Dr Laura James's writings

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 skil...

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.

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

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

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

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; Governanc...

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 answe...

Unusual sweets, kindly sent by Steffi some weeks ago