Based in Chora Sfakion on the SW coast of Crete the field trip provides a valuable learning experience for second year Human and Physical Geography students.
“Observation and analysis of characteristics of the Ilingas Gorge and vicinity”
“Sfakia: landscape, character, development – threats and opportunities”
Since World War II, Sfakia has seen a reduction in its population and little change in its core economic activities, whereas northern Crete has seen significant economic growth, particularly in the development of extensive tourist infrastructure along the north coast.
The Greek Population-Housing Census of 2011 found the population of the Sfakia region to be 1,189 (a decline of 21.9% since 2001), living in an area four times larger than the City of Bristol. Sfakia is one of the least densely populated parts of Europe.
The Census also found less than 13% of the Sfakian population were employed in accommodation and food service activities, compared to over 33% in the Chersonissos region that includes the tourist resorts around Heraklion.
Planning permission granted today for the £4.2bn Thames Tidesway Tunnel to assure London’s continued compliance with the 1991 EC Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive.
I watched “Ulcer Wars” – a BBC Horizon documentary – when it was first broadcast in 1994. It tells the remarkable story of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren’s discovery of Helicobacter pyloriand Marshall’s battle to gain mainstream medical acceptance of his well validated theory that H. pylori infection caused ulcers.
The documentary inspired me to include H . pylori as a water contaminant issue in my GG362 Water Resources module where it has remained since 1994.
Today the link between H. pylori and stomach ulcers is a matter of common knowledge but in 1994 the broadcast of this documentary was still controversial amongst some doctors (e.g. Colin-Jones, D.G. (1994) The Subtle Microbe, British Medical Journal. 308: 1378. http://www.bmj.com/content/308/6940/1378.full)
Today, the documentary provides an important historical insight into one of the major breakthroughs in medicine of the late 20th century.
In 2005 Marshall and Warren were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”.
Past students who enjoyed a downmarket Hotel Espana with me and colleagues on field trips in 2001 and 2005 may be interested in news of a revamp and a review in the Daily Telegraph which now rates it one of the best budget hotels in Barcelona:
The 2001 December field trip is infamous for the huge snow fall that fell on our first night and remained for the whole week, cutting off the region of Catalonia and causing power black-outs in the city. All our field work sites were inaccessible.
Ironically Barcelona in December was a late replacement for our usual summer field trip to the Yorkshire Dales. That year the Dales were largely out of bounds due to the foot and mouth disease outbreak.
My research student, Balarabe Getso, is about to commence his wet season field work on the River Kallawa in Kano State, Nigeria. I intend to join him later in the summer.
Our research project is concerned with endocrine disrupting substances in aquatic environments. This has become a well researched subject in Europe and North America but little work has been done in the developing world despite significant and widespread associated pollution problems and impacts on aquatic life.
“my bing map 2.0” is a new Web 2.0 application that creates a live feed from sites like flickr, twitter and wikipedia based on the visitor’s chosen location. Unlike my previous interactive maps, this is based on Microsoft’s bing map api, which is likely to prove strong competition for google maps.
The field trip to Crete (June 16-23rd 2009) involved three staff (Dr Alan Howard, Richard Tegg, Ken Beard) and 28 students registered for the degree in Human and Physical Geography at the University of Reading.
We were based in the village of Chora Sfakion in the Sfakia region of south west Crete. Fieldwork was undertaken in the village, at Loutro and in the Samaria Gorge.
Daytime temperatures ranged from 28 to 36 degrees and, whilst not in the sea, work was undertaken to model the extent and impact of a major flood in December 2000 in the Ilingas Gorge and the potential impact of tourist development on society in this area (Sfakia remains largely untouched by the mass tourism associated with northern Crete).
Group Photo - 22/6/2009, Chora Sfakion
During the field trip our students made use of various Web 2.0 technologies in order to produce group blogs and videos of their experiences. These were completed in the field utilising ubiquitous wireless internet access available in the village of Chora Sfakion and the mini Dell laptops we provided. The students did an excellent job and the process of writing daily entries on their group blogs (hosted on WordPress.com) enabled them to reflect upon the educational experiences they encountered. The blogs have been compiled here:
The field trip to Crete (June 16-23rd 2009) involved three staff (Dr Alan Howard, Richard Tegg, Ken Beard) and 28 students registered for the degree in Human and Physical Geography at the University of Reading.
We were based in the village of Chora Sfakion in the Sfakia region of south west Crete. Fieldwork was undertaken in the village, at Loutro and in the Samaria Gorge.
Daytime temperatures ranged from 28 to 36 degrees and, whilst not in the sea, work was undertaken to model the extent and impact of a major flood in December 2000 in the Ilingas Gorge and the potential impact of tourist development on society in this area (Sfakia remains largely untouched by the mass tourism associated with northern Crete).
Group Photo - 22/6/2009, Chora Sfakion
During the field trip our students made use of various Web 2.0 technologies in order to produce group blogs and videos of their experiences. These were completed in the field utilising ubiquitous wireless internet access available in the village of Chora Sfakion and the mini Dell laptops we provided. The students did an excellent job and the process of writing daily entries on their group blogs (hosted on WordPress.com) enabled them to reflect upon the educational experiences they encountered. The blogs have been compiled here:
I will soon be undertaking a field trip to Crete during which students will maintain a blog to enable individual and collaborative reflection on events and issues they experience.
Exploration is fundamental to Geography and Geographers have a long history of sharing their travel observations with the public through publication in books and journals. Blogging provides a new outlet for this oldest geographical tradition and the blogs written in Crete will feature other Web 2.0 technologies including photo sharing, video and twitter.
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.
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.
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:
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…
