Dr Alan Howard

No surprise that Norway were run away winners on Saturday night and I would have liked Azerbaijan and the UK to have been 2nd and 3rd. The model correctly predicted the winning entry but, overall, there was a less strong correlation (r2 value 0.46 compared to 0.75 – 0.85) than in previous years between predicted placing and actual ranking. As usual, the winning entry was judged by most people, irrespective of geographical or political affinity, to be the best in terms of song and performance and it is unlikely that the modified voting system made any difference.

Our website songcontestvoting.com crashed during the contest due to unprecedented visitor numbers. We will be moving to a dedicated server for next year’s contest and accepting advertising!

The outcome of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest taking place in Moscow tonight, May 16th, will be (according to our computer model):

1. Norway 0.7
2. Greece 1.7
3. Turkey 4.5
4. Ukraine 5.8
5. Azerbaijan 6.4
6. Bosnia Herzegovina 7.0
7. United Kingdom 9.6
8. Iceland 16.2
9. Finland 17.3
10. Armenia 19.6

With the number indicating the country’s “odds” of actually winning the contest.

Norway is a widely tipped favourite, but they have sometimes done less well on the evening than anticipated in the run-up. Out of the projected top-10 Norway has benefited least from “bloc” or friendly voting patterns in the past five contests. Iceland, Bosnia, and Turkey top the list in this regard. Also, in terms of doing well in recent contests, Norway is well below average with only Iceland and the UK with worse records.

Combining track record and friendly voting, indicates a top-4 of Greece, Ukraine, Armenia, and Turkey.

The British bookmakers have a projected top-3 of Norway, Greece and the UK. The UK tends to achieve a top-3 finish when they enter a deserving song. Anything less than a top-10 finish would be a disappointment (and evidence that Europe, rightly or wrongly, really do hate us right now).

Interestingly our word analysis (see below) of recent posts to the 20 top Eurovision sites has the UK and our entry, Jade, as one of the most talked about entrants. This is a feature of “Eurovision week” and  had not been the case in previous weeks and combined with the relative surge in bookmaker support, maybe there will be a big surprise tonight… However also keep an eye out for Azerbaijan, Turkey and Ukraine challenging Norway and Greece to the top-2 spots.

The Ordnance Survey has featured my “Sky Cam” implementation of their OpenSpace API.

On my webpage you can click on a map marker to view the latest skycam image. The map is created using the Ordnance Survey OpenSpace API including the loadurl AJAX method. Zoom in on the map and you’ll see it’s a real Ordnance Survey map.

There is also a Google map version.

Pete Seeger will be celebrating his 90th birthday on May 3rd 2009 with a benefit concert in aid of the Clearwater Organisation.

Seeger was responsible for promoting the project to build and launch a boat that continues to navigate the Hudson River every summer stopping at every town to disseminate information about the environment and the perilous state of the Hudson River. Don McLean was a member of the first Clearwater Sloop crew in 1969.

McLean says: “This boat is an example of the Seeger genius because it combines the fun of boating with the seriousness of environmental degradation and gets everyone involved at the same time while also being a public relations dream.”

McLean’s work as the Hudson River Troubadour in 1968 and his experiences with the Clearwater Sloop in 1969 proved inspirational learning experiences for him.

He is particularly proud of “Tapestry”, a song he wrote while aboard the Sloop and which became the title track to his first album. The powerful lyrics remain relevant today as they provide a warning of the consequences of humanity’s exploitation of the environment. “If man is allowed to destroy all they need. He will soon have to pay with his life, for his greed.”

Despite its powerful message, the song is one of Don’s lesser known compositions, overshadowed on the Tapestry album by the giants, “Castles in the Air” and “And I Love You So.”

Don McLean has never seen himself as any type of ‘environmental activist’ and has avoided becoming a spokesperson for the environmental movement. He says, “Political people bore me, and I don’t want to be one. I’ll settle for being a decent citizen.”

After the first Clearwater Sloop voyage in 1969, McLean left the crew. Before he left, Pete Seeger told him, “Don, I think you’re a genius. You’re like a wonderful chef who serves a great meal once and never repeats it.”

Don returned from time to time to perform at Sloop concerts. He also recorded a version of “Tapestry” for the 1974 Clearwater album and edited a book entitled Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew, with sketches by his friend Thomas Allen.

Later, in 1984, McLean played Carnegie Hall with the Jordanaires for a Greenpeace benefit. After the show, David McTaggart, the Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace, came backstage and told Don that his song, “Tapestry,” was one of the factors that got him involved in the environmental movement.

Adapted from The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs by Alan Howard
Copyright © 2007 Starry Night Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this work without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Used by permission.

Don McLean sings “Tapestry” on Australian television:

The first run of our “Eurovisionomics” model for 2009 indicates that Norway are clear favourites to win the Eurovision Song Contest next month in Moscow. The model predicts another disappointment for the UK with a finish in the bottom half of the results table suggested. The model takes into account various factors including performance in the last five contests and the extent to which countries benefit from “bloc” or friendly voting patterns.

A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual representation of the relative word content of a website or feed. The word cloud displayed in this post is computer-generated every 6 hours to display the most frequently appearing words in headlines concerned with the ‘environment’ from 12 international news organisations. Each organisation is likely to have some bias in its reporting of environment-related news but word cloud analysis helps reveal the predominantly important issues or stories of the day. Another simple word cloud is implemented at Eurovision Song Contest Voting, where over 100 sites are polled every 30 minutes. These are simple implementations of a much larger project we are currently involved with.

cloud @ 3/12/2010 7:22:06 AM

To mark the 50th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death, CNN has published a commentary that quotes extensively from my book “The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs“.

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.