Whilst clearing out my office I found some receipts. Nothing special there, except that these were for IT kit I’d purchased in the late 90s/early 00s. I couldn’t beleive how much I’d paid for some of this stuff:
That’s not a typo: that really was a 64MB flash card!
How times change!
Regular readers will know about my “Fit at 40” challenge and I have to say it’s pretty hard work right now. I lost the first stone (and a bit) and I built up to the point where I ran my first 10K race (albeit a little slower than I would like) but now it’s into the real hard slog… and I’ve found that I need to focus a little harder (although I’m still heading in the right direction).
I mentioned previously how my friend and former colleague, Garry Martin, is providing motivation with a sponsorship deal that requires me to meet certain targets that we have agreed as realistic but challenging. I will lose the three-and-a-bit stone, and I will run three races of at least 10K before my 40th birthday – but I really do hope to do a little better than that (let’s call it a stretch target!)
Friends and family keep on telling me that I’m looking slimmer, fitter, and healthier, but I put that down to wearing dark colours, a recent holiday leaving me suntanned and breathing in/standing upright! The fact is that the scales tell me I’m not shifting the weight fast enough – and the running is getting harder, not easier. Even so, I decided to take a look at my body fat measurements.
It seems that, in the UK, health professionals are obsessed with the Body Mass Index (BMI) – a simple calculation based on height and weight. That’s all well and good, but some of us really are “stockier” than others. According to a simple BMI calculation, I am obese (I am) but, I’ll still be overweight when I reach my goal… in fact, I’d need to get below 12 and a half stone to be “healthy”, despite having not been that weight since I was a teenager (and still growing up, rather than out).
In theory, all of this exercise is helping me to build muscle so it makes more sense to understand just how much of me is fat. For a while, I was using one of the many calculations available on the ‘net but they really do vary tremendously. So much so that they can only be considered as a guide (not much better than the BMI):
More importantly, the calculation I was using wasn’t suggesting any progress – despite clearly losing weight and being a lot leaner, my wrist and forearm measurements (two of the metrics used) are probably not going to change much.
When I look at my “ideal weight” there are just any many ideas of “ideal”:
Then, last month, I saw that one of the local leisure centres was advertising Body Stat tests (body composition testing) for £5, so I booked myself in. Using a bio-electrical impedance analysis (BIA) test I was given a range of figures indicating how fat I am and what I should be aiming for. BIA is not without it’s faults but at least by using a commercial product rather than a consumer body fat meter I’ll have increased the chances of accuracy. Just as important was the confirmation that my goal weight is realistic as well as the information that I’m not sufficiently hydrated (drinking more water should help me to lose weight). It also told me my basal metabolic rate (I could also calculate that myself or use a different calculation to take into account exercise and target weight loss), which explains why I’m so damned hungry if I don’t eat enough… and I want to lose weight at a sensible rate or 1-2 pounds a week, not go on a crash diet (I use the Weight Loss Resources site to help with tracking my food and exercise).
Ideally, I would have baselined this when I started the challenge but at least I have the numbers now I’m part way in, and I can check them again as I hit my milestones over the coming months. For what it’s worth, the ideal weight that the Body Stat test came up with was 85-91kg (13st 5lb-14st 5lb) and 13-19% body fat. That seems a lot more realistic than the numbers above and the top end is just below my “Fit at 40” target (so, “Fitter at 41?”)
Just on more thing before I sign off… a quick video from the Dads’ Race at my son’s school sports day last week:
I think I came second (I’m in the green t-shirt). The challenge continues…
My visits to Surrey seem to be getting more frequent… earlier tonight I was in Reigate, at Canon‘s UK headquarters for another great Digital Surrey talk.
The guest speaker was Professor David Frohlich (@davidfrohlich) from the University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre, who spoke about the changing picture of photography and the relationship between snapshots and social media, three eras of domestic photography, the birth and death of the album and lessons for social media innovation.
I often comment that I have little time for photography these days and all I do is “take snapshots of the kids” but my wife disagrees – she’s far less critical of my work and says I take some good pictures. It was interesting to see a definition of a snapshot though, with it’s origins in 1860’s hunting and “shooting from the hip” (without careful aim!). Later it became “an amateur photograph” so I guess yes, I do mainly take snapshots of the kids!
Professor Frohlich spoke of three values of snapshots (from research by Richard Chalfen in 1987 and Christopher Musello in 1979):
He then looked at a definition of social media (i.e. it’s a media for social interaction) and suggested that photographs were an early form of social media (since integrated into newer forms)!
Another element to consider is that of innovation and, using Philip Anderson and Michael L Tushman’s 1990 theory as an example, he described how old technological paths hit disruption, there’s then an era of fermentation (i.e. discontinuous development) before a dominant design appears and things stabilise again. In Geoff Mulgan’s 2007 Process of Social Innovation it’s simply described as new ideas that work, or changing practice (i.e. everyday behaviour).
This led to the discussion of three eras of domestic photography. Following the invention of photography (1830-1840) we saw:
What we find is that the three values of snapshots overlay this perfectly (although the digital era also has elements of identity it is mainly about communication):
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/AbigailH/statuses/94117587696357376″]
Whilst the inventor of the photograph is known (actually Fox-Talbot’s Calotype/Talbottype and Daguerre’s Daguerrotype were both patented in 1839), it’s less well-known who invented the album.
Professor Frohlich explained that the album came into being after people swapped cartes-de-visite (just like today’s photographic business cards!) which became popular around 1850 as a standard portrait sized at 2.5″ x 4″. These cards could be of individuals, or even famous people (Abraham Lincoln, or Queen Victoria) and in 1854, Disderi’s camera allowed mass production of images with several on a single sheet of paper. By 1860 albums had been created to store these cards – a development from an earlier past-time of collecting autographs and these albums were effectively filled with images of family, people who visited and famous people – just as Facebook is today!
The Kodak era commenced after George Eastman‘s patent was awarded on 4 September 1888 for a personalised camera which was more accessible, less complex than portrait cameras, and marketed to women around the concept of the Kodak family album. Filled with images of “high days and holidays” – achievements, celebrations and vacations – these were the albums that most of us know (some of us still maintain) and the concept lasted for the next century (arguably it’s still in existence today, although increasingly marginalised).
Whilst there were some threats (like Polaroid images) they never quite changed the dominant path of photography. Later, as people became more affluent, there were more prints and people built up private archives with many albums and loose photographs (stored in cupboards – just as my many of my family’s are in our loft!).
As photography met ICT infrastructure, the things that we could do with photography expanded but things also became more complex, with a complex mesh involving PCs, printers and digital camera. Whilst some manufacturers cut out the requirement for a computer (with cameras communicating directly to printers), there were two inventions that really changed things: the camera phone and the Internet:
By 2008, Abigail Durrant was researching photographic displays and intergenerational relationships at home. She looked at a variety of display devices but, critically, found that there was a requirement for some kind of agreement as to what could be displayed where (some kind of meta rules for display).
Looking to the future there are many developments taking place that move beyond the album and on to the archive. Nowadays we have home media collections – could we end up browsing beautiful ePaper books that access our libraries?Could we even see the day where photographic images have a “birthday” and prompt us to remember things (e.g. do you remember when this image was taken, 3 years ago today?)
Professor Frohlich finished up with some lessons for social media innovation:
I do admit to being in admiration of the Digital Surrey team for organising these events – in my three visits I’ve seen some great speakers. Hopefully, I’ve covered the main points from this event but Andy Piper (@andypiper) sums it up for me in a single tweet:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/andypiper/statuses/94116649699000321″]
One of the presentations I saw at the recent London Cloud Camp (and again at  Unvirtual) was Justin McCormack (@justinmccormack)’s lightning talk on “re-architecting for the ‘green’ cloud and lower costs” (is re-architecting a word? I don’t think so but re-designing doesn’t mean the same in this context!).
Justin has published his slides but he’s looking at ways to increase the scalability of our existing cloud applications. One idea is to build out parallel computing systems with many power-efficient CPUs (e.g. ARM chips) but Amdahl’s law kicks in so there is no real performance boost by building out – in fact, the line is almost linear so there is no compelling argument.
Instead, Justin argues that we currently write cloud applications that use a lot of memory (Facebook is understood to have around 200TB of memory cache). That’s because memory is fast and disk is slow. But with the advent of solid state devices we have something in between (that’s also low-power).
Instead of writing apps to live in huge RAM caches, we can use less memory, and more flash drives. The model is  not going to be suitable for all applications but it’s fine for “quite big data” – i.e. normal, medium latency applications. A low-power cloud is potentially a low-cost middle ground with huge cost saving potential, if we can write cloud applications accordingly.
Justin plans to write more on the subject soon – keep up with his thoughts on the  Technology of Content blog.
One of the reasons for the huge gap in posts here is that I’ve lost most of the last week to creating a presentation for an event where I’m speaking next week. The event is for The Society for Computers and Law, and I’m taking a look inside the black box of technology. I was briefed not to expect much technical knowledge as the audience are junior lawyers but I figure they probably know quite a lot already as they do work in IT law, so it’s been pretty difficult to work out what level to pitch things at. In the end, all I can do is take the event organisers’ advice and hope it works out on the night… we’ll see…
Anyway, I wanted to mix things up a bit and avoid death by PowerPoint. My slides are pretty pictorial (at least they are if the brand police don’t make me change them to something bland and corporate…) but I wanted to mix in some video too. PowerPoint is quite happy to embed video from a file but it’s a bit harder if you want to embed video that’s streamed from the web, for example from YouTube.
There is a way though (without resorting to installing an add-in)…
I found a post from iSpring Software that goes through the process of manually inserting Flash into PowerPoint 2007 (the version I’m using). There’s more detail in the original post, so I recommend that you read it, but these are the basic steps:
http://www.youtube.com/v/PPnoKb9fTkA?version=3).A couple of points to note:
So that’s YouTube… but what about other Flash content? Well, you may find that you can extract an appropriate URL from the embed code – and that’s what I did for BBC iPlayer content. Note that this works for videos embedded on the BBC website, it’s not for videos downloaded to the iPlayer Desktop client.
I don’t normally rate Yahoo Answers but it did turn up a 2 year-old post from someone called wm1995 that gave me the answer. Get the embed code for the video that you want to embed and look for the FlashVars parameter:
Add that FlashVars code to the end of http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/2.10.7938_7967/9player.swf?embedPageUrl= and you can view the video in a browser (without the rest of the webpage). Similarly, you can take the same URL and use it inside PowerPoint so, the Movie attribute in the Shockwave Flash object will look something like:
Last week’s Fantastic Tavern gamification event included the opportunity to win an Xbox 360 and Kinect and Microsoft’s Andrew Spooner (@andspo), a Creative Evangelist working with Xbox, gave an update on the latest Kinect developments.
Kinect is now (officially) the World’s fastest-selling consumer electronics device. That’s quite some achievement. I described how Kinect works in an earlier post (3 cameras including one RGB and two 3D motion depth sensors, 4 microphones for directional audio) but Andrew highlighted Audrey Penven’s photographs demonstrating the infra-red light patterns that Kinect uses (Audrey’s image is shown here under a creative commons licence).
After some initial unauthorised hacking, Microsoft has now released an official software development kit for Kinect, allowing Windows developers to develop new uses for the sensor [although there isn’t yet a commercial model for it’s use as a PC peripheral]. Andrew demonstrated some simple skeletal tracking but some of the examples of Kinect hacks (pre-SDK) include:
There are some pretty cool projects there – some are just geeky, but others have real, practical uses. Now that there is an official SDK, Microsoft is suggesting that we’re only limited by our imagination… and that’s probably not to far from the truth!
“All you need is life experience”
[Alex Kipman, “Kinect brainchild”]
Andrew finished off his presentation with a video where Kinect becomes self-aware. Of course, it’s not real… but it is amusing… and it does make you think…
Yesterday, I wrote about the ubiquitous gaming culture, the second in a series of posts from The Fantastic Tavern (TFT)’s gamification evening. Now we move on to the final level – examining the 4 Ms: of mystery (easy learning), mastery (hard learning), membership (making it social) and meaning (a story with a beginning, middle and end).
At TFT, four speakers each gave a lightening talk on one of the Ms so, here’s each in logical (not chronological) order…
TFT’s founder Matt Bagwell (Global Creative Director at EMC Consulting) started out by describing some characteristics that might describe mystery in gameplay: Where am I? What is the story? Make it compelling by building in reward/failure – make us feel on the edge, in flow (one of the tenets of happiness) and compel us to play.
Matt told us that, for mystery we need:
Golf is a simple game – the goal is to put a ball in a hole. Add some rules and increase the difficulty hitting the ball with a club and putting the hole a long way away. Then introduce elements such as other players, handicaps, etc.
Mystery is about the goal. But some games are actually about working out what the goal is! Mystery is about the player, their role, and what they are trying to achieve. Why are you here?
In short, mystery is about creating new worlds for us to discover; designing in some flow; and make us work hard to unlock it.
Richard Sedley (Commercial Director at Foviance) took this topic, explaining that games are about engagement; capturing moments of attention and elongating them; repeating interactions to strengthen involvement. The aim is to achieve flow – to match skills and satisfaction.
There are various game mechanics but rewards alone don’t make for engagement. When people use a wastebin, they like to toss it in – to make it a challenge, some fun – that is mastery.
Richard outlined three techniques to make mastering a challenge both fun and engaging:
Tom Hopkins (Strategy Director at Fortune Cookie) explained that, to understand membership, it’s often useful to look at the opposite: exclusion, alienation, being an outsider and how the resulting feelings drive human behaviour. Clicking to sign up for something, or Liking something or someone on Facebook is not membership. Think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and belongingness.
Social identity theory shows that we define ourselves through membership of groups; and we may have multiple group memberships. We need to consider both inside and outside the groups – what do the groups’ enemies look like?
An example is the Mac and PC advertising that Apple used for a number of years – it creates vitriolic feelings between members of the two groups. Generally people are either in or out of groups like these [I’m unusual in being in both groups]. Another example is the Stanford Prison Experiment – proving that artificial tribes can be powerful (even if they are arbitrary).
Ultimately though, Tom concluded, membership must confer some form of identity.
Alex Lee (Creative Partner at Kempt) gave the talk on meaning, starting out by describing different types of games:
Some games are about status – they reward everything so that the player earns more of something, has new opportunities, and can progress through the game. Alex gave an example that involved breeding celebrity puppies but I prefer the example of the pottery game that my children play on my iPad. They make pots, sell them (virtually), earn credits, buy more colours and patterns, and make more pots, to sell, etc.
We can gain meaning from slight of hand – a feeling of success – or by rewarding – rewarding failure as well as success.
Even health apps like Nike+ [or Runkeeper] are games that provide meaning when we’re exercising – they don’t chastise us, but talk in our ears and reward us for small achievements.
Another real-world gaming example is Weight Watchers – allocating points to “spend” on food, rewarding with real results – and now it’s gone online. Movember is another example, growing a moustache, but having fun at the same time (and with meaning).
Alex left us with some food for thought on gaming and meaning: how do people feel about Just Giving? When you donate, how do you feel about the value of donations either side in the list?
That’s it for this series of posts – if you want to read more about the science of gamification, check out my post from Michael Wu’s talk at Digital Surrey – and if you’re interested in future TFT events, find out more at The Fantastic Tavern site (or @TFTLondon).
Last week, I wrote a post about The Fantastic Tavern event on Gamification. That post was a bit light on details, so I’m now rewarding you with a move to level 2.
James Wallman from The Future Laboratory spoke about what they refer to as the ubiquitous gaming culture, starting out with a quote from Seth Priebatsch, CEO at SCVNGR and, as I hunted around for the source of the quote it seems he’s spoken about it at both SXSW and TEDx:
“While the last decade was the decade of social… where the framework in which we connect with other people was built… This next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built.”
Remember 6 years ago when the first Facebook [or LinkedIn] invitations went out? The ones we ignored for a while until we saw that all our friends [and business contacts] were there… well, that social framework is in place now and, in an age with many messages, the way that brands will connect and change consumer behaviour is
game mechanics.
James broke his talk out into trend drivers, trend impacts, trend consequences, and trend futures so, looking first at the trend drivers – what is making this desire to gamify things happen?
To start with, gaming changes people’s behaviour. In trials with burns victims, it was found that gaming isolated the patient from real world (and hence provided pain relief) more than any other medium. Then, consider the blurring of work and play (“bleisure”) – we often check our email on a smartphone when we’re not at work? [go on, admit it]. The social game market has massive potentially monetary value (Inside Network says it’s a billion-dollar business) and John Riccitello, CEO at Electronic Arts is right on the money when he says that:
“Every new device ends up being a game device”
(in a market that’s grown from 200 million gamers, to over a billion.)
Moving on to the trend impacts – i.e. the implications of gamification – brands are incorporating game play elements into applications, products and campaigns. Remember all those social networks that didn’t make it to the big time (Friendster?) – James suggests that today’s gamification is like those early social networks: an exciting, novel, concept.
From simple examples like the Braun/Oral B SmartGuide – a monitor with a display that changes according to how long you brush your teeth to the City of Melbourne’s interactive treasure hunt (to get people off the beaches and into the CBD) governments and commercial organisations alike are looking to gaming to control, nudge and monitor our behaviour. Take, for example, Toyota’s A Glass of Water app – designed to improve our driving and reduce fuel consumption… or London commuters can play the game of Chromaroma through a link with their Oyster Card (the London RFID travel card), earning points for getting off a stop early, or using one of the many “Boris Bikes”.
Looking at trend consequences, gamification will change our social and economic structures – James cited examples like Macon Money from Macon (pronounced Makin’) in Georgia, USA – an innovative approach to community building that uses a local currency to build personal connections and support local businesses. There’s even the possibility that people will pay to work (play + labour = “playbour”): Internet Eyes is one such example – a website where people pay a fee to watch live CCTV footage and are rewarded for spotting and reporting crimes!
So what trend futures does gamification offer? Research shows that a person’s behaviour in real life mimics their behaviour in the real world. This leads to the concept of “playfiling” – profiling through play.
James gave another example of gamification: New York’s Quest to Learn school. The school describes itself as school for digital kids – applying games techniques to digital learning. At work, when we don’t know something, we ask questions of our colleagues…. so why not at school? Quest to Learn works in 10-week problem spaces, with pupils co-operating as a team and playing games to learn. In terms of engagement, it’s now within the top 3% of schools in the United States.
James’ final example also came from New York – a clever foursquare hack called World of Fourcraft, that turns the city into a giant game of Risk – hopefully we’ll see something like this in British cities soon [are there some programmers out there that want to create a real-life game of Monopoly by mashing up Foursquare and Chromorama? I guess without the property purchases and the going to jail…].
In conclusion, James Wallman described a ubiquitous gaming culture toolkit for digital marketers:
My next post (“game on at #TFTLondon: level 3”) will take a look at the 4Ms of gamification – and if you’re interested in future TFT events, find out more at The Fantastic Tavern site (or @TFTLondon).
It’s been a long week… not just the normal work stuff but two great events meaning some late nights and I’m just not as young as I once was… in time I’m sure I’ll blog about Thursday’s CloudCamp and give some more details on last night’s Fantastic Tavern (TFT) but, for now, here’s the highlights on TFT.
Gamification. I wrote about that after a recent Digital Surrey event and it’s pretty big. Big? Hell, last night’s Fantastic Tavern needed a night club to house the 300 attendees – I only wish I hadn’t had to leave to catch a train home when the music started… anyway, if 300 people want to come along and learn about gamification, that gives some idea as to how hot the topic is right now.
Apparently, there are more than 10 million people in the UK who play games for more than 20 hours a week [they must be insomniacs, or don’t have kids/jobs with long commutes…] and some games are now so heavily played they feature rest rewards!
We all like the feeling of flow – that balance between skill and satisfaction that produces a neurological hit… so why is reality so dull? And that’s where gamification comes in, building out the game layer to cover education, leisure and work. Bringing in game dynamics and reapply them in the real world.
Last night’s TFT featured a talk on the ubiquitous gaming culture that is developing around us before we heard lightning talks on the four Ms of gamification (mystery, mastery, membership and meaning). Then, putting that into practice, we split out and brainstormed some topics to gamify Cancer Research UK‘s valuable work in a world where an increasingly cashless (and cash-strapped) society is giving less.
And just to prove the point, an old-school gamification method (i.e. a raffle) was used to get us to give up our cash for Cancer Research and win a Microsoft Xbox 360 system with Kinect.
I’ll write some more on the ubiquitous gaming culture and the 4Ms soon (I’ll try to line up some posts for next week, together with something on Kinect) but, if you’re interested in future TFT events, find out more at The Fantastic Tavern site (or @TFTLondon).
Before I start, let’s get one thing straight – I’m not condoning the actions of the News of the World, or any other medium that is illegally/illicitly accessing people’s personal information. And I added my name to more than one anti-Murdoch/News International petition this week. I’m appalled by some of what’s come out over the last few days but this is a technology blog – and this post is about technology, not politics or crime syndicates news organisations [source: Google/Wikipedia].
I just want to highlight something that was posted on Phil Hendren (aka Dizzy)’s Dizzy Thinks blog last year:
“* Calling someone’s mobile, waiting for it to go to voicemail and then entering their four digit pin (0000) is not hacking. Hacking is about circumventing security, not being presented with [a security check] and passing [it].
** Calling someone’s mobile, waiting for it to go to voicemail and then entering their four digit pin (0000) is not tapping. Tapping is the covert act of real-time interception of active communication links.”
But we can all protect ourselves – David Rogers explains how on Sophos’ Naked Security blog. So I urge everyone to check their voicemail access code(s), and change it/them to something non-default. After all, you wouldn’t make your email logon credentials consist of your email address as a username and the word “password” as your password would you?