London Olympics pollution on course to land Britain hefty fine from IOC

Air pollution is such in London that drastic measures would be required before 'greenest ever Games' to avoid £175m fine
• Toxic waste clean-up on Olympic site cost taxpayers £12.7m

Even a 30% reduction in normal traffic during the Olympics would not bring emissions down to a legal limit, a report has said. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Britain could be fined up to £175m by the International Olympic Committee if it continues to break air pollution laws by the time the Games begin next August.

The prospect of the air pollution penalty is becoming a major source of embarrassment to the government and Olympic organisers who set a goal of making the Games "the greenest ever" but have already watered down green measures planned for the event.

To meet the legally binding agreement, London may have to reduce traffic levels by more than 30% over a period of nearly a month, raising the possibility of draconian measures such as banning cars with number plates ending in odd and even numbers on alternate days.

Under the non-negotiable host city contract with the IOC – signed by the government and the mayor of London in 2005 – the IOC can withhold 25% of the expected £700m broadcasting income generated from the Games should air quality levels exceed EU limits during the games.

The contract has been given a temporary extension until later this year by the EU for the reduction of levels of small particulate matter (PM10), but has so far failed to find a way to do so and London risks a £300m fine from the European commission later this year.

London is one of the most polluted cities in Europe, with official studies showing that air pollution – mainly from traffic – causes more premature deaths than passive smoking and traffic accidents combined, at a cost of about £2bn a year.
According to the Olympic Delivery Authority's Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), published this week, the expected increases in traffic along the Olympic route network of 600km of London roads during the Games will lead to further breaches of European legal limits in areas that already suffer from poor air quality.
Even a 30% reduction in normal traffic during the period of the Olympics may not be enough to bring emissions below the legal limit, it said.
Lawyers said London now has few options left beyond actions such as imposing an odd and even number plate ban throughout the city to enable endurance events, such as the marathon, to take place.

To read more, click here: London Olympics pollution

The panel's pledges ... and the reality

Air quality
Pledge: London signed up to the Olympic host contract which specifies that the city must meet international pollution laws.
Reality: Olympic route will impact heavily on air quality making London more likely to breach laws unless it bans 30% of all cars.
Construction
Pledge: 90% of demolition materials to be reused or recycled, half of all materials to be brought in by rail and local waterways and at least 20% of recycled material to be used to build permanent venues and the Olympic village.
Reality: 95% of the buildings and infrastructure on the Olympic site was crushed and melted, but only around 1% reused. £20m was spent restoring a canal to ship 12,000 tonnes of waste and building materials a week, but only 3,000 tonnes were shipped on them in the first two years.
Athletes' village
Pledge: To make the village of 8,000+ homes energy self-sufficient.
Reality: Numbers reduced to 4,700 and homes built to Level 4 – good for UK but not the best possible.
Waste
Pledge: To achieve a 'zero-waste' games by reducing waste, recycling and sending nothing to landfill.
Reality: Plans watered down. Some food waste to be sent to landfill in Bedfordshire, 30% to be incinerated. No catalysation of nearby authorities to improve waste policies.

Energy use
Pledge: To generate 20% of energy on site from renewables.
Reality: The Olympic park to only produce 9% of its post-games energy from renewables. About 1,000 homes in surrounding areas to be insulated. Plans for wind turbines in Hackney and at Eton manor abandoned.
Olympic flame
Pledge: A low-carbon Olympic flame and torch.
Reality: EDF energy announcement expected soon.
Decontamination
Pledge: The site was heavily contaminated and 2.5sq km of contaminated land and 1.4m tonnes of soil had to be cleaned or remediated.
Reality: Independent assessors argue that more than 7,000 tonnes of radioactively contaminated material dumped in a former landfill site has been buried.
Wildlife/Park
Pledge: To create Europe's largest urban park.
Reality: 300,000 wetland plants grown in Norfolk and Wales. Almost 2,000 newts and hundreds of toads plucked from the site's wetlands and waterways. But anger in Greenwich where hundreds of trees will be affected, and the park closed for several months. Future problems could include erosion of park to make way for more housing.
Food
Pledge: To serve "the best of British" food.
Reality: Cadbury, McDonald's and Coca-Cola are the main sponsors, but millions of meals will be prepared by caterers. Hopes that all food would be organic, British and Fairtrade have been watered down. Dutch brewer Heineken have "pouring rights", which means no branded British ale will be sold on the 40 sites.
Carbon footprint
Pledge: To encourage visitors to come by train.
Reality: Event tickets to include London Underground travelcard.

Oh, and Google probably also knows where your Wi-Fi router lives

After the iPhone and Android tracking revelations of last week, a researcher finds out how to query Google's database of home and business router locations

Google knows where it is. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Google really does have a very big location map - and that may include where your router is. The results of its giant Street View exercise in which it took pictures of houses and shops but also gathered locations of Wi-Fi networks and - oops! - collected data from open Wi-Fi networks has all been collated.

And what's more, you can query it yourself.

Got a Wi-Fi router? Got admin access to its interface? Then you can get its MAC address and plug it into the "android map" interface offered by Samy Kamkar, a hacker and researcher who last week showed that Android phones transmit their location data (as uncovered by another researcher, Magnus Eriksson)

The page where you can plug in the details is at http://samy.pl/androidmap/, and comes with an example MAC address in there, which if you click it shows the details that are held - log/lat, country, country code, region, county, city, street, house number, postal code, and "accuracy" - an interesting idea, though it's not immediately obvious whether that's accuracy in metres or some other metric.

As Kamkar explains,

android map exposes the data that Google has been collecting from virtually all Android devices and street view cars, using them essentially as global wardriving machines.
When the phone detects any wireless network, encrypted or otherwise, it sends the BSSID (MAC address) of the router along with signal strength, and most importantly, GPS coordinates up to the mothership. This page allows you to ping that database and find exactly where any wi-fi router in the world is located.

Personally, I tried it for the two Wi-Fi routers in my home, and it turned up nothing. It could be that the data for Britain has been wiped, or that my routers weren't turned on the day Google drove by (it certainly did, because it's got a pic of the front of the house) or that it somehow didn't reach the car.
Scary? Encouraging? If all this data is somehow open sourced, is that useful or not?

ANSWERS TO THE EXERCISES IN THE BOOK

Sorry about the delay but I couldn't upload the document earlier. I hope you have enough time to make corrections before our class on Wednesday.

Key to exercises pp 82 & 83

MODAL VERBS TO TALK ABOUT THE PAST

Now you can see the presentation I showed you yesterday. Remember that you have some good exercises in the Workbook and also the CDRom.

Modal_verbs_past grammar

IRELAND AND IRISH EMIGRATION

The 5-7 pm group has contributed with this piece of work. Unfortunately I haven't got the part of the films, so I can include it. As soon as I get it, I'll add it to the document.

Enjoy it!

IRELAND & IMMIGRATION

REPHRASING

I attach the key of the photocopies with sentence completion exercises for you to make corrections.
If you have any doubt, you can ask me on Monday.

sentence completion key

Ukraine Lost Children

This is a very shocking video about homeless children in Ukraine.

Film-maker Antony Butts spent a week living with Odessa's homeless children - and with the police unit tasked with tracking down their hiding places in old water pipes, under manholes and in derelict buildings.

ukraine-lost-children-video

World Digital Library

I made a mistake and this address wasn't published in this blog. Sorry about that.
Now you can access to this really interesting link.

World Digital Library

Mission

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

This Site

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.
Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.
Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.
The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations.

IRELAND, EMIGRATION AND FILMS ABOUT IMMIGRANTS

We have finally gathered all the documents sent by the 7-9pm group. It's the same material they presented to the class last week and now you have a chance to read it all.
Thanks for your cooperation!

Ireland, immigration & films 7-9