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 :-(