The new Pirates of the Caribbean movie has been pretty much trashed in every review I have read … but you know it’s got to be bad when the Ninja trashes it ….
Book: The Battle for God
The Battle for God, by Karen Amstrong
A friend of mine lent me this book recently, after I lent him Sam Harris The End of Faith, which I’ve talked about before on this blog. Both books deal with analysing the phenomenon of fundamentalism but the two authors deal with the subject in very different ways. Harris’ book is full of vitriol and lacks any real compassion, whilst some of his arguments are interesting this gets lost in his rabidly anti religious stance, his intolerance of faith is as damaging as the very fundamentalism he discusses. Armstrong on the other hand tries to rationalise and understand monotheistic fundamentalism,by examining in detail Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism. She examines each of them in turn with dignity and depth and amazing richness of detail particularly from a historical point of view
Unlike Harris'(who is so rabidly anti-islam that he’s become the poster child for Islamophobes ), Armstrong’s analysis is very objective, surprisingly so in fact, and I’m very glad I read the book, it taught me a great deal. She tries to understand why fundamentalists believe as they do and behave as they do, but she certainly isn’t afraid of articulating her own feelings about these people.
One of the most interesting arguments (if that’s the right word) she makes is that as scientific rationalism began to “explain away” God, fundamentalism rose up as its “implacable” enemy. It’s fascinating how she explains that before this conflict between scientific theories and literal readings of holy texts everyone embraced the “Independence relationship” between science and religion – a theory ascribed to Ian Barbour. In which he describes science and religion as separate domains of equal value in life since they focus on dealing with separate parts of our existence.
Armstrong tries to de-demonise fundamentalism and I think offers some hope in favouring discussion, dialogue and integration as a way out of the ever increasing conflict between fundamentalists and humanists.
It’s a very well written book and offers a valuable insight into the genesis of the fundamentalist movement and what keeps these movements growing. It’s an insightful read and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interesting the debate around fundamentalism.
Starcraft II … finally!
I loved the original Starcraft games released by Blizzard. I was very pleased to read that they have finally announced the long-awaited sequel. In addition to that they have released a set of trailers which you can view here, that show case the game features and the new units, races etc. The best way to describe Starcraft is, Warcraft in space! and from the trailers you can see that the graphics are absolutely amazing! Whislt retaining its RTS roots.
I can’t wait to get my hands on this game…
Terrorism in SecondLife … and some other thoughts
Came across this article … looks like vandals in Second Life blew up ABC Island. Unlike in the real world, in the virtual world of Second Life, creators Linden Labs, were able to “rollback” the island and restore most of what was destroyed. They aren’t the only commercial organisation that has been targetted in this way.
Whilst these incidents are both amusing and also a tad disturbing what I found was more interesting was this bit of research done by Tateru Nino that provides some numbers for how many SL users actually visit corporate sites created in SL. Perhaps it’s like I said before … people don’t want to visit Dell or Coco Cola in a virtual fantasy world.
Contrary to some people’s opinions I dont hate Second Life … there are some things its very good at …
Whilst I was at Xtech I listened to a very interesting talk by Matt Biddulph who demonstrated, something I’ve mentioned before, which is just how useful Second Life can be as a modelling tool particularly as Matt demonstrated, when you are able to link physical objects in the real world with objects in the virtual world.
Semantic web starting points
I’ve been getting to grips with SPARQL over the last week, probably more so than I have at any time over the last year. SPARQL is an RDF query language and one of the nice things about the Talis Platform is that you dont have to know SPARQL in order to retrieve data. So up until recently I really didnt have much need to write SPARQL queries, I could pretty much do what I wanted with the platform using its other RESTful services.
The platform however has extensive support for SPARQL, so whilst working on a spike this week it was apparant that some of the things I wanted to do would require writing some queries. I used it as an opportunity to brush up on my RDF and SPARQL – it’s amazing how easily we can take things for granted when the tools and services we use on a day to day basis hide us from low level implementation details.
If your anything like me when you want to brush up on something you you tend to scour bookshelves, or google for bits of information, which can be time consuming and sometimes a bit hit and miss. Fortunately Danny came to my rescue, he joined Talis recently and I think he’s a fantastic addition to the team. Danny sent me a link to his Semantic Web Starting Points, a collection of links he’s compiled that provide a great introduction to semantic web technologies, which obviously includes RDF and SPARQL.
Thanks Danny!
Spikes, PHP and a Platform that just works
I’ve had a pretty good week. I’ve been totally engrossed in a project I’ve been working on since getting back from Xtech last week. Essentially I’ve been working on a spike with Andrew and Hardeep to extend the functionality in our Project Cenote concept car.
The purpose of the spike was two fold. Firstly to try to better understand how to build a funky new set of features into Cenote, and secondly to allow the members of the team become familiar with and experiment with some technologies that they aren’t familiar with.
In fact it felt quite good leaving work today, having gotten to the point where the little prototype is pretty much feature complete. What’s really impressed me isn’t necessarily what it does (which is cool!), but the speed with which we’ve been able to put it all together. The spike was timeboxed to two weeks, but the reality is that the bulk of the implementation has actually been completed within the last few days. It’s by no means a production system it’s just enough to hopefully facilitate some of the discussions we hope to have both internally and externally … much like the first release of Cenote, which we Open Sourced recently.
The original version of Cenote was a read only application that allowed users to search for books and then mashed up the results with data held in various stores in the Talis Platform as well as external sources such as Amazon in order to provide users with some pretty useful information. This spike extends the original version by allowing users to use that data to create and share some really useful things.
I think there’s some important reasons why we have been able to put this together so quickly. The technology stack has been kept very simple – its just an application built in PHP5, running under Apache 2. Furthermore the application is built upon our Talis Platform which is constantly evolving and becoming more and more powerful. I’m not saying that just as someone who has worked on building that platform, I’m actually saying that as someone who has been using and consuming it’s services primarily to build applications with it.
When Rob and I originally wrote Cenote, we were both impressed at how easily we were able to use the platform, as it was then, to put together a cool looking application in the space of a couple of days. If that impressed me at the time, then I’m doubly impressed at how simple it’s been to create an application that supports creation, deletion and updating of data.
Google New Experimental Search Features
http://www.google.com/experimental/
Google have come up with a set of experimental new search features aimed at improving the search experience. I’ve been playing with them and have to admit they are really cool!
The first is the ability to view search results on a timeline or on a map. Google do this by extracting dates and locations from the search results so that the information can be viewed in a different way.
For example a search for Olympics, and specifying a map view plots the locations the event has been held in on a map. Whilst searching for information on the civil rights movement, and specifying a timeline view will highlight key dates and events on a timeline.
The next new feature, is the enabling of keyboard shortcuts to navigate around search results. After initially using this, I can’t stop! A small arrow is rendered next to a search result, pressing the ‘J’ key moves to the next results, whilst pressing ‘K’ moves to the previous. You can open a search result by pressing ‘O’ or just hitting enter. You can also press ‘/’ to have the cursor jumpt to the search box, whilst ‘ESC’ moves the cursor out of the search box. Try it for yourselves here, it’s really easy to use and if your like and means you dont need to use a mouse at all to navigate around search results.
Another new feature is the addition of facets to search results, ( which Google oddly refer to as left hand navigation? ). Basically the left hand pane lists a set of groupings, for example content type, patents, products, news etc. The left hand pane also list’s a set of related searches. Together both these bits of information allow you to narrow your search, in order to find whatever it is your looking for, hopefully, quicker. This feature is also available on the right hand side of the screen.
It’s encouraging to see that Google are trying very hard to improve search, not only by providing mechanisms that should enable ordinary users to get to the content they are interested in faster, but they are also thinking about how to improve the experience. The keyboard shortcuts, whilst on the face of it might look simple, actually increases your productivity because you don’t need to interact with a mouse at all.
I’m impressed.
Pictures from Xtech 2007
Just got home from Xtech, was only out there for two days. Must confess I would have loved to stay longer but have tonnes of work to do.
I’ve posted some of my pictures up on flickr here.
But also created the jumpcut movie below using them, enjoy …
I had a really good time in Paris!
Xtech 2007: Physical Hyperlinks
Speaker: Timo Arnall, Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Some notes I made whilst listening to this talk.
Talk is about connecting the digital to the physical.
Physical:
- Things
- places
- people
Digital
- Content
- Applications
- Services
Currently being driven by mobile phones technology, phones are fast becoming universal controllers.
Context Awareness is really hard AI, raises implications over choice. People like to be able to choose
Biggest driver of this technology is advertising and marketing – holy grail of advertising.
Taking services and things back to physical products.
Design for universal access. Finding more information about products for people with impairments.
Mimic graffiti by offering new ways of authoring.
Mobile devices increase social awareness but also narrow them down to a screen – which can be a very anti social activity. Physical hyperlinks an help get us back to interacting in the physical work instead of these tiny screens.
Everyday objects start to have agency and voice in the digital world.
Technologies that would allow us to achieve this:
- Bluetooth, used increasingly for marketing and advertising. Posters in London allow users to download advertisements. Problems with Bluetooth: works at a large range, the interaction field is large and difficult to visualise, ideal platform for location spamming. As a user I want to be able to choose what I get, not have it pushed to me.
- SMS, e.g. Yellow Arrow. Simple to implement, but requires users to read and type codes, relies on network and you have to wait for feedback which will not be immediate.
- Barcodes. Everything has barcodes, they are truly ubiquitous. Designed to improve the speed and accuracy of data entry. They have become universal standards, they are so ubiquitous we dont notice them anymore.
RFID
- Seen as a replacement for barcodes.
- RFID doesnt work when theres metal around or liquids, currently problematic in practise.
- Tag per item or per pallet?
- Short range technology 10cm.
- Interaction is quick, there is an immediacy.
- Hold up to 4kb of data.
- Two way information, get data from tag or write info to it.
- Often break down when there is more than one tag in the same bubble.
- Controversial because of privacy issues, but this might be unfounded.
Applications
Timo showed many examples of how Barcodes etc. QR Codes are used in real world applications. Infrastructure can now be setup using QR Codes this is an interesting way of delivering settings to devices (i.e. network access).
Urban Seeder, uses very complex visual codes, and relies on more sophisticated pattern recognition. Lovely in the way that most people would not recognised them unless they were in the know, this might mean that people start exploring, taking pictures of patterns to see if they contained a hidden meaning.
Some of Timo’s research has shown that people using these things on the street in Norway find that it can feel very strange to be interacting with smart posters etc. because its manifestly apparant that you are to everyone passing you by … users complained it felt like picking up litter, because you very exposed. Whereas RFID is much quicker. Is this local cultural ( norway ) or could it be a gobally cultural phenomenon.
Of all the talks I’ve listened to this morning, I must confess I enjoyed Timo’s the most. Find out more about him and his research here:
Xtech 2007 : Arrived in Paris
My fellow Talisians and I flew into Paris earlier this evening and managed to find our way, eventually, to the Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel hotel. After we checked in and freshened up we all met up in reception and wondered off towards the Eiffel Tower in search of somewhere to eat, and eventually found a lovely little restaurant where we spent the better part of the evening. It was a really pleasant evening, spent most of it laughing and joking, but also discussed what we wanted to try to achieve whilst we are all here.
The walk back to the hotel was really pleasant, in fact I remember an old friend once saying that the true soul of a city is revealed at night, and I did sense that was true of Paris, or perhaps thats just the romantic in me.
The conference doesn’t officially start until tomorrow but we are all pretty excited to be here. There’s going to be some very interesting talks on tomorrow and I suspect I’ll probably camp in Amphitheatre C for the talks on the Ubiquitous web. I’m not sure if the other’s have decided which talk’s they are going to sit in on but I have no doubt we’ll all be meeting many of the attendees here this year.
I’ll echo some comments made my colleague, and our newly promoted CTO, Ian Davis:
“So here’s the pitch from the new CTO: if you want to face the challenge of creating something world-changing; if you like the idea of a company that controls its own destiny and is small enough for you to change it; if you never want to stop learning; then I want to hear from you.”
“Come and find me at XTech this week, or grab one of the other 8 Talisians that are going and get the lowdown on what it’s really like to work here. If you can’t make XTech, then email careers@talis.com and tell them I sent you :)”