Brains working towards machine consciousness

 Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

 While I am feeling *ahem* musical, here's a song (In to the midnight blue) I wrote a long time ago, which I finally got round to re-recording.  It could be a lot better, I know...  CC ND licence on this, I reckon, so if anyone is crazy enough to want to re-do it, you can, but you must say I was the writer/original 'artist' ;-)

 I'm really happy to be involved in a new JISC project here at the University of Reading, called Digitally Ready.  We've got the first programme meeting coming up soon, and the programme managers at JISC want an 'elevator pitch', which should be 'creative' and 'definitely no powerpoint'.

That's a challenge for a Comp Sci Engineery type.  No Powerpoint? What can these people be thinking? ;-)

 I guess I hadn't tried putting a default constructor in a Hash before, or if I had, the behaviour was different...

I wanted a Hash which holds a number of hashes (actually, to be honest, I probably just wanted it to have arrays, but when I started, I thought I wanted hashes, and it isn't an unreasonable use case).  I haven't worked out why this does what it does, 

 Many people suffer some degree of stage fright when confronted with having to give presentations.  It can range from a mild anxiety (often said to help enhance "performance") to truly horrifying, gut-wrenching fear of being the focal point, the expert, in front of many people with high expectations of you.  Indeed, it can be sufficiently bad that some people are sick or just cannot go on stage to give the presentation.

 (based on a true story by Ella Davies, Earth News reporter for the BBC... well, sort of ;-))

Dave White wrote about his Digital Resident/Visitor model on the TALL blog back in 2008 (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2008/07/23/not-natives-immigra...) and it has been well received. I have recently been thinking about the Digital Native/Immigrant idea of Prensky again, and finding a lot of the criticism of it to be focussed on a particular point, and somewhat lacking in critical reasoning, so I thought it about time I went back and looked at Dave White's model too.

I see a lot of people saying that Prensky's concept of Digital Natives (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20di...) is flawed because e.g. you can't differentiate by generation, that not all young people are a whiz with technology, or that brain structures have not been modified by experience with technology.

To some extent, they have a point - Prensky asserted that "Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of

Just a brief mention of my colleague, Karsten Oster Lundqvist's tutorial on Android game development, which he runs as a workshop for our undergraduates (and others!). He has an online version on his blog (http://oster-lundqvist.com/karsten/?p=4886)

It is in a nice conversational style, with plenty of screen shots and working copies of code should you run in to difficulties. The only thing missing for a java-numpty like me is how to get Eclipse to run reliably. I know it works for a lot of people, but I also know quite a few who suffer the same woes with it as I do... ;-)

Dear Sir,

Please can you tell me how much money was spent by your department on the Opera report mentioned in your press release http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/1925280

Furthermore, can you please let me know how much of this cost the department has identified as having been wasted by reviewing the claims the Opera report makes in light of Ben Goldacre's expose of it's inadequacies (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/24/bad-science-local-go...)?