Tag: science

AdaLovelaceDay09: Marie-Louise von Franz

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same…

That's how it started a, Suw Charman-Anderson's vision to do something special for Ada Lovelace day has become huge with a sign up rate and more being added still a few days before.

Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (mother and daughter) created the psychological test better known as the MBTI (Myers Briggs type indicator). Although not exactly in the technology field, this has a profound effect on the technology field and this was also a field run by super intelligent males such as Sigman Freud and Carl Jung. However the lesser known story is Carl Jung had a lab partner called Marie-Louise von Franz. It was Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's work which Katharine Briggs read and studied then passed on to her daughter Isabel Briggs. Marie-Louise later worked with Carl Jungs friend Barbara Hannah, who Carl Jung actual set up together. She later went on to publish first the mathematical structure of DNA and a series of essays, books and videos. I found out about Marie-Louise by accident while reading Into the Dream by William Sleator which sounded like a film I watched sometime later called The way of the Dream. Marie-Louise's intelligence pushed her forward and although not the only woman drawn to Jung, she was the only one not to have a affair or get mixed up in all that. Instead she worked hard and paved her own way, linking psychology and physics. Before she died she lectured all around the western world and became known for her own thoughts and theories instead of Jung's. Shes not as well as known as than Myers-Briggs but her influence in psychology has been huge, and its great to see hard work pay off.

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The benefits to sleeping late

Manchester at Night

This one comes from Wired magazine via Imran Ali again. 3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late. I have to agree with every single one of the points. It still kills me getting up early in the morning but whats worst is when i'm in the creative zone at 1:30am and then have to start heading to bed, knowing theres a bunch of things I could get done if I stayed up a little longer.

1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You'll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

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I may just have the next werewolf

I have playing with playing cards most of the night. Seems while I was sleeping that I came up with a card game which seems to be like werewolf/mafia but very different. I was reading up about game theory to see if it fit in one of the categories and it seems to fit into reciprocal altruism which is nicely exemplified with file sharing.

Another potential example would be the Internet file sharing communities. The ability to download (receive) a given file (an economic good) directly depends on other people who already possess the same file and share it through allowing uploading it to those who want it (a process which is also called seeding). Those who receive the file and later refuse to share it with others (through seeding) are known as leeches. However, there are methods to ban leechers, ie to deny them further participation in the file sharing network.

I don't want to come across like its totally tied down but the game seems pretty fun and could work with groups as big as 40 or as small as 12. Some other people have spoke to in the past have talked about the notion of a 3rd entity like the vampires. Well although we've not tried it out, I do worry it will just be chaos and there not enough to go on to make it worth doing. Plus vampires would be like a 2nd team of werewolves.

So forgetting vampires, my game is like werewolf as in there is a night and day phase but its more like a change of location with certain characters not being able to see or hear. The moderator/god/voice of the game is required to do a lot more in this game in regards to whos who. It may even require two or a piece of paper. The social notion of cheating and saying whatever you like is still there and is a major part of the game but now there's more emphases on altruism. You also don't need special cards for this game, a standard pack of 52 will scale up to 44 players I worked out. The suits, numbers and royality cards are very important for the game. And I did consider upping the numbers using the joker cards but it got very constrictive. Of course the game works well with drink too. The closes game I can find to the core idea of the game is this invented game called anandis.

I tried to do some probability calculations on who would win depending on how many of each character but it was beyond me. No what I really need is a Card game simulator. Maybe once I get a feel for the maths behind the game, I will write up a complete set of rules and release it to the world under a creative commons attribution licence or something.

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Sharing critical documentaries

Saw this on Rocketboom today (yes I still watch it). Its a guy who gives away copies of documentaries like Sicko on DVD in a Subway station in New York. It seems like all the films he's copying and giving away are rights cleared (except maybe Sicko). Anyway I thought it was a great way to educate and enlighten people. Also get people talking and debating. He describes at the end how people will stand around and start talking to each other about the films and there meaning.

Without going into much detail, one of the elements for the ARG a few of us are still working on, includes the mass distribution of information in a public area. This might be a really good solution.

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You are irrelevant…

apple Ipod billboard

I was talking to one of Emma's friend on a night out in London a while ago and we got talking about my theory of Steve Jobs control of Apple (still to be written I guess). Anyway we got around to the ipod and I suggested that before the ipod, Apple was all about Thinking Differently

Now its not about thinking anymore its about you being irrelevant now.

The more famous commercials and print advertising featured dark silhouetted characters against bright-colored backgrounds. The silhouettes are usually dancing, and in television commercials are backed by up-beat music. The silhouettes are also usually holding iPods and listening to them with Apple's supplied earphones. These distinctively appear in white, so that they stand out against the colored background and black silhouettes. Apple seems to change the style of these commercials quite often depending on the song's theme or genre.

Yes you can also be the dark silhouette, a mean-less thing to hang a ipod off? Well thats the way I see and Emma's friend did actually agree with me. Its not very suttle either… I mean what other adverts have you seen when they have blacked out the person? Imagine a wii advert with a black silhouette? Car advert with a silhouette driving the car, hell even a drinks company advert with silhouettes? Yes it might sound all wrong to some of you and maybe some will say its just good advertsing. But good advertising works by getting in deep and making you feel inadaquent or in other words irrelevant right? The ipod adverts are just less suttle.

Yep your irrelevant get use to it, or change it.

right shall I close the comments?)

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Resume at any point

Adrian Hon, talked about his dis-taste for choose your adventures books in his session. He described the 5 finger holding multiple pages and multiple routes which we choose to hold while playing those games. He even mentioned how he sometimes will start the game from the finish.

And it got me thinking, is it only geeks which do this kind of thing? Also is this a good or bad thing? I would say being able to hold multiple places of a complex script in your head at the same time and being able to move forward from any point and resume at anytime any of them has to be a good thing. This actually ties nicely back to the those geek qualities The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers.

Geeks understand multi-dimensional relationships

Geeks connect with their online buddies in several guises, often getting to know the person behind the avatar as friendships deepen and move from adult communities to personal IM.

A geek can flow seamlessly between conversation about a friend's partner and kids in one window and an elaborate group sex scene in another, without feeling any discontinuity between the personas. Even if the friend is a 43-year-old father of two in IM, and a 22-year-old dominatrix in the group.

With all that going on, a geek has no problem accepting that sometimes you want mocha ripple cherry fudge chunk swirl with almonds and a waffle and sometimes you want vanilla lite.

Just a quick thought…

Althought I got to add when I put this past Kate, she did say “isn't the only people who read the choose your own adventure books geeks?” So everyone who read those books were doing the 5 finger resume? Maybe…

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What is it with Newspapers on a Weekend?

Communication?

I can't put my finger on it but something about the British (i'm not so convinced its just the British now) and Newspapers which I'm observing, which I find interesting. There's something about going to places like coffee shops, bars, pubs and even parks with a Saturday or Sunday paper in hand. Then (usually in couples) sitting in silence reading the paper to themselves. Sometimes if they find something very witty or interesting, they will attract the attention of there partner and read it out aloud. What kills me is sometimes there reading the same paper! So one of them most of opted to buy the same paper instead of waiting a while to swap papers?

What this type of activity is called or does for relationships I don't know but its the opening scene in a new british movie – scenes of a sexual nature. So it got me thinking would the same effect be true if both persons were on a laptop or some kind of read/write device? For example if both couples were on a crackberry (blackberry) would that be radically different and why? How about if they were reading a ebook type device? What is the effect of this newspaper reading too? I've identified a lot of couples do this activity, so it can't be all that bad, can it? Maybe you can tell people are a couple by them reading silently to themselves in the park? Or maybe there's something extra low level going on like in this picture. In the movie, the guy actually angles his newspaper and body in a way to peer a look at some other woman sitting reading a book.

I was talking to Nicole about this today over dinner and she suggested that maybe that's ME time for most couples? But a strange way to have Me time, I would say. When I have Me time, I usually need to be shut away from everyone or something like that. Maybe its like a less intense version of Me time? I could buy that maybe. Hey, maybe me and Nicole were looking at this the wrong way? Maybe this is actually shared time?

There's a ton of research which I've yet to find about how the digital world effects notions of a modern relationship, but its certainly something I'm finding interesting.

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Thinking Digital Conference

The thinking digital conference was great. At one point I twittered that I felt like I was at TED. And seriously I wasn't joking. some of the speakers like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurtzwell, Helen Fisher, Jonathan Harris, Tara Hunt, etc, were top notch speakers and worthy of the ticket price alone. But rather that go completely out there, the conference was unpinned by a lot of business type talks like for example Greg Dyke, Doug Richard and Casper Berry. There was also the usual what is the future of mobile, green technologies, the future of media and social networking. All the panels were interesting and included a bit of time for some good crowd questions.

So a quick time out for some of my favorate talks. Helen Fisher's talk was simply amazing. She deconstructed why woman are in the position there in now and what the future spells for woman. As Helen calls it woman are shedding 1000's years of a farming lifestyle in favor of something much natrual like in the stone age. Helen asked the question What is love? and pointed at 3 parts of the brain. 1st one being sex (drive, lust,etc), 2nd being romantic love (passion, obsession, etc) and 3rd being deep feelings of attachment (calm, monogahmy, security). Helen sees the first part as a way of getting out there looking for a partner, the 2nd part to keep you faithful and the 3rd part to able you and your partner sane enough to raise children. Pushing things along Helen asks the question if we know about these chemical reactions in the brain, can we have casual sex? Yes we can but the brain systems are stimulated and there is a 1/3 chance you will fall in love with your casual sex partner. Its also possible to have the brain parts act upon different people. Aka you have the drive to have sex with one person, feel loving to another person and feel safe and calm with another person. There not connected.

Female sexuality is growing – Woman are as sexual as men! Always have been. But on the other hand Men are as romantic as woman, Men always have been. Some world wide trends, Fact! When woman are better educated, or higher income theres more sexuality. People who divorce have more sexuality, people with access to conception are more likely to express there sexuality,

21st centery marriage, a marriage between equals is now commons. Divorce isn't a fail, its a positive things.

A few other things, picked up from Helens talk
1. Bad – Use of Anti-Depressions, the drugs kill the sex drive, performance and Fantasies. Helen believes it also effects your romantic love and attachment brain areas. Helen calls it the numbing of the world
2. We working harder on our relationships that ever before.
3. Divorice rate is flatting out, maybe because we're marrying later
4. Peer marriages / marriages of equals are here to stay, Marriages are also happier maybe for the same reason.
5. Middle age isn't the end, there are drugs which can help you keep the drive. While the romantic love and attachement comes natrually.

I had heard some people moan about the conference being not like your traditional Technology/New Media conference. Well maybe if you had only hear the title you might be mistaken for what the conference was about. But one look at the list of presenters and there would be no doubt what kind of conference this was going to be. I mean can you imagine Ray Kurtzwell at Future of Webapps? Xtech (maybe), Web 2.0 expo, etc. Nope theres always been a need for a high end conference in the UK for a while, yes it will be expensive but you don't get this kind of quality for cheap. It was a risk which did pay off, the codeworks team are already talking about thinking digital 2009 which I'm sure will be even better and even better attended.

The Venue for Thinking Digital was the Sage2 in Gateshead. I've never been inside of it before but it was a excellent venue for such a event except one thing. Power for the audience. I know there were quite a few people blogging and once they had run out of battery power they looked for anywhere to plug in and charge up. If the team had just spread some 6ways across the bottom and top of the seating, then chained them along a few meters then used black tape to keep them stuck down, it would have covered the problem. It was sad to hear too, because the speed of the network was blazing. I was uploading videos of about 100meg to blip.tv in less that 5mins flat. Flickr photos were painless too, I sometimes reduce the resolution on photos to flickr, so uploading is quicker. But there was no need. During uploading to Blip, I saw a peak of 891kbps. So total kudos to the best internet conference experience I've ever had next to Over the Air.

All the videos I shot are online already, but the quality is low, if I had knew what uploading would be like, I might have opted for VGA quality. There were other cameras shooting the whole thing, so I assume, one was for archiving and the other for the live screens inside the venue. I asked permission before and I think you'll agree, although the records are complete the quality of the sound and vision wasn't the best. Fear not there is a set of audio only podcasts which need to be edited by myself and uploaded to Blip.TV and IT Conversations.

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The second day at the Thinking Digital conference

Aubrey de Grey

Session 5: Mobile 2.0 panel debate

— Gerard Grech
— Vikesh Patel
— Mark Selby
— Bradley de Souza

Greg Dyke interviewed by Andy Allan

Session 6: Unconventional Wisdom
— Aubrey de Grey

— Carl Honore
— Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs)

Session 7: Globalisation – Opportunity or Threat?
— Jessica Flannery
— Claire Nouvian

Session 8: Management & Leadership
— Richard St John
— Dan Pink
— Doug Richard

Conference close – reflections

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The first day at the Thinking Digital conference

Tara Hunt talks about BarCamp

Backstage is supporting the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead/Newcastle. Its a new conference along the lines of TED/Pop!Tech but based in the North of England and not exclusive to the in crowd.The conference has great wireless and so we're able to upload videos straight from the conference only a few moments after the speaker was on stage.

Day one

Session 1: The Future of Media
— Matt Locke
— Eric Lindstrom & Steve Jelley
— Jeremy Silver

Session 2: United We Stand

— Darren Thwaites
— Ian Kennedy
— Tara Hunt

An Entrepreneur's Story
— Sean Phelan

Thinking Digital Tech Demo

— Steve Clayton
— Q&A

Session 3: Happiness
— Helen Fisher
— Caspar Berry
— Jonathan Harris

Session 4: The Singularity
— Ian Neild
— Ray Kurzweil (via Teleportec)

Almost every talk is special but all the talks about happiness which I have to say were the best of the day.

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The Trojan malware arms race

Geekdinner with Dr. Richard Clayton

So after the London Geekdinner with Doctor Richard Clayton from Cambridge University, (you can watch the videos here 1, 2, 3, q&a or listen to the audio in total here.) I had a little wonder around the net to see what I've been missing out on since I moved to GNU/Linux.

And as expected the battle over adware, spyware and trojans has grown into something extremely serious. A friend at work keeps talking about the problems she has with her windows machine. The things she describes sounds like trojan activity but I can never be sure, so I'm not quite at the point of saying to her reinstall Windows fresh again. (We actually rebuilt her machine over the Christmas period already, because things were so bad she couldn't login). However after hearing about this banking trojan on Security Now recently. I'm reconsidering my advice.

Not only does it Trojan.Silentbanker steal your passwords, but it can perform a man in the middle attack on SSL connections, rendering the secure nature of SSL totally useless. It can also modify HTTP and HTML, meaning when you log into your bank and try and pay your bills it will replace your bill details with ones of the trojans chooses. Yes click that button to transfer funds looks legitmate but it will go to a off shorebank you've never heard of. It can steal cookies, certificates, cache passwords and change your DNS settings on the fly. So type in your banks url and the browser gets sent to a site which looks like the banks site but actually its not. To finish off it automaticlly updates its self and for some reason can install it a midi driver which screws around with your sound. Maybe to play the sound “kuchhing” when you finish that hijacked transation?

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Over doing the caffeine

illy Expresso

Ok I have to be honest and say when I first heard this story I laughed and said 7 double expresso's is nothing.

A teenager was taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso coffee.

Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.

 

Now to be fair it was a teenage girl who 17 and shes maybe not use to drinking a lot of coffee anyway. But I got to say when I worked in Starbucks in Victoria. I use to drink about 4-5 double expresso's a shift. But then again I was also drinking about 4-6 cans of redbull on a weekend too.

I found this great site about caffeine via DL.TV a while back. Death by Caffeine allows you to put in your current weight and it will work out how much cups of coffee, tea, insert name of energy drink here it will take to kill you. This might sound all in bad taste following this teenagers near death experience but you got to look on the light side. Oh and drink less caffeine.

Some slighly shocking findings.

It would take over 200 cans of redbull to kill me by caffeine alone but only 150 expresso's. Actually a double shot of Starbucks Coffee has double the caffeine of Redbull when you look at it per ounce and a expresso 5 times more.

At the top end of the list is Fixx Energy which has 500mg (85ml per 100ml) of caffeine in a bottle, which just beats a Starbucks Grande Coffee which has 372mg but 79mg per 100ml. But if your deadly serious about your caffeine in take you need to look at the pills and mints. No-Doz, Maximum Strength and Dexatrim has 200mg per pill! No wonder I was still very wired at 8am in the morning after going out clubbing when I was younger. Luckly I never experienced what Jasmine did.

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