Sunday, 17 October 2010

Battle of Ideas

Two weeks to the Battle of Ideas, and if you are or could be around in London that weekend, it's time to checkout the themes.

All being well I'll get along to 'Going nowhere? Staying local in a global village' (with John Adams among others), exploring whether or not there's 'a contradiction between localism and our global aspirations'. If I can't get into that I'll be in the (unfortunately simultaneous) debate about 'Ageing and medicine: quality versus quantity?' (which asks 'Are we in danger of assuming quality of life is purely a corporeal thing?'). After which I'll be speaking, hopefully for no more than a few minutes, at a debate about Big Society.

Other sessions of interest:

17 Oct 2010 03:50:41

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Rural areas: small state, big needs The other day the Commission for Rural Communities published a report on 'the economic conditions for organisations contributing to the Big Society in rural England'. It tries to say nice things about Big Society, although the previous day the government had announced that the CRC is being abolished anyway. Can't have been easy finalising the text with that news looming. The report makes clear that conditions in some marginalised rural localities are not expected to get any better in the foreseeable. Respondents in the study on which it is based said that, among other things, they would like The government to understand that the Big Society, although cost efficient, is not cost free and that some communities do not have the capacity to get involved. Ongoing and long term funding as well as professional support is still needed to carry on delivering their services and taking on additional responsibilities. Here's a sample comment from within the report illustrating how economices of scale could impact (from Remploy, another state-funded agency, whose future is apparently still 'under consideration'): 'As contracts are cancelled and niche programmes disappear the economics of high volume delivery do not lend themselves to specific delivery within the rural communities... Rural communities are deemed the areas of acceptable attrition as the funding cuts bite and providers are asked to deliver more volume outcomes for less.'
PREVIOUS POST
An environment designed for car drivers From the 'Designing Streets for People' list, a statistical note by Alasdair Massie referring to a crossing that he uses regularly: If approaching “as traffic” on the road you generally have a green light – 87% of the time in fact. If you are unfortunate enough to hit a red, then you have at worst a 16 second wait before you can proceed. As with pretty much every junction / crossing except for large signalised roundabouts, you clear the crossing in one go. If on the other hand, you approach the same crossing as a pedestrian, you almost ALWAYS meet a red light. At most, if there are people pressing the call button continuously, only 5% of the phase shows green to pedestrians. You then have to WAIT. Assuming that nobody has pressed the button before you, then that wait will be 40 seconds if there is traffic (which there is for most of the day). You then get 6 seconds of green time. Then, having got to the sheep pen in the middle of the road and struggled your way through the phalanx of people coming the other way, you have to go through the whole process again, admittedly with a shorter wait.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments