There is no Guitar

Great article over at Gamers with Jobs about a near religious experience with Guitar Hero 3. I've not played Guitar Hero, but I can certainly relate to that moment in-the-zone when your senses extend beyond your body, and for a brief few moments you are one with the world.

The guys at Slashdot don't seem convinced by the whole religious experience angle, but I'm not so sure. There's something rather pure and beautiful about those times when the world fades away; something that even a cheap plastic guitar can't spoil.

At this festive time, when the media is full of Coca-Cola Santa Clauses, predictable Xmas Number Ones, and Witless Elf Movies, its actually quite nice to see something more deep and meaningful - even if it is in the aisles of Best Buy.

So here's to all those moments of Guitar Hero calm in a bad and crazy world...

The Descent (from above)

Earlier this week I managed to watch The Descent, a British horror flick that I missed on its cinema, rental, DVD, and satellite spiral. Luckily the nice folks at Channel 4 marched it into the last broadcast saloon known as terrestrial telly and I finally caught up with it. Unfortunately they failed to warn me that it is the scariest movie ever made :-(

Essentially the story is that there is a group of intelligent, peaceful cave dwellers living under the Appalachian mountains, every so often they venture above ground and hunt for food, but otherwise keep themselves to themselves. Then one day a bunch of psychotic killers drops into their midst, all of a sudden the cave dwellers find themselves fighting for their lives as the deranged invaders storm every last corner of their home, smashing in dwellers heads with rocks, drowning them and being positively vicious with a pick axe.

The dwellers fight back, but because they are blind they have no real chance against the stronger, more intelligent predators that are slowly wiping them out. The invaders even get a bit bored and start murdering each other at several points in the story. The film ends with the brave dwellers taking out the invaders main soldier (at a huge cost if the screaming and splatters are anything to go by), while the invader's leader sinks completely into madness.

The weird thing is that the film makers decided to tell the story from the point of view of the psychotic invaders (who of course are humans, in fact a party of women going caving), almost ignoring the noble family lives of the dwellers (who of course are presented as hideous monsters).

I just don't buy this telling. It seems obvious to me that it is the women who are the most terrifying monsters, take the score at the end of the film:

• Humans 10
• Monsters 3

and that's with the monsters having the advantage of being on their home turf. Let's face it, as soon as the word gets out that the mountain's full of pasty-looking monkey-men they're stuffed (probably in the 'and mounted' sense of the word).

It's not the first time that I've noticed this weird twisting of the tale. Take the film Aliens (the second one with James Cameron at the helm). Its true that at the beginning of the film around 300 people get turned into human Cow&Gate paste for the Alien nursery (shame it wasn't those Spartans - that would have shown them!), but look what happens when we later inject a measly 13 soldiers into an otherwise peaceful alien colony. Thousands of aliens get wiped out in all manor of gun-porn ways, and then at the end, as if to add insult to injury the person who isn't a soldier goes all fancy dress in a JCB costume and tears great lumps out of the alien queen. But wait - there's more. Not intent with this carnage they proceed to nuke the remaining confused aliens from orbit.

• Humans: pretty much everything
• Aliens: 313

So the moral is that if you're at a party and notice a corner of wan-looking slimy cave dwellers, another of slick-headed Giger aliens with acid for blood, and a third of ditsy young women in day-glo jackets, go and sit with the monsters - you're statistically less likely to get your head bashed in.

JISC CETIS Conference 2007

This week I went to the JISC CETIS Conference in Aston as a panelist in the Semantic Structures for e-Learning session. After my bleak interaction with the e-learning community back in ICALT, I was pleasantly surprised to find a really progressive mood.

In particular Mark Stiles gave a characteristically candid closing keynote that was uncannily like my own talk on Web Literacy a few weeks ago. Mark came at the problem from a policy angle (rather than a technology one), and asked the question of whether VLEs were the new orthodoxy, constraining and limiting student learning rather than promoting it. He lamented the control and manage culture in HE, and pointed out that students were breaking free of controlled institutional e-learning systems and beginning to use public applications and sites (to which they occasionally invite a lecturer - but only if they like them!).

There is definitely something in the air...

The Semantic Structures panel was a similar pleasant surprise. I came prepared with what I thought was a fairly outlandish position - that the Semantic Web was already happening in the real world, and that we needed to stop speculating about applications in a far semantic future and start worrying about how semantic applications might have an impact now.

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For me this raises a number of key questions about how we articulate the advantages of RDF and OWL over XML and XSD for Web 2.0 style mashups - after all they both enable encourage well-formed metadata and interoperability, so why use RDF?

I was therefore surprised to find myself emerging as the hardest Semantic Web person on the panel (at Southampton this is rarely a position I find myself in!), so perhaps my main point was lost somewhat. I invoked the characters from the Wizard of Oz as examples of people who get so wrapped up in the journey they don't realise what they already have - my point was that in some ways the Semantic Web community is like that, so concerned with the technological upper levels of the layer cake that they miss the significance of the emerging data web that is already out there.

The other panelists gave very interesting position statements which introduced me to a number of new things, including Cohere, GRDDL and RDFa. The audience also raised some interesting questions, but mostly they boiled down to the same one that I had raised. Why use RDF when XML gives you so much for so little effort? Alistair Miles described this as a variant of the Tragedy of the Commons - in that RDF only shows real advantage when there are already many people publishing it, and the conclusion of the session was that to push this work forward in our world we should all becoming semantic extroverts - hoping to achieve some sort of viral effect.

I had the chance to run this past Wendy Hall yesterday. Wendy was head of group when I was studying for a PhD in Hypertext, and is now a co-founder with Tim Berners-Lee of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) based at MIT and Southampton. Wendy was pretty robust in her defence of the Semantic Web as a means to interoperability, and pointed out the semantic standard's advantages over POX (that RDF/OWL is more shareable, more flexible, and encourages general rather than bespoke solutions). I think that the advantages at the top end of the Semantic Stack (i.e. the ability to automatically exchange ontologies and the functionality that this unlocks) is rather secondary to Wendy - a bonus if you like - and that the main goal is still to create a machine readable web using the best language that we can (and in most terms that is RDF/OWL).

Her approach is 'Build It and They Will Come' - which takes us back to Mark Stile's keynote. Mark mentioned this as one of many strategies to encourage students to use e-learning systems. Actually he followed this with a 'But Of Course They Wont' based on some of his past experiences. Mark encouraged us to think about how we can engage with students without trying to control what they are doing, and I wonder if that's not the best message for the semantic web as well: to engage with Web users, find the best ways in which to help them express and exchange their data, and introduce the Semantic Web quietly, as and when the real needs arise.

Why the Semantic Web hasn't failed, and how we shouldn't fix it

(a position statement for the JISC CETIS conference, Aston, UK, held Nov 2007)

I've been invited to present a position statement at this years JISC CETIS conference on the topic of Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning. The session aims to explore the potential of Semantic Web technologies in e-learning, and also raises the question of why Semantic technologies haven't been more successful in the e-learning domain, especially given the amount of academic interest in them.

We have become used to seeing the Semantic Web through the Semantic Stack (the infamous layer cake), a layered model of protocols that builds from the syntactic, through the semantic and logic, to higher level concepts such as trust.

This is a useful technical view, and helps to place the Semantic Web standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SWRL, etc) in context. However, it does not communicate the original vision of the Semantic Web. In his Scientific American article, Tim-Berners Lee (and co-authors Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila) say that the Semantic Web will:

"...open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together."

This goal - of a machine processable web of information - lies behind the set of Semantic Web technologies. The vision is clear, that we take the Web's open approach and apply it to machine-readable information, providing a global platform for knowledge systems.

The Semantic Web family of standards helps us toward this goal in three ways, in that they:

• Promote Well-Formed Meta-Data - using the Semantic Web stack we are forced to build properly considered ontologies to describe a given domain. This makes it more likely we would produce a well designed schema, even if it doesn't guarantee it.
• Encourage Interoperability - because ontologies in the Semantic Web are explicitly named we can remove ambiguity about terms, even in documents that mix statements from different ontologies. This doesn't guarantee interoperability (because we might be using different ontologies) but it does guarantee that at run-time our systems can identify when they do and do not mean the same thing.
• Enable Reasoning - because we can define reasoning rules (for example simple transitivity, or other deductive logic) that can simplify the creation of software that processes the data (because we can move some of the burden from the software itself to a reasoning engine).

In e-learning we might see see benefits in well-formed metadata from an increased inter-relatedness of e-learning standards (for example, relating Learning Object Metadata to Learning Design Schemas); benefits from interoperability in the form of exchangeable records (for example, between Student Information Systems, Portfolios and Item Banks); and benefits from reasoning in the shape of aligned teaching or supporting independent learners (e.g. linking syllabus to teaching materials to assessment).

In the Learning Societies Lab we have been particularly interested in the potential of reasoning to create aligned teaching. A few years ago we created a simple demonstrator that reasoned about which questions might be appropriate for a given syllabus by examining a SKOS model of the subject domain.

While it is technically interesting to explore these issues there is a real problem in getting the information into the right forms to apply the reasoning techniques. In the aligned teaching case it would mean having an institutionally agreed ontology for each topic, and having all syllabus and all questions annotated using it.

In fact while the upper layers of the Semantic Web Stack have attracted a lot of academic interest, it is the bottom layers that have seen the most success: the core naming scheme of URIs and the Syntax of XML. In the last few years XML has had a massive impact on the way in which people use the Web, and has enabled cornerstone features of Web 2.0 such as RSS feeds and Mashups based on XML APIs. To a certain extend XML on its own takes us a long way towards well-formed meta-data and interoperability, and the data-integration that it enables has already had a significant impact on our approaches to e-learning.

In my last post I talked about the rise of a New Web Literacy, a preparedness amongst the new generation of students to share, trust and co-operate online, and to take ownership of their digital identity and environment. This is all enabled through loosely coupled systems, often connected together using RSS or XML APIs. There is a growing feeling amongst e-learning technologists that we should shift away from institutionally owned Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) towards Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) that are more respectful of this Web Literacy.

So URIs and XML have already taken us a long way into a new world of data integration that has already radically changed the way in which we think about e-learning. But the Semantic Web is much more than just data integration.

The ability to describe ontologies means that ontologies themselves can be exchanged as data, opening up the possibility of a system automatically mapping two ontologies (using a mapping service that is aware of both) and thus learning new ontological terms.

The ability to articulate rules means that behaviour that is currently implicit in programs could be pushed into the data cloud, not only simplifying development (because you could reuse reasoning engines rather than writing bespoke code), but also potentially allowing systems to share behaviour and automatically extend their functionality (by discovering new rules).

This is a much more powerful and open approach than current Web 2.0 style mashup mechanisms, but it has a significantly higher overhead, and the end result depends on the network effects of many other systems taking the same approach.

If the Semantic Web is to become a reality then I believe that it is necessary to build it from the bottom up. We already have an emerging Data Web, so the challenge is to find ways to naturally progress up the Semantic Stack until we have an emerging Semantic Web.

In this view the Semantic Web hasn't failed, it just hasn't succeeded enough. There are a number of ways this incremental change could potentially happen. One possibility is through the promotion of a number of simple but key ontologies (Dublin Core, FOAF and SKOS come to mind), another is to explore RDF as a basis for REST services rather than POX. The difficulty is that there must be a clear and immediate advantage for this to happen (perhaps the ontology resolution services mentioned above, that could reconcile RDF statements from multiple sources into the particular ontology that a given system understands).

This view also means that we shouldn't try and fix the current situation - but instead should focus on building on it. There are simple ways in which e-learning system builders might contribute:

• Use real REST services rather than XML-RPC as your externally facing interface. As a RESTful approach (using the HTTP header commands to control a set of resources rather than encoding functions in the URI) naturally builds a web of data.
  
• Leverage existing key ontologies in order to help build a suitable mass of RDF content based on core schema.
  
• A little goes a long way - so we should all be semantic extroverts and publish everything that we can (within the constraints of privacy).

One particularly interesting question is whether we can apply the light touch of Web 2.0 to ontology building. This idea is appealing because people are already evolving dynamic vocabularies (in the form of tags) that are not to far from being folksonomies (simple ontologies built by the people). Other systems, such as Semantic Wikis, go further and help people design ontologies with an instance-first approach based on semantics-on-demand (you define a type or relation as you need it). Folksonomies might also be a driver for the evolution of the Semantic Web as the mid-levels of the Semantic Stack would allow these folksonomies to be articulated and thus exchanged and shared.

E-learning systems are changing. In order to address the new Web Literacy they need to be decentralised, loosely coupled, and flexible.

My view is that the Semantic Web could form a key part in this change, with RDF and its associated languages forming the basis of data exchange (and enabling more powerful mashups). To get there we need to figure out how to incorporate semantics into our existing systems and practices, and to demonstrate real advantages without real sacrifices (and in particular to respect the informality of users). Only in this way will we build up the momentum, acceptance and motivation that will make the Semantic Web a reality.

The New Web Literacy

I've just given a seminar to my research group (The Learning Societies Lab) on the notion of the New Web Literacy, how e-learning systems should change to support it, and what we should be doing as e-learning researchers to enact and understand that change.

I have wanted to present something on this topic ever since I went to ICALT earlier this year. There seemed to be two groups of people present at the conference: practitioners that had discovered Web 2.0 applications and were having great fun experimenting with them, and more traditional e-learning researchers still exploring the cornerstones of traditional e-learning thinking (Virtual Learning Environments, SCORM, Learning Design, Learning Objects and the like).

My thought was that the excited practitioners are like the Nouveau Riche of eighteenth century London. Back then new money was flooding into the Capital from the colonies and into the hands of people who weren't used to having it. For the first time the Old Money, established families in the Gentry and Aristocracy, were faced with people with a different mindset who were experimenting with their wealth, exploring new forms of literature and music, and engaging with architecture and fashion with no regard for the established rules or structures. At ICALT I thought I saw an analogy in the form of the Nouveau Technorati (New Technical People) - who didn't respect the old rules of the e-learning world and instead were eagerly experimenting with the new generation of Web 2.0 technologies.

I began to wonder what the underlying cause of this was - what is it about blogs, wikis, social software, resource sharing and tagging that strikes such a chord? I'm not the only one left wondering:

The quote is from Time Magazine, when they broke with convention and voted "You" person of the year, 2006. I think they perfectly captured the zeitgeist, and cut straight to the key issue about these technologies - which is that they are about empowering their users, and giving the ownership of technology back to You.

But who is "You"? Surely the claim isn't totally Universal? Diana Oblinger starts to tease this apart in her work on understanding the new students. She talks in generational terms about the attitudes of students.

We've got used to the Baby Boomers (people in the demographic upsurge that followed the World Wars, and who had their teenage years in the sixties and seventies) teaching Generation X (the disaffected young people who rebelled against the dominance of the boomers, and who had their teenage years in the eighties and nineties). An important distinction between these generations is Computer Literacy, which Boomers need to learn, but which Gen-Xers grew up with. Diana Oblinger makes a case for the emergence of a new generation that she calls the Millenials (but who have also been called the iPod Generation, or Generation Y), who have their teenage years in the 2000s.

Millenials have not just grown up with computers, they have grown up with the Web, and are used to being connected and having information at their fingertips. They also have a radically different approach to participation and privacy that sets them apart from the Gen-Xers, I think that a good term for this attitude and openness is Web Literacy.

As far back as 2000, people were noticing a different mindset emerging in students. Jason Frand listed a number of characteristics:

• Computers aren't technology - just part of the furniture
• Reality is no longer real - or perhaps Unreality is no longer Unreal - students view activities in the virtual space as being as real as things that happen in their physical lives
• Multitasking is a way of life - they have become used to multiple information channels
• Internet is better than TV - they are the first generation to watch less TV than their parents
• Nintendo over logic - they prefer to try something out than have it explained to them
• Staying connected - they are used, through mobile phones and broadband, to being connected to each other and the information world at all times

Marc Prensky has a great way to talk about the differences between Millenials (who have this mindset) and Boomers and Gen-Xers (who don't), he talks about Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants.

It is interesting to focus on the different attitudes to education held by Digital Natives and Immigrants. The argument is that Immigrants are much more passive that Natives, and prefer their learning experience to be structured, focused and based on individual experience, while Natives prefer a multi-tasking, random-access approach to information which is much more interactive and collaborative. They also see learning as a natural part of their world, rather than an unnatural adjunct.

If we take these characterisations of our students we can then look at how our current e-learning technologies match up with them to find out if we are providing the sort of support that our Web Literate students actually need.

E-learning at the moment is dominated by the notion of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), these are monolithic systems that provide a single port of call for students and where they can get access to resources, receive notifications about course events and interact with their teachers and peers. It seems obvious that this kind of structured experience, owned wholly by institutions and teachers, does not fit the kind of flexible, random-access mindset of the new Web Literate students.

(above image is from a generator at http://generator.kitt.net/)

Actually VLEs have fulfilled an important need. For a number of years the potential of technology has exceeded practitioners ability to use the technology (making course notes available online for example), this technology deficit decade (from around 1995-2005) was well served by VLEs, but their time is probably over.

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are an alternative vision that have emerged in the last few years. PLEs explode the functionality of a VLE, the idea is that a PLE is a learning management system used by a student to draw together data and functionality from a wide range of other applications and services. For example, to gather resources from online repositories such as Flickr, news feeds from sites like Technorati, and more specific information from portfolio servers and institutional Student Information Systems.

Examples of PLE software include the early Colloquia system (a kind of desktop learning organiser), PLEX (an organiser that is integrated with a variety of online services), and more recently Elgg (an open source social networking system).

But you could go further. Flock is a new Web browser that understands the APIs of a number of key websites, this allows some very powerful data integration (such as dragging photos from Flickr into Facebook to share them with friends), and NetVibes offers a sophisticated way in which to build and customise a homepage that uses a wide range of widgets to draw information together. This effectively means that one can imagine an extreme PLE made up solely of publicly available Internet applications and services. For example, NetVibes can display calendars constructed of shared iCal files (so imagine if institutions published timetables, coursework deadlines and exam schedules in this format), displays RSS (what if courses had an RSS feed?) and has widgets for key social sites like Facebook (perfect for organising group work).

We can thus see an e-learning spectrum, from VLEs where the institution has almost total ownership, through PLEs, to entirely Web-based systems, where it is the students who have the ownership of their learning experience.

The problem is that we could take this argument a lot further. If we say that students can build their own learning experiences using open online applications, then surely they can do the same thing with content, drawing on online tutorials, help files and examples, creating ad-hoc learning groups using goal-sharing systems like 43-things, and building an independent portfolio of work. In this world, all learning is informal, and the institutions role is purely as an acreditor.

I accept that there is a place for this kind of learning (after all, we don't stand intellectually still after our University days are over), but I think that just as student ownership matters, so does institutional ownership. Institutions have values that they pass on to their students, and provide a service that guides and supports students to achieve a high quality of learning in a relatively short space of time. It is this spirit - and the access to the professional staff that embody it - that constitutes the added value of an institution, and which students are willing to pay for.

So the question is how could we support student ownership of the experience, without throwing away the institutional ownership of the provision?

I think that the answer is to keep the system in the cloud, in other words institutions provide a number of loosely coupled tools that can be appropriated by students or staff as needed. To make this work the tools have to be functionally focused and have open applicability so that they are easy to incorporate into peoples working spaces, and can be used flexibly in as many different ways as possible. To be successful I also think that it's necessary for these tools to exist as a public service, but also to be available as open source solutions so that Institutions can run them locally and thus guarantee a certain level of service to their students and staff (in a similar way to the email systems they run today).

I'm currently trying to create a Learning Societies Toolkit, which packages of number of applications with these characteristics that have been developed in the Learning Societies Lab here at Southampton, and am also intending to create public versions of them so that teachers and students at institutions without the capability (or inclination) to move forward in this way have a way in which to access them.

Before I finish its worth drawing attention to a marvelous piece of work undertaken by the Digital Ethnography department at Kansas State University, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Wesch. The following video presents the result of 200 students surveying themselves using a collaborative web authoring tool (Google Docs):

Its a very evocative video, but I don't entirely agree with the conclusions (that a solution to personalised learning is to return to chalk and talk teaching methods). I think that instead we could concentrate on building e-learning systems that don't try and enclose students in a safe but suffocating environment, and instead look at building systems that empower both teachers and students, helping them to interact and support one another in an open, flexible way.

It's time to reclaim the virtual learning environment.

The VLE is dead, long live the VLE!

Joining the 21st century

Recently we moved to Wiltshire, a beautiful county, but one which has only recently discovered electricty (and some of the locals still arent convinced). With a bit of effort we managed to find an ISP with telephone wires at least nearby, but it has taken us a lot longer to sort out our television reception. Our house has a television arial the size of the Eiffel tower on the roof which provides us with a fuzzy four terrestial channels, but no digital TV reception, and the cable channels dont have cables long enough to reach us.

So last week, with a heavy heart, I ordered Sky Satellite installed - although its the vegetarian FreeSat version, which means that I only paid Mr Murdoch for the equipment and installation (no insiduous running costs for me, thanks!)

It's been a bit of a culture shock; as students we had basic cable, and in our first place we had FreeView (that is early freeview, with just a few extra channels + a couple of those shopping channels where they try to sell you some tatt and hope you've never heard of eBay). So when it took me nearly half an hour just to flick through the ruddy things on Sky I was a bit taken aback. Now I'm frightened to look again, in case I get lost in some horrible US import, or become mesmerised by one of the cheap music channels with those inane phone in polls running at the bottom (how compatible are you and your pet?)

To make matters worse I finally invested in a Flatscreen Digital LCD Widescreen HDTV. Since the last time I bought a TV none of those words actually meant anything in the context of television it has also made a dramatic difference (if only because I can now move the TV without using a forklift truck). Next I was faced with the challenge of getting it all working with my PVR, VCR and Wii - something that the guy who installed it really couldnt be bothered with (he managed to get the output of the PVR running into the output of the Sky box, which probably caused something of a bit war somewhere in the middle of the lead).

My father-in-law went through this process recently, and unhappily reflected on the fact that his first TV had one flick-switch on the side that selected between BBC and ITV, and that was about it. Now he has to worry about widescreen flags on scart leads, alternative TV resolutions, and multiple channel sources. He's an experienced engineer, so you can imagine what the experience must be like for the less technically adept amongst us.

Anyway, I think that's all sorted now, so I can finally enjoy the best entertainment the twentieth century can throw at me. Sadly, this turns out to be on those four channels that I started with, although at least now they arent fuzzy :-(

A needle in the eye for science

On my commute home the other day I was listening to the Radio 4 PM show, which had an article about acupuncture. It was inspired by a news item about a recent trial (also reported by BBC news online) and was framed as an interview with two experts. One expert (I couldn't find out his name) was pro-acupuncture, the other (Ben Goldacre) was quite sceptical.

Now I have no axe to grind about acupuncture - it looks kinda sharp, but people seem to like it and as far as I can tell no-one's bled to death yet, but I found the whole article deeply depressing. Why? Because the scientific results were being horrifically misrepresented, and even the sceptic seemed oblivious to the perversion.

So here's the experiment and results in a nutshell:

Over 1100 patients take part in the study. One group is given conventional therapy, one is given acupuncture and the third is given a sham acupuncture treatment (that looks like acupuncture, but is essentially just randomly pricking people with needles).

The results:

1. 27% of the conventional group show an improvement
2. 47% of the acupuncture group show an improvement
3. 44% of the sham group show an improvement

So the question, science fans, is what does this tell us about acupuncture?

The pro-acupuncture guy stated (with no sense of shame as far as I could tell) that this proves that acupuncture works. Remember I was driving? I almost crashed.

Never have I seen such an incredible twisting of a set of results (actually that's not quite true, a few years back I saw an article in the Bristol Evening Post that said a car was stolen every 30 minutes in Bristol, and then a councillor was quoted as saying that this was ok, as a car was stolen every 3 min in the UK, and so Bristol was plainly better than most :-/ Maths, people. Maths! )

To me these results show two things (within the scope of the study):

1. Acupuncture is not significantly better than a random sham activity
2. Both Acupuncture and the sham are better than conventional treatment

So the most probable conclusion is:

1. Acupuncture benefits significantly from a Placebo effect, that is so strong that it even beats conventional medicine

This is not the same as "Acupuncture works", in fact its a damn site closer to "Acupuncture is all a load of bollards".

I'm sure that the German scientists behind the work came to this conclusion (the more balanced wording that is :-) but I was dismayed at the complete lack of ability of the general public, even a Radio 4 audience, to understand the results in an unbiased way.

The sceptic was trying to be nice, and was arguing that although the improvements were impressive, we should be spending our cash on less expensive Placebo effects. But I wanted him to just pick up the massive logical club lying conveniently next to him, and wallop that damn needle guy right in the family arguments.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't written acupuncture off completely. This is just one study, and it does clearly indicate that the Placebo effect is worth investing (and acupuncture is one way). But please don't get overexcited about your meridians.

And don't even get me started on homeopathy (where's my axe!). Dawkins says it best:

Hypertext Conference 2007

I've been on my travels for a while, culminating this week in Manchester, where I attended the ACM Hypertext Conference. Hypertext is a smaller gathering than it used to be and in recent years has been in danger of becoming a fringe event, however this year numbers were up and the conference felt very positive. Besides I think that everyone should hang out at the fringe occasionally, it's good for the soul.

In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I was part of the Program Committee and am also on the Hypertext Conference steering group - but to be honest my fondness for the Hypertext Conference comes more from the fact that it was the first conference series I went to as a PhD student than it does from my professional connections with the event.

For me there were a number of highlights this year (besides the fine wining and dining that always accompanies a Hypertext conference):

• Hypertext and Tragedy - my only official job this year was as part of a panel on Hypertext Tragedy organised by Nathan Matias. Now my ignorance of literature is dwarfed only by my ignorance of literary theory, so I was feeling a little bit of a fish out of water as I sat alongside Emily Short (Interactive Fiction author), Nick Lowe (Reader in Classics) and Kieron O'Hara (Philosopher and Epistemologist). However, I have been involved in number of projects concerned with building narrative systems (information systems that in some way use story structures) and I hope that I was able to convey a sense that engineers do have some appreciation of narrative theory, and get across our slight disappointment that we can't get more mileage out of the ideas of the Russian Formalists (let alone Aristotle).


• Un-hyping the Semantic Web with Ted Nelson - If Sir Tim is the Father of the Web Gods then surely Ted Nelson must be one of the Titans, probably Atlas, bearing the weight of all the Web's failings on his back (this is responsibility in the didn't-finish-Xanadu-first sense). He is also great at coining new words and names (including the word Hypertext) and this year I have added swarf (swoop+morph), flinks (floating links) and hyperorthogonal (orthogonal in n-dimensions) to my vocabulary. I've known Ted and his wife Marlene for a few years now (Ted was a visiting Professor at Southampton) and it was great to catch up with them and talk over one of Ted's bugbears - the Semantic Web. I can't help thinking that some of the Semantic Web's most vocal supporters are also it's worst enemies; the arguments I've heard against the web such as "no-one will ever agree the one-true ontology" and "RDF is no match for the expressive power of human language" are just staw men, made possible by people who oversell the Semantic Web vision. Much of my conversation with Ted and Marlene was about me trying to un-hype the Semantic Web and present it for what it is - a simple set of technologies that allow machines to exchange meaningful tokens - perhaps a better name would be the Semiologic Web. Intriguingly it occurs to me that Ted's ZigZag idea might make rather a nice storage mechanism for Semantic Web triples (or if you like Semantic Web standards might make a nice exchange format for zzStructures). I shall have to mull that over :-)
  
• Wendy's keynote - This year we had the conference dinner at Christie's Bistro, which is part of Whitworth Hall at The University of Manchester. Wendy Hall gave the after-dinner speech, choosing to reflect on the history of Hypertext and the divergence and potential re-integration of Web and Hypertext research. Wendy recently gave up her position of Head of School within ECS and it was great to see her get some of her bounce back now that the pressure has lifted. There were a lot of messages in her talk, but the one that I take away is the message that came through between the words - that research can be joyful :-)
  
• Discussing Iraq with Mark Bernstein - The final event associated with the conference was a fascinating talk by Mark Bernstein on the rebuilding of Iraq and the role or lack of role played by information technology in that process. In some ways technology has dramatically changed our perspectives on war - the blogs of the citizens of Baghdad or the online accounts of the soldiers serving there have formed an independent channel of information that has prevented the type of media-control that we saw in the first Iraq War, but I am also struck my how much has not changed. It seems that even technology cannot prevent wilful ignorance. After all the European imperialists managed in the 18th and 19th centuries (for good and ill) without a Wiki or Blog in sight.

No other conference I can think of has the shear diversity of Hypertext. I hope that Wendy is right, and that the conference continues to grow and attract renaissance men and women - it is an important part of my continuing education, and I'm looking forward to next year's event in Pittsburgh.

Childish 30's: Zelda and the Transformers

This week I have been regressing to childhood. It started when I received a Wii for my 31st birthday, immediately turning it into my 13th birthday. As a paid up member of Generation X I grew up with gaming culture, but I haven't had a console since my original Playstation died of dust poisoning a few years ago. Wii Sports is a lot of fun but it's The Legend of Zelda that's been soaking up my time.

Zelda is a beautifully crafted game - just stunningly well thought out - with a perfect pace, that ebbs and flows as the game mode changes between Link the Hero, Link the Wolf and a number of well-placed minigames that slot carefully into both the storyline and the environment. For once puzzles seem natural, and the solutions are pitched at just the right level of difficulty.

I've played this type of arcade adventure before, but none have managed to create such a structured experience without making it feel linear (the only example I can think of is Knights of the Old Republic, but that didn't have the same pleasing variety of gameplay).

Now Zelda is worth regressing for on its own, but a few days after my birthday I had the chance to see the Transformers movie. When I was a kid Transformers were absolutely the toy of choice and god knows how much money I nagged out of my poor parents to build my collection of plasticy little alien robots. I watched the cartoon movie when it was on in the cinema, and even read the comic for a while, so the Autobots and Decepticons are imprinted on some impressionable part of my brain.

I'm a happy Britisher, but every now and again something comes along that makes me wish I was an American; the 2000 American election was one (in fact I wished I was 538 Floridians) and the new Transformers film is another. The reason being that if I was an American I could lobby for a new law that would force Micheal Bay to only ever make movies with giant robots in them.

Trust me - Micheal Bay was born to make this movie. Everything about his style: the ridiculous action shots, the hammy music, the slo-mo army dudes, and all the rest of the military pornography, everything is geared up to support giant robots in the best possible way. In fact, thinking back, Pearl Harbour would have been a lot better had the Japanese fleet been intercepted by a host of flying giant robots, and think how great Armageddon would have turned out had Bruce Willis been forced to put away his silly pimp-my-space-shuttle and fight some giant robot asteroids - for all mankind!


My one and only niggle with the ridiculous, testosterone fueled two hours that is Transformers, is that the new robot designs don't look that great when they're moving about, especially when Micheal Bay is having an attack of editor's Tourettes and fast cutting between fighting robots, giant guns and sweaty female midriffs. I mean look at Megatron, imagine that as a toy, you could have someone's eye out!

All in all its been a fun week being 13 again, sadly the mortgage needs paying and no amount of reminiscing will mow the lawn, so I better put the wii-mote aside and do some real work - at least until the next Giant Robot film, or they release No More Heroes:

Missile Command for Monks

Discovered this fabulous little flash game called Boomshine. It's a bit like Missile Command but with a calm sense of oneness instead of the needless aggression. Wonderfully Zen.

Ubuntu - a tale of discovery and woe

In the last few weeks I've been getting bored with Windows XP (my OS of lack of choice) and have had a bit of a roving eye, sneaking lusty glances over the shoulders of Mac users and hanging around in dodgy Windows Vista galleries ogling Aero through the glass.

Having decided that I cant really justify a MacBook when my Samsung PC has pretty much identical hardware already, I have resorted to a PC-based alternative and tried out Ubuntu.

For those that don't know, Ubuntu is a kind of Linux-for-dummies, a UNIX solution targeted at desktop users who cant be bothered to recompile their kernel every five minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I've been using flavours of Linux for over ten years, but I've never been religious about it, and I don't have the time or the energy to build, configure and tweak my laptop setup - I just want it to work.

The experience started off really well, I found a simple Ubuntu installer called Wubi that installs Ubuntu into a single file on your windows store and changes the bootloader to make Ubuntu an option on startup (this is handy as it means you don't have to repartition your drive - and essentially means you can try out Ubuntu risk free). Wubi worked really well, and (after waiting an hour or two for the 600MB download) I booted for the first time into Ubuntu.

Out of the box it seemed to work pretty well; the basic apps are all solid and critically it managed to autodetect and install the right driver for my wireless card and gave me a preinstalled Firefox, pretty much all you need to get started with anything.

But then I got greedy. I was after the whizzy 3d effects and fancy transparencies (check out the video above) and chose to ignore the bones of the dead that littered the way ahead. It all seemed simple enough, I had to install a specific ATI driver for my X1600, install an OpenGL driver, add a few installation repositories and then point the auto-installer at Beryl (a GUI extension that more properly would be called Candy). I even found some helpful tutorials using my complete and fully operational firefox to show me the way.

Mmmm... within five minutes I had resorted to the command line to try and install the ATI drivers. Within ten minutes I was busily editing my X config file - although in Ubuntu's defence I didn't have to use vi. Within fifteen minutes I'd broken X and had been chucked into fullscreen console mode, not very useful when your tutorial is on a web page in your broken X session :-( Luckily I had my trusty Glofiish with me (damnable thing) and so I found the tutorial on that, rediscovered the location of the config file and managed to fix it (with pico, I'm not using vi for anyone).

After an hour or so of hard work I just about had Ubuntu back into the same state it had been when I first installed it, not quite the experience I had been hoping for, but at least I hadn't killed anyone or resorted to sticking pins in a little Linus Torvalds doll like the last time I dated RedHat back in 99 or so.

Anyway, these things take time, and I still haven't forgiven XP for rebooting without asking every time I turn my back, or for popping up modal dialog boxes in the middle of typing a sentence, so I'm willing to give Ubuntu a second chance. But the second I see that bloody text editor coming it's out of here, and I'll be grabbing a Vista CD from the Uni's distribution site. Ubuntu - you have been warned!

Update 8th August 07: Ok - so I finally managed to get Beryl working. I have an ATI x1600 graphics card and I have to use the proprietary ATI driver (i.e. use fglrx) + XGL; a few places say to use the open source driver but I just couldn't get that to work. These guides were of great help:

• Paerez (on the Ubuntu forum)
• ArsGeek's guide
• ATI driver Wiki
• and especially happis' guide (also on the Ununtu forum)

One thing not mentioned very much is that XGL support is accidentally missing from Beryl 0.2.1, so I had to revert to version 0.2.0 using Synaptic and locking it to prevent it updating(which meant learning how Synaptic works). So now I have a very pretty looking Ubuntu setup - but it wasn't exactly effortless to set up, I think it took me around 5 hours to get it going in the end.

ICALT Japan Photos

I've had a chance to organise my photos since coming back from Japan, and also had a chance to play with Picasa (which as you'd expect is very polished and nicely integrates with all Google's other goodies). Turns out that we've all been busy little photo sharers:

• Dave's Photos
• Hugh's Photos
• Maurice's Photos
• Alex's album

Especially Alex's album of bad English translations and general weirdness :-)

My favorite pic is of this ema at the Meiji Jingu shrine (prayers written on wooden plaques at the shrine) . There's something oddly satisying about flying 5000 miles and finding a homage to the flying spagetti monster :-)

ICALT 2007 - Two steps behind

So the ICALT conference is over for another year. It's an interesting event that tries to bring together researchers from both east and west, and for the most part it succeeds - the mixture of presenters is about half and half and there is a lot of opportunity to meet people from countries that in the past have been under-represented in international academic research.

Of course there are some problems too. English is the conference language but not all participants have strong English skills which can make communication difficult (I probably experience this most jarringly as a native English speaker, but can guess that it is frustrating for everyone else as well).

But probably the most disappointing thing for me is that all the researchers, east or west, still seem to show undue reverence to the e-learning techniques, technologies and methods that have been built up in the last ten years or so. Many papers continue to look at standards such as SCORM, and systems like LMSs as if there existence was pre-ordained and their execution canon. What I'm really hoping to get out of a conference is an exciting dialogue or two, sounds of dissension and dissatisfaction, and if I'm really lucky some ideas for innovative new solutions.

In ICALT I really only got that feeling in the three keynotes, which were all rather good. Perhaps the best was from Marc Eisenstadt, entitled "Does e-learning have to be so awful?".

Its difficult (and never that accurate) to sum up someone else's argument, but the main message that I took away from Marc's talk was that if we want to understand how student's might make use of new technologies then we need to be using those technologies, and if we need to understand the issues then the best way is to have those issues ourselves. This extends to the wider case as well, and Marc argued that to gain a proper understanding of how those technologies effect learning we need to roll them out to real students on a real scale and experience the results.

I personally felt that given his provocative title Marc was pulling his punches a bit. There was an undercurrent of real dissatisfaction throughout his talk, a subtext of couldn't-we-do-better, and I think he's right to draw attention to the misalignment of our research on e-learning and our real world teaching. What I found frustrating about this conference was that everyone (and on reflection I am probably just to blame as everyone else) is about two steps behind where they should be. Two whole steps!

The people on the bottom step are the ones who haven't realised that the stone is already rolling and that the world is moving on. These folks are still working with the temporary solutions that are LMSs and ITS systems (temporary in that there existence is only justified in the narrow technology deficit decade of 1995-2005 - where IT skills were playing catch up).

The people on the first step, and I like to think that this is where I live, are focused more on the reality of students today, they are excited about social software and radical new ideas like Second Life (radical in the non-fictitious sense anyway!). They enthuse about the wisdom of crowds, loosely coupled systems and mashups. But even these people aren't really in the right place, because this stuff is happening anyway - there are teachers out there using second life, lecturers building learning communities on Wikis, students sharing their experiences on the blogosphere. The people on the first step don't have to enthuse, this is the reality.

So what's the second step, what should a conference like ICALT be serving up on its east-west plate? I think that we all need to move forward to a place where we can set the enthusiasm aside and begin to think more critically about social software and the consequences of all this can-do power in the hands of our students. At the minute we're so busy trying to persuade everyone that the rolling stone is right that we can't take the time to reflect on the times when it rolls down an inconvenient gully, or crushes a pedagogy when no-ones looking. How do we deal with the sidelining of experts, how can assessment cope with so much sharing, how can we manage cultural differences that might disadvantage some students in online settings?

As we left Japan I realised that despite Marc's excellent talk, this is what made me so dissatisfied with ICALT this year. No-one seems to be asking these difficult questions - and surely that's what the academic community is for?

ICALT 2007, Japan - a shaky start

I'm off on my travels again, this time to sunny (well, luke warm and sticky) Japan, and the International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) 2007, held in Niigata on the north coast.

It was an interesting start to the trip. Just after we landed in Tokyo the Niigata area was hit by a 6.7 earthquake which caused quite a bit of damage to buildings and disruption to the travel systems in the area. As a result we ended up staying the night in Tokyo waiting for the Shinkansen to start running again.

Tokyo

It's my first time in Tokyo and the city seems a massive, sprawling urban landscape, without the defining centres that characterise other megacities like London and New York. Much of it is disappointingly bleak - as if someone cut and pasted Birmingham a hundred times - but some is fabulously alive with neon and activity, with fascinating curios stuffed into every possible space. For example, we walked along the edge of a raised train express route and the number and variety of businesses crammed beneath its arches was incredible; traditional Japanese drinking holes side by side with Limousine garages and trinket shops. We ended our unexpected day with a Lost in Translation moment in the 40th story of our hotel block, with a melancholy nightcap overlooking the steel canyons of Shinjuko.

Niigata

With the Shinkansen running again we made our way to Niigata. The Shinkansen (the bullet train) is just stunningly fast, although we were frustratingly sitting on the bottom floor of a double-decker coach and the Japanese have built a wall 4 feet high and 200 miles long between Tokyo and Niigata which did an excellent job of blocking the view. Niigata itself is markedly quieter than Tokyo, it's a city the size of Glasgow with the personality of Wadebridge, perhaps Japanese metropolitan culture only ignites with millionaire populations.

Launchy

I'm quite bare-bones when it comes to my PC. I go through the damn things like a wrecker ball in PC world and so cant be bothered to personalise them much. As a result I use them pretty much out of the box, so I'm not a big fan of fiddly little productivity apps. However, in the last few days I've come across a neat little utility called Launchy, a very lightweight application launcher, and I'm rather taken by it.

When you press Alt-Space Launchy pops up a command box in the center of the screen and allows you to type common app names to launch them, or set up simple commands (for example to open a web browser at a particular URL). This gives you back some of the productivity we all lost back in 1969 when Doug Engelbart invented the mouse, simultaneously opening up computers to the common person, and slamming the door on the fingers of powerusers everywhere.

I think Launchy has just made it onto the list of apps-that-I-can-be-bothered-to-install-on-the-first-afternoon-with-a-new-machine list. Joining such luminaries as Textpad, Putty, VLC and Paint.Net. Bare-bones compared to some, but those apps are all free and very hard to beat.

More symphonic metel madness

In the last month or so I've been listening to the new albums from Within Temptation and Lacuna Coil. I've discovered both of these bands in the last year and subsequently realised that they are already massively popular just out of earshot, which is always mildly disappointing, but it hasn't stopped me enjoying their new efforts.

'The Heart of Everything' is Within Temptation's disc. It's really just more of the same stuff that was on 'The Silent Force' but that's no bad thing because that album was just brilliant. You couldn't complain if Leonardo suddenly appeared again and started doing his usual thing, and when these guys start screaming Latin at you and threatening a full choir with electric guitars you cant help but smile:



Lacuna Coil released 'Karmacode' as a way of hardening their sound, dangerously moving towards the mallcore mainstream. Risky it may have been, but it's paid off. Their previous albums were good, but they had a faint pub whiff about them, as if this was a great local band that you'd stumbled across in the Dog and Duck on a Friday night. With 'Karmacode' they achieve a more professional studio sound, and the harder rock sound really suits them (and look they even cover a depeche mode classic:)



Go on. Buy some symphonic metal greats - you know you want to.

Spiderman 3

At last I had a chance to see the Summer's big film (well - May's big film) in the form of Spiderman 3: Spiderman vs the icky-black-goo thing and the sandpit dude. I have low expectations of superhero films; for years I was convinced that if only they treated the subject matter with seriousness, as modern myths, they could produce some wonderful cinema. Then I saw X-men and realised the error of my ways (in fact the best superhero films are not explicitly superhero films at all, for example the recent 300, or the original Matrix).

So for me a real superhero film (the spandex kind) should be a fantastic spectacle, a roller coaster ride of childish exuberance, and the main job of the film maker is not to balls it up with to much dialogue or plot (which is not to say that I dislike dialogue or plot, but that in superhero films this always equals bad dialogue and plots with holes big enough to drive a blockbuster through, so they just should keep it quiet save the explosions and shouting).

All this meant that I wasn't expecting much from Spidey, even if he can do everything a spider can. In fact this is a very unusual film, in retrospect what obviously happened is that Sam Raimi and his team happily spent many months revising the script, staging and shooting scenes, and overseeing special effects before Sam retired to the editing studio with his buddies to edit the thing together.

After a healthy breakfast it all starts well enough, spidey is reintroduced, we are reminded of what happened in the other films and we get to see some interesting new villains. Over lunch things slow down a bit and they accidentally edit in an extra hour in the middle involving lots of teenage introspection, angst, needless handwringing and a blond.

Things pick up again in the afternoon and Sam gets into his stride, then something unfortunate happens. Just as we are getting into the denouement Sam has to take a toilet break. In his absence all hell breaks loose, some work experience kid gets his hand on the editing suite and suddenly the film is full of American flags, heavy handed plot twists, bad dialogue (told you!) and a laughable bad sequence shot from the point of few of a news cameraman where Black goo and Sandpit revert to children in a playground ("Spiderman - stop us if you can!"). When Sam returns he is assured by his brazen team of film wreckers that everything is well, and he happily finishes the climax blissfully unaware of the gaping hole in his film just below the waterline.

As the credit roll I was struck by an image of a confused Sam Raimi standing on the sloping deck as his otherwise beautiful creation sinks into the waves. Maybe he can do everything a spider can, but he can't swim. Utterly bonkers.

We have met the enemy and he is us

I know that I'm just another liberal lefty academic but all the same I was very impressed with this piece by the historian Chalmers Johnson on the current path of the American Empire.

Occasionally I watch some 1970's American TV show or film and am reminded of how much we (meaning the British public) used to love America. Growing up in the 1980's I saw America as an ideal progressive and modern society, sure - nothing is perfect, but the Americans I saw on television and read about in books and newspapers, seemed concerned with the things that I thought were important - freedom of expression, democratic rule, the scientific endeavour - and these were coupled with a sense of adventure and possibility that I didn't see in Thatcher's Britain.

Cartoon Free America, Brian Narelle

These days I am more used to hearing about how the British public (not to mention the rest of the wider world) objects to America's policies and ideals. Johnson sets out a way forward for the US to reclaim the moral high ground and to save itself, from itself.

This is the new global politics, away from the old left/right tensions of the 20th century, that is about pragmatic moral change on a world scale. It seeks to tackle issues such as world poverty and climate warming, and looks not to protect the rich and the powerful, or to destroy them, but to enrol them in this cause as powerful drivers of change.

It may be a tad Utopian, but it's a view that I've also heard reflected in the the recent Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. In these, Professor Jeffrey Sachs makes a convincing argument that global co-operation is needed to tackle the major problems in the world. Sachs' vision, for all rich nations, echoes Johnson's more specific call for America. Perhaps our current obsessions with Terror (why is that a proper noun exactly?) is just a red herring from the real challenge of this century, which is a call-to-arms to engage with a new level of political debate about global problems that have nothing to do with religious belief.

We have met the enemy, and he is not who we thought he was.

Update (4th June, 2007) - I read an article in this week's New Statesmen magazine by Michela Wrong where she attacks Sachs for being simplistic:

"Sachs believes that Africa's salvation is ours to bestow. It's that simple. We have the know-how; all we need is a huge hike in western aid. History-lite, politics-free, unashamedly populist, his vision of the world is utterly appealing. It just doesn't happen to bear any relation to the world I live in. I guess that's why I find him so tiresome."

Wrong might have a point in that Sach's monologue was all about the message, but I can't help but feel that its an important motivational one. She recommends The Bottom Billion, by Prof. Paul Collier, as a more realistic read. I'll have to check it out.

You will soon be able to download music online!

Yes, folks - hidden away in the depths of the BBC technology pages is the revelation that at last, after years of false starts and obfuscation, you will finally be able to legally download music online.

Of course, many people falsely believe that they can already download music. They are sadly mistaken. The current set of online stores allow you to purchase a limited legal right to listen to music on very restricted terms - this is not ownership in any sense that the word has been traditionally applied (even to copyrighted materials).

I am not condoning downloading communism - I fully appreciate the need to respect an artist's rights to their own work, however I am against DRM whose implications are hidden from those that are purchasing the protected content. There are now millions of people who believe that they have extensive digital music archives, and while they only use their iPods they are none the wiser.

If you buy a CD you are purchasing both an optical disk and the legal right to play and use the music on that disk in a wide variety of ways. If you purchase a music file from a store such as iTunes, you are purchasing only a set of rights, and ones which are not as extensive as those you enjoy with the music on a CD. In particular you lose the right to store the music on other formats, and to store unlimited multiple copies for personal use. This has serious long term consequences for your music collection (and negates one of the main advantages of having a digital copy in the first place).

Now at last a real company (and not some dodgy outfit) is planning to extend its customers the same wide set of rights with music purchased online. This is major news, one of the most important technology stories I have read this year and it's amazing that it's tucked away on the BBC back-pages. The record companies may be beginning to trust their customers again - and this particular customer is very much looking forward to making his first online music purchase, some twelve years after the technology actually made it possible.

Electronic Voting

I live in Wiltshire, in the Borough of Swindon, and so I was one of the people who got the chance to try the new electronic voting system at last Thursday's Council elections. I didn't vote beforehand, but opted to use the computer in the polling station - it was a horrifying experience.

1. There were no instructions on the welcome page. I had to press a button labelled "Check Voter" which didn't mean anything but seemed to be the only option. I'm guessing that this was a validation process - the guy by the door also had a laptop, and I imagine that he confirmed each voter when that button was pressed.
2. So why wasn't I told this? Initially I wondered if there was anything to stop me voting twice!
3. No instructions on the actual voting page. I was presented with a list of candidates with links to their statements, however it looked like a simple list and there were no indication that I should do anything other than click the Next button - I didn't realise that there was a well-camouflaged button next to the candidates names that you could use to select them until I was asked to go back and choose.
4. Confusing confirmation pages - it was not clear when I had finished, and whether my vote was counted. On one page the next button had scrolled off the bottom of the screen.
5. It allowed me to select meaningless options - I was asked if I wanted to vote in parish election even though there was no such election - I was also asked if I wanted to read candidate's statements even though not all candidates had uploaded them. In both cases it wasn't until I selected the option that I was told that it wasn't valid.

I'm very pleased that at last we're getting e-voting. Although ironically some difficulties with the system actually meant that it took longer to count the e-votes than the paper ones. Despite the pig-ugly HCI the system also seemed reasonably robust, and at least I was able to go backwards and forewords and undo the mistakes that I had made.

But it's incredible that with all the expertise available the final product looks so ugly and crude - in all honesty it looked like a bad A'level project from the 1990's, adorned with basic VB-style elements in cumbersome form layouts. Just dreadful.

If a Computer Scientist found it confusing, just imagine what Grandma would say :-(

2001: An Event Horizon

Imagine a world in which The Sword of Shannara was written before the Lord of the Rings. It's good, Tolkien's critics might say, but its just a reworking of that Brook's drivel - isn't Gandalf just Allanon with a beard? Why has Shea shrunk? Swords, rings, who cares?

In a more just Universe Danny Boyle's new film, Sunshine, would have been released in 1997 and I would now be saying that the newly released film Event Horizon was derivative rubbish, but unfortunately this isn't a just Universe, and it's Sunshine that has just been released 10 years too late.

Sunshine isn't a bad film, in fact in some places it puts aside its pointless loopy captain and attains a kind of beatific Zen wonder, but its to little to late (or more accurately to soon, because it's the first half that's great). It's carefully put together, I love the fact that nothing is explained but it all still makes sense (the international crew, the gold space suits, the botanic garden). It's an ode to 2001, which deserves the homage, and it's just as pretty, but it's the shadow of Event Horizon that stretches an inglorious sunspot over the film. Ship goes off to do something importantly MacGuffinish and doesn't come back, another ship follows because the MacGuffin is important, the second ship finds the first ship. Much is weird. At this point someone goes bonkers, some other folk die, pause for transcendental moment... and release. Actually its kind of like Sphere as well :-(

Oh well. The direction is great, the performances are believable and the Sun is beautiful. Forget the annoyingly pointless burnt-out third act and focus on the Star. What can you see, what can you see? A missed opportunity that's what :-(

300

Wow! - the Battle of Thermopylae has never looked so good. I've just watched the film adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, itself based on the 1962 film The 300 Spartans. I've been struggling a bit with how to describe it - the critics are divided, is it a 21st century masterpiece or a shallow array of action set-pieces? What about the plot, they ask, what about the characterisations? But that's a bit like complaining that Michelangelo's David is a bit drab, that War and Peace lacks pictures, or that the Mona Lisa is a bit small. In short - it completely misses the point.

300 is not a narrative film - it's not supposed to be. 300 is a film of simple emotions, raw physicality and beautiful, beautiful imagery. Damn it, if the basic plot line bores you then put your fingers in your ears and just watch the pictures. I promise you that it would still be more enjoyable than staring for two hours at this oil painting of the same story by Jacques-Louis David - and he was a famous artist don't you know.

Of course you might also take exception to the one-sided perversion of history, xenophobia, homophobia, testosterone soaked fascism, misogyny and eugenics - but then again nothing is perfect.

In all senses of the word 300 is bloody good fun.

CnC on the Cheap

I came across this tower defense game on del.icio.us. I found it oddly familiar, and then realised that it's essentially Command and Conquer on an etch-o-sketch. No wonder it comes naturally, I've been playing its big brother all week.

Oddly satisfying :-/

High score to date: 1998

Commanding and Conquering

I love the smell of Mammoth Tanks in the morning. A few days ago I grabbed myself a copy of Command and Conquer 3 and I'm currently enjoying smashing, crushing and blasting my way through the Brotherhood of Nod. It was in my student days that I was first introduced to the RTS joys of Command and Conquer; that game, and its Red Alert sequels, were a stable of our student LAN parties and I still have fond memories of creating an alliance with the Soviets and teleporting a submarine into an inland lake to blow the hell out of our opponent's secret wave power plants.

Of course at some point you must put away childish things, which was why, as a PhD student, we put aside our GDI and Nod uniforms and turned instead to the sophisticated intricacies of Total Annihilation :-) Ahh.. the sweet happiness of bombing the seven bells out of the Core Commander.

Sadly the additional unit packs could only extend our obsession by a few hundred games, and so we forgot about our differences ("ergh.. your commander is blue!") and allowed our anger to wane, as the years passed we have gone our separate ways and have forgotten the guilty pleasure of sending hundreds of little pixelly soldiers to their deaths.

That is until now.

Command and Conquer 3 has awoken the tiger, poked the dragon and made silly faces at my inner Mahatma Gandhi. Now I am angry again, and once I have eviscerated Kane and his lunatic idolisers, I will play again, erm.. as Kane, and obliterate the namby pamby forces of the Global Defence Initiative.

Fantastic, bombastic, FMV happiness in a box. Command and Conquer is back.