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Alexandra is learning to read

20/3/2014

If I have a church it is reading, and Alexandra, five years old, is learning to read.

After I read her chapter two and-a-tiny-bit-more of Pippi Longstockings, Alex reads me yesterday's book brought home from school: Water. "Water can be cold. / Water can be hot. / Water can be rough. / Water can be calm. / Water can be fun!"

She also brought home a photocopied picture of a hand with each digit containing a different reading strategy.

Learning to Read

I remember the look
of the unreadable page

the difficult jumble

& then the page
became transparent

& then the page
ceased to exist:

at last I was riding this bicycle all by myself!

Cilla McQueen

She pretended not to know the water book by heart so she could try out every strategy: looking at the picture for clues; saying the first sound; making a guess; stretching out the word; going back to the beginning of the line.

'Hmm, what could that word be?', Alex has big eyes she has a habit of making bigger.

'R. Rrrrr. Roo. Rou. Ff. Fffff. Rough! Water can be rough", she says.

Alex is learning to read, is understanding the trick of learning, and is re-enacting the trick all at the same time. I remember the same with her big sister Maggie learning to talk, only months after mastering fluent language herself, she would pretend to be a baby, babbling and trying out whole words in roughly formed explorative vowels. Mastery.

After Alex was in bed I kept thinking about Cilla McQueen's poem 'Learning to Read', one of the few poems I know by heart. It was published in The Listener in the 80s and it made odd and beautiful tugs at my teenage heart. There is so much I love about the poem, the perfect cadence, the momentous journey it travels from illiteracy to literacy, and the way the final giddy triumph is realised in a completely different realm.

The lines I kept coming back to were '& then the page / became transparent'. Because, of course, the words on the page are as stiff and opaque as ever when you're reading, but you do see through them. I tried squinting my eyes and looking at the spines of the books in our bookshelf and willing myself not to read them - to see the words only as shapes and patterns. I couldn't do it. Even books with ugly or over-elaborate typography, I could not forget even for a moment how to read. I could not not read.

This glorious notion of transparency. A metamorphosis as magical as any I know. That words lift off the page and become experiences and ideas, threats and declarations, houses and streets. Forests and gloomy mountains. And people calling through them all. And while all this is happening, left on the page, the 26 husks of letters, a dozen or so dots and flicks, the rhythm of white spaces.

I love that sentences or stanzas are little time bombs. Able to be duplicated and replicated or typed out from memory or tagged on a wall without the impact on reading ever diminishing. The best of them eternally chocker with explosive force.

It feels hallowed this time with Alex learning to read. When I was reading Pippi she said 'Look Mum, it and is. The. And Mum, if you took that o off that word there, it would be to.'

She's training her brain to read. Already unjumbling the letters so that she scans a page of text and picks out the familiar. She's doing it recreationally and without trying.

The first time I saw Maggie read for pleasure by herself, it was a fairy story. It was in my parents' house on my old bed. The sun pouring in and just about reaching her. I was a little heartbroken by the glory of it.

Now I watch Alex. She must be watching letters, first singly, then in tentative pairs fly up off the page to somewhere entirely her own. Soon it will be flocks. Just about, I think, just about.

Water meters still don't reduce consumption

15/3/2014

In 2009, Joe Buchanan wrote the following report that was published by Right to Water, a New Zealand group working to support the human right to water. I'm publishing it again because it's pretty much fallen off the web, and because Kapiti mayor Ross Church is claiming that introducing volumetric charging will reduce consumption by 25%. I suspect he's rehashing these statistics which, as Joe's paper shows, don't stand up to even a cursory examination.

The impact of metering on water use: a brief look at the statistics
Joe Buchanan
Wellington: Right to Water, November 2009.

Context
Throughout New Zealand, meters are being mooted as a tool for conserving water or reducing water use. Nationally, the Turnbull Group, Water NZ and the Institute of Professional Engineers (IPENZ) are promoting meters and volumetric charging on these grounds. Many local councils are also considering or implementing metering. Advocates of meters often cite impressive sounding figures about how much water meters can save. And many people, while concerned with the social impact of metering, especially on large families and those on low incomes, now believe the conservation benefits are worth it. Right to Water looked closely at the statistics to see if the evidence stacks up.

Summary
We found statistics were being cherry-picked, inflated and massaged to support pro-metering arguments. The most common errors in statistics purporting to show that water meters result in reduced demand were:

Comparing actual residential use in metered areas with gross water use (including commercial and leakage) in non-metered systems, divided by the permanent population of the region. This will always show lower usage in metered systems, even if actual residential use is the same.
Attributing all reductions in water use to the introduction of meters. Per capita water use has been decreasing in many parts of the country over the last decade or so, in both metered and non-metered systems.
Cherry-picking statistics that are favourable to the pro-meter argument. This is especially common in references to international studies, which show a wide range of impacts from meters, including zero reduction in demand. These studies often acknowledge low confidence in the figures and that findings are not transferable.

Some examples:

ONE
“Water meters can result in a 15% reduction in water use” e.g. TV3 news report October 25 2009

This figure appeared in the book “Water: Use Less -Save More: 100 Water-Saving Tips for the Home” (The Chelsea Green Guides) by Jon Clift and Amanda Cuthbert (2007).

When contacted the author acknowledged that the figure was “picked up... from the various UK water companies who cite this figure.”

This figure appears to have no real basis. It appears to be an amalgam from various studies or PR but is neither indicative or predictive for the New Zealand situation.

TWO
“Studies have shown that the introduction of water meters results in a reduction of water use.” Beacon Pathways report (1)

The report cites two international studies as evidence for water savings from meters (2). Both studies however, are equivocal. They each cite mainly US and UK studies that show anything from 0–50% reduction in consumption following water meters.

Both studies acknowledge:

a drop off in savings after an initial period that savings might reflect other conservation programs (such as public education)
low confidence in the figures
most savings are from reductions in outdoor use and are most effective where there is a large disparity in summer and winter use

The highest saving cited in these studies is from the Solomon Islands in the 1960s.

In general these studies show savings from water meters are made where summer use greatly exceeds winter use (for example parts of the USA where summer demand can be five to six times winter demand) or where pricing makes water use prohibitive (e.g. third / majority world countries). Neither situation applies to Wellington.

THREE

“In Nelson… [when water meters were] introduced several years ago, peak summer demand reduced by 37 per cent” Murray Gibb (Water New Zealand) Dominion Post October 19 2009 (3)

The 37% was not a reduction in total peak period water use, as suggested. This dramatic figure was attained by first subtracting “typical” winter use from total use, then calculating the reduction in the remainder which was termed
“discretionary” use.

The actual reduction in water use between the peak periods used was 17%, and this includes any reductions in commercial use and reductions in leakage.

It also includes reductions arising from education campaigns and simple year-to-year variation (over the same period water use decreased in areas that did not install meters).

Using the same methodology Wellington’s peak water use decreased by 23% between the 2007/8 and 2008/9 summers.   There is no basis for claiming that reduced water demand in Nelson resulted from the introduction of water meters.

FOUR

“Meters can result in a 40% reduction in consumption when compared to non-metered systems” IPENZ report (4) from Beacon Pathway paper. (5)

This claim is accompanied by an impressive graph that claims to show several unmetered Council areas that use far more water than unmetered regions.

The figures are cherry picked and misleading. In this graph, and the table in the Beacon Pathways report on which it is based, the per capita usage shown for non-metered areas is total use, including system leakage and commercial use, apportioned across the number of residents. Conversely, in metered areas, the Right to Water figures shown are average amounts used by households alone. This comparison is either deliberately misleading or disingenuous.

The figure shown for Manukau is around 190 litres per person per day. Gross use in Manukau is above 300 litres per person per day when commercial use and leakage is included (6), putting use into the range shown for unmetered areas. Similarly the figure shown for Tauranga is just over 200 litres per person per day, whereas gross use since metering is around 335 litres per person per day (6).

The lowest figure shown is for Nelson, about 160 litres per person per day. When the figure is recalculated using gross water use/permanent population to make it comparable to the figures shown for non-metered areas, Nelson usage rises to around 500 litres per person per day (7). This is higher than figures shown for some non-metered areas.

Some areas use more water for various reasons: horticultural use, climate, soil types, types of housing etc. Queenstown showed the highest per capita use in these statistics, but the Queenstown Lakes Council estimate nearly 50% of the volume supplied is lost by system leakage, and that high use arises from commercial use (commercial use in Queenstown is not metered, aside from three hotels) and a large visitor population which is difficult to account for (8).

The figure for Kapiti (650 litres per person/day) is not the actual water use, it is a Council target. Water use across the Kapiti region varies, with very high use in Greater Otaki, which the Kapiti Coast District Council acknowledges includes large volumes used by commercial horticulture and lost due to leakage from ageing pipes (9).

It is particularly surprising that IPENZ, a professional organisation who one would expect to understand statistics, should promote these figures. Calculating per capita usage by including commercial and leakage does not reflect residential usage.


References
1
Best practice water efficiency policy and regulations (WA7060/3); A report prepared for Beacon Pathway Limited, May 2008
2
A & N Technical Services, Inc. 2000. BMP Costs & Savings Study: A guide to the data and methods for cost-effectiveness analysis of urban water conservation Best Management Practices (BMPs) and Inman, D. and Jeffrey, P., 2006.
Urban Water Journal
, Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 127
–
143
3
The 37% figure was from the Nelson City Council Water Supply Asset Management Plan 2009
–
2012).
4
IPENZ: Water: New Zealand’s valuable resource (undated).

5
The figures appear to be from Lawton & Birchfield, Beacon Pathway Ltd 2008. Making New Zealand policy water conservation friendly. SB08 conference paper (Table 1).

6
Blakemore, R. & Burton, S. 2007. An assessment of peak daily demand in Tauranga city and implications for water supply management.
7
Statistics provided by Nelson City Council.

8
Queenstown Water Demand Management Plan, Queenstown Lakes District Council, December 2008

9
Kapiti Coast District Council 2002. Water Matters: Kapiti Coast District Sustainable Water Management Strategy.

Alexandra is learning to read

Water meters still don't reduce consumption

The impact of metering on water use: a brief look at the statisticsJoe BuchananWellington: Right to Water, November 2009.

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The impact of metering on water use: a brief look at the statistics
Joe Buchanan
Wellington: Right to Water, November 2009.