Walking with Robots

40 roboticists and artificial intelligence researchers are gathered in Bristol for three days of workshops and seminars about science engagement under the banner ‘Walking with Robots‘. It’s chaotic, frenzied, nail-biting stuff. Or at least, my bit is: I’m here with Gia and ten researchers, running a newsroom.

Keep up with our efforts – and if we’re doing our jobs right, what’s happening in the rest of the event – at the Walking with Robots blog.

In the three days of the event, we’re hardly going to find a huge audience – but please, if you read this, head on over and leave a comment or two. It’s a training exercise, but we’re live to the world, so feedback is keeping us on our toes.

Photos in our Flickr stream, by the way.

Movable Type Design Assistant

In beta at the moment, but this significantly softens the learning curve for restyling MT blogs. Notes about it here.

Movable Type 4 has been quite reasonably criticised for being overly-complex to work with, since the default templates are full of conditionals and in places appear to have descended into tag soup. In practice it’s nowhere near as bad as it seems, and the complexity is more due to the flexible nature of the tools than anything else. But we’re starting to see simplified and alternative template sets.

There are still performance, usability, and documentation problems – but I’m far less tempted by switching to WordPress than I was before. Also of note: it feels like mailing list traffic and excitement has picked up quite considerably since the release of MT Open Source 4.1.

Hague on Blair and Brown

One of the tragedies of the last decade of British politics is that successive conservative leaders, once deprived of that burden of office, have turned out to appear to be Rather Decent Chaps After All. None more so, perhaps, than William Hague. He was always a decent speaker, but now he doesn’t have to pick and choose every word for fear of a minor mis-step being wielded by those looking to stab him in the back, and he’s terrific.

Witness his description of the prospect President Blair of the EU; helpfully recorded and set to illustrations in this YouTube video:

 

Of course, the other tragedy of British politics is that too many of us still can’t picture ourselves voting for these guys. Which rather undermines the concept of a multi-party system, I tend to think. But at least Hague can deliver a decent gag, which is almost as important.

Children’s MMOs

Fascinating article at Ars about Disney’s young-teens-targeted Pirates of the Caribbean online game. I share the reviewer’s skeptical eyebrow at the idea that swords are somehow more wholesome than guns, but the justification is interesting – that basically nobody is going to come to the game without being aware of the film, and the film is absolutely in the swashbuckling tradition. The violence, then, is in some form of historical, almost cartoon, context.

Hmm.

Building websites for children isn’t easy, and we’re grappling with some of this stuff with SciCast (lots of new films up yesterday, by the way). In principle, I hold that all content on a child-focussed site should be moderated. Our editorial procedures for articles and the like are good enough, though there are changes I’d like to make; all comments are moderated, and currently that’s rather clunky. But it does, I think, have to be done.

Which presents a problem, in that while I’d love to use the site to foster a community of science film-makers in schools, the overheads of administering that isn’t something with which we could currently cope. We even think we’ve spotted a clever simplification that would reduces the moderation load dramatically, but… implementing that would be tricky, because it’s absolutely not the way ‘community’ sites tend to work.

Of course, this is one of the hidden costs of web media. It may be cheaper to originate content than, say, broadcast, but the ongoing support costs are much higher.

Bloody Omaha

Given how little TV I’m watching at the moment, I rather missed Richard Hammond fronting a Timewatch about Omaha Beach, and hence didn’t see this sequence:

 

Two observations:

  1. Damned impressive.
  2. You didn’t show all the post-production time, then?

I’m guessing that weeks of sitting in front of Maya, Shake, After Effects, Flame and the rest didn’t make for a great trailer, which is fair enough. But I’d be fascinated to know how long all that took.

[tip o’the hat to the aptly-named RPG for the link]