Dull Twinned with Boring

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Welcome to ‘Twin City’ Enter most towns, cities or villages in not just the UK, but in Europe and beyond, and you will likely find a ‘Welcome to [insert place name]’ and underneath ‘Twinned with [insert twin cities]’. Perhaps it is easy ignore these twin cities and linkages, or dismiss them as nothing more than symbolic, but what is the story behind twin or sister cities and what does it mean today? For those unaware a twin or sister city partnership is where there is a ‘friendship’ and legal/social agreement between one town or city (or even a region) to another , usually in a different country.Read More →

UK_ESC_Overall_Post2000_Points Comparison

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Trying to understand and explain the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) isn’t the easy. Tune in on the evening of 13th May 2017 and in between overly-scripted hosts, thumping Eurodance and ballards, you’ll treated performances like Azerbaijan’s which includes a man wearing a horse’s head. Meanwhile Italy is one of the favourites, despite having a man dancing in a gorilla suit- and this is par for the course each year in the ESC. For those unfamiliar with ESC,  on the face of it, this is an annual song contest where each competing European country writes and performs a song, which is then scored by a panel of judges andRead More →

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England is often known as the ‘home of football’ due to the its role formalising the first standardised rules of ‘association football’, and this game that was spread globally over the 19th and 20th century. In its early origins in England , the Football Association was formed in 1863, which formalised the rules of the game and started the FA Cup in 1871, but football remained an ad-hoc amateur game, run by those who could afford to play this as a pastime.  For example, the majority of founding FA clubs were private school teams, despite the large popularity of the game in the industrialised inner cities of Victorian Britain.Read More →

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Football is perhaps the true global game, but is it played on a level playing field, particularly economically? Most of you probably know the answer to this, but the relationship between performance and strength economically, and sporting ability and opportunity is still an interesting one. National team football is a better way to analyse this, given the great financial disparities in club football to buy the best talent and that national identity is a more static attribute. Now, I realise that some may love football/sport, some may loathe or have little interest for it. However, exploring the relationship between football and economics tells us something deeperRead More →

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It’s been a while since I’ve added to this feature for various reasons, but thanks to the ‘The Pudding‘, a superb infographics and ‘visual essay’ based site, there is a excellent and important entry for Map of the Day. The Shape of Slavery evidences historical and modern day racism, by providing geographical representations of the areas of United States of America where proportion of African-Americans have been over time, the numbers of slaves up until it was outlawed, and the number of (black) incarcerations per state. This is a well designed and thought out web map, which utlises topojson.js and other Javascript libraries, to tie inRead More →

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Happy St David’s Day/Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus to all those around the world with Welsh links or sympathies. For those unaware, St David’s Day on 1st March,  is the national day of Wales, celebrating the saint day of the patron saint of Wales, David, and is an excuse (if ever needed) to stock up on Welsh flags, sup some Brains Beer, tuck into Welsh rarebit and Welsh cakes, and sing Calon Lân while watching reruns of Wales beating England in rugby. With all stereotypes out the way, the nation building of Wales/Cymru is an interesting one. The history is uncertain, but Wales has it’s originsRead More →

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How would you define a map? A type in a popular search engine beginning with ‘G’, has a familiar definition, “a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc.”, and indeed the word map derives from the word ‘mappa’ meaning sheet/napkin. However, ironically though ‘map’ isn’t restricted to this two dimensional version we can fold up; as we all know, we live a digital age where you navigate the world around you with your laptop or smartphone too. But what happens if you live somewhere with little to no mobile internet signal and sub-zero temperatures most of theRead More →