Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Alom’s Why is Science Important? project continues apace, with new postings most days and the film in full production. This contribution, however, is worthy of particular mention:
She’s 12. Her article is brilliant. Spread this one far and wide, folks, it deserves to be read.
I was a late adopter of Twitter, joining just a little under a year ago, and tweeting mostly about making tea. I’ve written about Twitter here rather a lot in the year since, either referencing it directly when discussing OhMyScience or my favourite STEM engagement project of 2008, the Mars Phoenix Lander twitter stream, or simply reposting things I learned from people I follow.
One convention on the service is to tag tweets about specific events or subjects with ‘hashtags‘, short unique strings prefixed by #. For example, for the BIG Event this year we’ll likely use #BIG09. They’re only a convention (at least for the moment), but they do at least allow people to define ad-hoc groups around events or shared experiences.
Looking for that group, however, is not straightforward – the tools are lagging the convention somewhat. However, as an aide-memoir (and a post for posterity, for some indeterminate time in the future when this all seems so primitive. Perhaps three months from now), here are some services that help:
Ultimately, I worry that the ‘trending topics’ type analyses can’t conceivably scale, as Twitter grows. I can sort-of believe Twitter Search being able to sample a representative proportion of tweets, but surely anything else is going to be flaky, with access to only a tiny fraction of ‘the firehose’? In which case, they’re simply showing what lots of people are talking about. The whole point, surely, is to spot fast-growing minority topics?
Twitterfall is nicely done, but I fear it’s not necessarily that useful in practice. If I’m following, say, #omc09 (the Oxford Media Convention), I’m more likely to want to see everything tweeted there, not miss stuff if I blink. But there may be situations when I want auto-refresh, I suppose. Nice to know it’s there.
Finally, there are activity aggregators, Friendfeed being the principle player here. Many people swear by it, but I’ve never quite got my head around it.
An interesting development is the next version of blogging/CMS software Movable Type Pro – Motion is a roll-your-own activity aggregator, based off the system driving the Action Stream page here. I’ve yet to play with it, but look forward to doing so – I should also play around with Action Streams stuff, and integrate it with the main flow of the blog somehow.
There’s something rather appealing about being able to pull content from around the web – people talking about your product or project, for example – and catalogue it in real time, on your own branded page. It’s a dangerous concept, but a powerful one.
I’m (finally) posting new films to SciCast. Want an example? Try The Immiscible Love Story. Genius.
Insight of the day:
Don’t waste time trying to influence decision-makers. Just make decisions.
Apple’s Compressor, which ships as part of Final Cut Studio, comes with a distributed processing/rendering system. In principle, one can turn networked Macs into processing nodes, and push compression jobs across the network across all the nodes. This is of interest to me because:
Unfortunately, I’ve never managed to get Compressor/QMaster to, you know, work. I’d follow the instructions, define nodes, add them to a cluster, and … nothing. No jobs pushed, no error messages, nothing. Reading around the boards, Compressor clusters are notoriously finicky, and setting them up is something of a black art. Nothing I tried ever worked, and a year ago I gave up entirely.
But today, I read (and did) this page of set-up instructions. Now, I have four CPUs munging through an H.264 compression batch at ludicrous speed, with three more MacBooks back home in Glasgow to add to the cluster.
Wheee-hah!
An obvious gag absolutely made by superb production values. Lovely. Great work, Onion.
After all the words today, a picture. My nephew Stanley, with added soup. More at Flickr.
I’ve written before that the key question behind children’s television – indeed, behind education, child support, national strategy, and so on – is ‘What sort of people do we want in the future?’
Clearly, we want the next generation to be willing and able to take on the world, keen to shape it in their own ways. But we also want them to have perspective and informed views and all the rest. You can fill in the gaps yourself, but it boils down to something like ‘capable, but keen to explore entirely new mistakes rather than retread the goofs we made.’ That sort of thing.
Now, formal education tackles core knowledge and (ahem) thinking skills, and lots of government effort at the moment seems to be directed at ‘not being obese’ (which is less ridiculous than it sounds, if you believe the forecasts). What role, then for public-service media?
For the decade I worked in it, I think the key word in children’s TV was ’empowerment.’ It wasn’t often vocalised, but on reflection I think it was central to most of what was done through the late nineties and into the early zeroes. Commissioners and executive producers wanted shows that empowered children, that gave them control and authority, that made their actions count and their decisions feel valued.
Hence lots of physical action game shows, from things like Fun House to Jungle Run. Hence also My Parents Are Aliens, which was a delicious inversion of the traditional family dynamic, with the world-weary kids looking after their annoyingly-naive-but-strangely-lovable alien ‘parents.’ MPAA was regarded as a classic series, and rightly so.
Empowerment is good. It was a necessary mantra, and I think may be almost as relevant now as it was 15 years ago, despite ongoing curriculum changes in schools shifting more decision-making into children’s hands.
But alongside empowering children, you also want to inspire them. You want to show them the wonders of the world, and reassure them that it’s good to feel awe, or joy, or excitement. You want to show them what other people have achieved, and invite them to say not just ‘I could do that,’ but ‘I will do that.’
Empowerment and inspiration are parallel concepts, but I’d nevertheless argue that TV shows can aim for one preferentially over the other. So, My Parents Are Aliens was empowering, but How2 was inspirational.
My concern about Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab, then, boils down from this epic monster nit-pick to a single accusation: I think it’s neither empowering nor inspiring.
See, the achilles heel of children’s media is that it has to be entertaining – it only works if children choose to watch it. My guess is that the CBBC commissioners were so delighted to have a proposal for a science series that they thought looked entertaining, that they failed to hold it to the higher standards to which they should aspire. If I’m cynical, I’d say they fixated on the idea that the series was aiming to show that science can be fun – which is frustrating, since in the last decade STEM engagement has been moving on from that naive approach. Science is fun: we don’t have to make it so, we simply have to reveal that reality.
The show is entertaining, certainly. Much more so than I expected, I’m happy to say. This in itself is a considerable breakthrough, showing the powers that be at the BBC that factual children’s series can be something other than worthily plodding. It’s been years since anyone’s achieved this with the BBC, really. Bravo, Hammond & crew.
But the show doesn’t empower the children in it, nor the viewer at home. Not really. And while the big stunt demo is somewhat inspiring, it’s buried in the middle of the show and not quite treated right to form a ‘Did you see that? That was amazing!’ take-home.
It’s close. Closer than I’d hoped. But I think, in the end, they’re aiming for entertainment, and forgetting that children’s media can – indeed, should – be that and more.
Blimey: xtranormal. Write a script, embed actions, and have your movie rendered and played out by not-quite-Lego-minifigs.
Unbelievable. Could be a tremendous tool for script development and storyboarding, especially for first-time film-makers. I love how the camera shots widget allows you to pick MCU, over-the-shoulders, two-shots, CUs, and all the rest, without having to know what any of them are called. All very slick indeed.
The biggest achilles heel is the speech performance. It’d be incredible if you could record your own audio clips in place of typing dialogue.