It caught my eye… 4 -2025

This is a map from quite a while ago, 2014 in fact. This was one of the first times that a group of people really tried to gather together a good set of subject data that could be easily searched down to a very local level. It certainly did not try to cover everything, but it was a good source of information for its time. It even spawned a book.

The data sets used covered information from various sources, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), The Met Office, Public Health England to name a few. A full list of all the data sources used is available. The project, run by the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College London, seems to have come to a close not long after the publication of the book. Time and data collection has really moved quickly over the subsequent 10 years, with Information/Statistics about every conceivable subject at the drop of a hat!

Defence spending is a big topic of conversation at the moment across the whole of Europe and with the next UK strategic defence review due in the Spring of 2025, it will be interesting to see how the UK.Gov intends to spend its scarce financial resources, given the recent comments by the US Trump administration.

Here’s a set of listings of how much various countries currently spend on Defence? Not a subject that is going away.

Britain From Above recently updated its pricing and added some more images to its archive. It’s a fascinating site where you can lose track of time looking through the various historical images.

There are now quite a few other historical aerial mapping sites to visit.

UK Aerial Photos, National Collection of Aerial Photography, Britain from the air: 1945-2009 and the Royal Air Force Museum to name a few.

Back-Up! Back-Up! Back-Up!

Shock, horror, panic!!!! I was working on some new files in Adobe Lightroom today and after that, I happened to look in a directory of some very old folders of files dating back to 2006 when to my horror all I could see was an empty frame with no preview of the file. Long story, short, the files were missing from my hard drive! However, all the Lightroom info (metadata) etc. was still present.

I have a leftover habit from my many years of IT work and when I latterly worked as an independent IT consultant (with other people’s data) of always having backups of everything. Hence, how could this have happened?

I use the grandfather, father, son backup method where three large USB discs are rotated over a period (currently 14 months) of time. Along with the occasional extra back up to another 2 USB drives which I rotate and keep at a neighbour’s house – backups are no good if your house suddenly burns down/floods/broken into. When I was doing work with clients, it was a condition of the contracts that I also provided off-site secure backups as well. You could say that old habits die hard, so again how could this happen?

There is of course cloud storage in its abundance today and at reasonable prices, but one thing that lets this down is the very variable speed/time it takes to upload files to the various cloud storage options on offer, but that’s a subject for another post.

Suffice to say I have managed to track down the files on a backup disc of June 2024 and restored them, so there is now peace in the world!! I need to investigate why they suddenly disappeared and around what date, and why only some files – the backup software error logs offer no clues at the moment.

Good job that they were only my own files, even so; missing old photographs of memories is not a good thing!

It caught my eye… 4–2023

I participate in a number of medical research projects at Reading University which I find interesting and if they can learn anything, all well and good.

Of course, this means that you give over various personal details to help them move forward on their projects. All covered by various UK data protection rules.

I also volunteered for similar projects with Biobank and again gave up personal details under UK data protection rules. Image my surprise to find that Biobank appears to have given access to that data to insurance companies!!

Seems that was not in the small print that I remember.

Just announce today that Palantir, the USA based Data Analytics company has just been awarded a £ 480m contract for the NHS.

Palantir will work with its UK partner Accenture to set up and operate a Federated Data Platform (FDP) (Link is to NHS explanation) for the NHS. For more information about FDP’s see Wikipedia‘s explanation.

This deal opens up all sorts of data privacy issues, which have already started some serious discussions.

In case you were wondering, how many data breaches — where private data is accidentally released due to errors, system failures or hacking etc.

Here’s a List of Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks in 2023 from the IT-Governance website.

Makes you think!