Alan Howard

I have just finished transcribing an interview with Don McLean that I recorded last week and which is mainly based on questions his fans submitted to his official website. The interview is available here and contains something of interest for most fans and casual readers including insights into Don’s favourite food and a surprising interpretation of an American Pie lyric. The interview extends to 13,000 words.

I was interviewed live on BBC Radio Berkshire this morning following an unexpected request to comment on the news that Graham Norton was replacing Terry Wogan as presenter of British television’s coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest. They were still determined to explore the myth that the British were hard done by in this year’s contest thanks to bloc voting amongst Eastern European countries. My comment was that Britain entered a talent show runner-up with a song that managed number 65 on the Uk pop charts, so what else did they expect?

We have been doing some work with AJAX methods provided by the OS Openspace API. To help anyone else out there working on this we have provided a simple example that loads a list of coordinates and URLs from a text file and uses these to add markers to a base map. In this example the marker, when clicked, reveals a live “sky cam” image, usually provided by a personal weather station website.

The application is created using the Ordnance Survey OpenSpace API including their loadurl AJAX method. Zoom in on the map and you’ll see it’s a real OS map! We also have a version using Google Maps.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would have us believe that his Government has done the car-driving British public a favour by suspending a proposed 2 pence per litre increase in fuel duty. The rise, announced in the 2007 Budget statement, was originally scheduled for April 1st 2008 but had already been put on hold for six months. At Prime Minister’s Questions on July 16th, the Oppostion leader, David Cameron, asked if this had “anything to do with the Glasgow East by-election”.

But Gordon Brown said the move, coming just before Parliament starts its four-month summer break and amid rising oil prices, would help people facing high food and fuel bills [ BBC ].

The price of fuel in the UK is currently running at about £1.20 per litre for unleaded petrol and £1.30 per litre for diesel. At the start of 2008 prices were around £1.05 and £1.10 respectively. The increases have been blamed on the soaring price of oil and general economic malaise sweeping vulnerable economies such as the UK.

Yet at £1.20 per litre most of the money goes direct to the Government. Even fuel duty (currently 50.35p) is taxed at 17.5%! The Government has therefore enjoyed an income boost with each incremental rise in forecourt fuel costs - fuel duty may be fixed but income from VAT increases every time the cost of a litre rises. In fact the Government is earning about an extra 2 pence per litre in VAT today compared with January 2008 when fuel was 15-20 pence per litre cheaper. The Prime Minister could therefore well afford to suspend the official 2p rise in fuel duty!

How much fuel is sold by UK filling stations each year?
In 2006 9832 operational filling stations sold on average 4081904 litres [Energy Institute].

How much tax per litre do we pay?
For a £1.20 litre of petrol or diesel the breakdown of cost is:

Fuel Duty: 50.35p
VAT: 17.9p
Cost of fuel + forecourt charge: 51.65p

In total, given an average sale price of £1.20 the UK Government will receive over £20207 million per year from fuel duty plus at least £7300 million from VAT on fuel, which in total equates to about £872 per second…

Geoffrey Styles’ blog Energy Outlook provides interesting insights into the global energy scene and the new energy crisis.

Short video of a University of Reading Geography field class to Khora Sphakion, Crete in June 2007. The whole region was gripped by a heat wave and temperatures exceed 40 degrees every day. It’s tough work but someone’s got to do it…

Video was filmed by Ken Beard and the music is Neil Diamond’s “Talking Optimist Blues” from his 1996 “Tennessee Moon” album. Neil Diamond currently has three albums in the UK top-11.

Following Russia’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest our prediction proved surprisingly correct and was picked up by various media outlets as further evidence of neighbourly voting ruining the contest and the chances of nations like the UK from ever winning again.

The Eurovisionomics analysis had looked at those countries who’d received unusually high scores from the same country on at least four occasions in the past 6 years. Such occurrences were less likely to be attributed to chance and indicate that other factors may motivate voting. Based on this it was concluded that if Russia’s entry was half-decent then their strong showing in this Eurovisionomics analysis should see them through to victory. Further details here.

However the Eurovision Song Contest Voting website has always taken the view that neighbourly voting does not determine the song contest winner. We therefore excluded all votes cast in the 2008 contest that were above the country’s average (+ the standard deviation). This removed former Soviet states votes for Russia and other nations who’d apparently scored a song well above its true value as determined by the majority of the other competitors. The outcome made little difference to the ranked results with Russia still being the clear winner. The exercise was repeated for every contest since 1957 and revealed that without voting bias Russia may well have won in 2007 (they actually finished second).

As for the UK, removing “friendly” votes from the 2008 contest left us with “nil points” - probably well deserved considering we entered a talent show runner-up with a song that managed number 67 on the singles chart.

I have created a simple application to plot website visitors on a google map and implemented this at
http://www.songcontestvoting.com/e.

This simple mash-up plots the locations of the last 50 website visitors. It
requires:

1. a script to determine the IP address of the visitor and to geolocate this
IP using a service such as maxmind.com

2. a script or data file in which the latitude, longitude, and country (or
other text) of the last 50 visitors are saved (e.g. figure 2 below) in csv
format.

3. a google mashup like the one given in figure 1.

4. your own google api key.

You can download the sample code from here.

Bloggers date stamping posts prior to 1970 will encounter an error using Wordpress as the script processes dates in Unix format. The solution is found here and works well:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/27367?replies=23#post-194153

We have created a simple map displaying real-time data for a local weather station in Wiltshire using the OS Openspace API. At present the page refreshes in order to reload data but we will seek to use AJAX to overcome this.

Brinkworth, Wiltshire: http://www.brinkworth.info