I thoroughly recommend this film!

On a seperate, related note, I also watched the new Batman: Gotham Knight, animated movie last night. It’s very much done in the same vain as the “Animatrix” movie, in that it this 80 minute movie is a collection of six short stories all masterfully animated using six very different styles that fills the timeline between Batman Begins, and Batman: The Dark Knight, and introduces some of the characters that appear in the sequel. If you’re an anime fan, definitely check this out.

Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It’s “ubuntu,” he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

This is one of the most touching Ted Talks I have ever seen. With just a few simple, and unbelievably powerful stories, Chris Abani delivers messages of hope, human compassion and what I think he sees as the essential goodness within each of us.

Every day, all of us here, are building gods that have gone rampant.
And it's time we started knocking them down.
And forgetting their names.

Alex doesn’t seem to like Bambi!

The shoot itself was really well laid out and spread throughout the forest, it’s the first time I’ve ever taken part in an event that featured only 3D targets, in other words no 2D pictures! The targets themselves varied in size and shape, from Lions to tiny crocodiles. What made this so challenging though was that a) the targets were generally much further away than on any other shoot I’ve competed in and b) the elevation of the targets also varied. Some were at the top of a hill, others you had to shoot down at from the top of a 30 ft hill. This meant there were no easy shots, particularly if you are shooting with longbow or in the HT category where you have to compensate for elevation and distance far more than archers who use compound bows.

Although I think I did very very well I did loose in inordinate amount of arrows, some were lost in the undergrowth which was very dense, and with some of my others the points came off rendering them useless I even ended up having to borrow a couple of arrows from Richard and John to complete the shoot, but because these were much heavier than my normal arrows it was far more difficult to shoot with them over these distances. .

Simon lining up a shot.

I still think I did really well though, at one point I went through a 6 target spree, scoring a kill / inner kill with my first arrow on each which is a great feeling especially when you having to judge distances with just your instincts. It’s all great preparation for the Southwest Challenge in Devon from the 1st -8th of August, which I’m taking part in this year, and am really looking forward to.

As always I’ve uploaded some pictures to my flickr account …. here.

     Love's Secret

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!

Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

   by William Blake

Been doing a lot of thinking recently about network effects, participation and collaboration. This Ted talk by Clay Shirky, although three years old, was made available a few day’s ago and might seem a bit dated to some, but Shirky demonstrates and explains how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small, often individual, contributors have a significant roles and their fluid cooperation replaces rigid, institutional, planning.

This is hugely relevant to our thinking in our Xiphos division and the projects I’m currently working on.

It was a slightly unusual shoot from my perspective because it was divided into two separate courses, each of 18 targets. The two courses were set up in a field and in a wood about a half a mile away so it might have been a little disconcerting for the locals to see a hundred or so archers wandering through their village. It was also a very wet day, hence a lack of photos, but it was thoroughly enjoyable.

It was also the first shoot in which every member of the club took part - so KNTA was well represented on the day, it was me, Richard, Cliff, Simon, John, Tony, Phil and Alex. I was competing in the mens HT along with Simon, whilst Phil was competing in the Junior HT. Everyone else was shooting longbow on the day. Tony, Phil and Alex all won medals on the day in their individual categories which was great for them and for the club.

It was a great day, as usual all my pictures are on flickr here.

Pretty interesting talk by Prof. Abraham Bernstein. He suggests that the Semantic Web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic, but this is inaccessible to casual users.

Im still mulling over everything he covers … but it’s well worth watching.

The rules are:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

I’ve adapted this slightly, and have only highlighted things I’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (yes I have read it all, The New International Version most recently thanks to Rob)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( yes I have, my father gifted me a copy of the complete works and I did spend an inordinate amount of time reading through it all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (yes it was cos a chick recommended it)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (many, many times)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (good, but not that good)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (have the complete works, i loved this stuff, sad I know)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

       The Fighter

I fight a battle every day
Against discouragement and fear;
Some foe stands always in my way,
The path ahead is never clear!
I must forever be on guard
Against the doubts that skulk along;
I get ahead by fighting hard,
But fighting keeps my spirit strong.

I hear the croakings of Despair,
The dark predictions of the weak;
I find myself pursued by Care,
No matter what the end I seek;
My victories are small and few,
It matters not how hard I strive;
Each day the fight begins anew,
But fighting keeps my hopes alive.

My dreams are spoiled by circumstance,
My plans are wrecked by Fate or Luck;
Some hour, perhaps, will bring my chance,
But that great hour has never struck;
My progress has been slow and hard,
I've had to climb and crawl and swim,
Fighting for every stubborn yard,
But I have kept in fighting trim.

I have to fight my doubts away,
And be on guard against my fears;
The feeble croaking of Dismay
Has been familiar through the years;
My dearest plans keep going wrong,
Events combine to thwart my will,
But fighting keeps my spirit strong,
And I am undefeated still!

        by S.E. Kiser

… but there’s a lot to be said for never giving in.

For those who don’t know {TWR} stands for Team Wolfenstein Resource, its an FPS gaming clan that plays several games created by idSoftware, these include the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it’s sequels Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and the recent Enemy Territory Quake Wars, some of us also play Quake 4. We are, as you might imagine, a pretty diverse bunch - if the phrase unity of opposites ever applied to anything then its definitely a moniker that fits {TWR}. Whilst it’s easy to try to dismiss us a bunch of gaming geeks the reality is that although we all share a common interest the friendships that we have formed have transcended that - the truth is the game is now simply a way we keep in touch, rather than the reason we do. Events like this are really so we can all catch up and see how everyone is doing.

This get-together was special because it was the first time Mike, the founder of Wolfensteinresource.com was able to attend given that he lives in Melbourne in Australia. We chose a weekend that we knew he’d be in the UK visiting relatives with his wife Analina and their son Brodie, who spent most of the weekend clambering over me or chasing me round the kitchen table - he’s a wonderful kid! The weekend was full of humour, it’s a {TWR} tradition to make fun of each other as much as we can, and whilst I’m not going to recount any specific things here, I did laugh my head off when Wim presented me with a radio controlled K.I.T.T car from Knight Rider - it’s an ongoing joke .

Mark+Lois,Me,Wim,Analina+Mike+Brodie,Penny+Alan

Wim+Julia, Penny+Alan, Me,Lois+Mark,Joanne+Marcus

Like all of our events it was awesome, the house that Wim found for us to stay in was amazing and the day out in Stratford Upon Avon was also a lot of fun It was nice to leave everything behind for a weekend and simply have a laugh even if it was mostly at my expense ( thanks Alan! lol ). I can’t wait for the next one.

I’ve uploaded a selection of pictures to my flickr account, and so did Alan to his Picasso account.

To everyone who took part I want to say … Thank You!

    The Conflict of Convictions
       by Herman Melville

On starry heights
  A bugle wails the long recall;
Derision stirs the deep abyss,
  Heaven's ominous silence over all.
Return, return, O eager Hope,
  And face man's latter fall.
Events, they make the dreamers quail;
Satan's old age is strong and hale,
A disciplined captain, gray in skill,
And Raphael a white enthusiast still;
Dashed aims, at which Christ's martyrs pale,
Shall Mammon's slaves fulfill?

    (Dismantle the fort,
    Cut down the fleet--
    Battle no more shall be!
    While the fields for fight in æons to come
    Congeal beneath the sea.)

The terrors of truth and dart of death
  To faith alike are vain;
Though comets, gone a thousand years,
    Return again,
Patient she stands--she can no more--
And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.

    (At a stony gate,
    A statue of stone,
    Weed overgrown--
    Long 'twill wait!)

But God his former mind retains,
  Confirms his old decree;
The generations are inured to pains,
  And strong Necessity
Surges, and heaps Time's strand with wrecks.
  The People spread like a weedy grass,
  The thing they will they bring to pass,
And prosper to the apoplex.
The rout it herds around the heart,
  The ghost is yielded in the gloom;
Kings wag their heads--Now save thyself
  Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.

    (Tide-mark
    And top of the ages' strike,
    Verge where they called the world to come,
    The last advance of life--
    Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!)

Nay, but revere the hid event;
  In the cloud a sword is girded on,
I mark a twinkling in the tent
  Of Michael the warrior one.
Senior wisdom suits not now,
The light is on the youthful brow.

    (Ay, in caves the miner see:
    His forehead bears a blinking light;
    Darkness so he feebly braves--
    A meagre wight!)

But He who rules is old--is old;
Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold.

    (Ho ho, ho ho,
    The cloistered doubt
    Of olden times
    Is blurted out!)

The Ancient of Days forever is young,
  Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;
I know a wind in purpose strong--
  It spins against the way it drives.
What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?
So deep must the stones be hurled
Whereon the throes of ages rear
The final empire and the happier world.

    (The poor old Past,
    The Future's slave,
    She drudged through pain and crime
    To bring about the blissful Prime,
    Then--perished. There's a grave!)

  Power unanointed may come--
Dominion (unsought by the free)
  And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders' dream shall flee.
Agee after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man's changeless heart their way they win);

And death be busy with all who strive--
Death, with silent negative.

    YEA, AND NAY--
    EACH HATH HIS SAY;
    BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.
    NONE WAS BY
    WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;
    WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.

The program for the day was quite varied, with speakers talking about a number of different issues related to higher education We opened with Peter Murray-Rust from the University of Cambridge, who spoke passionately about the need to open up research and research data. Following him was Andy Powell from Eduserv who talked about Web 2.0 and Repositories, I found his talk to be rather enlightening since I’m fairly new to this domain and still learning. Following Andy was Carsten Ullrich from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Carsten had flown in from China to give a presentation on “Why Web 2.0 is Good for Learning and for Research: Principles and Prototypes“. I had already seen a variation of this presentation at WWW2008 last month, in fact those of us who were there felt that his ideas were hugely relevant to some of the issues we are trying to understand around Higher Education so we invited him to speak at our event. Carsten is based in the e-learning lab - and is researching into how learning can be made easier and more interactive using technology. Most recently his team have been looking at Web 2.0 technologies/approaches and how they can applied to learning. What they found is that these approaches were transformational, in other words that you you have to change the way you teach to use these approaches and benefit from them. The final speaker before lunch was Alan Massen from University of Ulster, who presented a project he has been involved in using a Hybrid Learning Model to Describe Learning Practices. The model he presented addresses a issue in higher education around the fact that teachers don’t posses vocabulary to describe their teaching practice/pedagogy, and actually this information is quite important to students as well since it can be used to help them understand their learning goals. After lunch my colleague Chris presented one of our research prototypes, Xiphos Network, which creates a social network from a Web Scholarly Data. Following him another of my colleagues, Ian Corns, presented Project Zephyr, a resource (reading) list application that we will soon be trialling with several institutes here in the UK. Following this, the final session of the day was me, giving a presentation on Open World Thinking. The remainder of this post will focus on what I said during that presentation, with some links at the end to my slides.

Open World Thinking

I started off by introducing myself and explained that whilst my colleagues had presented some examples of applications we had developed that addressed some of the issues raised during the day, my talk was going to be slightly more esoteric … and understanding that we might need to change the way we think about problems.

In order to set the tone for some of what I wanted to address later in the presentation and in attempt to get the audience to start to appreciate the complexity of some of the problems we want to be able to solve but currently can’t because of the way we think about things I posed a couple of questions for the audience:

1. What is the most referred to text in first year
    undergraduate computer science courses in the UK?

and

2. Based on pedagogical approaches, what are the
    recommended resources required to teach an
    emerging subject in a new department a University
    somewhere?

The questions are largely rhetorical, or just plain impossible to answer. So they next thing I asked was whether the audience felt that the reason we couldn’t answer the question was because the data didn’t actually exist? I stated that I believed that the data probably did exist but if it did then it existed within individual institutions, across a myriad of internal systems, and sometimes even across departments. This led me to make the observation that Higher Education Institutes are not just silos they are in fact “silos within silos”. I also pointed out that as long as they remained silos we wouldn’t ever be able to answer the kinds of questions I had posed earlier. Which is the fundamental reason why we need to start finding ways of linking data together across these silos.

I diverted slightly to ask the question “Why have we ended up with silos?”, and offered my own answer that really these silos were a product of close world thinking, historically the systems implemented with institutions where designed to solve a set of problems for that institution, they were never designed with interoperability in mind, and were really about controlling data. However the problems we are trying to solve today are different to the problems of old, the world has changed and so we need to change too. One way of addressing these problems of interoperability, problems of sharing and reuse is to be more Open. Tim Berners-Lee said that “Openness tends to be an inexorable movement through time” and that’s something that I believe is true. I mentioned that I wanted to talk about two aspects of this what I describe as an Openness of Description and an Openness of Access.

However before going any further I wanted to make an important point, that what absolutely not talking about is a technology change. What I’m talking about is a paradigm shift, a very different way of thinking about the problems we are trying to solve. I then displayed a picture of the Linked Data Graph with another of Tim’s quotes that “Linked Data is the Semantic Web done right, and the Web done right”. I explained that this graph represented data sets published by communities in an agreed form in order to facilitate re-use and linking disparate data sets together. Through this level of openness others can come along and build new applications and services that use this data. I talked about how this facilitates the notion of “Designing for Appropriation”, where the creators of an artifact might intend it for a purpose but others can appropriate it for a completely different use. This is also the promise of the semantic web the fact that we no longer need to rely on structures to be defined up front, we can slice and dice this graph of data in order to create structures on the fly. However in order to achieve this we need to design data at the right level of granularity.

So openness of description is about agreeing on ways of describing certain kinds of things. When you have shared, open ways of describing things it makes it easier to Share, to relate things together and to integrate across. I also anecdotally pointed out that as Rob had pointed out to me “through openness of description and dereferencible URI’s you get interoperability for free”, which is true … kind of

One way agreeing on shared descriptions is through the use of Ontologies, I explained what they were and cited a few examples. In order to illustrate the point further I used Alan Massen’s Hybrid Learning model as an example and suggested that since it was a “controlled vocabulary” that defined a set of “concepts” and the “relationships between those concepts” what he actually had was the basis of any ontology. I also suggested that if every institution in the UK/World used this ontology to describe their courses you could present an enormous amount of information to students in a standard way which might make the selection of courses or indeed the choice of which institution to go to more transparent in terms of the learner understanding what the institute provides and how, but also what is expected of them as students.

I pointed out that Talis has worked on developing a number of ontologies that are all being used to underpin the applications we are producing as part of Xiphos, but others outside of Talis have also started to adopt. I pointed the audience to www.vocab.org for more information.

I then went on to talk about Openness of Access ( which is not Open Access ), it’s the idea that we need to provide users with ability to consume content and information anywhere, anytime, anyhow. I also pointed out that unless we do this we can’t create the kind of truly personalised learning experiences we envisage. Part of this is recognisng what I’ve referred to a lot recently as the need to develop applications as Contextualised Perspectives onto this amorphous web of scholarly data.

This is a large part of the paradigm shift, recognizing that if this Web of Scholarly Data exists then we don’t own it, it exists independently of the applications and services that are built upon it. However it becomes the job of application vendors or developers to create value by developing Contextualised Perspectives onto that graph of data that allow their users to perform a set of activities, or achieve some goals that he or she sets out to. In other words this Web of Scholarly Data allows us to create contexts on the fly that are relevant for a task your doing at the time your doing it … in some ways thats the grand vision. A perspective could be a facebook application, or an iPhone app, or some functionality embedded in an institutions VLE, an enterprise application … anything … but the point is that we need to create these perspectives since it’s only through them that ordinary users can make sense of it all.

… *phew* … I think i’ve pretty much covered most of what I said … however for a slightly more coherent view of it all, I’ve written a piece on Open World Thinking in issue 2 of Nodalities.

You can access the slides here.

The polite, reserved exterior of INFPs can at first make them difficult to get to know. They enjoy conversation, however, taking particular delight in the unusual. When INFPs are in a sociable mood, their humor and charm shine through. Disposed to like people and to avoid conflict, INFPs tend to make pleasant company.

Devoted to those in their inner circle, INFPs guard the emotional well-being of others, consoling those in distress. Guided by their desire for harmony, INFPs prefer to be flexible unless their ethics are violated. Then, they become passionate advocates for their beliefs. They are often able sway the opinions of others through tact, diplomacy, and an ability to see varying sides of an issue.

INFPs develop these insights through reflection, and they require substantial time alone to ponder and process new information. While they can be quite patient with complex material, they are generally bored by routine. Though not always organized, INFPs are meticulous about things they value. Perfectionists, they may have trouble completing a task because it cannot meet their high standards. They may even go back to a completed project after the deadline so they can improve it.

INFPs are creative types and often have a gift for language. As Introverts, they may prefer to express themselves through writing. Their dominant Feeling drives their desire to communicate, while their auxiliary iNtuition supplies the imagination. They enjoy metaphors and similes, having a talent for symbolism. They continually seek new ideas and adapt well to change. They prefer working in an environment that values these gifts and allows them to make a positive difference in the world, according to their personal beliefs

So there was something that felt familiar in all that … and for the most part It does feel familiar, although I don’t know why that admission makes me feel awkward. I asked a couple of friends of mine to read it and asked what they thought … they seemed to think it did reflect the kind of person I am … which on one hand feels pretty cool … but on the other hand the notion that my I, or anyone, can be analyzed and reduced down to a four letter acronym disturbs me quite profoundly.

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive

A fascinating TED Talk, if we believe Susan then Darwin’s idea’s around evolution are not just applicable to biology they also apply to culture. “Memetics” is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas or ‘memes’ - naturally vary and that the fittest ideas survive and are absorbed into a our psyche and replicated across generations. Susan argues that Earth now has three replicators - genes (the basis of life), memes (the basis of human culture) and temes (the basis of technology). Technology, through temes, she argues, is now driving us forward as a species, whether we like it or not.

You can read more about this over on Susan’s site.

Truly inspirational … Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations — animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire. Listen for wild stories from the (somewhat raunchy) edge of the animal world.

       The Dream Called Life

A dream it was in which I found myself.
And you that hail me now, then hailed me king,
In a brave palace that was all my own,
Within, and all without it, mine; until,
Drunk with excess of majesty and pride,
Methought I towered so big and swelled so wide
That of myself I burst the glittering bubble
Which my ambition had about me blown,
And all again was darkness. Such a dream
As this, in which I may be walking now,
Dispensing solemn justice to you shadows,
Who make believe to listen; but anon
Kings, princes, captains, warriors, plume and steel,
Aye, even with all your airy theatre,
May flit into the air you seem to rend
With acclamations, leaving me to wake
In the dark tower; or dreaming that I wake
From this that waking is; or this and that,
Both waking and both dreaming; such a doubt
Confounds and clouds our moral life about.
But whether wake or dreaming, this I know,
How dreamwise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary tenure not to break,
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disordered insolence and passion quell,
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he played;
Whether tomorrow's dawn shall break the spell,
Or the last trumpet of the Eternal Day,
When dreaming, with the night, shall pass away.

            -- by Edward Fitzgerald

The conference was two days long and comprised of 26 featured presentations by colleagues from every part of the business as well as a dozen or so three minute lightning talks. There were also a number of breakout sessions where staff split off into their respective divisions and worked on discussing issues around vision, ethics and culture.

From my perspective it was hugely valuable and gave me an opportunity to listen to colleagues from other parts of the business, whom I ordinarily wouldn’t have really gotten to speak to or have ever really gotten to know - thats a failing on my part. In fact this realisation was part of the reason I did a relatively spontaneous lightning talk during which I put up pictures of cartoon characters and revealed the names of colleagues that, from my personal perspective, embodied the characteristics of each character - this was a variation of a game that Sarah often uses when she asks us to think of a character that embodies us on a good day, or when we are in a happy place, and a character that embodies us on a bad day :). The point I wanted to make though was that out of roughly 90 people in the company I could only really do that for maybe twenty: that’s how many people I felt I had enough of a rapore with, and felt comfortable enough around to be able to do that. So if we were here as a group talking about the direction of the company, our shared ethos and developing a culture then how could we do that unless we first got to know who we are. I think the point was well received, and I do believe that events like this internal conference are definitely a step in the right direction and serve as a great way of bringing us together. Oh and incidentally for those who are curious here’s the two characters that I believe reflect my good and bad sides …

click on either for more details

On the friday afternoon, I had to give the penultimate presentation. Rob and I were asked to put together a presentation about our recent trip to WWW2008 in Beijing, and to talk about why the trip was important for the company, and for each us as individuals. Rob and I wanted the presentation to be amusing, however since Rob wasn’t going to be at the conference in person, we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. We opted to record a bunch of pre-canned videos with rob in various guises (including Princess Leia), and I had to work each of the clips in as I was talking. I think it went down really well, the first half of the talk focussed on the conference itself, the people we met formed relationships with, and the importance of that to us as individuals and the company. The second half of the presentation was about the five of us who went and what the journey meant to us a individuals and how it brought us closer as a team. I used a slideshow of photos from the trip which was overlayed with a some music ( well it was me playing my flute ), I talked about the journey we went through, and how dealing with adversity is what often brings teams, or any group of people, together. I finished with a slide that said “a journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles“. I wasn’t sure how this half of the talk would be perceived since it deliberately lacked the outlandish humour of the first half. Yet if the response I got from everyone who came up afterwards is anything to go by, then I think it was really well received.

Our CEO Dave Errington gave the final talk of the conference, and offered a very personal perspective of Talis and what it means to him. It was a brilliant talk, and quite inspired, although my heart did skip a beat at the end when he put a slide that said “the journey is its own reward”, since I had used the same quote on my final slide but removed it about half hour before I presented since I didn’t think I had enough time to explain fully what I meant.

After the conference we all headed to the venue for the Summer Ball and spent the evening eating, drinking and some people even danced it was a great way to end two days of collective thinking and sharing of ideas and vividly recall as I left the ball around midnight feeling very happy, and in many ways re-invigorated.

I spent most of yesterday recovering from the conference and the ball, and also reflecting on it all which is why I’m writing this piece. I spent some time thinking about what the conference had taught me about the people I work with as well as a few things I’d learn’t about myself. At some point yesterday evening, I was sitting and reading through some notes when my ipod randomly shuffled to a song I hadn’t heard in a very long time … and as I listened to it I realised that it epitomises the image I have in my mind of the kind of people I work with, the kind of people make up Talis, and the kind of ethos we share, the resilience we have, the “fuck off great big ambitions” and dreams we share (as Dave put it), … that something inside that is so strong …

This talk begins with an overview of software development at Adobe and a look at industry trends towards systems built around object oriented frameworks; why they “work”, and why they ultimately fail to deliver quality, scalable, software. We’ll look at a possible alternative to this future, combining generic programming with declarative programming to build high quality, scalable systems.

… a very interesting talk, that raises some important questions, about the very nature of software development.

A number of us at Talis have been thinking and talking a lot about DataPortablity, my colleague Danny even went as far as recording the YouTube video above, which I think is excellent. When Google recently launched their Friend Connect service earlier this month, it seemed like a step in the right direction. Finally I’d be able to move my social graph from one service to another … I mean it’s my data after all, right?

I had been wondering, as I’m sure many others have, how established services like Facebook would react to Google’s initiative and indeed any initiative by the more open dataportability movement in general, especially when you consider that the only real value Facebook actually has is all the data we, as users, have entered into it. I wasn’t too surprised to read this article by Scott Gilbertson over on Wired Blog, which describes pretty much the kind of reaction that I had expected from FaceBook … but what did surprise me was that Facebook’ terms and conditions do actually state the following:

You may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository
which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook
User for such Facebook Properties)to access or share the Facebook
Properties without our prior written consent.

Scott sums it up quite succinctly when he says “Facebook’s TOS make no bones about who controls your data. The answer is: not you”. He is also right to point out that Google’s motives are far from altruistic:

But don’t go getting idea that Google is really all that concerned with freeing up your data. Google, like every other site, wants a slice of the pie. If Google helps you gain a little control at the same time, consider it a happy coincidence, not a motivating factor.

Yet what does frustrate me about Facebook is that they are using the tired old excuse that they are trying to keep their users safe; that their users privacy is paramount, which is laughable as Scott also quite rightly points out:

Facebook’s own failed Beacon ad platform effectively showed that, deep down, Facebook doesn’t care about your privacy, it cares about making money off your data. And to do that it has to make sure it keeps that data locked up on the site. Letting Google siphon your info off to other social sites isn’t going to help line Facebook’s coffers.

There’s something deeply wrong with the idea that I can create data about myself, and my relationship with other people, but then that data doesn’t belong to me. For me this situation highlights the importance of DataPortability, as Danny so vividly puts it, to Get Your Data Out. Scott is probably right when he observes:

If we want an open social web, we’re going to have to build it ourselves, using technologies that no one company controls.

• Blue Oceans - Ian Davis and Zach Beauvais discuss the ‘Blue Ocean’ opportunity facing those who embrace the Semantic Web
• Social Networking - Garlik CEO Tom Ilube introduces the notion of ’social verification’
• Environment - David Peterson puts semantic technologies to work in the fight against Climate Change
• Predictable Mavericks - Talis CEO Dave Errington looks back at the company’s past, and forward to a semantically powered future
• Open World Thinking - by me! in it I offer my thoughts on how Semantic Web developers need to see the world differently
• Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters - Read transcripts of recent conversations with these factual information powerhouses, and learn how the Semantic Web is being put to work.

Talis has launched a magazine called Nodalities that bridges the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements. Supplementing our blogs, podcasts, and Semantic Web development work, Nodalities Magazine is available - free - online and in print, and offers an accessible means to keep up with this rapidly evolving area.

As the Internet is being overrun with video traffic, many wonder if it can survive. With challenges being thrown down over the imbalances that have been created and their impact on the viability of monopolistic business models, the Internet is under constant scrutiny. Will it survive? Or will it succumb to the burden of the billion plus community that is constantly demanding more and more?

Download here

Just finished listening to this really interesting panel discussion made available over at IT Conversations, on the subject of whether the net needs an upgrade based on the changing and ever increasing usage patterns and demand from an ever increasing base of users. The panel is comprised of Van Jacobson, Rick Hutley, Norman Lewis and David S. Isenberg.

We have seen the rise in demand for video online, increases in peer to peer data, and whole virtual world syndrome. The way we are using the internet today is radically different from what it was originally conceived as. The internet as such is evolving and as been from the moment it emerged and perhaps part of the problem is that it is evolving so quickly, it represents a myriad of innovations but has also created a number of complications. If you consider that when the net was first and conceived and used it was a closed system at any point in time every point in the system was a trusted point, we can contrast this with what we have today where the open nature of the internet has abrogated this principle. Yet the very openness of the internet is what has driven it’s massive growth, we have seen entire industries emerge during this growth, entire businesses formed around the pervasiveness of this infrastructure.

It was interesting listening to the panel most of whom agreed that some kind of upgrade was needed, yet for me the point Van made seems profound, even though I don’t fully grasp it : he argued that it isn’t the net that needs upgrading its our point of view that needs to change. Instead of looking at the network we need to look at the content because thats what we are now using the internet for, we need to think in terms of that content moving around, whats the best way to move it around and secure it based on what it is.

I think I need reflect a little longer on this discussion and better understand the arguments presented by the various panelists, it’s difficult to switch from being a consumer or in essence a user of services or abstractions built upon this vast infrastructure to actually trying to start to think about the net as a physical infrastructure … but it’s given me great food for thought.

The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual - presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures. Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces. But can these UIs become the norm?

Over on his blog, Alex Iskold has written a wonderful piece on The Rise of the Contextual User Interfaces. In it he contrasts old school traditional user interfaces from the days when Microsoft Windows dominated everyones interaction with a computer, to the new generation of contextual user interfaces that the likes of Flickr, 37 Signals, Shelfari etc. all seem to have embraced.

I think contextual UI’s are something that we all subconsciously appreciate but don’t really think about , they just seem to work, they just seem to let us do what want to - and therein lies their beauty. It’s their elegance and their simplicity that makes them a pleasure to use. They only tell us what we need to know, if we need to know it, they don’t confuse us by presenting a plethora of options that we then have to decipher before we can continue, or indeed hide important functionality behind an “advanced” setting somewhere. It’s for this reason I completely agree with Alex when he describes how one of philosophies of the old UI approach was entrenched in the idea of presenting the user with all the information all of the time, which was overwhelming. The move towards Contextual User Interfaces is really about building user interfaces that respond to the way that users interact with them - and ideally to the individual user him/herself.

As hardware and processors have become more powerful we have become better able to pre-process and analyse information for users in order to give them exactly what they need when they need it.
This transition towards being context aware isn’t something that happened overnight, it’s happened gradually over time as technologies have matured and improved to allow us to do things that weren’t necessarily possible before. One often touted example of this is the Spell Checker, I remember when you had to explicitly invoke the spell checker in Microsoft Word, whereas now its done automatically in the background as you type. So I do wonder how long it will be before processing becomes cheap enough for us to process entire databases for users in order to derive better context.

But one of the stumbling blocks is that whilst we can derive or assume some context within an individual application we still don’t have the tool’s to computationally describe and communicate context where reasoning and inference is distributed. Why is that important? well to me my context, as an individual, is in some ways predictable and in others it’s highly temporal. In an ideal world there would be a way to describe who I am, what my interests are in general, but also what also what my interests are at a given point in time. If we could formalise that description, using an standardised ontology, then we could provide that ontology as an input into any application we used. That’s where a lot of the work that my friend Alan has been doing has been focussed, and it’s also one of my areas of interest.

That’s why Alex’ post was so wonderful, it resonates with an articulates many of the things that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

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The BBC is opening up and making its data accessible to development teams outside the beeb - they are also following the Linked Data approach …

We have been following the Linked Data approach - namely thinking of URIs as more than just locations for documents. Instead using them to identify anything, from a particular person to a particular programme. These resources in-turn have representations, which can be machine-processable (through the use of RDF, Microformats, RDFa, etc.), and these representations can hold links towards further web resources, allowing agents to jump from one dataset to another.

They have designed and published a simple but versatile ontology for describing Programme data which can be accessed here.

Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

I was amazed watching this fascinating Ted Talk, you have to see it to believe just how much Crows as a species have adapted to human beings.

Instead of being limited to keywords, Powerset allows you to enter keywords, phrases, or questions. Instead of just showing you a list of blue links, Powerset gives you more accurate search results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles.

I have to confess I am very impressed with it - I used it for a few hours late last night to help find some references for a blog piece I’m writing and loved the way it seemed to understand the concepts I was asking about rather than giving me matches based on keywords. Currently it only searches Wikipedia but does also provide results from Freebase as well. I really find the MiniViewer useful, it allows you to view a short result snippet presented on the results screen within the other original context it was extracted from, this also makes the search results feel interactive.

Here’s the demonstration video that explains how Powerset is different using some cool examples:

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

I’m really interesting in seeing where Powerset goes next …

       A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

        --by Edgar Allan Poe

John deserves a huge amount of credit for this contribution.

    1913 A Boy's Will
       Revelation

WE make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

          -- by Robert Frost

In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to Superstring Theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. This is a wonderfully visual and accessible Ted Talk.