Apparently voting only counts towards a relatively small percentage (30%) of whether or not it will be selected, but with 2346 proposals in the system, I suspect it counts a lot more than that.

The session is rather vaguely defined because I’m not really sure right now what’ll still be interesting in a few months. I also want to garner as many opinions from the community as they can about what they want to know more about, see speak or show off – so do make your voice heard in the comments.

SXSW submissions are a bit nuts, really.

The mega-conference happens in March every year. By the time you’re done clearing your credit card bill and the fuss on twitter has died down a few weeks after the event, it’s already time to submit proposals for the coming year with the deadline at the start of July.

That means you need to think about your proposal a good 9 or 10 months before the next event.

In my mind, it’s incredibly difficult to predict what will be a hot topic or really relevant 10 months down the line in an industry like ours. Things move incredibly quickly. I also find it very difficult to know what to vote for – I may find at the beginning of next year that actually, I really could have done with knowing more about The Latest Technique, but right now I don’t know what it is to vote for it.

I also worry that interesting topics that I don’t know about yet don’t have the community around it to rally support and get the votes. Inevitably, the topics that are most trendy or have the most well-known organisers/panelists will be the topics that get the most votes. They tend not to be the panels I’ve enjoyed the most, though. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly hard to figure out which sessions are going to be great and which aren’t, since SXSW is just so big now – I think it has become quantity over quality. </ complain>

Anyway, not a lot I can do about that other than play along and attempt to include a session that I will attempt to put together at a level that I deem acceptable quality. I do want to see microformats.org have a representation there, so help me out, huh?

p.s. The spelling of the tag “microformats” as “micoformats” is not mine. It’s theirs. And I asked to have it corrected, but apparently their system doesn’t easily allow for that at the moment. WTF?

Possibly related posts:

1. SXSWi Microformats Panel Confirmed
2. London Microformats vEvent
3. Microformats vEvent and London Web Week

So, hgroup, eh?

hgroup is one of the new elements featuring in the HTML 5 specification. It’s purpose, quite simply, is to group two or more headings together into one block so that subheadings are treated differently and only the first heading becomes part of the document outline.

The hgroup element is typically used to group a set of one or more h1-h6 elements — to group, for example, a section title and an accompanying subtitle.

From the current HTML5 working draft

The WHATWG wiki has the following rationale for requiring the hgroup element:

The point of <hgroup> is to hide the subtitle from the outlining algorithm

WHATWG wiki

Over on HTML5 Doctor, John Allsopp appears to find fault with this element also and suggests that the requirement for hgroup is symptomatic of a flaw in the outlining algorithm. I can see his point, but I’m more concerned that it’s a fundamentally inaccurate use of a heading.

In my mind, headings are designed to denote sections. At least, that’s what they were used for in HTML 4. Things either went in a heading, because they denoted a new section of content, or they didn’t. This is Frances the idealist speaking, I realise this, but still.

Let’s say I had a new website about a children’s story about monsters, and I wanted to title it “Monsters live under my bed”, but it could also have a sub-title or strap-line. As an author, I either want my title to be “Monsters live under my bed. Where things go bump in the night” or I want it to be “Monsters live under my bed” and the next line is incidental and a supplementary strap-line and not something I would consider to be part of my title.

Currently, I might do any of the following:

<h1>Monsters live under my bed
Where things go bump in the night
</h1>

Example wrapped for legibility, but my story title is the full text and is in a heading.

<h1>Monsters live under my bed
<span>Where things go bump in the night</span>
</h1>

This one is mostly a stylistic example. The strapline needs to look like a strapline, so I’ve stuck a span around it (yeah, I know…), but fundamentally I’m still considering it to be part of the title. My story’s name is the full text.

<h1>Monsters live under my bed</h1>
<p>Where things go bump in the night</p>

In this case, the title of my story is only “Monsters live under my bed” and because HTML 4 doesn’t really offer a suitable element that I would consider “a sub header that isn’t a new section of the document” I’ve stuck the sub-title text in a paragraph.

<h1>Monsters live under my bed</h1>
<h2>Where things go bump in the night</h2>

This one suggests that I have a title and then the first chapter beneath the title is “Where things go bump in the night”. That second line is no longer the title of my kids story. The h2 would be a new indented item in an outline and would suggest that further within the document I may find more h2s and that I have stepped into the document by a level.

What HTML 5 says you would do is this if you want a sub-title/sub-heading is:

<hgroup>
<h1>Monsters live under my bed</h1>
<h2>Things that go bump in the night</h2>
</hgroup>

This has the effect of making that h2 not appear in the outline, since it will no longer create a new section. The outline now considers that the title of my story is again “Monsters live under my bed”. Any content that comes after this would be within the section titled by the h1. The h2 doesn’t count as the start of a new section (as it would if there was no hgroup wrapper). The contents of the h2 is considered a special non-sectioning-heading case, but it’s still in a heading element. But if it’s meant to be a heading, why isn’t it in the h1? Gah!

I kind of have the feeling that what we should have at our disposal is something that looks more like the following, which allows for a heading and some sort of sub-title(s) (naming isn’t my strong point, I’ve picked ‘strapline’ fairly arbitrarily, but essentially I imagine it as a non-heading sub-title of some nature – maybe even subheading?). It’s not as if hgroup is allowed to hold anything other than headings anyway.

<h1>Monsters live under my bed</h1>
<strapline>Where things go bump in the night<strapline>

It satisfies my problem with using lower numbered headings for things you consider to either be associated as part of the first heading (or rather, supplementary to it) or not actually headings at all. If I want my full title to be all of the above, it can all go in the h1. If I don’t consider the second line to be part of a heading, it gets to go in it’s own non-heading supplementary titling element. The rationale quoted above specifically says “subtitle”, although I noticed the current editor’s draft for hgroup does mention “subheadings”.

Do you follow my drift?

If we’re in the business of having the opportunity to create new elements, can’t we just create one that actually satisfies the requirement explicitly rather than sort of allow authors to do things that seem somehow hypocritical to the point of heading elements in most other contexts. I also realise that purist intentions fall waaaaay down the list of priorities when compared to the requirements of paving existing usage, but as an author as well, I feel that there’s something fundamentally inaccurate about treating a heading as a non-heading. As an author I want to be able to be as accurate as possible.

Is it just time for me to let go of the idea that headings do the job of creating and naming sections in a document outline?

Aren’t semantics fun!

Possibly related posts:

1. HTML5 Microdata – Over-cooked?
2. JAWS Screen Reader Session, Microformats and Us.
3. Adding XFN

Science Hack Day hasn’t actually happened yet, by the way. It’s going on this weekend (19th & 20th June) at the Guardian offices, and there’s still time to sign up if you’re interested. This is an idea I was playing around with, but I probably won’t be doing this at the weekend unless it piques someone else’s (with more linguistic intellect) interest. Feel free to bug me if this is a topic to chat about.

The Turing Test

One of the basic concepts and experiments in the AI world is the now defunct, but intellectually and philosophically interesting, Turing Test. In the simplest terms, the test is around proving intelligence by showing human characteristics through dialogue and natural language, and this is shown through genuine human testers being blindly pitted against either another real human being, or a test program, and guessing as to whether their conversational partner is a human or not. Every year challengers from around the world still compete in this test, and produce complex computer programs that can converse with human beings and nearly fool them into believing they too are human. No one has created a program that can behave accurately, or more often randomly enough, to fool participants completely – which is why it remains an interesting, although essentially irrelevant, problem.

The reason this test is defunct as a gauge of intelligence is pretty obvious in hindsight. Being able to converse like a human being might show that whatever it is doing the conversing can take apart the constituent parts of a sentence and cobble them back together with some new information to fool a human, but it’s not really showing other markers of intelligence – specifically the ability to think. And neither does an entity being unable to converse in this way preclude it from having intelligence – you just need to look around our own animal kingdom and see the wealth of intelligence shown in other organisms that have no verbal language. The ‘Chinese Room‘ is the original thought experiment that describes this specific problem, which you should totally go and read about right now.

Now, I’m not for one moment suggesting that over 2 days (or 2 lifetimes) a person such as myself with no linguistics or complex algorithms training could create a program that could have a go at passing the Turing test and win the Loebner Prize, but I got to thinking about how people interact with the internet in such a way that maybe the Internet itself could be considered to have the capabilities, and the depth and range of knowledge, to show ‘intelligence’ as Turing would have defined it through this test.

Google as an intelligent conversationalist

Go to Google and ask it a question – even better, ask it a question and hit ‘I’m feeling lucky’. Most of the time it produces an ‘answer’ that’s pretty bloomin’ accurate to what you’re looking for. Take a sample of that page that possibly directly answers that question and cobble it into some pigeon English, and would that do as a conversational retort? Reckon it could have a stab at knowing the punchline to your rubbish ‘Knock knock…’ joke? I think it could.

In fact, from the Loebner Prize rules, the sample questions are all easily answerable by Google – the only thing it would struggle with is the memory part, but with Google’s ever growing logging of what kind of information you search for, it’s only a short way from that.

I was googling about trying to find other people who must have been thinking about using search engines for turing tests, and came across John Ferrara in 2008 discussing the user interaction benefits of using search in a way that would produce Turing test-ready results (I particularly like his accurate prediction that ontologies are the way forward – more on that later). Google is clearly doing some really interesting, and without doubt highly complex, things around parsing search terms and working out what the interesting parts of the query are. They’re doing Natural Language Parsing, but just one way – the asker to the responder.

Natural Language Parsers

So, I started digging about on the web for a natural language parser to see if I could maybe package up Google results in one line retorts. In JavaScript. Mostly because I’m a client-side developer, but also because that seemed like a funny idea (one late night after a couple Amstels) and JS can be lightning fast in the right environment. Unsurprisingly – there wasn’t one. I found this nice little ‘parts of sentence’ tagger that someone had ported from another project into JS, and this seemed like a good start, and there’s OpenNLP – the open source hub for NLPs (mostly in Java, Perl and Python). Then Jake suggested I port one of the ones in Python to JS. Ah hah hah, where’s that <sarcasm> element when you need it?

The highly complex NLP part is really only the dressing. It’s the bit that does the fakery and really reacts and responds and produces pretend empathy and is essentially what people who are trying to win the Loebner Prize care about – to be honest, there’s plenty of real people behind machines to talk to than we really need as it is on the internets, let alone adding a bunch of equally inane computer ones – so I’m not really that interested in that to any complex level – I just need something relatively simple.

I am interested in mining the ever growing source of richly marked up data and sources on the web, and presenting them back to a human being in a friendly, natural way. Basically, I want one of those slightly-sinister robot voices talking to me from my computer, as featured in all good sci-fis (maybe less Hal and more Gerty) who can cooly and calmly, for example, present me the probable likelihood of poisoning myself by eating out-of-date eggs or what factor suncream it might be wise to wear to the park tomorrow so that I don’t burn to a crisp. An information supplier and sympathiser that’s smarter than me and knows about more sources of information than I could and can save me a bit of time wading through google results.

Let’s talk

So, on to my fuzzy notion of how this might work, just as a thought experiment at first and maybe a slightly naff proof of concept.

Blindly searching google for sensible responses from any old web page seems foolish. An awful lot of sites continue to be badly formed and unintelligible to machines. The obvious thing to do is restrict searches to sites with well-formed data – microformats and RDF seem like the obvious things to look for. This clearly poses a slight problem in that not all topics exist in well-formed data, but over time, that’ll improve. To make this proof of concept easier, and one that I could feasibly think about building in a weekend, I’m therefore going to limit the topics of interest to data I know I can get at in a well-formed model.

Let’s have a chat about food. I’m going to propose a fictional conversation that I want to create the responses to automatically.

Maybe we want to ask our machine:

Do you know any good vegetarian recipes?.

A good response might be:

Yes, I know 20582746 vegetarian recipes. Do you want to narrow it down a bit?

Yes, I’m looking for a good recipe for a feta and spinach tart.

I have a good recipe for that. Would you like me to give you a link to it, or just tell you the ingredients?

I want to stop there and illustrate a couple of interesting things about these sentences. Firstly, the word ‘good’. How could a machine know if a recipe is good? Well, hRecipe allows for a recipe to receive a rating – the machine could use this to determine whether to describe the recipe it’s found as ‘good’. Likewise, I could have asked it ‘What’s the worst meal you’ve eaten?’ and perhaps it trawls off for the first lowest rated recipe it can find and declares that its least favourite. Kind of makes me think that this machine person would need to be called Legion, because rather than having the opinion of an individual (or rather the opinion of the programmer), it has the crowd-sourced opinion of all web participants.

Great. Does it have tomatoes in it? I don’t like tomatoes.

No. Would you like the recipe now?

Yes, what are the ingredients?

And so on… Having a program read back the parts of a well-formed recipe are really easy. Recipes marked as hRecipe clearly define each of the parts. You could ask it to read you step one of the method, or repeat step 3, or double check what temperature the oven needs to be at. To be honest, you could obviously be reading that directly yourself, but the act of marking up information like that makes it really easy to programmatically extra useful, relevant, information out of a webpage, strap it into some semblance of natural english, and read it out to a person in such a way that a person might believe that a human being was interpreting the page, which they could find more accessible. And that’s the ticket, really. Google search results, or rather the elements derived from rich data snippets, become the lexicon element of the previously mentioned NLPs.

Limitations

What it probably couldn’t do is tell you how it’s feeling or where it lives – the sort of questions and topics that turn up in the logs for turing tests – but really, does it matter? It would probably also get confused really easily by badly formed pages and it would just as happily give you bad, irrelevant or plain gibberish responses sometimes – but all computers will do that – which is a greater reason to make pages as well-formed and parsable as possible.

Even if my notion of a simple friendly-face Google bot couldn’t pass the Turing Test, I bet that if Alan Turing had still been alive at the advent of Google and Wolfram Alpha and the likes, he’d be bloody impressed and be pleased to know that he probably instigated some of it.

Which reminds me – June 2012 will celebrate Turing’s 100th birthday – Pretty sure we’ll need to have an extra special Science Hack Day for that too, don’t you think?

Possibly related posts:

1. SemanticCamp London
2. Facebook
3. Implementing hAtom: The entries code

The last three years at the BBC have been good ones. I think the quality of the output and massive range of products that have come out of the development teams has just been amazing. It feels like everyone I have had the pleasure of working with at the Beeb has been smart, engaged and really got the web and wanted to make cool things.

I’m certainly sad to be leaving. I’ll of course be missing the Glow Super Friends a lot, in particular, but I feel that I’ve made brilliant friends and connections in various corners of the company and there are many I hope to continue seeing a lot of and will no doubt get to work with again in the future. I leave knowing I’m going to miss everyone to pieces, but London really isn’t that big – so they won’t get rid of me too easily, even if I do have to stalk Vesbar.

But ever onwards – the season called for a change of scenery and getting a look at a whole new ecosystem of challenges. I think working at Nature will be great and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I only hope they’re ready for my special brand of optimism.

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1. DHL and City Link are incompetent
2. Writer’s block and Project52
3. New Things

I think I speak for both of us when I say that we really enjoyed the evening – everyone was lovely and friendly and asked really excellent questions. Highly recommendable meet-up, and we’re both intending to try and make it to some of the future sessions.

Some useful links from my stuff:

• My previous write-up about using Woosh (although note that Woosh has become a bit more featureful since that write-up)
• QUnit
• Glow Github repos and the Glow website and docs
• JSDoc Toolkit

Possibly related posts:

1. London Web Standards Talks
2. Full Frontal 2009
3. Github and QUnit

Although it’s not a Glow specific talk, we will be using Glow in our examples, so feel free to come along and talk to us about the library too, if you’re interested.

Tickets are available now for the event on Wednesday 31st March at The Square Pig in London.

Possibly related posts:

1. London Web Standards – slides and further info
2. London Microformats vEvent
3. Microformats vEvent and London Web Week

See the rest of the shots on flickr.

Making the book

For those interested, the illustrations were drawn on white bristol board and inked with fast-dry black pigment liner, and then scanned and printed on to light-weight (80gsm) cream paper and cut to size with a craft knife. I then had some trouble figuring out the best way to attach the pages to the ancient book we found on ebay, without permanently damaging it.

I ended up bracing the illustration and text pages with extra blank sheets on either side, binding the edge with masking tape. Then I used some partially dried glue stick (pritt-like) which I could pinch pieces off and roll into sausage shapes and press into the masking-tape spine, to create a malleable, but strong, join for the pages to move on. No super-glues I had seemed to work as well as this rather Blue Peter-esque technique. The best thing about the glue-stick solution is that it rubs off the paper anywhere that it shows, so the join is seamless.

It was a nice little project and I’m really glad to have been able to contribute to the film in some way. The first two illustrations and title are used as the introduction to the film, with a narrative voice-over and music, and the final illustration is used as the outro. Hopefully I’ll get to do some more illustration work in the future.

Possibly related posts:

1. Film and Lit 2008
2. Film and Lit 2009
3. Leaving the BBC, joining Nature Publishing Group

Rachel Andrew blogged today about a very sad incident yesterday, where herself and her fellow female speakers were mocked by audience members of Boag World’s live podcast event. Essentially, viewers in the backchannel decided to concentrate on their physical attributes rather than their well educated views, with suggestions that they were far too good-looking and well presented to be there for their abilities alone.

Rachel has rightfully pointed out that such behaviour shouldn’t be tolerated, but she also writes about how women in technology shouldn’t be encouraged to dress down or become more tom-boyish just to feel accepted or to avoid attention.

Barbie has a whole host of more fundamental reasons why she’s probably a poor role-model for little girls (her figure is the obvious one), but I don’t think having her careers be varied and non-traditional is one of them. I’m actually into the idea of a Barbie that helps to say that it’s okay to be as girly-a-girl as you want to be and work in traditionally male dominated industries. And hey, I think glasses look cool.

Possibly related posts:

1. Women of the web
2. London Web Standards Talks
3. Cold-calls and Madison Maclean recruitment

It’s hard. Really hard.

It’s week 5 and although I generally suffer various rage related incidents* over the course of a week, nothing has presented itself as particularly bloggable. Likewise, work has been fairly unspectacular and I’ve not been especially creative so I’m lacking anything of true substance to talk about or teach. Next week should be better, as there’s an upcoming event I’ll be involved with and I’ll have produced some extra-curricular illustrative commisions I’d like to share.

I asked twitter – the natural home for people who don’t know what to talk about – and the suggestions came back that I just get this stupid meta-post over and done with and talk about writer’s block (cheers Olly and Craig).

I like writing. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but I can string a few words together into something that vaguely resembles prose. Finding topics that haven’t already been talked about excessively in the web world is just an especially difficult challenge.

Only today, a mailing list I frequent has been discussing how difficult it can be to stay motivated and interested in a field that’s coming out of it’s emergent phase. Finding a cause that doesn’t already have more than enough band-wagoners is rare and finding something unique to add is unusual and perhaps it’s feeling less ground-breaking. There’s less to do for the invidiual as more hands come on deck. Ultimately, this is super for the web but not so good for personal satisfaction, in my opinion. The word “jaded” was used, but I think (and hope) it’s a bit early for that.

Finally, a suggestion from Matt:

@phae Ask for suggestions of what to write about. :)

matthewpenell

So, dear readers (probably, mostly, I should just address this to “mum”), anything I’ve hinted at in the past that you’d like me to elaborate on in the future? I know it’s a cop-out, and it’s lame to ask, but hey… you never know, it might work.

* OK, here’s a little bonus list of things that have made me want to strangle people this week:

• CSS3 being compared directly to Java Applets – please, people. Lets at least let it out of the stalls before we condemn it.
• More pro-homeopathy articles, the Pope, the Daily Mail, the usual.
• Email responses to technical debates that consist of nothing more than off-topic quotations.
• Latest version of Chrome reporting unexpected background-repeat values in JS-land.
• iFrames.
• A guy on the tube who complained about the placement of someone’s feet (they were a cm too close to his) and the crowded nature (it wasn’t very crowded) of the carriage.

Possibly related posts:

1. Computer engineer Barbie
2. Cold-calls and Madison Maclean recruitment
3. Facebook

If you haven’t already stumbled across the many manic rants about homeopathy, and why it’s such a ludicrous load of rubbish, then here’s a selection of posts I could recommend (Update: Here’s an excellent one from New Scientist today that covers everything up to now). The videos on the 1023 site alone are good and will help explain things quickly and often hilariously.

This weekend, 1023 has organised an active protest aimed at Boots. Around the country objectors to homeopathy will be necking a whole packet of homoeopathic pillules (sugar pills) to show that there’s no actual active ingredients in them, since they won’t be keeling over (I shall be amongst them). Homoeopaths are making defensive statements already to suggest that it won’t do anything (they know as well as we do that they won’t have any affect), because without a trained homoeopath prescribing the correct pills for the correct illness, it won’t work (something to do with it being like the likelihood of having an allergy, or you have to have the right illness for the right pill for the magic to work… I don’t quite get it). In my mind, that weakens their argument even more, since Boots sell non-prescribed pillules without advice to anyone – so they shouldn’t work for those non-protesting people either.

I love the NHS. It’s one of the main reasons I’m walking around now having a generally jolly good time of it. I think as a nation we’re proud of it and what it provides for us, but as with most things, it’s under-funded. Something like four million pounds a year goes into funding homeopathy treatments and hospitals. If you take a look at the research on homeopathy, it’s just an elaborate placebo effect, and it seems a lot of homeopathists don’t even deny this, and say that it’s the act of caring and talking and the long appointments people get to have that help make them feel better – so I’m all for scrapping the lunacy and putting that money into therapies and councillors. Should have a similar sort of result, no?

Anyway – all that aside, and all the obvious nonsense and I’m still left with my biggest issue with the topic. If you want to take a “them” and “us” approach to the argument, my problem is with some of the people on “our” side. You’ll see comments on articles and posts all the time that go something along the lines of “Who cares? It’s charlatans selling pills to fools“. Sounds fair, right? I don’t agree. Charlatans: yes, generally. Fools: I don’t think so. I think consumers and patients are well within their rights to follow recommendation.

Take Boots for example. Although clearly a commercial entity first, they still have a role in our world as a trusted pharmacy with a brand we recognise. Is it so wrong that people should trust a pharmacy to sell pills that have some efficiacy? Could you honestly say that you understand how the paracetamol or aspirin you take works? What it’s chemical structure is? How it’s produced? What it does to your body? You take them regardless, because you trust that those tablets have been tested to be safe, work and reliable. We’re not expected to be experts on medicine. We don’t have to be, because we rely on trained professionals to direct us. When the NHS provides money to a practice that is unproven, who are we as consumers of the NHS to question what appears on the surface to be a funding-based seal of a approval? Call people fools if you like once they’ve been shown and had to confront the science, but you can’t label general man-on-the-street consumers as those people.

Someone asked me once if it meant we should be up in arms over anti-aging face creams with false claims for all the same reasons and my response to that is I’ll start caring if they falsely claim to cure your illnesses too. Buying a cream and still having a few wrinkles isn’t likely to be fatal, but not taking the prescribed and proven medication, in place of a few sugar pills when you’re seriously ill, just might be.

Possibly related posts:

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2. Cold-calls and Madison Maclean recruitment
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