Tag - Aston University
A productive green infrastructure: Our response to “Places for the Future”
The Sustainability Team at Birmingham City Council asked for a response to their supplementary planning document, Places for the Future.
So we wrote one and this is it: NewOptimists_Response_Places4TheFuture_SPDDoc. (By we, I mean the wonderfully insightful Matthew Green @policyworks wrote most of it, and yours truly tagged along.)
Today’s city leaders in the UK have never had to think about food supplies in the way their forebears did, and in the way their successors must — and that might mean feel-good
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New Optimists Forum: What’s happened so far
We’ve run three events: on 2nd November, on 9th February (specifically on food poverty) and on 1st March.
The outputs (recordings, transcripts from the conversations, blogposts, interviews, tweets) from these events are analysed under the guidance of Warwick Business School, and will be posted soon.
Meanwhile, here’s a one-pager summary of the impact of the New Optimists Forum: NewOptimistsForum-27thFeb2012.
Top of our impact list is that food and food issues are rising smartly up the agenda in the city. Indeed, there are more than a few intimations that food security will be part of Birmingham’s long-term strategic planning.
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Will the lights go out?
Could Birmingham do an industrial-city version of what’s been achieved on the Isle of Eigg; i.e. become energy self-sufficient?
The islanders have achieved much through the demand side. Here in Birmingham, we’re about to do something radical on the supply side.
Aston’s EBRI looks set to be the beginning of a game-changer — and in the first instance for Birmingham.
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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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#TNOfood: Beginnings of a linguistic analysis
I’m Dr Nicci MacLeod, Research Associate at Aston’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics. I’ve been carrying out a variety of linguistic analyses of the audio recording of the first meeting of the New Optimists Forum held on the 2nd November. I’ll be posting my findings here as I go along, so watch this space!
The first stage was to identify the ‘aboutness’ of the exchange. To this end, I identified the most frequent words in the data
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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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Helen Griffiths – What we eat and how we age : New Optimists Forum
Helen Griffiths – Aston’s Professor of Biomedical sciences added her thoughts to the New Optimists Forum’s first conversation on the future of food with these ideas about how we eat now and what sort of a population we’ll be as we age:
Ian Nabney – how can data help us feed ourselves better?
Ian Nabney Professor of Computer science at Aston University
One of the 10 scientists or policymakers in this room at The New Optimists first Forum on Food and Birmingham is Ian Nabney – he’s a specialist in using large datasets to tackle complex problems, including questions like obesity. In his opening thoughts he explains the link between data and finding sustainable ways to feed Birmingham through to 2050 and beyond…
One curious thought of my own – what if we made supermarkets share their data as a form of planning gain?
2nd November: Join the conversation on food scenarios for Birmingham 2050
The first New Optimists Forum event is on 2nd November, beginning around 6pm. Join us on-line!
It’s the first in the series of facilitated events with regional scientists, the start of a conversation about food scenarios for Birmingham 2050.
Nick Booth and the Podnosh team will be blogging live throughout the event at newoptimists.com/blog and/or follow it all on twitter.com/newoptimists.
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Face to Face with the New Optimists: Roslyn Bill talks about healthy ageing
It’s been a busy week for Dr Roslyn Bill. Head of the Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing, at Aston University, Ros spoke to us earlier this week to tell us all about what’s happening at ARCHA, including the showcase event they held last week.
Not only that but she’s also joined the ranks of Birmingham Post bloggers, writing a blog about the research centre. You can read more from Ros and the other New Optimists here.