The Political Futures Tracker

I usually avoid politics, I certainly don't tend to air my political thoughts in public. Of course if you live in the UK then you can't really avoid politics at the moment as we now have just a month to go before the election. Not only will I be bombarded with leaflets and adverts but even my work is political at the moment. We've been working with Nesta to develop the Political Futures Tracker which "tells us the top political themes, how positive or negative people feel about them, and how far parties and politicians are looking to the future". I've been spending a lot of time on this recently writing code, analysing data, and producing nice visualizations.

Most of the work has been looking at how politicians use Twitter, but we are also analyzing the party manifestos as they become available. So if you want some (hopefully) unbiased analysis have a look at the six blog posts we've published so far and keep an eye out for some live analysis this evening (George's tweets are probably the best live source).

Neglected

Looking back over the posts for 2014 it seems this blog has been rather neglected. In fact I've made just 14 posts. It isn't that I'm not blogging as much as I used to but that my posts are now spread across three blogs. In total I've actually written 167 posts; six over on my code and electronics blog and 147 on model railways. I also joined Twitter at the end of 2013 and so have posted some items there over the last year as well. It does mean though, that I have a fair amount of catching up to do on this blog, so just as I did last year, I'll fill this post with brief glimpse of the rest of my 2014 adventures.

Looking back over the year the most interesting things (from a blog post of view) have probably been the trips away with work, as I've had the opportunity to visit some really great places. I visited four new places but only blogged, briefly, about the trip to Kaiserslautern. The first trip of the year though was in February when I went to Luleå in northern Sweden.

One of the main reasons for holding the meeting in Luleå in February was that there was a chance to see the northern lights. Unfortunately the weather was rainy rather than very cold and clear so I'll have to wait to see the northern lights. I did, however, get to experience a 15km ride over an ice road from Luleå out to the island of Hindersön. The trip was at night (we had dinner at the Jopikgården restaurant on the island which included reindeer steak and cloudberries) so there wasn't much of a view, which was probably a good thing as it was scary enough as it was. As we left solid ground and were driven onto the ice we were told to undo our seat belts as it's easier to escape from a sinking car without them on! If that wasn't bad enough part way over there was a little moment where the car wasn't pointing the right way, and our driver admitted he'd never driven an ice road before and it wasn't his car. It was certainly an interesting evening.

The following morning, before the meeting started, a small group of us managed to also make it out to Gammelstad which is a UNESCO world heritage site just outside Luleå. Apparently it's the best preserved church town and consists of 424 wood-built houses around the central church. Traditionally the he houses were only used on Sundays and during religious festivals by those members of the congregation who couldn't return home the same day due to the distance and travelling conditions.

After the icy cold of northern Sweden a trip to Turin in June made a nice change. It being Italy there was an awful lot of good food and coffee, although strangely I didn't have any pizza, but the highlight of the trip had to be the evening visit we made to the Egyptian Museum. Apparently it houses the worlds second largest collection of Egyptian artifacts after the museum in Cairo; it certainly was very impressive with lots to see and take in. Certainly well worth a visit if you are ever in Turin.

October saw the final work trip of the year to a new destination, this time Istanbul in Turkey. This was my first trip to Turkey and was certainly interesting. First of all Istanbul is HUGE. I don't think I've ever seen such a large sprawling city, which means I saw only a very tiny part of it, but what I saw was great. It's the first time I've seen the boundary between two continents. We had dinner at a restaurant on the European edge of the Bosphorus looking across the water to Asia. I also managed an afternoon of sightseeing and with a colleague in which we visited both the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia as well as sampling the delights of Turkish ice cream which is chewy and doesn't melt in the heat!

I've already blogged about some of our holiday on Skye in August including dolphins, seals, and Loch Coruisk but it's also worth mentioning that we had a wonderful lunch at the Kinloch Lodge Hotel; the first time I've eaten food that comes with a Michelin star!

Strangely I also seem to have spent quite a while fixing things this year, I even spent about 45 minutes on Boxing Day replacing the door lock on a dishwasher. My favourite fix of the year had to be the new bracket to fix the fridge door. I've already blogged about this, but I thought it worth mentioning agin especially as it made Shapeways review of the year blog post!

I also fixed a toilet using a piece of gaffer tape after it stopped flushing. It turns out that part of he mechanism is a rather flimsy plastic sheet, which can easily tear over time and when it does it can no longer lift the water to flush the toilet. Fortunately it's easy to repair... if you can get the toilet apart.

So it was an interesting year even if I didn't blog about a lot of it. Hopefully 2015 will be just as fun for us all!

I Know Where The Bodies Are Buried

On a recent work trip to Kaiserslautern in Germany we had a guided tour of some of the old remains in the city centre. This photo shows where a number of old graves were discovered during previous archeological excavations just outside the modern town hall.

Last Year's Loose Ends

So the world has moved on into 2014, and yet since August I've managed just a single post on this blog. It isn't that I haven't done anything interesting since August, but for some reason I've just never got around to blogging about what I have done. I suppose at least part of the problem is having multiple blogs, and now a twitter account as well, which means that when I do have something to share this blog isn't always the most appropriate place. So to make up for the lack of posts I'm going to do one long(ish) post that will hopefully bring me up to date.

After my trip to Gent in August the rest of the summer was fairly quiet; no work or personal trips and nothing particularly interesting to report from the garden either. Things started to pick up in mid-September when we had visitors to stay for the weekend of the Penistone agricultural show, for which the weather behaved. If the summer had been quite though, I made up for that in October.

First up was a trip to Thessaloniki in Greece for a ForgetIT project meeting. This was my first trip to Greece and it was definitely an interesting place to visit even if I did keep getting mixed up with the different alphabets (note to self: write things down for taxi drivers in the local alphabet). Half the fun of these work trips is the socializing with other participants and this time was no different; the photo shows some of us watching the fish in an unbelievably clear ocean on the first evening before dinner (thanks to Søren Schaffstein for the photo, especially as I didn't take any of any interest). As usual I didn't have that much time in which to explore, but I did experience a magnitude 4.5 earthquake on the final morning; I was in a rather decrepit lift at the time which certainly added to the experience!

Given my schedlue for October it was unfortunate that I managed to pick up some form of throat infection while in Greece that left me barely able to talk. I was fine when I boarded the place home in Thessaloniki but by the time I arrived in Munich I could hardly talk at all, even copious volumes of weissbier while waiting for the plane to Manchester failed to improve things.

Five days after getting back from Greece, and with a throat that still didn't want me to speak, I headed to London to take part in the BBC #newsHACK event at Shoreditch Town Hall. I've already blogged about this event over on one of my other blogs, so I won't bore you with the technical details, but I will point you at our hack/demo and possibly more interestingly show you the video of the pitch session: If you don't want to watch all 27 demos, you can skip to around 55 minutes to see our presentation; including hearing how bad my voice was when I tried to answer a question.

I ended October with a visit to the National Railway Museum in York for a one in a lifetime chance to see the six remaining A4 steam locomotives together (two of them are usually to be found in North America). As with the #newsHACK event I blogged about this trip elsewhere, so I'll just include the obligatory photo at this point.

October also saw me being paid for the very first time for the 3D models I have on sale via Shapeways; my first sale was back in January 2013, but they only pay out when you've made at least $30. I won't claim this as profit, as I spent more than I've made on test prints, but it's a very good start! In fact someone ordered another model this morning so hopefully 2014 will be profitable.

November was again mostly taken up with work, but we did take a few days off to have a long weekend in Warwickshire so we could attend both days of the National Poultry Show at Stoneleigh Park. I always thought that it was interesting looking at marque worth of chickens at the Penistone show, but I think I was all poultried out by around lunchtime on the first day. I'm not entirely sure how many chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys we looked at but according to the programme there were nearly 7000 entires plus 500 sale pens, and as some of those will have contained more than one bird you can begin to imagine just how much there was to see. The hope was that by the end of the weekend we would have a much better idea of which breed(s) of chickens we would like to keep once we have sorted out the garden, but if anything I think it just gave us more options! Still it was a fun weekend.

December mostly saw us getting ready for Christmas and visiting relatives, and strangely I haven't taken many (if any) photos so there isn't really much to show for our travels. Anyway that brings the blog nicely up to date ready for whatever 2014 may throw at me. I hope you've all had a great holiday and wish you all the best for the new year!

Gent

I realised yesterday that I never showed you anything of my trip to Belgium apart from a beer glass, so here is a panorama I shot from one of Gent's many bridges in the centre of the old town.

As you can see it wasn't exactly the ideal time of year for really appreciating the architecture as a lot of it was hidden behind the stages set up for the music festival. On the plus side there was plenty for me to do in the evenings, besides drinking Belgium beer.

And The Missing Letters Were....

So the missing letters from the last post were v and l which should allow you to spell the name of a well known Belgian beer; Duvel. I was assuming that at least one of my readers would drink enough Belgian beer to recognise the distinctive font used on Duvel bottels and glasses but I was guessing I was a little over optimistic.

I was trying to spell Duvel as I'm currently in Gent, Belgium (I've been giving a GATE training course to a great bunch of people at CrossLang) and happened to arrive in the middle of their yearly arts/music festival. The hotel I'm staying at has a Duvel sponsored bar, and for each Duvel you buy you get two tokens which represent bottle tops with a letter on them. If you manage to spell out Duvel then you get a free commemorative Duvel beer glass.

It took me two nights and some trading of tokens but I now have my glass and lasting proof that I was here. Of course now I have to hope that I can take the glass on the plane home within my hand luggage, a) so that it will survive and b) as I don't have any checked luggage with me (after my trip to Marrakech I try and avoid checking luggage unless I really need to).

Give Me A 'P' Please Bob

Yet again a work trip turns interesting; although technically I'm not missing a 'P', but I am short too letters.

The Physics of Rubbish Cheese

I'm not sure where I'd end up come a revolution, but this is the view from where I'm currently sat; a hotel room in Hannover.

I had great fun trying to translate the message this morning. As you might have guessed the three possible translations for quark are the elementary particle, a type of cheese, and a concept that seems to cover nonsense, rubbish and piddling little details. I'm guessing they weren't refering to physics or cheese which leaves the message reading "The revolution is great; everything else is rubbish."

Political messages aside, I'm in Hannover for the kick-off meeting of a new project I'll be working on called ForgetIT; the project is so new it doesn't even seem to have a website I can point you at. I'll get a better understanding of the project over the next few days of meetings, but essentially it's about archiving digital data, taking into account duplication and context, to allow for some things to be forgotten, while ensuring that everything else is preserved with enough context to enable it to be understood if/when it is needed in the future. That of course is an over simplification of around 100 pages of proposal that resulted in the funding being awarded! What makes this project different from the others I've worked on in the past, is that I'm going to be the lead researcher from Sheffield. This is great in that I'll have a bigger say in the direction of some of the work, although I'll also be responsible if it goes pear shaped. Wish me luck?

Seven of Fifty-One

I am Seven of Fifty-One. I know it doesn't sound quite as good as Seven of Nine, but allow me to explain.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember that part of the work I've been doing over the last few years has been related to cancer studies (I've blogged about it here, here, here, and here). Specifically I've been involved with trying to reduce the cost of performing Genome Wide Association Studies, by reducing the number of samples required. We have been doing this by mining the published literature to try and determine the prior probability that a specific single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) will be related to specific cancers.

Essentially the idea boils down to this (although I have to admit in advance that neither the genetics or the statistics are my strong points). If a SNP occurs near a gene that has been shown to be involved in either the specific cancer under investigation or in the healthy functioning of the organ/tissue that the cancer affects then it is more likely that this SNP might be the cause of the cancer than if it occurs somewhere else in the genome. We calculate the probability that this is the case by mining the published literature and when these priors are combined with results from both healthy controls and diseased patients the statistical power of the tests are improved. As the power of the test is improved we can determine that a SNP is related to a cancer using less samples than previously. While this will save money it is especially important when investigating rare forms of cancer where it might be difficult or impossible to ever assemble the required number of patients for testing using the standard approach.

We'd previously shown that the approach worked, but only by going back and reproducing previous results using less data. Now, however, we've used the same approach to find a new cause for cancer! The results have just been published in the journal PLoS ONE: Using Prior Information from the Medical Literature in GWAS of Oral Cancer Identifies Novel Susceptibility Variant on Chromosome 4 - the AdAPT Method. PLoS ONE is an open access journal so you can all go and read the article if you want to!

By this point you might be wondering what this all has to do with the title and opening paragraph (and I can't say I'd blame you). Well I'm author number seven of fifty-one.

Where Shall We Play Today?

While Where Shall We Play Today? by Gilly Meredith isn't a book I remember from my childhood (unlike Bryony), but I'm fairly certain that both Hedgehog and Mouse would have known that an abandoned iron works wasn't a safe place to play. Unfortunately I'm neither a mouse or a hedgehog, so I thought it was a splendid idea, especially at night!

Last week I was in Duisburg (it's a ten minute train journey from Düsseldorf airport) to attend a Khresmoi project meeting. We had the usual project dinner on the Tuesday evening (excellent food and wine), but on the Monday night one of the local organizers (thanks Sascha) had organized a sightseeing trip to Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

I hadn't looked at the park's website so I didn't really know what we were going to see. The only hint I'd had was someone mentioning that it was built on an old industrial complex. We arrived at the park around 8pm as the sun was beginning to set and it was clear that this wasn't a flat and green park land, but rather the remains of a substantial factory complex -- in fact an iron works.

By the time we had found our guide for the evening it was getting very dark. Fortunately the buildings are lit up at night in a multi-coloured light-show so in most places (but definitely not all) you can at least see where you are putting your feet. We started with a general introduction to the park, where we found out that the iron works closed 27 years ago and that the park officially opened in 1994 and now contains one of the biggest indoor scuba diving centres in the old gas storage tank. Of course diving wouldn't be fun without things to explore so there is a ship wreck and a crashed airplane, a few cars and an artificial reef! Leaving the tank behind we headed further into the works.

The first thing to notice once you head into the works is that a park such as this would never be allowed in the UK. Given that we seem to need Health and Safety signs for almost everything (including exposed tree roots in a forest) I'm sure an abandoned iron works being made open to the public would be completely out of the question. There are plenty of places to trip, fall and bang your head, especially at night and yet the park is open 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Even access to almost the top of one of the blast furnaces isn't restricted (it's a good couple of hundred feet up in the air). The stairs are steep and exposed, and when you do eventually make it to the top there is just a simple rail around the platform (which seems to be a favorite place for teenagers to gather for a quiet beer). Don't get me wrong I thought it was wonderful, I'm just surprised there aren't more accidents.

As I've already mentioned the buildings themselves are lit up at night to form a large artwork that can be seen for miles around, but some of the buildings are also used for temporary art displays, including what our guide referred to as the floating shower caps!

We spent around over two hours exploring the park and it was a really good evening. I didn't think I'd ever better my night time wonder around Berlin for project meeting entertainment, but this was better. I think this was partly because you never quite knew what to expect around the next corner, while in Berlin you have a good idea of the sites you will visit. I'll finish with one last photo showing the majority of the factory (including the crocodile crane). If you look at the large version then you can see the steps up the side of the blast furnace which gives you some idea of how exposed it was and how high we ended up.

Another Room, Another View

As I recently mentioned, my job has changed slightly over the last few weeks as I've moved from working on LarKC to working on Khresmoi. Khresmoi has just finished it's first year and this week we are having a short meeting to discuss the feedback that was obtained at the review and to plan the work for the next year. The meeting is being held at Charles University in Prague and so I've had the pleasure of spending two nights in a city I've never visited before.

There will be a couple more posts about Prague once I get home (I fly back this afternoon), but I thought I'd show you the view from my hotel room: the west end of the Charles Bridge.

Moving On

The research group I work as part of gets most of it's funding from external sources; government grants or companies wanting R&D. This means that while the style of work stays fairly consistent the actual tasks can vary widely depending on which project I'm currently working on. Since I joined the group at the start of 2009 most of my time has been dedicated to the LarKC project. My recent trip to Vienna, however, marked the end of LarKC and the reviewers from the EU were highly impressed with all the work that has been achieved. The work package I was most involved with helped discover a new genetic mutation which we proved causes oral cancer, and they couldn't help but be impressed by that! Actually I'm pretty impressed by it as well. Finding a new cause for cancer wasn't something I ever imagined being involved with. We are currently in the process of writing up the finding for a journal article so I'm sure I'll tell you more about it when that work is done. LarKC has also allowed me to make good use of my passport with trips to Bled, Milan, Berlin, Lyon, Munich, Sofia, Innsbruck, Beijing, Lund (which I seem not to have blogged about at all), and of course Vienna. Of course, while I do get to briefly see the countries we visit I spend most of my time with the other people who worked on LarKC, and here we all are (well those of us who were at the final meeting in Vienna).

So now that LarKC has finished I'm moving on to work on another large EU funded project called Khresmoi. Khresmoi is about medical information analysis and retrieval and has been running for a year already. From discussions in Sheffield it looks like my work will be similar to stuff I'd been doing for LarKC. I'm sure I'll have a much better understanding in a weeks time as I'm attending a project meeting next week in Prague, so it doesn't look as if my passport will be getting a rest anytime soon!

My Hotel Room Had A ...

A couple of weeks ago I spent three nights at a hotel in Richmond while I helped to give a training course at The National Archives. Like all good British hotel rooms it had coffee making facilities (I so miss these when I travel abroad) but, unlike every other hotel room I've ever stayed in, it also had it's own conservatory!

Unfortunately I wasn't in my hotel room for most any of the day during which the sun would stream into the conservatory, although it was pleasant to sit in even when the sun had set. It just seems so odd to add a conservatory to a hotel room. Surely most people, most of the time, are going to be out of their room during the day?

LarKC, The Movie

On a number of occasions I've tried to explain to people what it is that I do for a living. Telling people that I'm a University Researcher working in Computer Science gives most people all the information they need -- in other words they are bored already! Some people, however, make the fatal mistake of asking questions such as so what do you actually do? what is your research about? This post is for those people.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is called LarKC, which stands for the Large Knowledge Collider. As part of the dissemination activities the project funded a short movie to try and explain what we are doing. So heat up the popcorn, turn down the lights and enjoy "LarKC, The Movie"!

Click To Play

So now you know. Although I'm not entirely sure that will have cleared things up for anyone outside the semantic web community.

The LarKC platform can be used for many different, large scale processing tasks. I'm working on one of the use cases along with people from International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Specifically, we are looking into ways of using previous biomedical publications to improve the efficiency (and hence save money) of genome wide association studies.

I bet you wish you'd never asked!

Tian'an Men Square

So after feasting on duck we were taken on a brief walk aorund the area near Tian'an Men Square. The guide started by walking us down Qian Men Dajie (Emperor's Avenue). I'm not sure what this street was like before the Olympics were held in Beijing, but it is now a soulless shopping street. Everything had been torn down and re-built for the Olympics -- the architecture was different but not particularly interesting.

For me, The highlight of the walk was my first glimpse of the (in)famous Tian'an Men Square,.

Unfortunately it is closed at night so we had to make do with simply looking in across the barrier. Apparently the square is closed at night because it costs too much to police it to the level the state requires.

What you can see in the photo is actually just the south end of the square. On the left is Zhengyang Men whilst on the right is Mao's Mausoleum. The famous Tian'an Men ('men' means gate) from which Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic, and from which the square takes it's name, is actually at the north end of the square. Unfortunately it wasn't lit up and so I didn't manage to get any good photos.

The project meeting I'm in Beijing for actually finished at lunch time and I don't fly home until Friday (it was cheaper to stay longer than to take an earlier flight) so I'm hoping to do quite a lot of exploring in the two days I have left. Tomorrow there is an organized tour to see the Great Wall, and on Thursday I intend to try and visit the Forbidden City and Tian'an Men square during daylight. Hopefully this will give me lots more to blog about.

The Local Delicacy: Peking Duck

So did anyone have a guess as to where I am this week? I'll give you a hint: Peking Duck is the local delicacy. Yes I'm spending the week in Beijing, China.

Last night was the social meal and we went out for proper Peking Duck! We went to the famous Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant in the center of Beijing and had a fantastic meal.

I'm not exactly sure what all of the things I ate were, but I can recognise roast duck pancakes and (as our waitress named them) "Beijing Hamburgers". I did photograph my attempts at making pancakes  but the photo in this post shows the better examples the waitress made up to show us how, which included rolling the pancake using chopsticks (I rolled mine by hand). Incredible Dexterity!

As well as serving fabulous food the restaurant was interesting in a number of other ways. There are lots of photos of famous politicians who have dined there when visiting Beijing, including George Bush (the first one), Nixon and Ted Heath. But more interestingly was the size of the restaurant. We were served in room 502. Just like a hotel the first number dictated the floor we were on. It really was huge.

To walk of a little of dinner we then had a short guided walk around the area near Tian'an Men Square, but more on that in a later post.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3. Hopefully you can all hear me?

I'm away with work this week and I've had to jump through some hoops in order to access my blog. I think everything should work but I thought it wise to check before I wrote a long post only to find I couldn't publish.

So where am I you ask? I'll get to that in a later post but for now see if you can at least work out the country given the labeling on the coke can.

I Am Still Here, Honest!

Sorry I haven't blogged much recently. It's been a busy time at home and at work. I'm not working on three different projects at once at work which requires a little bit of juggling and some time working in evenings to keep on top of everything. This week I have to spend Wednesday and Thursday in London helping to finish up one project but then we have two weeks of annual leave so hopefully I'll have lots to blog about.

Anyway if you want to know about the project I've just started working on, then you could read the press release.

A Room With A View

Given that we don't go around wasting tax payers money booking expensive hotel rooms when we travel for work I usually end up looking out over a car park or at the wall of another building. I was, therefore, surprised by the view I got when I pulled back the curtains of my room at the Park Hotel Vitosha in Sofia.

Certainly a better view than I had the first night of the trip!

A Night At The Airport

As you know from my last post I spent Sunday night trying to sleep on the chairs by the departure gate at Munich airport. Notice I said trying to sleep, those chairs really are not comfortable. Anyway I thought I'd post a few of the photos I took that evening showing the departure board, my pillow and blanket and the view from my bed.

So if you want something fun to do then I'd definitely suggest A Night At The Opera or A Day At The Races and most certainly not A Night At The Airport!