The world according to Andrew

It looks as though I may actually be able to get my hands on a Rasperry Pi device in the very near future. The team announced today that they’ve started manufacture of the device. initially, as a UK charity, they wanted to make the device in the UK and support local business but like many other people I’ve spoken to sadly the cost of local production is just too high when compared to what’s on offer in the far east (I recall reading an article by Simon Mottram of Rapha saying the same thing and complaining about quality too).

However it was this paragraph that left me stunned:

“I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.”

I think this just about sums up a lot of the problems that technologists have in the UK at the moment and the disconnect between Government policy and the real world. For all the focus on the Tech Hubs and the upcoming digital revolution there are still huge barriers to entry for UK companies to be competitive on the global marketplace. Having just filed my Tax return I probably shouldn’t be too critical of HMRC but it seems to me that the Government and the Revenue service have some aligning to do. For the UK technology sector to flourish it can’t all happen through browser based web services – we need more Raspberry Pis in this country.

There’s been a lot of talk today about the future of computing in schools. As I’ve written previously it seems that technology and in particular programming are the education topics of the moment. The UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove got up on stage at the BETT conference this morning and in his speech branded ICT as currently taught in UK schools as boring and dull. Learning how to create spreadsheets or create a word document does not equip young minds for the future. Interestingly he’s opened things up and told schools to teach ICT as they see fit and to perhaps explore partnerships with Microsoft or Google. As it is, it seems that I’m not the only one interested in this topic and there has been a raging debate going on in the comments of the Guardian story covering the event all day. I highly recommend taking some time to read them (Incidentally the Guardian is running a great series of articles as part of their digital literacy campaign on all kinds of topics related to ICT in schools). For all the ill informed nonsense in the comments there are some very interesting points made along with a noticeable absence of ICT teachers. I suppose they were all in class. What worries me though is that this free form enterprise driven approach to ICT will only add to the confusion and push corporate messaging onto kids too early. Microsoft for example may not install the virtues of Open Source technology on their eager audience and I suspect Google see a future where every child in the playground has an Android device in their pocket. Personally, what I’d like to see is schools become more responsive to offers of help from interested people from industry no matter the company size or brand value along with a strict code of conduct on self promotion. My experience shows that schools are woefully inactive in this area having made several offers of help myself. Perhaps this announcement will change things. Only time will tell.

I’ve just finished reading an interesting post by Mike Loukides on the O’Reilly Radar titled “The End Of Social”. Quite an interesting piece that questions the value of the amount of automated data that is broadcast to us across social channels every day (Spotify, Foursquare etc, etc). The basic premiss is that information broadcast to us is just annoying noise, yet information shared directly with us is, by the fact the creator took time to send it direct is more valuable and, as your social network expands, the amount of this useless noise increases and the number of curated interactions diminishes as you get lost in the crowd.

All sounds very obvious but something to keep in mind while we’re developing a more connected, data powered internet of things.

It’s occurred to me that it may be entirely possible, that if we’re all living in a simulation as some suggest. The current poor state of the world economy, weather, recent natural disasters etc may entirely be down to my long running poor frame of mind.

2011 has been an extremely stressful time, moving house, jobs and loads of other problems – as the Queen once put it; an annus horribillis (or if coding really is the new latin: 01100001 01101110 01101110 01110101 01110011 00100000 01101000 01101111 01110010 01110010 01101001 01100010 01101001 01101100 01101001 0111001). Perhaps if I alter my state of mind to be a bit happier the world may become a better place. Or at the very least it might just start to look like a bit more hopeful.

Well we didn’t see this coming did we? HP have announced that they are going to be (retiring) releasing the Palm WebOS into the Open Source community. The detail of this announcement however is still unclear, for example, how will the patents be managed, what bit’s will be included in the open source package and which won’t? It’s all a little vague.

I really liked WebOS. On the whole it was clean and architecturally a reasonable departure from the norm. It had some nice UI touches too. Problem was nobody made anything for the 7 or so Palm WebOS users. Oh and the handsets were slow and ugly to boot.

I don’t really see things changing much with this announcement. Open Source projects rarely flourish when it comes to coherent design and normally suffer badly from design by committee. If you open your house to everyone it won’t take long for some idiot to trash it and I fear this is the way WebOS is heading. At the end of the day when you open source a mobile operating system you don’t end up with a world class Apple beating mobile operating system. You end up with an open source operating system – or even worse 100 slightly different but mostly the same (fragmented) operating systems. No vendor in their right mind would select that!

I had the pleasure of attending the London chapter of the Creative Mornings series of talks this morning. The speaker was the ever interesting (and wow very pregnant with twins) Beeker Northam from the agency Denstu London. I’ve been following Beeker and her team closely for the last 18 months or so as they as a company are very much aligned with my vision of work environment based on invention (we also have loads of friends in common).

There were a load of interesting references in her talk that I am going to have to follow up on over the next few days and one point in particular she made about the loss of craft in our industry due to the rise of the big idea and outsourcing to cut and shut production houses certainly rang true with me (as did the concept of Cultural Steam).

All in all a great talk. That said it was a bit of an advert for Dentsu and Berg. I was a bit too chicken to ask questions at the end but i’m fascinated by the PR and self promotion ability of these two companies and their friends. I love how they all point to each other all the time and how they knit each others ideas and concepts into their work and the amplification effect that this has. Berg themselves recently published an article about how they use video to communicate their ideas and much of what they said alluded to this.

I believe a video will be made available soon but once again thanks to Beeker, good luck with the babies in the next couple of months and thanks to the creative mornings London team for putting the event on.

That was the title of a recent BBC News article about the current lack of interest in Computer Science among UK students. It’s also the slogan of a new campaign aimed at getting school kids interested in computer science and programming. Well I don’t know about you but I can’t think of a worse slogan to boost interest – I hated latin at school and i’ve used < 10% (see what I did there) of what I learnt since I left school. Is coding a dead language? I don’t think so. Firstly coding by it’s nature is a collection of languages, algorithms, techniques. Maybe you could say “Cobol – the new latin” but Scala, Javascript, Objective-C, C++, Java etc etc. I don’t think so – one of the wonders of programming is the sheer variety of subsets and supersets of languages and approaches.

I’ve written at length in the past about the need to make coding and computer science more interesting to children. I think it’s really, really important, but I don’t think this campaign is going to do much to inspire them.

There have been suggestions made in the past by others about how this talent drain might be stemmed. I’m fully behind the various calls to use outputs such as computer games to garner interest for example. However, i’d also love to see teachers look towards the semantic web, the internet of things, robotics, automation (just look at bigdog, the google car etc etc) and the concepts of a connected society to inspire and enthuse the next generation of technologists (btw, it’s NOT just programming, that’s like saying when I grow up I want to be a hammer operator).

Perhaps the real problem is with the quality of teachers and their depth of experience, I would wager very few come from industry – maybe they don’t deserve that pension (i’m generalising and don’t mean to offend)? I also really don’t care too much about the current discussions about getting more girls involved in tech. To me it all boils down to making the topic interesting, getting the right teachers to inspire, exploring the breadth of what technology means and making the topic more accessible (fingers crossed for Rasperry PI). Then the right people will choose their career path because they are passionate, interested and engaged. The focus should’t be on gender – if it were then there should be a campaign to get more male beauty therapists (again, i’m being glib).

Finally, the fact that there’s a lot of early technologists approaching retirement age, looking at their achievements, their careers and most importantly, their legacies can only help push this forward and if I can do my bit, I will.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the newly released Jawbone UP. The pre-release buzz sounded really promising. A wearable device that synced with an iPhone that provided some personal telemetry data visualised through an accompanying app. It looks like a great start – the design was great too – with the device being a single unit including a 3.5mm jack for syncing built in. My worry at the time was that the accompanying software looked, well like a bit of an afterthought really. And it seems as though I may have been right. There’s are lots of reports coming from around the internet of limited features and buggy syncing.

It got me thinking about the importance of the conduits and outputs (and outcomes) in the Internet of things concept. All of these connected devices, transmitting their data, elegantly, continuously is all well and good but it’s how the data is interpreted and used that’s important. It sounds obvious (and is) but was clearly forgotten in this case. Hopefully Jawbone will work to make improvements in future versions.

Each day in the G2 section of the Guardian is a question to which readers are invited to respond. A couple of days ago the question was “When did people start calling the Railway station the Train station?”

There was no direct answer in the paper, however it got me thinking about how we might solve this. I’ve been toying with the Google NGram viewer for a few weeks now and it seemed like the perfect tool for the job. The NGram viewer allows you to see language trends based on the occurrences of words in the documents that Google has scanned over time.

You can see from the graph above that Train station came into modern prose in the 1940′s and became to norm in about 1999 give or take. Interestingly Railway station has had a bit of a resurgence since the Millenium while Train station has declined slightly. No idea why. I wonder what it’s called in Harry Potter?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about games for commuters. More specifically how there doesn’t really seem to be any that require any kind of interaction with those around you. It seems like such a missed opportunity. Many people in close proximity, in my case for 45 minutes at a time with little to do and a mobile phone in their hand.

A bit of observational research over the last week has shown me that most people have a mobile of some kind, Blackberry, iPhone or Android and most use them for either playing a game of some kind (95% Angry Birds), sending SMS messages, reading email or looking at Twitter. All of these devices are capable of bluetooth, have GPS and, where it’s available, are internet connected (3G in the UK is rubbish at the best of times but on a moving train skipping between cell’s you might as well just not bother). In fact the number of people glued to their mobile devices for their entire journey is staggering.

A year or so ago I drew up a prototype for a Bluetooth transmitter that could be attached to trains magnetically and that could then be used by brands to broadcast to mobile devices used by commuters, an ideal tool for advertising or streaming in movie trailers etc (these days it could be a wi-fi hotspot rather than Bluetooth). Unfortunatly it also looked like a bomb and with all the bad things going on in the world I didn’t fancy causing a full scale terror alert by carrying out a field test. I still think the idea is sound, although the idea has evolved into one where the phones act as a grid to manage the game where certain devices act as super nodes brokering game data etc in a similar way to which Skype works. It’s on my projects list to prototype in the coming months.

I’ve also started to think a little about what a game mechanic in this area might look like. Imagine if tribes of commuters could play against each other, say the 7.30 from Milton Keynes plays the 5.50 from Manchester, economies could be set up, goods farmed and bartered, battles fought (perhaps for who sits and who stands) I think the scope for this is pretty wide and the opportunities for gamifying the commute many..

The problem I can see though is that commuters don’t really seem to interact with each other, commuting despite the proximity to others seems to be a very solitary activity. I’ve travelled with many of the same people every day, twice a day for the last ten years. I don’t know any of there names and we don’t really even acknowledge we’ve seen each other before. Perhaps this is an opportunity to use technology to change that. In fact on the list is a future blog post about using technology to enable people to interact with strangers as it’s something i’ve been thinking about for a while – why do I never say hello to the woman I see in the coffee shop queue every single morning, why does the man on the platform never say good morning? I know I want to but feel I can’t.

Anyway for now commuters seem happy with the latest iteration of Angry Birds so I guess I have some time :)