Dr Laura James's writings

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...

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!

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 inv...

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...

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 inst...

I met the founder of Logiblocs yesterday. I'd never seen this plug and play, electronics and logic building block system before. It's like Lego Mindstorms but on a much lower level; AND gates and signals, rather than programming icons. The blocks are friendly colours and nicely translucent, and as well as hands-on building you can do simulations on a PC or Mac. There are energy blocks, input sensors, output devices, wires, logic gates, delays and so on. There's also a robot kit. Apparently it's huge in France, but hasn't really taken off over here. I felt embarrassed that I didn't know about it - the company has been going for 10 years! - but at least I've seen it now. Although it's clear that part of the company aim is to bring electronics, and the real basics of programming, to kids who would otherwise be unaware of these concepts, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the upcoming range of products, "Logimen", are mostly fighting machines...

At the weekend, Michael and I went camping in Sizewell, at a site recommended by Gray . Although the bathrooms were not the best when compared to previous campsites, the location (right next to a nuclear power station, and the beach) was unparalleled. Photos are here . This week I'll be off to Techlinks and a MentorSET event in Birmingham. Next week, Michael and I are off to Scotland.

After working on research, product design, and finally development, AlertMe is now taking pre-orders from friends and family for a limited edition release before we launch nationally. This is an incredibly exciting moment for all of us, as the system we've been working on is finally becoming a real product. If you'd like to be one of the first 100 customers of a new kind of home awareness system, email me asap! We won't be billing anyone until we ship kits out, and we'll reconfirm your order before shipping. After all this time in development, and with so many great features, it's sometimes hard to step back and see the real user value in the system rather than just the overwhelming coolness and flexibility we have to offer. There will be more content on the website soon, but I can do no better today than to quote my colleague Nik in Marketing: What: AlertMe revolutionary home security & more! You’ll have the ability to check on your home and receive alerts...

Since signing up for twitter , along with the rest of the world, to see what it was like, I haven't thought of many genuinely useful things to do with it. It could, of course, be a way to alert people to things happening at home for AlertMe . But there are many other ways to do that, too. We used to use a whiteboard in the office as an IN/OUT board, and this worked well when there were three of us there on most days. Now there are 18! In addition, we now have phones, which ring when people aren't at their desks, leaving one wondering where they've got to. The solution is clearly that we all use twitter for our current status/location, and that we have a CamVine screen showing the latest tweet for each of us on the office wall. This means at-a-glance where people are information, and it can even be updated remotely using SMS. It's a great idea, only partially marred by the unreliability of twitter. As I thought of it earlier, and explained to my Instant Messaging but u...

Both Michael and I have won places on this year's NESTA Crucible scheme. This is good - three weekends to visit new places and to meet people and work on our interdisciplinary creative thinking - and bad, as Michael being there too makes one fewer new person to meet!

It seems like an age ago now that I ordered a Wattson from DIY Kyoto . It arrived on Friday. This is a very highly priced "limited edition" product (mine is the 89th of 250), made from translucent white acrylic and wood, and £350. This seems a huge amount, and probably is, but is slightly less painful when compared to the Electrisave , at £60-£80. The Wattson is a much more attractive unit, and also comes with a USB link so you can log and process your data yourself (although this requires the use of one of those high-power-consumption computer doodads) - a major selling point for me. Also, as well as a numeric display, there is an ambient colour indicator of how much power you are using. The box is fairly simply made, but looks good. The manual is large and friendly. My first hand-stitched manual. This is the first page of the manual - great text there. Over the years I have bought many products which came with cloths - usually screen cleaners. This is the first to come wit...

Last week Michael and I went to Paris, and filled my camera (!) with photos ( one , two , three , four ). This week, I am in London for Usability in Practice training camp. The basic camp is probably not as intensive as you might expect, but it gets more so if you use the filler time to write out a detailed plan for your own company! We are all dedicated enough to attend on a Sunday and a Bank holiday, anyway. There's a lot of people here, from all around Europe and beyond, mostly web people, more non-profits than you'd expect. I'm envious of those who simply have an e-commerce site to test!

Terence Blacker in the Independent derides the aggressive style of The Apprentice . Although as a rule I agree that this kind of ruthless competitiveness is counter-productive, I wonder how many of today's successful executives still exhibit it; I doubt that it is as out of date as Blacker suggests. The current vogue for entrepreneurship is in evidence outside the world of reality TV. In Cambridge, it has been popular for at least the last decade to trumpet the ability of anyone (and everyone) to have an idea, get some funding, and have a blast running their own business. From undergraduate lectures to seminars for people looking for a career change, starting your own business is sold as the ultimate aspiration, and whilst there is normally a mention of how it might be hard work at times, it is assumed that anyone could do it, particularly with the support networks available in the area. The goal is, of course, not as material as a simple personal fortune, but that the aspirant ...

On April 24th 2002, AT&T Laboratories Cambridge closed down. Daisy organised a great reunion for ex-ORL people last night, and Quentin has put up some photos of us all. It was great to catch up with people, and see that everyone seems to be doing well. Thanks Daisy!

As Michael reported , we had a nice short break on the Norfolk Broads last weekend. You can also get these images as a Photocast , which your RSS reader will eat, or iPhoto might if you have the right version of it. As John commented the other week, this was Coot Club territory - many of the place names were familiar to me, and it was lovely to finally see the environment I read about in Ransome 's books. The area around Wroxham in particular may still be home to Hullabaloos , but most of the trip was very peaceful, and the River Ant where we canoed was idyllic.

I was at the House of Lords on Monday for the inaugural meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Engineering and IT Group, which was essentially an excuse for a very fine lunch, and some useful networking. Alec Broers introduced the main speaker, Lord Browne of Madingley (and of BP). His speech was fairly lightweight, although the topic (raising the profile of engineers and engineering in society) was quite serious. As well as the challenges of education, he discussed the role engineers play in the "greening" of society (climate change and One Laptop Per Child got mentions). One thing which struck me was the call for the constituency of Chartered Engineers to push for more debate of technology topics, demonstrate how they are driving development of cleaner technologies, and so forth. Although I gather there are still a fair few CEngs in traditional industry, even amongst younger engineers, I do not think there are many in the high tech field - AlertMe has just hired its sec...

Karen Spärck Jones died yesterday. She was an amazing woman, both in her own research and her support for other women in the Computer Lab at Cambridge. "Computing is too important to be left to men."

Apparently not just any red wine is good for the heart; you have to pick the right one , says the Independent . Luckily I'm quite fond of tannat grapes, and don't mind the old world style tannic reds; or the dark chocolate and cranberries the article also recommends!

Last night I was in London for an event at the Science Museum 's Dana Centre (where there is a nice cafe; I'd not been there before). Some of the authors of the Royal Academy of Engineering report entitled "Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance" were there, and I'd recommend the report , a fascinating read, and clearly the mix of engineers and social scientists on the working group found the process of interdisciplinary discussion enlightening. It's a very pragmatic study, considering where the world is going and where we are now, not just where we might like to be. The real purpose of the evening was "Keeping an Eye On", a workshop to explore the implications of the report, and part of the Science Horizons project. The scenarios presented weren't great, I thought, particularly the second in which the main point appeared to http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifbe that the radical new technology didn't actually work correctly, but the dis...