Category — Science & Technology

The oth­er week­end I had the great oppor­tu­ni­ty to vis­it the Beamish open-air muse­um in Coun­ty Durham. I was stay­ing with friends near Sun­der­land for the week­end and their sug­ges­tion that we went there was a very good one. I can hearti­ly rec­om­mend the muse­um to any­one inter­est­ed in our indus­tri­al his­to­ry – and par­tic­u­lar­ly that of North­ern England.

Not only that, the Muse­um is cur­rent­ly offer­ing a spe­cial deal where for £16 you get a year’s admis­sion. Well, it’s worth that for just one vis­it – you need to allo­cate an entire day to the site (and still you won’t get round it all).

Both my friends have been involved with Beamish over the years and as a result they knew all the cool places to go. There are quite a few build­ings and oth­er items on-site, each hav­ing been painstak­ing­ly dis­man­tled, brought to the site, and rebuilt.

The cen­tre­piece, I sup­pose, is a rebuilt town street, set in 1913, with a ter­race of hous­es (includ­ing an ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry den­tist, a pianoforte teacher’s house and much more) and shops includ­ing a Co-Op, a sweet shop with sweet­ies made on the premis­es, a garage, a bank, and the most recent addi­tion, a Mason­ic Hall with a com­pre­hen­sive dis­play of arte­facts and regalia. There’s also an excel­lent cafeteria!

There’s also a Wag­gonway, set in 1825, where you can trav­el for a few hun­dred yards behind a repli­ca ear­ly steam loco­mo­tive (see below); a Col­liery Vil­lage cir­ca 1913 and an old Manor on the hill. The dif­fer­ent areas are linked by peri­od bus­es and trams.

The peri­od cov­ered is broad­ly Victorian/Edwardian, but some loca­tions (such as the Wag­gonway and the Manor, which are set in 1825) are set in ear­li­er peri­ods. Every­where there are staff mem­bers (in cos­tume) who will tell you about the old prac­tices and explain what you’re see­ing. I real­ly could­n’t fault them.

This is a real­ly tremen­dous place to vis­it and I can’t rec­om­mend it enough – I’ll be back as soon as I can.

I took some video while I was there and present them below. All three items are hand-held so I’m afraid they are a lit­tle wob­bly at times, but hope­ful­ly they will give you a feel for some aspects of the place.

This first one is of the Pock­er­ley Wag­gonway, where we trav­elled for a short dis­tance behind the “Steam Ele­phant”, an ear­ly steam loco­mo­tive. We see the jour­ney from an open coach and also from the track-side, and the trip is pre­ced­ed by some back­ground from a staff member.

Pock­er­ley Wag­gonway at Beamish Muse­um from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

The sec­ond item is also from the Wag­gonway area: it’s a demon­stra­tion of a tra­di­tion­al Pole Lathe, used by a “bodger” to make things like table and chair legs and oth­er items that could be turned from wood. The oper­a­tor, William Slas­sor, describes its prin­ci­ples, oper­a­tion, and how it was used.

Pole Lathe at Beamish Muse­um from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

And final­ly, a short video of a gen­tle­man play­ing a Ger­man ‘Har­moni­pan’ street organ in the main street of the recon­struct­ed town.

The instru­ment is hand-cranked, and turn­ing the han­dle both oper­ates the bel­lows that enable the pipes to sound; it also draws a roll of punched paper tape about 2in wide across a what we might call a “read­er”, con­sist­ing of a row of holes, each con­nect­ed to a pipe. The bel­lows pass air to the read­er, and where there is a hole in the tape, air pass­es through and off to the cor­re­spond­ing pipe.

The music is a med­ley of Amer­i­can tunes, and ends with quite a flour­ish. I was­n’t able to cap­ture the very begin­ning of the med­ley, but I got most of it and what there is effec­tive­ly cap­tures the feel­ing of this kind of street enter­tain­ment, com­mon in the Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian eras.

‘Har­moni­pan’ Street Organ at Beamish Muse­um from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Last night I went along to the sec­ond Cam­bridge Geek Night, held upstairs at the May­pole pub in Park Street, Cam­bridge (right next to the Park Street car park) for an evening of net­work­ing, chat­ting and short presentations.

In addi­tion to good com­pa­ny, the evening includ­ed free drinks (cour­tesy of The Guardian’s Open Plat­form!) and the pub serves excel­lent food. What more could you ask?

The three pre­sen­ta­tions con­sist­ed of Richard Boul­ton on Xapi­an, an inter­est­ing open-source search engine; a pair of local lawyers from Tay­lor Vint­ners solic­i­tors giv­ing an overview of the legal­i­ties of entre­pre­neur­ship (and although I knew some of it, it was most def­i­nite­ly direct­ly use­ful); and final­ly Michael Brun­ton-Spall from The Guardian, who gave us a fas­ci­nat­ing view of the paper’s API and what you can do with it, and a tiny glimpse into the future of what I believe is the best news­pa­per in the coun­try. And between pre­sen­ta­tions, time for a good chat with a few of the (about 30+) attendees.

Kudos to Véro Pep­per­rell, “Social Media Con­sul­tant and Geekette”, aka “that­cana­di­an­girl”  for a great evening: next event is in about six weeks, so if you live or work in the Cam­bridge area, keep an eye on the Cam­bridge Geek Night blog for details of the next one. Plus you can sign up for an email list here.

Here’s the last of my video sequences from the Open­Tech 2009 Con­fer­ence, which I was pleased to both attend and speak at.

Women In Tech­nol­o­gy was a fas­ci­nat­ing and use­ful con­scious­ness-rais­ing ses­sion that more men should have stayed for! It was a fol­low-up to this year’s Ada Lovelace Day.

Chaired by Zoe Mar­go­lis, the pan­el con­sist­ed of Sue Black, Janet Parkin­son, Suw Char­man-Ander­son and Kathryn Kor­rick (right to left as you look at the screen). Each gave a short pre­sen­ta­tion and the ses­sion end­ed with ques­tions from the floor.

The vast major­i­ty of most of the pre­sen­ta­tions is cov­ered in this video, with the excep­tion of Kathryn Cor­rick­’s mini-work­shop (which I par­tic­i­pat­ed in and thus could­n’t eas­i­ly shoot) and a slight hic­cup when the bat­tery ran out – sub­se­quent sec­tions are hand-held as Sanyo thought­ful­ly placed the pow­er input con­nec­tor for my cam­corder so as to obscure the tri­pod sock­et. Hmph.

How­ev­er there is enough here to appre­ci­ate the major­i­ty of the content.

Women In Tech­nol­o­gy — Open­Tech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Here are two short video sequences shot on Spring Bank Hol­i­day, 25 May 2009, at Bletch­ley Park, near Mil­ton Keynes.

Bletch­ley Park is an impor­tant aspect of Britain’s tech­no­log­i­cal and wartime her­itage, where unique machines, includ­ing the world’s first pro­gram­ma­ble com­put­er, Colos­sus, were built to read Ger­man cod­ed mes­sages. It’s been sug­gest­ed that the work at Bletch­ley Park short­ened the war by as much as two years.

The two videos are as follows:

The Tun­ny machine

David Stan­ley, a mem­ber of the team at Bletch­ley Park, describes how the ‘Tun­ny’ emu­la­tor machine was used to decrypt high-lev­el wartime Ger­man mes­sages pro­duced by the Lorenz SZ40 and SZ42 encryp­tion units, and a lit­tle about the recon­struc­tion of the machine at Bletch­ley Park.

The ‘Colos­sus’ was used to work out the start­ing posi­tions (equiv­a­lent to the ini­tial set­tings on the Lorenz machine) and then the ‘Tun­ny’ emu­la­tor (the name ‘Tun­ny’ actu­al­ly applied to the traf­fic), the machine demon­strat­ed here, actu­al­ly decrypt­ed the mes­sages and print­ed them out on a teleprinter.

‘Tun­ny’ emu­la­tor at Bletch­ley Park from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

The Colos­sus Rebuild

Tony Sale led the team that recon­struct­ed a Colos­sus Mark 2 com­put­er, which was com­plet­ed in 2007 at Bletch­ley Park. Here he is seen describ­ing how Colos­sus was used and a lit­tle about the rebuild.

The orig­i­nal Colos­sus was the world’s first pro­gram­ma­ble dig­i­tal com­put­er. Colos­sus machines were used by the code­break­ers at Bletch­ley Park dur­ing WW II to help read encrypt­ed mes­sages and employed valves (vac­u­um tubes) to per­form the cal­cu­la­tions. The machines were designed by engi­neer Tom­my Flow­ers with Allen Coombs, Sid Broad­hurst and Bill Chandler.

The Colos­sus machines were used to help decrypt Ger­man mes­sages sent using the Lorenz S40/42 machines which, unlike Enig­ma, had 12 set­ting wheels. Colos­sus deter­mined the start­ing posi­tions for the wheels so that the Tun­ny machine (see above) could decrypt the mes­sage itself.

Colos­sus Rebuild at Bletch­ley Park from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Today, Bletch­ley Park and the Nation­al Muse­um of Com­put­ing that is co-sit­ed there, need your help to sur­vive. The estab­lish­ment receives no Gov­ern­ment fund­ing (why?) and relies entire­ly on dona­tions. Can you help? Vis­it Bletch­ley Park or its web site, and see the Nation­al Muse­um of Com­put­ing — for more details, click the links in this para­graph, and please help save Bletch­ley Park.

Please also vis­it Dr Sue Black­’s Sav­ing Bletch­ley Park Cam­paign site.

You can also watch video of the Bombe tak­en on the 26 July, 2009 Find­ing Ada group visit.

Rather unex­pect­ed­ly, I was able to be present at, and to cap­ture the major­i­ty of, this address to the atten­dees at Open­Tech 2009 by Sir Bonar Nevill-King­dom, self-described as “Her Majesty’s most senior civ­il ser­vant con­cerned with Infor­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nolo­gies (or “ICTs”) [and] the Prime Minister’s data-shar­ing czar.”

He dis­cussed “The Three Pil­lars of Dig­i­tal Britain” and the major­i­ty of the text of his address may be found here.

Due to the unex­pect­ed nature of this event, I regret that the very front of the pre­sen­ta­tion is miss­ing and the video is hand-held. The Open Rights Group, with a lev­el of fore­sight that has to be seen to be believed, has pub­lished a rather bet­ter record­ing of this event, and I am pleased to direct you to their ver­sion on blip.tv. Or you can watch my wob­bly ver­sion below.

Sir Bonar Neville-King­dom — Open­Tech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Ben Goldacre is a med­ical doc­tor and best-sell­ing author of the (high­ly rec­om­mend­ed) book Bad Sci­ence, which was short­list­ed for the BBC’s Samuel John­son Prize for Non-Fic­tion recent­ly. The book shows how you can sim­ply apply the sci­en­tif­ic method to suc­cess­ful­ly guard your­self against both main­stream and “alter­na­tive” med­ical scams, and debunk non-demon­stra­ble claims, with some fair­ly scary examples.

In this some­what impromp­tu talk deliv­ered at Open­Tech 2009, Ben looks at how we could take some of the ideas in the book a good deal fur­ther. Ben’s talk was part of the after-lunch ses­sion in the main hall, and he is seen with Bill Thomp­son (you can see Bil­l’s talk here) and chair Zoe Margolis.

Ben Goldacre: “Beyond Bad Sci­ence”, Open­Tech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Here’s the cur­rent list of Open­Tech 2009 mate­r­i­al I’ve been able to locate online, organ­ised by ses­sion num­ber. If I’ve missed any­one, please add a com­ment with details (Updat­ed 14:00, 24 July):

Ses­sion 1

• Main Hall Ses­sion 1 audio Com­mu­ni­ty and Democ­ra­cy in Hijacked Space (Space Hijack­ers); Does FoI work? You Bet! (Heather Brooke)
• Room 3E Ses­sion 1 audio Radio Dra­ma at a dis­tance (Richard Elen); Dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gy of the micro­com­put­er, 1974–1994 (Steve Good­win); How can open video become the new TV? (Hamish Campbell)
  Richard Elen on Radio Dra­ma at a Dis­tance (slide­cast with audio)

Ses­sion 2

• Main Hall Ses­sion 2 audio Mak­ing things hap­pen: Going beyond ideas to imple­men­ta­tion. With Tom Stein­berg (mySo­ci­ety), Tom Loose­more (4iP and more) and Louise Fer­gu­son (Open­Rights­Group and more).
• Upper Hall Ses­sion 2 audio Dig­i­tal Engage­ment — Richard Stir­ling (Cab­i­net Office); Open Gov­ern­ment Data — John Sheri­dan (OPSI); Open­ing Up Gov­ern­ment Data: Give it to us Raw, Give it to us Now — Rufus Pol­lock (Open Knowl­edge Foundation)

Ses­sion 3

• Main Hall, Ses­sion 3
  Bill Thomp­son on The 10 (2) Cul­tures Prob­lem (video)
  Ben Goldacre, Beyond Bad Sci­ence (video)
• Room 3E Ses­sion 3
  Phil White­house, How to build Devel­op­er Com­mu­ni­ties (slide presentation)

Ses­sion 4

• Main Hall Ses­sion 4 audio Women In Technology
  Women In Tech­nol­o­gy pan­el ses­sion (video)
  Kathryn Cor­rick­’s write­up of Find­ing Ada at Open­Tech 2009 (blog)
  Com­men­tary on Women in Tech­nol­o­gy ses­sion by Judith Tow­nend (blog)
• Upper Hall Ses­sion 4 audio Web of Pow­er — Richard Pope & Rob McKinnon

Ses­sion 5

• Main Hall Ses­sion 5 audio Ephemer­al­i­ty? Real time web vs per­sis­tence (Gavin Bell); Loca­tion and Pri­va­cy (Gary Gale); Your Ener­gy Iden­ti­ty (Gavin Sparks)
  Gary Gale on Loca­tion, Pri­va­cy and Opt­ing Out (slide presentation)
• Upper Hall Ses­sion 5 audio Spread the Web (Fran Sains­bury); Local web beyond the hype (William Per­rin). Slides for both talks.
• Room 3E Ses­sion 5
  Ade­wale Oshin­eye on Fed­er­at­ed Microblog­ging (slide presentation)

Ses­sion 6

• Upper Hall Ses­sion 6 audio (No2ID and Open Rights Group: Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Pro­gramme (IMP), pre­ced­ed by Sir Bonor Neville Kingdom)
  Sir Bonor Neville-King­dom on The Three Pil­lars of Dig­i­tal Britain (text) or watch the video
• Room 3E, Ses­sion 6
  Tom Loose­more on 4ip (slide presentation)

Gen­er­al

• Lunchtime slides say ‘Thank You’ to peo­ple who made the event pos­si­ble (PDF)
• Flickr Open­Tech images
• Review of Open­Tech by Dr Ian McDon­ald, Devel­op­ment Pro­duc­er at BBC Learn­ing, includ­ing some use­ful links
• Offi­cial Open­Tech 2009 site
• The Open­Tech 2009 Sched­ule page now links to audio record­ings  and pre­sen­ta­tions where available.
• Open­Tech 2009 feed­back form
• Sam’s notes on the event

One of the high points of my atten­dance at Open­Tech 2009 on Sat­ur­day was the after-lunch talk by Bill Thomp­son, whom I would rate as one of the UK’s lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy com­men­ta­tors. He writes and broad­casts fre­quent­ly (such as on BBC World Ser­vice’s week­ly tech­nol­o­gy show Dig­i­tal Plan­et, which I also rec­om­mend high­ly), and is well worth fol­low­ing.

He took as his theme an updat­ed take on the “Two Cul­tures Prob­lem”, after CP Snow’s famous lec­ture of 50 years ago.

From the notes for Open­Tech: “It’s fifty years since CP Snow’s famous lec­ture on the Two Cul­tures – sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture. We seem to have a dif­fer­ent divide these days, between ‘peo­ple like us’ and the rest. What might be done about this?”

Here’s the video I took of Bil­l’s talk – which is the short ver­sion of one he gave last month in Cam­bridge, for which a record­ing is cur­rent­ly unavailable.

Bill Thomp­son on “The Two Cul­tures Prob­lem”: Open­Tech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.

Read more of Bil­l’s work at http://www.andfinally.com/ - and you may also find his BBC News | Tech­nol­o­gy arti­cle, A nation of pro­gram­mers? of interest.

On 4 July I was pleased to be able to give a pre­sen­ta­tion at Open­Tech, held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don Union, Malet St, on how to cre­ate radio dra­ma when the par­tic­i­pants are geo­graph­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed. The tech­nique employs VoIP tech­nol­o­gy (Skype in this case) and the pre­sen­ta­tion includes an overview of tech­nol­o­gy choic­es, how to get the best results, and plan­ning, per­for­mance and pro­duc­tion tips. Hope­ful­ly it will be use­ful to oth­ers inter­est­ed in devel­op­ing new approach­es to the won­der­ful field of radio drama.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is informed by my expe­ri­ences work­ing with the Radio Riel Play­ers, a group based in the vir­tu­al world of Sec­ond Life around the radio sta­tion Radio Riel.

This pre­sen­ta­tion is now a Slide­cast, includ­ing not only the slides but also the audio of my pre­sen­ta­tion, cour­tesy of Sam and David at Open­Tech. Yes, there are some minor sync issues, but not dis­rup­tive ones!

For a more detailed descrip­tion of the pre­sen­ta­tion, please see this page.

ITN news­read­er Alas­tair Stew­art calls for ‘Beech­ing’ inquiry into BBC — Guardian

ITN news­cast­er Alas­tair Stew­art attacked the BBC at a CBI NW region din­ner last night, sug­gest­ing that it would ben­e­fit from a “Beech­ing style enquiry” to assess whether its ser­vices are all real­ly “nec­es­sary and viable”.

A “Beeching”-style enquiry into the BBC? You must be jok­ing – look at the dam­age Beech­ing did that will hit us even hard­er as we enter the age of cli­mate change. Tak­ing the coun­try’s major assets and will­ful­ly destroy­ing them is not an answer to the ques­tion of why peo­ple aren’t watch­ing the competition.

Call­ing for a “Beech­ing-style” enquiry is equiv­a­lent to call­ing for a hatch­et job. In fact the sug­ges­tion is very reveal­ing of true intent.

Only some­one work­ing for a com­pet­ing media pro­duc­er could think of such a thing. Go out and do a bet­ter job than the BBC and then you can talk from a posi­tion of strength instead of one of des­per­a­tion. Make the invest­ments in new tech­nolo­gies, inno­v­a­tive pro­gram­ming, stuff that isn’t dumb­ed-down to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. Make some inter­est­ing pro­grammes that are worth watch­ing. And yes, cov­er the news better.

Every­one and their friend who still works on a news­pa­per wants to get at the BBC, but it is still doing a bril­liant job. It just lost its nerve back in the days of the Hut­ton Enquiry. Yes, every­one has some­thing to say about the licence fee — it’s the worst way of rais­ing mon­ey for PSB except for all the oth­ers — but by not being a tax it is not so much able to be influ­enced by a gov­ern­ment annoyed at crit­i­cism. We need ring-fenced fund­ing for qual­i­ty broad­cast­ing to ensure it does­n’t all go the way of ITV — down to the bottom.

Yes, we also need oth­er PSB providers, doing inno­v­a­tive things. We have at least one, in the shape of Chan­nel 4 with its remark­able devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives like 4ip, but we need more. Is top-slic­ing the answer? No. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there’s a prece­dent for that so no doubt we’ll see more, but at least keep it in the PSB arena.

We need a BBC that is free to make the pro­grammes and deliv­er the ser­vices that com­mer­cial oper­a­tors can’t, or won’t, pro­vide. Look at the world-lead­ing BBC web site; the world-lead­ing BBC doc­u­men­tary and fac­tu­al pro­gram­ming; the pop­u­lar BBC News chan­nel. These all offer amaz­ing val­ue at half the price of a dai­ly news­pa­per and half the price of an aver­age Sky subscription.

Of course there will be areas of the BBC that can be improved. I have no doubt that a bit of trans­paren­cy would go a long way — a process already start­ed. How about trans­paren­cy on the com­mer­cial side? No doubt we would like the Cor­po­ra­tion to pay less for celebri­ties — which is fine as long as every­one else does the same and it’s not in breach of con­tract. There’s room for improve­ment for sure — but a slash-and-burn dis­mem­ber­ment is not even slight­ly an answer.

Being unable or unwill­ing to com­pete is not a good rea­son for diss­ing the oppo­si­tion. It sounds a lot too much like sour grapes.