The Daily Grind

I’m on a train heading to the World Conference of Science Journalists, but I’m following the ‘New Media, New Journalism?’ plenary via Twitter. Obviously. A couple of people ( @franknorman, @emmapotter ) have mentioned that the National Science Foundation is planning to distribute a large number of Flip cameras to scientists in the US.

This piqued my interest, partly because I’m hoping to do something vaguely similar in the UK, but also because I think Flips are so so close… but ultimately not quite there. Distributing them this year might, I think, set a difficult precedent for the recipients, and steer us into making a whole load of wrong-headed video.

Ideally I’d show you what I think is wrong in a video, but people might start getting angsty if I haul out the three cameras I’m carrying (including a Flip Ultra), and start demonstrating on the train. So:

Let me be clear — Flips remain the cameras I recommend to people starting out with SciCast, and my colleague Alom seems to be handing them out like sweets to labs involved in the pilot of a project we’re developing. Flips are terrific because they get lots of things right:

• Decently wide-angle lens, which places the camera (and hence microphone) closer than with most similar cameras. This is also why I prefer the Ultra to the smaller (but longer-lensed) Mino.
• Low-light sensitivity is far better than the competition. This is critical.
• AA batteries (in the Ultra).
• Surprisingly effective auto exposure and white balance. Mostly, it ‘just works,’ again in contrast to most of the competition.

Overall, they’re very well set-up for going from somebody talking to you, to YouTube, as smoothly as possible.

Trouble is, people making short science films don’t want to be limited to filming a person talking. They want to film close-ups of an experiment, or a wide shot that still features reasonable sound. Here, the Flip fails — the minimum focus is about 60cm, and the screen is too small to see when it goes soft. The screen also doesn’t swivel, so it’s hard to shoot from the hip or a low angle. Finally, there’s no microphone input, so audio is unfixable if the built-in mic isn’t enough. It’s good for somebody speaking at arm’s length, but anything else is inevitably troublesome bordering on useless.

I hear the same complaints about Flips time and again, from people who love them but have run into their limitations. I steer some of them towards the Canon FS100/200, but the low-light quality isn’t anywhere near and they’re now clearly overpriced at £280. However, I’m not aware of anything else below about £500. Crazy.

I think there’s a clear market for a Flip Pro. Something like:

• Same sensor as the UltraHD.
• Perhaps a higher bitrate recording option?
• Autofocus lens. I’d be happy without a zoom, note: ‘zoom with your feet’ is a reasonable mantra. Or, fit a little screwthread on the front and let people make accessory lenses.
• 3.5mm jack mic input.
• Fold-out & swivel screen.
• I’d be willing to forego an SDHC card slot, but that’s a tough call.

The hard bit here is, I suspect, the lens… and then the knock-on effects to battery life. But I’d love to see Pure Digital try something like this. With their current products they already make more appropriate/enlightened compromises than do Canon or Sony. Now I want to see them push the boundaries a bit.

Who am I kidding, though? The hard part, obviously, is working out how to sell such a product. The original flip sold into an obvious (in retrospect) target market that had a clear precedent — mobile phone video was rubbish, but lots of people did it anyway. Surely they’d prefer to make films you could, you know, watch?

A Flip Pro would be breaking new ground, and that’s an order of magnitude more risky. Are people ready for it?

100+, originally uploaded by Quernstone.

Flossie’s gran turned a hundred last week, and the following day there was a big family party. She’s a wonderful woman, who brought the house down as she heckled her eldest son in the middle of his speech, for going on and on. He wasn’t, but that’s not the point.

Here she is, playing with some of her great grandchildren. Say hello to Mrs. Persis James, known universally as ‘Nain.’ She rocks.

Monks. On Segways. With fire on their heads. Playing Philip Glass.

Genius, if not just a little bit odd.

via — where else? — Metafilter, where one comment describes the performance as ‘debilitatingly epic.’

Glenn Murphy’s article in the Guardian this morning points to the Science Museum as an exemplar of science engagement, asserting that their learning teams are “internationally renowned masters of inspiration and discovery-based learning.” Are they?

Frankly, it’s hard to say. I grew up in the North of England, so I’ve no particular affection for the Science Museum. They have a terrific collection which I enjoy exploring, but here we’re talking about their engagement and outreach work, not their museum/collections work. I came to the wider STEM engagement world after a decade or so in science broadcasting. In the years since I moved across, the impact of the Science Museum on my thinking has been, well, minimal.

Most of the big science centres have hosted my workshops or employed my services, which isn’t necessarily a mark of anything other than gullibility on their part, but at least means I have a working relationship with them. I know their staff, and talk industry politics, policy, and practice with them on a regular basis. We share knowledge and experience through the mailing list of the British Interactive Group, on which all major national centres are active… with the exception, notably, of the Science Museum. I count three messages from them in the last two years; compare with 80+ for Techniquest, 100+ for the Centre for Life, and 70+ from commercial provider Science Made Simple (and… er… 230 from me and even more from Ian Russell. Oops).

These same contributors are notable by their active part organising sessions at the practitioners’ conference, the BIG Event — a glance through the programme will show much participation from the likes of Thinktank and Glasgow Science Centre also. Science Oxford, meanwhile, seems to have a deliberate policy of aiming for the most memorable sessions in any given year.

Traditionally, the Science Museum don’t much engage with this community. They do their own thing, but they don’t talk to us. Part of this is undoubtedly down to a cliquiness — perceived or actual — of the BIG regulars, but it’s a few years since the Science Museum re-engaged with BIG, and their level of participation is starting to look odd. It’s not just a BIG thing, either, as they’re not noticeably involved with next week’s British Science Association Science Communication Conference.

Hence: the Science Museum are not, one would have to say, significant behind-the-scenes contributors to the STEM engagement community, at least within the UK. I could have learned about some of their projects if I’d been willing to trek to Milan for the ECSITE conference the other week, but the Science Museum’s participation in the UK scene appears to be minimal.

Surprised? Me too.

I’m delighted, therefore, that they’re delivering one of their shows at the BIG Event this year. It’s high time we saw them engage with their peers and fellow practitioners, discuss approaches and insights, and contribute to the advancement of the sector.

In particular, there’s a standard conception in STEM engagement that ‘it would all be OK if only we were properly funded.’ This is, I believe, dangerously lazy thinking, and the Science Museum could contribute significantly by showing that even with core funding, centres must continue to grapple with quality and development issues.

They’re also one of the few centres to dip their toes into the murky waters of online media, but there’s little sign they’re willing to share any lessons they may have learned or challenges they may be facing with the wider sector. Business imperative, or missed opportunity?

I’m not sure we’d trust the Science Museum to lead the community — those of us outside the capital are fed up of London-centric management — but let’s go for participation, shall we? We can haggle about leadership later, once we’ve established who leads at what.

Author Glenn Murphy writes in the Guardian today:

You see, since the very beginnings of science education and the so-called Public Understanding of Science movement, the whole approach has essentially been an argument to ethos. Never mind what science is, you should learn it because it’s good for you. It’s the educational equivalent of shouting: “Eat your greens!”

Straw man. This hasn’t been the conception of science engagement for years. Perhaps a decade or more.

Instead, why not begin lessons, discussions or curricula with appeals to logos and pathos? Discuss why science is important, don’t just assert that it is - kids are too smart for that. Have them consider why they should bother with science, how their lives can be enriched and improved - what has science ever done for us, and what’s in it for them? And make it personal. Why did you study science? What was in it for you?

This isn’t going well, is it? By which I mean: this isn’t original thinking. However, stick with it, it gets better:

Above all, don’t make it feel like a lesson to be learned. Make it an emotional - yes, emotional - journey of discovery.

Ah. Now this — this is both valid and interesting. Also, the subject of at least one current doctoral thesis (no, not mine. You know who you are, and if you’re reading this, you’ll know that I’ll rant at you for faffing about. Paul).

The article’s worth reading, if only as a useful summary of the sorts of discussions one has with newcomers to the STEM engagement field. It’s rather brazenly a plug/love-in between the author and the Science Museum, the branding of which is plastered all over the author’s books, but so it goes.

Speaking of the Science Museum… actually, that’s another post.

Quick post pointer to Little Wheel — a simple Flash interactive story/game with a thoroughly charming style. Help the robots!

I love the last line of this BBC News story about a school soliciting encouragement from celebrities for their GCSE candidates.

That is all.

Missed the SEPECAT Jaguar on eBay? Couldn’t quite stretch to the £15,000 asking price? Fret not, for the US Navy is offering a prototype stealth warship, complete with floating lair dry dock, free to a good home. Here’s a more recent article on the same offer at Aviation Week.

Image: Wikipedia.

The BBC’s new science magazine series is finally official, and it’s not called Tomorrow’s World.

Bang Goes The Theory will start on BBC 1 in July, and one of its presenters is engineer Jem Stansfield, formerly of this parish. Press release; interview with Liz Bonnan, another of the presenters.

I’m not working on the show, but some good people are. I am, however, helping connect a bunch of academics with the BBC’s web team. More later.

A bunch of photos taken while trying to avoid being blown off the hillside, glued back together in Photoshop. Lots of work needed, not least cloning out the huge splobs from the chunk of goop on the sensor that, somehow, managed to sneak between pixels on the camera’s LCD. Gaaah.

Still, I’m liking the wider-than-wide stylee. First time I’ve done this.

Flossie pointed me to this film at the BBC, in which BBC World News America’s Bill McKenna describes what he does. He’s the White House News Photographers’ Association’s ‘Editor of the Year’, so he knows of which he speaks.

The film’s a bit angsty, a shade too quick-fire to take in, perhaps rather too cutty. Which is probably deliberate, as it all serves to emphasise the confusion and distraction and noise and complexity of the edit suite — all surrounding the editor, as they try to do one of the oldest things in the world: tell a story.

Nicely done.

Psssst! Want to buy an ex-RAF Jaguar GR3a strike aircraft?

One’s currently up on eBay for £15,000. From the looks of the seller’s estate, there are quite a few more going, too:

View Larger Map

Bizarre

The new Star Trek movie pretty much rocks, in a ‘mindlessly entertaining action romp’ sort of way. It looks great, rattles along nicely, and the humour gracefully avoids the Grating Curse of Jar-Jar Binks. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is excellent — probably good enough for him to avoid being Sylar for the rest of his career — and the moment when Chris Pine’s Kirk ‘Shats up’ is priceless. Draw a discrete veil over the astrophysics and the instantly-forgettable score, and it’s all good.

Well, mostly. I’ve one snark, and one more significant worry. The latter I’ll save for another post, but the snark is this:

I get that Abrams is trying to suggest action off-shot with all the lens flare, and I rather like the effect. In places the live-action look is reminiscent of Alwin Kuchler’s gorgeous cinematography on Sunshine, only with a white rather than black background to everything.

The CGI effect matches the style rather well, too – there’s some magnificent colouring work in the picture, and my, how CGI lens flare has progressed since the early days of the Video Toaster. But in All-New Trek the graphics folks have a new toy, and just like the early flare effects, they’ve seriously over-used it.

They’re simulating dirt on the lens.

Along with the flare, in the darker corners of the frames, there are weird nebulous diffuse/defocussed blobs, which to my eye looked like the effect you get from a dirty lens. Once I’d noticed them I couldn’t take me eyes off them – they’re damn everywhere in the CGI shots, and the result is distractingly ghastly. Space Dust used to pop on my tongue, not in my eye.

It’s doubtless a cute effect in moderation, but it’s taken way way way too far here. Any real camera op with lenses that dirty would be removed from the set. Come on, folks: keep your glass clean. Even if it’s virtual.

The Detroit Free Press brings us the fabulous story of — I think, it’s not entirely clear what sport we’re discussing here — ice-hockey fans, and the multiple-arms race between them and officials. The officials, you see, are trying to stop them throwing octopus onto the rink. Read the article for absolutely no enlightenment at all, in the grand scheme of things.

(via MetaFilter. The other links there are worth exploring, too. Though be warned that the New Scientist video has possibly the most annoying voice-over ever.)

“Computer spies” (sic) have broken into the Joint Strike Fighter project and made off with several terabytes of data, reports the Wall Street Journal.

This would be the same F-35 Lightning II project of which one of the major partners is the British Government, themselves not unfamiliar with losing important data. Though, to be fair, we tend to just leave it lying around or bung it unencrypted into the Royal Mail, rather than be so unsporting as to force people to have to bother stealing it.

But hang on — a few years ago, there was a bit of a hoo-hah about this very project. It transpired the Americans weren’t quite convinced the UK understood concepts of data security (well… durr), and thus had mild reservations about handing over the complete source code for the F-35’s software. The British, not letting anything past them, realised this meant that between a British pilot flicking an insouciant British finger onto a British bomb-release button in a British plane on a British mission, and that specific (British, obviously) bomb, there could conceivably be some dastardly Yankee code along the lines of:

if (bombReleaseTriggerDepressed) {
    switch (isBombGodFearingAmerican) {
        case (hellYesBlowThemAllToHell) {
            releaseMunition(YeeHaw);
            break;
        }
        case (heckNoLimeyBastards) {
            errorMsg(insufficientPermission, escalateUACLevel);
            break;
        }
    }
};

Understandably ticked off, the British threatened to pull out of the project and… oh, I don’t know, build TSR.2 or something. In the end, some sort of fudge was reached whereby Blair could announce (Wikipedia again):

“Both governments agree that the UK will have the ability to successfully operate, upgrade, employ, and maintain the Joint Strike Fighter such that the UK retains operational sovereignty over the aircraft.”

…which is one of those odd phrasings that means less the more you think about it.

Ironic, then, that it turns out the easiest way of extracting the long-sought-after F-35 source code may have been to partner with the Chinese all along. Indeed, there are two possibilities here. If MI6 were being clever they could have just outsourced their industrial espionage, presumably at a huge saving to the British taxpayer.

Alternatively — and back to the Wall Street Journal —

“Foreign allies are helping develop the aircraft, which opens up other avenues of attack for spies online. At least one breach appears to have occurred in Turkey and another country that is a U.S. ally, according to people familiar with the matter.”

I think we all know which other country that’s likely to be.

Oh, arse. They got the code, then left it on a bus, didn’t they?