Tag - 2nd November
#TNOfood on 2nd November: drivers & trends, food issues & solutions
Here is Ellie Richards’ analysis of the content of the conversations that happened at the New Optimists Forum meeting on 2nd November: Analysis_Forum2ndNov2011_EllieRichards
Ellie has done a superb job in analysing the transcripts from over three hours of scientists talking, plus all the blogposts, interviews and tweets.
Her brief was “make something of all this”, with the further instruction to put her thinking into not more than four pages — she did it in three!
She divided the conversational topics into three main categories: (1) Drivers and trends, (2) Food issues and (3) Solutions.
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#TNOFood: ‘Food’ and the company it keeps
You can put ‘food’ in front of anything actually! (laughs) [...] Yeah that’s what we’ve just proved really isn’t it!
- Hanifa, Helen, Eugenio and David
Far from going ‘in front of anything’ as our speakers above exclaim, there are identifiable recurrent patterns in the way that particular words are used. In order to examine the patterns associated with food, I generated a list of its most frequent collocates (words that co-occur) using WordSmith Tools. The word cloud below shows the words that appear most frequently to the right of food. As the ManyEyes visualisation illustrates, the most prominent theme to emerge in relation to food is education, as demonstrated in the following extracts:
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Mapping food production in Birmingham?
After the first New Optimists Forum on 2nd November, Digital Birmingham’s Simon Whitehouse and I talked about mapping food production in Birmingham, something I mentioned in a blogpost at the time.
We’ve been thinking about this a tad more. What might a mapping project look like? Who’d be involved? And how would it make a difference to Birmingham and its citizens, i.e. thee and me?
Here are ten reasons I’ve come up with over the weekend — please comment, challenge, add to the list:
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New Optimists Forum: #tnofood in the Scheme of Things
So Food & Cities: Birmingham 2050 is the headline title for the New Optimists Forum in its first year. With its first meeting on 2nd November generating so much interest, I’ve drawn up this diagram to help show where it all fits into a planned Great Scheme of Things:
This may quite well be enough for you, just a sense that what’s happening is part of something that’s been thought about and planned . . . Or you may want to find out a tad more. If so, here goes:
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New Optimists Forum, #tnofood & what’s happened since 2nd November
We knew lots of interesting stuff would happen once we began the conversation about food futures for Birmingham 2050.
So no surprise that the first New Optimists Forum event on 2nd November sparked just that.
Take medic Jim Parle’s video interview on food deserts in Birmingham, a podcast about the importance of data by computer scientist Ian Nabney and twitter at #tnofood and you’ll understand what caught the curiosity of Richard Burden MP. On 9th November, he confirmed that he had done what he promised; i.e. written to Sainsbury’s:
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Ten scientists, an architect & the city’s development strategist
Next Wednesday, 2nd November from 6pm to 9pm, ten scientists, an architect (last year’s RIBA President no less) and the city’s development strategist take part in the first New Optimists Forum event.
They’re a great mix of people. And here they are (see photo below for their mugshots):
(l-r, top row): Plant scientist Eugenio Sanchez-Moran, IT strategist Professor Hanifa Shah, chemical engineer Professor Peter Fryer and biochemist Dr Gareth Griffiths.
(l-r, middle row): Director of Warwick Crop Centre, entomologist Dr Rosemary Collier, Professor of Primary Care Jim Parle, social scientist Dr Peter Lee and architect Ruth Reed.
(l-r, bottom row): Birmingham City Council’s development strategist David Bull, biomedical scientist Professor Helen Griffiths, computer scientist Professor Ian Nabney and public health nutritionist Professor of Sociology Liz Dowler.
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New Optimists Forum: Who’s who for the first event on 2nd November
The New Optimists Forum is a series of conversations among regional scientists and others to generate food security scenarios for Birmingham in 2050.
Here are the list of people engaged on the first event on 2nd November 2011 (in alphabetical order):
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