As I mentioned previously, having noted that Barcamp London is coming around again, I decided to get a little more involved this time and attended one of the recent meetings. It was an interesting experience. I hope to stay involved although I'm not being awfully useful to the team at the moment as the major focus is on earning sponsorship for the event.
And that's what's actually so interesting to me. To date, the events I have helped to run have varied from small scale personal parties, through large parties to raise the profile of a cause at a convention, up to conventions themselves. The biggest of these was Eastercon in 2009. What most people imagine when I talk about a science fiction convention is a hall full of people listening to William Shatner and queueing up for his autograph, and while that's a valid understanding to hold, there are more kinds of conventions in existence. The ones I frequent and have had a hand in organising are a rather different beast. Ask around the community and you'll find many people talking about the difference between an entry ticket and a membership. Eastercon encourages its attendees to see themselves as members, to be a part of the whole, to offer their own expertise and ideas and to be more than a passive consumer. These events are run on a relatively small budget, drawn largely from selling the memberships. The guests are not big name TV stars, but there is a big focus on the literary and the big name guests will generally be authors, some of whom attend the convention outside of their invitations to be guests of honour.
The budget is never fixed, a committee can never be sure what they will have to spend, they can only estimate based on how many they expect are yet to sign up. However, the money is assumed to a degree, and allocated to modest costs while hard negotiating is done to get a decent hotel deal that usually involves a certain amount of required bar spend, and filled hotel rooms in order for heavily discounted or free meeting space.
With that all taken as known, the main work of the committee is to work on the programme, to find the volunteers, to slot everyone into a vast grid to try to get a nice balance of programme streams that don't clash horribly with one another, and to make contact to get the people on the panels or giving the talks ready to perform. It's all fairly informal, but the programme is a major headscratch.
That's where Barcamps differ from conventions massively. The convention is closer to the traditional conference, however the conference has a more professional air, while the barcamp has the same cameraderie of a convention. While a con expects to find much of the membership visiting the bar regularly, Barcamps have no such thing, but may offer drinks and encourage the attendees to visit a nearby pub.
The meeting I attended was looking closely at the venue for the first time, and that was almost exactly like the hotel visits I've been on in the past. The people leading things scratch their heads and try to view the room from various angles, working out how they best fit together for their varied purposes and envisioning the partition walls pulled back. But instead of a hotel with some awkward and eager to please hotel staff leading the tour, we had a university building and a knowledgable faculty member enthusing about how it could all work.
It's intriguing to be in early and seeing behind the scenes, but I'm at a bit of a loss for suitable sponsors to approach directly myself. Unfortunately I'm unlikely to be able to make the next meeting, so I'm hoping to find some other way to make myself useful, and am keeping my eyes open for more of the differences and similarities and wondering if there are lessons to be learned in either direction.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Monday, 26 July 2010
Cathederal
I played a new game this weekend, it's called Cathederal. A quick search around the internet informs me that the game first came out in the 70s and upon opening up the game I suspect my copy is about that old. It came from a car boot sale, you see. While the 'retailer' asked for the princely sum of 10p, as i took it and one other game from a vast pile of the usual fare (Monopoly, Go For Broke and so on) I felt guilty and paid them a whole 50p for the two.
This is my second bit of good fortune in my quest to acquire a strategy game hoard. The first one was a copy of Hive, seemingly brand new and unused, unearthed in a charity shop and sold to me for £1.50.
They're similar in style - two players, counter based strategy, but Cathederal is confined to a board and plays, my opponent tells me, similarly to Go, while Hive is a little less restrained. Being new, though, Hive didn't come with the interesting artefacts that Cathederal did. I now own what appears to be a school seating plan for a group meal from the decade I was born.
Hive is available to play online. Cathederal, however, suggests IRC and chess form notation for playing at distance. I think I'll stick with the in-person version. Meanwhile we're wondering how well Hive would play out as a three player, and wondering how to build a new set of pieces.
This is my second bit of good fortune in my quest to acquire a strategy game hoard. The first one was a copy of Hive, seemingly brand new and unused, unearthed in a charity shop and sold to me for £1.50.
They're similar in style - two players, counter based strategy, but Cathederal is confined to a board and plays, my opponent tells me, similarly to Go, while Hive is a little less restrained. Being new, though, Hive didn't come with the interesting artefacts that Cathederal did. I now own what appears to be a school seating plan for a group meal from the decade I was born.
Hive is available to play online. Cathederal, however, suggests IRC and chess form notation for playing at distance. I think I'll stick with the in-person version. Meanwhile we're wondering how well Hive would play out as a three player, and wondering how to build a new set of pieces.
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Playing with brains - a write up
As I mentioned previously, I went along to a talk entitled Playing with Brains on Monday evening. It was given by Peter McOwan, Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. I guess it was very much a lecture for the ley person but I found it very interesting and for a fleeting moment considered taking up studying part time. I won't, though, I simply don't have enough spare time and I know my motivation would slip. All the same, I will look out for more events run by the same people.
The talk took place in a fairly small room in a pub and while it filled up slowly it ended packed, and I was surprised to find a much greater female to male ratio than I usually see at tech meetings.
Peter McOwan has a background in technology and psychology and he used the session to give an overview of current understanding of how brains work and how the knowledge can be applied to AI with liberal use of illusion and computerised examples. The first we were shown was the checkerboard illusion in which a shadow is cast over a checkerboard and the two squares upon it are marked, one we instinctively know to be a black square, the other a white one. In fact both are the same shade of grey but out brains will not accept this without demonstrative proof. McOwan points out that we are getting very good at teaching computers what is right and what is wrong, but getting computers to get things wrong in the same ways that we do remains somewhat ellusive. He explains that many of our perceptions are based on evolutionary need and repeated examples reinforcing our understanding, so in the same way that this just seems true, so too are we 'programmed' to see faces everywhere and to understand that the light source comes from above even when it doesn't. He reinforced the idea of what a face looks like according to our brains by showing the rotating mask illusion. We know that noses stick outwards and aren't sunken inwards and so that is what we are forced to see.
Much of this was stuff I was already passingly familiar with, but he also covered some history of understanding brains. I had never realised that ancient science understood brains to be containers of liquids squirted around our body, causing mixtures of cognition, imagination, emotion and memory. I was familiar with the basics of phrenology, but hadn't linked the head maps and bumps to the actual shape and mapping of brains in more modern times and they are disturbingly similar.
McOwan talked at length about how we know what we know, and how we accept that it may all be proven incorrect further down the line as we take our understanding further. One of the biggest sources of examination is what he termed "nature's experiments", that is, those who have suffered brain injury and now perceive things differently as a result. He talked in particular about a patient who cannot recognise movement, and moved on to discussion of further routes of examination that include monitoring brain blood flow using FMRI and depolarising sections of the brain to effectively turn them off. This latter work has been performed on people he knows and he reports that they talk about it being a very trippy experience, one he's reluctant to volunteer for himself. I asked him to expand on these experiments and he explained how areas of the brain that deal with speech or movement can be disabled and the "victim" finds themself unable to interact normally.
Moving on we covered further illusionary and test examples where McOwan demonstrated how the brain fills in missing details so we overlook changes between two pictures, or fill in the gaps when listening to an MP3 file. Computers, meanwhile, can spot these differences, and use them. Further, they can be "trained" or appear to learn and while they can fake many things others are more easily perceived to be broken or wrong. He talked about how computer generated images that are based on human painting styles can fool art critics, but this seemed to hold little weight to my mind. Elephants can paint pictures that people laud as great examples of artwork before they know their origins, after all. He talked about companion robots used around the world and the work he does for Lirec and touched briefly on what counts as a cyborg (a man wearing glasses has enhanced mechanical ability, after all) before time drew short and he opened the floor to questions.
Overall, it was a fascinating talk and well worth attending. It's clearly worth looking out for more from Science London.
The talk took place in a fairly small room in a pub and while it filled up slowly it ended packed, and I was surprised to find a much greater female to male ratio than I usually see at tech meetings.
Peter McOwan has a background in technology and psychology and he used the session to give an overview of current understanding of how brains work and how the knowledge can be applied to AI with liberal use of illusion and computerised examples. The first we were shown was the checkerboard illusion in which a shadow is cast over a checkerboard and the two squares upon it are marked, one we instinctively know to be a black square, the other a white one. In fact both are the same shade of grey but out brains will not accept this without demonstrative proof. McOwan points out that we are getting very good at teaching computers what is right and what is wrong, but getting computers to get things wrong in the same ways that we do remains somewhat ellusive. He explains that many of our perceptions are based on evolutionary need and repeated examples reinforcing our understanding, so in the same way that this just seems true, so too are we 'programmed' to see faces everywhere and to understand that the light source comes from above even when it doesn't. He reinforced the idea of what a face looks like according to our brains by showing the rotating mask illusion. We know that noses stick outwards and aren't sunken inwards and so that is what we are forced to see.
Much of this was stuff I was already passingly familiar with, but he also covered some history of understanding brains. I had never realised that ancient science understood brains to be containers of liquids squirted around our body, causing mixtures of cognition, imagination, emotion and memory. I was familiar with the basics of phrenology, but hadn't linked the head maps and bumps to the actual shape and mapping of brains in more modern times and they are disturbingly similar.
McOwan talked at length about how we know what we know, and how we accept that it may all be proven incorrect further down the line as we take our understanding further. One of the biggest sources of examination is what he termed "nature's experiments", that is, those who have suffered brain injury and now perceive things differently as a result. He talked in particular about a patient who cannot recognise movement, and moved on to discussion of further routes of examination that include monitoring brain blood flow using FMRI and depolarising sections of the brain to effectively turn them off. This latter work has been performed on people he knows and he reports that they talk about it being a very trippy experience, one he's reluctant to volunteer for himself. I asked him to expand on these experiments and he explained how areas of the brain that deal with speech or movement can be disabled and the "victim" finds themself unable to interact normally.
Moving on we covered further illusionary and test examples where McOwan demonstrated how the brain fills in missing details so we overlook changes between two pictures, or fill in the gaps when listening to an MP3 file. Computers, meanwhile, can spot these differences, and use them. Further, they can be "trained" or appear to learn and while they can fake many things others are more easily perceived to be broken or wrong. He talked about how computer generated images that are based on human painting styles can fool art critics, but this seemed to hold little weight to my mind. Elephants can paint pictures that people laud as great examples of artwork before they know their origins, after all. He talked about companion robots used around the world and the work he does for Lirec and touched briefly on what counts as a cyborg (a man wearing glasses has enhanced mechanical ability, after all) before time drew short and he opened the floor to questions.
Overall, it was a fascinating talk and well worth attending. It's clearly worth looking out for more from Science London.
Monday, 19 July 2010
My computing in the 80s
As the song goes, “We bought it to help with your homework!”
It was the 80s, and home computing was taking off slowly. While people marvelled at the ability to do home accouting on their TV screen rather than the 100 times faster method of scribbling in a book, kids were getting into the likes of Jet Set Willy and The Lords of Midnight. Home taping was killing, not only music, but software too, no doubt, and my school had a huge illicit trade going on with ZX Spectrum games. Our cousin had the Spectrum 48k and the 128k had come out recently too. We’d relegated his cast-off ZX81 to a cupboard somewhere as gameplay was not really an option on it. We begged and pleaded and asked repeatedly for a Spectrum of our very own. We wouldn’t just play games on it, we insisted, we’d learn programming and everything! And on Christmas day Santa delivered a computer. Excitedly we threw back the table cloth covering the tea trolley it had been mounted on and found… an Atari 800xl.
My parents, oblivous to the whys and wherefores of technology had gone into Dixons or whatever the mid 80s equivalent may have been, and been sold this machine as much better, more powerful, all around more suitable for kids. They encouraged me to type up one of the games from the old ZX81 computer magazines and see if it would load. The damn things never loaded on the machine they were meant for, I was pretty certain it was futile but they had me try anyway, “Some of the language must be the same,” they reasoned, “it might work”. Of course it didn’t.
Later, we did get the 48k, after my cousin cast that off in his next upgrade, but the trading games thing at school had died down somewhat. And it was on there that I played the followup games to the one that really impressed me beyond description on the Atari 800xl. It was the following year, on my birthday, that I was presented with a game that cost a tenner and was a rubbishy platform clone and one that had been £1.99. That game was Spellbound, the second in the Magic Knight series, and the first to use “windimation” a fantastic drop down menu system that let you interact with the game world. We’d sit and wait for hours to load up the game from the tape recorder, and never quite mastered save games, so replayed it a lot to get back to the same position. It was a brilliant game, well ahead of its time and sadly underrated alongside most of the Spectrum world of gaming.
This picture shows me holding my little sister as we all crowded around the computer that Christmas, pretending to be a bit more impressed than we actually were.
It was the 80s, and home computing was taking off slowly. While people marvelled at the ability to do home accouting on their TV screen rather than the 100 times faster method of scribbling in a book, kids were getting into the likes of Jet Set Willy and The Lords of Midnight. Home taping was killing, not only music, but software too, no doubt, and my school had a huge illicit trade going on with ZX Spectrum games. Our cousin had the Spectrum 48k and the 128k had come out recently too. We’d relegated his cast-off ZX81 to a cupboard somewhere as gameplay was not really an option on it. We begged and pleaded and asked repeatedly for a Spectrum of our very own. We wouldn’t just play games on it, we insisted, we’d learn programming and everything! And on Christmas day Santa delivered a computer. Excitedly we threw back the table cloth covering the tea trolley it had been mounted on and found… an Atari 800xl.
My parents, oblivous to the whys and wherefores of technology had gone into Dixons or whatever the mid 80s equivalent may have been, and been sold this machine as much better, more powerful, all around more suitable for kids. They encouraged me to type up one of the games from the old ZX81 computer magazines and see if it would load. The damn things never loaded on the machine they were meant for, I was pretty certain it was futile but they had me try anyway, “Some of the language must be the same,” they reasoned, “it might work”. Of course it didn’t.
Later, we did get the 48k, after my cousin cast that off in his next upgrade, but the trading games thing at school had died down somewhat. And it was on there that I played the followup games to the one that really impressed me beyond description on the Atari 800xl. It was the following year, on my birthday, that I was presented with a game that cost a tenner and was a rubbishy platform clone and one that had been £1.99. That game was Spellbound, the second in the Magic Knight series, and the first to use “windimation” a fantastic drop down menu system that let you interact with the game world. We’d sit and wait for hours to load up the game from the tape recorder, and never quite mastered save games, so replayed it a lot to get back to the same position. It was a brilliant game, well ahead of its time and sadly underrated alongside most of the Spectrum world of gaming.
This picture shows me holding my little sister as we all crowded around the computer that Christmas, pretending to be a bit more impressed than we actually were.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Brains!
I'm planning to head over to this event tomorrow after work:
What's in a brain? Bring yours and join us as we explore vision and perception through a series of interactive brain-bending games and experiments, and hear about some of the cutting-edge research helping us understand human and computer intelligence. Our guide, Peter McOwan, is Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. He'll be coming along with his extra brain.
http://brains.science-london.com/
Anyone else?
What's in a brain? Bring yours and join us as we explore vision and perception through a series of interactive brain-bending games and experiments, and hear about some of the cutting-edge research helping us understand human and computer intelligence. Our guide, Peter McOwan, is Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. He'll be coming along with his extra brain.
http://brains.science-london.com/
Anyone else?
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