Read the full article here. In my role as Energy Policy Adviser to the Institute of Directors, here is my latest contribution with my excellent co-author, Corin Taylor. Unfortunately, far too many people in the energy industry and energy policy circles are stuck in a pre-recessionary timewarp. They just don’t seem to have caught up with the fact that our current raft of energy policies are running far ahead of ordinary people’s budgets and the balance sheet strength of our utilities. Energy policy is not just a question of political will and it really shouldn’t be immune from cost-benefit analysis and some open criticism of the underlying energy assumptions. Sometimes I wonder, does our energy policy have no clothes?

Read the full article here – Energy policy for a less affluent age.

Read the full pdf here.  A special thanks to our brilliant Space Fellow, Jim Bennett – as well as many others – on helping me with this wide-ranging feature article in the latest quarterly publiction of the Institute of Directors. Truth to tell, if you want a positive story about the UK Economy, this is almost the only one going.

It’s fascinating as well to realise that some of the best places for Spaceports in the UK are in Scotland – which now comes with a new kind risk for investors should it become independent. It seems we are a long way from really fully understanding the costs and benefits of Scottish independence. But with my energy hat on, I for one wouldn’t bet on renewable energy subsidies and oil prices remaining high and stable into the future – which together form a big part of  the Scots Nationalists’ calculations.  Permanence, after all, is the illusion of every age.

Read the full pdf here - The UK Spaece economy: the present and exciting future.

Whilst we wait for www.police.uk, a government-sponsored website competing in and crowding out a supposedly emerging open data marketplace,  to have a full run of publicity – The Sunday Times yesterday, press today and tomorrow – pending a late release of monthly and additional data that we as 3rd party developers were not consulted on – I wanted to highlight one of the few crimes to be growing significantly on an annual calendar basis – bike theft.

 According to the Home Office British Crime Survey figures (see table 1), over the calendar years 2009 – 2010 bike theft increased from 477,000 to 533,000 – a 12% increase. That’s over 5% of all crimes estimated to have been committed by the British Crime Survey out of 9.7 million in 2010.

Bike theft is such a problem because according to research by Halfords, in 2010 of the estimated 533,000 bikes stolen, only 115,147 were actually reported to the Police.

It’s not just that victims don’t believe the Police can do much about it. There has to be an easier way of registering crimes like these with the Police to close the gap between reported and actual theft. It also seems reasonable to get some more granularity here.  The offence of “Theft of a pedal cycle” is currently classified under “Other” crimes on our website and Police.uk. Would it really be so terrible to share with us – with the consent of the owners – where those bikes were actually stolen from?

Victims of bike theft would have far more incentive to report the loss if they knew that everyone could see where it happened on a map and at what time. We could then quickly work out where the hotspots were and owners could take additional security measures while Police Forces and local communities could start to take preventative action or at least ask some searching questions about the apparent lack of progress.

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Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/01/30/bike-theft-a-highly-unreported-numerically-significant-crime/

Some of you have been asking when we will have the data ready on UKCrimeStats for the month of Police.uk – so were we !

Unfortunately, as 3rd party developers, we are beholden to the external release by Police.uk which is meant to appear on the 25th of every month. Our inquiries have now established (they didn’t tell us in advance) that it won’t be ready until 31st January and we need a bit of time to put it on our own system after that.

Over on our forum section that we launched a few months ago – read the opening post about it here, we are keeping tabs on data errors and the NPIA’s and Police Force’s progress in correcting them. We have had some successes – notably with Sussex Police neighbourhood data, neighbhourhood population data (now just 39 out of 5,000 plus rather than 500 with populations of 1 or 0) and Cheshire ASB data – but there is still a long way to go. We need to see a lot more progress on the very incomplete locations of Police Stations across England and Wales. for example. One year on and 5 Police Forces have not seen fit to report these at all – Wiltshire, North Yorkshire, Humberside, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire – and others only partially. We need to know where the Police Stations are so we can start to filter out the distortionary effect of crimes with no location assigned to a Police Station on or near a specific road.

With the impending full calendar year of data, of particular importance for this month’s update are Hertfordshire’s Jan 2011 and Vehicle totals which look transposed. We told the NPIA about this at the beginning of December 2011 and a few times since then. So let’s hope they get it checked and fixed this time.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience everyone, we will have an update with you soon.

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Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/01/29/december-2011-police-uk-data-late-this-month/

Last week, for the first time, I actually used the QR code (Quick Response) scanner on my Blackberry  and I belatedly realised what a great invention they are. No difficult and long urls – just scan and it takes you straight there and then you can share the QR code by facebook or email. UKCrimeStats has a huge and growing database of monthly information and we’re always trying to make it as accessible as possible. So we’ve decided to experiment and introduce an individual QR code for every single page on the site, right down to the individual crimes like this one, no. 1003 and streets like Oxford Street - QR code below.

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Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/01/18/qr-codes-now-uploaded-for-7-million-pages-on-ukcrimestats/