Laura's Blog

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!