Month: September 2016

The High Street Centre – Update on progress

Now a couple of days into my final week, I can start to reflect on my time here at The High Street Centre. Since my last post, I’ve completed 2 funding bids, totaling over £13,000, almost finished my program, and continued to help out wherever I’m needed.

The bids are for the funding of a holiday club for children with additional needs, and during my time here I’ve supported after school sessions on a Monday for the same young people, which has been really rewarding. Seeing how much they enjoy the couple of hours every week, and imagining the difference it must make to both them, and their family (in terms of respite) has emphasised for me how the funding I’ve applied for, and the program I’ve produced, can make real differences.

The actual process of forming the applications for grants; the long, ‘wordy’ questions, scrutiny over grammar and generally unquantitative nature was more complicated than I initially thought. However, as with most tasks, once I actually start and get into something, I can apply myself and complete it without too much difficulty. I learnt lots throughout, one noticeable factor of the process being backing up with comparative quotes everything you ask for: although tedious, this is obviously necessary on their part, and morally a charity probably shouldn’t be applying for more than it needs.

I’ve also continued to work with the over 55s IT class and have received some great feedback from several of the attendees: it’s been great to see how things that I see as simple on a laptop or tablet, such as transferring photos can open up so many opportunities once taught, such as being able to share family photos across the world. As a result of this, I am looking into becoming a home tutor alongside my studies.

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I look forward to my last few days of my internship and hope to complete my program to a standard I’m happy with, and then tutor the team on how to use it.

#3: The History of the Future of Automation

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Source: Nesta

Hey, I was one of those ‘100 radical speakers’! Or maybe they added an extra slot for me and I was speaker 101. Either way, speaking at FutureFest was a pretty memorable experience.

On both days of the weekend-long festival I spoke about ‘the history of the future of automation’, and both audiences seemed to enjoy themselves. Actually, one of my supervisors put it best when she came over to chat with me after my Saturday talk:b3-futurefest-1

Supervisor: “So how do you think the talk went?”
Me: “Okay, I guess. I forgot to break the seal on my bottle of water before I went on stage so there was a weird pause where I finally had to say to the crowd, ‘Oops, this is an awkward pause.’ And then I think I wore my microphone too high cuz my beard kept rubbing against it which made a weird swishing sound…”
Supervisor: “Stop. If you’re concerned about minutiae after a talk, that’s when you know it went pretty well.”
Me: “Oh… great point!”

Truth be told, I cheated a little bit with the talk. Rather than try to talk for twenty minutes (who wants to listen to that?), I included 5 clips from various films and documentaries from the past century. The clips illustrated points that I was discussing in my talk, but for the most part I included them because I thought they were funny.

— — —

In the run up to the festival I was asked to co-write an article for the Guardian with one of the supervisors of my project. The article argued that as the use of artificial intelligence grows, we will need to find ways to acknowledge and tackle people’s concerns about AI in order to help build public trust in the technology. When I opened the Guardian app on my phone I have to admit I was slightly bemused by the choice of image. HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Really?! I’ve had a think, and I haven’t been able to come up with a more clichéd image to represent artificial intelligence. One of those skinless Terminators from Terminator 2: Judgment Day might have been a close second. All things considered, though, I guess I should be happy they didn’t go with a screengrab from Johnny Depp’s abysmal AI film, Transcendence. (Disclaimer for Johnny and the Guardian: All in good fun.)

— — —

I am extremely grateful for my time at Nesta and wish them success with their future projects. I’ll miss the free (nasty) coffee, the free fruit on Mondays and Wednesdays, and the free pencils (at least I think they were free). But most of all I’ll miss the people.

Wow, that was cheesy.

#2: Microfilms and Memories

What a strange, circuitous, six-decade trip that must have been! I recently spent some time in the BBC’s archives tracking down the script of a radio programme about the effect of industrial automation on employment – the topic of my research for Nesta – and I was struck by the long journey the script had to go through before it could become a word document on my laptop.

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My setup at the BBC archives

In this age of instant access to information and the [Ctrl + F] search function ([Command + F] for you mac people), it can be easy to forget that tracking down information was not always this easy. Which is why my time in the BBC archives left such an impression on me. For the aforementioned script to make it all the way from 1956 to my computer in the year 2016, the data went through a dozen different forms: What started out as a handwritten script became a type-written script; became a carbon copy of a type-written script; became a photograph of a carbon copy; became a microfilm image of a photograph. The microfilm then sat in various filing cabinets for sixty years until, at last, in August 2016 it became a projection of a microfilm image onto the screen of a microfilm reader; became a photograph of the screen of a microfilm reader; became a photograph on the memory stick of a DSLR; became a JPG on my computer; became a PDF; became a simple text analysis by an Optical Character Recognition programme; and, finally, became a word file on my computer. Considering the iterations the script went through on its way to my computer, it is hard to believe that the OCR was able to recognise anything!

b2-microfilm-smudge-2I also find it hard to believe that so much of the BBC’s historical records exist in forms of memory such as this – especially considering that microfilm has long since surrendered the mantle of ‘Best Way to Store Data’. According to one of the archivists who helped me operate the microfilm readers, few companies manufacture parts for the clunky, aged machines, so there is little the archivists can do when one breaks down. Even worse, the machines are also starting to damage the microfilms themselves. As I was sitting at the microfilm reader I came across a two-page section that I really liked. When I rewound the film to read the passage again, however, I found that the microfilm reader had left a gouge on the film itself. b2-microfilm-smudge-1The words that had waited six decades to be rediscovered – and had existed only seconds before – were now lost to history. It was a sad moment.

One can only hope the BBC sees fit to digitise its archives before more information is lost. Perhaps they could even build a machine that would automate the process. Though, were that to happen, I suppose I might be out of a job.

#1: Best Summer Since ’98?

During the summer of 1998 I visited Disneyland, built a zip-line, and got a new bike. It was the best summer of my life. And then I went to work for Nesta. I’ll leave it to my older self to sort out which summer was better, but working for an innovation charity was pretty darn great.

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Source: Nesta

Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to, as they put it, “help people and organisations bring great ideas to life.” I was stationed in the Futures team with a bunch of ‘futurologists’ working on projects related to education policy, the ethical implications of big data and machine-learning, ‘playable cities’, and innovation in the media. (A word to the wise: never call a ‘futurologist’ a futurologist to his or her face. They hate it.) My own research at Nesta was meant to look at the conversations that have surrounded automation over the past century and deliver a talk on my findings at Nesta’s semi-annual festival, FutureFest. Futurologists mingling with historians? These are strange times, indeed.

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Source: Nesta

My main question heading into this placement was how well historical research would be able to inform Nesta’s more future-focused research. Even if I was able to identify a historical trend I would not necessarily be able to say whether that trend would continue in the future. However, in my first week at Nesta I came to view my role not as attempting to predict what will happen over the next decade, but as challenging my audience at FutureFest to question their own assumptions about what they believe will happen over those years. As my first blog for Nesta showed, many generations have convinced themselves that they are unique – that they are experiencing unprecedented and rapid changes relative to the changes experienced by the generations that came before. My work has focused on drawing people’s attention to this recurrent belief and challenging them to think critically about why they believe they are the exception to this rule.

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It was a nice change of pace to work as part of a team again and to work toward a common goal. Writing a humanities thesis can be quite lonely, isolated work. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it (who wouldn’t enjoy sitting at home in your pants – the British kind – writing for 10-12 hours a day?) but there was also something really great about having colleagues to bounce ideas off of, plan projects with, and receive guidance from. Nesta is definitely the kind/type of organisation I could see myself working for somewhere down the road. I get the sense that Nesta researchers are able to delve deeply into a research area for six months to a year, then delve into another related but different area after that. A research career that moved from interesting project to interesting project definitely appeals to me.

Plus, there were two burrito places and three artisan coffee shops near the Nesta office. For a Californian like me, that’s damned near Nirvana.

Weeks 2 and 3 at the K&C Foundation

Having gained a strong understanding of how the foundation engages with a business, I was ready to visit a significant number of small businesses in the borough and convince them of the importance of closing the gap between the rich and the poor. The main focus thus far had been towards larger, established businesses in the borough.

My networking skills proved key in convincing managers, supervisors and owners of these businesses that we weren’t just another charity in need of donations. In order to do this, I needed to demonstrate a level of confidence that they simply couldn’t ignore. One of the ways I used to describe the K&C Foundation was by calling ourselves an “umbrella charity” that helped a number of smaller, lesser known charities in the borough. During weeks 2 and 3, I experimented by using different ways to describe the Foundation and chose the ones that were well received.  The areas I visited to approach small businesses  include Sloane Street, King’s Road, Kensington Church Street and many more. On my daily visits to these areas, I discovered that large chain stores were unlikely to respond positively to our cause as they had head offices based out of the borough. As a result, I adjusted my strategy and approached businesses selectively so that time would not be spent unnecessarily. When visiting the small businesses, I carried a set of flyers, leaflets (of campaigns) and business cards in order for them to know more about us and contact the office directly if they wished to do so.

In addition to my outdoor visits, I needed to add the contact details and other relevant information to the office database at the end of each day. This would allow the team to easily contact the relevant person and keep them informed of our work via phone or email long after my time at the Foundation had ended. Doing so proved somewhat tricky as my colleagues were already occupied with work of their own. I then decided to create a business follow-up document that would be used to suggest next steps and the progress for each business. It meant more work due to the fact that at least twenty businesses were visited each day and had to be added to both the database and the business follow-up document. Another task that I undertook in the last two weeks was making twenty-something follow-up calls to larger businesses already contacted months ago but hadn’t responded yet. These were added to the business follow-up document too. However, at the end of each day, I felt really good about myself because I had done the very best I could do!

All Rise (3)

The last two weeks of my internship went too quickly for my liking. I wanted to put all my research together in a decent report for Anna and Tom, and I wanted to enjoy being at the RCJ until I could. I really liked the office life, working intensively 9 till 5 or 6 and to then have the evening free. The first few days of my internship I actually tried going to university to do some more work afterwards, but I was, in the end, too mentally exhausted from the new and fascinating legal world to get actively back into the cerebellar one. I made a mental note to try and apply the same working hours once back at university. But I know that experiments don’t like a 9 till 5 schedule. Still, there’s hope this internship taught me something about getting things done efficiently and quickly.

Both Anna and Tom suggested I went into a courtroom during an actual trial. So, on Tuesday I went into the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal. Every day the public can come and sit in a courtroom, you only need to check the daily cases https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/court-lists/list-cause-rcj.

Now, I had many ideas of what the barrister and judges would look like during a trial, thanks to my experience at the students mock trials, but as I happened to choose appeal cases, it was all a little different. At appeal cases at the criminal court there are three judges, all wigged and robed up. As the case has already been sentenced, there is only the barrister for the appellant, all alone in front of the three judges. On the day I went there were 5 cases presented to the Court of Appeal.
Several things impressed me that morning. First, the soft tone that the barristers used to address the judges. Polite and firm, but with a touch of pleading. After all, they were arguing the reduction of a criminal sentence. Second, the ability of the judges to listen to the appeal, sum up the case, and wrap everything up quickly, in well-structured, logical sentences. It did not seem easy, the job of a judge. Third, the age of the second defendant, who appeared via videolink. He was in his early twenties, maybe younger than me. After the judges argued their point, announcing a reduction to the sentence, this young man brought his hands to his face and muttered a ‘thank you’, his voice seemingly broken by sobs. But what really impressed me was the final hearing. This man was being heard to apply for an appeal on his sentence. The surprising thing was that this applicant had no barrister. Just an average man, in his forties, standing there by himself, trying to argue his point. His appeal application was refused and the judges left the room as everyone else rose.

I got slightly glued onto my chair the last week, so Anna asked me to please go out and get some fresh air. I had been re-reading a lot of resources by that time, and I did feel like my eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. So I followed Anna’s suggestion I went for a stroll around the RCJ. Towards the end of summer, the building is almost empty. There are only a handful of trials and appeal cases going on. I started walking onto the stone floor, looking at the paintings of haughty-looking judges and expressionless marble busts on the side of the long corridors, where the ceilings are high and the windows are made of opaque glass criss-crossed with iron. I could swear I had been following signs to somewhere, but after 15 minutes of solid pacing, would you believe it, I found myself at the starting point. Frustrated at my ridiculous sense of orientation, I went back to the office. Anna was not surprised at my getting lost inside the RCJ. It is, apparently, very common. I imagined people disappearing for weeks, only to be found starving and mad one random day, begging for water and swearing their innocence. Thankfully, I knew where the office was.

My week was over and I frantically wrote up a few reports with my findings, as well as leaving all my notes typed and resources found in well organized folders. Anna and Tom got me a beautiful cake and some gorgeous flowers. On the last Friday Tom went over my reports, saying he was happy with my work there. Together with Lizzie, a new lovely addition to the London NCCL team, we went to have a farewell drink.

I was honestly sad to leave NCCL. The dreaded final year of my PhD awaited me. But, overall, this experience had been empowering. It proved to my neuroscience-tired brain that there are so many more interesting things out there to be learned and experienced. And that I have the skills and willpower to finish my PhD and go out there and conquer the world [insert evil laugh here]. No, seriously, it was great. If I could, I would do it all over again. And this time, I wouldn’t get lost. Probably.

My last two weeks with OneZoom

Phew! These two weeks have been busy. After the difficulties getting the current codebase running on my machine, the last weeks have been much more productive! Here’s a little look at what I’ve been up to.

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Demonstrating tree approaches to viewing big data

Science Museum Lates

On the 31st August, I was lucky enough to be offered the chance to be a collaborator in the Science Museum Lates with the rest of the OneZoom team. Our stall was called ‘Big Data and the Family’, and showed how using fractal trees can improve viewing big data. We had two different trees to demonstrate, ranging from a genealogy viewer called ZoomPast (our close family, other humans) to OneZoom’s full evolutionary tree of life (our distant family, the one I’ve been working on). The opportunity to get excited about science to people who were genuinely interested was a wonderful experience, and I’m very much looking forward to participating in further outreach of this kind.

Web development in Oxford

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Programming in a flat by the river in Oxford

Last Monday, I caught the train down to Oxford to work with James and Yan (two of the OneZoom developers) in person for a few days. Before this, I had only been working on the codebase alone, and, although I had met both James and Yan before, working with them closely and getting to know them better was great. I was also able to vastly increase my familiarity with the codebase, and troubleshooting problems that required a detailed knowledge of the architecture of the application became much simpler. I also enjoyed the chance to explore Oxford a little, and experience the bustle and clamour of St. Giles’ Fair. Despite the heat, my knowledge and skills benefited hugely from the group programming environment, and it was sad to be heading back to London after only three days.

Working on a major mobile improvement

picture1After returning from Oxford with new vigour and confidence, I felt prepared to really get stuck into the main project of my placement. Currently, although the tree is certainly usable on mobile devices, some older phones and tablets suffer from lagging problems that make the tree frustrating to use. I am now working on an improvement for mobile devices that will allow users to pan and zoom the tree more easily, only redrawing the full canvas when they take their finger off the screen. This should hopefully provide a large performance improvement, and really make OneZoom a truly mobile app. So far, I have made progress that allows the improvement to be used for panning (albeit with a few bugs that affect usability) and will be moving onto making it work for zooming too; once the bugs are fixed!

 

Final week at The Brilliant Club

Final week at the Brilliant Club: Interview with David Jones

My final post is an interview with David Jones, the Teaching and Learning Manager of The Scholars Programme. David’s first job after university was for a charity which runs low cost Saturday schools. He then trained to be a teacher and taught in a primary school in South London. David left the classroom with the intention of working for an educational organisation which turned out to be The Brilliant Club.

 

How did the Scholars Programme come about and how is it run? 

The Scholars Programme came about from the work of two teachers – Jonathan Sobczyk and Simon Coyle who participated in the Teach First training programme. They spotted that within the classes they taught, there were pupils capable of going to highly selective universities, but weren’t doing so. The charity’s overall mission is to mobilise the PhD researcher community to tackle the issue of fair access to highly selective universities. The charity now runs two programmes – Researchers in Schools which is a teacher training route for PhD graduates and The Scholars Programme. Through The Scholars Programme, we recruit, train and place PhD researches in non-selective state schools to deliver university style tutorials.

 

What are the biggest challenges of running the programme? 

The biggest challenges tend to be around the logistics, such as matching up the availability of tutors and schools. For the pupils, the programme is a challenging experience as the work they are required to complete is pitched at a key stage above one they are currently in, and pupils are also required to produce an extended final assignment. Running the programme in areas rural and coastal areas is a bigger challenge, as the distances that people have to travel to get to the schools becomes much greater.

 

What direction is The Scholars Programme heading in?

We are excited to expand the programme to Wales – we now work across the whole of England which we are very proud of, as it is not just an urban programme. We worked with over 8500 pupils last year and we are setting ourselves the challenge of taking in a bigger cohort of students.

 

Do you monitor the destinations of students who participated in the programme?

Historically, this isn’t something we’ve been able to do in a systematic way. We know pupils who have completed the programme and gone on to study at highly selective universities such as Oxbridge and LSE. However, this is an area that we are currently trying to improve through the newly formed Monitoring and Evaluation department. One of the tools we are going to use is the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) which is going to be available to third sector organisations in 2017. HEAT is a national database that universities currently use to track all their outreach activities. This will allow us to see the destinations of the pupils that we work with in a more systematic way. The tracker will also allow us to investigate the effectiveness of sustained interventions over time.

 

Why is charity work appealing to you?

I don’t think it’s right that the school you go to, or the background that you are from should limit or advantage your opportunities. The statistics clearly show that people who have been to independent schools are overrepresented at highly selective universities and in a number of professions. I am motivated by ensuring that all pupils have the same opportunities and succeed on the basis of their ability, determination and their choices.

The best part of the job is going to the graduations to see pupils that completed the programme; hearing them talk about what they learnt, challenges they overcame and seeing how proud their parents are of them.

Final words

img_1617It was an absolute pleasure to work at The Brilliant Club for 4 weeks. It was inspiring to see the hard work that goes into running social mobility programmes and it is an area I am considering as a potential career. I would like to thank The Brilliant Club and the Charity Insights Programme for this fantastic opportunity, which enabled me to develop a wide range of transferable skills.

The High Street Centre – My first week

Reflecting on my first week at the High Street Centre in Rotherham, it feels like I have already learnt and done so much. The purpose of the charity itself is to “enable, equip and establish services that make Rawmarsh a better place to live and work” and growing up in the area I have seen the positive changes to people’s lives that the charity has instigated.

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The main focus of my project is to create a computer program which searches through funding opportunities and grants in the area, of which there are hundreds and determines using a  variety of criteria which should be targeted. This should help the workers be more efficient and more successful when they apply for money and the time saved can be then applied elsewhere.

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Having never touched coding before I started my first year in Mathematics last year, I was quite daunted about how I could actually build something that worked and that could be used by anyone. I had a few ideas in mind as to where I might start, but first I needed to figure out exactly what made a fund provider the best match. One of the first jobs on arrival therefore was to discuss with the team who both usually do the work on funding bids what sort of criteria the program would work with. After getting a few general ideas together, I was happy that I could at least start coding. As I’ve found before, once I start a project or problem I can become quite consumed and get excited about every step, so much so that I found that on several evenings last week I would still be making changes at 11pm.

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As well as starting to create the program, I have helped in various different ways when needed, including an over 55 IT class and an after school club for children with special needs. I’ve enjoyed and learnt from everything I’ve done during the first week and look forward to continuing to grow and to hopefully make lasting differences throughout the rest of my internship.

Reflections after Four Weeks at Full Fact.

When I started at Full Fact, I wanted to build a program to carry out their first ever automated factcheck.

Four weeks later, that what’s I finished with: so far, the automated factchecker can check ‘Employment is rising’. It reads the word ‘employment’, goes to the Office for National Statistics’ labour force data, and runs a couple of simple tests to get an idea of whether the number of people in work really is rising.

Beyond that one example, the code I wrote shows real promise. It understands what kind of data needs to be looked up when presented with an example sentence.

I spent four weeks on a problem that will take months to solve, so I was only creating a basic framework. Although I did not have enough time to get deep into the part of the software that analyses ONS data, I was able to find a good approach for the part that understands what data to retrieve.

There are still many challenges. When you get into all the different ways sentences are formulated, it seems impossible that there might be one way to process them all. How do you work out that ‘since 2010’, ‘recently’ and ‘last month’ all give you information about time periods, while ‘to Europe’ and ‘in my constituency’ are both location-related?

By looking at phrases from different points of view, and discussing them with others, I found and was able to implement a structure for the code that will form a good basis for future work.

It turned out my time at Full Fact was about more than just coding. Along with experience programming and communicating, I learnt about linguistics, an unexpected but interesting field. To make sure that the tool picked up all relevant claims, and excluded irrelevant ones,I had to think about the construction of speech in some detail.

I also learnt it’s difficult to get tired of £2.50 falafel wraps at lunchtime.