Just as a quick pointer, I’ve made a new post in the GIST foundation blog. We’re having an open town-hall meeting to discuss responding to the DfE consultation on disapplying the ICT Curriculum. The idea is to garner as many points of view as possible from the grass-roots community in Sheffield and work out if we should respond, and what such a response might contain! Please do come along!!!!!

http://foundation.thegisthub.net/2012/01/open-invitation-a-gist-magazine-town-hall-meeting-to-discuss-and-respond-to-the-dfe-ict-consultation/

A quick addendum, spotted the cyclesheffield response to the smart routes proposals here: http://www.cyclesheffield.org.uk/policies/ecclesall-rd-smartroutes-consultation/ really great to see that the cyclesheffield team are on the case, huge kudos!
Quick apology @Jerry for taking so very long to approve the last comment. No special info about Knowle Lane, but I’m going to try to go to the ecclesall forum meeting next week, and ask about the smart routes proposals. Will be sure to mention this!

WOW!

incredibly nice email from the smart routes people inviting me to attend the offices and make changes to the simulations and re-run them as a part of the consultation process. I’m completely impressed! Well done guys! For now I’ve told them I want to spend a bit of time thinking about the alternate modelling scenarios I’d like to see, and to find out if there are other people interested in attending a small workshop to play with the models. Really quite impressed tho!

This is a personal post about the background thinking and events that led to the Saturday Morning Programming Club. I’ll add a link to the official GIST Entry as soon as we get it up.

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me moan on about the state of ICT as a subject, and how it should be re-branded “Learn to use Microsoft Office”. At a recent “options” event I chatted briefly with an ICT teacher at High Storrs and asked if they taught any programming whatsoever? I was told: “Well, we had 3 a-level students doing it last year, but it wasn’t enough to keep that part of the couse”. me: “So thats no then”, school “Thats right”.

Slightly dismayed by this, I bought a copy of http://inventwithpython.com/ . Impressed with the “Download it free” approach (Which only made me want to buy it all the more), and thinking I might see if my eldest AJ (Who’s got an interest in ICT generally) would have a go. I kept meaning to sit down with AJ and the book, but work and the general hullabaloo of life got in the way. Then, one day my parents were looking after the kids whilst I was out. When I got home I asked how the kids had been, only to be told “We haven’t seen Aaron, he’s been programming all day”. WHAT?. Turns out he’d picked up the book himself, got python installed and was working through the chapters. He’d stuck in a few places, needed some help with debugging in places, but generally, had managed to achieve (With this book) that geek-ideal of self directed learning.

Couldn’t have been prouder The other thing thats critical for me is that Computer Studies (As it was then) was the real keystone subject for me. I was (Still am really) a bit of an intellectual duffer, but programming in particular unlocked maths (Too many school lunch times spent learning to draw and animate lissajous figures on a BBC B, inspired by my then teacher Mr Cowley) which then unlocked physics and the whole thing cascaded into an almost coherent education (Save English, clearly).

So What next? Well, the thing about Programming is it’s a great activity to do alone. Late nights pouring over a keyboard are a wonderful rite of passage. However, these days it’s also a very social activity, and we need to embed the spirit of cooperation and teamwork in our kids programming style (And more generally, I’d say) from the first moment possible.

So, Starting on Saturday 16th of April (Coinciding with Barcamp Sheffield as it happens) we’re kicking off “Saturday Morning Programming Club” at the GIST Lab. Probably run from 9am to 12pm(ish), longer if there is energy for it. I’ve blagged some laptops from a UK online centre pool so there shouldn’t be any reason for people to be excluded. I’m trying to blag some USB sticks for people to save their work on. Anyone is welcome, so long as young children bring their own responsible adult, who will have to stay with them in the lab. My hope is to do this monthly, but we will play it by ear. Although the inspiration is for kids to learn the craft of coding, it’s really open to anyone wanting to take their first steps into coding. Think of it as the geek-cadets

The club won’t be giving lessons, there will just be geeky types on hand to help explain, work through problems and generally offer support. People are welcome to bring their own projects, or grab a copy of http://inventwithpython.com/ and start working through it. I’ll try and find whatever kit is needed. If specific common issues come up, we might do some breakout groups. The idea tho is to get the kids supporting eachother and working together, whilst the geeks drink coffee (And maybe eat breakfast baps).

If you’re coming along, remember to donate to the refreshments tin! Really happy to answer questions, listen to suggestions, concerns, anything really. Just shout up!

Cheers,

Ian.

Well, unexpectedly an email turned up containing the summary report created by the modelling. Happy to share it with you all. Unhappily, the document doesn’t have any authority information, or even date/time information, so I’ve no idea how recent or otherwise it is. Some of the base data certainly seems rather old.

More worryingly tho, the model seems to be built around several features not in the actual consultation, and misses out some of the features described in the consultation document. Examples include

• The proposed right turn lane onto ringinglow road is not modelled even though it’s present in the consultation.
• The model does contain proposals to move the crossing from the bottom of ringinglow road to the city outbound side of the junction. This proposal is not in the consultation document. This is particularly worrying, given that it’s the crossing used by children on their way to High Storrs.
• The model contains several right turn lanes which are also not in the proposed consultation, for example onto brincilffe edge road.
• The model also seems to be predicated on the abolition of several sections of bus lane. No reference is made to the impact on cyclist saftey.

Perhaps a more worrying observation is that the great improvements being made here generally amount to 10 seconds here or there…

Have asked for clarification on what changes are actually proposed – the ones in the consultation document, or the ones in the model… If the latter, the model seems irrelevant to me. Have also explained that the reason I wanted the model was to see comparative differences with/without certain proposed features.

more to follow.

Man I’m struggling to see any coherent sense in the ecclesall road smart routes proposal (http://www.smartroutes.co.uk/ecclesallroad/). I started writing a ranty response letter (Which incidentally the “Interactive website” makes almost impossible, I just want a document listing all the changes). Then I thought – I can’t be right about this. This proposal must have been created by intelligent, thoughtful people. They wouldn’t make silly mistakes. Most of my objections are founded on a trivial grasp of network and graph theory. I figure maybe this transportation stuff is just really counter-intuitive and that the people behind it must have run simulations and models.. So, with great anticipation, here’s the hasty email I fired off today. I’m thinking of running a book on the possible responses

—–
to: ecclesallroad@smartroutes.co.uk

Hi

I’m responding to the consultation at the moment. Is it possible for you to share your network models and simulations for each of the proposed changes? I’m really struggling to see the sense in them, and my intuition is that most of the changes will simply speed traffic on to other bottleneck areas. I would very much like to see the models you have used in creation of this proposal as a part of the consultation process.

Many thanks,
Ian.
—-

…Is a question I’ve been asked often this week, most notably by chrismurray0 at fridays collabolab.

So, it’s time for another one of those personal brain dump, rambling, not coherent, emotive, please ignore, not technical postings.

In a nutshell, yes, the effect was profound. There’s monetary impact on the business both now and in the future, some impact on home finances, particularly in the mid term. It’s hard not to be concerned about the longer term future too, and a particular niggle that my long-term dream of getting back to doing some kind of cybernetics work is now even less of a possibility.

All of these things demonstrate the mild, but still important, ups and downs in the course of life. Perhaps the most worrying immediate and direct impact of the current climate is the redundancy of a close and extremely capable friend, although I hold out significant hope that situation will all work out for the best.

And yet… I can’t say I find much of this profound, or even surprising.

As I watched the announcement I have to confess to feeling physically sick. This room full of people, elected by us, and placed in an arrangement of sincere dialectic deliberation were deciding the immediate fates of a huge number of people. The decisions reached would have far reaching short, mid and long term consequences. Now more than ever, reasoned debate needed to hold sway. No cheap points scoring (Except where legitimate ones can be seen, rather than clever argumentative word play) should be seen. All this in a room now filled with cameras, for the whole nation to see the process of government.

I don’t care if you’re in favour of the cuts or not. To cheer and “Here Here” decisions that will put people out of work is simply wrong. It demonstrates beyond doubt a lack of empathy and compassion which should be amongst the first prerequisites for the job of a minister (Closely followed by a skin of concrete and a keen intellect, no doubt!). I was appalled by the behaviour of the government. (With a small hat tip to the front benchers, who did seem to retain some dignity).

On the other side tho, to target decisions taken in good faith, decisions which support the policies and perceived priorities of the elected office and to score cheap syntactic hits, to provide no substantive alternative or critique beyond the bleedin’ obvious is equally wrong. To shout, albeit against the cuts, because you don’t have anything constructive to say, is wrong. To not have a substantial response is wrong. To let things get into this state was equally wrong (Even if it has given us an opportunity). Also, if the CSR is a reckless gamble on the basis of confidence (Which I may tend to agree with, even tho I have no evidence that is the case), it’s hard to see how pointing it out in quite that way can be anything short of equally reckless? Surely quiet critique would be the order of the day, to try and influence policy whilst not treating “Confidence” as tool with which to scare the electorate? Instead of throwing around words like reckless, intended only to feed the electoral machine, chase for details, why this over that, how did you decide. These are the qualitative aspects I expect a well paid mind to chase. Show and document the reckless decision for what it is, instead of parading around.

All my voting life the government of this country has been in an uncontrolled (Or a barely controlled) oscillation between two ideologies which are essentially (To my mind) orthogonal. No doubt there are deep rooted reasons for this (Represented largely by the background and gestalt of the major parties). Because of this, there’s never any compromise on the two axes represented. Each party seems uniquely incapable of providing reasoned coherent and integrated opposition, just as the party in power seems incapable of taking part in reasoned debate.

The voters of this country vote tribally. And we enable appalling behaviour and the bad decisions bred by a system who’s goal is purely short term self preservation, not good decision making across all the dimensions of government. The individuals and ideologies composing government are in a homeostatic relationship with the population of voters, creating a stable system of electioneering which has precious little to do with democracy or good governance.

I am disappointed to be repeatedly presented with pseudo choices (On all fronts) supposed to create the illusion of “Democracy”. “We have no other choice than to deal with the deficit”. At the risk of quoting general meltchett, heres the crowning turd in the water pipe: I have been a supporter of the tobin/robin hood tax for a while. Of all the corners that might have been fought in the opportunity created by this situation, that would have been the one for me. I can see merit to the argument that the deficit must be reduced (And that it shouldn’t have been allowed to get that way in the first place). The leaders responses to the robin hood tax shocks me as much as cheering cuts. In the same way that it’s now OK to agree with an opposition member, “The robin hood tax is a good idea.. But.. Wait for other countries, etc, etc, etc”. If we truly have no choice, then surely the first choice we don’t have involves the substantial reform of banking – even if this needs to be done unilaterally. We have a government for itself (And I include in that the previous administration), not for the people. How else could we not implement the robin hood tax at this time. How could the opposition not drive it as a fundamental opposing point rather than just a bullet on the stage managed bland opposition response.

We badly need to get out of the undecidable propositions foisted on us by this electoral system masquerading as a democratic and political process. Not just for the sake of finances, but for the environment and all our futures.

Sadly, many of the best placed to think us a way out of this seem happy to sit and regurgitate the obvious and mundane. They come up with ever better solutions to already solved easy problems, and duplicate existing analysis of hard problems. Frightningly, they seem to be amongst the worst for becoming entrenched in the very ideological problems that keep us trapped here. Now more than ever we need a metalanguage of governance and serious political reform.

Ultimately, this is all belly-ache I guess. But it raises in me a profound question. How do we know our process of government is any good? When we’re dealing with the uncertainty of the future, what metrics allow us to say this isn’t as good as it should be. Where is the critical reflection, not of the opposition, not of the electoral process, but of the wide process of government itself.

The problem for me is that there’s a whole load of tribal debate going on. This is fuelled by a lack of information. People are arguing ideological positions, filling in the blanks with their own version of what utopia would be. This is good for the electoral process, very very bad for good governance. Lets see the figures. Lets see the financial models being used ON BOTH SIDES. I’m not suggesting radical change here, I am suggesting that our government (As a whole) is woefully poor at explaining to us the problems it faces, it’s decision making process, and it’s reasons for selecting one model, one course of action, one ideology over another. The same is equally, perhaps more, true of opposition. “Here are my projections of this course of action and changing x to y has z affect, why don’t we do that” Now that would be opposition! You don’t get to get away with saying “Well I’d do a better job if I were in power” any more.. Substance both in proposals and opposition! Of course if decisions were made on the basis of evidence rather than ideology, one wonders what would be left to vote for?

I will no longer spend my vote for anyone to sit in the house and shout “Here Here”, it’s not a vote well spent, for anyone. I want more from my vote. I don’t mind hard decisions being taken, but its about time the process got a SHIT LOAD more open and accountable. When we’re right, lets look back and say “We were right”, when we’re wrong, lets look back and try to find out why. Lets drop the ideological debate and all this other nonsense. If you’re going to say something, say it in straightforward documented words, supported and illustrated by models we can run at home. Significant events like this need to be accompanied by high quality information dissemination exercises, not big media campaigns or “Debates”. One might even say “Quality Debate” over “Big Debate”. When I say “Why can’t we do the tobin tax as a part of dealing with the crisis” I want that added to your models, with explanations of the results you anticipate and why you chose or reject that. I expect the opposition to do the same, giving me some substance to prefer one selection over the other.

Perhaps, in better explaining itself to us, our government might better understand itself.

**end rant**

So… Some of the problems we were hoping to be fixed in the patches for the spatial search seemed to still be a problem. Specifically, an item only 10 miles away still cannot not be found until the radius hit 20 miles. Alas, although the JTeam plugin ships with code, it doesn’t ship with a build file, which makes debugging and testing a real pain. We’ve created a pom for playing with the JTeam code, drop us a line if you want a copy.

More interestingly, in the CartesianShapeFilterBuilder we think we’ve spotted something odd…

private Rectangle getBoundary(double x1, double y1, double miles) {
double miplatdeg = DistanceApproximation.getMilesPerLngDeg(x1);
double miplngdeg = DistanceApproximation.getMilesPerLatDeg();

Specifically, “miles /2″ But whats passed in here is already a radius, not a diameter, so it looks to me (And more than willing to admit to being wrong here) as though what already a radius is halved again before coming up with the Cartesian tier filter. This in essence means that the filter will throw away lots of items within your search radius. We’ve removed the / 2 and seem to be seeing much better results.

Feel free to try this out, YMMV!

Over the past few months it’s become apparent that there are some deeply rooted issues with the default solr spatial plugin that I’ve written about in previous posts. Most notably, at different scales (Different radii) search items which were present at a smaller radius disappear when the radius is increased. The confusion is amplified for users because in the first search the distance to an item will be calculated and returned. Since most users rank by distance, the effect of increasing the radius should only ever be to increase the number of search results. However, this issue means that items can actually vanish when increasing the radius. A bit of digging seems to indicate this is a problem switching between tiers.

The SOLR spatial community seems to be experiencing a flurry of activity, but as is always the way with solr, that activity seems to be focussed on the head revision, leaving anyone with deployed systems in the lurch really rather badly (Again). I know I know if it means that much I can fix it myself… But with so much effort going into the head, it seems like patching is wasted effort. Fortunately, the JTeam guys have done the work for us, and back ported some of the current development effort to a solr 1.4 spatial plugin. This posting is really just an Aide-mémoire for myself going through the process of replacing the old solr spatial libraries with the JTeam patch, to see if things are any better there.

First step is to get the jar from JTeam, this is (unfortunately, AFAIK) an email-register-download situation. I really understand JTeams desire to track usage and build up a user base, but I’m really not sure what they are doing is compatible with the letter of the original codes license (And I’m almost certain it’s not compatible with the spirit). Anyway, info about the plugin is here: http://www.jteam.nl/news/spatialsolr.html

Next up, our build process is maven based, so I need to import the jar:


mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=nl.jteam.search.solrext -DartifactId=spatial-solr -Dversion=1.0-RC5 -Dfile=spatial-solr-1.0-RC5.jar -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true


Hats off to the JTeam guys for their documentation and installation notes… Here’s what I’ve done so far:

We build our own solr war from the apache source so we get a chance to pull in any extra plugins. You can see the source for the jteam branch here: http://developer.k-int.com/svn/default/solrwar/1.4.1-jteam-spatial This project simply removes the old localsolr plugin and all it’s dependencies and replaces it with the jteam jar. Specifically, the pom has changed: pom.xml

Next up, configuration changes in solrconfig.xml

I’ve updated the updateRequestProcessorChain which referenced com.pjaol.search.solr.update.LocalUpdateProcessorFactory as it’s processor class and changed the class to nl.jteam.search.solrext.spatial.SpatialTierUpdateProcessorFactory. There is also an additional str parameter _tier_ in this new update processor

The jteam plugin also adds a SpatialTierQueryParser and geodistance searchComponent. These are neatly documented in the pdf that comes with the JTeam download.

Finally, changes to the schema.xml

Add a dynamic field for the _tier_* fields, I’ve left the old _local* fields in, and will note later if it can be safely removed. For now, I’ve left my lat and lon fields as tdouble, even though the JTeam documentation seems different to that..

That represents the sum total of my mornings work… on to testing… more to follow.

Ok, so I missed #rsrc – Rewired State : Rewired Culture Much as I love our capital, there’s only so much london I can handle in one week, and a 5am start on a Saturday was going to be one too many To try and make up for this lack of enthusiasm, I figured I’d work on one of an incubating cultural heritage project : an end-user configurable JDBC -> OAI gateway. Been pushing this along for a while now, and having cleared the weekend for #rsrc, it seemed the right thing to work on.

After a couple of hours hacking on saturday I arrived at a point that needed some test data. What to reuse? I figured I could just throw together my usual collection of cybernetics books and use that. What data model? FRBR is getting some air-time at the moment. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just pick up a JPA definition of the FRBR model and drop it into your project? I thought so.. But a look around didn’t yield anything I could reuse. Since my test data really only needs work/creator at the moment, I’ve created some classes under org.frbr.datamodel, pasted a GNU affero license on it, and whacked it out there in the public domain. Think maybe this needs to live at sourceforge, but I don’t fancy going through the hell of that just for giggles. The sourcecode is here for now: http://developer.k-int.com/svn/default/sandbox/frbr_rel_model (Can be svn checked out from this address too). If this is something of interest, prod me and I’ll get it up on sourceforge and share out the permissions.

This could be something I work on over the coming months depending on interest, or it might just stay as a neat way to store test data for the generic JDBC<->OAI gateway.