Dr Laura James's writings

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...

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 ...

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 th...

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 s...

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 esta...

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 star...

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

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 foun...

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, althou...

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.

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 ...

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?

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.

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.

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 t...