Dr Laura James's writings

NationBuilder - a nice example of how legally connecting bits and bobs gets you targeted advertising not for products, but for politics . Fascinating notes from a Harvard workshop about public interest internet - politics, standards and infrastructure. Thanks Niels ten Oever. PwC’s recent Responsible AI Diagnostic Survey of more than 750 senior business executives through September 2019 found that only 34 percent think their use of AI is in line with their organisation’s values . UN entities are not subject to GDPR , it turns out. Cybersecurity for cars is a huge industry - growing to $2.3b in 2025 ! Maybe car companies should have spent money upfront on securing their designs, rather than paying startups to fix problems later. (via Beau Woods ). Cybersecurity for shipping. A fascinating tale of investigating how vulnerable systems are. An investigation into how Boeing's financialisation links to the 737 MAX crashes . An article from early this year by Deb Chachr...

The latest and third edition of the Fairphone was announced . Looks like another solid Android phone, as Fairphone 2 was. Nothing fancy in terms of 'conventional' specs - screen resolution, camera, some processors - although the dual SIM and replaceable battery are nice features. You buy Fairphones for other specs - fairly traded minerals, decent working conditions, repairability - and in this edition, recycled materials, too. I plan to replace my Fairphone 2 - it's given good service, but has also seen heavy use and is starting to show some signs that it may be wearing out. A lifetime of 3.5 years seems quite respectable, for all that it's far less than one might hope for. Fairphone 3 should be maintainable for 5-7 years - if this seems short, you'll be horrified by how electronics manufacturing works . There are p ositive effects to going green - it's not about what you give up , but what you get, as a person.  It's not so clear cut for companies - some ...

Last Friday was the Festival day at Wuthering Bytes , and for the third time I was the compere. Andrew Back did an excellent job curating a great range of speakers as ever. I've written up a few notes on what struck me as most interesting below. The diverse talks managed to weave together several common threads. Community came up in many talks - communities around local projects, building guitars, designing satellites. Some communities are made of citizen scientists measuring air quality, tracking satellites, and even testing genetically modified seeds. Technology in our homes, in our local areas, in our societies and the control we have over it, and the purposes for which it is used. Another theme seemed to be technologies and ideas arising in perhaps less likely places - past and present - in the Calder valley, in catering businesses; nuclear physics in gardening and medical care. Wuthering Bytes 2019 badge JP Rangaswami opened the day with a keynote about the ...

A highlight from this year's Wilderness Festival was Arcadia Spectacular - a small portion of the show was Lords of Lightning . Lords of Lightning - Musical Tesla from Arcadia Spectacular on Vimeo . Looking forward to more Tesla coil action at Wuthering Bytes festival day in a couple of weeks - as ever, a stunning line up of talks on all kinds of science, tech and culture topics. Grab a ticket now and join us in Hebden Bridge for the most authentic tech festival in the UK! An interview with Martin Kleppmann, on formal verification and distributed systems . Formal verification is one of the bits of computer science I think is least well known in the wider 'digital' world; this is regrettable, as it is one approach to tackling some of the problems people encounter with computer systems. It's been great to work slightly with Martin whilst at the Computer Lab in Cambridge. A study finds "older drivers aged 55-75 removed their eyes and attention from the ...

Doteveryone has published our "definition of done". What does it mean to finish a piece of work?  What does good advocacy, protest or resistance work look like now? It turns out clear communication is important. Don Norman on replacing "Yes, and" with "Yes, but, and" - Note that the “but” anticipating the “and” is essential. In order to build on your idea, your colleague does not just add a new improved proposal. First, she provides a critique, which enables you to receive precious and specific information, see weaknesses in your half-backed idea you couldn’t spot yourself, and therefore learn. You and the entire team will then be ready to dive deeper into the next iteration. It is the combination of “but” and “and” that creates real progress, enabling the team to see both positive and negative components and allowing each iteration to go even deeper into the analysis. Research from the Collective Impact Forum on funding for 'backbone' wor...

This year's Festival of Maintenance takes place in Liverpool on Saturday 28th September.  Maintenance is a fascinating topic, cutting across so many parts of our lives and our world, and yet often neglected in how we think about things. Last year's event was very well received and we were delighted to be covered by the BBC World Service and in the Economist, suggesting that perhaps it's the start of a new surge of interest. So the 2019 Festival is a great opportunity to find out why maintenance matters, and to explore maintenance in a complex and changing world. Tickets are just £15 and we have some great speakers and intriguing themes lined up: We start with opening talks from Donna Young, Herbarium Curator, Liverpool World Museum, on keeping dead things dead, and Ben Ward on community IoT sensor networks as a self-made burden. Climate crisis With environmental factors so certain, our built environment will require a far higher value placed on maintenance than at...

I've had Steven Jackson's paper on repair in my reading stack for months. I think I first came across it via Lee Vinsel's Maintainers graduate seminar syllabus . It situates maintenance within socio-technical studies, examining the broken world, the role of the fixer as distinct from the user or designer in innovation, and the risks of focussing on nostalgia or heroism as frames for maintenance. Secondly, attention to maintenance and repair may help to redirect our gaze from moments of production to moments of sustainability and the myriad forms of activity by which the shape, standing, and meaning of objects in the world is produced and sustained—a feature especially valuable in a field too often occupied with the shock of the new. Via Festival of Maintenance team-mate Naomi Turner, an article by Jesse Weaver on resilience as a key design imperative for the future - because we've forgotten to do this recently. We don’t like to think about worst-case sc...

Being back in open source, work on funding it is especially interesting.  Nadia Eghbal writes about the different motivations of funders of open source - corporates, who want technical outputs and brand association, compared to individuals who value the work of others as an inspiration and as training material . Pia Mancini compares GitHub Sponsors to OpenCollective - a useful breakdown of different ways to go about supporting open source maintainers. André Staltz has made an analysis of what funding to a selection of open source projects looks like compared to a 'fair salary' for the maintainers involved, and an interesting critique of what parts of the FOSS ecosystem funding world are visible or not. I hadn't realised TideLift (an open source subscription platform) were VC backed - I wonder how they plan to generate the revenue/exit that will require. A reflection on the vogue for tidying, and Marie Kondo, and modern life : The idea that everything must be subj...