building on this

two things:

1) add the cyclic patterns for every form of centralisation->decentralisation

technology | politics | finance | energy | cosmology | art | religion | etc…

2) look to see if there’s a damping factor

Are we dealing with periodicity that has diminishing amplitude?

ie. thinking in a political/government sense: do we “normalise” into the status quo – and then need a revolution to introduce a new disruptive signal?

How quickly do we get to the “right” cloud-edge balance?

Can we map the damping factor to accelerate change? (ie. reduce wastage)

If we use a large pile of sand, could we get expectations towards “sustainability”(1) moving faster?

Or am I trying to invent (another) negative entropy machine?

Or is it all just about gravity?

(1) Sustainability being defined as “measuring the rate of change of the right thing”.

Science, data, internet, ontology, work and non-work themes converging – my post on O’Reilly Radar

Keywords: WordPress, HostPapa, managed hosting, image upload, fix, migration

I recently moved a friend’s blog to a managed (virtual) hosting solution (hostPapa in this case) and it all worked fine apart from the fact they couldn’t upload images via the wordpress UI.

In the WP-Admin site, if went to edit a page, then tried to upload an image, you got (for example);

“Unable to create directory /public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/06. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

After chasing around the houses, and annoying HostPapa  – who claimed that they have a slightly different ruleset around chmod (for example, they don’t allow 777 even though you can set it in their UI).

I found the fix to this issue was to edit a field in the WordPress database as follows

Table: “wp_options”
Entry: “upload_path”

change from
“/public_html/wp-content/uploads”
to
“/home/<username>/public_html/wp-content/uploads”

Things wrong with Companies House Crown Copyright data disclosure (which allows free copying)

Get the DVD rom of the data

£30 for a copy of the data – WIN

£1200 if you want to actually save the data – FAIL

Crown Copyright Data is in a closed format -  FAIL (although in a hackable form)

DVD self-destructs after 6 months – WTF!
(not stated at the point of sale, or on the phone when I called them)

Then it gets worse;

Windows *only* (not stated anywhere apart from the booklet inside the DVD (e.g. not on the website, phone or on the outside of the DVD)

Uses ActiveX wrapped into an executable – so I had to reset my default browser to IE…

Requires the DVD to be in the drive (”please insert DVD number XXX”) – so also tied to that specific DVD

Has an “Award for excellence” badge on the back of the DVD.

My verdict: 1/10.  Not excellent. Not even good. I couldn’t do what I needed to with this open, Crown Copyright data. They have an XML API, but that is traffic-restricted.

FOI request sent.

<not for the squemish…>

I consider myself to have a high tolerance (albeit a low threshold) for pain: I can usually accept it and work my way through it when it arrives. Having experienced kidney stones and dental abscesses before, I know roughly where some of my own limits are.

My experience over the last week has been a little different, with some different outcomes that I wanted (and needed) to document.

Firstly, the definition of pain is always subjective. However the small amount of research I did to try and find a common, non-jargon-based language didn’t really reveal what I was expecting: if anyone knows of a simple, official 1-10 scale with clear examples, please comment below with a link.

The most useful I found was here (from 2002) and its author also expresses frustration about the lack of a common language. It’s a good article, and I’ve copied the table here for completeness

And so, onto the story.

On Tuesday one of my teeth started to ache. I recognised it as likely to be a root canal issue as my dentist had it on their list of to-do’s. With impeccable timing – Tuesday was our last board meeting of the year, and am in the midst of negotiating our biggest ever deal – I had to just start on the Nurofen and pace out the day. That night it stepped up and after a very interrupted night I started to alternate Paracetemol and Ibuprofen to get through the next day, and arranged a dental appointment for Thurs 9am.

Weds night stepped up again, about a (6) on the above scale, so almost no sleep, but pain I can certainly “meditate through” for a few hours. On Thursday my dentist duly identified an abscess and I started 500mg Amoxicillin 3x a day. Unfortunately Thursday night went up a notch (7) and was continuous, so to try and seek some stronger pain killers, I trundled myself off to A&E at about 11pm. A&E is never a good place to go, but after 3 hours of concentrated pacing (one of my pain management techniques is to walk and count out loud, small wins of control) I was given a course of 60mg Codine (heavy duty pain killers) and 50mg Diclofenac Sodium (reduces inflammation). To help them get into my system, I walked the 30 min journey home, they kicked in, and I went to sleep. For an hour. Then I was back to a continuous (7)… fitful sleeps, and the next morning my partner picked up a course of 400mg Metronidazole from my dentist (heavy duty antibiotics). The thing is with antibiotics is that they often take 24-48 hours to kick in.

Friday saw the intensity grow from a (7) to an (8) in the evening and, with my energy levels falling, inability to eat and increased tiredness, tipped me into a “must do something” state. Consultation (via my partner) with NHS Direct (which is excellent by the way) at 8pm led to direct referral to an all night emergency dental clinic… albeit a 40 minute cab journey away. Unable to see any alternative, I bundled myself into a cab and concentrated my way to the dentist, somehow filled in a form (no idea what it said) and that’s when things got really interesting.

The dentist could clearly see I was in distress, understood why and wanted to help. So he injected an anaesthetic to numb the area, to relieve the pain, then work on the tooth.

It’s difficult to remember now what it felt like, and still sounds like a very unreasonable claim, but this is where things went to a (9). At the point of the injection I felt like I was going to pass out. However, the step change thereafter – from a (9) to a Zero (no pain) was so dramatic (I could actually feel the anaesthetic moving through my jaw) that within seconds I was in shock: shaking, weeping, numb hands and arms.

After “an amount of time” and a glucose drink, I calmed down. The relief of having no pain was ecstatic. I then smiled my way through a partial root canal treatment, drifting in and out of sleep.

After that, feeling vastly improved (still numbed), I got the tube home and started to rest.

If only.

Bang. The anaesthetic wore off. The pain was worse than before. I’d say a (9) although still feel uncomfortable about that number because I can’t compare this to throat cancer(!), but it was more than an (8).

I subsequently learned from my normal (excellent) dentist, that while the emergency guys were obviously dealing with the situation in hand, you *never* inject and/or operate on an infected tooth. Even just the additional liquid from the injection adds more pressure to the abscess, never mind the drilling/etc.

So, in my on-the-ground state, my partner called for an ambulance, checking carefully that it was both appropriate to have one and that there would be someone at the other end to deal with the issue. They said “yes, we’ll be there immediately, get out onto the street”.

Note to all: never call an ambulance for a dental problem. They have no way to deal with it and dental units at hospitals seem to close at 10pm.

After standing on a cold December street for 40 minutes the ambulance finally arrived. I don’t remember waiting, just pacing and counting. They then said that there was nothing they could do and the dental unit was shut, and I needed to go back to the all night dentist. In a cab (since it was on the other side of town).

The medics were very empathetic and did what they could: 10ml of oral morphine. But it didn’t touch the pain. And they flagged down a cab…

40 mins later I was back in the dental surgery. It’s now 1am Saturday, and a different dentist, who … anaesthetised me.

Same reaction as before. (9) + shock + calm.

Peace was now not the only outcome, but substantial delirium. The cocktail of pain, morphine, pain killers, lack of sleep/food/etc. meant my most concerted efforts to concentrate were futile. Sentences were slow/slurred, even if visualised well in my head.

“Did I want an extraction or to leave it?” was my choice.

I suppose I should feel happy that even under these conditions, a part of my sanity had already worked out that that would be terrible, not just because of the loss of a tooth (even though a part of me wanted that payback so very desperately!), but because I was working out why the last visit hadn’t worked.

“No” was my answer, so in my somewhat befuddled mess of a state, I got another cab, 40 mins, home.

Home, I slept, the second (double-dose) of anaesthetic wore off while I was asleep and I can only imagine that the antibiotics magically had kicked in to reduce the basic cause of infection.

Saturday 9am I woke up, totally exhausted, but not in excruciating pain. My normal dentist saw me at 11am and imparted the words of wisdom about having to wait it out until the antibiotics kick in, even if it seems impossible at the time. There really isn’t another option.

Home by noon, and starting to get the rebound effects of the last few days I went into extremely deep lethargy and narcolepsy. I couldn’t keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds before plunging into fitful/lucid dreaming/ sleep.  My entire body ached. I couldn’t really move.

Given the lack of nutrition I knew I had to at least drink, however it would take me over 2 hours to actually make it across the bed to the glass in-between sleep, waking, realisation and trying to move. And, unfortunately, my body had reacted so badly that I wasn’t able to retain even water…

18 hours later I knew I was also feeling the impacts of dehydration, and again NHS Direct were great, at 5am, over the phone diagnosing and sourcing a local doctor to prescribe additional medication.The only glitch being: I had to pick it up from the local hospital. At this point I couldn’t pick my head up from the bed, so back to sleep it was.

And of course, if you can’t keep down water, you can’t keep down antibiotics. I remember thinking … “oh crap” … as I drifted back to sleep again, but was comforted by the last words my dentist had said to me on Saturday: “it will not be as painful again, you are over the worst of it”. Fortunately, she was right.

Throughout Sunday and early Monday, my condition was steady-state: utter exhaustion and all-over aching. Gradually, with some moments of quite deep shock/emotional release, it started to pass.

Monday afternoon I was, finally, able to digest water, and that started a proper, but gradual recovery.

What did I learn/what would I do differently?

I’d get onto antibiotics (all of them) sooner.

I’d not call an ambulance for any dental-related emergency, regardless of how severe.

I’d somehow insist that any emergency dentist did not inject anaesthetic. Apparently this not only increases the long-term pain, but introduces the potential to spread the infection to other areas.

I don’t know how to reconcile that level of pain with no action/waiting. I know in retrospect that it’s “one of those things”, and quizzed my normal dentist about it a lot. However, “in that moment”, I could easily imagine asking for a full extraction.

I have no idea how I’d deal with something similar again. My pain management process is always to focus on accepting the pain, taking it on board, then thinking about how I’ll reflect on it later (as this blog post is doing). There always has to be a future point to anchor to.

Reading up on pain, and seeing the definitions above, I was quite shocked to see suicide mentioned so many times. It’s not something I think could ever conceive of, but I could easily imagine that prolonged exposure to this kind of intense, crushing, omnipotent pain could entirely take over your whole perspective of life.

My admiration of those who suffer this on an ongoing basis has certainly increased.

Take care.

(copy of my post on the O’Reilly Radar)

We’re all aware of the emotive language used to polarize the climate change debate.

There are, however, deeper patterns which are repeated across science as it interfaces with politics and media. These patterns have always bothered me, but they’ve never been as “important” as now.

We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. The sheer complexity of these interweaving systems is staggering.

Much of this change is being driven by “climate science”, and in the communications maelstrom there is a real risk that we further alienate “science” across the board.

We need more scientists with good media training (and presenting capability) to change the way that all sciences are represented and perceived. We need more journalists with deeper science training – and the time and space to actually communicate across all media. We need to present uncertainty clearly, confidently and in a way that doesn’t impede our decision-making.

On the climate issue, there are some impossible levers to contend with;

1. Introducing any doubt into the climate debate stops any action that might combat our human impact.
2. Introducing “certainty” undermines our scientific method and its philosophy.

When represented in political, public and media spaces, these two levers undermine every scientific debate and lead to bad decisions.

Pascal’s Wager is often invoked, and this is entirely reasonable in this case.

It is reasonable because of what’s at stake: the risk of mass extinction events. If there is a probability that anthropogenic climate change will cause the predicted massive interventions in our ecosystem, then we have to act.

The nature of our actions must be commensurate with both the cause and the effect. The causes are many: population, production, consumption – as are the effects: war, poverty, scarcity, etc.

Our interventions will use all our means to address both cause and effect, and those actions will run deep.

Equally, we must allow science to do what it’s designed to do: measure, model, analyse and predict.

From a scientific perspective we must allow more room for theories to evolve, otherwise we’ll only prove what we’re looking for.

However, if we ignore the potential need to act, the consequences are not something anyone will want to see.

It’s not something we can fix later (for me, “geo-engineering” is not a fix, it’s a pre-infected band-aid).

Given the massive complexity of the issues, and that – really – anthropogenic climate change is only one of many “peak consumption” issues that we face, there is no way we can accurately communicate all the arguments that would lead to mass understanding.

However, the complexity issues are no different from those we face in politics. They are not solvable, but they are addressable.

We can communicate the potential outcomes, and the decisions that individuals need to make in order to impact the causes.

Ultimately it’s your personal choice.

My choice is based on my personal exposure to the science, business, data, policy, media, and broader issues around sustainability. That choice is to do my best to catalyse change as fast as I possibly can.

We all need to actively engage in improving communication, so that everyone – potentially everyone on Earth – can make informed choices about the future of the planet we inhabit.

–
Recommended reading:

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a great resource.

Today, the UK Government launched a campaign “to create a more science literate society, highlighting the science and technology based industries of the future”

I’ve been a SoundCloud member since Feb 2008. My most recent login threw up a “we have new T+Cs” message with no option to continue unless you said yes. Here’s the standard stuff

1.  USER hereby grants SOUNDCLOUD and its successors and assigns a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download and/or otherwise make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services.
2. USER also grants each and every other registered user of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download USER’s content and/or otherwise to make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services as set forth herein.

Which is all very predictable and quite hard to avoid if you do anything online – the usual definition of “Service” as “anything we want” is normal, if questionable. Now here’s the interesting bit;

3. This license does not grant SOUNDCLOUD the right to sell USER’s Content or otherwise distribute it outside of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website or Services, provided however, that streaming of Content on third party Websites via embedded widgets or the SOUNCLOUD Application Programming Interface (API) or similar tools shall not be deemed a distribution outside of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website or Service.

which on the surface looks necessesary for them to offer an API, however the way it’s worded means that they are explicitly carving out the ability to distribute USER’s Content via the API… and who’s to say they can’t charge for ads on such streaming (and you’d expect the sites embedding the streams to sell ads). Another good example of the deal-flow from £ to content-producer still not being realised.

Cape Farewell sets off today with a slightly different crew to norml; including Jarvis Cocker, KT Tunstall, Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and many other remarkable individuals.

Hopefully I’ll have something more to write about soon, but in the mean time, good luck Chris and no I’m not jealous at all…

At least once a year I refer someone I meet to Danny’s superb piece on Wired UK.

I wanted to write about this now, partly because I’m embarking on a new venture, partly because there is a another bubble emerging, but mostly because I’m reminded of the “global coincidence of desires” that Danny spotted in 1994.

An amazing part of what Danny captured was what it felt like at that time: the genuine, emotive belief by an army of people that they could change the world (and many did), and how at a time when the nature of a website was something we were all trying to work out – that individual decisions fundamentally affected the architecture and building blocks that shape what we do now. Aside from the gold-rush, the underlying story of world-changing actions.

I was fortunate enough to work with Tony, Danny and Rik at Virgin Net.

I was in my mid-20s. I was an Astrophysicist and knew a bit about software. I had my own naive views of how the web might bring about the democratisation of information – both through bottom-up action and by redirecting mass-media – I had more than a little to learn.

I certainly wasn’t Wired. My move to London was enough of a culture shock – I remember my first meeting about “online community” – listening to Marketing define it as “everyone inside the M25″, me trying to describe the 800 person village on a small Scottish Island I grew up in, Tony describing Colours Magazine and Danny talking about the real things people were doing. I don’t think any of us actually understood each other.

I spent most of my 4 years at Virgin listening, watching, experimenting and learning how a coincidence of desires is impossible to execute – even within relatively small, exceptionally talented and committed team inside an international brand. Over the last 9 years I’ve learned a bit more about multi-dimensional communication; and the many impossible balances between corporate, social and personal objectives.

This global coincidence of desires is fueling collisions across all our spaces (”convergence” is never anything but a collision). The catalyst is our looming potential self-destruction – our “Resource Crisis” now encapsulates Climate Change and Peak Oil, Energy, Water and Landfill shortages, the depletion of raw materials, globalisation, the list goes on…

Each year I re-read Danny’s “What nearly happened” to remind myself how that time felt, and to re-contextualise one of the most important statements in it, a point that Tony made: “can’t everyone define the future?”.

Apart from great insights backed by luck, I’m not sure anyone understood how the web would really manifest itself today, and how long it would take. I spent at least 5 years attempting to get a YouTube-like idea off the ground, but the serendipity wasn’t fully aligned until 2 years after I stopped trying.

At ETech this year, Tom Loosemore summarised MySociety’s 5 step process for changing civil society, which includes “Leave for X years”.

Now we’re in a space where we are starting to seriously address the combination of cloud, grid and edge, open APIs, open data, openID and oAuth – watching the unfurling of everybody, unpacking system that “dump excess energy in the form of structure” [Burke] and scratching the surfaces of digital identity management.

All these are arriving, coincidentally, at exactly the time we need them – not just in a technological sense, but driven by a global consciousness that we all know: that, really, we need to do this to address sustainable living.

Friends who’ve been pushing the environmental agenda for decades have a tough time right now, having everyone else come in an “own” their parade, but mass-adoption rarely recognises the small army of dedicated individuals who created the movement. It’s a painful transition but we need them all to help us work out what’s next even if it is “move all the towns“.

The fascinating thing for me is watching the whole sustainability space not only collide with itself, but with a broader, globally connected consciousness, driven by a Resource Crisis that will affect every living thing.

The personal desire to catalyse change has been evident in every single person I’ve met over the last 3 years, from politicians to scientists, from bands to hedge funds, from engineers to activists: “everybody”.

Our challenge lies in creative execution: to create many granular, networked spaces that can flourish. How can we let these networks flourish and not only create value for them, but redefine what value means in the process? The words are coming: “Creative Capitalism“, “Philalthrocapitalism” but you have to assume that these are the sticking-plasters of change, similar to the early old-media references to the Net, rather than the radical re-engineering that’s needed. That re-engineering will, most likely, come from unexpected places.

Further to the outcry at the time, this weekend The Guardian reports;

“Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film”

“Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world’s leading climate scientists … Ofcom is expected to censure the network … but … it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.”

I’m certainly looking forward to reading how it’s possible to misrepresent the world’s leading climate scientists without misleading viewers.

The key quote seems to be “One source said both sides would be able to claim victory after a bitter dispute” which sounds like diplomacy has won over decisiveness and truth.