagine what one is.

Thinking about the maintainance of a Bonsai tree seems to be a good start.

But playing with a simulation of cooperation (Netlogo) brings it home how hard it is to find the parameters that favour altruistic behaviour.

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is one of those words that people use to pull rank over others. Its akin to situations in office life when people use "experience" as proof their argument is superior. Its in the medical profession that I think pseudoscience is at its most extreme and dangerous...

The NHS is not structured to be able to share knowledge and certainly doesn't work with patients to learn more about diseases. The only people able to conduct thorough experiments are the large drug companies and they are driven by the need to create products that make profit for shareholders i.e. pills.

So many diseases can be prevented or cured by simple changes to diet, removing pollutants from our environments, exercising etc but the GPs only see us when we're at deaths door and are habituated to just try for the quick fix, the magic bullet approach.

Yet organisations like the NHS are gatekeepers to the official cure, the 'real science'. We cannot challenge this monsterous body of often arrogant doctors who want to do some whacky experiment to get their name published and themselves onto the best golf courses as soon as possible.

It must be possible to set up some online tool that allows patients to work together to test a hypothesis, to gather their own experimental data, to make their own conclusions. Somewhere in the melee of the professionals and patients we need to create some kind of entity that actually cares. Just like priests do not own god, men in white coats are not the only people who can perform real science.

Pseudoscience is rife and killing people.

Pseudoscience:

noun beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.

References:

1. Neurocritic blog
   

Under siege

At the London Science museum last weekend I managed to gain temporary relief from something that has been burdening my and I suspect many other people's minds for too many years now - the Bush-Blair axis of evil. This impressive building in Knightbridge is one of the last remaining public refuges from the pseudo-religious insanity that is sweeping our and many other countries.

Before we didn't care about fanatics, they lived their lives quietly. But American foreign policy has ensured they've been stirred up into a frenzy. Through violence the fanatical drone of the insecure has started to infect minds that really do hold genuine wonder at 'gods' creation.

At the Science Museum it was such a joy to read that researchers had actually watched a star form from dust in space. Admittedly I felt old watching children vote with glee at the prospect of using genetic engineering to bring back animals from extinction, they didn't seem to flinch at the feat.

I am fed up with our political 'leaders' trying to drag us back into the stone age with all their spin on fundamentalism, terrorists, WMD etc. I don't understand why we cannot put Bush and his poodle in the docks for war crimes.

The science museum is a temple to sanity. With Special Relationship being hell bent on making the world implode into pseudo-religious turmoil, at least we have a place where you can go and look forward, remind yourself what is means to be in awe of 'god'.

At the science museum we can also learn how 'god' will soon be reaping revenge on us all for our small-mindedness and greed over the last 50 years. The Oceans will swell, the winds reek havoc and rain will cause great floods. Yes, that's right climate change is coming and all we can do is spend billions on killing Arabs for their oil. Presumably Bush and Blair would like us to believe the imminent change in weather conditions was caused by their gods, bearded men in the sky?

Siege:

c.1225, "a seat" (as in Siege Perilous, the vacant seat at Arthur's Round Table, to be occupied safely only by the knight destined to find the Holy Grail, c.1230), from O.Fr. sege "seat, throne," from V.L. *sedicum "seat," from L. sedere "sit" (see sedentary). The military sense is attested from c.1300; the notion is of an army "sitting down" before a fortress.

noun 1 a military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to surrender. 2 a similar operation by a police team to compel an armed person to surrender.