Category: culture-and-politics

The polls currently say McCain 90 and Obama 200.

I go to bed knowing the world is finally a safer place, now Obama will be the next American president.

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So I started to write a comment to this TechCrunchUK blog post. But decided it was worth writing a blog post instead.

So a quick overview of the blog post. Mike Butcher went to Dublin to check out Digital Hub which is funded by the Irish government. He then launches into a pled for the same thing in the UK. He names it the Techhub and starts to say it should be based in London.

But I think it ought to be in London. Why? Simple really. Money, access and the networks inside London. Startups can make use of the amazing access to the wealth of mentoring, venture capital and talent here. I know there is an argument for creating other centres around the UK. But the classic clustering effect created by Silicon Valley would be replicated by concentrating efforts on one geographical area.

Yawn! I've heard it all before, and to be frank its getting a little tired. What is it with people and big shiny shiny central locations? What would this all achieve? Remember the dome people dummys! What about all the other simular activities going on all across the country? Liverpool where I was tonight has something like this, Manchester already has the MDDA and is working with many others on Media City UK, even Bristol now has the iShed project which i'm hearing so much about. Yeah forget all those, lets build another one bigger that everyone elses. Also what is the need to duplicate Silicon Valley in the UK? We should be building on our strengths and building the next, not a copy of the past.

What really gets me is, what is techcrunchuk going to do to make this all happen? Seriously, what practically are they going to do?

I was talking to the people at Geekup Liverpool today and explaining how Geekdinners changed over time and how it was different from other events in London at the time. The point I was making, was that when I first moved to London, I got fed up of the events I was going to. So I did something about it. I made something happen. I mean for example, the Techcrunch tours, what happened to those? What came out of them? Anyway, Mike jokes at the end…

This is going to require people from government to get involved. I may even have to kidnap Boris Johnson and hold him to ransom.

I'm not advocating kidnap, but hell if you could get some action by fingering through that massive contact list you must have and pulling some strings to get something done. Then great do it. But till then, I don't really want to hear anything more about techhub. Support whats currently going on across the country before thinking up yet another version of the same.

Rant over….sorry mike but its frustrating to see what people are doing across the UK and your advocating something which doesn't seem to help them or the industry in a meaningful way.

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I was waiting for my train for Manchester today at London Euston. A old woman comes up to me and asks me, if I'm from Kenya, I say no and she thinks for a second and then asks me if I'm from Africa. I say no once again and she then asks where I am from? I say the UK and she gives me a funny look and asks wheres my parents from? I say the Caribbean and in return she takes a second and says can I give her 4 pounds. I look at her and wait for her to say more about why she needed the money but it doesn't come. So I say, I only do cards, I don't have any cash at all (which if you know me well, is very true actually). Anyway, she turns away and just walks away.

The whole thing lasted less that a minute, I was thinking afterwards while running for the train so I can get a seat with a table (I got one, facing backwards). She didn't even ask for spare change or a low amount of money, I mean would you give someone you don't know a fiver for no reason? Anyway, also the repour thing was quite laughable and i'm never the kind of person who goes for that whole thing. Yo yo, were from the same city, now give me a fiver.

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So I only watched the film Cheaters. It was excellent and put across the true story really well. Anyway here's a really good user comment which sums up my thoughts.

What I absolutely loved about this movie is the fact that it displays a genuine moral dilemma without necessarily preaching anything. It doesn't provide viewers a standpoint for moral ascendancy, instead, the viewers get the pleasure of interpreting the situation, thus gaining that threshold for ascendancy.

I'd say the film did play out a bias, and the bias was in favor of the students from Steimetz High. I'd say that it is rather a fair bias, because it is rare to see the cheaters as the protagonist. Amidst this, they weren't portrayed as the over-glamorized heroes that will promote a cheating society. What John Stockwell did was to give us a dose of reality, an arena for sympathize with cheaters, at the same time, displaying the consequences of the human act.

I love the mixture of documentary footages. Opening Credits was awesome, wherein there were raw footage in grainy stock of actual American high school. It played greatly on the emotional framework that the film worked on and I'm so glad my parents were able to find a copy of the film on DVD.

Nice work John Stockwell, I don't usually like Jeff Daniels but he did a great job in this film. If you get the chance to see this film, do watch it, you won't be disappointed.

I love these moral dilemma's and coming from a not so great school I can certainly agree with what they did. Sometimes you do need to break the rules to get things changed or at least make a difference. This isn't justification to break the rules but I guess most people know when the right time is.

Technorati Tags: cheating, cheaters, documentary, dilemma, moraldilemma, morality, dvd, film

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Found via Bruce Schneier's blog. An awesome thought about how the psychological make up of being the underdog in a asymmetrical war forces you to rethink the sacrifice involved.

Interesting and thoughtful article about suicide attacks in the online video game Halo 3:

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I'm only making it easier for them to shoot me — and thus I'm marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade — and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die — but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone “from beyond the grave.”)

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.

It's not just that I'm willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It's that I'm exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don't want to die. If they die too often, they won't win the round, and if they don't win the round, they won't advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it's all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I'm the underdog; I know I'm probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I'm poor.

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Its been a really busy week and I've still not quite got around to blogging most of it but I did want to say (quickly) that the Videos for the Women in Games Mixer videos (part 1 and part 2) are now up on BlipTV. As usual unedited and under a creative commons licence, so you can edit the best bits if you like. Nothing to stimulating but interesting. Good work Thayer.

You can also find the boagworld 100th Live meetup video at the same place this time in 4 parts. Expect to hear audio from the Will Wright Lecture, some shouting about how Andrew 'amatuers are killing the industry' Keen got a frosty reception at the Arts Council and some writing about other games related events soon. Still I can't believe I missed Toshio demonstrating Electroplankton at ZeroOne, I would have paid to have been there. Anyway, don't forget today is the Geekdinner with the Wii and Thursday a Geekdinner with Stowe Boyd.

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Jason who now works for Google instead of the BBC had some crushing words to say about the BBC's online future on his blog. I hadn't noticed because my RSS Owl is playing up (yes I'm going to write a bug request for this problem) so I've missed a lot of what my friends have been writing about. Anyway Jason makes the point that the BBC's web efforts are doomed to fail because we are a broadcasting company with broadcasting type funding in a nutshell. So when I first read his blog entry, I was going to respond on the backstage blog but felt the backstage blog wasn't the right place to reply, as some of these points are my own view and not of the BBC. So I may just link to the post on backstage and leave it as that. It won't spend much time on the front page either because there will be posts from the Future of Webapps Expo tomorrow.

Here's some choice quotes.

Moving away from the economic analysis of the situation facing the BBC, we can see the tide already turning. The BBC was an innovator in radio (2LO – in beta 1922, v1.0 when licenced in 1923) then TV (BBC Television Service – beta from 1929, v1.0 release 1946) but not now in the online age. Sky Anytime, 4OD, and ITV.com's video revamp have all launched before the BBC's iPlayer service (iMP beta 2005, iPlayer in beta, v1.0 not released at time of writing) showing commercial efforts in this field have trumped the BBC. One person working on the project called it “worse than boo.com”. With the lead now lost, how can they pull it back?

Frankly and I'm sure I'm breaking some part of my contract here. iPlayer is a mess and I can't / won't defend it on my own blog. Everyone I speak, asks what happened? Why would the BBC put out iplayer and think it was acceptable? Even in Boston the developer of Miro/Democracy player was asking me seriously why would a public broadcaster do such a thing? I don't have an answer, I really don't. In the first BBC Backstage podcast, Dave Crossland answered Tom Loosemore's question if the BBC should have done nothing over releasing iplayer. He answered yes, do nothing because it was morally wrong. Well thats his view but lets be honest would we better off if we didn't do iplayer? I actually think so. Tom Loosemore was right, we do need to deliever to those who don't understand bit torrent or simlar technologies but I wonder how many of us we're eating our own dogfood?

Lets go through the some of the principals of Web 2.0 and the BBC…

• Rich user experience: archaic BBC tech standards say that you can't rely on javascript/flash to deliver content, and pages need to be below 200kb in size. Buh bye innovative user interfaces, widgets/gadgets, Google or Yahoo Maps style interface, or YouTube for that matter.
• User as contributor: BBC requires moderation of content before publishing it – see above for 606 example.
• Participation, not publishing – as above.
• Enable the long tail – BBC tech has limited ability to cater for large amount of content in the first place. CMSs are disparate and clunky, content distribution network is run off one single, overloaded computer (!).
• Radical trust – this simply doesn't happen at the BBC, see 606. Not even to employee's, see first point.

Right so, point one. The BBC Standards and guidelines are under consistent review and lots of those archaic are being shifted as our audience become more internet savvy. Backstage also doesn't have to live by those standards and guidlines. Jason is right publishing is cheap and free, we need to reflect that. Yes long tail, we need lightweight cms which don't require a room full of people to understand how it works. Trust I won't talk about right now.

Anyway, there's lots more I want to say, but its late and I got a early start tomorrow at FOWA. So I'll finish off later (maybe Thursday).

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Filmmaker Deborah Scranton talks about and shows clips from her documentary The War Tapes, which put cameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard, for one year in Iraq. The soldiers' raw footage and diary excerpts tell a powerful, unsettling story of modern war.

Wow, powerful talk and I did go check out the site later. Its self described as…

Straight from the front lines in Iraq, The War Tapes is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty. Steve is a wisecracking carpenter and a gifted writer. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves to travel and is fluent in Arabic. Mike is a father who seeks honor and redemption.

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Something about Freetards and the BBC, but it all started here, don't ask me – I'm not going to comment.

Oh here's some more details on the Register, Open rights group, Download Squad, Cory's piece in the
Guardian, some official response and podcast on the backstage blog and finally the last word from Defective by design.

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So Maz really has shaken the gender teapot. First the post Me Tarzan. You Jane, then Geeks can be Chic(K)s.

Some quotes,

Add to this my return from a recent visit to the San Francisco to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo where I was struck by the uniformity of the male technology enthusiasts – As one of the few females in attendance, I stuck out like a PC at a Mac convention, so much so that another woman with whom I met remarked how few ‘skirts there were amongst all the suits’. Well that’s certainly one way to put it!

It does sadden me to think that amongst my daily little foray into the Web 2.0 world, there is little realisation, nor concern about such a gender imbalance. It seems ironic that where we are very savvy at collectively contributing and sharing information there is a lack of attention about the formation of such user knowledge, shares and application creation.

Maybe the way the world is Tarzan build tools; Jane gets to use them…

Perhaps the Web 3.0 jungle will bring with it a more egalitarian gender balance?

Yep there's certainly no real argument there. Some of the comments are also interesting, including this one which points out that there more women in the less programming led fields. Human computing, interaction and even xml seem to be fields where woman are more common that straight programming.

But whats really interesting is…

It seems that gender is not the only issue here, but also the geek image. You are only allowed into The Club if you possess an in-depth knowledge of coding and more structural aspects of web development. Ok so here my own level of ‘geek ability’ does rather fall short. I do, do HTML (when forced), Javascript, Flash and so on… but hell Web 2.0 fluidity makes this less of an ‘essential’ special power – especially as I am not by ‘trade’ a web developer. However, there are
important assumptions that are being made about the types of knowledge one should (and can) possess and the association of such abilities along gendered lines.

Case in note, one of the biggest issues that a (female) friend of mine has come across is that people assume that she is not a web developer. No, not that she is not capable, but simply that she does not fit the ‘image’, that that particular role calls forth. Now where’s the equality in that?

The Geek image is certainly something which I've touched on before but I've never thought about how the poor geek image is affecting women.

I'm going to avoid the current comments about special treatment just to say if the environment and people are inherently corrupt how do you reverse that? The answer isn't simple and its something most people hate but most people have never faced such corruption.

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