Dr Laura James's writings

Ada Lovelace Day

2011-10-07T20:47:00.000+01:00

Another Ada Lovelace Day, another blog post (see 2010, 2009).

This year, I'm going with a topical woman in technology from the lovely DevChix community. I'm not sure if she'd want to be named; but she stood up and asked for an apology after a male speaker made a sexist joke at a major tech conference (JavaOne) recently. She also made sure the organisers heard about it, and they apologised and will follow up with the speaker's company. But in some quarters she's been criticised for making men in the audience uncomfortable - but she's still an inspiration.

It's depressing that these things are still happening (and that the joke reportedly got a good laugh). But raising awareness helps others understand that such incidents are offputting to women in technology The lovely ladies at GeekFeminism provide great resources - they too should be celebrated today.

Getting knowledgable

2011-01-21T17:10:00.001Z

This week I've been settling into my new role as Head of Knowledge at True Knowledge. It's very exciting to be joining such an awesome management team, and a company full of incredibly smart and capable people.

The best way to describe what we're doing is probably to quote our website:

True Knowledge is building the first internet-scale platform for answering the world’s questions.

Our goal is to power a new kind of search experience where users can access the world’s knowledge simply by asking for the information they need in a way that is completely natural to them; just as if they were talking to another human being.

Instead of a list of links that may or may not be relevant to the query, the user experience is an immediate, perfect response, giving them exactly the information they are after.

Our unique semantic technology has been many years in development. It understands user questions, represents knowledge in a way that the system can understand and process and can combine existing knowledge to infer new facts and answer questions it has never seen before.

Powering the platform is also a database of facts: a unified representation of the world’s knowledge containing factual, common sense and lexical knowledge. We can already answer trillions of questions and as this knowledge base grows, we understand and answer more and more.

I even have a new hat, thanks to Amyas:

Exciting times!

Making Makespace

2011-01-12T15:47:00.002Z

One of the new things I'll be working on in 2011 is Makespace.

Makespace will be a physical space in Cambridge, where people can come together to design, build or fix almost anything, and the community of those who share the space and help and train each other. Ultimately, it will be a place in the city containing many things:

A FabLab including a 2D laser cutter, 3D printer, CNC router, soldering stations, etc
A meeting and training area
Flexible access control and facilities
The surroundings to meet, work, build, socialise and do amazing things

As a community resource, we hope to bring together a network of enthusiasts and innovators, the prototyping industry, consultants, businesses and educational communities in a mutually beneficial way. Makespace should support people from all across the East of England, using Cambridge as the initial hub. We won't be the first FabLab in the UK - that honour went to Manchester - but with any luck we'll be the second.

For many aspects of Makespace we'll be drawing on the best bits of other hack spaces around the UK and the world, but, in addition, I think it's very important that we can make a space and a community which is inclusive and accessible to all, regardless of age, gender and so on.

It's a very exciting project, bringing the wonders of engineering into people's own hands, and I'm delighted to be able to be part of it as a founding director. We incorporated as a not for profit at the end of 2010, and are currently working on the logistics for our first space(s)!

There's more information linked from our website, and if you'd like to stay in touch, please join the Meetup group, which is acting as a mailing list at the moment too.

Rewired State: Carbon and Energy - the hack weekend question

2010-11-01T12:20:00.002Z

I went to my first Rewired State event last weekend; this time the theme was carbon and energy. It was a great weekend, with lots of ideas and a great range of projects at the end (which I'll blog later). Thanks to all the people and organisations who made it happen!

I'd vaguely hoped there might be more electronics hackery there; but that would really require equipment and maybe a different kind of space (Makespace, anyone?). There's also a question as to how much of a hardware hack event would need to be devoted to training, rather than doing. I had a lovely chat with Georgina from Tinker.it and perhaps we'll be able to do something more in this vein down the line...

During the introductions, where we learnt about useful datasets and tools, I wondered whether we had quite the right blend of people in the room. Everyone seemed to have data, and be asking for others to help out with visualisations and other efforts to engage a broader audience, but there were hardly any designers, let alone user experience people, in the room. (Those that were, like LordJawsh, managed to contribute to lots of projects - kudos!)

Later on, it seemed to me like there were two quite different viewpoints about how to get people involved with carbon and energy. One set of people were optimistic that they could hack up a valuable new way of engaging people, whilst the other - more cynical perhaps - spotted the challenges (privacy, psychology, the differences between geeks and others). This latter group generally felt that 2 days of technical work wouldn't overcome the key challenge which people working on climate change issues have been looking at for years - how can you get people to change their behaviour because of a very scary thing which won't affect them for years/decades? It doesn't matter whether you are looking to get people to turn off lights or buy a different car or invest in insulation for their home or relocate to reduce their commute or accept a nuclear power station near their town or vote for certain policies - change is always more effort than staying the same, and you've got to have powerful reasons to drive people.

Maybe there's scope for getting together a slightly different set of smart people - social scientists, technologists, ethnographers, designers, economists - and seeing what ideas can be generated on a strong theme (like energy). This isn't quite Rewired State, and it's not quite CityCamp, and it certainly wouldn't be called a "hack" weekend. But thinking outside the box is going to be a key part of figuring out how we can tackle rebalancing our energy generation and consumption, to secure a civilised future.

Help Wanted

2010-10-03T09:47:00.001+01:00

I'm imagining a new job. We could call it the Personal Data Assistant, or "PDA". For most people, their PDA would be a part time role, perhaps just needing a couple of hours a week. This would be a highly trusted role, just like a PA, but with a different set of specialist skills.

The Personal Data Assistant would do all the tedious tasks which one ought to do around personal data - creating it, sharing it, securing it, archiving it, curating it. Sure, there are tools for some of these tasks, but none of them operate without manual intervention, and these tasks tend to be either tedious work which we avoid doing at all, or tricky things which could more quickly and effectively done by an expert.

So, what would my PDA do? He would archive and preserve my old emails and files, which I don't usually do very well. I, like Bill Thompson with his Zip disks, have old files on old disks which are running a serious risk of becoming unopenable and unpreservable; I think I still have floppies in a box somewhere. My PDA would make sure old data was migrated forwards into preservable forms and that if I wanted to dig information out of these old records, I'd be able to find it. He would take my paperwork and digitise it and file it so that it was findable, whether by searching, or more likely, by browsing in a structured way ("electricity bills from 5 years ago" or "emails from Bob with attachments, ordered by date." He would keep these private archives up to date, checking that all my files were backed up appropriately and that sensitive information was stored securely.

He would make sure my web presence was up to date, and, if sites I used to use are closing down, he would spot this, check with me, and perhaps grab and store any data I had there. He would check that I was Googlable and that the results were what I would want - that the good stuff was discoverable and the bad stuff less obviously findable. He would keep an eye on Google Analytics and other website logs and let me know if there were unusual things happening which I might wish to do something about.

My PDA would check that I only paid subscriptions to sites which I actually used. He would grab my preferred username on new web services I might want to use, even if I didn't get around to trying the service for a while. Maybe he would check that I had sensible privacy settings on FaceBook and advise me if terms and conditions were changing and I needed to review them. He would recommend new tools which would make the things I do with my data easier (just like Michael suggested Courier the other day). If I was struggling to find something amongst my files or online, my PDA would be able to point me at more powerful search terms or methods.

There's definitely a service in this which I would be willing to pay for, and I'm sure I'm not alone. PDAs would need to be highly trustworthy, reliable people. Perhaps 10 to 20 people could share the services of one full time PDA; if they paid £20-50 a week, this could add up to a reasonable wage. I think there's a market out there for this sort of thing, although one might want to find a better name for the role...

Later, you will tell me that your RSS reader missed this blog post

2010-09-05T18:00:00.000+01:00

Overheard yesterday at Science Online -

In the 1990s, one would say “sorry, your email didn’t reach me.” In the 2000s, one said “your email must have been eaten by my spam filter.” Now, one will say “alas, your email didn’t make it into my Gmail Priority Inbox!”

A weak joke, but an interesting idea - do unreliable systems fulfil some social need?

Hilary Mason is thinking along similar lines:

How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time?

We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service.

Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior.

Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections. How often have you heard or said something like “I was sure I was following you” or “I must not have gotten that DM” or even “I think I tweeted that…”?

The ability to politely ignore at least some of our incoming messages has existed for a long time - even post was never totally reliable. If our online systems do tend, over time, to become more reliable, perhaps we will just lie about them to cover our own foibles?

Android apps take two

2010-08-14T15:34:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I posted my list of Android apps.

Since then, I've moved to an HTC Desire, and a similar-but-different set of apps, arrayed differently across my increased number of screens, and folders. The recent upgrade to Froyo has been valuable in that I can now move apps to storage on my SD card, as the phone's internal memory has been getting short...

So, here's the epic list, which might help you if you're wondering what apps to install or buy, but is mostly for my own reference... I've ignored the built-in apps, in the main, and I have probably missed a couple of widget-only apps (I know I have a blue thing which lets me toggle silent/vibrate/ringer - no idea what it is called though!

First off: alphabetical list, or go straight to the same apps listed by category.

Say No to 0870. Because no one likes paying premium rates for calls if they don't have to.
Abduction! and Abduction World Attack - two superb games
Action Potato. I like this game less - just too hard for me! But it's a bit of fun.
Advanced Postbox Hunter. Not a game, but a way of helping the UK develop a database of where postboxes are. When I spot one, I enter it into the database using this app.
AK Notepad. Lets me write little notes.
Aldiko Premium. This is my main e-book reader; lots of free content, and a good system for adjusting screen brightness whilst reading. You can buy books through Stanza (I think), with a bit of effort.
Audioboo - make short audio recordings to share online
barcode scanner. Reads lots of kinds of barcodes. Easy.
Beamreader, for those PDF moments
Bump. Essential business card swapping technology! You can even exchange info with those weird beasties, iPhones
Calculator, Calendar, Call History, Camcorder, Camera - all the C's are built into Android, not downloaded apps.

Clock, Desk Clock, FM Radio: Android or HTC apps.
Colossal Cave Adventure - retro text gaming!
Compass - because sometimes I have a map that isn't in my phone, and there's no sun
ConvertPad, for changing things between different units
Cycle Hire Widget. This is a new app for me, which theoretically points to the nearest bike hire rack in London. Not yet tested!
Documents to Go: lets me read Office docs. Useful when you need it.
Draw! A basic drawing app, useful if you want to make marks on a screen
Facebook. Hugely improved since the recent update, it's all the FaceBook you need.
fIRC chat - not something I use much, but useful in case I ever need to leap into work discussions remotely
Fix My Street - building on the classic website from the lovely people at MySociety, I can now take a picture and grab the location of any offending pothole, and instantly tell the council about it. (Note: also works for non-potholes needing fixing!)
Footprints. A weird HTC thing which looked fun but never really worked for me. Takes pictures and stamps them with time and location.
Friction Mobile. A monochrome game, very simple, which I am very bad at.
Friend Stream. Another HTC special, looks very useful, but I like my streams from twitter, facebook, email etc separated out, because they all have different purposes for me.
Gmote - turning my phone into a remote control. Nice.

Google Goggles. Letting me identify things with a camera! Shiny.
Google Mail, HTC People, Internet, Latitude - all built in things, for email, contacts, the internet, and some weird place-based social network I don't use
Google Sky - pretty! Tells you what stars you are looking at.
Google Translate. In case you need to turn things from one language to another
GPS Speedo. For finding out how fast you are going. Sadly, only works where GPS works.
Here I Am ('2 Pro'). Lets you easily share where you are with others, via email and so on.
Juice Defender. The paid for version which is brilliant for reducing power consumption. Just needs a little configuration.
K-9 Mail. For all my non-gmail email.
Kindle. Another ebook reader. Lots of purchasable books through Amazon, once you've figured out how to do this. Puts words on the screen. It's OK.
Layar - a wacky augmented reality system which lets you add layers of information over what you are looking at, or a map. If you can find the layer you need, it's brilliant.
Listen - google's "podcatcher". What, you say? Podcatcher. A thing which lets you follow podcasts via their feeds. Would be useful if I ever got around to listening to things on my phone.
London City Tube info. Does what it says.

(Another) London Cycle Hire - this one has a map of the bike parks.
Now the built-in M's: Mail - built in email thing which I don't use; K-9 meets my needs better. Maps is Maps; Market is App Store; Messages is SMS and MMS. Music is some mp3 player I've never tried. I have no idea what News is, but I don't use that either.
Meebo is an instant messaging thing which connects to all your different IM systems
miniBus is a Cambridge-based bus app which uses real time bus information. It's getting bitrot sadly, still working, but the bus people must have changed their APIs, and now instead of bus stop names, I get numbers. Still, I can guess which I need and still figure out when the bus will turn up.
My Maps Editor - for when I want to correct the world of google!
My Tracks - records where you have been for walks, or whatever. You can export them into google Earth and so on.
Navigation - turn by turn, how to get to where you're going
NewsRob - RSS reader which synchronises with Google Reader
Ocado! Order your groceries from your phone. Easy to add items to your shopping basket. Actually a great experience for a fairly complex app, and kudos to Ocado for making it better than the web
OpenTable, for finding restaurants near you
Opera Mini - an alternative browser for when "Internet" won't do (I only use it occasionally)

Panoramio - a sort of augmented reality view of local shops and so on
PDANet - enables you to connect your laptop to the internet via 3G, using a cable or bluetooth. Cable mode still more useful than the (now with Froyo) built in wifi hotspot, as you can properly charge your phone at the same time.
PDF Viewer - does what it says
peep - HTC's twitter client which I don't use at all
Places
Places directory - google's index of local facilities.
qik - make short videos you can share online
qype - yet another local directory app. (if I have enough of them, one will find me the shop or watering hole I need!)
Remember the Milk. The app version of my to-do list service, which also has a handy widget
robotfindskitten. Yet more retro gaming. Very Zen.
runkeeper - an app which lets you map and time and measure your speed as you run (ha!) or cycle or whatever. I've used it a couple of times to figure out how fast my commute cycle is (not fast)
scrambled net - a lovely, simple puzzle game where you connect servers to terminals with cables. Updates have made the graphics very pretty - the cables pulse with networky goodness.

Shazam - identify the audio you are listening to
ShopSavvy - find the best online prices for whatever you've just scanned the barcode of
Taptu - fast mobile search, developed here in Cambridge
ToggleWifi - turns Wifi on and off at one click of the widget.
TunesRemote. Control things across the room with your phone!
tweeps around - a Layar addition, showing tweets in your local area. I don't use this much, but it's a fun way to see what other people are twittering about
Twidroyd PRO. My twitter client - works very nicely and worth paying for the PRO version
Vignette - if you have seen oddly blurry or tinted photos online lately, they may well have come from the iPhone app Hipstamatic. Vignette is the Android equivalent, but in my opinion makes nicer, slightly retro images. The UI isn't as flashy as Hipstamatic, but then it's quicker to change settings and take a picture in Vignette!
Voice recorder - record things and mail them to yourself.

Voice Search - worth installing, because as well as letting you search by voice, with Froyo you also get to Command your phone by voice!
Wapedia - a mobile port of wikipedia, very fast, very effective.
wifi analyser - so you can see what channels are in use locally. One for geeks

Now, in vague categories, and not including the built-in apps:

Often-used

ToggleWifi - turns Wifi on and off at one click of the widget.
Facebook. Hugely improved since the recent update, it's all the FaceBook you need.
Remember the Milk. The app version of my to-do list service, which also has a handy widget
Twidroyd PRO. My twitter client - works very nicely and worth paying for the PRO version
Vignette - if you have seen oddly blurry or tinted photos online lately, they may well have come from the iPhone app Hipstamatic. Vignette is the Android equivalent, but in my opinion makes nicer, slightly retro images. The UI isn't as flashy as Hipstamatic, but then it's quicker to change settings and take a picture in Vignette!
miniBus is a Cambridge-based bus app which uses real time bus information. It's getting bitrot sadly, still working, but the bus people must have changed their APIs, and now instead of bus stop names, I get numbers. Still, I can guess which I need and still figure out when the bus will turn up.
Ocado! Order your groceries from your phone. Easy to add items to your shopping basket. Actually a great experience for a fairly complex app, and kudos to Ocado for making it better than the web
Juice Defender. The paid for version which is brilliant for reducing power consumption. Just needs a little configuration.
K-9 Mail. For all my non-gmail email.
NewsRob - RSS reader which synchronises with Google Reader
PDANet - enables you to connect your laptop to the internet via 3G, using a cable or bluetooth. Cable mode still more useful than the (now with Froyo) built in wifi hotspot, as you can properly charge your phone at the same time.

Online tools

Taptu - fast mobile search, developed here in Cambridge
Say No to 0870. Because no one likes paying premium rates for calls if they don't have to.
Advanced Postbox Hunter. Not a game, but a way of helping the UK develop a database of where postboxes are. When I spot one, I enter it into the database using this app.
Bump. Essential business card swapping technology! You can even exchange info with those weird beasties, iPhones
Wapedia - a mobile port of wikipedia, very fast, very effective.
fIRC chat - not something I use much, but useful in case I ever need to leap into work discussions remotely
Fix My Street - building on the classic website from the lovely people at MySociety, I can now take a picture and grab the location of any offending pothole, and instantly tell the council about it. (Note: also works for non-potholes needing fixing!)

Offline tools

AK Notepad. Lets me write little notes.
barcode scanner. Reads lots of kinds of barcodes. Easy.
Clock, Desk Clock, FM Radio: Android or HTC apps.
Compass - because sometimes I have a map that isn't in my phone, and there's no sun
ConvertPad, for changing things between different units
Gmote - turning my phone into a remote control. Nice.
Voice Search - worth installing, because as well as letting you search by voice, with Froyo you also get to Command your phone by voice!
wifi analyser - so you can see what channels are in use locally. One for geeks
Voice recorder - record things and mail them to yourself.
Shazam - identify the audio you are listening to
Documents to Go: lets me read Office docs. Useful when you need it.
Beamreader, for those PDF moments
Google Sky - pretty! Tells you what stars you are looking at.
Google Goggles. Letting me identify things with a camera! Shiny.
Google Translate. In case you need to turn things from one language to another
GPS Speedo. For finding out how fast you are going. Sadly, only works where GPS works.
ShopSavvy - find the best online prices for whatever you've just scanned the barcode of
TunesRemote. Control things across the room with your phone!

Web2 stuff

qik - make short videos you can share online
Audioboo - make short audio recordings to share online
runkeeper - an app which lets you map and time and measure your speed as you run (ha!) or cycle or whatever. I've used it a couple of times to figure out how fast my commute cycle is (not fast)

Location stuff

London City Tube info. Does what it says.
(Another) London Cycle Hire - this one has a map of the bike parks.
Cycle Hire Widget. This is a new app for me, which theoretically points to the nearest bike hire rack in London. Not yet tested!
OpenTable, for finding restaurants near you
Panoramio - a sort of augmented reality view of local shops and so on
My Tracks - records where you have been for walks, or whatever. You can export them into google Earth and so on.
Navigation - turn by turn, how to get to where you're going
My Maps Editor - for when I want to correct the world of google!
Places
Places directory - google's index of local facilities.
Here I Am ('2 Pro'). Lets you easily share where you are with others, via email and so on.
Layar - a wacky augmented reality system which lets you add layers of information over what you are looking at, or a map. If you can find the layer you need, it's brilliant.
qype - yet another local directory app. (if I have enough of them, one will find me the shop or watering hole I need!)
tweeps around - a Layar addition, showing tweets in your local area. I don't use this much, but it's a fun way to see what other people are twittering about

Leisure

Aldiko Premium. This is my main e-book reader; lots of free content, and a good system for adjusting screen brightness whilst reading. You can buy books through Stanza (I think), with a bit of effort.
Draw! A basic drawing app, useful if you want to make marks on a screen
Kindle. Another ebook reader. Lots of purchasable books through Amazon, once you've figured out how to do this. Puts words on the screen. It's OK.
Listen - google's "podcatcher". What, you say? Podcatcher. A thing which lets you follow podcasts via their feeds. Would be useful if I ever got around to listening to things on my phone.

Games

Abduction! and Abduction World Attack - two superb games
Action Potato. I like this game less - just too hard for me! But it's a bit of fun.
Colossal Cave Adventure - retro text gaming!
Friction Mobile. A monochrome game, very simple, which I am very bad at.
scrambled net - a lovely, simple puzzle game where you connect servers to terminals with cables. Updates have made the graphics very pretty - the cables pulse with networky goodness.
robotfindskitten. Yet more retro gaming. Very Zen.

Things I don't really use:

Footprints. A weird HTC thing which looked fun but never really worked for me. Takes pictures and stamps them with time and location.
Friend Stream. Another HTC special, looks very useful, but I like my streams from twitter, facebook, email etc separated out, because they all have different purposes for me.
PDF Viewer - does what it says
peep - HTC's twitter client which I don't use at all
Meebo is an instant messaging thing which connects to all your different IM systems; I have it for emergencies. Google talk is often sufficient, the people I need to chat with urgently are almost always on google
Opera Mini - an alternative browser for when "Internet" won't do (I only use it occasionally)

Not hiding but seeking

2010-08-01T13:44:00.001+01:00

Another year, another Hide&Seek weekender! But this year was different, because Michael and I were organising a game, as well as playing.

Time*Trails was our first outing for Michael's new creation, PlaceWhisper (a DigitalFlapjack production - more info here), a mobile location-based app, which lets you leave and collect messages attached to specific places; like geocaching, only without the tupperware. Time*Trails uses an iPhone app to let users explore the South Bank area as it was in the 20th century, particularly during the Festival of Britain in 1951 - with the support of some terrific period maps. We had over 50 "whispers" with facts about South Bank history, so that players could learn about the places they visited as they would have been in the past. Also, we had three story trails, which let you follow in the footsteps of three people in 1951 as they explored the festival.

It was wonderful to get it out in the open at last, to see so many excited players, and to have an excuse for some very up to the minute tech support gadgetry...

During preparation time on Friday, in between folding Time*Trails maps, we got to take part in a dry run of Silent Relay, run by Berlin Invisible Playground. Wearing an earpiece to feed instructions from HQ, I ranged around the National Theatre, collecting items from drop boxes, exchanging codewords with contacts, and generally avoiding surveillance (ie suspicious looks). It was a surprisingly immersive experience, and even though we weren't able to use the live link to Berlin for the final stage of the game in this practice run, we were gripped to the end.

We'd've loved to have a chance to play Visible Cities on Friday night, but we were still setting up Time*Trails and practising our pitch. It was the big game of the weekend, with a huge crowd of players, and some unusually costumed people disappearing into the city to, well, do whatever they did. Michael took his brother Tristan to watch Super Political Street Fighter, (Contact, Manchester), and a great deal of applause and laughter ensued as policies were created, debated, and fought over with help from the audience.

Saturday was hot, and busy.

We had lots of players and interest in Time*Trails, and ended up talking with people pretty much non-stop.

Note our period table; our beautiful maps and historical reference book; and our original guide to the 1951 Festival of Britain - full of amusing advertisements (thanks to Sophie!)

Later in the day, we found our highest scoring players - Fruitbat - who collected almost all our Whispers. We were as pleased as they were at their success.

Michael found time to play Shabbat-Put! (from the PlayRites Collective), which involved teams of four trying to complete Olympic athletics challenges whilst obeying orthodox Jewish Shabbat rules, most of which involve not doing anything. He came back smiling, and surprisingly not sunburnt - it was really very hot, and very sunny, out on the field where they played. Reminded me of visiting the original Olympics site in Greece, actually, although with more animal skins and other games accessories...

I had a go at Explorers (Peter Law and Katy Beale). Playing the role of a fussy monarch, I was lead around the palace grounds by my putative explorer, who attempted to sell me the exciting things she could bring back if only I funded her voyage. This was made more interesting by my being blindfolded, so that I could better appreciate how small palatial items could be imagined into wondrous plunder from far off lands. I was particularly taken with the promise of castle-building robots, and a giant throne, which drew musicians to it by magic. I only hope she delivers - I paid her 4 gold coins in advance.

We also briefly played Walking Smiles, collecting smiles from people around London and texting in the locations and occasions of each. Their map of pins was a sight to behold as the South Bank became peppered with recorded smiles.

Briefly, we tried in vain to translate the multiligual poem of the London Poetry Game, but I could only really manage the French - we were hopeless at finding people to help with the other languages.

Then it was Saturday night, and time to head off to the ICA, to find new friends by matching flags (I had the unlikely but impressive Boat flag, above, from Saint-Pierre et Miquelon) and shout and giggle through the Ping Pong Quiz. Michael's hat played a starring role, helping (briefly) maintain Alex's dignity during the strip pong round. (Luckily, I have no photos from that round, but here's one of Blind Pong, with the players masked!)

On Sunday, things were quieter all round, and we were able to squeeze in some more playing.

We both played Sangre y Patatas (from Coney), and Babel (by Midnight Beast). Sangre was a quick and low tech game, an experiment with using only sound to create a game experience in which all the players have their eyes closed. It was surprisingly compelling, as players moved around in shared darkness, hoping to avoid the monster who moved amongst them, and dying loudly and dramatically when they failed. Babel pitted three teams against each other as they tried to hide, collect and re-hide their team totem, and to steal the other teams's totems - whilst unable to speak or write, except for the single word babel. Our game was a little chaotic - I'm not sure we all entirely grasped the rules - but everyone was happy.

We watched from afar the ribbons and feathers and paper of Pass the Impossibly Large Parcel, and admired the balloons and crazy headgear that filled the South Bank afterwards. We wound down with a sedate run of International Golf Proxy, as more players were needed, and I'd been assured no golf was involved. Simon Katan ably scored the game.

In the peace of Sunday afternoon, Michael had a go with the sonar gear from The Bloop (which had run out of tickets before we could get some, alas; it sounded excellent, with whales chasing krill and navigating solely via sonar).

It was a long weekend, but a good one - even though we were running a game (and in fact our first game ever) - we managed to play some things too, and not to collapse despite the heat.

It was a great start for Michael with PlaceWhisper - today, the UK App Store and a bunch of players in London and beyond, tomorrow, the world! He'd put a huge amount of effort into ensuring the technology and the game went smoothly, and they did. A well-deserved success.

High praise to the Hide&Seek team and all the other volunteer organisers, too, for another brilliant weekender!

Death 2.0: the future of succession law in a digital age

2010-06-02T11:50:00.001+01:00

Another Tuesday, another Arcadia Seminar!

This week we heard from Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law at Sheffield, on Death 2.0: What Becomes of Digital Assets after Death. I won't attempt to summarise - there is a great precis from Daithí Mac Síthigh here. Professor Edwards went beyond questions of how to provide your heirs with the ability to access your encrypted data (usefully discussed by Cory Doctorow here) and into the tricky area of digital assets and reputation.

The talk covered questions of archiving and access (for the public good and for financial gain, as well as for sentimental reasons), issues of privacy, and of course the tricky legal situation, where the third party of an internet platform probably has some control. Terms and conditions of web services vary in the ways they handle the death of a user - if they do at all - as well as the jurisdictions where they might operate. Facebook, for all the fuss around privacy and control of data, is one of the few online services which has a form where you can register a death - although this is far from comprehensive or clear.

Surely the best way to handle dilemmas of privacy (should your online social network profile be deleted, be kept, be shared with family who may not have seen it while you lived, or archived for future use by others) would be through individual statements of their wishes; but whether these can be recorded simply, and acted upon legally, is another matter. It is usually a breach of online terms and conditions to allow someone else access to your account, but that seems the only option in many cases today. It may be appealing for the technocracy to talk of abandoning Facebook and moving to Diaspora, but until such services which empower people to truly control their own data are genuinely accessible, usable and mainstream, this is utterly unrealistic for most internet users. (Note that I am very much in favour of novel systems which enable users to encrypt their data, share it out between trusted parties/places, and make it possible for "normal" users to control their own data rather than sell it to the cloud in exchange for adverts and datamining rights. However, I am aware of the huge challenges of creating such a thing with the capabilities necessary to go mainstream; as well as the difficulty of selling such a thing to a population weaned on free online email, free social networking, free video and photo sharing, and so on. The benefits of control and security are hard to market when there is so little understanding of risk...)

Personal data is one thing; information of value to your business or employer is another. Could your organisation keep running if one of your staff went under the proverbial bus? Perhaps you can get access to their corporate email; but what about information they may have stored in third party services in the cloud, or online accounts for critical services such as payment or sales systems? This is a particular concern for small companies (or one man bands) where heirs might hope to carry on the business, or at least sell or pass on reputational value.

The main things which struck me about the seminar were the gaps. I've only occasionally pondered these issues, and I'd assumed that if I made the time to dig around, I would find information, guidance, examples. But it seems that there simply isn't anything out there - very few services (and those that exist offering partial support, and in some jurisdictions only), very little information, no guidance. What would you do if you had to handle the online affairs of a deceased relative? Can you (have you?) set out your own wishes, and enable your executors to enact them, legally? Who knows! Things have not moved on since 2004 when Dave Birch wrote about this in the Guardian; and in internet time, that's a geological age.

Although I enjoyed Professor Edwards's lively talk, I was left somewhat frustrated that a decade into the 21st century, when silver surfers are not some tiny emerging population, there is still so little in this field. We cannot argue that internet users are all too young to worry about mortality. Apparently there is no precedent for how digital assets might be handled under a power of attorney, either, which seems a notable omission.

I think it's time we started to address this area, to secure appropriate archiving and control of our data for the future, whether that is to enable descendants to look at our family photos, or the researchers of tomorrow to explore more than just the Twitter archive in the Library of Congress as they investigate the lives of the past. And we should make it possible for people today to plan ahead and express their wishes easily, and for their executors to act upon them, in the digital world where so much of our lives are lived, as well as outside it. Perhaps it is time for a celebrity-endorsed campaign for clarity and basic online guidance, even if it will take years to establish practice around digital assets with substantial financial value.

In the meantime, the best advice, it seems, is to write all your usernames and passwords down with a note of what you would like to happen to your digital assets, and leave them with your will, ideally in a solicitor's secure document store - and leave your executors and heirs to deal with any legal entanglements that might ensue.

Playfulness everywhere

2010-05-14T14:41:00.002+01:00

This week, the Playmakers film launched on the web.

It's a combination of the story of the design and evolution of the Playmakers game, as coaxed into existence by Alex Fleetwood and Holly Gramazio from Hide&Seek, and a compelling overview of what pervasive gaming is all about. The film includes wonderful people such as Howard Rheingold and Michael Wesch, and brings in elements of theatre, public spaces, playfulness in everyday life and specific games, as well as the edginess where pervasive gaming tilts towards street protest. There's also a little discussion of conventional computer games, compared with "no technology" games and technology-assisted pervasive gaming.

The documentary is worth watching, whether you are already interested in gaming, or interested in learning more about an exciting emerging field.

Playmakers from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

All this leads up to the final launch of Playmakers the game, which Michael and I were lucky enough to catch at the Hide&Seek weekender on the South Bank last summer. If you look closely enough, you can see both of us in the game footage, wearing yellow ties and running around madly; there's even a good shot of Michael being attacked by aliens just behind an ice cream van. As the film says, pervasive gaming should give you experiences you would never have had otherwise, and which you will remember for a long time. Playmakers was an excellent example of this - really unforgettable, challenging and funny and enjoyable - and all the running was superb exercise...

There's another Hide&Seek weekend coming up soon - July 9-11th at the National Theatre. See you there?

hot rock

2010-05-09T18:18:00.004+01:00

We cooked lunch on my lovely new Rondue, which is rather like the hot rock cooking we first enjoyed in a restaurant in Wales. Thanks to Michael for the Rondue, and my parents for the new camera which took the picture!

Ada Lovelace Day 2010

2010-03-24T21:38:00.004Z

It's Ada Lovelace day today, and just like last year, I am pondering whom to blog about.

On the CARET blog, today we've featured our wonderful technical women, and I'm proud that without any positive discrimination our small department has managed to hire so many.

If you've been wondering why we celebrate Ada Lovelace, there is history on the Finding Ada site. But in recent weeks I have been reading the wonderful stories of Sydney Padua, who is crafting splendid comics from the real history of Lovelace and Babbage, and giving them exciting lives in a parallel universe where they succeeded in realising their early potential. Their true histories shine through, though, in scholarly footnotes, from Babbage's real anecdote about cheese to economic commentary.

So, which woman working with technology will I blog about this Ada Lovelace day?

I shall go off the beaten track, here, and nominate my mother. (Hi Mum!) Mum is not only on FaceBook, twittering, emailing and surfing the web, but has been running a website for many years, and also maintaining a charitable society's membership database in Microsoft Access, a technology beyond many of my deeply technical friends - not to mention me. We have finally migrated the database to OpenOffice now, but the ability to create queries and maintain data in this form is a non-trivial technical skill, of which she should be proud. I certainly am!

In memoriam

2010-03-13T20:46:00.001Z

Yesterday was my friend Robert Priddey's funeral. He was only 34, and his sudden death in hospital was a huge shock.

Funeral services are always hard, and for someone who has died with so much unrealised potential even more so. Robert's family had done an incredible job during the worst of times to pull together a lovely service, punctuated with Robert's own poetry and music compositions, as well as moving tributes. It was particularly special to hear more of his music, including the startlingly beautiful Tinnitus Siderium, the pianola track produced by converting the layout of stars of the night sky directly into a score, and the only composition of his I had heard before. There were many periods of silence, as even when filtering in and out of the crematorium, it seemed like the crowd had no words to fill the gaps. And it was a crowd - every seat was taken - and rightfully so, as even a hall packed with weeping women could not have done justice to Robert's wonderful modesty, creativity, wit and friendliness.

The crematorium at Knebworth was a fairly uninspiring brick construction, but had natural light and a tall window with views of rolling fields and sky, and I was pleased by the location, which was quite pleasant, on a slight hilltop amidst the countryside, with a large garden of saplings and flowers. The day seemed to mimic the mood, mostly grimly overcast with occasional violent dark rainstorms, and moments when the sun broke through dazzlingly.

It is difficult to craft a tribute to Robert, without sounding as if I am just using the truisms almost invariably rolled out at funerals, because they really do apply to him. He was genuinely incredibly nice, in the best possible way, open and friendly, and unbelievably modest and unassuming despite brilliant accomplishments and talent - a rarity in academia. Robert was a cosmologist, musician and film-maker, a real polymath, and able to cross domains in a way which should be the envy of the rest of our NESTA Crucible cohort.

Robert was the first one of my friends around my age to die. I will remember him whenever I look at the night sky.

This blog is moving...

2010-03-13T08:18:00.003Z

This blog is now located at http://blog.lbj.org.uk because Blogger is turning off SFTP support, sigh.

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All the Android apps I have

2010-01-08T18:21:00.002Z

Last autumn, I made several rash promises to friends who were considering buying an Android phone, that I would at some point blog the list of applications I had on my HTC (slogan: "quietly brilliant") Magic, and what they were good for. I procrastinated sufficiently that this eventually became a Christmas holiday task, and then my phone decided on Christmas Day that it no longer wished to turn on, causing me to spend nearly 3 weeks without it, and also necessitating a complete reinstall of all my apps.

Luckily, my phone did have a rough idea of things I had downloaded before (thank goodness) so reinstalling was not as painful as I had anticipated. Nonetheless, I am now writing that blog post... If you are not interested in Android, you should stop reading here, as it is about to get boring.

The HTC Magic has three "home screens", where shortcuts and so on live. On one, I have useful things I often need (email, calendar, weather, RSS feeds). On the main first screen, I have things I need to access instantly - turning the phone onto silent/vibrate, camera, messaging, contacts and maps, and folders (of which more later). On the final screen, I have frivolity - facebook, ebooks, games. I've found apps through searching the Android Market with intent, browsing "featured" Market apps, the odd Lifehacker post, and occasionally a recommendation from a friend. I have made very little concerted effort to find good things, so imagine that I am using far less than the full capabilities of the phone; on the other hand, I am impatient and fussy, and avoid or reject apps that insist I set up new web accounts with a lot of information in them to make them useful (I'm thinking of you, FlyScreen!). So this list may be of no use to others; but will hopefully be of value to me, if I have to restore everything again...

So, my useful things screen has:

Starred bus stops, a widget which is the fastest way to access MiniBus, a wonderful little app from the DTG at the Computer Lab, which lets me see real time bus information for Cambridgeshire
Android marketplace (for finding new applications or upgrading the ones I have)
Settings (which I don't actually use much, now)
NewsRob, the best RSS reader I've found, which synchronises with my Google Reader account perfectly. It's a lot more usable than using Google Reader directly in the browser
Browser (for when I have a URL I want to look at, or fast access to some sites through bookmarks)
Google Mail for my personal email
K-9 Mail for my work IMAP email
BBC News shortcut, which takes me straight to the "low graphics" news
BBC Cambridgeshire Weather shortcut
Google Calendar widget, showing the next event across my various calendars, and giving me quick access to the full Agenda mode (a nice view for checking what is coming up!)

On my rapid access first home screen:

Camera - letting me take photos very quickly
Toggle WiFi, so I can save power if I need my phone to last a long time through heavy use. This widget also shows me whether or not I'm on a wifi network in the status bar
Ringer Toggle Widget, enabling me to move from ring to vibrate to silent with single clicks
PdaNet. For the cost of an expensive (~£18) one-off payment, I can use my phone to get my laptop online via 3G with just a click at each end - very convenient and worth the money
Messaging. The built-in app for text and multimedia messaging. Straight in to my Inbox or to compose a new message
Contacts. This one is really only here to enable me to get quickly to my favourite ("starred") contacts if I want to phone them, or to get to a regular numeric dial if I'm calling someone new. I don't use this much, because I don't call people much!
Twidroid Pro. Still the best Twitter app I've found, copes with my multiple accounts and set up to give me neat notifications of replies and direct messages.
Maps - because when I need to figure out where I am or how to get where I'm going, I want to launch this straight away, so it must be on the first home screen
Folders, which I've only recently taken to: for tools, web-based tools, and search. I can click a folder, and see another screen full of shortcuts to more applications.

Tools is full of little utilities I like having to hand.

Alarm Clock
Calculator
AK notepad - a basic notepad with separate notes. Quick to add/check notes.
Barcode Scanner. I can take a photo of a barcode, and instantly find out all about the product online. Worked nicely for the few things I've tried it on, including QR codes.
StopTimer, which has one initially confusing UI flaw, but otherwise is a great app as a stopwatch or countdown timer
ShopSavvy. Another barcode reader, this one tells you how cheaply (or otherwise) you could purchase the product online
Compass (only for when it's cloudy!)
Gmote, a remote control app for my laptop - not used this in anger yet, as all my recent talks have been without visual aids
GPS Speedo (who doesn't want to know how fast they are going?)
My Tracks. This is Google's own app for tracking where you've been, on foot or otherwise. I don't use this much, but it's fun for random walks and mazes
Voice Recorder. A lovely straightforward app, although I've been bemused (foolishly) to find it doesn't work so well for noises which aren't voice. Easy to forget that phone mics are designed for the narrowband of human voice, not beeps :)
Unit Converter. This has small, non-intrusive ads - unusual, as most of the apps I have are not ad supported, but generally seem more likely to be free than the equivalent iPhone apps, based on experience with Michael's phone on the App Store.
Draw! A really simple thing which lets me draw shapes on the screen and save them for later.

Web based apps are slightly more obscure, but fit here within my personal categorisation system. There would probably be lots more of these, but I am lazy and actually use surprisingly few Web2.0 services (although I have accounts on more than I use, and am aware of more again).

MiniBus - this time the full app, not just the widget
Say no to 0870, for those moments when I do need to use my phone as a phone!
Advanced Postbox Hunter. A little app which lets me record postboxes I find, so that the world can have a free database of postbox locations
AudioBoo, which I've never used, but vaguely think I'd like for some situation I've not encountered yet
Bump. This is a little app, also available for iPhone, which lets you exchange contact information - a business card, essentially - with someone else's phone, by physically bumping the phones together.
Fix My Street. An essential app from the lovely folk over at MySociety, which lets me report potholes and other issues to the local council or other responsible body, with a note of location and a photograph
Google Sky Map. A truly wonderous thing, which means I can point my phone at the sky, and see what stars I am looking at. One of the big advantages of the Magic over the original 3G iPhone (which had no compass, and so couldn't manage this real augmented reality. The 3GS does have this though).
Here I Am, which is a nifty thing converting one's location into something which other people can use
London Tube Status
Qik - see AudioBoo

Search is an interesting category. On my home screen I also have a box where I can type in a search term, or I can click a button and then talk into Voice Search, but these days there are many specialist applications which bear on search too. So, in this folder:

Google Goggles. A very strange app which tries to figure out what you are looking at, by visuals of logos, landmarks etc. It sometimes works; perhaps I see too many obscure things.
Shazam. Listens to music and then tells you what it is (artist, title etc).
Taptu, a mobile search engine. Downloaded because a friend works there
Wapedia - from Taptu. Mobile wikipedia content. Quick and simple.
Layar is another augmented reality thing, for which you can create layers of content about different, erm, realities, such as local tourist information or whatever. The user-generated content aspect should make this interesting, but in practice, I've not yet encountered a dataset I've wanted to see.
OpenTable for restautrant bookings. Not used.
Places Directory is Google's own "yellow pages on a map". Works OK. I usually use it in combination with:
Qype - another location-based directory service. Have found at least one stunning restaurant using it. Should try to evaluate it harder against Places, next time.
Panoramio finds photographs taken near you. Seems OK but I suspect it could use a larger dataset of photographs, as I don't think it pulls in Flickr for example, so it's of limited use.

In my final screen, I have used up half the available space with a FaceBook widget, so I can always see what everyone has been up to. I can browse status updates from my friends in the widget, update my own status, or whiz straight into the full FaceBook application.

Gallery. This is a slightly different view of my photo "reel" than available through the Camera application. (Aside: why do we still use the term reel?)
eReader. My first ebook application, and very nice, with the ability to buy online through a webstore, as well as downloading project Gutenberg titles for free
Aldiko Premium. A second eBook application, bought when eReader seemed briefly to be unable to sell me new books. This one has a beautiful user interface, and a fair selection of books, which I can buy in the app.
FaceBook PhoneBook widget. Never used this, but it seemed a nice idea and it's functionality I can only get through a widget - a list of FaceBook friends, with their photos, and I can click them to call them on their FaceBook phone numbers. This is probably useful for my friends who update FaceBook but whose moves from job to job and country to country pass me by
A shortcut to the FaceBook mobile site, which has a very different set of functionality to the FaceBook application
And my Games folder...

What games do I have? Since getting the Magic, I've been most impressed with Abduction!, a delightfully silly casual game, involving bouncing a variety of animals up to a flying saucer at the top of the screen. At the time, nothing comparable was available for iPhone; you can now get a game where you navigate platforms with a little green alien instead, but the gameplay is much weaker. Abduction! remains the top Android game for me.

I have the paid version, Abduction! World Attack.
ActionPotato because I liked the name. It's a simple casual game and probably too hard for me
Colossal Cave. You can't beat a traditional text adventure for casual gaming on the move :) although the need to hand-draw maps is starting to be pressing, and I've hardly made any progress yet.
Flight Director is a clone of the startlingly popular Flight Control on iPhone. I have friends who seem to play Flight Control together whenever they meet. Director uses real airports, and I am hopeless at it. Don't recruit me into air traffic control.
Frozen Bubble
Friction Mobile is a very simple monochrome game. Wouldn't stand extended play but fun to fiddle with.
Space Physics, which sounded great but I've not played yet. If it's anything like the various physics puzzle games I have installed on Michael's iPhone, it will be too hard for me (at least, for me in the state I usually am when I resort to phone games).
robotfindskitten - purely for the nostalgia of playing this on my very first computer, after I'd installed linux on it, in 1997.
Scrambled Net. A relaxed, untimed puzzle game where you aim to connect servers to terminals via cables.

My need for games on my phone is mostly for time on buses or trains, especially when there isn't an internet connection; games dependent on the accelerometer for control (I'm thinking of Abduction! here) are not good when your transport lurches around corners. More puzzlers which do not require lightning reflexes or fine motor control, and which follow some logic, would be superb.

Of course, I also have apps which do not appear on my home screens. Some of these are things I've downloaded, found less than useful, and abandoned, but many are simply applications which I don't need to open directly.

Beam Reader lets me open PDFs
Documents To Go opens word files and, I think, Excel
fIRC chat, in case I ever need to leap into technical conversations with colleagues whilst on the move (so far, never, probably to the relief of our operations staff)
Flickr Droid. I use this indirectly from Camera to upload images to Flickr, at least in theory; in practice, I take few pictures, and tend to dump them into twitter these days.
FX Camera makes funny pictures
Google Talk. I thought I'd use this a lot, but in fact I've barely used it at all. I guess I tend to be at a computer when I want to talk with people.
Last.fm, for when I need music on the move without my iPod (so far, rarely)
Learn! - another DTG app, downloaded mostly because I met the developers, although visual flashcards for language learning are neat too
Listen. I gather this is what in the argot is termed a podcatcher. As I have not once used it, I can clearly survive without pods.
Locale. A fancy tool to enable your phone to set itself up appropriately, depending on where you are (WiFi on when you are at home, low ringer volume for the office, etc). Not used.
Meebo IM would be a wonderful supplement to GoogleTalk, bringing my other instant messaging networks online, if I was ever struck with the wish to MSN with folk away from a computer.
Meridian, which plays various formats of media file
Metal Detector, which actually works better than one might expect, but is in no way a serious or useful application
Mother TED, downloaded in the hope that one day I'll have free time on the move to watch lots of lovely TED talks
My Maps Editor
Nimbuzz. This was recommended somewhere as an alternative to Meebo, and has received less use (mostly because it requires an account to be set up, and I'm very lazy).
Trimble Outdoors. A GPS app, bought because I've visited Trimble and their engineers were very friendly.
Tunes Remote lets me control iTunes around the house from where ever I am
YouTube

And that's it. Phew!

Leading talented creatives

2009-11-01T15:29:00.001Z

At Playful09 on Friday, Kareem Ettouney, Art Director at Media Molecule, spoke eloquently on the challenges of leading creative teams - and becoming a servant, rather than the head honcho. The difference between a small team who know each other well and where you can each do everything, and a larger team, where you are hiring in new specialist talent, is huge. Kareem emphasised that people will always moan about their work; and when you become the person in charge, or start a new business, you intend to create an environment where people don't feel the need to gripe. But that is an impossible dream; and when you become a leader, you see the big picture in a way you didn't before, and you see how the apparently easy changes which would improve things often aren't as simple as they initially appeared. All you can do is minimise those moans, and hope to get great designs out of the world class people you've hired (more than the 2% Kareem quoted as a common level of output for insufficiently fulfilled elite skill creatives). You can't let these brilliant people each do their own thing, because you'll get an incoherent whole; and you can't run with the traditional hierarchical model, like movies (with an art director at the top, and specialists working in a tree structure further down, and doing what they are told). This (probably) won't work because you've got people with broader talents than just one area, the work doesn't divide neatly into areas anyway, and they are not going to respect the person at the top unless they are an acknowledged god in the field. So, you need to give your creatives ownership of specific areas of work, and also share enough of the big picture "pragmatics" that they can understand the impact of their work on the whole project. Ownership needs to include responsibility, and answerability - if they screw up, they will have to answer to the entire team.

This is all a genuine challenge for someone who has previously worked on some specialist area themselves, and who now finds themselves trying to manage a team of highly skilled creatives towards an overall product vision (which is created through the team and their work together). Kareem insightfully identifies this as being the phase of one's career where you stop spending time at your own desk, and start spending all your time at other people's. When you are hanging out with these other people, you should avoid giving "input" or just reviewing their work. You should be sharing the journey with them, seeing the problems and figuring parts of them out together, bouncing ideas off each other, and connecting them to others.

This is all well and good, and reassuringly chimes with my current managerial style, but still we have an open question: where is the cake? What is the reward for talented creatives in this model, where they are not imposing their vision on the overall product? You have to clearly identify success in a final great product as coming from each of them, but also, make sure everyone has their own personal projects too. If they work solely on team projects, and work well with others, there is a risk that creatives will become precious about their own input. An interesting idea, and one I'll reflect on some more.

Playful

2009-10-31T15:37:00.009Z

Friday was Playful09, a day of talks about play, games and related subjects. The tagline was "a day of cross disciplinary frolicking" which sounded fun, whilst leaving me without much idea of what to expect. It turned out to be around 16 talks, of the "no audience questions" format which allows good content to be packed in, in the relaxing setting of Conway Hall. The audience was almost all white, mostly 25-40 I would say, and at least 2/3 male, which was a worse proportion than I might have anticipated, for an event with a strong design/art/play theme. There were 4 female speakers out of 17. And there were balloons.

Kareem Ettouney spoke about leading creative teams, and I have blogged this separately - it was one of the best talks of the day.

Roo Reynolds spoke about the difficulty of converting games into films - and the comparative ease of the opposite path. It's all about storylines, and one's ability to dream about playing another character: to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, and in a movie-of-a-game the character does their own thing, without the viewer necessarily feeling a part of it. The highlight was the Minesweeper movie trailer which reminds me of stolen moments procrastinating, many years ago.

Daniel Soltis from Tinker.it talked about hardware and the delight of physical objects connected to games - unsurprisingly for a Tinker.it hacker - and the areas he thinks games will go next, and be most interesting. These will be games with a social aspect - the best games always are - and ideally those without a screen/keyboard interface. Daniel pointed out the absurdity of urban games, where players walk along streets peering at their iPhone screens. Spaces are also important - games that are about spaces, or distributed across large areas (or the world). Asynchronous gaming is intriguing too, the idea that one might dip in and out of a game, and interact with others playing at other times. Games which can accommodate a changing pool of players are a particular challenge to create, but very interesting if you can make it work. Finally, Daniel showed the GPS puzzle box (which has been doing the rounds online this month), which beautifully illustrates several of his points.

Matt Locke interviewed Robin Burkinshaw, a student at ARU whose experiment with homeless characters in Sims3, Alice and Kev, has become an unexpected forum for discussion around homelessness and support. Robin's skill at in-game camerawork, and his beautiful storytelling on the Alice and Kev blog, stood out at least as much as the ability of the game to simulate a situation surely not anticipated by the game's creators.

Tassos Stevens, from Coney, spoke about cricket. Whilst this may not have been a subject the audience felt much connection to, Tassos's identification of key elements within the cricket-watching experience which engage the observer was compelling. A key part in cricket is not the game itself, but the pauses which punctuate the game - a great deal of the enjoyment Tassos derives from a match is the commentary and activity during those pauses, such as debate around cake at tea time. The imagined outcomes of the match, combined with the uncertainty around the result, can leave the audience in suspense not just for hours but for days, and also add to a playful atmosphere - alongside the tribal team aspect, and the general ambiance. Tassos's points clearly translate to other game spheres, and resonated with me strongly, especially as Michael and I played (and I won!) the QNTMFSLC game at the Hide&Seek weekender earlier this year. QNTMFSLC was a game which fitted around other activities, was uncertain, had a sense of tribe and ambiance, and engaged one's imagination, and was one of the best experiences of the weekend.

Molly Range (from Fabel) shared a Scandinavian view of the world, and how playful experiences are increasingly being used in a variety of spheres there, from campaigning to education. She had a wide range of examples to share, but pointed out the huge challenge around wider engagement. These individual projects are successful in their way, but each is created from scratch, and this simply isn't sustainable. Molly identifies a need for standardised ways to prove the value of play in these areas, so that proper investment can be made.

Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu seemed astonished to have won an Olympics-linked art grant for London in 2012. They will be installing monochrome LED panels on top of 40 London bus stops, where they will be visible from double deckers. The panels will have some kind of public API so that artists and others can use them for internet-connected display. Technically, this seems fine, but I imagine issues around selection of content for the displays, and moderation, will be exceedingly tricky. Nonetheless, they have several years to figure it out, and are just starting a long planning phase for the Bus-Tops project now.

Simon Oliver highlighted a couple of challenges of game design which might be particularly useful for indie developers. Firstly, how do you design fun? Probably not using a top-down methodology... He recommends lots of rapid prototyping, and using this to find out what gems emerge. You don't need everything to be incredibly fun, but a handful of great interactions will be enough to engage a player. Another challenge is interfaces and controls - in conventional computer gaming, these started simple (a stick with 4 directions, and a button) and got more and more complex (eg. Playstation3 or XBox360 controllers), but may now be getting simpler again (with WiiMotes and Project Natal). Human short term memory will hold only 5-9 items, so your control system needs to have no more than this number of aspects for people to be able to get to grips with it. If the first page of a game manual contains 30 or so different controls ("Button B + Left Top Trigger: second alternate melee weapon") then you have probably gone wrong. He recommended three things for new developers: box2d, Bullet Physics and Ogre Forums. Don't reinvent the wheel - there are lots of useful toolkits out there, and people ready to help; the indie community has the right blend of collaborative competition.

Tim Wright spent the summer walking the walk of the protagonist of Kidnapped (by Robert Louis Stevenson, but of course you knew that already). He followed the route and timings of the original book, and video-blogged the whole thing: Kidmapped. I was pleased to be able to identify many of the "maps from novels" shown during Tim's book, including Riddle of the Sands, which clearly defeated most of the audience (unlike Lord of the Rings) - this probably tells you everything you need to know about the Playful demographic.

To wrap up, Chris O'Shea presented a wide range of conceptual and art projects which have brought playfulness into the lives of people, in many cases those who would not venture into an art gallery. I was sorry to have missed the Hand From Above when it was live in Liverpool in September. His work with people-tracking and responsive clusters of objects was particularly compelling (Audience being a beautiful example of this).

Although the event overall was entertaining and a welcome creative break, it wasn't as energetic as I might have hoped, and the audience wasn't very lively. In the afternoon teabreak, it was suggested that the audience might run around the block; instead we walked around Red Lion Square (taking Robin Burkinshaw with us, possibly because he was simply too polite to refuse), and we were the only ones to move at all. Some games in the background or in the breaks would have gone down well.

Relaxing at home yesterday, in a mildly playful way:

To thine own self be true (as Conway Hall has over the stage).

waving not drowning

2009-10-06T11:24:00.002+01:00

Definitely not drowning, in fact, as the number of my friends on Google Wave is still exceptionally small. The invitations seem to take many days to get through...

The original fuss about Wave was around the merging of email and instant messaging. Personally, now I'm actually using it a little, all this seems to give me is a confusing, messy interface. The key elements I think may make this a really interesting system are open federation - the ability to run your own server and keep your data out of the Google monolith - and bots, which are already appearing, and offer a wide range of functions.

A recent workshop with senior academics at the University highlighted email administration as a key challenge, with a "virtual PA" being the ultimate technology advance sought ("as smart as someone with a PhD in my field"), and I can imagine Wave, with a range of quality bots to deliver filtering, automatic responses and so on, delivering part of this quite soon.

In the meantime, back to waving by myself...

(Energy) Horizons

2009-10-04T16:21:00.004+01:00

On Thursday I took advantage of one of the perks of working for the University of Cambridge: a free place at one of the regular Horizon conferences. This one was about Energy and Environment, and provided a nice overview of some of the issues, whilst of course beautifully showcasing the best academics in the field.

Professor Dame Ann Dowling kicked things off, as newly appointed head of the Department of Engineering. She presented the work of the Energy Efficient Cities programme, taking a holistic look at the connected areas of buildings, transport and energy. In cities, it's all about tradeoffs (even just in the engineering space - once you pull in the socio-economic factors too, it's worse again). Low density buildings mean you can use natural convection, vegetation for shade, distributed power and so on; but they may increase the demand for heating and transport. There is a need to consider local air quality, as well as climate change effects, and the layouts and green spaces within cities are critical. The programme hopes to answer questions such as "is telecommuting good for climate stability - or not?" with better understanding of the tradeoffs, and city planning requirements.

She reckons that most new build will take 40 years (of energy savings compared to an equivalently functional existing building) to compensate for the energy used in construction. This, and the existing city structures we have, point to the need to look at retrofit as well as new build technologies.

Key research around transport for cities, in descending order of importance, is to do with smaller, downsized vehicles (this being much more important than lighter weight materials, although they play their part, coming next in line), real time information about traffic and vehicle systems, fuel systems, and integrated power supplies.

In energy, the programme is looking at combined heat and power, fluidised bed gasifiers, fuel cells, wind, and district-level solar electricity. Buildings research is all about sensors and smart systems, surface treatments, heat and ventilation flow engineering, phase change materials, heat pumps, LEDs (I assume for lighting), and photovoltaic roofs.

Julian Allwood was up next with a lively and energetic talk. He shared his energy 'map' - showing where energy comes from, how it is converted, and where it goes - and illustrated how many commentators muddy the waters with double-counting of "energies" (McKinsey being singled out as repeat offenders in this regard). The map is illustrative and helpful, especially as one starts to consider a predicted doubling of demand by 2050; but, as some of the audience noted, the map's disregard of efficiency and conversion losses could lead to some confusion. With 90% of energy lost in the fuel-to-device conversion (where fuel energy becomes heat, motion, or other forms), this is a substantial missing factor.

When discussing where efficiency savings might be made, Julian identified heated spaces, and road transport, as being key areas with great room for improvement, whereas trains and planes are already close to their optimum efficiencies. Two major challenges will be how to make super lightweight vehicles safe, when some people will still be driving round in Chelsea tractors, and how to retrofit homes with better heating/insulation in a feasible way.

(At this point, Julian spoilt his otherwise excellent talk with an aside, that he couldn't comment on practical matters, as he "works in a university for a reason", which offended me unreasonably, particularly when he was discussing practical matters, and so were the other academic speakers).

Steel and cement production volumes are unbelievably huge at present, having risen through the Asian construction boom since 2000. The world produces over 2000 megatons of cement, and over 1000Mt of steel, each year. This consumes - unsurprisingly - a great deal of energy. It is interesting to note that if demand for steel doubles by 2050, and if everyone puts in place every energy efficiency measure as regards steel production and reuse that we know of, we can keep the CO2 emissions related to steel the same as they are today. But this is extremely unlikely to happen. We need, said Julian, to find strategies for living with less primary material production.

An aside here revealed that UK (or Western?) clothing purchases per year increased threefold from 2000 to 2005! Also, since Lotus7 gets great performance and works at 500kg, a 300kg car should be feasible, although its 0-60 time might be less impressive.

Julian has a couple of mildly eccentric sounding projects underway. One looks at how we might make photocopiers which could erase already-printed paper for reuse (since people often are not printing for long term storage, but to read, and then the paper can be reused in the office). Another involves primary school children using their own physical efforts to recycle drinks cans into a bicycle frame (aluminium cold bonding, for the engineers out there). Splendid stuff, and he's also bought a URL where you can find out more: wellmet2050.com.

The next speaker was Glenn Vinnicombe, who I can remember lecturing my undergraduate course many years ago. He talked about feedback networks, particularly as they relate to the smart grids which will be needed to manage more complex and distributed power consumption. Glenn asks the question: do we need big, complex models to understand these systems? Or, can we predict global properties from local interaction characteristics? Luckily, the answer seems to be yes, and there are even design rules which can be applied to make sure a smart grid works well.

The world of smart grids (technically graphs, not networks) was illustrated with a Lego Mindstorms Segway, which can be built using entirely linear maths. Apparently Glenn uses this in his control theory lectures - an innovation which must be much appreciated by today's undergraduates. It was hard going on the blackboard and OHP only in my day.

The final speaker of the morning was from Cambridge IP, and began by asking what role universities should play in low CO2 energy innovations. Unfortunately, the talk did not answer this. We learnt a little about the current IP landscape around renewable technology - over 80% of patents in some renewable areas are owned by big corporates - but were left unsure whether this was a good or bad thing, and whether it signifies much in any case. A few suggestions for innovation in IP itself - such as the creation of publicly-backed IP pools - were made, but overall there was no strong conclusion. There is a report from Chatham House about this, which I have not yet been inspired to read.

After lunch, we were plunged into three talks from excellent speakers, all of which unfortunately rapidly descended into technical depths beyond me, and I suspect beyond most of the audience. Professor Neil Greenham spoke about printable solar cells, Prof Chris Howe (a Corpuscle, like myself) about the potential of algae as a renewable energy source, and a slightly jetlagged Prof Clare Grey about battery technologies. All three were accomplished speakers, but it was mildly interesting to note that the style of presentation favoured in Web circles (of a single photo/image on each slides, and no bullet points) does not dominate in these scientific fields, where to my mind somewhat dated "busy" slides, with primary coloured graphics, mixed fonts, and jumbled photomontages are still the stock format. I can imagine that it is easier to reuse one's existing tricky molecule images, even if they look old-fashioned, but I was surprised that the overall slide layouts stuck with a somewhat confusing and bemusing format.

After a much-needed tea break, we were back to the bigger picture, with Professor David MacKay reprising his Without The Hot Air talk (yet again - at least he had the grace to apologise, as many of the audience must have heard this at least once before). Newly appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, David apologised that he could no longer talk about politically contentious issues, but of course, that's OK, as energy policy isn't contentious at all... He did mention that the installation of some energy systems available today, such as domestic heat pumps, is likely to be supported by DECC in future - these do not attract any incentives today.

David's main point was that almost all countries are moving up a scale of population density multiplied by energy needs per person. The varying positions of different countries suggests we could import solar and biofuel power from other nations. On a UK scale, David's speciality, we saw one energy plan "that adds up" which draws energy from a diverse range of sources, with new energy in every area of the country. He pointed out that because Scotland is historically anti-nuclear, this plan populates the highlands with wind farms; the going rate is 2,000 wind turbines or one Sizewell B equivalent.

Finally, we were given a real "practical" view - that of a young engineer working at W S Atkins, a large engineering consultancy. Carbon is now a major driver (alongside time and money) in all of their projects, with around 80% of their business having it as the main component. They apparently need to retrain their entire workforce to handle this effectively; this seems reasonable, until qualified with a comment about how at least carbon is nice and measurable, unlike other environmental concerns that are too subtle for Atkins engineers to understand (I was rather sad to hear this, as it didn't give me a great impression of my generation of graduate engineers!). A lot of their work concerns embedded carbon calculations.

Overall, a few useful points came up during the day. Firstly, carbon is not the same as sustainable, but it is increasingly treated as such. The language around carbon isn't helping any more - it's so confused now that it blurs the real situation, and hinders clear thinking, discussion and decision-making. We also heard that climate change mitigation now strongly clashes against other sustainability and conservation - the Severn Barrage being a case in point here.

The final remarks noted that if an organisation of smart people (such as Cambridge) was given a nominal £1bn to spend on energy and the environment in the UK, the reflections on what we would do with it could be far more useful than the numerous small projects being tackled independently today - a good reflection of the emphasis on the holistic approach needed.

Crowdsourced rabbit funding

2009-08-20T18:11:00.005+01:00

A ray of hope from my old colleague Emmanuel Moll, who has helped set up SaveNabaztag.com - an effort to raise funds from the community to rescue Violet, the struggling company behind the Nabaztag internet bunny.

I've blogged about the Nabaztag before, as has Michael, who even stars in a lovely YouTube video showing how CamVine kit can be controlled by RFID bunnies. We're big fans - as much of Violet for making the first real consumer products showcasing what the internet of things can be, which is a great accomplishment - as of the actual Nabaztag itself. Having made internet connected electronics products from scratch ourselves, we know exactly how challenging this must have been for Violet.

It would be sad to see Violet go under when they have achieved so much, and I'm intrigued to see how crowdsourcing rescue funding from the community might work. This isn't the first attempt to crowdsource funds - it seems to be all the rage at the moment - but with an established product and a passionate user community perhaps this could be a real success.

You can pledge to own a little of Violet here.

I went to HideAndSeek and I...

2009-08-03T08:04:00.012+01:00

contributed to a major building project (as part of City Blocks)
as Lady Delphinia Watson, helped select the new Grand Emperor (who turned out to be a joint appointment, and half revolutionary, which will lead to trouble in the future)

(thanks to Dom Camus for this pic)

created a semaphore-style code and used it for team communications, beating the oppositition, whose code was much less subtle (in Semaphoria)

found the treasure by following clues (in BinoHunt)

listened carefully to M, and tracked down and unmasked a spy (winning QNTMFSLC, a twitter-based game)
wore a smart jacket and tie to record a news item, and helped my team of tabloid video hacks record a great many other stories, eventually causing both Frank Gaff and Michael Portobello to appear so depraved in the public eye that the election was called off (as part of the Yellow team, scoring the moral victory in Playmakers)
was a hedgehog during some Animal Mayhem (briefly!) Michael was a cow and achieved two shiny stars for his efforts, including this "funny face with cat" (thanks to Silke Abele for the acting as paparazzi here)

puzzled out 5 live musical performances with the winning Team Random in Rubiks Music - a mind-bending audio experience

(thanks to Nikki Pugh for the pic!)

saw 55 things and shared our sightings (managed fourth place in And I Saw... as Team SuperSpy)

nearly died of exhaustion moving giant balloon structures between bases around the busy SouthBank and avoiding the opposition's inflatables (in Elephant) (thanks to Dan Dixon for the pic)

became covered in stickers

All these activities were social games - activities where one has to work with others (probably people you've never met before) to solve puzzles or play a game - and part of the Hide and Seek weekender. Some of them are also pervasive games, because they happen in public spaces, mixing in with people who aren't playing. It was a great weekend and we'll be back next year - and I hope to be able to link to more photos and video from the games as it appears online. The organisers and game conveners did a great job.

We managed to avoid some of the highly active games (the Go Game, the Following, Paparazzi, the Potato Game) and we dropped out at times to wander around the Hayward Gallery or Tate Modern or for a drink, but nonetheless we spent almost the whole weekend walking briskly around, dancing, jogging or even sprinting. The NHS should be prescribing social games to get people off their sofas and outside - although we were glad of a sofa to collapse on at the end!

Finding Ada at Bletchley Park

2009-07-26T17:43:00.003+01:00

Michael and I spent today learning about the women (6000 or so!) who worked at Bletchley Park and the many amazing things which happened there and are still remembered today. We were incredibly lucky to be shown around by Jean Valentine, a Bombe operator during WWII. Despite the wonderful things we saw - an Enigma machine, the rebuilt Bombe and Colossus - and the recent successful funding for repair work, the site still needs money for capital projects to repair and maintain the buildings and therefore their contents. Some pictures from our day are here. Also check out Sue Black's picture of the appalling state of Hut 6.

I was also surprised to find so many different projects at Bletchley Park - all needing your support:

Bletchley Park Trust: donate
Projected Picture Trust (no obvious donation link) - Enigma cinema pictures
National Museum of Computing: donate
Codes and Ciphers (Colossus rebuild): again, no obvious donation link, but you can buy things here

mystery shopping

2009-05-29T09:06:00.002+01:00

We get our groceries from the internet. This is a magic system which means we in theory never need to visit a supermarket.

Usually, we get our stuff from Ocado. It's great; bags of food arrive, and it's almost always exactly what we ordered. Sometimes, alas, like last week, there's something missing - in this case, frozen croissants. Argh!

So yesterday I tried Waitrose Deliver instead. Like Ocado, groceries arrive on your doorstep; unlike Ocado, there were a few substitutions and again a missing item. But the delivery guy wasn't just a driver - he was a comedian! He had a bunch of items in his van which didn't belong in any of the orders he was delivering. Did we want 5 bags of rice? Had we ordered them? We had not. Nor had we requested two loaves of sliced wholemeal. Or the box of cocoa puffs (although perhaps I should have claimed them for M). We were thrilled to have the chance to opt in to random items.

When we went through our order after he had left, we found we had done particularly well, scoring 4 boxes of jelly when we had only ordered two. Surprise!

We would recommend Ocado if you want your groceries, and Waitrose Deliver if you want a magical mystery tour of other people's mislaid goods. We'd also recommend buying your croissants from somewhere else, because Waitrose didn't bring any either. (The delivery guy kindly said he'd quit tomorrow, and go set up a croissant delivery service via bikes around Cambridgeshire.)

thoughts on a new phone

2009-05-13T22:02:00.004+01:00

It's been a long time since I got a new phone. My Nokia N73 served me well, but it's been time for a proper smart phone (on an unlimited data contract rather than pay as you go) for some time. I thought about an iPhone, which would seem a logical choice given I have Macs everywhere; but Michael beat me to it, and I felt I should have something different, partly so that we'd be on different networks (increasing the chance of getting a signal in remote areas) and partly so we could compare and contrast two devices. So he's been on the iPhone 3G for a while, and I've been lagging behind with occasional use of the (actually quite usable) Opera browser on my N73 and of course a quality camera that takes good pictures (unlike the iPhone's).

When the Android G1 came out, I was optimistic that this might be the smart phone I'd been waiting for, but I was hugely disappointed when I played with one in a T-mobile store. I like physical keyboards, but this one, although OK to type on, was an awkward slide-across mechanism, and I realised I wouldn't be able to create a quick text message one-handed, which seemed like a requirement. The rest of the experience was OK, though, and I keenly anticipated the G2 (whilst preparing to be disappointed, that something on the surface so iPhone-like would be a let down). So shortly after the G2's release, I could be found in Cambridge's Vodafone store, annoying the (horrifyingly young) salesmen, and now I have my very own G2 on the desk beside me.

There's no point in my listing features - this is a smartphone, it does smartphone stuff, and I can't be bothered with comparing the detailed figures of hardware specifications. But I think it's worth reviewing, because I've been surprised by the G2 in a number of ways, and as a long-time iPhone user (albeit not my own) the comparison is interesting.

Physically, the G2 is a nice, solid bit of kit, actually looking pretty good with clear design effort having gone into it, and quite a reasonable size. The screen is large enough for most things, and the scroll-ball is a great alternative to greasy finger prints on the screen (and also means you can scroll without obscuring the screen if you want, which is a nifty feature in my view - I find iPhone reading frustrating as I must always block the screen to move the text on).

I'm fussy about user interfaces these days, and I was expecting to be annoyed by the G2 after the iPhone - partly because I expected it to be "worse" in some ways, and partly because I felt I was too used to the iPhone paradigms to be able to adapt to a whole new way of doing things. This has not been the case at all. The buttons on the G2 have been well chosen, offering consistent and useful behaviour across all apps ("home" screen, "back", search, and "menu" which brings up a menu appropriate to what you are doing).

Typing works well; you can have a portrait (narrow/small) QWERTY keyboard, or a landscape one, which has bigger buttons - the phone figures out which way up it is. I like being offered 4-5 different words as I type, rather than the iPhone's one (which was rarely what I wanted). The punctuation, numbers and so on are fine and there are some nice shortcuts, not too hidden away. I'm already able to type quite quickly and accurately, and I don't get annoyed by the autocorrection stuff as I do on the iPhone. My one complaint is that the letters at the very edge of the screen (L and P) seem harder to "hit" for me; bit odd.

All the applications you would want are there - maps, Gmail and other email, camera, twitter, etc. My google calendars are there all the time; I can make it buzz when I get email - or not. Google Sky Map is the most amazing so far - it uses the GPS and compass to show you what stars are around in the part of the sky you are pointing the phone at! You can wave the phone and it updates as you move it. Wow. Most apps seems to be free, but some are not, which is fine. Although there is not such a profusion of apps as the iPhone AppStore, there are enough for the things I actually want to do, plus a few nice games (such as Abduction, where you bounce cows around - a compelling casual game and bettering FlightControl on the iPhone in my view).

A whole lot of things just work, which is excellent. I can take a picture, using some image stabilisation (!), and then twitter it or send it as an MMS within a click or two. A USB cable will charge the G2. I've not needed to think about how to set things up, so far everything pretty much works as I would like. There's a notification LED which lights up when things have happened, and a useful notification bar on screen gives me an instant view of events, and I can open that and dive straight into the application for an event with one swipe and click - very fast and just what I need. I also enjoyed entering a "swipe pattern" as my security protection, rather than ending up with another PIN to remember.

The biggest true annoyance for me is not having the Apple pinch/zoom interface in maps. I also feel I'm going to be frustrated by battery life (which I haven't measured in detail, but I suspect it will be not enough for a weekend away, putting it on a par with similar phones, but a long way behind my old Nokia). I know I'm going to fret about the screen getting scratched, but this is something which would have bothered me about any similar phone though.

Overall, although I haven't been using it for long, I feel this is an iPhone-beater for me. The open source nature of Android goes some way towards cancelling my innate fear of getting trapped in a Google ecosystem, but Google knows everything about me already, so I am also somewhat resigned to this. All smartphones seem likely to tether users to one ecosystem or another. Ah well.

Arcadia seminar

2009-04-25T20:25:00.005+01:00

I spoke at the Arcadia seminar this week on Scholarly Networking. The talk seemed to go down well, and you can download an mp3 of it here. Many thanks to John Naughton for the invitation to speak, and Michelle Heydon for the logistics.

The Arcadia programme at Cambridge is an exciting one, exploring the place of libraries in the digital age, and considering their impact on teaching and research in the future. I'm helping on the Fellowship support group this term, and very much looking forward to following the activities of the programme as a whole.

Finding Ada

2009-03-24T18:00:00.003Z

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. I should be blogging about a woman I admire in technology to support and publicise the efforts of innovative and amazing women in computing worldwide, but I'm not going to.

I've always struggled with the idea of role models; sure, there are people I admire (mostly those I've worked with myself, not far-off celebrity figures) and whom I might wish to emulate. But mostly they are deeply personal to me, and the reasons I respect them are not necessarily helpful to others with different career ideas to me, or who don't know them personally. And my role models are both men and women; I cannot in all honesty say the women outnumber or outrank the men, although I have known some incredible women in technology, including Karen Sparck-Jones (already written about by others today). The women are just, sadly, few and far between compared to the number of men I have worked with, and some of the men have been damn good.

I don't feel able to single out one, as each has played a different part in helping, guiding, inspiring and coaching me. I don't know that I can even recall to mind the whole list of brilliant engineers and computer scientists I would want to cite, amidst a busy day in my life as an engineer and leader.

So instead of an insight into one particular outstanding woman, you get a short blog post, encouraging you to go out and find all the other people who are posting more erudite articles and recollections today, for they are a source of inspiration and hope.

This Ada Lovelace Day, there are far too few women in technology; far too few women in leadership in business and in academia; and far too few women governing in the political sphere. Karen Sparck-Jones once said - accurately - that computing was far too important to be left to men. Industry, teaching, research and the future of our nation and world are also far too important to be left to men.

1100100000

2009-01-14T21:24:00.003Z

I nearly crashed my bike into a bollard when I spotted this light show.

I assume it's because of "the 800", as it's called in the University. I'm looking forward to more fun and unexpected events to celebrate, although I am also a little sad that I (thus far) have not received a lovely 800 fleece, unlike my colleagues in the Communications Office.

But what does it all mean?

We are 800

2009-01-14T21:06:00.003Z

The University of Cambridge is 800 years old this year.

There are many things happening to commemorate the occasion.

For example, today I have been upgraded to a brand new shiny phone! This replaces the old ways of doing things in Cambridge (paper). Although I suspect that in reality there is still a great deal of paper in my future. Luckily my desk has space for both.

The famous University messengers are also being upgraded, from their old royal blue bicycles, to - err - new ones.

Good to have the right blue on them at last, I guess.

Attack of the giant space octopuses!

2009-01-08T14:05:00.002Z

This morning I heard about a terrifying incident in Lincolnshire, on the Today programme (just before a piece about ghosts - really!). Apparently a large wind turbine has been severely damaged (one blade removed, one severely bent) by some sort of large object. Glowing lights were seen in the area, and also glowing tentacles. I think there can be no doubt that this was perpetrated by a giant space octopus.

For some time now, pictures of a tiny piglet squid (deemed particularly cute for his smiley face) have been all over the internet. We can only assume that these are a small relation of the giant space octopus, which has arrived to defend the squid from the embarrassment of having naked pictures broadcast to all and sundry. The octopus has begun the destruction of our electricity generation system, without which the internet cannot operate.

We must defend our lands against this glowing tentacular menace.

Not 2008 any more

2009-01-04T12:06:00.003Z

It's been quiet here of late, but I've been keeping busy otherwhere.

CARET has a splendid new website, and if you are reading this within a fortnight of me posting it, we are currently hiring.

SeriousChange also has a revised website, and I'm looking forward to working on a much richer and more informative version in the coming weeks.

I still pine on occasion for electronics, and setting up our Nabaztag at home (along with some RFID bits and bobs, including a Mir:ror and adorable Nano:ztags) was fun. I'm looking forward to controlling our home energy consumption more in 2009, although I still have doubts as to whether purchasing gadgetry is a helpful solution to this for most people. Our reliable and simple central heating and hot water timer, for which we had been gradually calibrating the timings to give adequate heat without excessive boiler operation, at some point in the autumn suffered a power cut. We didn't realise this for a while, until we realised that the heating was running late into the night, under the factory default settings. We reprogrammed it with what we could remember of the timings, but it was frustrating that it had gone wrong for some time, and that we had no way to recall the lost settings. Luckily we have a room thermostat too.

At work, I'm involved with the future of virtual learning and research environments at Cambridge, and beyond, with the project to reinvent Sakai, the community source project on which our current VRE is based. Sakai3 (proposal PDF) will be in many ways a whole new product, with a more social and flexible user experience, and a new powerful and scalable back end.

At one level, this seems fairly easy; web-based collaboration tools have been around for quite a while now, and surely such things are well understood and richly developed? But they don't seem to be; most such tools generate huge amounts of complaint and grumbling from their users (although people will, as ever, tolerate a lot of inconvenience in IT). The use cases for education also have a tendency to be complex; there are many kinds of users, and they overlap (a student in one arena may be a tutor in another); there's a vast array of content types and activities you might undertake; you can have thousands of users at one time, all looking at the same or different content in various ways; and all those users will expect a consumer "web 2.0" quality product, with near-instantaneous bug fixing on demand :) As one of my colleagues says, it's not rocket science, but it's not as simple as you might think, either; good to have a challenge. Sakai3 is going to be worth following, as it might yet turn into an advanced platform for data services plus a flexible user interface, which could well be useful beyond education...

Words of wisdom

2008-10-09T11:42:00.002+01:00

It's a little over 3 years since I submitted my PhD thesis. It seems so long ago!

This beautiful summary is provided by Wordle.

Ah, those were the days.

and another thing...

2008-10-09T09:28:00.002+01:00

I realised this week that I am juggling multiple projects more than ever before. At work at CARET, I am managing a range of nascent (and production!) software and strategic projects, from CamTools and Talks.cam, to newer JISC projects on curriculum design, technology to support teaching administration, and more.

I'm also working on a business plan for a possible startup company; why stop just because the global economy is falling apart? If you have contacts in health or social care in the UK public sector, or have money you would like to remove from a bank and put to work growing a company, get in touch!

I'm also helping out with Serious Change - a campaign to lobby for rational government responses to climate change. Sign up! We're going to try to save the world. You should also read David MacKay's book, Sustainable energy without the hot air, which is now out, and downloadable (and free) here: a very pragmatic analysis of where energy comes from and where it goes.

I am also still somewhat active on a variety of longer term projects, mostly to do with promoting engineering to children, women, and parliamentarians. This must be multitasking :)

autumn vacation

2008-09-30T22:30:00.001+01:00

Holidays are great. I recently returned from this one.

When screens go wrong

2008-09-16T14:28:00.003+01:00

One often spots display screens, particularly in railway stations, which have suffered from peculiar Microsoft faults and are displaying error windows on top of the information one is trying to read, or which have abandoned informing altogether and are showing just a blue screen of error codes.

I was, therefore, perversely satisfied to spot this giant iPhone model with a "which WiFi network would you like?" popup window, illustrating that even OS X can fall prey to this kind of thing.

Good thin clients must be the right solution here...

Sleepy

2008-09-05T12:27:00.002+01:00

Our office coffee machine has had a bad week. It broke; wanting always to be rinsed, not being any happier after rinsing, and never making coffee.

The repairman visited and told us off for abusing the machine. He fixed it up and left, and the coffee machine worked for about 40 minutes.

Then the machine got taken away for repairs. In its place was our warning sign for when the machine is busy with other things and cannot make coffee; gradually, people added magnetic poetry.

This morning the machine was back, complete with shiny new pump, and an admission from the workshop that they do not know what was wrong with it. It is still working. For now.

weekend on the Wirral

2008-09-02T21:46:00.003+01:00

We spent last weekend relaxing on the Wirral and catching up with my parents. The Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool was impressive, although the high tech audio guides (iPod Touches) suffered a variety of failure modes on our visit, at the end of the penultimate day of the exhibition, so we had to make do without.

Michael has put some pics up, of a walk at West Kirby Marine Lake and beach, attempts to find superlambananas (not as successful as we had hoped), a rather wet walk up Caldy Hill, and a tricycle we spotted at the M6 toll road services en route back to Cambridge.

construct

2008-08-21T14:42:00.004+01:00

This was on Botolph Lane this lunchtime.

I've spotted a few similar things around the area; earlier this week there were boards near the Pitt Building on Trumpington Street with cryptic phrases and some maths concepts.

It's coming...

2008-08-15T13:29:00.005+01:00

This, in Corpus Christi College on the corner of Kings Parade and Bene't Street, will soon be the home of the new Clock, part of the Library Court project. This clock will be incredible in a number of ways, but mostly stands out at the moment as a monument to the pre-web age, because I can't find any reference to it online. I remember that I read an article about it on paper some time ago, talking about the traditional mechanism and amazing art that will surround it, and now I can see where it's going to be, I'm really excited.

before the storm

2008-08-08T16:55:00.003+01:00

Before the intense rain and thunder last night, Dominic and I sat
outside at the Pickerel in the sunshine. He was sporting the new
AlertMe customer support team fleece - very smart! We managed to stay
outside under the nice green umbrella through most of the storm, and I
didn't get too wet cycling home afterwards.

It sounds as if Dominic, and James (who joined us later) and everyone
else are doing a great job. Thanks to all for the (rather belated)
leaving present, too!

BarCamb2

2008-08-05T14:19:00.002+01:00

Last Friday, it was BarCamb time again, with BarCamb2 being held at the Sanger Centre. Michael has put some photos up, and I blogged the event for work.

Highlights included being one of a select handful of presenters who have given talks at both BarCambs to date; Simon Ford's mbed update "embedded can do the internet too", including mention of their terrific Mashed08 demo of Packet Network; and a programme with a mix of biotech, community, software, and technology talks. The afternoon's panel session confirmed my view that git is the latest&greatest thing (either that, or it just happens to make people terribly evangelical) and that at work we should probably have a review of whether it's worth migrating from SVN, and maybe a tutorial session.

Once more, thanks to Matt Wood for doing a sterling job organising a barcamp!

Cory's Cambridge talk

2008-08-04T10:39:00.003+01:00

Video of Cory's recent talk - the first of the Cambridge Business Lectures - here. I enjoyed his lively presentation, although I felt the audience was more techies/hackers (a traditional Cory audience) than the business types I might expect for this talks series in general. The business-minded section of the Cambridge entrepreneurial community would probably have benefited from Cory's ideas.

An appetite for APPEITG lunches

2008-07-31T13:48:00.004+01:00

It's not the best abbreviation, but the APPEITG (All Party Parliamentary Engineering and IT Group) do host a pleasant meal. The group exists to promote the role of engineering and the future of engineering in the UK, and I've been happy to see that they are keen to involve younger engineers (like me!) as well as the usual grey-haired examples. I look forward to being more involved, and perhaps to more delicious lunches on the beautiful House of Lords terrace.

At the lunch in mid-July, Sir David King spoke about the challenges of climate change and how engineers should be stepping up to tackle these. His key points were not particularly novel but bear repeating, in the context of a call to arms for engineers (and others).

The "City big bang" should be a drive for the UK science, engineering and technology sector to deliver new solutions for climate change
It should be possible to hit the carbon reduction targets set for mid-century, and still grow GDP
Engineering skills are desperately needed to deliver new nuclear power stations, zero carbon homes, and (very important for the UK) the technology to retrofit homes and other buildings to reduce carbon output. This means technicians and apprentices, as well as Chartered-level professionals. We need more engineers of all types
Don't forget that reducing emissions can save money
We need new, novel solutions. The Prius, for example, is great, but this is an example of a transitional technology - we need fully electric vehicles and a decarbonised grid
There is still a need for real cultural change. The media are happy pushing Tesla roadsters, because it's a bit like a Ferrari; but instead we should look to a future where a flash car isn't a status/sex symbol

I was also encouraged by Baroness Platt of Writtle to look into joining the Worshipful Company of Engineers. (I fear that I'm not quite senior enough for the Company yet, and couldn't really afford the membership fees, but I've bookmarked it for the future.) The APPEITG lunches always remind me that although women are scarce in engineering, they are present at all professional levels and represent all generations. A little bit of a boost for those of us who are starting out in our careers - or feel as if we are!

live music Tuesday

2008-07-29T18:33:00.001+01:00

Cambridge was full of buskers today, in unusual places (outside the
Chop House on Kings Parade, or here, outside Carluccio's by the Grand
Arcade / Lion Yard). These guys were pretty good.

Proper engineer

2008-07-25T19:31:00.004+01:00

From our fascinating tour of Tate Modern's oil tanks.

Polite notice

2008-07-25T19:26:00.001+01:00

In the bathroom of my room at Keele University, where I was for the
JISC Innovation Forum.

Other people's toys

2008-07-19T14:50:00.002+01:00

If this worked, this photo is tagged with a location on flickr.com :) I couldn't resist playing.

Sent from Michael's iPhone

non-words

2008-07-09T19:56:00.002+01:00

The Local Government Association says that the following are "non-words." I find this very encouraging, and look forward to seeing some clear communications from local public service organisations in the future, as this list is adopted. Although at a first look, words such as "welcome" seem quite innocuous, when I recall how they are used in some official documents, I can see why the LGA picked them out.

Ambassador; Agencies; Beacon; Best practice; Bottom-up; CAAs; Can do culture; Capacity; Capacity building; Cascading; Cautiously welcome; Champion; Citizen empowerment; Community engagement; Conditionality; Consensual; Contestability; Core Message; Core value; Coterminosity; Coterminous; Cross-cutting; Customer; Democratic mandate/legitimacy; Distorts spending priorities; Early Win; Empowerment; Engagement; Engaging users; Enhance; Evidence base; External challenge; Facilitate; Fast-track; Flexibilities and freedoms; Framework; Fulcrum; Good practice; Governance; Guidelines; Holistic; Holistic governance; Improvement levers; Incentivising; Income/funding streams; Initiative; Joined up; Joint working; LAAs; Service users; Level Playing Field; Localities; Meaningful consultation/dialogue; MAAs; Menu of options; Multi-agency; Multidisciplinary; Outcomes; Output; Participatory; Partnerships; Pathfinder; Peer challenge; Performance Network; Place shaping; Predictors of beaconicity; Preventative services; Priority; Process driven; Quick hit; Quick win; Resource allocation; Revenue streams; Risk based; Scaled-back; Scoping; Seedbed; Shared priority; Signpost; Single point of contact; Slippage; Social contracts; Stakeholder; Step change; Strategic/overarching; Streamlined; Subsidiarity; Sustainable; Sustainable communities; Symposium; Synergies; Tested for soundness; Third sector; Top-Down; Transparency; Transformational; Value-added; Vision; Visionary; Welcome; Wellbeing

(Thanks to Denis Payne for the link!)

Tim Berners-Lee at NESTA

2008-07-09T11:53:00.002+01:00

I was at NESTA last night for a debate about the future of the web. Sir Tim was at NESTA to launch the web science research initiative. I won't bother blogging most of the talk content or the WSRI as I'm sure this is better covered elsewhere.

You are spared my mediocre camera work, as conveniently Bill Thompson was sitting in front of me, and did a good job of recording the event with his superior tiny camera. I was too
awed by the beautiful character sketches of the speakers and audience being produced by my neighbour, Chris Meade, from if:book, to take many photos myself.

TBL's presentation was given in Firefox, which made a nice change, and contained quite a number of typos. Either that, or he's invented a new field called Electroncis. His strongest analogy was comparing the ecosystem of the web with the blob of gunk which you find when you unblock your sink - full of historical items like fishbones and niches where new bits can settle. Nice.

There was no answer to Charlie Leadbeater's question about whether a fully open web could solve the spam problem. Maybe the answer is not to faff around with the web, but just read books; Charlie referred to at least 4 books during his talk, but no online content.

Well done NESTA, especially Roland Harwood for valiant tweeting in the face of laptop crashes. (There was a slight contradiction between the encouragement to twitter, and the instruction given in the main auditorium that everyone should "turn off your mobile phones because they interfere with the equipment".) Excellent canapes, as usual at NESTA :)

Party animals

2008-07-01T14:56:00.001+01:00

Unusual sweets, kindly sent by Steffi some weeks ago

Green gadgets?

2008-06-26T20:45:00.004+01:00

A lot of companies are bringing out green gadgetry of all kinds at the moment. I often feel it's a little strange to be buying yet another gizmo to try to help combat climate change, but anti-consumerism isn't flavour of the month in the UK yet. Energy metering seems to be the latest thing; and I do wonder if in fact loans are the way to go for these bits of kit, as HICCA (Histon and Impington Climate Change Action) are offering. Most people aren't going to keep an eye on an energy meter every day or week, however pretty it is, and even if they do, I wonder how effective mild personal guilt is at changing ingrained comfortable behaviour patterns. However power-hungry you tell me my washing machine is, I'm still going to wash clothes; yes, on the lowest temperature setting, and the shortest wash, still using a lot of power, but you aren't going to get me bashing clothes in a sink full of water any time soon. I might turn off lights, put a jumper on and turn down the heating, but I don't need an energy meter to help me do that - I already know what the right behaviours are, I just need to get my act together and feel motivated. Nonetheless, the odd week with a meter to help me check there's nothing wasting power in the background could be helpful, but I'm not sure that having one full time will really reduce my power. (I speak as someone on to my second meter, which is all very well, but I know I don't really do much differently after the first few days of excitement about the new gadget. If anything, my energy usage in those few days goes up, as I test out each electrical device in our home to see how much power it's using!)

We'll see how the range of energy meters work out in the mass market over the next 18 months or so. I'm particularly interested to know how the manufacturers of these devices will find evidence of their gadgets reducing energy consumption, especially at a time when energy costs are due to soar, which is a driver for new behaviour at least as much as an LCD screen flashing scary messages at you is.

If you are going to buy something to try to be greener, it's worth considering keeping it simple. Michael and I each bought BodyFliks a few months ago. These are nifty plastic curves, which you use to remove water after showering. Since you are then much drier when you hit your towel, the towel doesn't get as wet, so needs less drying out, and the bathroom needs less airing and heating. They work well, come in a range of bright colours, and get a definite recommendation from us. Designed by a woman inventor, too!

Blast from the past :)

2008-06-12T10:11:00.002+01:00

I'm talking about AlertMe on this week's BBC Digital Planet. Listen whilst you can...

Thanks Bill Thompson and Anna Lacey for putting together such a great piece!

I guess that's why they call it hardware

2008-05-30T09:29:00.004+01:00

Undoubtedly, many readers will already know that it's challenging to make computing/electronic hardware, compared to just producing software. But I have observed a number of challenges that I would not have anticipated until I actually tried to do it myself.

Disclaimer: I've met lots of lovely technical people who understand the challenges of hardware and the business world, but I have also met some arrogant and annoying people who don't, and who won't accept that they don't know everything about everything to do with technology. Luckily, they are a minority, and us hardware-aware types are tenacious and hard to put off...

Firstly, when you decide to make some hardware, you need to commit some time (just as you would to write software), but you also need to set aside some funds to buy actual physical goods. (You will also need a computer for most projects, but let's assume you already have one.) In addition even though you are making hardware, you will most probably need to write some software too, so that's another chunk of time gone. You carefully assemble your hardware, and maybe write some software, and then you have a prototype, which is splendid, until you spill coffee on it - there are no backups with hardware.

This is such cool technology that you probably want more people to see your nice hardware, and a single prototype won't be enough. You're going to have to make lots of these things - maybe thousands. This is where things get trickier; you're going to have to find lots of money, and that means you'll probably need a business plan of some sort to help you access ready cash. You will have to alter your design so that it's something that can be assembled easily (and possibly automatically), you need to produce some test kit so you can make sure your product works when you've made it, and you might need to reduce the cost of the thing so you can afford to sell it (if that's what you plan to do), so you may need to find cheaper parts and re-engineer everything. Of course, if you are sending your device out into the world, it will need a case (to stop that darned coffee from getting in it again), and some packaging (so that it reaches whoever wants it in one piece) and of course some safety certification to make sure it's all nice and legal. Huge amounts of time and money are draining away here, and that's without mentioning extras, such as if you decide that for cost reasons you want to make it in another country, or if for a laugh you've decided to patent something.

Anyway, this is already a jolly sight harder than slinging together a bit of a website, and you're mighty envious of your friend who took that route, and already has lots of users, praise from bloggers, invites to cool startup parties, and possibly even potential for revenue in the future. You're still trying to get your software to work on the third iteration of the hardware design, the thing heats up inside the improvised metal case enough to melt the surface of your desk, and you can't remember when you last went to a party.

It's clearly time for a bit of shameless promotion, so you go along to speak at a techie event - a conference, or seminar, or pubmeet - mostly internet and web 2.0 types, people from all the latest startups, and the people who blog about them. You tell them a bit about what you're doing, and the audience swoons with excitement, and you feel very pleased. But next come the questions, and this is where things get harder again.

You always thought that techies were pretty smart - probably smarter than you, in fact - and it's a familiar crowd, one you hang out with occasionally (or used to, before you started making hardware and ran out of time). Some of them even know about the business world as well as C++, they have diverse interests and knowledge, and they can usually keep their coffee inside their mugs. You figure you'll get some inspiring questions, maybe even some helpful comments.

In fact, what you get is two questions.

The first might actually be relevant, but you'll get it whether you are making an intelligent kettle (containing a tiny microprocessor which runs a couple of hundred lines of logic, and could no more run an operating system than a marathon) or a fancy internet appliance (which is almost certainly running Linux already, because otherwise you'd still be writing code for it in 10 years time). "Can I run Linux on it?"

So, this isn't a bad question - unless the answer is no. You then explain that the kettle doesn't need to run a powerful operating system, but now the audience are grumbling and twittering that you're worthless. (Later, when you quiz someone in the bar, it will turn out that they could possibly ignore their religious requirements for everything to run Linux, but they also desperately want an API so they can access data from your device, and they believe that APIs are only possible with Linux. The USB port which you included so you could publish data openly is totally ignored or dismissed, and you feel a little sad, because it was only to please these kinds of people that you added it anyway.)

You should not attempt to explain your answer to the second question on stage, because it will be incomprehensible to most of the audience, who may be bright but don't seem very practical. They will ask if it's 100% open source; and again, if you say no, you're in trouble. (If the honest answer is yes, then have a banana! You are probably having fun and doing something beneficial for society; you might need the banana though, because what you're doing may not pay that well in monetary terms.) All you can really say to justify your wanton anti-openness is that you'd love to open source it, but you couldn't get any money to manufacture it if you did, and you'd rather the technology got made and shipped somehow, than just remaining a fun (albeit coffee-stained) prototype. The audience will not believe this. They will Google some of the components you mentioned were in your device, and will find out a price for some of them (less than a dollar, say); and then they will berate you for not understanding that cheap components mean a cheap device, because you have a recommended retail price that is greater than the component cost.

At this point you will give up and retire to the bar, where the few remaining audience members who haven't written you off as closed-source scum will ask you moderately technical questions. You will answer these cheerily, buoyed up by drink, until you realise that you've now tried to explain two dozen times that your device cannot run for years off a single, tiny, non-rechargable battery, whilst continuously using WiFi, and so you're using another wireless system to network your device. Not WiFi, no. Yes, your laptop does WiFi, but the battery runs out after a few hours, doesn't it? And that's a pretty big battery. And I need this device to work for years, not hours. Well, there are these other wireless systems out there which don't use so much power. Yes, I suppose the one I'm using is a bit like WiFi, in that it doesn't use wires. Have I thought about changing to WiFi in the future? No.

Even with the booze, your connection to reality seems rather stronger than that of your questioners; you know you can't maintain your polite tone much longer, and depart. You realise you won't be able to enjoy parties with these people ever again, or at least not until you're working on a new project; but that's OK, as you've enough practical challenges to deal with that you'll be stuck at work with no time to socialise anyway.

You reassure yourself that your product will sell perfectly well to normal people, and that geeks represent such a minuscule proportion of the market that your sales team won't notice that they aren't buying. You would normally be dismissive of the sales people as clueless about technology, but in fact your faith in them has just been restored: sales and marketing people evidently know just as much about hardware as the web 2.0 crowd.

This would have been a terrific retort, if only you'd thought of it earlier.

transitioning

2008-05-27T13:34:00.003+01:00

I've been working at AlertMe for 2.5 years now, and it's been a great ride going from a back-of-the-envelope idea (broadband home security) to a real product selling in volume to genuine customers.

But I decided it was time to move on. I'm leaving AlertMe today, and will be starting a new job on Monday: a project at CARET to look at embedding emerging technology into the university (amongst other things).

I'm looking forward to a fresh start in a different field; everyone I've told has been very encouraging, and I've been surprised by how many diverse folk have contacted me with suggestions of people to talk to in my new role.

One benefit of a job change is a welcome chance to clear out crud from my computer, and blithely to delete emails and files I'll not need again. My desk drawers are empty now, too, and I'm hoping that in my two days of unemployment this week I will find time to go through their former contents, along with sorting out long-neglected paperwork at home.

Alternatively, I may just find out what it's like to lie on the sofa and watch daytime TV.

Flat Earth News

2008-05-20T22:03:00.002+01:00

A fascinating debate last night at Wolfson about Nick Davies's new book, Flat Earth News, discussing the underbelly of UK newspaper reporting. I'll have to add it to my reading list! Photos from Michael here. I'd had a busy day, and so need longer to properly absorb the contents of the debate fully...

Ireland holiday

2008-05-05T09:34:00.001+01:00

Snaps here.

the science of why

2008-04-16T14:59:00.004+01:00

Last weekend Michael and I were up in Disley for another NESTA Crucible workshop. The best bit was jamming on the Saturday night; first time I've played maracas in ages.

Duncan Lockerby - our star fluid mechanics expert - entertained us with one of his own compositions, a delightful Newtonian song. Worth a listen, because there aren't anywhere near enough physics-themed songs in the world.

Tom Webb also demonstrated extensive musical talent, but I don't have any mp3s of him to hand...

RAEng on TV

2008-04-09T15:21:00.002+01:00

For a few days more, see the Royal Academy of Engineering on University Challenge, via iPlayer.

April 1st roundup

2008-04-01T08:34:00.003+01:00

Little blogging of late - more of a story is told by my facebook status feed, or perhaps now twitter...

The undercover economist is a good speaker, with excellent pacing and tone; but his appearance at the Cambridge WordFest suffered a little from the classic problem of book talks, in that he didn't really have a point to get across, just a series of anecdotes. And why was he wearing a jumper with sleeves far too short for him?

Birmingham Rep's "She stoops to conquer" was splendid at the Arts Theatre last week. Goldsmith's poetical intro and epilogue were revived, with his original tirade against sentimental comedy replaced with a plea for more live theatre attendance. A modern spin at the outset saw the fourth wall broken down, with a pair of ushers having a shouting match before the curtain went up, then leaping onto stage, slipping into rhyming couplets, and blending into the cast. At the end, the ushers returned, with the tongue-tied male making a Dylanesque plea with signboards. A happy ending ensued, of course.

Rose Melikan's book, The Blackstone Key, is out, and amazon delivered my copy yesterday. As soon as I feel well enough to appreciate it, I'll be diving in!

FaraDay

2008-03-08T17:15:00.003Z

Yesterday I was at the Science Museum in London, helping out with the first FaraDay (groan), where school groups who have tried the IET Faraday activities online came together to celebrate their work, and learn about engineering advances in the field of technology for life. You can read my official report over on the Faraday blog.

bits

2008-02-05T14:54:00.000Z

Having only ever heard of the wonders of Katamari before, I'm delighted to see that there's a version coming out soon for the XBox 360. I played the demo last night, and had no idea what was going on, but it was fun, and extremely pretty. The style is psychedelic 1960s, similar to Amped3; who'd've thought that would be in this year?

When I returned from holidays on Monday, my colleague Nik mentioned that he'd been up late watching the SuperBowl. I always like to keep up with the state of the art in expensive TV advertising, and as ever, you can see the ads online.

AlertMe - the wait is nearly over!

2008-01-18T17:41:00.000Z

All being well, our online shop will be open on Monday.

Exciting times!

Urban activity

2008-01-18T14:18:00.000Z

Yesterday, I spotted the wonderful Cambridge Joy parkour video:

It turns out that one of the stars is from the Wirral, like me! Indeed, the Wirral is evidently a hotbed of urban sports; there's also a nice YouTube video of some young skateboarders in Morrisons car park in West Kirby.

These kids are just amazing.

The wonders of USB (for Amyas)

2008-01-08T21:11:00.000Z

Yesterday, Amyas let his tea get cold on his desk. I mentioned that a USB cup warmer would stop this happening; Amyas, being a sensible chap, seemed surprised that such a thing existed.

Well, I knew I'd seen them somewhere, and I thought I might purchase one for fun. I looked on the internet... and there were USB cup warmers. Great.

But it isn't that simple. You can pay anything from £2 to £20, it seems, for a single warmer. You can choose between silver, white, black, gold, all in different shapes and sizes. You can get a USB cup warmer with integrated 4-port USB hub. Some cup warmers come with cups. Or stainless steel cups with lids. Some are flat-topped, some have round indents, some have on-off switches and LEDs. Some - very rare, this kind - have LCD clocks and temperature readouts! Some offer 50-60C warming; some 40C to 80C, from outer edge to centre.

I'm overwhelmed by the variety! I am awed that so many people should have designed these gizmos and had them manufactured; can the market be so large? Perhaps office workers worldwide are desperate for computer add-ons to warm their beverages (at least we aren't sticking our mugs on top of warm bits of computer, inviting dangerous spills, I suppose). Poor old USB, too; I can't imagine that a 4-port hub plus heater is going to meet the current limits required by the USB standard.

(Amyas - I'd've got you one, but I couldn't decide.)

sketching

2008-01-06T18:35:00.000Z

I haven't drawn anything for a very, very long time. Yesterday I sketched a bluetit, and today a robin, which I then watercoloured. I think the bluetit is better.

the other night

2008-01-03T10:41:00.000Z

We talked about backup solutions for our data.

Michael said that by now, 5 years ago he would have expected to give his credit card and some words to a software agent, and it would go off and find the right thing online, and a box would just show up at the house with a backup solution in it.

I said that the agent would actually be off looking at kitten pictures; Joy of Tech said so in their Web N.0 predictions.

Michael said he didn't know about kittens, but that some of his friends are into cat pictures with captions of the form "I am in your blah, blahhing your blah" and that these were deemed extremely funny.

We had to look it up.

Apparently, the concept is called Lolcatz. We found a nice, clear definition, which says: an LOLCAT is any photo of a cute cat along with an irony-free caption... An LOLCATZ is a photo similar in content, but one that captures the aggressive stupidity found in some parts of the Internet, such as 12-year-old boys who grew with the Internet their entire lives.

We found many examples of the genre. Some of them were even amusing. We felt the best ones embody both the definition, and the caption form, written in l33t speak.

We made our own.

Amusingly, when we found the original WebN.0 Joy of Tech, it includes a sideways reference to LOLCATZ. So, as usual, Michael and I are several months behind on our web memes. Hey ho.

Paris in winter

2007-12-21T11:26:00.001Z

Michael and I had a lovely time in Paris last weekend.

What are you thinking?

2007-12-07T21:09:00.000Z

AlertMe is keen to find out what our customers, and potential customers, think we should be creating in the future. Cast your vote, and leave us your thoughts, by taking our survey. (It's also a prize draw, if you need any more incentive!)

In Business

2007-11-20T22:36:00.001Z

At the Silicon Valley Innovation Forum tonight (of which more later!) I met the delightful editor of Radio 4's In Business. Stephen Chilcott. He was quite rightly chuffed that more than 730,000 people downloaded the In Business podcast in September, thoroughly beating supposedly more popular shows. I've always enjoyed In Business, and wish Stephen and Peter Day continuing success with this excellent programme, which always has something new to teach me.

Silicon Valley Connect

2007-11-16T12:07:00.000Z

The Union debate last Thursday was a lively affair, with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurial types attempting to decide whether Europe, or the Valley, will be the best place to start billion dollar companies in the future. In the end I felt i had to abstain though - I can't bring myself to care much where innovation happens most. It was encouraging to see that some of the leading lights of entrepreneurship can also compose a strong speech and present it with panache, although most of the points were comical rather than intellectual.

NESTA and Silicon Valley Connect had organised last night's forum in London, as part of a tour for visiting Valley luminaries. It had rather more content than the debate! (As ever, I am reminded of an old colleague of mine, who always called it the valley of the silly clones.)

George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor, spoke coherently and well about the need for university and industry interaction, the importance of an encouraging tax regime, and how governments could support SMEs by relaxing regulations limiting public service contracting. He also mentioned that the "most interesting trip" in his two and a half years as Shadow Chancellor had been to Silicon Valley, a particular highlight being a visit to "a strange company called Mozilla." I'd've liked to hear more about that! His references to Facebook and open source were reasonably in context, and he came across very well. Several attendees commented that although they would never vote Tory, they were more likely to after hearing Osborne speak.

Reid Hoffman, founded of LinkedIn amongst other things, believed that Silicon Valley will continue to dominate the world in consumer internet development, but that other clusters, perhaps with different technology focuses, would arise/grow. Virtual social networks are good, but will never replace physical ones; these local ecosystems are increasingly important to encourage enterprise, and the world is better for it. He seemed encouraged by what he had seen in the UK (or at least, in the Golden Triangle of Oxbridge and London), but did note that he feels angel investors here need to be seen more as a resource outside the financial sphere, as well as within it.

One question asked how young people should be encouraged to be entrepreneurial. Hoffman said that we should enthuse kids simply by enabling them to succeed, which was fine, but at this event he didn't exactly motivate me - it sounded like it was jolly hard starting a business (at least in Reid's area) and there was no hint as to what one might get out of it, other than money.

No consumer internet startup in the Valley has a plan for more than 6 months out these days, because things are moving so fast, and "you have to be running." Hoffman stays in touch with his staff even when travelling, to avoid any delays in decision-making. One method he has is to ask them to email him any question requiring a decision as soon as they need an answer, with a list of options (a: do it, b: don't do it, c: i'll call you asap, etc). He can then get the urgent mail on his Blackberry and reply with one letter, even if he's in an important meeting.

James Slavet, a VC, highlighted some points he sees as crucial to an innovative cluster, where ever it is in the world. There must be access to management talent (in the form of leaders of "foundation companies", such as Apple and Google, as well as serial entrepreneurs), and technologists must be respected within the culture. Venture capital is necessary, too. Risk taking must be encouraged, with it being perfectly OK to fail, and to have gone through many jobs. Slavet commented that in China enterprise is generally seen as a good thing, whereas in India, whilst technologists are admired, someone working for a startup is viewed as poor marriage material without a reliable income. Culture is critical for an enterprising ecosystem.

Slavet thinks that Silicon Valley will stay at the top of the pile in terms of being the biggest and best tech cluster, but that others would appear around the world. In the UK, Slavet would increase the transparency of technology in development, to make it clearer what could be commericialised. This seemed to be a roundabout way of saying that tech transfer between academia and industry was important.

Megan Smith from Google spent a lot of time saying how inspired she was, by the UK tour, the debate in Cambridge (where she was quite tickled by voting with her feet), the wonderful innovative atmosphere at Google, and so on. She mentioned the need for strong academic interaction with industry, and that alumni networks should be fully utilised. Another important catalyst for enterprise is reduced friction - that setting up a company should be easy and quick - with centralised services to link entrepreneurs with resources. Smith quoted someone from Toshiba, about how Silicon Valley is like one company, with many divisions, and people moving freely betweek the divisions; this "company" encompassing Stanford as well as businesses. Smith also talked a great deal about the wonderfulness of Google (as do most of the Googlers I come across lately - their brainwashing techniques must be top notch), with staff writing papers, enjoying their famous 20% time, eating well, and not having the burden of managers. (I have been wondering of late how easy it is in the UK to switch between industry and academia. The talk in enterprise circles is always of academics spinning out and becoming entrepreneurs; but can people move the other way, particularly if they have been at a small company without the time to publish as well as creating a product?)

Again, Smith highlighted the importance of having the right culture. Talented people appear everywhere, then meet up in technology clusters, and will spread ideas and styles of working from the Valley back to growing clusters around the world. Still, she knows of succesful "fully networked" companies, with staff widely distributed between countries and cities. The UK would do better with more flexible government purchasing requirements, and if only we could see angel investors not as a plentiful source of capital gains tax, but as a way of growing the tax base of the nation through employment.

It was an interesting evening. NESTA CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum, proved an able chairman, and is really getting the organisation doing some great stuff to "make innovation flourish." Thanks also go to the NESTA events team, who ran a splendid function, and were very polite when asking us final stragglers to leave, so they could go home. The kiwi and melon juice in particular was very fine.

Safety Last

2007-11-14T16:13:00.000Z

It's been quiet of here late, although Michael has been tracking what we've been up to quite well!

Last night we saw Paul Merton at the Corn Exchange, hosting an evening of silent film comedies. The pianist accompanying the films was excellent, and the selection of comic moments from Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and more was excellent. Merton introduced the films briefly, but didn't really give enough information for me. I caught references to names and years, but not enough detail about the world of films, or the stars and directors, to feel I'd learnt anything. Still, at least the presence of a big name has some of these wonderful films in front of people again. The second half was Lloyd's splendid Safety Last, which remains an engaging story after 80-odd years.

Cultural evenings

2007-10-24T13:58:00.000+01:00

On Monday, a lecture by Jorge Cham, who creates the wonderful Piled Higher and Deeper comics.

Yesterday, a Mitch Benn gig - actually Mitch Benn and the Distractions. I hadn't really known what to expect of this, as I only really knew of Benn through the Now Show on Radio 4. But it was wonderful - a really vibrant live performance, and some stunning funny songs, reminiscent of Weird Al (only more topical, perhaps, and certainly more British). It turns out that Mitch is from Liverpool, has an accent that fluctuates madly, and does a very fine rendition of Macbeth in the style of Eminem.

Tonight, we're off to see Stardust, which I'm really looking forward to!

Tomorrow, less culture, at a Web2.0 discussion meeting. No idea of what to expect there!

Faraday 08

2007-10-11T18:06:00.000+01:00

Many engineers remember the annual Faraday Lecture, as an inspiration in their childhood or teens. The IEE (now IET), which ran it, took the decision that a lecture tour could only ever reach a small number of people, and have this year launched The Faraday, which is a set of videos and activities presented online, and supported by a team of Faraday Engineers around the UK. The website includes various games for you to try, and challenges for school teams to undertake (with the incentive of starring in a film, if their competition entry video is a winner). If they need any help, any school can call the IET and request a Faraday Engineer to come in and support them with activity help, careers advice, or whatever.

Yesterday was the launch event in London, compered by Dr Jack, the "face" of Faraday 08. He seems a lively chap, with a real PhD (neuroscience), and very hip, which is undoubtedly what science needs these days.

There was quite a party atmosphere.

Spot the movie star...

2007-10-08T17:03:00.000+01:00

AlertMe's first corporate video is out! You can play at spotting your favourite AlertMe staff in it.

Enlightenment

2007-09-28T14:21:00.000+01:00

A very nicely done example of viral marketing: Smart Enlightenment. Are you vacuuming the carpet of pain? If so, Dr Tridion can help. (Thanks to Mum for the link!)

If you are in Cambridge this week...

2007-09-18T23:02:00.000+01:00

then I'd strongly recommend going to see "I am Shakespeare" at the Arts Theatre. This was, sadly, somewhat poorly attended tonight, but was a great show, starring Sean Foley (of The Right Size, a duo I admire hugely) and Mark Rylance of the Globe. If you are interested in Shakespeare, or the internet, or just enjoy a lively show, go see it.

Migrating birds

2007-09-12T21:40:00.000+01:00

Michael has a new passport. It contains a wide selection of images of British birds. However, the note that came with it, full of puff about the high tech security features, fails to describe the birds! A great deal of effort with Google reveals one leaflet about the birds (here, on a very unofficial site), but the bird on the "chip" page is unnamed. Does anyone know what it is? It's pictured in the leaflet I've linked- twice, in fact.

It's media week for me

2007-09-05T17:26:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, the podcast. Today, I was interviewed by Rory Cellan-Jones for BBC News 24! The video is linked from the image of a tasteful toy Post Office in that article, half way down. As well as showing some of the first bits of AlertMe kit we've revealed to the public, it was nice to be asked about the reasons I moved from academia to industry, too.

SET Women podcast

2007-09-04T13:22:00.000+01:00

I'm featured in the latest SET Women podcast, produced by Cobi Smith. It's very strange to hear your voice and words, processed and tidied up by someone else! Cobi has done a good job on the podcast series though, even if I don't feature until number 6 :)

AlertMe is live!

2007-08-24T15:03:00.001+01:00

Our website is now live. Enjoy!

Misc.

2007-08-23T17:01:00.000+01:00

A pleasant consequence of living near a jam factory is that sometimes the village smells of strawberries.

If you listen to the Archers, and have read all the Harry Potter books, you are likely to enjoy Lantana2's fantasy.

Last year, Michael and I attended an excellent Wine Appreciation course at Impington Village College. It is on again during the autumn term and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about wine in an informal setting. If they don't get the numbers, the course will be cancelled, so do consider registering and joining us! It was so good, we're taking the course again.

Wattson & Holmes

2007-08-14T16:52:00.000+01:00

We've had the Wattson at home for a while. Using the Holmes software (subtle naming there!) I can view our household electricity usage over the last few months. Holmes may be in beta, but it makes lovely graphs.

We've been glad to find that our "resting" power consumption is quite low, even with the server running. You can see the kettle boiling and so on in the morning, and the washing machine (ouch!) in the evening.

Our consumption goes up when Michael stays at home with a cold, boiling the kettle and running extra computers...

We can also spot the weekends when we are at home more, and more likely to be running washing machines and so on:

It's very interesting to see how our power usage varies over the hours, days and months. I look forward to the winter to see how that changes things!

(Aside: I recently read Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - a fascinating book. I'd recommend it to all those who like the naming of Wattson!)

Saturday night snippets

2007-08-04T20:30:00.000+01:00

I've put up the photos from last week's Smart Festival.

Everyone should watch the fascinating video ("shift happens") about what the 21st century is probably going to be like - I spotted it here on John's blog.

Subversive Thinking

2007-08-03T10:24:00.000+01:00

I was unaware until yesterday that Cambridge had a Fringe festival, which starts this week. This year, the Fringe included a science comedy cabaret last night at Footlights, and all the hip scientists from the region were there.

The evening started with Mark Stevenson, who did some traditional standup with a vaguely scientific spin. Lots of sex and a small amount of monkeys. (Photos are the traditionally bad mobile phone camera in bar style, I'm afraid!)

Harry Witchel was up next, "you can see me on Big Brother, but you're better off not". He eschewed straight standup in favour of a lecturing style, well-suited to his audience, and presented some scientific analysis of dating and body language. It was a great act, only slightly let down by his audio-visual aids (movies are not best shown on a laptop screen, picked up by a CCTV camera, and relayed to an LCD panel!).

Finally, we heard from Ron Laskey, the creator of Songs for Cynical Scientists, and the man who wrote a song about the day his bicycle disappeared from Cambridge train station, and sent it to the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police by way of a complaint.

Ron (&friends) were terrific, and a superb way of ending the evening. They sang of the joys of flying from Heathrow, of how committees and commitments eat into an academic's days, and of being a post-doc.

Footlights was packed throughout, so perhaps there is an untapped market for scientific comedy in Cambridge. I'd certainly go to any similar events - as long as the publicity reaches me in time!

We're all mugs

2007-08-03T10:08:00.000+01:00

AlertMe employees apparently do not wash up their mugs. We have therefore been given our own mugs to force us to wash up.

They are lovely mugs; although not the easiest to wash.

Another weekend with a sunset

2007-07-31T16:02:00.001+01:00

A Smart Festival at Mercedes World in Brooklands, Sam and Zoe's wedding, and another Impington sunset.

Ooh, a BarCamb

2007-07-26T11:39:00.000+01:00

BarCamp is coming to Cambridge! BarCamb will happen on 24th August. It should be interesting to see how the web2.0ish BarCamp types blend with the science people local to Hinxton. Hopefully there will be some interesting sessions anyway.

There's a MiniBar in London tomorrow too, which sounds like a hoot, although I won't be there.

Star trails

2007-07-23T18:31:00.000+01:00

A beautiful picture of "the graceful concentric arcs traced by the stars" as the earth rotates. (Thanks to Amyas for the link!) It's part of the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day series.

July weekend

2007-07-23T15:26:00.000+01:00

The plants turned out to be from Michael's grandmother - many thanks! Michael did a good job of planting them out before we went away for the weekend.

Whilst away we visited the red squirrels at Formby Point.

Much of the weekend we had brilliant sunshine; hard to imagine the floods elsewhere. When we got back to Cambridge, it seemed as if it could have been dry all weekend, and there was a terrific sunset.

Surprise

2007-07-20T07:59:00.000+01:00

This morning, before 8am, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery man with 27 baby plants for Michael. "Must be planted within 24 hours." We have clematis and honeysuckle and pinks, and no idea who sent them.

There should be an emergency gardener we could call out to identify homes for them in the garden, bring some pots, and do some urgent planting out.

Stardust

2007-07-18T09:33:00.000+01:00

I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman's writing, both novels and shorter format work, although I've never managed to get into his comic books. Stardust has now been made into a film, and comes out in the US next month, and the UK sometime in the autumn. There's always a slight worry when magical and beautifully described books appear in film, but the TV spot for Stardust looks promising, and Gaiman seems happy with it too. I'm looking forward to the release.

Bike to Work Day

2007-07-18T08:56:00.000+01:00

Today a few dozen bikes rode in formation into Cambridge to mark Bike to Work Day. I was on the back of one of them. The police were there too to tell everyone what to do.

The riders got free high visibility jackets with various slogans to encourage people to bike, "Fed up of traffic?", "I'll get there before you" and so on, along with a URL: http://takeyourbiketestnow.com. The bike test is changing, and so if you are thinking of learning, now is the time.

things squeezed into other things

2007-07-17T11:01:00.000+01:00

On Sunday we saw the current Harry Potter film, which was quite enjoyable, although perhaps less strong than the storyline of the book; the necessary trimming to fit within a feature length removed some of the subtleties of the plot. There was less showing the strength and potential of Neville than I would have liked, for example; and although the London flight scenes were lovely, whatever happened to stealth? Moody would surely have disapproved of buzzing tourist boats... I'm looking forward to the final book, although I fear my pre-order (from what a friend splendidly calls WarlikeSingleBosomedLadyDotCom) may arrive in a place where I am not, delaying my reading by a day or so. I don't expect stunning writing, but at least a rollicking storyline.

Last weekend we went camping on the bike; we managed to take all the usual stuff, and there was still plenty of space for me on the back.

On Thursday we visited the former Millennium Dome, the interior of which is a pedestrian boulevard crammed with the usual UK franchise restaurants and bars at ground level, but resembles a plywood copy of Miami above that. There is even a fake beach and palm trees to bring the illusion down to earth. A very strange place. The Indigo2 venue, where we saw Cake (and Ruarri Joseph as support), was excellent, though it remains to see how well it ages. Cake have quit their major record label for a smaller indie one, and seemed grateful that they still get enough publicity to get an audience at all. It was a good gig, with an interesting cross section of people in the audience, reflecting the musical style and politics of the band.

This week, I anticipate less squeezing, except for the usual fitting of many tasks into finite hours.

The other side of Cambridge

2007-07-12T13:06:00.000+01:00

I spent most of yesterday at a secondary school in central Cambridge, explaining the world of engineering and work to a large group of 14 year olds. We spent most of the day examining bridges - what factors have to be considered, what kinds of structure are strong and why, how you can model a bridge using computer aided design (CAD) tools on a PC, and how you can build a bridge from spaghetti if you try hard enough.

I was impressed by the computer suite, which had enough PCs that each teenager had their own. Quite a few of them got the hang of the software quickly and were designing and testing their bridge ideas without help. Others struggled, particularly with starting afresh with a new bridge design. As I explained the process (click to open the File menu, then either Save your current design or click New Design to start again) I realised that in some cases the problem was not unfamiliarity with the Windows paradigm, but that some of the teenagers couldn't read. This startled me more than it should have done.

Overall the teenagers were a good bunch; they all created good bridge designs in the end, and engaged with most of the activities very well. It was a good day for brushing up my jargon. The school is just coming out of Special Measures (ie a period of time attempting to rapidly recover from very poor performance beforehand). Many of the teenagers in this group were Statemented (meaning they have statements of special educational needs, and often behavioural problems as well). The catchment area is difficult (many families with no working parent, etc).

In two years most of these teenagers will have finished school for good. It is very easy to forget that Cambridge is not entirely made up of University or high-tech connected families, who prioritise education. The underside is hidden from many people in the area.

Rainbow

2007-07-04T16:50:00.001+01:00

Last night there was a huge amount of rain, and sun. At one point, looking out of the front door, I could see streaks of light sparkling against the dark sky as huge raindrops fell through a shaft of sunlight.

Although my phone does not normally capture unusual lighting conditions at all well, I was quite pleased with this one.

Lab 1

2007-07-03T15:59:00.001+01:00

The first Crucible Lab was last weekend. It was very tiring - lots of thinking, talking and drinking - but the awardees are a great crowd (following on from previous stars like Sue). Michael has put the photos up here.

The best speaker was Mark Miodownik, winning hands-down with his Materials Library and artistic collaborations. Best poster was Andrew Byde from HP, a talented artist, and best poster talk the enviable Jon Copley, who spends three months each year at sea (or under sea, for preference). As well as networking, pondering career aims, figuring out science policy structures and learning how to handle the media, I was finally able to thank Lord Oxburgh personally for providing the most excellent sausages on sticks!

a cat, a girl, and an experimental meta-narrative

2007-06-29T08:12:00.000+01:00

I've enjoyed a range of web comics over the years. I check a range of comics daily, weekly, or on RSS, for ongoing storylines or random, thought-provoking content - from a long-standing love of Sluggy Freelance to a more recent fascination with Cat and Girl (whose shirts I can often be spotted wearing).

Web comics are not all frivolous, as the Phoenix reports this week; there can be a lot more to them. It's good to see Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl cited here!

Having read that, I now feel I should go and read more Dinosaur Comics - I've only ever seen the odd one before... must wait until the weekend, though...

SETWomen podcasts

2007-06-26T11:57:00.001+01:00

Today SETWomen is launching the first of a series of podcasts about enterprising women and women working in technology fields. I was one of the women interviewed for the series, and I'm very much looking forward to hearing what we all had to say!

Facebook explosion

2007-06-25T15:31:00.000+01:00

Of late, I've realised how much my web usage has moved on. I no longer want to work my way through a pile of comics pages each day, but most still don't provide RSS feeds. I prefer the ones which give me a feed, as they make my daily web trawl shorter. I now see that some comics offer Facebook feeds!

There's a side point there about RSS feeds and how minor, advertising supported websites can manage with them. With comics, I am very happy to subscribe to a feed with both the images and some news items, so I'll still see a request to buy a book or T shirt to support the site, but I won't see the site-supporting ads. I detest partial RSS feeds, and will opt to visit only rarely a site that uses them, rather than regularly headline-checking in a feed reader and sometimes clicking through.

Now even my boss is on Facebook, raising the topical question of whether such people should be one's Friends, if they are just colleagues; but is it wise to refuse a friend invitation from one's line manager? A nightmare of office politics there. All the new kids on the block, such as Michael's younger siblings, are on Bebo, apparently.

Vacation

2007-06-24T20:37:00.000+01:00

Michael and I had a full week away from the internet in Scotland. The scenery, and cloudscapes, were impressive. Once more we took a great many photos without really realising it - page 1, page 2, page 3. Each lot is probably best viewed as a slideshow.

Now it's back to reality and piles of email and a now-urgent requirement to produce an A0 poster about myself, which will require me to consume wine tomorrow night...

13 months later

2007-06-15T13:11:00.000+01:00

A diverting piece in the Indy today about how UK PhD candidates would benefit from more public examinations, to bring openness and, more importantly, a sense of occasion, to the end of an arduous process.

Indeed, the end of a PhD here is a long drawn out affair. The first moment of triumph, and sense of completion, is at the submission of a thesis; after many months of writing, this large document is finally printed and handed over to the authorities. Most candidates then return to their jobs, no longer burdened with writing up at evenings and weekends, or start new employment, rapidly forgetting the trials of the PhD. Months later, after a stressful buildup (during which the candidate frets that they have forgotten what they wrote about, or that they will not be able to answer the questions of their examiner) comes the day of the viva. This is pretty much exclusively either anticlimatic or a nightmare. But afterwards, assuming the student has passed (which most do), life returns instantly to normal, pausing only for some archaic graduation ceremony months later again.

The article also contains the interesting phrase "a good wine needing no bush", which was new to me and Amyas today. Our PhDs were not broad enough to cover such material, alas.

It is almost exactly 13 months since we graduated.