O'Really?

September 9, 2014

Punning with the Pub in PubMed: Are there any decent NCBI puns left? #PubMedPuns

PubMedication: do you get your best ideas in the Pub? CC-BY-ND image via trombone65 on Flickr.

Many people claim they get all their best ideas in the pub, but for lots of scientists their best ideas probably come from PubMed.gov – the NCBI’s monster database of biomedical literature. Consequently, the database has spawned a whole slew of tools that riff off the PubMed name, with many puns and portmanteaus (aka “PubManteaus”), and the pub-based wordplays are very common. [1,2]

All of this might make you wonder, are there any decent PubMed puns left? Here’s an incomplete collection:

  • PubCrawler pubcrawler.ie “goes to the library while you go to the pub…” [3,4]
  • PubChase pubchase.com is a “life sciences and medical literature recommendations engine. Search smarter, organize, and discover the articles most important to you.” [5]
  • PubCast scivee.tv/pubcasts allow users to “enliven articles and help drive more views” (to PubMed) [6]
  • PubFig nothing to do with PubMed, but research done on face and image recognition that happens to be indexed by PubMed. [7]
  • PubGet pubget.com is a “comprehensive source for science PDFs, including everything you’d find in Medline.” [8]
  • PubLons publons.com OK, not much to do with PubMed directly but PubLons helps you “you record, showcase, and verify all your peer review activity.”
  • PubMine “supports intelligent knowledge discovery” [9]
  • PubNet pubnet.gersteinlab.org is a “web-based tool that extracts several types of relationships returned by PubMed queries and maps them into networks” aka a publication network graph utility. [10]
  • GastroPub repackages and re-sells ordinary PubMed content disguised as high-end luxury data at a higher premium, similar to a Gastropub.
  • PubQuiz is either the new name for NCBI database search www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery or a quiz where you’re only allowed to use PubMed to answer questions.
  • PubSearch & PubFetch allows users to “store literature, keyword, and gene information in a relational database, index the literature with keywords and gene names, and provide a Web user interface for annotating the genes from experimental data found in the associated literature” [11]
  • PubScience is either “peer-reviewed drinking” courtesy of pubsci.co.uk or an ambitious publishing project tragically axed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). [12,13]
  • PubSub is anything that makes use of the publish–subscribe pattern, such as NCBI feeds. [14]
  • PubLick as far as I can see, hasn’t been used yet, unless you count this @publick on twitter. If anyone was launching a startup, working in the area of “licking” the tastiest data out of PubMed, that could be a great name for their data-mining business. Alternatively, it could be a catchy new nickname for PubMedCentral (PMC) or Europe PubMedCentral (EuropePMC) [15] – names which don’t exactly trip off the tongue. Since PMC is a free digital archive of publicly accessible full-text scholarly articles, PubLick seems like a appropriate moniker.

PubLick Cat got all the PubMed cream. CC-BY image via dizznbonn on flickr.

There’s probably lots more PubMed puns and portmanteaus out there just waiting to be used. Pubby, Pubsy, PubLican, Pubble, Pubbit, Publy, PubSoft, PubSort, PubBrawl, PubMatch, PubGames, PubGuide, PubWisdom, PubTalk, PubChat, PubShare, PubGrub, PubSnacks and PubLunch could all work. If you’ve know of any other decent (or dodgy) PubMed puns, leave them in the comments below and go and build a scientific twitterbot or cool tool using the same name — if you haven’t already.

References

  1. Lu Z. (2011). PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature., Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, http://pubmed.gov/21245076
  2. Hull D., Pettifer S.R. & Kell D.B. (2008). Defrosting the digital library: bibliographic tools for the next generation web., PLOS Computational Biology, PMID: http://pubmed.gov/18974831
  3. Hokamp K. & Wolfe K.H. (2004) PubCrawler: keeping up comfortably with PubMed and GenBank., Nucleic acids research, http://pubmed.gov/15215341
  4. Hokamp K. & Wolfe K. (1999) What’s new in the library? What’s new in GenBank? let PubCrawler tell you., Trends in Genetics, http://pubmed.gov/10529811
  5. Gibney E. (2014). How to tame the flood of literature., Nature, 513 (7516) http://pubmed.gov/25186906
  6. Bourne P. & Chalupa L. (2008). A new approach to scientific dissemination, Materials Today, 11 (6) 48-48. DOI:10.1016/s1369-7021(08)70131-7
  7. Kumar N., Berg A., Belhumeur P.N. & Nayar S. (2011). Describable Visual Attributes for Face Verification and Image Search., IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, http://pubmed.gov/21383395
  8. Featherstone R. & Hersey D. (2010). The quest for full text: an in-depth examination of Pubget for medical searchers., Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 29 (4) 307-319. http://pubmed.gov/21058175
  9. Kim T.K., Wan-Sup Cho, Gun Hwan Ko, Sanghyuk Lee & Bo Kyeng Hou (2011). PubMine: An Ontology-Based Text Mining System for Deducing Relationships among Biological Entities, Interdisciplinary Bio Central, 3 (2) 1-6. DOI:10.4051/ibc.2011.3.2.0007
  10. Douglas S.M., Montelione G.T. & Gerstein M. (2005). PubNet: a flexible system for visualizing literature derived networks., Genome Biology, http://pubmed.gov/16168087
  11. Yoo D., Xu I., Berardini T.Z., Rhee S.Y., Narayanasamy V. & Twigger S. (2006). PubSearch and PubFetch: a simple management system for semiautomated retrieval and annotation of biological information from the literature., Current Protocols in Bioinformatics , http://pubmed.gov/18428773
  12. Seife C. (2002). Electronic publishing. DOE cites competition in killing PubSCIENCE., Science (New York, N.Y.), 297 (5585) 1257-1259. http://pubmed.gov/12193762
  13. Jensen M. (2003). Another loss in the privatisation war: PubScience., Lancet, 361 (9354) 274. http://pubmed.gov/12559859
  14. Dubuque E.M. (2011). Automating academic literature searches with RSS Feeds and Google Reader(™)., Behavior Analysis in Practice, 4 (1) http://pubmed.gov/22532905
  15. McEntyre J.R., Ananiadou S., Andrews S., Black W.J., Boulderstone R., Buttery P., Chaplin D., Chevuru S., Cobley N. & Coleman L.A. & (2010). UKPMC: a full text article resource for the life sciences., Nucleic Acids Research, http://pubmed.gov/21062818

July 29, 2014

A simple and useable classification of software by Aral Balkan via Wuthering Bytes

Three kinds of Software: Enthusiast, Enterprise & Consumer by Aral Balkan

Three kinds of Software: Enthusiast, Enterprise & Consumer by Aral Balkan

It’s getting pretty hard to do anything these days that doesn’t involve software. Our governments, businesses, laboratories, personal lives and entertainment would look very different without the software that makes them tick. How can we classify all this software to make sense of it all? The likes of this huge list of software categories on wikipedia are pretty bewildering, and projects such as the Software Ontology (SWO) [1] are attempting to make sense of swathes of software too. There’s lots of software out there.

Aral Balkan, one of the people behind the Indie Phone, has proposed a simpler classification which will appeal to many people. In his classification, there are three kinds of software (see picture top right), as follows:

  1. Enthusiast software: like a classic car. We tinker with enthusiast software, in the same way motoring enthusiasts tinker with their classic cars. To the enthusiast, it is a joy when the software breaks, because that’s part of the fun, fixing it and getting it back on the road. However, you wouldn’t drive your classic car during your day job, or commute to work. Like a classic car, enthusiast software, is largely for weekends and evenings only. Raspberry Pi software is a classic example of enthusiast software made in garages by hobbyists.
  2. Enterprise software: like a juggernaut truck. We use enterprise software, because our employers mandate that we do so. It might not be fun to drive, or work particularly quickly, but enterprise software is often a necessary evil to get work done on an industrial scale. Cynics will tell you enterprisey software is slow because the engineers have:

    “…added a delay of 3 seconds to every action and now users are feeling it’s enterprisey”.

    Cynics will also tell you, enterprise software has been made by architecture astronauts, purchased by clueless decision-makers who don’t have actually have to use the software themselves, but have been hoodwinked in notorious“vendor meetings” which could explain the unpopularity of some enterprise software. But that’s another story…

  3. Consumer software: like a family saloon car. We rely on consumer software to get the job done, it is purely functional, does the job in a reliable (and boring) way on a daily basis, just like the vehicle you commute in. Consumer software can be found on your mobile phone and most consumer software is Application Software aka “Apps”.

I came across Aral’s classification at Wuthering Bytes last summer, a small and friendly festival of technology in the Pennines. Wuthering Bytes is running again next month, August 15th -17th and is well worth attending if you’re in the North of England and fancy having your bytes wuthered [2]. It’s a great mix of talks by the likes of Sophie Wilson and many others combined with hands-on activities in beautiful Happy-Hippy-Hacky Hebden Bridge for a bargain £10 per day. It’s software (and hardware) for enthusiasts (not enterprises or consumers). What’s not to like?

References

  1. Malone, J., Brown, A., Lister, A., Ison, J., Hull, D., Parkinson, H., & Stevens, R. (2014). The Software Ontology (SWO): a resource for reproducibility in biomedical data analysis, curation and digital preservation Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 5 (1) DOI: 10.1186/2041-1480-5-25
  2. Brontë, Emily (1847) Wuthering Heights

August 7, 2013

A sweet taste of beekeeping with @Grow4ItChorlton in Chorlton-cum-Honey

busy bee

Mosaic of a busy mancunian bee in Manchester Town Hall

Down in deepest, darkest Chorlton-cum-Hardy [1] the good people of Grow for it Chorlton have been running a series of taster sessions on beekeeping (a.k.a. apiculture). Here are some notes from one of these sessions held last weekend and some info on where to find out more if you’re interested.

Bee Science

With the ongoing mystery about the decline of bee populations [2,3] and controversial pesticide bans [4], there’s been a surge of interest in bees and beekeeping. If you’re thinking about starting a hive, here’s some things you’ll need to consider:

  • Beekeeping can be very rewarding. Remind yourself how fascinating the biology of bees is: dronesworkers, queens and swarms – you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
  • It’s a real buzz breaking the propolis seal on a hive full of ~60,000 bees and having a look inside, you can’t beat hands-on experience – handling bees was the highlight of the taster session.
  • Apiculture  takes lots of time, in peak season you’ll need to be inspecting hives at least once a week for any potential problems, such as the emergence of new queen cells or pests & diseases like Nosema and Varroa mites.
  • Beekeeping can be a substantial financial commitment too, depending on how resourceful you are. There’s a lot of kit you need, see thorne.co.ukbees-online.co.uk or beekeeping.co.uk for some examples of what you can buy and how much it costs.
  • One of the biggest threats to bees is irresponsible bee-keepers! If bees aren’t looked after hygienically, diseases can be spread to the  larger population. You don’t need a license (yet) to keep bees, but it’s a good idea to register hive(s) with DEFRA’s BeeBase (not to be confused with BeeBase.org) [5].

For such a tiny insect with even smaller brain, bees are surprisingly good at maths and computation. For example, bees use sophisticated vectors [6] to tell members of the hive where the food is during their famous waggle dance. Also, honeycomb is hexagonal because this is the shape that makes optimal use of beeswax – covering the maximum area using a minimum of material.

If you’re interested getting your hands on some bees in South Manchester, contact Loucas Athienites, Nancy Green or Erica Gardner at Nam-Bee-Pam-Bee Beekeepers, Chorlton based at Grow for It, Chorlton – their next (most excellent!) beekeeping session is due to run in late August 2013. Manchester & District Beekeepers Assocation (MDBKA), part of the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), run a longer two-day course at Heaton Park (and elsewhere) which is essential if you going to take things further. [7]

References

  1. Yes, as you might expect, Chorlton-cum-Hardy suffers from the Scunthorpe problem
  2. Bill Turnbull et al (2013) What’s Killing Our Bees? A BBC Horizon Special featuring Rothamsted and BBSRC
  3. Charlotte Stoddart (2012). The buzz about pesticides: Common pesticides affect bumblebee foraging Nature DOI:10.1038/nature.2012.11626
  4. Daniel Cressey (2013). Europe debates risk to bees: Proposed pesticide ban gathers scientific support as some experts call for more field studies Nature DOI: 10.1038/496408a
  5. Munoz-Torres MC, Reese JT, Childers CP, Bennett AK, Sundaram JP, Childs KL, Anzola JM, Milshina N, & Elsik CG (2011). Hymenoptera Genome Database: integrated community resources for insect species of the order Hymenoptera. Nucleic Acids Research, 39 (Database issue) PMID: 21071397
  6. Rossel S, & Wehner R (1982). The bee’s map of the e-vector pattern in the sky. PNAS, 79 (14), 4451-5 PMID: 16593211
  7. Ted Hooper (2010) Guide to Bees & Honey (updated): The World’s Best Selling Guide to Beekeeping Northern Bee Books, ISBN:1904846513

July 3, 2013

Manchester Digital and Higher Education in 2013

xkcd good code

Writing good code is often harder than it looks via Randall Munroe at xkcd.com

Manchester Digital is the independent trade association for the thriving digital sector in the North West of England. Last night they held their AGM and elections for new members of their council. I was encouraged to stand for election, and alongside 19 other candidates, had to give a two-minute  “manifesto” in a hustinglightning-talk format. Here’s roughly what I said, from the perspective of software, hardware and developers, with some added links and a bit more polish:

The success of Manchester’s Digital economy is dependent on educating, recruiting and training a pool of talented developers to work in the region. As identified in the Manchester Digital skills audit, developers are often the hardest roles to fill, as many graduates and potential employees are drawn to other high-tech hubs like London, Silicon Fen and Silicon Valley, California for employment.

Addressing this issue is an important for Manchester Digital and requires closer collaboration between Higher education, Secondary education and employers. As a tutor at the University of Manchester, with responsibility for managing internships for students in Computer Science I am in a strong position to enable more collaboration between educators and employers. As a council member I would do this in four ways:

  1. Encouraging students to consider employment in Manchester as their first job, by promoting internships and graduate vacancies with local organisations alongside traditional graduate programmes at larger multinational companies
  2. Listening to what employers in Manchester want so that students can be better prepared for the workplace, while balancing the competing needs of training and education.
  3. Challenging local employers to raise their game to compete with larger employers and attract graduates to work for their organisations
  4. Inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers by extending current work with schools and supporting undergraduate students doing outreach work involving Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). For example: through the STEMnet ambassador programme, Code Club, Animation FestivalTeenTech and related work.

These are key activities that will enable the continued success of Manchester’s Digital Economy and I ask Manchester Digital members to vote for me if they agree. Thank you!

Whatever the outcome, the AGM & hustings were great fun and it was good to catchup with old friends and meet some new people too. Hope to see some of you again the Manchester Digital BBQ on 11th July…

July 1, 2013

New music? No thanks, we’re stuck in the fifties / sixties / seventies / eighties / nineties / noughties

John Peel comtemplating Drum & Bass by bhikku

John Peel comtemplating Drum & Bass via bhikku on Flickr.

If you’ve filled your boots with the wall-to-wall glastonbury festival coverage, you might find it curious that many people have little or no interest in new music, choosing instead to listen to the artists they liked in their formative years and loyally sticking with them for life. John Peel put it another way:

People do find it curious that a chap of my age* likes the things that I like but I do honestly feel that it’s one of those situations where everyone’s out of step except our John, because in any other area of human activity – theatre, literature or something like that, you’re not supposed to live eternally in the past, you know, you’re supposed to take an interest in what’s happening now and what’s going happening next and this really all that I do, it seems to be a perfectly normal and natural thing to do.

*John Peel was a spritely 50 years of age at the time of the interview where he said that in 1990 [1]. Isn’t it curious that, as Peel said, new music is largely considered to be the exclusive domain of “younger people”, while new theatre, new technology, new art, new science and new anything-else is not? Wonder why that is?

References

  1. Desert Island Discs Archive, Find a castaway (1940 – date)

June 18, 2013

Peter Suber’s Open Access book is now freely available under an open-access license

Peter Suber's Open Access book

Open Access by Peter Suber is now open access

If you never got around to buying Peter Suber’s book about Open Access (OA) publishing [1] “for busy people”, you might be pleased to learn that it’s now freely available under an open-access license.

One year after being published in dead-tree format, you can now get the whole digital book for free. There’s not much point writing yet another review of it [1], see Peter’s extensive collection of reviews at cyber.law.harvard.edu. The book succinctly covers:

  1. What Is Open Access? (and what it is not)
  2. Motivation: OA as solving problems and seizing opportunities
  3. Varieties: Green and Gold, Gratis versus libre 
  4. Policies: Funding mandates (NIH, Wellcome Trust etc)
  5. Scope: Pre-prints and post-prints
  6. Copyright: … or Copyfight?
  7. Economics: Who pays the bills? Publication fees, toll-access paywalls and “author pays”
  8. Casualties: “OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt”
  9. Future: Where next?
  10. Self-Help: DIY publishing

Open Access for MACHINES!

A lot of the (often heated) debate about Open Access misses an important point about open access being for machines as well as humans, or as Suber puts in Chapter 5 on Scope:

We also want access for machines. I don’t mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. We’re well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines don’t have access, then we don’t have access. Moreover, if we can’t get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing.

Think about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which you’d have practical access if you couldn’t use search engines, or if search engines couldn’t index the literature you needed.

Information overload didn’t start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, what’s new, what’s relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldn’t cope with information overload. Or we’d have to redefine “coping” as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve.

It’s refreshing to see someone making these points that are often ignored, forgotten or missed out of the public debate about Open Access. The book is available in various digital flavours including:

References

  1. Suber, Peter. Open Access (MIT Press Essential Knowledge, The MIT Press, 2012). ISBN:0262517639
  2. Clair, Kevin. (2013). Kevin Michael Clair reviews Open Access by Peter Suber The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39 (1) DOI: 10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.017

May 14, 2013

Measuring scientific coverage of @Wikipedia: Fellows of the Wiki Society index 2013

In 2013, 44% of newly elected Fellows of the Royal Society had biography pages on wikipedia.

Earlier this month confusingly-named “Royal Society” announced their new fellows for 2013. The society is made up of (quote):

“…the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.”

A quick-and-dirty measure of the scientific coverage of wikipedia is the percentage of these fellows that have a profile on wikipedia at the time of their election to the prestigious Society.  Let’s call it the Fellows of the Wiki Society index (FWSi),  a good score of 100% indicates that wikipedia has excellent coverage of science while 0% indicates the opposite. Last year, that index was 40% because 21 out of 52 fellows were also Fellows of the Wiki Society.

This year the index is slightly better at 44%, with 24 out of 54 fellows having a wiki-biography, see  [1-54]. So as well as more women this year, there’s more wikipedia too, although the difference isn’t particularly big.

If you’d like to improve the content of wikipedia because there’s plenty of good reasons for doing so, why not take a look at the guidelines for biographies of living persons and create or improve a page for one of the people below?

References

  1. Harry Anderson
  2. Judith Armitage
  3. Keith Ball
  4. Michael Bevan
  5. Mervyn Bibb
  6. Stephen R Bloom
  7. Gilles Brassard
  8. Michael Burrows
  9. Jon Crowcroft
  10. Ara Darzi
  11. William Earnshaw
  12. Gerard F Gilmore
  13. Nigel Glover
  14. Raymond E Goldstein
  15. Melvyn Goodale
  16. Martin Green
  17. Gillian Griffiths
  18. Joanna Haigh
  19. Phillip Hawkins
  20. Edith Heard
  21. Gideon Henderson
  22. Guy Lloyd-Jones
  23. Stephen P Long
  24. Nicholas Lydon
  25. Anne Mills
  26. Paul O’Brien
  27. William Richardson
  28. Gareth Roberts
  29. Ronald Rowe
  30. John Savill
  31. Christopher Schofield
  32. Paul M Sharp
  33. Stephen Simpson
  34. Terence Speed
  35. Maria Grazia Spillantini
  36. Douglas W Stephan
  37. Brigitta Stockinger
  38. Alan Turnbull
  39. Jean-Paul Vincent
  40. Andrew Wilkie
  41. Sophie Wilson
  42. Terry Wyatt
  43. Julia Yeomans
  44. Robert Young
  45. Margaret Buckingham
  46. Zhu Chen
  47. John Hutchinson
  48. Eric Kandel
  49. Elliott Lieb
  50. Kyriacos Nicolaou
  51. Randy Schekman
  52. Eli Yablonovitch
  53. Andrew The Duke of York (eh?)
  54. Bill Bryson

April 19, 2013

Will Academic Education ever meet the skills needs of the IT Profession? #BCSDebate

“This house believes that Academic Education will never meet the skills needs of the IT Profession” via #BCSDebate

“This house believes that Academic Education will never meet the skills needs of the IT Profession” via #BCSDebate

Here’s an interesting upcoming event: a debate on the motion: “This house believes that Academic Education will never meet the skills needs of the IT profession

Universities are failing to educate graduates with the skills we need – this is the oft heard complaint by employers of IT graduates. Does the problem start in school with the dire state of ICT teaching and assessment at GCSE and A Level? [1] Should academia be trying to produce graduates with only ‘employable skills’ that have a shelf life of at best a couple of years? Are employers really expecting universities to produce a mature, rounded professional with 20 years experience straight out of university? Is it reasonable to expect Academia to bridge the skills gap when employers are not prepared to provide a robust career path for IT professionals?

Academia and the IT Profession seem to be out of alignment in a way that other more mature professional career paths are not. Medicine, law, accountancy and the teaching profession provide a clear path from university to the highest levels of those careers – not so in IT. The IT Profession’s skills framework (SFIA) is only a decade old, and IT is neither a regulated or statutory profession – perhaps employers ask and expect too much of Academia, when the IT Profession is still in its infancy.”

This deliberately provocative motion conflates Education with Training as well spreading further confusion about the important differences between Computer Science and Information Technology. There’s already been some debate, including this early response from Ian Sommerville at the University of St Andrews:

“Computing systems are now ubiquitous in all areas of our professional and personal lives – which means that are incredibly diverse from personal apps for your phone to remind you to exercise to safety-critical, world-wide air traffic management systems. The notion that there is a single body of practical skills that is applicable to all of these different types of system is ludicrous as is the expectation that university courses should attempt to cover all aspects of computing practice.”

That’s a view from academia, no doubt employers will probably have a different take on the motion. David Evans and Deborah Trayhurn will be supporting the motion, with opposition from Bill Mitchell and Kevin Jones. Whatever your opinion, the debate takes place on Wednesday 12th June 2013 from 6.30pm – 9.00pm at the Armourers’ Hall, 81 Coleman Street, London, EC2R 5BJ. You can book a place at events.bcs.org/book/577, more info on twitter at #BCSDebate.

March 15, 2013

Creating with the Raspberry Pi vs. Consuming Apple Pie at the Manchester Raspberry Jamboree

MiniGirlGeek

Thirteen year old Amy Mather aka @MiniGirlGeek steals the show at Manchester Raspberry Jam 2013

Last Saturday, the first ever Raspberry Jamboree rolled into town, organised by the unstoppable force of nature that is Alan O’Donohoe (aka @teknoteacher). The jamboree looked at the educational value of the Raspberry Pi (a $25 computer) one year on from its launch on the the 29th February 2012. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the things that happened in the main room, aka ‘Jamboree Central’. The workshops and other events have been covered by Jason Barnett @boeeerb.

A key feature of the Raspberry Pi foundation (and the Jamboree) was neatly summed up by Paul Beech (aka @guru) who compared the Raspberry Pi to various Apple iThings. Paul’s view is that when it comes to computing, Apple gives you a “sandy beach, sunbed and cocktail” to passively consume digital content with while the Raspberry Pi gives you a “desert, knife and a bottle” to actively create new things (see his tweet below).

Consuming Apple Pie on a sandy beach, with a sunbed and a cocktail

Engineering evangelist Rob Bishop used Apple Inc. to illustrate what the Raspberry Pi is about in his talk ‘one year on‘. Rob pointed out that a huge amount of effort at Apple Inc. is put into making Computing invisible and seamless. This is great if you’re consuming content on your iPad or iPhone, and what many users want – easy to use, with all the nasty internal gubbins tucked away, out of sight. This is tasty Californian Apple Pie, which many of consume in large amounts.

However, invisible computing is a problem for education, because it is difficult to demonstrate the Wonders of Computer Science (Brian Cox’s next TV series) with a device like the iPad.  Many of the internals of modern devices are completely inaccessible, and it’s non-trivial for budding young engineers to build anything very interesting with it particularly quickly.

In contrast, the Raspberry Pi can be challenging to setup, just getting the Operating System up and running isn’t always straightforward. However, there’s a ton of interesting stuff you can build with it: Nifty robotics, bionic bird boxes, musical hackery, twittering chickens, live train departure boards, internet radiossinging jelly babies and loads of other pideas. Try doing that with your iPad…

Creating with Raspberry Pi in the desert, using a knife and a bottle

Most of the jamboree focussed not on Apple but on the things that can be created with Raspberry Pi: the What and Why and When And How and Where and Who with keynotes from Steve Furber [1] and talks and panel sessions from:

A highlight of the jamboree was the closing keynote given by the thirteen year old Mini Girl Geek on what she’s been doing with her Raspberry Pi. MiniGirlGeek (aka Amy Mather pictured above) stole the show with her demo implementations of Conway’s Game of Life in Python. [update: see video below]

What’s interesting is that Conway’s Game of Life is used as an exercise for first year undergraduates in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. So it’s great to see teenagers mastering the “knife” of Raspberry Pi, and reminds us that Raspberry Pi is no “sunbed and cocktail” but with a little patience, ambition and talent there’s plenty to capture the imagination of young people about Computing.

References

  1. Steve Furber et al (2012). Computing in Schools: Shut down or restart? Royal Society Report

February 18, 2013

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description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for December 2014
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