Dick Sblog

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Miri airport, Sarawak.

I’m sitting at a table in a well-known brand of global coffee shop, about to go cyber-incommunicado for 3 weeks in the heart of the Mulu National Park, exploring more of the world’s greatest caves.

It’s a novel experience these days – there’s no internet connection, no GSM network and, as we are based in a steep gorge, a satphone connection for only about 3 minutes at a time, if you’re lucky, as a satellite passes directly overhead. We haven’t got one anyway, so that’s irrelevant on this trip.

It’s such a difference from my first trip here in 1980. Then it was a 3 day journey on ferry and outboard powered-canoe to reach the Park, the great brown Baram River meandering through seemingly endless forest – now it’s a 40 minute plane ride over cleared land and palm plantations.. Then our base camp was a simple wooden structure with a tin roof – now on the same location is the 180 bed Royal Mulu Resort. Then, a trip into Deer Cave, the largest single cave passage in the world, was a rare privilege – now hundreds of tourist go there to watch the spectacular evening flight of bats (and there is even a live webcam, focused on their roost).

In those days, when I set out on an expedition, work was left behind as a distant memory – now I’m accessible online right up to the Park HQ and this netbook will come with me so that I can exploit every useful moment (assuming we have fuel for the generator!)

It’s a shrinking world, in time, space and diversity. I’m not sure that it’s better for it.

For those of you interested in all aspects of flexible working, I’ve located some relevant webcasts from the Act Now initiative in Devon and Cornwall…

From a conference on flexible working

A presentation from Peter James of the Sustainable IT initiative

Robert Mannings, the BT futureologist

The growth in interest in what are [now] called Cloud applications is really quite extraordinary, just do a search in Google Trends for the term ‘cloud computing’ and look at the exponential rise in enquiries. I’m very interested in hearing about any such applications so that I can promote them via the Grid Computing Knowledge Transfer Network to illustrate the way in which new technical infrastructures are changing business practices and promoting new working models. So, if you know any, please add a comment to this blog and let me know what they are, what they offer and a URL, please.

I’m off to Borneo tomorrow to go caving for a month, exploring the greatest caves on Earth. As I like to say, cave exploration is the only true exploration frontier remaining on the planet. Using remote sensing techniques you can see what you are letting yourself in for anywhere else on the Earth’s surface, including below the sea or even in space. (And the proof of this, if you need it, is the availability on google earth of sub-sea detail. Of course, google earth is, itself, an example of a cloud application…)

In caves, you can’t – every bend in the passage represents the truly unknown. (And being below ground means that you can’t get email or the web – bliss!)

iEARN UK recently ran a learning circle in Bristol as part of the Science City Bristol initiative. From the start, the project suffered a few problems – of the 5 participating schools who sent teachers to the briefing sessions, 2 sets of teachers weren’t sure why they were there and one set reported that their school had had an ICT upgrade over the summer and nothing worked – not very good for an online project! In addition, and most importantly, the timing of the project was driven by the needs of the Science City Bristol project, rather than being responsive to the curriculum pressures placed on the staff.

Learning circles involve groups of students from a number of schools. The groups use each other as collaborative resources to investigate and analyse issues related to the project topic, in this case the theme was ‘One World’. They commit to produce a report which could be video, powerpoint, poetry, a website or anything else that can be published online.

Nothwithstanding these problems, some of the student groups got stuck into the project and have now produced their reports. You can see these at the project site Look out for the obese giraffe – brilliant! The reports – video and powerpoint – show how the kids brought together a number of scientific themes that illustrate how interdependent we are on this fragile Earth.

A couple of interesting things appeared in my inbox over the Christmas break. One of them was an email about Rypple, a new webservice that has been set up to provide a mechamism for individuals to receive feedback. I’ve registered for the beta and will be using it to get audience feedback on a couple of caving lectures that I’m due to give in the next few weeks. I am, of course, God’s gift to public speaking but it might be useful to get some confirmation of that… or otherwise! All responses are anonymised which could be a shame as I might want to have a serious discussion with any members of my audience who disagree with my self-opinion. I’m only joking, of course; I think that this opportunity to get targeted feedback could be fantastic in all sorts of contexts and I just wish that I’d had the brains to think of it myself.

The other good thing (things) was some information about the Natural History Museum’s Darwin 200 initiative (for which I must thank Lynne at iEARN UK).

Darwin200 is a programme of mainly UK-based activities celebrating Charles Darwin’s life, his ideas and their impact around his two hundredth anniversary. The collaboration brings together more than 70 UK organisations planning to celebrate the bicentenary to share ideas, and to collectively endorse and promote events. Many Darwin200 partners are developing dedicated teaching resources for the bicentenary such as science shows, resource packs, workshops, lectures and teachers’ courses. Check their website for more details.

As part of this special year, The Society for Popular Astronomy (SPA) has up to 1000 telescopes to award to secondary schools, to be used by pupils aged between 11 and 14. The free telescope is a high quality 70mm refractor, and comes with a DVD (funded by the Royal Astronomical Society) showing how to use the telescope, what to look at, and much more. Secondary schools in the UK are eligible to apply for a telescope, simply fill in the form and describe to the SPA (in less than 500 words) what the class will do with the telescope. Applications close on 31 January 2009 so be quick if you are interested.

I was listening to the radio this morning as I dragged myself into a new day. They were talking about developing autonomous military robots – killing machines that could be programmed to respect the Geneva Conventions.

This prompted two thoughts – firstly that computers are great at crunching numbers and making decisions based on rules. But (at least so far) they are pretty hopeless at solving real problems because they are unable to analyse context and sort out what’s important from unimportant. This seems to me to be a significant barrier to a machine honouring the Conventions. After all, faced with a figure in a chador holding a bundle, even a human might have problems determining whether or not this was a woman carrying a small child, a female suicide bomber or a male insurgent in disguise. What would the machine do, shoot first and then apologise?

The second and more depressing thought was about the ways in which we prioritise our activities. Apparently, the US defence research establishments have spent over $4bn on this strand of development – using human ingenuity to develop more sophisticated ways of killing other humans. This is against a background of decreasing food stability, increasing poverty across much of Africa, increasing political instability, environmental degradation, antibiotic resistance in pathogens and, of course, climate change etc etc.

Finding positive examples of the use of human ingenuity is therefore both a relief and an affirmation of goodness. Another story this morning was of a MSF surgeon working in poor conditions in Congo who took guidance by SMS text messaging from a colleague thousands of miles away. These instructions enabled him successfully to carry out an amputation, saving the life of a young man.

Another, which I mentioned in a blog a few days ago, is the use of the World Community Grid to help the search for effective treatments for Aids. I’m grateful to a comment from Brian drawing my attention to a video that WCG created to commemorate World AIDS Day.

Martin Parker, the Professor of Organisation and Culture at Leicester Unversity’s School of Management, makes some interesting points in his piece in the Observer’s business section on November 30th.

He talks about the multiple forms of organisation that have been adopted by people throughout the time we’ve been around and comments on the fact that business schools almost universally teach market managerialism to the almost complete exclusion of every other model. Market managerialism has a tendency to promote globalising, speculative capitalism as being an inevitability.

This narrow focus means that students often get no exposure to alternatives such as local exchange trading schemes, share swaps etc. In these circumstances, is it much of a surprise that our current financial structures and corporate bodies are crashing round our ears? Monoculture may produce good crops for a while but is terribly susceptible to disease… Lets have a bit more variety.

The point was driven home to me this week. I’ve been working on a project to set up a skills academy. We proposed that the governance of this new institution should be vested in a Community Interest Company.

This form of organisation was established by Act of Parliament in 2004. It’s intended to make it easy to establish organisations that trade but have purposes that are for community benefit. CICs have an asset lock so that their value can’t be given away. (They are an alternative to jumping through hoops to have a charity with a trading arm). Despite the fact that they’ve been around for 4 years and despite the fact that social enterprise is [has been] a significant growth area in the UK, they’ve not been heard of by two of the major public bodies with which I have been dealing.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in ZD Net’s forum pages about the use of Google Apps in schools. For those of you not familiar with this bit of the Googlempire, it’s an online suite of applications that can be accessed on an anytime/from anywhere basis via a browser: it was one of the first examples of consumer software services ‘out of the cloud‘. Apps offers fairly basic equivalents of office programmes plus collaboration tools, all stored online. Google offers the Apps suite free for schools and very small businesses.

The discussion is interesting. There’s a quiet minority who say things like, “I’ve tried it, it works, it offers enough functionality for my students” and a more vocal majority who don’t like the idea. Their reasons for not liking it are varied but many revolve around worries about losing service and data, about being locked in and not being able to move stuff out of apps to another system, about the software not offering sufficient functionality or that this is a ‘bad’ route and we should be setting up systems based on integrating open source software for use in schools.

I’d make a few comments on this (I suggested google apps as a route for delivering school software so long ago that I can’t now be bothered to wade through my archives!). Firstly, most schools (smaller ones anyway) don’t have the technical capacity to set up and maintain anything vaguely complicated.

Secondly, worries about service reliability are perfectly valid, as they are with all computing (I’ve had a blue-screen of death today on this machine) and there should always be backups of critical data held in another format (and yes, you can shift stuff out of apps fairly easily, it isn’t locked in).

Thirdly – how much functionality do you need? I’ve watched my kids working on computers for several years now. Two things consistently p*ss me off – the fact that we don’t teach kids to type and so they spend time looking at keys rather than thinking constructively while they work and also the fact that they waste time messing about with appearance rather than focusing on content. So,  reduced functionality could be a good thing for kids’ thinking skills!

Finally, this discussion provides a wake up call. Cloud services are coming… There are several reasons for this. One is that it solves the problem of pirated software – it provides a model for payment for the service as you use it, rather than paying for a CD/Download which can be hacked and redistributed. Also, it provides a significant route to reducing carbon emissions. IT is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions; having data stored in massive, highly efficient data-centres which are sited alongside renewal energy generation sources is much more sensible than everyone having their own servers at the end of the hugely inefficient power distribution system that we call the National Grid. Accessing applications through the browser is going to become more and more common, get used to it.

Check out the UK’s Grid Computing Knowledge Transfer Network for more information about grids and cloud computing.

Starting on World AIDS Day on 1 December, the World Community Grid will sponsor a month-long challenge via its FightAIDS@home project, with the goal of increasing the number of computers and computer cycles available to researchers conducting HIV/AIDS research. At the laboratory of Arthur Olson in the molecular biology department at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, computational methods are used to identify new candidates for drugs with the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV.

With help from the World Community Grid, a philanthropic public computing grid organization started by computer giant IBM in 2004, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have so far donated over 84,000 years of unused computer time to researchers worldwide. If you want to assist, go here and click ‘join now’.
This will start a process by which the project will send data to your computer. When you’re not using your computer its processing capacity will crunch their data and send the results back to the project. It’s safe and it provides a means for all of us to contribute to solving this hideous global health problem.

And tell your friends…

The European Schoolnet has recently produced an interesting brochure on iClass, a system developed to support self regulated personalised learning. Behind this term is “what teachers have always been trying to achieve in schools: motivate the learners by empowering them, teaching them how to make meaningful choices and reflect on them.

The iClass system translates the ideas of the pedagogical model into an online platform which invites the learner to ‘plan, learn and reflect’. It is a prototype of what may well be common place in a few years’ time: a system which helps learners creates their own learning paths based on their preferences, mode of learning and character”.

It’s interesting, take a look.

One interesting feature is that there were no UK schools involved in the project. Similarly there were no UK projects featured in their recent survey of “laptop programmes for students, an overview through Europe and beyond”. No doubt we’re still installing lost of electronic whiteboards here in the UK, so that’s OK then.

I’m always entertained by peoples’ differing views of what’s valuable in the application of science and technology. For me, this is best illustrated by the resurgence of civil nuclear power in the UK. With the increasing dependency on overseas energy and the entirely [in my opinion] justified concerns about climate change, nuclear power is being presented as our only hope – a clean, carbon-free source of unlimited power.

This is, of course, bollox.

This post is prompted by clearing my office desk. In the process of doing so I found a bit of the Guardian letters page which I had torn out, months (years?) ago. It’s not dated. The fragment has a letter from Prof. Lewis Lesley. I think this is so relevant that I’ll repeat most of it in full. After a couple of comments about the stunning cost and staggering waste represented by the Thorp plant at Sellafield, he says…

“… All of these false starts miss one vital point. Uranium is a fossil fuel. There are no uranium reserves in Britain.

Mining, refining and transporting uranium generates significant environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emssions, which need 10 years of nuclear generation to balance. As a scarce commodity, uranium prices will rise to follow oil. Noone knows wht to do with the waste, except make weapons of mass destruction.  For 10% of the tax money spent without results on nuclear power, we could have retrofitted 100% of our housing stock to a zero-carbon standard and saved 40% of our energy consumption.”

We’re cascading towards a recession and unemployment is rising. Wouldn’t spending money in this way, creating thousands of relatively low-tech jobs, be preferable to investing huge sums of money in a technology that has consistently failed to perform, consistently created highly hazardous and long-lasting waste, which will employ a very small number of individuals many of which will have to be recruited from overseas (because we don’t turn out enough engineers in the UK) and for which the financial value of construction and operation will pass overseas?