Pig Sty Avenue

It was suggested to me that I'd be better off searching the University's library catalogue that using Google Scholar, (the tax dodging, Tory government arm-twisters, don't get me started...) but, whatever, I found a whole new rich seam of journal articles and books via Scholar yesterday. Here are just a few of them. Lot of reading next week. Citations in bold = search for a copy. The rest are now saved, and cataloged in   Mendeley [Includes articles (NOT books) found at  https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=related:yOu-yOP1t_gJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5] Baldi, G., & Goodman, S. W. (2013). Balancing Integration Obligations and Welfare Rights: An examination of membership policy in three European countries. In American Political Science Association Annual Meeting . Chicago. http://doi.org/10.1007/s13398-014-0173-7.2 [NB: Draft – Please Do Not Cite Without Authors’ Permission] Blackledge, A. (2009). “As a country we do expect”: ...

I turned in a slightly new direction on Monday . The "migration crisis" which dominates the news, (and the thoughts of many of us) has skewed my focus. What I'm looking at is the other end of the formal "migration" process, the claim for ILR, or application for citizenship, where the language testing is actually taking place. And it needs to be kept close to test validity. Let's assume for the moment that I'm going with the consequential model of test validity, per Bachman & Palmer (2010) and Chalhoub-Deville (2015), (which is not to say that I've made any kind of binary choice between them and Kane, 2013). So, it needs to be shown, (note use of passive), that the (currently) B1 CEFR Speaking & Listening test, being the language component of KoLL, has beneficial consequences. Now, it may be shown that achieving the cut score has benefits for the test taker. But what about a failure?  See, if someone fails to get their 6.5 in IELTS, say, a...

Done, now, with yesterday's flooded allotment blues . Here's what a bit of thought and a good night's sleep suggests: a lot of the spoil I've got, (from the pond and under the path) is either heavy clay soil (path), or actual boulder clay from the pond excavations. I'm going to use that as the first line of defence along the NW boundary, build up a wee bank with it. I'll need at least part of the path relaid first, and the scaffold boards I've been garnering, so I can get about with the barrow on the waterlogged ground. The Predecessor had a bank there, with some success. But here's the best bit: when I was talking to the bee-lady at the allotments, she was very interested to hear of my hedgerow plans, and told me the allotments had a huge amount of willow whips... So I'll plant out the clay bank with willow, which will hold the fort this year and next whilst the hawthorn and alder are growing. In the longer term, the combination of clay and hedg...

Facing North Probably, it's not as bad as it looks. Though it did look pretty depressing this morning. I went first thing, because last night's weather forecast suggested there'd be a break in the rain. They were out by a few hours, it actually stopped raining, and the sun even came out, around noon. And so I didn't do what I'd planned, which was to carry on relaying the path for a couple of hours, (the path being that wee canal running down the middle of the photo). You can see the NW bed is waterlogged now, too. Bloody hell. And below, that's looking South. Pond at maximum extent. On the plus side, if you follow the canal up the middle of the photo, you can see where I managed to get a start on relaying the path at the weekend, even though it's veering off slightly West. So it was all a bit depressing, compounded by the lack of endorphins I usually get after a couple of hours hard labour, lost to the flooding and the ceaseless downpour. But, you ...

The Knowledge of language and life in the UK guidance, "published for home office staff on 15th December 2015"is where I need to be reading next. A quick skim tells me that refugees looking for ILR don't have to take the tests, but that means applicants for citizenship do. Interesting distinction between the person who gets ILR but (perhaps) waits in hope that things back home improve, and the person who says, "I'm never going back there to live again, no matter what; this is my home now." So it's not as oppressive as I'd at first thought. Unless a refugee with ILR  is in limbo - they don't need to do the KoLL, but they won't get the benefits of citizenship. So this is the arena I'm moving into, that distinction between ILRs and Citizens, and what that actually means, what it feels like, and why anyone would choose to be an ILR. NB: This blog is quite interesting on the topic of doing the KoLL in Welsh. Will look at figures for L1s i...

If you're looking for stuff about gardening or language testing, today is not a good day at Pig Sty Avenue. I'm researching something else.  Godefroy (2008) suggests (p235) that the trench warfare on the Western Front was the result of Germany's war with Russia in the East - they were unable to wage aggressive war on two fronts. And the invention of machines guns and the artillery of the time meant that the Front "soon settled into a series of largely static front lines that required... new ideas in order to break through them" (p236).  "Trench raiding was essentially any raid or minor operation whose purpose it was not to take ground from the enemy and hold it, but rather to complete smaller objectives against the enemy such as inflicting casualties, destroying enemy equipment, collecting intelligence, creating deceptions, lowering morale and, in general, cause havoc within the enemy lines." (P238)  An order in 1917 gives details of the trenches to ...

1.2 History and sources of immigration law "The introduction of biometric identity documents for foreign nationals in 2007 heralded the entrenchment of of immigration status into everyday life." (P12).  "The [Asylum and Immigration Appeals] Act 1993 introduced... the concept of a claim 'without foundation'... [T]his is based on the idea of a potential entrant as dishonest." (P13) Clayton sees (p16) 6 strands emerge in policy evidenced in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, and the white paper which preceded it: development of highly regulated framework for control of asylum seekers; entry for work, where needed, in tightly controlled circumstances; institution of a sub-class of people devoid of rights; putting many immigration decisions outside the UK;  concerns over terrorism;  increase of central government power. The legislation produced by the New Labour government (see, eg, pp19-20) appears to be both draconian and petty min...

See, this is one reason, on top of climate change, why we get flooding in Britain. Too much bloody paving, not enough well cultivated land, hedgerows, and trees. This is the view from google earth. This image is before my time, I'm guessing it was taken a couple of years ago. That's my plot edged in green. To the left is the raised beds area. You can see by its proportions that it's two plots joined together. A large part of it is paved, (that near circular area in the middle, and the paths between the beds, and that area in its bottom right corner. The red arrow shows the direction of the slope. It's a gentle slope, probably a couple of feet from the bottom left to the top right in the photo. But the thing is, almost all of the rain that falls on that area, about 5400sq ft, just trickles slowly over the paving (and the impacted grass areas), and into my plot.  I don't know when the two plots were paved over, and presumably nobody thought about the effec...

BEFORE: Heap of clay to the north of pond AFTER: Heap of clay gone, more pond Despite best endeavours, the water levels just keep on rising. The course of the path, now a trench down the middle of the North end of the plot, is filled with water. To try to lower the overall levels, I dug out another area, maybe 15ft sq, (the right hand AFTER picture). As you can see from the photos, that caused the overall levels to drop by, oh, 2ins.  To add to my woes, it looks like the water is backing up into the NW bed, which is severely waterlogged again - you can see water lying on it. You can't walk on it without going ankle deep in mud. To relieve this, I'm going to lay a French drain - along the course of where you can see the drainpipe laid across the bed, and about 2ft deep. An almost £ shaped pond.  And I'm going to have to dig yet more pond, quite a big area, to get the overall levels down. As you can see, by accident, the pond is beginning to look like a £...

Almost finished a submission on a major theme of my Lit Rev: current paradigms in Language Test Validity. I'm looking at what Lyle, (Bachman & Palmer, 2010) has to say about "unintended detrimental consequences". I've got to reframe that for the language test score = indefinite leave to remain discourse. A language test like this is unlike any other.  For example, say a student needs IELTS 7.5 to get her place at a UK University. Let's also agree, just for now, that IELTS scores have been fully justified/validated, and that the University admissions department knows full well, using past experience, that anyone with less than 7.5 will be unable to keep up, submit essays of the required standard, and will not graduate. Maybe they know that because until a few years ago the bar was set at 7.0, and they had a whole load of mushkila situations with L2 students.  So our student gets 7.0. This looks like a "detrimental consequence" for her. She re...

Yesterday, the heap of useless contents from the sheds went in the barrow and along to the skip. Plastic sheeting, broken polystyrene fish-boxes, beer cans and plastic bottles, an electric kettle, miles of knotted garden hose, old bent chairs, and of course plenty of broken glass. I don't know how many barrows full, but my iPhone told me at the end of the morning that I'd walked 5 miles. No BEFORE and AFTER photos, it was very un-photogenic. A significant morning though. That's the last of the rubbish. Which means that the only things to leave the allotment from here on in will be good things to eat, and flowers for the windowsill. Well, subject to what I find in the subterranean midden, hopefully just rotted wood which can go into the soil, or be burned. The new allotment era will be a self-sustaining one, what goes onto the allotment stays on the allotment. Allotmenteers need to have sharp eyes to get stuff for nothing, but sometimes the impulse goes too far. I mean, wh...

Or conservatory, as I'm perversely inclined to start calling it. Obviously, no actual gardening could be done today with a couple of inches of snow on the ground. But not going to the allotment on a Sunday is a bit like not having a good old garlicky red-wine gravy with the Sunday dinner - almost unthinkable.  Anyway, I was curious to see how it would look in snow - a first. And also to see how much fox activity there'd been overnight, from tracks in the snow. There had been some Reynard activity, as you can see from the photos, particularly the blood-and-feathers, which were downy and grey. Perhaps a wood pigeon which was investigating the compost heap and was too fat for the fox? I hope so, we've more of that species than we need. And it would have made a nice meal. Anyway, I got the potting shed/conservatory cleared. Lots of plant pots and green garden netting, (protection against said wood pigeons). Couple of nice old metal boxes containing metal things like hinges ...

Shed interior: before This is the shed as I inherited it in June. 7 months have gone by and so long as I had a square yard of space to keep the tools and me out of the rain, that was enough. But the plot was frozen this morning, my mountain of bricks all frosted together, so today was make a start on the shed day. It's actually in two parts. This is the left hand side, looking South, and is where I'll keep the tools, bits and pieces, and produce when I've got some. The right hand side still awaits tidying, but it is more open, and seems to have been a potting shed, which it will be again. But today was the storage shed. Unbelievable amount of rubbish in it. It was looking very medieval, and I realised why archaeologists find stuff in the layers of detritus on the floors in old dwellings. Here they would have found plastic Lucozade bottles, flattened tins of Tennant's lager, and (gawd help us) electro-magnetic tape from an old reel-to-reel machine.  Plus a lot of r...

Very quick visit this morning to allotment, taking the kitchen waste  to the compost heap, and having a quick look and think. This is the view from the North end. The level of water at this end of the path is still too high: that's the course of the path you can see running down the middle of the photo, mind. So I'm going to extend the pond north and south (to the left foreground and middle ground in the photo) once I've got at least some of the path restored, and can start to barrow earth from the East to the West side. On the plus side, the fact that the path-trench has filled it up with water tells me that it's draining off the West bed, so it's working. It's impossible to say what the levels will be in future, given the exceptional rainfall we've had in December. So it might be a seasonal pond and dry out in summer, or it might be full all year. Whatever. It'll be a pond, and the drainage issue is almost solved.

Below, a list of pond plants from wildlifetrusts.org , (link goes to a pdf, and, just saying, it wanted proofing). Look at the names! Hornwort, Bladderwort , Stinking Iris, Lady's Smock, Bungle, Creeping Jenny... Like a window onto the Middle Ages.  Submerged oxygenators Spike Water Milfoil - Myriophyllum spicatum Hornwort - Ceratophyllym demersum (pollution intolerant)  Shining Pondweed - Potamogeton lucens Horned Pondweed  - Zannichellia palustris Fennel Pondweed - Potamogeton pectinatus (pollution tolerant)  Water Starwort - Callitriche stagnalis (pollution intolerant) Floating-leaved Water Crowfoot/Buttercup - Ranunculus aquatilis (pollution intolerant)  Bladderwort - Urticularia spp Frogbit - Hydrocharis morsus-ranae Broad-leaved Pondweed - Potamogeton natans (pollution tolerant)  Curled Pondweed - Potamogeton crispus (pollution tolerant) Emergent Branched Bur-reed - Sparganium e...

Alder Seeds, Floating in Water So yesterday I blogged about stratifying seeds for the hedgerow , and noted that the alder seeds whose cones I'd picked up from the pavement were floating when I put them in water, which anyone who forages seeds will know is a sure-fire indication of the seeds' non-viability. But I did theorise that, as alder generally grows by water, it would make evolutionary sense that its seeds could be dispersed by water, and floating away would be a good thing. And that appears to be the case, according to treesforlife.org , (scroll down to "Water").  Because I'm desperately trying to get my head back into my Doctorate reading, I'm going to make some analogies here to Kane's (2013) ideas about inferential validity. I inferred yesterday, that because alder grows by water, it could be argued that their seeds should float, and therefore flotation was not necessarily proof that they weren't viable, (which would be the case with,...

This evening I started the stratification of the 400 hawthorn and 250 rose seeds I've got, to sow this Spring, and plant out in the following Autumn. Backbone of the hedgerow. The methodology is, put them in a container with damp compost in the fridge, and leave them for two months. This simulates winter, in which seeds will spend a lot of the time in cold wet earth. This breaks down the seed coat, (not sure on the physics of that), and admits moisture to the actual seed. So when you put them in 20C compost on the windowsill in early March, hey presto! most of them should germinate. I found some alder cones on Onslow Drive a few days ago. I got about 100 seeds from them. But tonight I put them in a jug of water, and... they all floated. Generally, I've found seeds which float are barren, (maybe an F1 parent?)  But I'm thinking, trees which grow by water, their seeds might have evolved to float for a bit, carry them downstream?  Anyhow, I'll give 'em 48 hours, an...

Reading left to right, that's how the trench, which will be a path, has progressed over the last three days. The most satisfying aspect has been how it's filled up with water, which was exactly what was intended. As I was shovelling out the soil and clay, I could see water from the NW bed, (to the left in the photos) seeping out into the trench. Today, I was able to walk on that bed, and whilst it was sodden, (given the rain we've had in Scotland , not surprising), it was not sink-down-12-inches-boggy, as it was a few weeks ago. I had to dig a subsidiary hole-in-the-ground, NE bed, to take some more water, to the right of the original one, about 4x4ft. And I'm going to eventually shape both of these holes, perhaps a third one, into a pond, giving it some sloping edges. I quite like that wee island in the middle there, as a bed for bulrushes.  Massive learning curve. The soil underneath the path was clay-soil, that is, not good gardening earth, but not th...

L That's the path. I lifted the flags ages ago, and dug a channel down the middle. There were some foundations along the edges of the flags, bricks, (and in one place, timber; why timber? not as if this garden has ever been short of bricks!) and I've dug them out. It remains now to dig down another 9ins or so, and then refill the trench with 3-4 courses of bricks. And then put the slabs back. The grey drainpipe left middleground, I'm thinking of using a French drain, running down under the path and into the pond. Lots still to do before Spring.