A blog about things that interest me, politics, news, media, architecture, development, environment, local history, secularism, web, dublin ireland, tara

Contact me at expectationlost@gmail.com

Saturday 19 April 2008

Corrib Gas Rossport Google Map

I started this map a year ago or more but the area on googleearth wasn't high res enough and was too distorted to overlays maps, more of the area is covered now but not all of it, but I used other sources of maps to mark things. I consider it just a draft now but needed to get it up.

Corrib Gas Embed Map more up-to-date.

I want everything relevant to the issue on the map so please correct and add things. by emailing me or using googlemaps to make new placemarks.

For a primer on the Corrib Gas Project and protests go to wikipedia article on the issue

Need an overlay of the terminal and it place in the former Coillte lands.

Google Earth or Googlemap version - Refined and updated version April 08

Sources

http://www.shelltosea.com
http://www.mayogsinfo.com
http://www.publicinquiry.ie/pdf/Fiosru_2_HI_RES_Final.pdf
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/83016
http://www.archaeology.ie
http://www.npws.ie
http://www.corribgas.com
http://www.corribgaspipeline.com/
http://www.mayococo.ie/en/News/GasTerminal/
http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/corrib/
http://struggle.ws/rsc/
Shell in Ireland - Corrib Natural Gas http://bymnews.com/news/newsDetails.php?id=22299
Ireland Gov Marine Notices

Wednesday 16 April 2008

Separated religious teaching in schools, it might sound like the only good compromise but it doesn't work.

After the notion that the church could have a veto on each teacher in a primary school full of many different religions was rejected (that I blogged about previously) the debate moved on to how it will be actually thought in the new schools and the consensus among the religious and the mainstream was that children could be separated during the school day and guest clergy could teach each religion denominationally rather then teaching an overview of religion and ethics to all students at the same time.

David Quinn (Indo's religious hack) writes of three options

As to the second question, how should religion be taught, there are three basic options. One is to teach the children their own religion separately and during school hours. The second is to teach them a generic religion course, and the third is to teach them their separate religions outside of school time, but on the school premises.
And says he rejects the third and writes that the second is the only option...
So it looks like there is little practical alternative to teaching the various religions to the various sets of children during school hours.
Yet in the very same paper Educate Together CEO Paul Rowe refutes this and actually gives example of how when ET's started they were forced to do in-school separate religion teaching and he explains it just didn't work...
In some of our early schools we were compelled to adopt an approach similar to that being proposed in this pilot. It proved to be educationally unsound and led to difficult and complex negotiations that have resulted in the current Educate Together model in which children are not segregated according to religion within the statutory school day. In contrast, the VEC pilot as announced involves the compulsory registration and separation of children from the age of 4 according to their parents’ religion. Such practices have been shown to be socially divisive, unethical and educationally flawed. In a primary school class, they critically impinge on the socialisation of children and are counter-productive to the aim of preparing young people for a society in which religious discrimination is illegal.
He expands on the ad hoc setting up of here new VECs on the ET website and points out the DQ third option is the only workable option they found in practice.

A COI priest writes how segregated teaching of multiple religious would be chaos and describes the practical difficulties in his experience of it at a secondary VEC school...

Firstly, the pupils were often from different classes, so while in some cases the Protestant pupils would be receiving religious instruction at the same time as the Roman Catholics, in other cases they would be missing a maths, Irish or English class...
Although there are some differences between the teaching of secondary and primary we must keep in mind.

John Carr general secretay of INTO is personally in favour of non-denominational teaching but hasn't been clear enough enough on this issue as a representative of the teachers.

In this recent RTE interview he asked three times did he want religion though outside of school hours and he didn't proper answer. In 2007 he said...

Mr Carr said the INTO favoured a broad religious education programme for all schools on, perhaps, four days a week, with the various churches coming in on the fifth day to "add their own stamp", in accordance with parental wishes
In a another recent Irish Times article he fudges again

Separate religious teaching during school is just not practical and it comes back the issue that a more secular system suits most parents and is most social and cost efficient.

This post is collation of my and other thoughts and info from discussions on atheist.ie and on Boards.ie PS. It interesting to note that the Church of Ireland as a minority is happy to continue teaching COI primary schools kids religion outside of schools hours at Sunday schools etc.

Sunday 13 April 2008

Irish GeoRSS News feed: YahooPipes vs GoogleMaps

Testing to see if I can embed a geoannotated news rss feed into my blog, and testing the difference between Yahoopipes version and Googlemaps version on an Irish breaking news feed.

Feck yahoo pipes doesnt offer embedding for free yet, I'll should just try georss and yahoo map api, hmm need a server access for that, sure everybody outputs the result to google maps anyway. Here's what a Yahoo pipes map looks like Irish Examiner breaking geonews Yahoo pipe

Back to google maps thanks to nearby.org.uk and lots of detailed but basic how-tos at Mike at Blackpool Community Church Javascript Team!?.

okay so got that working its pretty simple but making it usable for an Irish website its what I want to do, so I can put it in the corner and a small list of the stories below from the same rss feed and be able to click those links with a # tag and have a small icon where you can zoom down to street level which would make it useful for local blogs.I figure out how to put a link in the infowindow directly to the story. So it doesn't work very well, but there are different versions and if you go to georss homepage you can add the locations as they come up so you can improve its hit rate yourself. There are also javascript api that allow for infowindow to display outside the map so you don't have to scroll to read it etc.

Here's a few attempts at refinement A GeoRSSS plus clickable sidebar list