London will be a guinea pig for future smart city technology after Intel pledged to spend a slice of £25m ($40m) on a new lab in the capital. The chipmaker will also plough millions into research centres dotted around Blighty.
Intel will set up the unwieldily monikered Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities in the capital in partnership with Imperial College and University College London, it announced today at an event at 10 Downing Street.
The company will spend the £25m over the next five years on all five of its Collaborative Research Institutes, but wouldn't give the breakdown of exactly how much London would be getting. ICL and UCL will also chip in some dosh, but again no figures were bandied about.
At the same event, Chipzilla said it will open a string of research centres around the UK, investing around £45m in an Intel Labs Europe UK R&D network: this will employ 350 researchers in labs including the one in London and others in Brighton, Swindon and Aylesbury to start with, and five more to be decided on by the end of the year.
"It is investments like this that will help us put the UK on the path we need to take to create new jobs, new growth and new prosperity in every corner of our country," Chancellor George Osbourne said at the launch.
"We are determined to make the UK the best place to do business in the world and a great place for technology companies to invest and build new business. It is encouraging to see major tech partners like Intel investing in this country as a result of the policies that the Government has put in place," he self-congratulated.
Intel will use the London lab to suss out smart city technology and it will also team up with Shoreditch's Tech City entrepreneurs to use their "social media expertise" to "identify and analyse emerging trends with cities".
"Using London as a testbed, researchers will explore technologies to make cities more aware by harnessing real-time user and city infrastructure data," the company said in a statement, describing similar Skynet-like smart city research elsewhere.
"For example, a sensor network could be used to monitor traffic flows and predict the effects of extreme weather conditions on water supplies, resulting in the delivery of near real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications."
Rattner: City under pre-planned stress
Intel CTO Justin Rattner also said that the London Olympic games would give the firm a great opportunity to look at a city under pressure and figure out where the weak points are.
"London is, as everyone knows, the host city to the 2012 summer Olympic Games, and we plan to use the event to understand the experiences of a city under pre-planned stress. What systems worked or didn’t work and why? How were the daily lives of the citizens, workers, and businesses of London affected?" he wondered out loud.
As well as giving Intel the opportunity to see it mess up, London is also a good choice for the research institute as the fifth largest city in the world.
"It has the largest GDP in Europe, and with over 300 languages and 200 ethnic communities, its diversity is a microcosm of the planet itself, offering an exciting test bed to create and define sustainable cities," Rattner enthused. ®
Source: www.theregister.co.uk
London 2012: Jessica Ennis Labelled 'Fat' By UK Athletics Official, Says Coach - huffingtonpost.co.uk
Jessica Ennis was labelled "fat" by a senior official at UK Athletics, according to her coach Toni Minichiello.
A "high-ranking person" at the governing body said the 26-year-old poster goal of the London 2012 Olympics is "fat and she's got too much weight", according to Minichiello.
The 45-year-old has coached the heptathlete since she was 11, and poured scorn on the criticism, clarifying Ennis' weight hadn't fluctuated.
"The things you can't deal with are what we've dubbed 'silver bullets'," the 45-year-old told The Guardian. "And other people. You can't deal with the expectations and pressures that are on other people, like the BOA's [British Olympic Association] team management."
Born in Sheffield, like Ellis, Minichiello suggested the distractions in the build-up to the Games stemmed from "people in fairly high positions, who should know better".
Commercial activities have been ramped up with just over two months to go until the Olympics begin, and Minichiello bemoaned the "advice" he has personally received, claiming it is easy to get "distracted by" the "background noise".
The former civil servant however conceded Ennis' image has elevated as London 2012 looms, but stressed she remained humble.
"The difference is that she's now a 'personality'. If she walks into the dining room, people will go 'Ooh, that's Jessica Ennis from athletics.'
"Equally, she'd turn round and go 'Wow, that's David Beckham on the Great Britain football team.' So there's lots of distractions."
UK Athletics have declined to comment.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
Essex activist files state voting challenge - Gloucester Daily Times
After challenging the voter residency of 114 Conomo Point residents last year, removing 23 from the rolls and leaving 60 in question, the Essex Clean Elections Fund left the task of cleaning the rest of the voting lists to town registrars.
Now, the leader behind the group filed a formal complaint with Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, alleging the registrars failed to do just that.
Clifford Ageloff filed the complaint with the help of West Roxbury lawyer William McDermott Jr. Ageloff has headed up the Essex Clean Elections Fund, a group of concerned Essex residents that have questioned the credibility of Essex's Town Meeting and election votes due to questions over the eligibility of voters, notably part-time residents who live at Conomo Point.
Ageloff said Thursday morning the town hasn't taken any action on removing seasonal residents from the voter rolls since the initial probe was suspended last fall.
State law, he said, doesn't allow seasonal residents who live elsewhere to pick a house they live in seasonally as their primary residence to register and vote in local elections and town meetings. A primary residence, he said — and as state and local officials confirmed last fall — is based on which community is focus of a person's life — and, in most states, from where a resident pays federal and state taxes. The town checks residency every January.
"(In other towns) there is a tacit understanding that voting is for permanent residents," Ageloff said.
Town Clerk and Registrar Christina Wright said that challenging voter registration isn't as simple as the street listing status. Wright said the town has very little case law or state guidelines to go on, adding that the town can't reject someone's voting application simply because they're not in Essex during the winter months.
Residency, she said, is determined as where the center of someone's civic, domestic, and social life is. Physical presence on Jan. 1, she said, isn't part of the voting statute.
"We're kind of forerunners as a municipality dealing with part-time residents being residents for voting purposes," Wright said.
Ageloff and his citizens' group began their challenge last year, he said, when they noticed that some residents in the town-leased properties on Conomo Point were voting both in Essex and in their home towns. The group also challenged residents who voted in Essex, but had their primary residence in another town as well.
The challenge led to a series of voter residency hearings in September that took up 83 of the 114 seasonal residents the Essex Clean Elections Fund put to the Board of Registrars, headed by Wright. Some of the names weren't taken up for several reasons, including insufficient evidence provided by the fund.
After the registrars struck 23 names from the rolls in two days of hearings, Ageloff and the fund withdrew their complaint, saying that they proved their point.
Two weeks ago, Ageloff filed a formal complaint with the Secretary Galvin's office, with an attorney, McDermott, funded through citizen donations. The complaint alleges that Wright and the registrars failed to uphold the standards for qualifying voters by allowing part-time residents to vote in local elections.
"Seasonal-use occupancy-restricted dwellings are routinely recognized as residences for voting purposes by the registrar and the board of registrars," his complaint states.
Ageloff said coastal towns, other than Essex, don't consider non-residents voters. Much of Cape Cod, he said, works that way, he said, with summer residents forming taxpayer associations to get their complaints across, though they can't vote in local elections. The Jan. 1 resident count, that towns do each year, is the way most coastal communities qualify voters.
"You can't call a place home," he said. "It actually has to be your home."
The seasonal residences on Conomo Point, he added, don't qualify.
Even so, said Wright, the town doesn't have much in the way of legal guidance regarding voter residency. She said the town's going to respect all voters' civil rights. She added that she hasn't seen another coastal community that flat out denies summer residents the ability to vote in local elections. Residents of Long Beach in Rockport are allowed to vote in local elections, she added.
There isn't anything in the law, she said, about how long one has to be a resident before registering, or that they have to be physically present on a certain time.
"We cannot reject an affidavit of voter registration simply because that person cannot be here during that period of time," she said.
Steven Fletcher may be contacted at 1-978-283-7000 x3455, or sfletcher@gloucestertimes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevengdt.
Source: www.gloucestertimes.com
Hot Topics Recap: London Olympics/Summer Games - Bloomberg
Source: www.bloomberg.com
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