Geography and all that Jazz

HIGH RISE.... "Up in the highrise, watching the girls eyes. Waiting to hear you, I am alive. Up in the highrise, tonight where the fun lies. Waiting I fear too...the elements rise." This Picture from the album "City of Sin" Image of Park Hill Flats above Sheffield Midland Train Station in the 1960s, taken by Flickr user sparkgap's dad. Let's play word association... "Tower blocks..." Try to avoid the following images: lifts smelling of urine, fear of crime, Ronan Point, concrete, demolition, windows, nowhere to play... Why has this image developed ? 'Is' this the image you had ? The development company URBAN SPLASH has some intriguing web resources. Several of their developments would be a useful counterpoint to the more negative images that people might have... I used to live in Huddersfield, and just up from the road in Newsome where I lived was an old textile mill with a huge chimney which was sat empty, but would perhaps now have...

19, 20, 21.... The 192021 site looks at the growth of the world's cities, and the 19 cities with populations over 20 million in the 21st century. Coming up to Christmas and one thing I'd like please is the poster of the world's 31 key buildings from SKYSCRAPER CITY . Some great information in the SKYSCRAPER CITY forums. Also check out SKYSCRAPER NEWS . A BBC News report also says that 'weather disasters are getting worse'. The number of weather based disasters has apparently quadrupled in the last 20 years.

Tesco have been trying to get a store approved in Sheringham , just around the Norfolk coast from where I live, for years. This week, the council voted to keep them out once again by 17 votes to nil. The TESCNO blog has been tracking the progress for some time, and has lots of useful resources. The Independent today picked up on the story. It has also been reported on the CPRE website. Today, as always, thousands of people will have spent millions of pounds at Tesco stores around the country. There are plenty of anti-Tesco websites and campaigns. A quick search reveals some intriguing geographical and economic details. I came across a nice post on a blog by E Ryan from Warwick University (judging by the e-mail) How much of this do you agree with ? It is Tesco’s job to sell things. They have done this well over the last few years they have therefore made profits and expanded. That is what businesses are supposed to do. I can remember when Tesco was smaller than the Co-op and l...

The White Stuff According to the BBC Forecast for tonight.... and my Derbyshire correspondent informs me that there was some around 8pm tonight. Spent a lot of time this weekend playing this game: one of my son's birthday presents - a version of Mouse Trap (except it's Rat Trap...)

David Rogers has produced a very useful resource on teaching using ENQUIRY. This presents some excellent ideas for using Enquiry as a basis for lessons which I intend to develop a little more into my KS3 thinking... Check it out, and then tell David how useful you found it... | View | Upload your own

Just back from a trip to York. Some new bits of the A1 now open after some years of engineering work... Catching up with some interesting postings on Noel's DIGITAL GEOGRAPHY . Some new Web 2.0 stuff. Revision video podcasts GIS ideas from a meeting at the RGS An online photo editor called Picnik Plenty of ideas on teaching GLOBALISATION. Using music videos in class Head over and check out the ideas now... Just discovered why it's important to check your website server logs every day. I normally do this, but forgot on Friday. Turns out when I checked earlier today that an image on my website (actually a smallish (thankfully) version of one of Ian Murray's GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS ones) has been picked up (and used in a hotlinked version) by several Chinese news sites in an article on Chinese products being exported into the UK) - I'd had over 4000 visits that day, and 15% of my monthly bandwidth had gone in one day. Ooops. Needless to say that image is no longer on the site, an...

Free Rice Game A new word game which helps provide FREE RICE for those who need it, via the United Nations. Here's a screen shot from a game I played earlier... I carried on up to 1000 grains, which I presume is a reasonable number... A secondary aim is to improve your vocabulary, which I think is an admirable idea...

More support from Government 'experts' for teachers... Cheers for that. Just enjoying my Heima DVD , after spending last night listening to Hvarf/Heim CD. Recommended... A great section with the sounds of a moving glacier, also a very non-vegetarian buffet ! Also just registered for BETT 2008 hoping to get to go to TEACHMEET08 only to see that it's on a Friday night. Will have to lurk again...

Be a Flaneur for the day... A flaneur is a word which you may not have heard before. To be honest it's a tad pretentious, but I've never knowingly been unpretentious, so here goes... It's someone who goes for a stroll through a city in order to 'experience' it. Been browsing the Canadian online SPACING magazine which has some interesting features, one of which is some psychogeography . There's also a great set of images showing a ROAD COLLAPSE .

East Coast on Flood Alert The sandbags are going out in Great Yarmouth tonight in anticipation of a storm surge. There are echoes of 1953, in the news reporting at least, and the whole of the Dutch coast is also on flood alert. We have low pressure, NW winds and a spring tide... This BBC NEWS story mentions a number of places (worryingly, my home village is one of them) Also tonight, make sure that you watch Newsnight for the Big Immigration Debate. Results of a large poll on people's views on immigrants. Also check out the WORTH 1000 site which is an old favourite of mine... and features Photoshop manipulations of images.. Perfect for some intriguing starter images... Also check out this great STRANGEMAPS post for a very useful image on the 'new' North South divide, which was also featured on the BBC News... Where is the North ? Also get Rich Allaway's fab GEOGRAPHY POSTERS for your department....

Autumn's here... The pink footed geese are back - had about 4000 fly over the other night in a mass aerial onslaught of sight and sound, and this week it finally got cold enough to light the fires... Here's a shot of tonight's bad boy - "well in" as my granny used to say... (and still does) - got to love those tiles - one of my favourite bits of my house... Also my copy of Atlas Schmatlas finally appeared... Great fun ! A good Christmas present for the open-minded Geographer in your life (contains some rude words and geographical irreverence...)

This finally arrived in the department today... Took a bit longer than I'd hoped to get it working tonight, but seems to work fine and good quality. Did my first bit of mixing and fading and adding music to voice podcast with some multi-track stuff.... Watch out for some new GeographyPages podcasts when I get a moment... Oh, and my car broke down... D'oh !

Just been listening to a remix of Francis Dunnery's "Feel like Summertime" , with PJV ( Peter John Vetesse ) on keyboards on Frank's MY SPACE page. Was searching through for some new materials tonight to fill in some gaps looking at modern models of urban land use. Forget BURGESS. As Charles Rawding says, you can " CHUCK HIM IN THE BIN " . ( WORD Document ) Came across a great cartoon map on THIS AMERICAN SITE . NEW URBANISM or SMART GROWTH : a very useful National Geographic site. BIG BANG campaign against CO2 emissions. Fairly random stuff I'm afraid...

ROSLA Mark II BBC NEWS article.

Interested in new magnetic map on BBC website. Looks at magnetic anomalies around the world.

Enjoying browsing through THE WRONG KIND OF SNOW which has an accompanying website.

"This is not America" was the title of a single released by Pat Metheny, famous American jazzer I have mentioned before (recently treated myself to remastered Special Collectors Edition of "Secret Story") and David Bowie. It was part of the soundtrack to a film called "The Falcon and the Snowman" which featured Sean Penn. A new video has been made in association with Disney called "Portraits of America". It is apparently used at places where people arrive in America, such as airports. WATCH THE VIDEO http://www.discoveramerica.com/ http://www.seeamerica.org/ There is one problem with it though. The clip which shows the Niagara Falls at one point is actually showing the part of the falls which is classed as being in Canada. Sean Penn's latest film is called " Into the Wild " and is based on a book I read years ago by Jon Krakauer. It is about a young man called Chris McCandless who walked into the wild in Alaska and was found dead. D...

Below is a picture taken of Captain Scott's Antarctic Party . Between November 1911 and March 1912 the sledging party made its way to the South Pole, and then tragically failed to make it back to a supply cache of food. Those doing Antarctica as their extreme environment will probably have referred to the extreme nature of the climate in that year, and the preparations that Scott made. They will also have compared the equipment and support available to today's visitors to the Polar regions which can make things easier (but not completely remove the risk). The book "The Coldest March" by Susan Solomon has an interesting (I believe the term is 'revisionist') approach which suggests that the temperatures were unseasonably low, which meant that the weight of the sledges was unable to melt the ice beneath the blades, and the men had to drag the sledges expending more energy and slowing their progress. Scott's diaries were recently put on display in the Britis...