Michaela Strachan is to open a new visitor centre at Abberton Reservoir near Colchester
By Chris Harris
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
7:48 AM
TELEVISION presenter Michaela Strachan will officially unveil a new wildlife visitor centre and nature reserve in Essex.
Ms Strachan, who has just finished filming Springwatch for the BBC, will open the Essex Wildlife Trust building at Abberton Reservoir near Colchester.
The 15-sided visitor complex has been built as part of a £150million project to increase the reservoir’s capacity by 15billion litres.
John Hall, chief executive of Essex Wildlife Trust, said: “We are delighted to welcome a wildlife champion like Michaela Strachan to Abberton Reservoir to carry out the official opening duties of our new visitor centre and reserve.
“We look forward to welcoming guests and the public to what should be a memorable day. Abberton is already a hugely significant site for wildlife and our new reserve will help make it even more crucial over the coming years.
“Our fabulous new visitor centre brings people closer to that wildlife. The trust’s vision is of a ‘Living Landscape’ where wildlife and people co-exist side by side, to mutual benefit, and Abberton is a fine example of that ideal.
“Together with Essex & Suffolk Water we are making Abberton Reservoir better for wildlife, better for people – and better for future generations.”
Strachan will officially open the centre on Saturday and will be joined by the Mayor of Colchester and representatives from Layer-de-la-Haye Parish Council, Essex Birdwatching Society, Natural England, Abberton Management Committee and TJ Evers, who built the visitor centre.The opening ceremony will coincide with a special fair, which will include a birds of prey display, charity and trade stands, refreshments and a beer tent.
John Devall, operations director of Essex & Suffolk Water, said: “Abberton Reservoir is one of the most important sites in Europe for its wildlife and is also an essential part of the county’s infrastructure helping us supply water to more than a million people in Essex.
“The official opening of the visitor centre is a chance to celebrate this fantastic new facility, which provides a gateway to access this very special site.
“The relocation and enhancement of the visitor centre is part of the Abberton Scheme, which includes the expansion of the reservoir’s capacity by 58%.
“Guests at the opening event will also have the opportunity to learn more about this essential and major Scheme from the project team.”
The old visitor centre, opened in 1990, has been dismantled on low-lying land that will be flooded. The new visitor centre is on adjacent higher land, at the heart of an 80-acre nature reserve.
Source: www.eadt.co.uk
Does the existence of Facebook really merit a rewrite of data law? - The Register
Comment The British government is keen for more public data and private transactions with taxpayers to be pushed online at precisely the same time as the Home Secretary demands more powers for security services to effectively snoop on communications traffic with the help of telcos and social networks.
Add to that the fact that spooks are constantly trying to interrupt encrypted sites that - they argue - are used by organised criminals and terrorists.
Then factor in the European Commission's vice president Viviane Reding's efforts to convince the EU parliament to pass a new data protection law because she and many others believe that the one written in 1995 is out of date.
Reding has repeatedly reminded audiences of computer academics and internet players, whom she has lobbied hard with her draft DP bill, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was only 11 when the previous legislation came into being.
Viviane Reding continues to lobby for rewrite of Euro data protection law
Indeed, that justification for overhauling the law was bandied around again by the Brussels' justice commissioner earlier this week when she was speaking at the inaugural Digital Enlightenment Forum in Luxembourg.
Google, she added, was in 1995 still three years away from being incorporated and its young execs were still working in a garage office in California.
Reding's views were met, in the main, with a positive response from the gathered crowd, many of whom expressed a sense of the digital world moving too fast.
This shifting sands attitude was pervasive at the event in which many experts on the topic of data protection and online identity were in agreement that legislation needs to happen, and that it needs to happen quickly.
The word "enlightenment" was somewhat cringingly used to help explain that sense of urgency. Some considered that we are in fact living through a kind of Enlightenment 2.0 - with the engine behind that apparent radical change in thinking being the internet and how society operates on it.
Facebook's dominant social data farm has seemingly proved to be the trigger for many of these thinkers.
Google - a startup born in the late 90s that became the world's biggest ad broker with billions of dollars of revenue - never got the sort of attention in Luxembourg this week that was lavished on data hoarder-extraordinaire, Facebook, with its modest sales garnered from an ad business model that still looks amateurish compared with that of Google's.
And many experts in the field of identity couldn't help but look on in awe at Zuck's vast 900-million-people-strong siloed estate.
Some contended that a new "social contract" was required that would put the user in charge of accountability when it comes to what data is stored online.
It's precisely the kind of contract that the UK's Cabinet Office is mulling over as part of its proposals to farm out the handling of taxpayers' online identities to the private sector.
A move which, as the Reg has previously reported, would eventually require primary legislation and regulations implemented in the same way that banks are scrutinised.
Some of the proposals the Cabinet Office has put forward were aired at the forum - that included holding up the principles of user control, transparency, governance, certification and, among other things, portability.
Portability is of course a concept that Facebook does not approve of. It has long held on to its users' data and declined to let the likes of Google tap into that information. The recently floated company does allow its users to take chunks of their data with them if they choose to leave the social network, but that data does not easily flow into competing websites.
What was fascinating at this conference was the fixation, not with Google or even Microsoft - a company behind, for example, the previous UK government's online "gateway" system for taxpayers to access services online - but with that of upstart Facebook.
Zuck continues to dig deep for ad revs
Perhaps that's not unreasonable given how many people are sharing their lives on Facebook. Zuckerberg has previously floated the smug notion that his userbase could be considered the world's third largest country.
Indeed, it has done what others including Google have failed to do - amass fine-grained, near real-time data that ought to be an advertiser's dream come true.
One speaker at the event naively likened today's social networks to US analogue television broadcasters of the 1950s and 1960s because TV audiences back then understood the commercial contract involved. Of course, that relationship was arguably much more benign than the interplay of Facebook with our lives today.
But making Facebook a major catalyst for an overhaul of European data protection law that many might hope will be expected to stand up to the tests of time better than the one written in 1995 could yet prove to be a huge, short-sighted error. ®
Source: www.theregister.co.uk
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