Amy Guy

21st - 27th January

Brainstormed about how to work with amateur digital media creators, mostly with the aim of starting to put together a vocabulary for representing various digital media creation processes, collaboration dynamics and audience engagement.  More coherent thoughts on that next week, I should think.

Lightning-talked about the Berlin Open Data Dialogue at an OKFN meetup in the National Library of Scotland on Thursday 24th.

Talked about ontologies for sensor data at Ontologies with a View.

Which was hosted by the National Library of Scotland. (Information).

I reported on the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin that I'd been to in December, but then had to immediately leave, so I don't have any notes on the rest of the talks..

14th January - 20th January

Further discussed ILW hack with various parties, and released a website with information for anyone interested in being involved, and registration for students.

I went to the first Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition class.  It looks interesting, but might be a bit maths heavy... I might concentrate on learning the maths now, and take the class next year, instead of killing myself with both.

Caught up on all my blogging!

7th January - 13th January

I was subject of Paolo's procedural task labelling pilot experiment.  It was quite complicated.  I don't know if I did a very good job.

I went to TechMeetup and networked like crazy.

• I talked to Andy Hyde about ALISS getting involved with the ILW hack, and Edinburgh OD scene in general.
• And a few other people about supporting the ILW hack in various ways.
• I talked to Felix Gilfedder of Popcorn Horror about novel ways of engaging with creative digital media communities (PhD related!)
• I briefly met Russell, with whom I hope to discuss digital video metadata (PhD related!)
• One other thing which isn't related to Open Data or my PhD but is very exciting nonetheless.

31st December - 6th January 2013

Wrote a 6 month plan.  It's nice to have solid targets.  Here it is in calendar form.

Got the flu.

17th December - 23rd December

Mostly things not strictly PhD related...

18th - Initial meeting about organising a hack for undergraduates during Innovative Learning Week in February
19th - Discussed how local small scale community groups can benefit from Open Data, and how they could get involved in the ILW hack, with Freda O'Bryne and Euan Jackson.
        - Also discussed these things with Ewan, and started on a spreadsheet of decent apps that use Open Data, and links to their data sources.

(Write-up about this event by the organisers here).

DMMM was a conference aimed at sociologists and anthropologists and the like, so, having never studied these disciplines in any way, I was worried I'd have no idea what was going on.

Fortunately everyone was friendly, and everyone's research was really interesting, relevant and mostly made sense to me.  You can read all of the notes I took here.

Humanities researchers are using and gathering digital data in lots of interesting and unique ways.  Using social media and other digital methods to engage with study participants (Jo Belcher, Lorenza Antonucci, Eve Stirling); sentiment analysis (Mike Thelwell); examining archives; image use in online interviews (Emma Hutchinson); e-focus groups (Ibrar Bhatt); digital records (reflections) of a creative arts process (Carole Kirk); crowd-sourcing of commercial ideas (Temitayo Abinusawa); avatars and virtual interaction spaces like SecondLife (Evelyn McElhinney); brilliant playful use of hacking to disrupt discussions about online learning (Jeremy Knox on MOOCs).

I talked about digital media on the Semantic Web, with as much of a sociology swing as I could give it given my limited expertise in that domain.  My slides, beautifully illustrated by Chloe Dungate (available for hire!  Academic slides starting at £2 a drawing!  Loves topics she doesn't understand so she can be as outrageously creative as possible!), are here.  You can see my talk notes there, too.

danah boyd, whose work I've followed more or less since my undergraduate, teleconferenced in to give a really interesting keynote called "Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era."  She discussed working with young people for the last few years to examine their use of social networks (mostly MySpace), and all of the challenges and considerations that came up along the way.  She was surprised a lot.

The open discussion at the end raised a lot of discussion about ethics.  It was implied at one point that the content of tweets or YouTube comments are ripe for the picking with no strings attached because they're already in the public space.  It's definitely not that simple.

There's also a danger of humanities researchers being out of touch with modern techniques and best practices.  Commercial research is sometimes way ahead, but there's no communication between each end of the spectrum, so methods get developed and optimised unnecessarily.

A lot of people had experiences indicating that digital methods in humanities are often not taken seriously.  Supervisors, ethics committees, funding bodies, who have only worked with traditional methods can struggle to see the legitimacy of results gathered by digital means.  On the other hand, certain levels of ignorance can sometimes work to the researcher's advantage in terms of being allowed to get stuff done with minimal red tape (because authorities don't know what questions to ask).

Personally I was interested by this general feeling of novelty about digital methods.  Having been in computing for almost my whole academic career (not to mention a child of the Web), a lot of things were being critically and confusedly discussed that I just take for granted.  Things like the validity of friendships that exist entirely online, and feelings expressed through short-lived text alone.  I think arts and humanities researchers who really want to get to grips with digital methods as legitimate research tools should consider orchestrating placements alongside technical researchers and immersing themselves in a world where the main options are all digital by default.

December 7th, 2012.

Notes as I scribbled them.  Read a proper review.

Peter Webster - Digital Resources for Social Scientists at the British Library
British Library research methods guide under social sciences.
Web about individuals and organisations is fragile, things disappear. Most site owners ignore requests for permission to archive stuff. New legal deposit legislation next year will allow scraping the Web and archiving everything without worrying about infringing copyright. Using this data is restricted; library premises or print one copy for non-commercial use. Can't use an item simultaneously with any other user.. (regulation is for print, derp)

Full text search for internet archive... open question, very complicated. Consultation going on about this. Legislation is very restrictive; need to look at data derived from dataset and how that can be made available.

Mike Thelwell - Sentiment Analysis for the Social Web
Sentiment is seen as peripheral, and often ignored, but actually it's core. Emotional reaction to tea or coffee.

sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk SentiStrength - detect strength of +ve and -ve sentiment in short text. Takes into account that text might not be gramatically correct. In social media, sentiment expressed in different ways (eg. emoticons, deliberate misspellings to embed sentiment: haaaapppyyyyyy). List of +ve and -ve term stems and strengths from -5 to 4. People disagree about sentiment surprisingly much. Something lots of people tweet about must arouse sentiment. But for big events, surge of quantity of tweets, but not surge in +ve or -ve sentiment. Lots of sentiment is implicit.

YT comments are easy to get so good source of social data. No ethical concerns about getting permission to analyse because it's already public. (hmm, no?)

Longer the text, less well it works. But does have a long text mode, with slightly different scoring.

Used by Yahoo question answering system to work out best people to give answers. Companies use it for product reactions.

Would like to see these techniques to smaller scale case studies. The most focused data stream still has loads of junk like what they had for breakfast..

Why are 1 and -1 neutral instead of 0? Because psychology - two scales, not one.

Jo Belcher - mixing traditional and digital methods to research hidden carers.

Is online support for parents and carers socially patterned like social media use? Needs to reach people who don't use the Internet, too, for comparisons. People respond in the medium they were first contacted. Treat online and offline results differently for analysis.

Lorenza Antonucci - Using social media in different phases of research process

Digital methods allow you to do something different. A lot of focus on big data and secondary digital data (twitter). Not about collecting own data, but using data already available on social media.

Might be a problem fitting secondary data into existing theoretical frameworks. So need to collect. She's looking at real vs virtual identities. Not possible to do follow up interviews just over facebook. DM help to select people. Also cross-national research. Age/generational aspects.

Jeremy Knox - MOOCs

Is learning simply the consumption of information online?
Web enabled sensors. GPS to record where he goes within MOOC - physical location and digital space together (cool).
Locations tweet when he's in the MOOC.
RFID system that allows office books to tweet content.
Experiments to disrupt and critise. Playful methods to think about the MOOC in a different way. Assemblage of human, technology and place; learning might be post-human.
Final outcome of research? Not sure.. a way to provoke thinking in what is often a closed area.
How is learning affected by physical space?

Sue Thomas - technobiophilia

O'Reilly's topsoil metaphor is cool.
Five categories about how people talk about online experiences.
Lots of nature metaphors. Metaphors aren't deliberate. We bring nature into computing because we innately want it to be there (biophilia)

Carole Kirk - Digital reflection: A method for arts practice-led research?

Questions and methods come from practical. Tacit knowledge. Capturing creative processes.
How to leave a trace of an action for reflection?
Digital methods can help.
Not a complete record, but a trace. Digital technologies that involve a high level of manipulation stimulate greater reflection. Only archives - metadata, feedback & discussion. Visible record of reflection. Process of creating records doesn't replace the practice itself. Might trigger embodied memory. Help to articulate fleeting things.
In arts, practice-led research is more about creating digital data.

Emma Hutchinson - Asynchronous online interviews and image elicitation

Async, like email or forum.
Complement interview with photos, but not used much online yet.
Identity performance of online gamers.
Images help with articulation. Lots to talk about.
Photos that do/don't get uploaded to facebook, why / why not?

Eve Stirling - Facebook profile as research tool

Undergraduate transition to university.
Lots of HE happens on fb. Looking at the every day.
Digital and physical spaces.
Personal fb is not academic, and hidden. Twitter is academic.
Ethnography is about understanding every day culture and developing trust and rapport with participants.
Fb friends are linked to study. Intrinsically linked. Does becoming fb friend need a disclaimer? Informed consent? Personal and professional lives blurring. After study - delete friends?

Me!  Digital Media on the Semantic Web.  
My slides are here.

danah boyd - Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era

Understanding social networks before there were sns
The rise and fall of myspace.
How much can be made sense of from a distance? Engaging with own friends not like working with young people. How radically difficult it is to interpret what she sees. Young people better at encoding the information they make available, because of adult surveillance. Just because she can see their content, doesn't mean she knows what's going on.

Observes offline too. Adults help to recruit youths with different perspectives.
Thought about recruiting online but stopped. Not a good norm to start.
Make sense of online things with offline interviews (ethical things considered, parents/friends nearby).
Don't begin the conversation with online material; need them to feel comfortable first; usually an hour into the interview.

How to coordinate data? Serious challenge. Blogging about things as she's thinking through them; trying to make sense of them in a public way.
Thinking out loud, can be corrected and challenged during sense-making process. Not just experts, but her participants too.
Controversial piece about shift from myspace to fb. Got picked up overnight and got over 10k responses. Most people frustrated and angry and didn't understand where she was coming from. People came forward with quantitative data that helped. Adults attacked her for being racist; young people responded with their stories.

How public to make the young people? Don't expose them, no real names unless their already public figures. Never quotes online material exactly so people can't search to identify the young people. Visibility has consequences people don't expect or understand. Can make people more vulnerable by making them visible.

The young people could choose to make themselves visible through the process (some do).
Speak for them or help them speak?
Public in the media to make young peoples' voices heard as much as possible. Never publishes in a closed access journal.
Collaboration is in sense-making, not writing. More in intervention-driven projects.
Generally don't want to, but a few exceptions - published two papers with teenagers.

Tension between MS and research?
No, MSR is academic institution. Lots of freedom.
Teenagers expect her to fix xbox.. External perception is more confusing than internal.
Can make the case for open access in a way that lots of university scholars can't.

Problems with paraphrasing quotes from websites?
Tries to make quotes more common, found everywhere.
Her ethics about making people not more vulnerable is worth more than skimping on real quotes. Helps that she doesn't rely entirely on online data.

Says she's not good at articulating her methods.

Ibrar Bhatt - e-focus groups and e-interviews

Separate summer project on student experience for postgraduate research students, distance learners, part time students globally.
Needed in depth focus group without them being there.
How involved do the students feel in activities in the School of Education?

Different doing focus groups online - affordances and challenges.
Used Adobe Connect. Facilitator echos some questions.
Multidimensional focus group. Participants could also discuss with each other, and with researcher, over personal chat.
Guidelines - rehearsal, drop-in session, beforehand - recording of everything; can integrate their video into a transcription.

Temitayo Abinusawa - Social Networking and innovation

Technical background. How organisations use IT to promote activities.
Social networking - Internet was loads of words, chaos. Make sense of the words, then you can innovate. Can create products and services to meet needs. Good ideas that need funding. People discuss ideas online. Organisations are looking for new ideas too. Organisation can search the Web for ideas to create innovation.

Outcomes: organisations can create more for less.
Feedback is consumer interaction that takes place on the Internet. Dell IdeaStorm - turn your ideas into reality.

Openness is important, not exploitation. (Seems to be reward focussed, rather than transparent exchange culture, query).
People don't read t&c so think they're being exploited.

Evelyn McElhinney - Social virtual worlds: a new place for the avatar researcher

Focus groups in Second Life with avatars collecting, sat in chairs like IRL.
Most people aren't roleplaying, their avatars are just themselves.

Closing Discussion

Ethics

Commercial research is sometimes ahead with digital methods practices. Things happening one end aren't being noticed by other end. Need to communicate and look out for each other. Mixed methods research.

Digital methods need legitamising to be taken seriously. Sometimes people not knowing much about it can help to get stuff done.

Read my complete notes from day one, and complete notes from day two.

The 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin in December was broadly a discussion about real-world applications of Open Data.  Lots of practice, less theory.  Despite this (or perhaps because of this, now I think about it) it wasn't as technical as I expected.  Felix Sasaki [1] talked about some basic technicalities of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, kind of the first things you'd learn if you were studying it in a structured way, and I heard a lot of people afterwards complaining that that had been too technical.

Importantly, there was a real message of getting things done at this event, and plenty of evidence that a world built on Open Data is not an idealistic pipe dream, but a reality right now.  Challenges are being articulated, and solutions are being created, and problems are being overcome.

I stress this particularly because a couple of sceptics who weren't at the conference tweeted things along the lines of "Sounds like your conference is a bunch of idealist hippies preaching to the choir…"  A genuine concern, but what's really exciting is that this definitely wasn't the case.  It was instead a bunch of realist technologists with the expertise and influence to actively overcome barriers to improving the world.

Open Data is about social change and empowerment.  It is about accountability of organisations with massive influence over the lives of ordinary people.  It is not about an abandonment of personal privacy, or everybody knowing everything about everyone else.

It should go without saying (yet it still needs to be said) that it is not appropriate to blindly make all data available to everyone about every aspect of everybody's life.  But what if you had access to all of the data anyone had ever collected about your life?  Think about purchase history (shop loyalty cards, travel tickets), online activities (searches, browsing history, social networking).  All this stuff is being stored anyway, all over the place.  Often by organisations who fully intend to profit from it, presumably with your unwitting consent.  They went to the trouble of collecting it, but you went to the trouble of providing it.  It's your data too.  What could you do with it (or hire a software developer to do with it)?  Then imagine you had access to the same data from everyone in your town, aggregated and anonymised, and visualised in a nice way.  Maybe you could team up with your neighbours for cheaper bulk food purchases?  Maybe you'd realise that others had similar hobbies or problems nearby, and could form special interest or support groups?  Reduce costs by sharing transport to similar destinations (or just have some company on the journey)?

There's so much potential within data that's already held.

The UK government's Midata initiative is a massive step in the right direction [3] toward compelling commercial enterprises to hand over machine-readable datasets to consumers upon request.

In Slovakia and Kenya (and possibly others, but these were the ones that came up), there is a constitutional right to data held by the government.  Not without loopholes and other problems, of course [5, 2].

One of the obvious problems is convincing large organisations that hold lots of data (like commercial enterprise and governments) of the circumstances in which it would be in everybody's best interest to release (some of) it.  Reasons they don't include a lack of understanding of the benefits; disproportionate assessment of risks; aversion to change; a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure; "data hugging syndrome" [2]; licencing issues; outdated business models.

Nigel Shadbolt's experience says that large organisations who open data always see benefits.  It's always worth the effort.  When the data is there, suddenly developers start doing things with it; applications appear, many unexpected, and usually free.  He stressed that it's important to have a stockpile of success stories in case you need to convince someone in charge of the value of Open Data, and his favourite one was the publication of MRSA rates in hospitals (resulting in sharing of good practice, and an 85% reduction in MRSA over two years).  See a list at the end of this post for all of the success stories I came across over the course of the two days.

There were lots of discussions about the users or audiences of Open Data, and the various different roles people can have.  Most consumers of Open Data are developers, and 'ordinary people' see the data via an application.  Many won't know (or care) about the source of the data that powers the app, even if it about them.  Many will, and trust must be built for people see the value that such apps could bring to their day to day lives.  Ideally, releasing a dataset would be part of an ecosystem, rather than a one-time thing.  Data providers should value consumer feedback, and commit to good quality, up-to-date data.  Rufus Pollock wonders why every dataset doesn't have a public issue tracker, and notes that poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hack events [4].

A successful Open Data world needs partnership between the public, media and organisations.  All of these parties need educating on appropriate combinations of the realistic potential of Open Data, and the technicalities of releasing and using it.  Michael Hörz [6] discussed the journalist perspective on Open Data; they're desperate for data about everything, and often manage to get hold of it.  But they find themselves begging for spreadsheets or CSV files, because what they get given are PDFs.  Eugh!  Yet they're not asking for Linked Data formats?  Which means, presumably, that after they've been through the trouble of extracting data from PDFs, they're putting it in a spreadsheet or something, and there's still a whole level of usefulness missing.  And I assume that's because they don't know otherwise, or perhaps don't have the resources to learn even if they're aware of the possibilities.  Similar sorts of reasons that they're being given PDFs by organisations in the first place.

So awareness, and easily digestable educational resources (how about SchoolOfData.org) need to be promoted.

Now then, about those success stories...  This list includes data publishing projects, groups and apps that have been built on Open Data.

• The Berlin Open Data Portal (100 datasets)
• Open Cities EU (various OD working groups)
• EuroCities (OD working group)
• OKFN OD working group
• Czech Republic Open Data Portal (171 datasets)
• Amsterdam Open Data Portal (137 datasets)
• Adopt A Hydrant (public upkeep of local area)
• Slovakia Open Data Portal (~52 datasets)
• Other version of Slovakia Open Data Portal.. (45 datasets)
• zNasichDani (links between businesses and Slovakia government)
• Cena Statu (Slovakia governement spending visualisations)
• OtvorenéZmluvy (Slovakia state profitability)
• Restart Slovensko (OD hack competition)
• Open Trip Planner (journey planning platform, deployed across 12 countries)
• FairPhone (pushing for ethically sourced smartphones)
• Locatable (where to live in London)
• Placr.mobi (public transport and venues in London)
• Mastodon C (green cloud computing)
• Apps for Amsterdam (OD hack competition)
• Apps For Democracy (Amsterdam gov't focussed OD hack)
• Kenya Open Data Portal (531 datasets(!))
• Farm Subsidy (EU spending on farm subsidies)
• Gapminder (Global data trends visalised)
• Europe Open Data Portal (>800 datasets)

Finally, I highlighted in my notes quite a lot of things that I need to find out more about.  A lot of them are technology or platforms for publishing or sharing Open Data, and various standards or studies I need to read in more detail.

I have a couple of questions to ponder on, too:

There's a massive focus around hacks (more often than not one off events) as a way of using and promoting Open Data.  What other ways are there?  What will the path to a deeper integration of Open Data in society look like?

There are lots of datasets and vocabularies about public services and society, as well as science and education.  What arts, culture and media datasets are out there?  (And what has been done with them?)  Ooh, or online social interactions?  Maybe I'll do a survey.

[1] Prof. Dr. Felix Sasaki, keynote: "Linked Open Data @ W3C-Vocabularies, Working Groups, Usage Scenarios."
[2] Prof. Dr. Simon M. Onywere, talk: "The Kenya Open Data Incubator Project – Outreach to Research Community."
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/midata-2012-review-and-consultation via Nigel Shadbolt
[4] Dr. Rufus Pollock, keynote: "Open Data, Building the Ecosystem"
[5] Peter Hanečák, talk: "Open Data and Open Government Partnership in Slovakia."
[6] Michael Hörz, talk: "Open Data in Local Journalism: An Excel file?"

December 6th, 2012.

Notes as I scrawled them.  Read a proper review.  Purple is calls to action for myself.

Rufus Pollock - Open Data, Building the Ecosystem


Open API is a contradiction.  
An API is not open (though still valuable) but not the same as bulk open data.
Should we open governments?  So much is hidden.
Ultimately a lot of it is about in/justice (debts paid off by younger generations).

Open spending
- only 30% of departments are up to date - can keep checking who's updating their stuff.
- but sometimes more up to date that government's own records - they use it themselves.

Getting the data is only the beginning.  Need a platform.

Getting citizens, journalists and government to work together.

Why doesn't every dataset have a public issue tracker?  This is what he'd like to see most.

The process is important.

Digital doesn't run out.  That's why open makes so much sense.

FourSquare uses OSM.

Average consumers won't see raw open data - but via products and services.

Next?  Building communities.  Takes time to nurture.  publicdata.eu.

We'll go from hackdays to deep integration.  Toy vs. core datasets.

Geodata is mature.

SchoolOfData.org.  Data analysis, programming, training.
- Teachathons better than hackathons.

Should have access to all our own data - travel (Oyster), shopping (loyalty cards), social.
- Would like to control who uses it.
- Compare with others (aggregate).  Only companies can do that.
- Some people will choose to publish/open their own data.  Even if it's a few people, still lots of data.

Open Data = Platform; !Commodity
- Build on it rather than sell it (and let others build on it)
- Already seeing people building companies/making money on this principle.

Ecosystem.  Need feedback.  Poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hacks.

Datagov census dashboard - who has what out.
There's no gov. data that's come back cleaned up from the community (even though people are almost certainly cleaning this data up).

Be patient.  Needed to wait for pressure to build up (why it's happening now).  Low investment.

Way to fund production of gov. data (or combination of):
- Charge users
- Taxpayer revenue
- Charge creators (most attractive)
  eg. Companies Register data; more efficient to charge people registering companies a bit extra, people won't be deterred from registering a company because of this.  Basically, add to existing fees for things people will pay anyway.

Open data saves lives!  Heart surgery data caused improvements.

MiData (more from Nigel)
Supermarkets not very good, but some big companies involved.

December 5th, 2012.

Notes as I scrawled them.  See here for a proper review.  Purple is calls to action for myself.

Dr. Philipp Mueller - Openness as a means, not an end
I missed the opening keynote.  His slides are here.

Dr. Wolfgang Both - One Year Open Data Portal Berlin

Open cities EU - Nov '10 - Apr '13.
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Helsinki, Paris, Rome.
Berlin responsible for open data working group; several working groups (OD is just one).

EuroCities

Knowledge Society Open Data working group
Guidebook for cities, 30 pages so far.

Open Data Berlin
Portal Sept '11
Publication
Press conference Feb '12
Short term: Political agenda, budget, working group.
Mid term: Harmonize data formats.
Long term: Legal framework (Berlin can't decide laws by itself, for whole EU).

Open Data Day May '11, '12 and '13 in prep.

WG open traffic hack (29th Nov '12)
- 150 programmers with transport data.

Portal stats
Are users interested?  Peak at start.  Other peaks for hacks, Apps4D contest (Nov '11)
Possibility for feedback - questions, advice, ideas.
100 datasets; daten.berlin.de

WG 2012
- formats and metadata
- licensing and user rules
- education for staff (lectures, this is new for many working in public sector)
- organisting and processing
WG 2013
- evaluation of OD studies
- Recommendations
- Exchange with other cities.

(Q&A)
Datasets were volunteered, not selected
- But are looked at for quality, machine readable, looking for wide range of topics of interest to public.
- Want open, transparent process for publishing.
- Communicate with media as well as community.

Licenses
- Heuristic... no legal advice available because it hasn't been done before.  Many possibilities; for opening data for individuals, CC was familiar to Internet community, includes origin data (CC-BY).  Some smaller datasets are licensed for non-commercial usage.  Discussion still ongoing.
Knows other cities will follow / copy there example whatever they do!

Jan Schallabok - Right to Freedom of Information on Enterprises


Call for open enterprise data.

Why?
Scenarios, set a timeline:
2015 - personal search
2016 - data disasters (identity hack)
2017 - pictures omnipresent, know all about everyone becomes normal
2019 - Google Glass on market

If there's no data on you, things don't work (eg. personalised advertising)
Society down the drain if it didn't open data (Switzerland in the story didn't open data, so Swiss woman moving to German couldn't settle in easily).

Moving away from clear facts towards probabalistic.
eg.
Google Translate fed by open (input) data, but algorithms aren't open.
Siri - enriches dataset from Web (he said Google search?)
OpenStreetMap (counter example)
If there was more data, everyone would use OSM paradigm (eg. government).

Harm businesses?
..maybe.  But more damage in the long run?

Need to make businesses move away from using peoples' data.   Like, we work for facebook.  our data, not theirs.

Data protection:
by law, data subject has rights to know logic involved
but
as long as it doesn't affect trade secrets

Privacy implications
'Anonymous' data can be used to identify people.  See AOL search database fail.
When can datasets go public?
Weather data can be personal data (no time for example..)

For the second year, I'm tutoring PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to MSc Design and Digital Media students for the Dynamic Web Design course in Edinburgh College of Art.

Sometimes this makes me feel like a wizard.

I'm supervising (created the brief, overseeing and guiding a group of 6 MSc students, grading) a Digital Media Studio Project in the Edinburgh College of Art.

I challenged my lot to use responsive web design techniques in a unique and inventive way.  You can see what they're up to here.

As a farewell present to Beth, who was vacating sunny Scotland for the harsh and unforgiving shores of the US, I made a squirrel.  But not just any squirrel.

A Morrissquirrel.

That's Morrissey-squirrel.  Don't question it.

I largely followed this pattern for the normal squirrel parts, then improvised to Moz it up.