maritime

 GATWICK AIRPORT You see humanity at its best and worst at airports in holiday times. Gatwick is such a place in August. Queues for everything but the stolid English acceptance of crowdiness means patience is needed. No shouting, jumping queues even when they exceed the tramlines put down for such an event. No, all nationalities seem to take on that English attitude of of resignation as they join those neverending queues. All nationalities are here and in all shapes and sizes as I found out when a rather large lady sat down on one of those linked seating arrangements. All though she was three seats from me I was catapultged into the air and returned with a thud. Good job I was not drinking tea! Another thing, everyone is using their mobiles. With faces glued to their minature screens they provide translations, directions and even security clearance and boarding tickets  for aircraft and trains. Thank goodness I bought an "eticket" for the  train and avoided a somewhat lon...

 A new challenge [1] Imagine you are a deck officer on watch and suddenly all the bridge instruments go dead. Imagine you are an engineer on watch and all the generators stop running. Imagine you are a port operator, and all the container cranes and stackers stop running. Imagine you oversee logistics for a large global operator and your software informs you that you have been hacked and need to pay a ransom to restart it. It has happened! A research report looked at 46 cyber attacks in the shipping industry between 2010 and 2020 and noted they are increasing [2] . Worse, the perception of cyber attacks at sea by seafarers themselves was that it did not happen on their ship! [3] This has encouraged research as at the University of Plymouth [4] In 2017 the Russian hacker group Sandworm started a cyber-attack that was global and affected the entire Maersk network of 76 ports with more than 800 vessels accounting for...

  Living with Grandpa Grandpa had always been a part of the family. We lived in his big red brick house that was built in the 1920’s most probably from the proceeds of many successful voyages as Captain. As his wife died our young mother decided to look after him and it was therefore natural that we all lived together once he had retired. Grandpa or Gramps as we called him was my mother’s father. Born in Lincolnshire in 1879, his father was a coastguard based in Sutton Bridge, he grew up around the sea. He went to sea in 1894 at the age of 15 and spent the whole of his life at sea working for a shipping company out of Whitby, Yorkshire and settling in the fishing village of Robin Hoods Bay. He retired as Captain and it as a pensioned seafarer that I knew him until I went to sea at the age of 16 in 1957. Throughout his seafaring career he saw 2 World Wars with many adventures and incidents. For instance in the 1 st . World War he told me a tale of being bombed. He was on a sma...

 A review Background It seems self-evident that museums are places of learning. That visitors come to learn based on what the museum offers in the kaleidoscope of cultural heritage available. How do museums provide the learning opportunities to the visitor whether they are children, families, or foreign tourists? That is the focus of this review. In 2020 the International Council of Museums had an article [1] focussing on museum learning as a forgotten profession. They argued that the term “education” had many interpretations and in some instances was interpreted as “ representing the omniscient museum that explains the wonders of the world and arts from a high ivory tower to a passive audience. This is far from reality.” [2] Falk and Dierking’s contextual model of learning in museums is considered important in understanding how museums can improve the effectiveness of learning in museums. [3] Mifsud argues that museums should have trained educators to run museum lea...