Remembering those that gave

This weekend, the UK marks “Remembrance Sunday”.

On November 11th 1918 at 11am, the first world war came to an end. To honour those that gave their lives not just in that war, but every conflict that has followed, Ceremonies are held all over the country on the Sunday closest to 11th November. Wreaths are laid at the foot of war memorials in every city and town. Two minutes silence are observed at 11am (GMT) which is a pause for reflection on those that gave so much for future generations.

Very often, out of military necessity, comes mankind’s biggest breakthroughs that enable it to continue its journey of discovery. Every major conflict sees some advances in technology that allow us all to lead better and more fulfilled lives. World War I saw Aeroplane technology advanced in leaps and bounds. It was the first war to extensively use aircraft as both a defensive and offensive tool. The biggest and probably most profound breakthroughs however, came in World War II. Two technologies that have since changed the world came to public notice and both were deployed as weapons of mass destruction. The development (and deployment) of the Atomic Bomb is an infamous example. Not so widely known though, is the development of the V2 Rocket by German Scientists led by Werner Von Braun. The V2 was the first ballistic missile and was used by the Nazis during World War II to destroy many cities, principally London. It flew at Mach 5, the first manmade object to do so. It had a very advanced guidance system that accurately (by the days standards) guided the payload to its eventual destination. It could be argued the Von Braun and his team developed the modern discipline of Aerodynamics. Because the V2 flew so fast, its shape became an important factor in the range and effectiveness of the weapon. The V2 had a brand new propulsion system that made it many times more powerful than conventional rocket propulsion systems.

Sadly, the V2 was developed for destruction, but after the war, Werner Von Braun assisted the US (and some of his colleagues assisted the USSR), in developing advanced rocket technology. Although much of this was further used for destruction (enhancing the range of Inter-continental ballistic missiles for example), Some went on to further more worthwhile causes. The technology used in the rockets first developed by Von Brown had the potential to produce enough thrust to provide the 11m/s^2 acceleration required to escape the Earth’s gravity and send men to the Moon. This directly led to the Saturn V rocket. This technology allowed us to put artificial satellites in orbit to provide communication and information. We can collect data on climate change. Perhaps map the lifespan and activity of the Sun, and the presence of threats from Comets and Asteroids and Gamma Ray sources. GPS satellites (also developed for military use) guide emergency medical staff and fire crews to where they are needed.

Often, a human life is measured in the contribution it makes to those that follow. Though we shouldn’t applaud Von Braun on his ethics, we can applaud him for the groundbreaking technology that he developed. Although used to take many lives during World War II, paradoxically, the loss of those lives have given mankind its greatest possible chance of survival. So this remembrance Sunday, Not only remember those that fought and gave their lives so that others may live. Remember those that died from the technology developed to destroy, that may one day be the salvation of Mankind.

Werner Von Braun

Arrival of a Gattaca styled world.

The brilliant film "Gattaca" which was released in 1997 foretold a time when Genetic profiling will divide the human race into "Valids" and "invalids" at birth. This division is accomplished by analysing your genetic makeup and from the information gained, deciding on your eventual future and what "opportunities" will be open to you. It's a pretty scary vision of the near future and the sad thing is, it is actually happening before our eyes. People are being written off before they have the chance to prove themselves as a combination of not only what their genetic profile says about them, but also as a product of their upbringing and drive. You cannot separate these two variables. In fact, whenever someone suggests we "go to far" by using the term "Eugenics" to, say, only allow blonde haired, blue eyed offspring, there is a massive outcry. The study of heredity and it's use in selective breeding is condemned around the world as indeed it should be.

But wait.  We select "Valids" everyday (BBC News). The "Invalids" line the incinerator rooms of hospitals. Those that have been deemed to not be worthy of our love and affection and terminated just because they will need extra care or they don't conform to what "Society" suggests is acceptable. They won't make a massive contribution to our future. They will drain resources from an already overstretched social system.

Society has double standards. I've always suggested that Parents should have the right to choose to terminate if they think that their unborn child will need the love and attention that they are incapable of providing. But those parents spend more time deliberating what it will mean for their lives rather then what it will mean for the child's life in most cases. My life would not be complete without my Daughter who has Downs Syndrome. She gives me a reason to get up in the mornings and if the tests had been performed and the Doctors had been listened to before she was born, I would not have had the opportunity to know how much she enriches our society and how fulfilling her presence in my life would be.

So what gives parents the right to chose one area of Eugenics (because that is what testing a baby invitro is really about), is acceptable and another area is not. Maybe this is why Society sucks so much at caring for those that really need their help. What is the "Invalids" value to society? They drain resources and add nothing to the development of the human race after all, right? They'll never discover a cure for cancer or the common cold. They will never walk on another planet or formulate a theorem about extra dimensions or the existence of life on other planets.

What they do is to show us our humanity and sadly, the vast majority of us come up lacking.

An ode to Phoenix

Perhaps Mars Phoenix has been the most media savvy Mars lander ever.  Throughout the mission, Phoenix has been twittering to interested subscribers about the day to day goings on during its time on the “red planet. So successful has been this venture that the lander won a “Twitties” award as the Smartest tweet. Other missions are now following in Phoenix’s tracks (OK, Phoenix has no tracks but that shouldn’t stop the puns), such as Cassini and the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Phoenix has arguably been one of the most successful missions to Mars ever. It has far exceeded its original goal of operation for 90 days (Martian days that is). But as the environment on Mars steadily gets colder, the lander will spend more of it’s precious energy keeping its instruments warm. Well before the 3 month period next April when the sun will not riseat the poles on Mars, it will fall silent and the world will miss its day to day escapades.

Naked Scientist Rocks :)

I sent a question into the Naked Scientist Radio program on Sunday and they asked it on air :) There was a crowd of us listening in Secondlife and everyone cheered :) The program was about aging and the question was :

Q:

I heard that our cells replace themselves every 18 months which means our bodies are actually only 18 months old. How do the new cells carry the information about our real chronological age forward into the next generation of cells? Rebecca

It was answered by Steve Jackson of the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge

A:

Steve - First of all, some cells in our body don’t divide such as nerve cells and so they really aren’t. They last our whole lives but even the cells that do turn over- a new cell is generated from the division of an existing cell. The age of an existing cell basically gets transferred. The new cell remembers how old the other cell was. One of the important things that is transferred are the chromosomes. The ends of the chromosomes called telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides. They are a very useful counting mechanism. These telomeres shortening is one of the important counting mechanisms that tells our cells how many times they’ve divided and how old they are.

Download a podcast and read a transcript of the show here

The "Unit" and Galactic fossil hunting

Does anyone know what the origin of calling people you are associated with a "Unit"? I'm seeing it everywhere these days. Mother Unit. Spousal Unit. Daughter Unit. It's really interesting how fast a new fad like this catches on and worrying that Internet communication seems to make us all clones.

I attended a really interesting presentation today by Mario Juric from Princeton. Mario talked about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This is a survey that has mapped a quarter of the sky (around 8000 degrees)  and has catalogued ~100 million objects. The presentation that Mario gave centred on his work relating to stellar density in the milky way galaxy as a function of distance from the centre. They have also done some analysis work on spectral data to ascertain metallaticitys of stars within the surveys range.

A really interesting outcome of this research is that he has possibly found artifacts of the Milky Ways past encounters with other galaxies or objects. This was deduced mainly by density anomalies in the data. What you should see is density of stars decreasing as you work outward from the centre. This holds true for most of the data but in at least two areas (and these "areas are huge), the density of objects sharply increases. The current explanation is that potentially, these are remnants of a past encounter. There are no current conclusions as the whether these areas also have velocity and/or metallicity differences but that is something they are working on.

I guess you could pose other possibilites for the these anomolies. Perhaps Dark matter is "clumpy" - but then we would have to explain why it clumped in these regions. How about an massive compact object such as a black hole that has now evaporated. As the massive velocity changes that this would bring are not seen currently, that seems unlikely. Others have suggested it is related to the warp of the galactic disk. If this is so, what caused the warp? Perhaps that brings us back to an encounter.

So it isn't just fossils from the Earth that describe our history. Cosmic fossils go back way before the Earth was even a galactic twinkle in Mother Natures eye.

Good luck China

Today, the Chinese space agency launches it's third manned space mission. The Shenzhou 7 mission will carry three "taikonauts" into space and include a 40 minute spacewalk hopefully on Friday. Recently, the ISM in Secondlife held an auction to sponsor the Chinese exhibits and I won the auction to sponsor the  CZ-3B. Here is my sponsorship plaque near the exhibit :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this is the actual model. This is a sister to the launch vehicle being used in today's launch - The Long March IIF. The launch today will be between 1pm and 2:30pm BST and the Chinese Space Authority will be webcasting the mission live such is there confidence. Future missions will assist in setting up a Space laboratory. Good luck China. I have everything crossed that things go well for you.

My secret fetish (Not secret for long)!

I have a fetish which I am now ready to reveal to the world. It is for notebooks. It's sad I know but I just can't resist buying them when I see them. One of my favourite pastimes is to fill them up with lots of lovely notes. Today, I found the notebook to put all notebooks to shame. Here it is :

I was so excited when I saw it sitting on the shelf I couldn't wait to buy it even though for a notebook, it was pretty expensive. Apparently, it's not really a Physics reference. Newton is the bear character. He "has a lot to say about life - and that's Newton's Law". I'm itching to go back to the shop tomorrow and buy another couple of them. What's more, it's the perfect size. A3 (I thinks that's the number for half A4?).

Marco Polo sample return

I'm so lucky. I live in a town that has a long history in Space flight. In fact, for as long as I can remember, Stevenage in Hertfordshire, UK has had pioneering companies involved in space related activities. The first was British Aerospace and now EADS Astrium. Astrium have been involved in a long line of groundbreaking missions including many built (but maybe not assembled) in Stevenage. The Beagle 2 and the Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Vern (ATV), to name two well known examples. Now, ESA are proposing a sample return mission to a near Earth object. The mission has been named Marco Polo and Astrium have been appointed the prime contractor.  What's more, the mission is a collaboration with the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, a potent mix of expertise. The proposed launch vehicle will be a Soyuz rocket.

So when someone asks you where all those ESA space missions are built. You can now tell them Stevenage in Hertfordshire, UK. It's where all the great European space stuff really goes on!

Changing for the better

Before my very eyes, studying science is changing me. The course syllabus says "You will start to look at the world in a different way". You certainly do. Whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for my morning cup of tea, I watched the water filled bowl sitting in my sink. The remnants of my dinner from the previous night. The tap was dripping into it. Obviously I didn't turn it off properly from my kettle filling chore. After a few minutes I realised that I was deep in thought about how the molecules of the water entering the bowl where dispersing. What did their motion look like? How fast were they travelling? How big were they? How long did it take the area of the water drop to be diluted into the background of the pre-existent molecules? How could I test all this. A coloured drop of water? Would the colouring in the droplet affect the outcome of the experiment? How would the temperature of the water affect it?

Without even realising it fully, my mind is developing into a machine that questions things in a far more detailed way then I ever did before. I notice things I didn't previously. I think about the hidden aspects of something. This is exactly how Einstein discovered Brownian Motion if you believe the stories. He watched the irregular motion of particles on the surface of a fluid - Perhaps Pollen on a pond? He wondered exactly what was making the particles move.

Finally on the home straight

Yesterday, I delivered the final assignment on my current course. I had to drive all the way to Cambridge to deliver it so that it wasn't late. As I heard it plop on my tutors mat a wave of relief came over me and my shoulders must have dropped about 2 inches. Only 1 assignment (CMA) and an exam to go and then I have finished 2008's presentations and  I can truly concentrate on S207. Everything starts to get very real after the arrival of the name and address of your tutor, the dates for your first tutorials and you see the date for the first TMA looming large.  I need to make sure I use the face time with other students provided by the tutorials.  It is becoming clear to me that studying is so much better when you can interact with others in the group. It will also help me over my shyness of group discussions.  Being able to actually stick my hand up and ask those questions I always want to ask would be fantastic. With that aim in mind, I also intend to go to more IOP lectures. The ones I have been to (with one exception) have been so good for practicing your "Networking" skills and of course for learning about what other people are doing. As time goes on, I'm feeling less of a fraud :)

Standing on the shoulders of giants

On the way into the office this morning I was thinking about all those great people who have given us our understanding of the world. Thales, Aristotle, Archimedes, Eratosthenese, Bacon,De vinci, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galilei, Cassini, Huygens, Faraday, Maxwell, Rutherford, Planck, Newton, Einstein, Hubble, Schrodinger, Dirac, Heisenberg, Bhor, Oppenheimer, Feynman..... But wait.. Who comes next? I can name many many who have contributed to our understanding of the universe since 1950 but they are no longer "household names". Mention the pre-1950's names I listed to anyone and they will have heard of them. Mention any of those that have come since, and I bet at least 70% of them will not be in the psyche of those not studying Physics or Astronomy. Why is this? You would think that with modern media and especially, the internet, The names of those related to the major breakthroughs in the Physical Sciences would be more widely known.  Most people, when asked to name a post 1950's Physicist, would probably name Stephen Hawking and that's it. Has the real breakthroughs in understanding the physical world stalled over the past 40 years or have we become so used to hearing about them that we have become immune to the impact of those discoveries? Maybe people are just no longer interested. It was upsetting to me that the biggest stories around the LHC First beam day last week where centred on the scaremongers warnings of the end of the world. But perhaps that's what sells newspapers.

A physical adventure

When I started my adventure into the world of Physics and academia, I used to look at some of the papers pre-published on arxiv.org and wonder if I would ever be able to understand the beautiful equations, tables and graphs that they contained. For the uninitiated they are truly scary. But the more I study, the more of those squiggles and abstract pieces of writing I do understand. So reading them, even if you don't fully understand them, is a valuable part of the educational process.

I'm also a very shy person. I hate being amongst crowds of people. This is especially true when the crowds of people have a massive potential for showing up my lack of knowledge and understanding. I wimp out. Being in a room full of people doing such great and interesting work and feeling that you really don't belong there is a terrible feeling. I had a conversation with someone at an IOP event once which went along the lines of :

Person : "I'm working on the Elastic theory of low-dimensional continua and its applications in bio- and nano-structures - And you?"

Me : "I'm a 2nd year Physics undergraduate at the Open University"

Person : "That's nice.......See you then...."

However, the comment Simon Singh made on BBC news 24 during the LHC first beam day ("I got out of particle physics because everyone was smarter then me"), made me think seriously about this. I know it hampers my development and I have really been trying to come to terms with the shyness. I think being a mature student I feel I have less validity then those that had the opportunity to go to University early on in life and now able to make a contribution to *real* research. I have this underlying feeling that I have "missed the boat" and "will never catch up".  I hasten to add that those in the Physics/Astronomy community don't make me feel this way. They are the most open and welcoming bunch of people (in the main) I have ever met. I do this to myself.

But wait. I am studying. I started late in life but have always had a real passion for the subject. I find it quite hard going at times which probably makes this a more nobler pursuit for me then those that find it easy. I'm holding down a full time job, and have other pressing life issues and I still choose to spend almost all my spare time pursuing this passion. Perhaps that makes me eminently qualified to be part of the world of physics. The feeling that the more I know, the less I understand also seems to be saying I am reaching the point where all the things I have learned will stop being a disparate bunch of facts and equations and finally make sense as a whole.

Big Bang Day - The highlights

Some of them slightly off-topic . Some made me chuckle (No, skinny people can "chuckle" too), and some made me sad.

Worst Quote - Simon Singh on BBC News 24. "I gave up particle physics because everyone was smarter then me"

Funniest Moment - 3....2.....1.....ohhh! Lyn Evans counting down to the first event.

Most annoying moment - No CERN webcast feed. They invented the web and damn, they don't know how to use it!

Never work with Children and animals moment - School child when interviewed - "What good do Electrons do me anyway?".

Saddest news of the day - A 16 year old girl from India committed suicide because she believed the story's about the world ending were true.

Most exciting moment - The release of the first ATLAS beam event images.

So, "Big Bang Day" comes to a close and the engineers can hand off the equipment to the scientists and their work can now begin. Everyone I am studying with is really looking forward to finding out more about the experiments and results over the coming years.

Incidentally, spare a thought for those of use who are NOT school age and have decided to formally study physics later in life. A lot of the news today was about inspiring young people into Science. This is extremely important to be sure, but there are also plenty of us mature students out here who believe we still can make a difference.

Public engagement in Physics

So tomorrow is the big "Switch on" of the Large Hadron Collider. I can't help thinking that it will be a little like Y2K. In the minds of everyone it's going to be this massive event. Scientists poised over "the" big red button. At 08:30 BST, the Chief will countdown from 10....9....8.... All eyes will be on dials and widgets that say "optimum performance".....7....6....5...4.... The excitement around the world will be palpable....3...2..... The dissenters will be holding hands waiting for the end off the world...1......BIG RED BUTTON PRESSED. Immediately, hundreds of screens around the sophisticated control room will burst into life and scientists will scream with delight as evidence of the Higgs Boson is delivered. The standard model of particle physics will be complete. Everyone can go home happy.

No! It will certainly be an exciting event but I think to most people, especially the "end of the world is nigh" folks, it will be a bit of an anti-climax. I doubt it will be exciting television and definitely not exciting radio. But how then, do you get the public to engage with the science when often, the exciting parts come after years of very hard and painstaking work? How can the perception of the scientist as mad, anti-social people working alone in some damp basement be changed? How can physicists especially communicate the work they are doing and show that funding physical science and astronomy is fundamental to the advancement, and, dare I say it, even the survival of the human race.

Scientists like Professor Brian Cox are changing the way the public sees big projects such as the LHC. And it is right that we do this. After all, if public money is being spent on these projects the public should have access to the knowledge and some understanding of what they money is being spent on. It is true that scientists don't engage the public enough. In the UK, we have a shortage of science and maths teachers and I think this is mainly because the subjects are seen as inaccessible to the average person in the street. Controversy seems to make people sit up and listen. For the LHC, its access to the main broadcasters have been via the "end of the world" stories it has brought about. Perhaps the originators of these stories are doing the scientific community a favour and we should turn the media interest it brings to our advantage by telling the public about the science of these projects and its benefits. For those of us that want to learn, we find scientists, on the whole, accessible to us. If you ask a question, often, they are more then willing to answer. This is not true of many other areas. We need to develop a common language which allows everyone to engage in the conversations about scientific progress on a level an individual finds interesting and relevant.

What does "Success" look like?

One of my former bosses asked me this on a number of occasions in relation to individual projects. I've recently been asking myself the same thing after spending quite a lot of time researching some stuff for the SL groups I look after. This time though, it's "Life" success rather then short term projects.  During this research, I've been looking fairly intimately at two figures; Brian Cox and Colin Pillinger.

At first, it seemed to me that "success" in the careers of these two individuals took them away from what they really love doing. But the more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps they were doing what they always wanted to do.

So. Professor Brian Cox. A theoretical Physicist at the University of Manchester and a spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He is currently working on the ATLAS experiment but we see him mostly giving lectures, TV and radio interviews trying to engage the public in the experiments they are due to begin on September 10th. These presentations are aimed at the general public and so do not have a high level of Physics in them. Rightly so. But how does a highly trained and driven individual cope with doing this kind of work? It's really something anyone could do. I wondered wouldn't Brian feel more comfortable concentrating on the actual physics of the experiments? Does this look like success for Brian? Well, yes. I suppose the purpose of any academic is to further our understanding of things and teach those insights to others. And that is precisely what he is doing.

Colin Pillinger is best known as the driving force behind the Open University's pioneering mission to Mars to search for life. It was his initial enthusiasm that brought this mission to reality. But again, he is not best known for the science content, but for engaging the public and seeking funding for the project. His quirky character was the perfect vehicle for the public. He comes across as the sightly eccentric yet loveable scientist. Talk to most people involved with the Beagle 2 project and they will tell you Colin is not exactly loveable. He worked people HARD! But this is what success is for Colin. A single minded determination to see the project succeed. Sadly, in it's primary mission aims, it did not. However, the wealth of information and skills gained by the team that worked so hard, is worth heaps. Again, we see Colin popularising science and bringing the public along for the ride.

Most of the scientists you can name have one thing in common. Their love of communicating science. If I can say one thing about the scientific community and that is they are (mostly) willing to impart their knowledge to anyone who will listen.  And if you want to listen to them, that is what success looks like.

Why bother with the maths?

An absolutely essential part of science is observation. So the theorists give us some idea (pretty good ones most of the time) about what to look for and the rest is about trying to observe those things. Of course, you could stab in the dark for something interesting. I think it's a far better use for time to actually have some idea about what you are looking for. So for this you'll need some sort of theory about roughly where you should be stabbing! But there are fundamental problems to the observation stage.

For starters, our senses are limited. Take studying electromagnetic radiation as an example. We "see" electromagnetic radiation as "light" Our eyes are sensors that pick up radiation in a very narrow range of values. We actually "see" a range outside that which our eyes can detect. This is the heat we feel coming from objects. This is just infrared radiation. We don't see it with our eyes but can sense it. To visualise the full range of electromagnetic radiation, we need machines that convert the stuff we can't directly sense to something we can.

Another problem for observation is that our intuitions are flawed. For example, our intuitive sense of space is in three dimensions. Up/Down, Left/Right, forward/back. However, we experience a 4th dimension, Time. We talk about direction of time by saying "Future and Past". We cannot intuitively sense time in a backward direction because we have no experience of it. Try to imagine 5 or more dimensions I guarantee you will fail. Our brains just cannot do it.

one area where intuition is some help though is in the sense of Beauty. A scientific theory or result is often seen as simple and beautiful. This beauty is often only apparent to those people who understand the universal language of beauty, Mathematics. It does not limit us because it does not rely on our senses or our intuitions. It liberates us from the shackles of human experience and allows us to see nature in all its glory.

But wait! isn't mathematics a human invention which will suffer from all the limitations of human intuition and sense? The answer lies in wether you believe we invented or discovered mathematics. Personally, I believe we are discovering although we have to be careful that our definition of beauty is not based on Human experience alone. Mathematics provides a description of beauty that steps away from what we perceive with our senses. This is what makes it such a valuable tool and why we should bother with Maths.

Progress to date on the Beagle 2 challenge

 

Lots of good work is being done by the team to try and get as much fresh information as we can muster. The Google group has had a few articles posted researched and written by group members. These will accompany the final model if we can get approval to use some of the content which is most likely copyright. It's a shame that the Beagle2.com site seems to have been abandoned and there is very little information there about what happened after the lander was lost and the lessons learned. Also, I posted an item about a possible "Beagle 3" lander that was suggested in a few places and hinted at by Colin at an event I attended. Not much follow-up information about that anywhere beyond a couple of press releases. As the proposal was to include launch in 2009. I think this is quite unlikely now as we have heard nothing since.

I, along with a colleague, visited the Walton Hall Library at Milton Keynes to see if we could un-earth some schematic diagrams from which was can scale the model inworld. At first, it looked like we hadn't really found anything that would fit that bill, but I was very grateful to receive a copy of Colin Pillingers book "The Guide to Beagle 2" from the Science Faculty at Walton Hall, which turned out to have some fantastic information contained within it. I also borrowed "Beagle - From Darwin's Epic voyage to the British Mission to Mars", This also has some great material, and 3 VHS tapes containing the BBC series that followed Beagle 2's early progress. I didn't realise that a major part of the lander was built in my home town by EADS Astrium. I'm hoping perhaps they can help us with some finer details about the lander itself.

For now, I have found out that :

Closed Lander Dimensions	660mm (About the size of a bicycle wheel)
Diameter	110mm Deep at the centre.
Open Lander Dimensions	1600mm measured across the Solar panel > Lid > Solar Panel axis   1900mm measured across the Base > Lid > Solar panel axis
Circular lander base compartment	600mm internal dimensions 80mm Depth Volume of 22 litres.
Solar arrays	Pentagon shaped. Rounded at the angles. 570mm diameter four panels take up a 1m^2 area made up of 78 solar cells each 69.2mm x 31.3mm

 

So it turned out to be a pretty worthwhile trip after all.

Authors that don't get enough recognition

I'm re-reading Richard Feynmans "The character of Physical Law". Why isn't this a standard text book on the curriculum of every school? Although this is really a transcript of a series of lectures given by Feynman, his style of delivery still comes across in print. I can see him in my minds eye and the the smile that would have been on his face. I remember watching one of the lectures in the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures series in New Zealand. The way he reacted when the audience laughed when he described that "Theoretical Chemistry is really Physics at the deepest level". He got quite upset and said "it wasn't a joke". He would have been talking about a particular topic and get carried away and become very excited, agitated and sidetracked. Finding someone with that level of passion is rare these days. To be able to talk about things in an understandable way and not in the least tied up with how others think you should be explaining something.

He was not afraid to say he did not understand some aspect or other.  He had a strong belief that Mathematics was the real way to "visualise" physics where human experience let you down. You cannot visualise the strangeness of the Quantum world or more then 3 dimensions for example, so don't even try. Although he was fond of using everyday analogies to re-enforce a point, he had a knack of doing it without clouding your view of the world. I have always hated the fact that the Rutherford-Bohr model of atomic structure made me see the atom as a set of electrons orbiting a central nucleus rather like the planets orbit the Sun. It's an image I can never erase from my mind whenever I read or hear about an atom.

I also have an affinity with Richard Feynman for purely sentimental reasons. He reminds me of my father both physically and in his actions. We also share a name Richard PHILLIPS Feynman.

How the hell is Physics done anyway?

As a late developing physics undergraduate, I often gaze at the papers I see physicists publishing and wonder how they ever got to the stage of producing the mind blowing bits of work contained in them. Now I'm not saying that I come close to even remotely understanding even a small part of the content of these papers. I am, after all just starting out on my formal education in the topic. I haven't yet completed my "Basic training". I can say though, that the more I study, the more I am beginning to recognise little snippets. I guess it's like learning a language. One day you are sitting in your car repeating after the linguaphone cd, not really knowing what the hell it is you are saying. Next thing you know, you are in a shop in a foreign country understanding totally what the foreign speaking shop keeper is saying to you. You suddenly get a realisation that you actually can understand more then you were giving yourself credit for.

This seems to be how all learning experiences work and that includes Maths and Physics (for me anyway). I look back on things I didn't understand 3 years ago before I embarked on the Maths I have been recently doing and realise that I actually understand it now.  Those little twiddles and curly things actually say something to me. So now my training is actually starting for real (it is no longer preparation), I wanted to know what it is like to be at the other end of the pecking order and actually be working on the cutting edge of Physics research. So I have been asking some questions.

One of the things I have learned and surprised me just a little is that Physics research actually seems to be quite a social thing to do. It's about group discussion and interaction as much as it's about lone research, theory, experiment and observation. The Genesis of an idea is often flushed out and molded by more then one person. This means you have to learn not to be precious about what you come up with. You have to accept that you are going to be challenged.

After chatting with a MICA member about this recently, He pointed me to blog, called "Cosmic Variance" and a three part piece called "The anatomy of a paper". It's well worth a read if you are interested in how the actual work of a theorist is carried out.

"How well are we doing?"

I recently had dinner with a friend and a few others and a conversation we had has been bugging me ever since. During the meal, I got a tap on the shoulder from another friend who I haven't seen for almost 2 years. I spent a little time talking to her and her husband at their table then rejoined the group I was sitting with originally. I recounted part of my conversation with the couple and was a little surprised at the response.

My friend and her Husband care for their autistic son. They also have a Daughter. Our conversation was partly about the lack of help the local authority give the family despite overwhelming need. They do amazingly well considering their son never sleeps. He gets into all sorts of problems including constant attempts to climb out of windows and often he self harms by banging his head on a table or even the floor or a wall. As a result, he needs almost 24 hour care and attention. The couple have to have separate holidays so that each can take care of their son while to other gets a little rest from the routine. It also gives them the opportunity to spend some quality time with the Daughter, who, despite being a teenager, helps out immensely so has had a weight of responsibility on her shoulders since a young age. Local authorities only step in if a family is "in crisis" and then the help is often so far in the future that is next to useless.

So this brings me to the conversation that has been troubling me. I mentioned to my the friend when I returned to my table that they had been asking for an extra night a month respite care. They currently get 18 days a year.Their son is now 16 and he is getting very big thus harder to handle and more aggressive as puberty kicks in. For every extra nights respite they get, they will have 1 day removed from the care they already receive. This is extra help??? This is robbing one area to pay for another. SO I expressed my disgust to my friend and she thought the authority were doing the right thing. "Other people don't get that much annual leave" , and "There is only so much money in the pot" was her response. WHAT! Is this how people see respite and is this why Local authorities are so reluctant to help family's BEFORE they reach crisis (despite helping them afterwards is always so much more costly)?

Imagine, if you will, the scenario. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the shoes of those parents. You're son will never grow into independence. Every day, you get 2 hours sleep and are woken from that sleep with either a scream, kick or a crash. Maybe even some days a trip to the hospital because your son has found something to cut himself with or has thrown himself against the wall so hard, has broken something. You have to deal with his needs like they where an extension of your own. Wash him, feed him, wipe him after the toilet, dress him. He can't tell you what he wants, you have to guess if he is in pain, needs a drink, wants the toilet. You have to find things to occupy him every day and fight for the treatment, therapy and care he needs every step of the way. You are told that he can only attend school 3 days a week because the help isn't available. If this were a mainstream child, you would be imprisoned for not taking to them to school 2 days a week yet for a disabled child this is acceptable. You can see the REST OF YOUR LIFE stretching before you with this the prospect for every single day.

You love the child and you do not see this as a burden but you yourself need time to to contemplate and replenish to allow you to continue this unrelenting regime day after day. Yet you cannot get the help you need because some IDIOT who sits in an office and has never lived this life or had contact with people that do, has decided that the money is better spent on building a new road, paying some executive bonus or an advertising company to tell the public  "How well we are doing". Perhaps the idiot has had contact. But it was an interview for an hour with you. You were having a reasonable day that day. You had got 3 hours sleep because a friend had looked after your son for an hour because she saw your exhaustion. So you are upbeat. Things aren't so bad. Idiot sees this in your so takes away one of the days respite you have because you obviously don't need it! Besides, you cannot express in words how bad things can get to someone who really just wants the day to end so they can go down the pub or to the gym. Something you haven't done for years or even been able to think about.

This is not a little extra holiday for these parents. It is a life line The only thing that separates us from being barbarians is our humanity and sympathy for others in situations less fortunate then ours. So perhaps you aren't doing so well after all.

Course set for next 9 months

I finally signed up for my next course yesterday. It begins on the 4th October. It's so nice to see it listed on my home page. I've waited quite a while to get to this point. There is a residential school associated with this course which I would really like to sign up to but there are a number of problems with that. Not least of which is that it is a week away from home at a time when a) the exam for the main course is due and b) the colleges are on summer vacation. Both these events add an extra burden. In addition, the local government elections are likely to be in June sometime and my workload will shoot through the roof at that point. It also depends on how well my progress is on the main course. I won't really know this until at least January/February.

I finished Dominic O'Brians "Learn to remember" finally this lunch time. It provides a number practical ways of retaining information. They actually do work too! Using both the PEG and Journey methods, I'm starting to retain more information then I thought possible. The trick is associate things with visual memories that create interest and the best ones  are those that are a little odd. For example. On the radio this morning was a news article about the world food shortage and how this would become an acute problem in the next 20 years or so. The program was detailing a variety of novel ways the world can meet demand and most of them where turning to science for the answers. For example, growing meat in a dish. Which brings me to the thing I wanted to remember. They talked about "invitro meat" and I wanted to look into this further. I would normally write this down or voice memo it on my phone but instead, I associated it with a vivid picture of a pig using Microsoft Messenger. Thus the association, Invitro Meat = Instant Messaging, Meat=Pig (The meat they where growing in the dish consisted of a clump of pig cells). Viola!  I now remember, and will probably always remember Instant Messaging as Invitro Meat. Ooh, I hope this is a good thing.

So, the next few weeks will be about putting Dominic's suggestions into practice and also tidying and de-cluttering my life and mind in preperation for the next 9 months of sheer hard work.

2008 London.

I try and get to the science museum at least once in a year. Today was 2008's trip. I had a good reason for going this time of course. Which reminds me. If you are an OU or Schomer, you can now read the new Schomebase Science blog at http://schomebasescience.blogspot.com/. Unfortunately, for this first posting, you'll get this one again. However, there will be a handful of contributors so you should get different perspectives on the topics we are covering.

I was actually quite surprised that the Science Museum wasn't as busy as it has been during the school summer break in previous years. A sign of the recession? OK , It's free to get in but a day on London for a visitor with travel and food can be quite an expensive outing.

The main purpose for my trip was to get  some detailed images of the Beagle exhibit for our build group. I felt quite upset that it was tucked away towards the back wall of the "exploring space" exhibition hall. You have to walk around the back to really see it properly. I was struck by some of the comments from some of the people who were looking at it. A few had no idea about what its purpose was. Comments like "It went to the moon"! The vast majority of people though seem to know that it was the lander "that they lost". It heartened me to hear that they didn't say this in any mocking sense.

So I got my images (several tens of pictures actually). And a few of other exhibits too. I was looking around to see if there were others that we could possibly tackle in the future. There really wasn't. They had one launcher as far as I could see but they did have contributions from UK establishments for NASA funded missions. Which reminds me - Where was the Huygens probe??? Not even Cassini. They need to update there exhibits I think. So, they had the SpaceLab 2 X-ray telescope which was built at the University of Birmingham.  It was designed to make a map of X-ray sources as they where detected through a mask (picture opposite). It mapped the x-ray sources at the centre of our galaxy. It even detected what was considered a micro quaser (an object that emits very high energy x-rays).

Couple of other things worthy of note. They now have a gallery for the history of science on film (OU, where are you)? I watched a movie from the 50's in which the Astronomer Royal (who's name escapes me), expressed his opinion on Manned space flight. He said it wouldn't happen for hundreds of years! a mere 10 to 15 years later, Russia put a man in space. In the same film, a very young and less eccentric Patrick Moore. An exhibit that is Science Art is the "Listening Post". IT takes real time snippets of chat from the Internet and displays them in a large bank of little displays and also converts the test to speech. it's quite hard to explain so you can look at a video of the exhibit here (youtube). I sat in front of it for nearly an hour. It was a very odd but strangely calming experience. You have to try it for yourself if you find yourself there.

Building group begins!

One of the projects I've just kicked off in Secondlife is a collaboration to build virtual models of some European space exploration vehicles. We are going to start with the Beagle 2 because we are all from the Open University and that was an OU project. It's terrible that often when you mention the Beagle2, people mock the fact that it got to Mars and then contact was lost. This is seen as a failure for the whole project. This belies the fact that building and flying Beagle2 was a magnificent feat in itself even though the science was not done. Credit should be given to all those dedicated people that worked on it. The very fact that the budget was next to nothing for this project makes you begin to see how amazing the achievement was.

So the group will convene next week. I'm taking a day out from study on Sunday to visit the Science Museum in London to photograph the Beagle exhibit they have there. I'm hoping I might be able to get some measurements too. The idea of the group will be to test how easy/difficult it is to collaborate on a build in secondlife. Not only will we build the model, but we will research it too. As well as secondlife for the build, we will also up date a Wiki, share relevant documents using Google Docs and possibly (a member of the group has suggested) update a blog on the progress of the project. The final product, if the group agrees, will be handed over the over International Space Museum. They really don't have too many European exhibits and I'm hoping our group, if the experiment is a success, will continue and build other models. I personally think it will be nice to see the finished product with all it's associated research on display somewhere.

In secondlife, a way to get really good results is to use "Sculptured prims". For this, you really require a 3D modelling package. They are expensive and freebies often watermark the drawings. BUT, those fantastic people at Google have done it again! I found Google SketchUp. I have no idea how this will work or even IF it will work with our project. If we decide to do some sculpted work though, it may well be a free alternative to other very high priced alternatives. Watch this space!

Science and the n-Body SIM

I've seen and heard some inspirational things today about science. Firstly, listening to the CERN podcast whilst I was peddling away on my "bike to nowhere", Brian Cox suggested that a scientist is someone working at the limit of their knowledge. That makes all humble students scientists then. The goal whilst studying is to push those limits further and further back until we finally reach a frontier where we are no longer learning from others but setting the syllabus ourselves. I guess besides the ultimate goal of truly knowing something fundamental, aiming to be a giant upon which others stand would the pinnacle of a scientific career.

Whilst attending the MICA VW meeting this afternoon, I saw a Machinima of an OpenSim nBody simulation. The more I see of gravitational simulations in virtual worlds, the more I'm beginning to love and appreciate their beauty. I'm going to use my experience with M257 to play around with some Java applet versions. They will be limited but I won't let that stop me.  What better way to learn about them then by doing.

I register for S207 on Friday. A course buddy said the material despatch is on 22nd August! That means we will have nearly 2 months to get ahead with the reading. Is this an indication of the volume of work the course team expect you to get through? There is a course revision weekend in September I may attend. I'm in two minds at the moment. Attending the M208 tutorial tonight was really excellent. I understood a surprising proportion of the material and I'm not studying that course!

We have about 8 names on the list to do the models for the European  Space exploration project. I had a go at building a prototype Beagle 2 last night. It looks more like road kill! This may be harder then I thought.

My grand day out!

I'm still without my car. The petrol tank fell of the other day and it's in being repaired at the moment. It was quite scary realising that the strap that holds the tank in place under the car had fallen off and was dragging on the road producing all kinds of pretty sparks. A friend of mine who saw me coming down the street said it reminded her of a bumper car at the funfair. Worryingly, at the same time, the dropping tank had ruptured a fuel line and petrol was spilling out on to the road. How close I must have come to a firework display I would not want to be part of.

So the weekend was all about discovering the wonderful world of public transport with all it's exciting twists and turns. How people do that all the time in this town beats me. If you lived in a city (central London or Paris say), then it would not be so bad. The Tube and Metro in these cities are an excellent way to get around. The buses though are hell! Irregular, smelly and uncomfortable. The people that drive them seem a little unfriendly too with English a distant fifth language. Perhaps if they mumbled a little less through the glass that now surrounds them, they would be vaguely intelligible.

All this actually allows me to put my proposed new fitness regime into practice. So, as I had a meeting in the next town over from me this afternoon, I decided to go by Public transport and walk back. This morning I bought a Pedometer so I could see how much exercise I actually did. So, I walked from the meeting to the train station. Stopped off and watched a movie on the way home. Then walked from the cinema to my home. The pedometer read 6,478 steps. After Googling how many miles that was it turns out to be just over 3 miles! I have to say it didn't feel like much and although I tried to walk it at a fast pace, I didn't really even breath heavier. Still, I feel fitter for it. Tomorrow it will be "bike to nowhere" day.

Walking is a bit boring if you have nothing else to do. I listen to podcasts a lot and I found an pretty decent podcast from Dr Brian Cox on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Worth a listen although it did get a little repetitive after a while. I also discovered that I had made a slight error on my Science Discussion page and typed the heading as  "Large Hardon Collider". Spot the deliberate mistake? I'm sure CERNs pages would get a bigger hit rate if they typed that!

Here comes the new plan

In about a months time I start a new course. This one is very very important to me as it marks the beginning really of the reason I started to study in the first place. Pretty much everything else has been preparation for this and the ones that follow. It has taken me nearly three years to get to this point. So you can imagine that I want to try and maximise the information and techniques I get from it. To this end, I started to put together a plan to help me achieve that.

One of the most important things will not only to be able to understand the content of the course but remember and apply it. For this, I need a good memory. I've noticed over the past year or so that I am finding it increasingly hard to remember things. I put this down to age. That's what happens as you get older right? To make sure this was the case I started to look into the memory and how I may be able to improve it. I got hold of a book by Tony Buzan and another by Dominic O'Brien (Learn to Remember). The Tony Buzan book details some interesting ways to visualise and Memorise "data". Oddly, these techniques are a large chunk of Dominic's book too. This seems to tell me that the techniques are pretty universal and, so far, they really do work.

Dominic talks about the brains need for Oxygen, time to consolidate and freedom from stress. To try and increase the Oxygen flow to my own brain and decrease stress I am going to start a better fitness regime and begin meditation again. Today, I'm thinking about what form that fitness regime will take and how I can fit it in to an already quite hectic schedule. That's going to be a feat in itself.

Lastly, In preparation for my course, I am going to give this blog a little more focus. I am going to try and use it to write mainly about my progress, how things are developing with the course and what I'm learning. I am going to keep writing about things outside that but that will be the main focus. I realised the importance of focus after reading several other blogs lately, not least of which was the one written by my cyber friend, Andy Males. I am also going to try and improve my writing style which, to date, has been pretty loose and undefinable.

You have to learn something new everyday

I learned today that hiccups are an evolutionary hangover to our amphibian past. Apparently, Amphibians, such as frogs, gulp air and water in a motor reflex. This predates the development of our lungs into the form they now take. Hiccups can be inhibited by elevating your CO2 intake. Perhaps the "old wives tale" of breathing into a bag to cure hiccups has some basis in fact then. The longest bout of hiccups was 68 years! and you think 10 minutes is bad!

Do people talk louder these days? Sitting in the staff restaurant at lunchtime, I noticed that I could hear conversations that were going on way across the room. I don't think my hearing has improved so it must be that people are talking much louder these days. Perhaps it's because I'm so used to working from home and being in a peaceful environment that I tend to notice these things more. Or perhaps we are just so much more used to socialising in these environments and being in over crowded spaces that we have learned to "zone out" those around us. It's a skill I need to relearn I think along with my memory retention skills (Save that for another day)

Our conversation was based on a much more mundane level. Haven't wagon wheels got smaller? The old classic :)

The singularity is definitely closer then you think.

If you have the time and inclination, I would recommend two books that may go some way to answer those questions you have about the future of humanity (what do you mean you never thought about it?????). The Singularity is near - Raymond Kurzweill and Radical Evolution - Joel Garreau. So depending on what scenario you end up subscribing to, Hell, Heaven or Prevail in Garreaus book or simply the Singularity in Kurzweills, you may find that the outcome is a mix of both enhanced humans that have longevity and built in technology that contains our entire knowledge. Who need Google or a wiki. Neither book seems to hold out much hope for a time when machines will overthrow their evil parents but I probably find this more appealing then the "grey goo" potentiallity of letting Mankind develop itself into destruction. In humanities final cut, organising information will be the least of our worrys, we will simply know it and won't need Google or a Wiki at all :) Incidently, according to Kurzweill, you won't have to wait long to find out - He thinks the Singularity, the moment we realise mankind is changed forever, is at most 30 years away. My head will no doubt have an "Intel Inside" sticker on it by then.

Technorati Tags: Singularity kurzweill gerraua grey-goo

"Reply to all" should be banned for stupid people.

"Reply to all" on email clients should be banned! I thought I worked in an environment where most people knew better. But no -  we had a group notice that went out for people to respond if the notice was relevant to them. In return, some absolute numptys replied :

"I don't know what this is or why you have sent me this" (Then possibly it doesn't apply to you?)

"Yes I do and my username and password is......" (Oh - that's why phishing is still popular).

These replies where sent using the "Reply to all" button getting maximum "Dimwit" coverage for the sender and also exposing the email addresses of every other person who got original email.

Earth to email users..... Try not to hit "Reply to all" unless you mean it.

Also, please don't "reply to all" saying "don't use reply to all".. That's even more annoying :)

Communication with a capital "C"

I think this year will be the year when the "C" in "ICT" becomes dominant. OK,  Communication in Technology terms has been a big thing  a while but what's the tipping point? Finally, 3G networks are being widely offered by TelCos in both dongles and handsets. The latter are becoming far more useable and reliable for data transmission. Also the  price of access and the technology is dropping all the time. The iPhone has had a big part to play but as I blogged yesterday, other manufacturers are catching up with SIM free handsets giving consumers a wider choice then just the locked down iPhone. Soon they will overtake the iPhone unless Apple open up access and unlock devices from one network. Things are really going to start hitting the mainstream and become ubiquitous. It will become more normal to be connected 24 hours then it has ever been.

Phone Lurv

I'm a little skit when it comes to technology :( Last week, I was in love with my laptop. then at a conference it blue-screened - twice! So I'm a little annoyed with him right now. But I got my new phone on Thursday. I'm in Lurv again :) I wanted and iPhone but didn't want to sign up to another lOOOOOng contract so I bought a HTC Touch Cruise. I have to say so far, I love it! And another bonus despite me hating my service provider I got a 3g unlimited data plan for £5 a month with only a 1 month minimum term! They might just win me over with plans like that!

 

Education is wasted on the young

Most of my weekend has been taken up with studying towards several assignments and some end of course work for University. I'm not getting any younger so why do I do this to myself? Maybe, despite the feeling of exhaustion, because I really enjoy it! In fact, that has to be the driver for almost all OU students. All of us would be out of the education system if it where not for the Open University. Participating in events in, for example. Secondlife, only makes it all the sweeter. It gives me access to people and teaches me new skills I wouldn't have the opportunity to practice elsewhere. For example, I'm running a discussion group inworld on Wednesday about "Life on Mars" - How cool is it that I get the opportunity to hone skills like that :)

Get yer friggin act together IT dept.!

I am more than a little agitated today. I've bought a new phone and I've been reloading all my software - That's enough to make you scream. Although I bought some of it from a company who states "your software will always be available to re-download", the most important piece, My backup software, was not. After a few exchanges with the customer service department, it finally transpires that for some reason, despite the fact they have it, they can't put it on my accounts page. The most annoying thing though is they cannot email it to me because the IT department have an upper limit on emails of 5mb! WHAT! Yes again we let the IT department dictate who the customer should be treated and what "services" they will allow us to have. It's high time IT departments deliver what they are supposed to deliver and that's a service not a dictatorship. besides - 5mb? WTF! I can download a googlebyte from the site when I'm buying but once I've bought I'm limited? No - that cannot be right. Ok - Pedants amongst you please don't comment and say that a googlebyte is more information then the content of the entire universe. It will only serve to raise my blood presssure even further.

Business and Policy in Secondlife - Metanomics!

I was absolutely blown away by the following for two reasons.

http://metanomics.net/archive072808

The link is to the video of the Metanomics presentation for Monday. This is great on two levels. Firstly, the way Secondlife is being used by some as an education platform for kids. Exciting, new and bold. Secondly, because the video produced was of the inworld event . Excellent!

Virtual Policies conference 2008 – BERR London.

Central government really wants to know about Virtual Worlds. It’s true! Indeed, almost all Local Authorities having programs about public engagement, inclusion, Futures, social networking and accessibility. Our authority is no different. BUT – Local Government doesn’t seem ready to adopt these technologies and embrace the opportunities for networking they offer on so many levels. Many of them are seen as easy to abuse, addictive and often really no more than toys. We are now though on the verge a fundamental shift in thinking where social networking, Virtual Worlds and the “Futures” agenda are concerned and these are now at least getting some airtime with some forward thinking authorities actually adopting or at least investigating the relevance to governance. Enter the Virtual Policies conference.

Hosted at BERR in London and organised by the Virtual Policy network (http://www.virtualpolicy.net), the purpose of the conference was to inform the government on the potential regulatory issues facing  those that adopt (and indeed are currently using) virtual spaces. Issues such as Intellectual property rights, inworld economics and protecting the vulnerable. Right off, it’s worth mentioning that “SecondLife” is not the only virtual world out there which was ably pointed out on day one. However, Secondlife seems to have become a Defacto standard because of its inhabitants ability to create their own environments and inventory or objects. Dick Davis of Ambient Performance has some alternatives. Amongst other applications, His company produces closed simulators for environments such as the Military and Health. These allow personnel the ability to train for real world scenarios without the danger that could be involved (in the military example), or the expense of providing realworld alternatives. Of course, this is a supplement (known as “Augmented”),  to real world exercises and not a replacement. The impression given that the need for real training in the “basics” can be reduced and realworld exercises can concentrate on those areas that cannot be adequately simulated due to the limitations in the technology or the need for actual “sensory feedback” such as pain! I’m sure immersive technology will eventually allow this to but this opens up a new debate on he morality of such experiences.

Interestingly, immediately preceding Dicks presentation, where the Educators. Notably the Open University who’s Schome and OpenLife projects have enabled collaborative working opportunities for both Young and Mature students respectively. Schome (The Education System for the Information age), although aimed at providing a lifelong learning platform, initially catered for Teenage students. It was hosted in a fully protected environment of SecondLife. The Identities of the individuals that took part where verified by independent means so as to provide an environment free from the potential pitfalls of predators. The initial aims of the project was to explore how Virtual Worlds could assist in the learning and development of individuals. The findings of the Schome project can be read about at http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/getfile.cfm?documentfileid=11344

Of course with any application of technology there is always the potential for abuse. We have all suffered from plagues of Email spam and many have also been victims of Phishing scams and identity theft. As adults, we can learn to deal with these and respond appropriately. How do we protect the vulnerable though? This protection should not only be children but adults too. There were several discussions about how this can be accomplished and I came away with the impression that the technology simply does not exist, yet. Many companies, such as the company offering “Habbo Hotel” a virtual space for  teens, verify a users identity by using a credit card or the credit card of a responsible adult in the case of minor. This is open to all sorts of abuse but it does at least identify an individual who will be responsible for the actions of the registered person. BUT – What if a stolen or cloned card is used? It is not free from abuse. You would be surprised at how many virtual world offerings there are for young people! All of them suffer from the same identification issues. How do we also make sure that the providers of virtual spaces for the vulnerable are not taking advantage of their clients by, say, targeted ads or privacy violations? We learned that Virtual worlds must adhere to the same rules that advertisers in the realworld do but how many people are actually making sure this is so? Perhaps this is about educating the consumer within virtual worlds to know what is acceptable and what is not. Another questions posed is how responsible you are for your inworld counterpart?

 

 (By kind permission : http://kzero.co.uk)

 

Knowing that even monopoly money could be considered income (you had to be there), the potential for financial gain and fraud within Virtual Worlds is as relevant as their realworld counterparts. Many realworld laws are being applied to Virtual worlds. For example, if you steal an object from another avatar (the generic name given to inworld occupants), is this really theft? In some worlds where game playing if the primary role, and if this is considered part of the game playing ethos, then it is accepted. Here, realworld and inworld laws breakdown. Or do they? Can you be prosecuted for criminal damage to, say, someone’s property if you and the owner agree that the act of damage is acceptable to you both? If you exchange real money, goods or services then there are common law contracts that bind all parties involved. This is no different in the Virtual World. Otherwise, fraud on websites would be policed. It is not about “money” but “value”.

There are many things to resolve when it comes to online social interaction and ePublic engagement (For want of a better term). Local Government has faced these issues before when introducing new technologies. 20 years ago, when we started to introduce email as a serious communication tool, we had the same barriers. Firstly, technology could not meet the demands of the application. Especially the exponential growth. Backend systems need to be saleable and designed to cope with the potential. This lesson we all have learned. A move to Virtual Worlds will be no less painful. They have heavy requirements on graphics processing and, in some cases, bandwidth. So 1 computer running Secondlife (as an example) will require 80kbps up and up to 400 kbps down. This is a modest requirement for a home user but multiply this tenfold for a local authority running many instances and it starts to have an impact. But this must not be used as an excuse not to see where this can take us. Local Authorities need to encourage staff and Members to use the potential of blogging, social networking and Virtual Worlds to help them reach the people they are there to serve. With appropriate safeguards (as are often in place for abuse of web browsing or email), networks should be opened up and officers/Members encouraged to take part in one of the biggest revolution to take place for decades.

So at this point you may be asking yourself “If Virtual worlds are so good, why have a real world conference”. And that would be a very good question. The Virtual Policies conference was also hosted simultaneously in SecondLife at Coventry University’s serious Games Institute. In some respects, an association with “gaming” that may be misunderstood. Virtual Worlds potentially can be (and often are) so much more then games. I can only offer the explanation that until we reach a critical mass of people that have access to Virtual Worlds, having a conference inworld will not be possible. However, having a conference that offers both inworld and realworld participation can only help with the accessibility agenda. The other limiting factor as discussed above is “Which Virtual world”. When we finally have an open way of crossing the virtual world boundaries, even if that means leaving our inventory behind to protect developers interests, then these types of conferences can truly happen in a virtual space.

Blue Screen of death!!!!

I was bragging to a friend recently about how cool my new laptop was and how nice and stable Vista was. Despite the taunts about the "blue screen of death" I had never had that. Yesterday, at two crucial moments what happens right in front of the person I had bragged about never having experienced it? It happened! I wondered if my love affair with my laptop and Vista was over however I think what is causing it are the vast number of Vista updates I seem to have received yesterday. Damn you Microsoft! You have tarnished your otherwise exemplory record (tounge firmly in cheek). 

It was so nice to hear on Buzz Out Loud that quite a few people had also experienced problems with the new iPhone 3G. So Apple, you are not completely squeeky clean either :) Makes me feel a whole lot better.

I thought it was kinda easier on Facebook!

I was going to withdraw from writing this blog from about......the other day! I've found an app in Facebook that allows me to blog there and it draws all things I talk about nicely together. Unfortunately, it also makes the reader of the blog install it! So pooh! So = Back with my old friend Blogspot and Livewriter. I will try and feed it into my profile on FB too. Good experiment though.

I have a friend - He is awesome! He is dedicating the next 3 months (and already has dedicated the previous month at least) to preparing to run the New York Marathon on November the 2nd. Not only this but he is doing it for a charity that provides holidays for terminally ill children. The charity is called "Dreams Come True". On top of all that, he is writing about his experience of training in his blog at andrewmales.com/blog/. He is including realtime stats on his progress using a Nike+ gadget that communicates with his trainers and computer! And he calls me a Geek!

Please, pleaSE, pleASE, PLEASE go sponser him and help him reach his target of £1000. It's a very modest target for such total dedication and we all need to help him get there. You can get to the donation page from Andys' blog page or directly on his entry on the JustGiving website. Finally - leave him some words of encouragement on the comments page :)

So See you all on Facebook (too) at

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=716751540

Tata......

Asparagus on Mars!

It's official! The phoenix science team has said that after the gas analysis on a soil sample lifted from the surface of Mars, It has all the right ingredients to successfully grow Asparagus! Yay - So we can live on Asparagus when we eventually colonise Mars. Might be a bit of a boring diet! Seriously though. The soil samples revealed that they would be hospitable but of course, the rest of the environment certainly isn't. Phoenix is such a magnificent achievement.

Finally - Someone sees through Carbon offsetting

A year or so ago I posted  saying that I would no longer recycle because the government really wasn't serious about Climate change and the need to recycle after the introduction of the stupid Carbon Offsetting program.

Now I see, at last, the Carbon Trust is no longer accepting carbon offsetting as an ethical way to operate. Corporate's will have to demonstrate real reductions in their own footprints to benefit from the scheme and be issued with the Carbon Trusts "seal of approval".

Now all we need is for the government to wake up and heavily subsidise renewable sources like Solar and I will start to take them a little more seriously.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7469083.stm

Work like someone possessed!

I've been a little busy lately on all fronts. Work has been hectic for some obscure reason. All the other pathetic stuff I have to do has caught up with me too but for the next two weeks, it's instant bliss :) I spent the day today just relaxing which is really the first time I've done that in a very long time. I still have assignments to complete, but I am slowly working through those and if the worse comes to the worse, I can ask for an extension. I pride myself on only ever having to do that once before (on the same course as it happens). I had a search through the books at the library today and for the longest time, I've been trying to find out what academic level this course is pitched at. AS level apparently. In some ways, I'm quite pleased about that as I never reached that in School. Eat my shorts maths teachers :)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web users 'getting more selfish'

Of course we are stoopid. We've got more important crap to do then look at rubbish and watch adverts for pathetic stuff we don't want and can't use! For far to long you've persuaded us to spend more time then is healthy going from one useless web site to another and getting sidetracked. Today's web users are more discerning and careful about where they go and what they do.....Now.... where's that interesting link I just stumbledupon ..........

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web users 'getting more selfish'

Climate change? You cannot be serious!

I'm a bit sick of hearing about how badly Humans are messing up the planet and being told to help by recycling and reducing my energy consumption whilst governments and corporations continue to trade "carbon points" and make money from the schemes put in place that the rest of us suckers support.

 

Example 1 : My local authority "kindly" picks up my recycled waste of tin cans, bottles, paper and green garden waste free of charge to benefit me and the planet. Hogwash! They pick it up because they can sell the cans, bottles and paper to recycling companies who then sell it back to us in recycled forms! They take my Green Garden waste and sell it back to me as fertiliser and other gardening products directly. We thank them for taking our recyclables from us for free, and then pay them to have them returned in other forms.

 

Example 2: If the government where serious about climate change and our part in the worlds downfall, then give us free (Or at least greatly subsidised) access to Solar panels. I would love to fit these and make use of the free and pollution free energy given to us by the sun. The panels are so expensive at the moment, I couldn't possibly afford to fit them. Here's a thought for a scheme that with perhaps a little tweaking could work. Why doesn't the government install solar panels on all socially provided housing. They can then offer subsidised or free electricity to those on benefits and the elderly and reduce fuel payments to both. The unused capacity can be sold to the energy companies to sell back to the consumer thereby helping to pay for the original installation. For home owners, subsidise the installation of solar panels and stipulate that spare capacity be given back to the government (in remuneration for subsidising the panels in the first place), who can, likewise, sell it on to the energy companies to provide back to those that don't want to install panels or use more energy  then their panels provide. You know why they won't do this? Because the government supports to extortionate cost of providing energy to consumers. It's financial which negates all their words on being serious about climate change.

The Apprentice is not for wimps!

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Pity nobody told the current contestants! Then again, perhaps the first few weeks are about weeding out the chaff from the wheat (No, I got that right in case your thinking).

I thought it was absolutely hilarious when they showed the video of Kevin side by side with the Vicky Pollard character from Little Britain. The similarity's are amazing!

They are the same people, surely! Next week, let's hope that piece of dirt Jenny gets booted. She is the biggest snake I think the show has ever had. Greetings cards about the environment! Please! I thought the singles day idea was quite good.

So do you think you can pick the winner yet? Of course. My favourite is Alex. Second, Claire.

Uses for your on-machine Camera

The fad of including a Web camera on your laptop seems to be expanding. Most of the laptops I looked at recently seem to carry them. This isn't a bad idea and it does save you the bother of carrying one around with you should you actually need one. The thing is, up until today, I hadn't actually used mine.

The use I put it to wasn't exactly what it was designed for but it was really valuable. Sitting at my desk, I became aware of a pain developing in my left eye. The sort you get when a rogue eyelash migrates away from it's usual position and decides to have a poke (literally) around the inner sanctum of your eyeball. Without a mirror, you are a bit stuck for finding the little critter and getting it outta there before the pain gets to great to bare.

One useful feature of my built-in webcam, is the ability to zoom in on the subject it is capturing. I used this feature to magnify my eye so I could see what was in it and retrieve that little sucker. Of course, the zoom is valuable because if you just go right in to the camera, you can't actually see what is on the screen.

I know, Genius huh!

The Robot uprising is coming - Are you prepared?

I've been reading Daniel H Wilsons book entitled "How to survive a Robot uprising". Up until today, I thought it would be years before the, rather tongue in cheek outcomes depicted in the book would happen. After seeing the following two robots :

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2949093547034908878

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI

I'm not so sure! With the advances in Artificial intelligence coming on in leaps and bounds (For example the great work the University of Hertfordshire are doing), it may already be here. The limiting factor, IMHO, for a robot world has always been mobility. These two developments overcome that obstacle. I should point out that both these examples where developed some years ago so I guess the projects have advanced even further now. Two things worry me about this. Firstly, we don't really have to wait for AI to catch up. The machines don't have to be self aware to take over the world. All it takes is a person with enough money to develop enough single application (ie, "Kill all Humans"), robots and the shear numbers would be a problem. The idea of a self aware machine created by man is an interesting one. I mean, isn't that just another form of evolution anyway so what is so far fetched about it?

A couple of curios things though. Why are the Mars Rovers so outdated? Surely, something like BigDog or QRIO could be far better suited to the Martian terrain. A limiting factor for BigDog would be the nature of it's energy source (A gasoline engine). This could, I assume be replaced with Solar power with a slight loss (due to weight increase) of mobility. With it's increased mobility, It could cover so much more terrain, reached places inaccessible to the current rovers and perhaps even clean itself so that it can run for far longer. I wouldn't want to see it licking another BigDogs butt though, know what I mean?

I think the holy grail of Robotics research has to be a nano-machine that cooperates with other nano-machines. An example would be the replicators in the TV series "Stargate".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyuMtpoG7eQ

After all, the physical elements of humanity are just a collection of nano-sized chunks of matter that somehow cooperate with one another.

 

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