http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/index.cfm?forumid=14 en-US FuseTalk Standard Edition 3.2 Build 80405 Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52313 2013-05-01T11:32:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52313#comments 0
The newly released PA Statistics Yearbook for 2012 shows that the total value of consumer e-book sales increased by 134 per cent on 2011 to reach £216m. The massive success of titles like the Fifty Shades trilogy meant that fiction played a big part, rising by 149 per cent and contributing £172m.

When all formats, including audiobooks, downloads and online subscriptions, are considered, digital sales increased by a more modest 66 per cent. That accounted for 12 per cent of the £3.3bn overall value of printed and electronic products, continuing a trend that saw digital taking a 5 per cent share in 2010 and 8 per cent in 2011.

Readers aren't abandoning print completely though. Despite buying more fiction electronically they also increased their spending on paper copies of novels by 3 per cent to just over £500m.

The figures show that British publishing is a healthy industry, PA chief executive Richard Mollet commented, with the continued increase in digital sales illustrating the shift of readers to e-book reading.

"Such growth has been achieved as British publishers have been able to invest in new exciting, innovative products and in great authors thanks to the strong framework provided by copyright law, which continues to be the cornerstone of stability for a creative industry like publishing," he said.

The data comes from around 270 publishers, representing 78 per cent of UK sales, who participate in the Association's on-going Sales Monitor scheme, and from its an annual digital survey.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52289 2013-04-29T13:52:04 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52289#comments 0 Alexandria in Virginia. Information about the Old Town Farmers' Market and left turn restrictions on King Street and Union Street tops the stories in 'What's New', but there's no mention of a unique title that's just been bestowed on the city and its people.

Amazon has named the residents of Alexandria (sister city to Dundee in Scotland, apparently) as the most well read in America in its new league table of the country's biggest consumers of the written word.

The chart's based on all book, magazine and newspaper sales, in print and electronic, since 1 June 2012. On a per capita basis, and considering only cities with a population greater than 100,000, Alexandrians beat Knoxville into second place, followed by Miami in third.

Situated on the western bank of the Potomac River, Alexandria is influenced by its proximity to Washington, DC, a few miles away to the north. Much of the population work for the federal civil service, military or defence contractors.

Why so shy about its victory? Well, this being Amazon, position is heavily influenced by Kindle sales and the three titles in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy turn out to be the runaway most popular book purchases behind Gillian Flynn's blockbuster relationship thriller Gone Girl. Maybe not the sort of thing that all those government engineers want you to know they're glued to on their commute to work.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52234 2013-04-25T15:28:30 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52234#comments 0


Designed to help audiences experience science and engineering through a combination of stand-up comedy, adventure, magic and mystery, the cabaret is the brainchild of Rhys Phillips, engineer, IET member and presenter of the eponymous show on Radio Cardiff where I pop up from time to time talking about new technology books.

Rhys somehow manages to fit all this in with his day job at the Lightning, Electrostatics & EMH Group at EADS UK, who are sponsoring the evening's entertainment at the National Museum of Wales.

It's going to be fun, he promises, but there's a serious side too. "The aim is to promote science, technology and engineering to a wider audience within the South Wales area. Wales' economy depends on a new uptake of these subjects which are currently experiencing low interest levels within the general public and young minds. This event aims to portray a variety of different science, technology and engineering related topics to a general audience in an interesting, entertaining and engaging way."

The acts, who are all performing for free, include neuroscientist and standup comedian Dr Dean Burnett, chemist Dr Rosie Coates, science junkie and adventurer Huw James, astronomer and 'Sky at Night' presenter Chris North, physicist Wendy Sadler, and systems engineer and professional magician Prof Jon Holt.

A bargain at £5 on the door, or only £4 if you book in advance at www.theiet.org/events/local/176809.cfm.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52218 2013-04-24T12:37:22 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52218#comments 0


The Romans are enjoying one of their periodic revivals in popular culture at the moment. I don't know how large the overlap is between viewers who enjoy reruns of I Claudius on BBC 4 as much as ITV 2's comedy series Plebs, but I fall in it. Timely then, that the British Museum's big summer exhibition, 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum', is on the same theme.

I was lucky enough to have the chance to look round, and can confirm that it definitely deserves the rave reviews it's been getting. Rather than being a collection of artefacts, this is a show that puts everything in context as part of daily life in the two cities two thousand years ago. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the people who lived and died in Pompeii and Herculaneum weren't as different as we might think. And when you've seen the various bits and pieces that survived the eruption of Vesuvius in their natural setting, whether as part of a street scene or interior of a middle-class home, the final casts of those who used them, captured at the point of death, packs a big emotional punch.

'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum' runs until 29 September. Tickets are selling fast, but may still be available at www.britishmuseum.org.

It won't carry the impact of seeing everything in person, but there's the chance to experience it through your tablet or smartphone with an associated app developed by Apadmi, the company responsible for the BBC Radio iPlayer app for iPhone.

After a short introductory video, the app offers the user a map of the Bay of Naples, with three main areas to explore - the two cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the volcano, Vesuvius. Touching on Pompeii or Herculaneum on the map takes the user through to the street plans, on which are plotted over 250 of the key objects featured in the exhibition. Users will be able to filter objects and their background information by theme; urban context, commerce, religion and beliefs, wealth and status, grooming and adornment, relaxing in luxury, entertaining, food and drink. Touching an object marker leads through to more information about the object and fully-zoomable high resolution images.

Each of the eight themes has an exclusive video introduction by the exhibition curator, Paul Roberts. A selection of star objects is accompanied by audio commentary from experts in Roman history: Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of Research, both at the University of Cambridge, and Amanda Claridge, Professor of Roman Archaeology at Royal Holloway.

Users can touch on the marker for Vesuvius to activate the interactive timeline that plots the devastating progress of the volcano in the 24 hours of the eruption. Based on an artist's impression of a typical street in both Pompeii and Herculaneum, the viewpoint shifts between the two cities as time progresses. An immersive soundscape brings the animation to life and illustrates how the two cities and their inhabitants met their end. Specially recorded excerpts from the first-hand account of Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption, provide the narrative.

At each key point in the timeline users can access additional information about the volcano and the eruption, the people who died, and the objects recovered from the sites 1,700 years later.

Users can follow the story after the eruption, exploring the re-discovery and excavation of the two cities, recent archaeology and the development of the British Museum exhibition itself.

The app's already available from the Apple Store at £3.99 for iPad or £1.99 for iPhone. Android users have to wait until 2 May for a £1.99 that works on selected phones. (For those who prefer a more traditional souvenir, there's a beautiful tie-in book at £45 in hardback or £25 in paperback.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52145 2013-04-19T16:49:00 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52145#comments 0 Tor, the science-fiction imprint of Pan Macmillan that publishes many of the UK's top SF authors, made the big decision to make all electronic versions of its books free of digital rights management.

It was a brave move, but one which Tor believed was essential for this genre. Writing in one of the special issues of Publishers Weekly brought out for this week's London Book Fair, editorial director Julie Crisp says that authors as well as readers had been expressing concern about the restrictions imposed by DRM.

"The genre community is close-knit, with a huge online presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do," she writes of the decision which Cory Doctorow described as signalling the beginning of the end of e-book format wars..

"We felt a strong sense that the reading experience for this tech-savvy, multi-device-owning readership was being inhibited by DRM, leaving our readers unable to reasonably and legally transfer ebook files between all the devices they had," Crisp adds. "We have very stringent anti-piracy controls in place. But DRM-protected titles are still subject o piracy, and we believe a great majority of readers are just as against piracy as we are."

If you agree, a raft of new titles and reissues released recently by Tor give you the chance to put your money where your mouth is if you prefer an electronic version to a paper one. (Or you could even buy both.)



For those who like their SF edgy, there's a new edition of Jeff Noon's Vurt out to mark the 20th anniversary of it winning the Arthur C Clarke Award, as well as a rerelease of 1995 sequel Pollen.

Both share characters and settings with the subsequent Automated Alice and Nymphomation, which actually come first in terms of fictional chronology, and revolve around an alternate reality accessed by sucking on various coloured feathers. Noon writes about the background to the series, and provides a track-listing of songs by The Fall, Buzzcocks and Sonic Youth among others that he thinks particularly resonate with it in a blog on the Tor website.



A more recent title getting a new lease of life is The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross, which brings together two previously published books, The Family Trade from 2004 and The Hidden Family from 2005.

Stross has been forthright about the problems of DRM, which he believes reduces readers' freedom and hampers competition. He spent ten years writing for Computer Shopper magazine and is the author of The Laundry Files, a series of thrillers about an ex IT consultant turned spy who works for a government agency that uses technology to fight occult threats.

The Bloodline Feud brings together the first two books in his Merchant Princes series, originally published as six titles between 2004 and 2010 and now being reissued as a three volume trilogy. Set in a world where some people have the ability to travel between parallel Earths with different levels of technology.

Stross explains the background to the series, and how the new versions presents the books as they were originally conceived, in a blog that gives a fascinating insight into the world of SF publishing.



Still with the trilogies, Neal Asher's Zero Point, out for the first time in paperback, is the second part of The Owner series, described by one reviewer as being "like a turbo-charged mix of Total Recall and 'The Bourne Identity'. With despotic world ruling organisation The Committee and its robotic enforcers in ruins following the end of the previous novel, various characters are vying to grab power..



If you prefer your SF no narrower in scope but with a bit less mayhem, Tor's sister imprint Pan has also brought out a new edition of Peter F Hamilton's 2002 novel Misspent Youth to coincide with publication in paperback of last year's Great North Road. The covers of both proclaim Hamilton as 'Britain's number one science fiction writer', and certainly deliver as far as scope and imagination are concerned.

The message of Misspent Youth is that you should be careful what you wish for. At the age of 78, Misspent Youth's inventor and philanthropist Jeff Baker is given the opportunity to become the first subject of a rejuvenation process that leaves him the body of a 20 year old. As he soon discovers though, gifts like that carry a huge price.

A Newcastle detective attending the scene of a brutal murder doesn't sound like the start of a science-fiction story, but Great North Road is set in the year 2142, and the events mirror those that happened 20 years earlier on the planet of St Libra, a tropical hideaway for billionaires. It's also the source of bio-fuel that's the lifeblood of Earth's economy in the 22nd century, so a vast expedition is mounted which soon finds itself cut off in the mysterious planet's rainforests.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52118 2013-04-18T15:48:33 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=52118#comments 0 Pythagoras' Trousers science and technology radio show gave me the chance to talk to host Rhys Phillips about a couple of new books that have caught my eye.



First up is The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan (Constable, £12.99, ISBN 978-1472101150), a study of the creatures that have terrified us over the course of thousands of years.

This isn't an attempt to work out whether or not dragons, werewolves and vampires actually exist. Kaplan takes it as read that they're all the result of mythmaking and Chinese whispers that have turned an encounter with the inexplicable into something that our imaginations so often try and convince us might just possibly be true.

Sea monsters and giant beasts are easily accounted for in terms of exaggerated tales. Kaplan looks also at why those tales persist, and what's behind less obvious monsters like the snake-headed Medusa.



The Man in the Rubber Mask by Robert Llewellyn (Unbound, £8.99, ISBN 978-1908717788) is interesting in that it's an update of a 1993 biography, written at the height of Llewellyn's fame as the robot Kryten in Red Dwarf, now reissued with '43.17 per cent more smeg'. That new content - equivalent to a second volume, takes the story up to date and covers the actor's subsequent success as a populariser of TV engineering through programmes like Scrapheap Challenge, and evangelist for electric vehicles.

It's all fascinating stuff, even if some of the accounts of behind the scenes high jinks might be a bit much for all but the most ardent of Red Dwarf fans. And it's all been made possible by the internet: the update was crowdfunded through publisher Unbound, which allows authors to pitch books to the public, who then get to read them if there's enough support.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51749 2013-03-27T15:54:35 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51749#comments 0 William Sieghart's newly published report for the government on the subject was never going to please everybody. There's one element of it though, inspired by classic British TV comedy, that suggests a possible solution.

Publishers and booksellers are understandably concerned that the ability to get a book on loan through a public library website which is to all intents and purposes the same as a brand new copy, and just as easily as buying it online, will hit sales. Some would like the public to only be able to take out an e-book when they're on library premises and not remotely, which largely defeats the object.

One compromise that's been suggested is for libraries to include links that encourage users to buy a book they've enjoyed or which is currently unavailable because someone else has the one virtual copy logged out to their account. The book trade's sceptical - how many books have you gone out and bought straight after finishing them and returning them to your local library, let alone if you'd only be investing in an electronic copy?



But what about the events of the 1960 Hancock's Half Hour episode The Missing Page ? Having finally got hold of the murder mystery 'Lady Don't Fall Backwards' from his local library, Tony Hancock finds that the last page has been torn out and spends a stressful but hilarious thirty minutes trying to find out the ending.

So why not warn library users (do they call us customers yet?) that e-books are free to borrow but missing their final few pages. My experience is that there's only a small proportion of paper books I've borrowed where I would absolutely have to read to the bitter end, but for the few I did, I'd be happy to pay a small charge. Consider it a gamble on how good the writing is - we could even have charts of the ones with the most gripping climaxes.

Some genres would lend themselves more to this approach. Then again, if you just want to find out who committed the murder, in which room and with which weapon, a few seconds in the company of Wikipedia ignoring spoiler warnings would be enough to satisfy your curiosity.

How hard is it technically to produce the electronic equivalent of the thing that so frustrated Hancock?]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51703 2013-03-25T13:13:12 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51703#comments 0 the world's oldest original working digital computer.

There was, of course a hiatus of nearly 40 years between that accolade and its first brush with fame when it was recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest operative computer, just prior to its decommissioning in 1973. Now the fascinating story of this landmark machine is told in a book published by the National Museum of Computing, where it now resides, and written by two of the people responsible for its second lease of life.



In The Harwell Dekatron Computer (£6.99, ISBN 978-0956795625), Kevin Murrell and Delwyn Holroyd draw on the memories of many of those involved with the machine across the years, from the original designers through users to today's conservation team.

At the time it operated at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire between 1951 and 1957, the relay-based machine was one of perhaps a dozen computers in the world. Weighing two and a half tones and as big as the wall of a living room, it was assembled from components more commonly found in a British telephone exchange and designed to perform the work carried out human 'computors' using hand calculators.

When the computer came to the end of its life at Harwell, the Oxford Mathematical Institute ran a competition to award it to the college that could produce the best case for its future use. This was won by the Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, later to become Wolverhampton University, where the machine was. Renamed as the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell) and used to teach computing until 1973.

At that point it was retired for a second time to a Birmingham museum, dismantled and left largely forgotten in safe storage until it was rediscovered by chance in 2008 by TNMOC trustee Kevin Murrell.



Following a full refurbishment, the computer was rebooted on 20 November 2012, generating a huge amount of media interest and over a million views for a YouTube video of the event. It's now a star attraction at the museum, but if you can't visit to see it in action, Murrell and Holroyd's book, well illustrated and with plenty of technical detail as well as history, is a fascinating account of a computing milestone.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51613 2013-03-21T11:42:56 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51613#comments 0 better bicycles and petcare technology.



Now Patrick, who's responsible for the Invention Of The Day blog, has decided to share some of his experience of trying to break into the UK and US technology markets in an e-book, Your Next Brilliant Product Idea.

According to Patrick, the advice in the book's three sections - Engines of Invention, Monetising Your Mentation and Roundup & Followup - is applicable anywhere in the world. "As an inventor, I'm keen to support companies and individuals in upgrading the quality and quantity of their ideas," he says. "I'm not going to attempt to give anyone guidance about how to market their particular protoproduct. I will however be offering tips about how anyone can plan to do that, given the available options."

Having kept up Invention of the Day for six years, Patrick says he thought is was time to see if he could extract and pass around some additional benefits from the process. "The reasons for doing this are to help other people accelerate their own creativity, to devise more 'insanely great' products and to make some money," he says.

Although he'll be delighted if he also happens to help reform the patent process, given his belief that it's inaccessible to every inventor who doesn't have large-scale financial backing, he says "I'm not holding my breath," about the possibility of that particular obstacle to innovation.

At £2.95, it's great value advice for any aspiring inventor.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51599 2013-03-20T16:26:30 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51599#comments 0 focus on the Raspberry Pi computer in the April issue of E&T to take a look at what's possible with the low-cost device, you'll probably want a concise guide to what you need and how to get it up and running.



To the rescue come Haynes with a Raspberry Pi Owners Workshop Manual (£17.99, ISBN 978-0857332950) written by Broadcom engineer Dr Gray Girling, who's been involved closely with the device's development.

Since being involved in testing one of the very first BBC Micros for Acorn Computers in the early 1980s Girling's worked for Acorn and a host of other computer and technology companies, writing and designing his own embedded operating system and computer languages.

A lot of the basic information can be found easily enough online, but there's something particularly useful about having it presented in a single volume in the distinctive Haynes style. Aimed at those switching on their Pi for the first time, it guides the user through the full process of set-up and configuration before looking at various aspects of computing and programming and how they can be implemented.

Haynes says the intended audience is the 'capable but uninformed reader'. That should include engineers who aren't computing specialists but would like a straightforward introduction to the subject with the potential to take things much further.

With the Raspberry Pi providing such a welcome reminder of the DIY ethos of the early days of home computing, this is an ideal subject for a Haynes Manual. Just as the enthusiastic amateur mechanic who wants to know what goes on under the bonnet of their car will usually have one of these books to hand, the keen programmer - young or old - will appreciate its straight to the point advice.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51152 2013-02-28T16:30:04 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51152#comments 0 flipping from matter into antimatter and back. Sounds significant, but if you want to really understand what the work at LHC means for our understanding of the nature of the universe, you could do worse than check out one of a few books that have come into the E&T office recently but which we haven't got around to reviewing in detail.



Higgs Force: Cosmic Symmetry Shattered (£12.99, Quantum Wave Publishing, ISBN 978-0957274617) is a very readable account of how scientists are gradually revealing the hidden structure of the natural world by Nicholas Mee. In a revised second edition, Mee, who received a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Cambridge and is currently director of software company Virtual Image, explains the fundamental components of matter and the forces that bind them together.



Described as "a tale that is woven around the symmetry at the heart of the universe and the mystery of how this symmetry is broken," it's a more accessible introduction than many similar efforts that takes the reader from the ideas of Greek philosophers thousands of years ago right up to current work at CERN.



If you find yourself wilting under the onslaught of "too much information", you might need a new survival manual that's been put together by an international group of experts from academia and industry. Information Overload: An International Challenge for Professional Engineers and Technical Communicators by Judith B Strother, Jan M. Ulijn and Zohra Fazal (Wiley, £33.50, ISBN-13: 978-1118230138) is the latest title in the IEEE PCS Professional Engineering Communication Series, designed to take a unique approach that combines theory with practical solutions.
With the emphasis on the role of engineers and technical communicators, 'Information Overload' starts with root causes and costs of this modern phenomenon before introducing proven techniques for tackling it and offering 'insight boxes' that recount different approaches to problems from various multinational corporations including IBM and Xerox.



The new, third edition of The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course by Roger L Cooke (£83.50, Wiley, ISBN 978-1118217566) is aimed at undergraduate students, but will be of interest to anyone keen on finding out how maths has evolved over the centuries. Examining the elementary arithmetic, geometry, and algebra of a number of cultures to show how abstract mathematics of the modern world arises from fundamental societal needs, this is just as much an analysis of social history as it is of how the way we handle numbers and concepts has evolved.


Finally, from Wiley comes the latest title in a series of books looking at the line of engineering research and practice which goes under the title of 'true sustainability'. Sustainable Resource Development (Wiley, £130.00, ISBN 978-1118290392), is a companion volume to another book by author Gary M Zatzman, 'Sustainable Energy Pricing'. In the new work, Zatzman applies his principles of 'true' economic sustainability to re - examine actual engineering practices in fossil fuel and as well as renewables such as wind and tidal power exploration and development.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51050 2013-02-22T16:57:23 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51050#comments 0 150th anniversary of the London Underground's opening will give you a taste of the Tube's engineering achievements. For the full story though it's hard to beat the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, and now there's an additional reason for a visit in the shape of a special exhibition of some of the best of the thousands of iconic posters that have been produced over the years by some of the world's leading artists and graphic designers. E&T's transport correspondent Lorna Sharpe went to take a look.



(The Lure of the Underground by Alfred Leete, 1927)

In the year that London's underground railway celebrates its 150th anniversary, the London Transport Museum is presenting a special exhibition showcasing 150 of the best posters commissioned for the network over the years.

The Tube has been described as the world's biggest art gallery, an accolade that owes much to the foundations laid by Frank Pick, who was appointed publicity officer for the Underground Group in 1906 and rose through the organisation to become managing director of the London Transport Passenger Board in 1933. Pick developed consistent branding and commissioned brightly coloured posters to generate traffic and give people confidence in using what was for many an unfamiliar and possibly daunting mode of transport.

This was of course the age of black-and-white films, when colour plates in books were an expensive rarity and electricity in private homes was still far from universal. Then and later, these bright images in stations showed everyday travellers that new experiences were within their reach.



(123-Quickly away, thanks to pneumatic doors, by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1937)

Poster Art 150 is sponsored by Siemens and features works in a variety of styles, many commissioned from eminent graphic artists. They are grouped in themes that include Finding Your Way, Capital Culture and Away From It All.

Engineering is celebrated in Keeping London Going, reinforcing the message that the Underground is fast, powerful, reliable and safe. Edward McKnight Kauffer's bold image of the (now closed) Lots Road power station - "nerve centre of London's Underground" - appears close by a 1937 poster explaining the benefits of pneumatic doors on trains. Posters have also been used to manage passenger expectations when maintenance and upgrade works are likely to disrupt their journeys, with examples ranging from the post-war 'Rehabilitation - it takes time' to 2007's 'We are transforming your Tube'.



(We are transforming your Tube, Studio Oscar, 2007)

The London Transport Museum is in Covent Garden, just a few minutes' walk from the IET building in Savoy Place. Poster Art 150 runs until 27 October 2013 and admission is included in the entrance fee of £15 (£11.50 concessions, children free) for an annual pass. For opening times and other information visit www.ltmuseum.co.uk

If you can't get to the exhibition, a catalogue showing all 150 posters with accompanying information is available to purchase online for £25 from the museum shop.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51022 2013-02-21T11:39:40 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=51022#comments 0 Grand Challenges of reengineering it completely. Yet as Christine Evans-Pughe explains in Mapping the Mind in the March 2013 issue of E&T of E&T, figuring out the processes by which we learn and remember could lead to improved treatments for crippling neurodegenerative conditions and faster computers.

A leading figure in this work is Ray Kurzweil, whose latest book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Duckworth, £20, ISBN 978-0715645376) is out now. We asked Kathleen Richardson to read it.



Technology needs its visionaries to imagine the future, to reason about its possibilities and to help to shape its direction. One of the most, if not the most important figure in epitomising this is Ray Kurzweil.

Described as "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes Kurzweil's unbridled optimism in super intelligent computing is unrelenting. His passionately written arguments for human-machine merging into the Singularity, and a (near) future where uploading consciousness into machines is a certainty, not just a speculative proposition.

His new book titled How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, centrally focuses on an argument of the pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM). The PRTM 'describes the basic algorithm of the neocortext (the region of the brain responsible for perception, memory, and critical thinking).'

What is the PRTM? Imagine the neocortex as a complex information processor, taking in information, sorting it into modules and then organising these modules into information hierarchies. Kurzweil emphasis on PRTM is combined with a theme he has outlined in his previous texts, such as The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005), technological advances will rapidly excel due to 'an evolutionary process [that] inherently accelerates (as a results of increasing levels of abstraction) and that its products grow exponentially in complexity and capability.'

He calls this 'The law of accelerating returns' (LOAR). Now what happens when the PRTM and LOAR coincide? Kurzweil argues modelling neocortex inspired algorithms combined with LOAR will result in supreme advances in computer and artificial intelligence.

The 'Biologically Inspired Digital Neocortex' chapter perhaps best expresses his key theme. He reasons that if the biological neocortex has 300 million pattern recognizers, then if this is augmented by a 'synthetic' version with no physical limits that are expressed in the physical limits of the biological brain, then it will be possible to use 'billions or trillions of pattern recognizers'.

The chapters on pattern recognition are the most intriguing in the book, often though the models are hypothetical, but nonetheless, Kurzweil's imaginative use of exploring PRTM and applying it to computers is intriguing and well worth a read.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50964 2013-02-19T15:29:00 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50964#comments 0 Global Grand Challenges for the 21st century are suitably high-powered aspirations that will need innovative thinking over a long period of time.

There's one entry on the list that will be the subject of an international summit to be hosted by the IET in London next month, however, that should have been sorted out a long time ago. In fact it's shocking that what should be the straightforward business of providing everyone in the world with access to clean water should still be considered a challenge still in need of a solution.



As Tony James reports in War on Water Shortage, which is part of a preview of the summit in the March 2013 issue of E&T, in a world where lack of clean water is responsible for more deaths than war, affordable, advanced technologies could make a difference for millions of people.

If you're interested in the background to the problem, why it's proving so hard to resolve, and how your actions might be having more of an impact than you think, James Salzman's Drinking Water (Overlook Press, £17.00, ISBN 978-1590207208) gives an excellent overview of the overlooked an often surprising history of drinking water.

Salzman is a professor of law and environmental studies at Duke University, so is as concerned with questions of social justice as the technical solutions, but follows the story through from Biblical conflicts to an age when consumers will pay over the odds for what is effectively tap water in a plastic bottle.

In fact, as one critic has noted, getting your water straight from the mains if you can and spending what you've saved on a copy of this book will make you think differently every time you run a tap in future. (As well as appreciating the ingenuity of the people who've made that so simple that you take it for granted.)]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50894 2013-02-15T12:04:49 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50894#comments 0 available to listen to as a podcast.



First up is The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science & Forensics (Oxford University Press, £18.99), in which chemistry professor and Holmesian James O'Brien makes the case for the fact that science plays a part, however small, in all of the great detective's cases.

Even if it's stretching the argument a little to include codebreaking and animal behaviour, it doesn't spoil what's an enjoyable new take on a character who's enjoying a new lease of life thanks to recent TV and movie adaptations. Arthur Conan Doyle was of course a medic with a solid grounding in science, and his interest in emerging forensic techniques like fingerprinting meant that they often appeared in his fiction before being widely adopted by the police.

The packaging does undersell what's an accessible and timely book. The same text wrapped up with a few glossy photos of Benedict Cumberbatch poring over his test tubes rather than the original Strand Magazine illustration by Sidney Paget would attract a wider audience who probably wouldn't go away disappointed.



Coincidentally, Christopher Brookmyre, whose latest novel Bedlam (Orbit, £17.99) is out this month, is a previous winner of two Sherlock Holmes Awards, although describing him as a crime writer shoehorns him into genre that doesn't really capture the essence of his style. For this one he's taken on science fiction, with protagonist Ross Baker playing the part of the ordinary guy plunged into an unfamiliar and deadly world.

Baker's an overworked and underpaid young scientist working on new medical scanning technology who would rather by playing computer games, but finds that when he emerges from a test session apparently inside a real life game it's not the dream come true he might have expected. The story's packed with humour, a lot of it black but just as much gentle and laugh out loud. Surely Brookmyre's the first writer to have a character ascending a platform elevator in an alien battleground feeling like he's at the start of an episode of 1960s childrens' TV show Camberwick Green.



While Brain Cox's latest TV extravaganza Wonders of Life is great to kick back to and doesn't need any promotion for its own tie in book, The Universe Within: A Scientific Adventure by the less well known US palaeontologist Neil Shubin (Allen Lane, £20) is perfect for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the big ideas of how the extreme scales of the universe itself and the essence of life are related. "The one place where solar system and planet merge is inside your own body," Shubin claims. If you doubt that, think about how orbital fluctuations have led to Ice Ages that in turn have influenced evolution across the planet.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50649 2013-02-01T12:55:28 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50649#comments 0 the potential for getting a hundred miles per gallon of petrol out of a family car. As Tony James reports, it looks at the moment like despite the allure of the electric vehicle, advances in performance mean that the humble petrol engine will continue to be the mainstay for cars for the foreseeable future.



Significant advances in the near future may, as many believe, lie in the development of the internal combustion engine, but interest in electric vehicles is unlikely to go away. So it's timely that Wiley have released a fully updated second edition of Electric Vehicle Technology Explained by James Larminie and John Lowry.

The complete guide to the principles, design and applications of EV technology includes all the latest advances, and as well as cars looks at motor scooters, buses and trains. New chapters cover pickup and linear motors, overall efficiencies and energy consumption, while those on battery technology and other rechargeable devices, fuel cells, hydrogen supply and ancillary system designh have been updated.

This isn't a book that questions the environmental benefits of EVs, and Larminie and Lowry have included new practical examples and case studies illustrating how they can be used to substantially reduce carbon emissions and cut down reliance on fossil fuels. They also examine in detail efficiencies, energy consumption and sustainable power generation.

Although it's aimed mainly at practising electrical, automotive, power, control and instrumentation engineers working in EV research and development, the book's comprehensive explanation of underpinning science and technology mean it may well appeal to the non-specialist engineer who's thinking of going electric and wants more technical detail than can be found in manufacturers' brochures.


Read all about it...

Buy Electric Vehicle Technology Explained (Second Edition) by James Larminie and John Lowry (£75, Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1119942733) at Amazon.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50548 2013-01-28T17:46:10 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50548#comments 0


Sir Peter Mansfield is a self-effacing man. While most authors are prepared to gush about their successes, Mansfield is reticent. For evidence, look no further than the inside back-flap of the dust wrapper of his new book. The only words you will find, beneath a typical author headshot, are the minimalist 'Sir Peter Mansfield, 2003.' It's tempting to add the citation for Mansfield's Millennium Medal that honours his 'profound impact on improving human health.'

His book - The Long Road to Stockholm' - has two subtitles. First is 'The Story of MRI', while second is 'An Autobiography.' You don't have to read far into his story to realise that magnetic resonance imaging and the man so closely involved with its development are intimately intertwined. His life and work would eventually take him to Sweden to receive the Nobel for his discoveries in the field of MRI, an award he shared with Paul Lauterbur.

Mansfield's autobiography supplies rich and meticulous detail about the Nobel process, from the first telephone call ('pull the other leg, it's got bells on it'), to the post-award dinner, when he sat between two members of the Swedish royal family. He doesn't tell us much about his reaction to the honour, other than to mention in passing a 'dazed state of euphoria' on first hearing of it. His modesty is of a bygone-age, but there are times when you feel there is so much more we could learn from the man behind the physicist.

Baroness Kennedy calls Mansfield's story 'incredible and inspirational.' She's right. Mansfield, the son of a gas fitter, left school at the age of 15 with a disrupted education caused by repeated evacuations during the Second World War. But his brilliance in the field of NMR spectrometry would lead him via a circuitous route to his PhD: the first step on the road that was to take in the influence of Charles Schlichter of the University of Illinois and the eventual production of images of the human body using MRI.

A recurrent theme in Mansfield's book is his stock response to requests from reporters to comment his work, the petty jealousies and rivalries that occasionally rear their head and embarrass him, and of course the sequence of events that led to the Nobel Prize. He declines with metronomic regularity, and on one occasion in 1993, even went as far as to think talking with an American reporter would damage the case for MRI's association with the Nobel system.

This quiet, self-effacing and sometimes defensive attitude is reassuringly old-fashioned and central to the psyche of a man dedicated to the advancement of science rather than reward. We should be glad that the now elderly Mansfield has slightly relinquished his grip on expressing personal views in the form of 'The Long Road to Stockholm', because it is in so many ways a remarkable book.

Read all about it...

Buy The Long Road to Stockholm: the Story of MRI by Peter Mansfield (Oxford University Press, £25, ISBN 978-0-19-966454-2) at Amazon]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50509 2013-01-25T17:33:31 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50509#comments 0 abebooks.com has always been one of the web's most dangerously alluring attractions - a giant catalogue of millions of second-hand books from thousands of booksellers with a neat search function that even if you're not looking for a particular title to buy lets you waste time seeing what the most expensive editions are of your favourite author's work.

I think the site's missed a trick with its list of 50 essential science fiction books though. The clever part, even if it's not technically earth-shattering, is that if one of them sounds intriguing you can follow a link to dealers with copies to sale.

Thing is, from Asimov to Wyndham most are reasonably well known stories that I don't think any fans of the genre are going to buy on impulse if they don't have them already. So why are search results set to return the cheapest copies available?

If I'm going to pick up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's 'The Sirens of Titan' (which I've neglected to read before now) I might find it useful to know there are a bunch of dealers around the US who can sell me a 1970s paperback edition for around ten dollars including shipping. Or I could order it into my local library for nothing, or have a look on eBay, Amazon or wherever.

What I really want to know though is that a really nice 1961 first edition goes for around $4500, almost twice that if signed by Vonnegut himself. Only a single click to rearrange the results, but it seems such an obvious thing that anyone interested enough in classic sci fi to read the article would want, you wonder why it's not the default.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50460 2013-01-23T17:14:18 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50460#comments 0


If the opening paragraph of Jack Clemons's 1989 short story 'Tool Dresser's Law' is the sort of thing that floats your literary boat, you might be pleased to learn that Amazing Stories, the world's first science-fiction magazine, has returned in the latest incarnation of its turbulent history.

Amazing Stories wasn't the first magazine the feature sci-fi, but when it launched in April 1926 was the first title devoted solely to the genre. Fiction alone doesn't cut it these days of course, so the new website includes discussions and posts from more than 50 bloggers alongside original and archive prose.

Issues 1 and 2 are already available, or for a more retro experience lacking only the distinctive smell of a pulp magazine you can find the first issue of the original magazine from April 1926 in various formats at archive.org.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50409 2013-01-21T16:21:40 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50409#comments 0
You can listen to the roundup I did of a few of Christmas gift books on Rhys Philips's Pythagoras' Trousers radio show. Here are a few more that came my way at the tail end of 2012 but are worth considering.



The Royal Engineers at Chatham 1750-2012 by Peter Kendall (£50, English Heritage, ISBN 978-1848020986) was reviewed here earlier this month and as well as being a great choice for anyone who's been linked with the military in the Medway Towns is a great exercise in local history even if you don't have any military connections.



Another coffee table tome from English Heritage that will appeal to readers interested in the impact of motoring on society and the landscape is Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture, and Landscape in England by Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis (£40, Yale University Press ISBN 978-0300187045).
In a sumptuous book packed with period photography and even a few schematic diagrams of car parks, Morrison and Minnis describe the transformation that has affected England's architecture, infrastructure and natural environment since the motor car first came to England in the 1890s of the country. You don't have to be a Top Gear fan to appreciate this detailed look at the structures designed specifically to accommodate cars, from garages and petrol stations to car parks, factories and showrooms. Carscapes reveals the many overlooked ways in which automobiles have shaped the modern English landscape.



It's a long held belief in publishing that every equation to be found within a book's pages cuts its potential audience by a significant proportion. In The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations (£19.95, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691152820), Dana Mackenzie starts from the opposite premise and celebrates them by relating the history of 24 great and (in his opinion) beautiful equations that have shaped mathematics, science, and society. Examples range from the elementary (1+1=2) to the sophisticated (the Black-Scholes formula for financial derivatives), and from the famous (E=mc2) to the arcane (Hamilton's quaternion equations). For each, Mackenzie explains what it means, who discovered it (and how), and how it has affected our lives.



The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders (£25.00, Atlantic Books ISBN 978-1848877955) is all about people, and how the unprecedented technological transformation that shook the world in the 19th century affected life on the streets of London. For much of this period Dickens was famously walking the streets of the city observing its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Flanders tells how the revolutions in the transport system, sewers and buildings were reflected in the writing of the period's best-loved novelist.



Finally, a book that is surprisingly free of technology is The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios by Eric Rasmussen (£16.99, Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0230109414). Of the 160 First Folios listed in a census of 1902, 14 were subsequently stolen-and only two of these were ever recovered. In his efforts to catalogue all these precious First Folios, renowned Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen embarked on a riveting journey around the globe, involving run-ins with criminal street gangs in Tokyo, bizarre visits with eccentric, reclusive billionaires, and intense battles of wills with secretive librarians. You might expect that in the 21st century, the business of authenticating rare books would rely on complex technology, but in fact it's largely down to hard work and an encyclopaedic knowledge of your subject.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50145 2013-01-08T16:09:42 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50145#comments 0
The dockyard site where the young Dickens's father worked may now be home to a theme park celebrating his work, but a significant part of the stronghold whose story mirrors Britain's rise to global prominence during the wars of the 18th century and colonial expansion of the 19th lives on in the shape of the Royal School of Military Engineering, home of the Corps of Royal Engineers.



Published by English Heritage, Peter Kendall's lavishly illustrated The Royal Engineers at Chatham 1750-2012 (£50, ISBN 978-1-84802-098-6) marks the School's 200th anniversary, but tells a story that goes much further back to the pre-Roman occupation of a key strategic site on the road between Dover and London.

In Dickens's time, siege exercises on the Great Lines overlooking Chatham drew thousands of spectators and are immortalised in The Pickwick Papers. Today, refurbished heritage attractions like the sophisticated fortifications at Fort Amherst and the Historic Dockyard pull in more modest numbers, but anyone who has spent time in the area either as a visitor or member of the military will find this a compelling account of how the fortunes of engineering in the British army have changed over the course of centuries.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50062 2013-01-04T16:54:58 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50062#comments 0
It turns out though the simultaneous arrival of tablet variants from Apple, Kobo, Amazon, Google and B&N itself has muddied the waters. Yes, the marketing guys have been working day and night to establish the optimum price differential between an 'old fashioned' ink on paper-like device (with or without built-in light) and one equipped with a colour screen and capable of handling music and video, but it's not a massive gap so the question becomes one of why you would want to go for something that does books alone.

In fact I reached a point where, sitting on a train with the Nook in one hand, iPad on the other for making notes and acutely aware of the smartphone in my pocket, I started to wonder how much of this technology was really essential.

Surely with iBooks built in and access to apps for other platforms the iPad does it all? Despite happily reading in short bursts on it, as soon as it was sat alongside the Nook's illuminated e-Ink screen I winced at the thought of getting stuck into anything that would involve concentrating for more than ten minutes at a time.



By that time I'd already become acclimatised to the Glowlight function, having recreated the TV advert above in the comfort of my own home with a non-lit Kindle Keyboard in one hand and Nook in the other. (For complete accuracy I downloaded some Dickens like the actress who is so eagerly anticipating ending the day by getting stuck into the first chapter of David Copperfield as her partner slumbers next to her, blissfully unaware.)

Even with a bedside light on, a backlit page felt more comfortable. Not a big enough difference to chuck out the Kindle and upgrade, but if I was in the market for a new device I'd pay the premium for a light.

Other than that, the Nook does everything you'd want of a dedicated e-reader at a reasonable price. Ability to change the size of font, straightforward touchscreen navigation, fits comfortably in a pocket, battery lasts for weeks at a time even with the light in use... The big question, as I've already said, is whether books alone are enough or you want to carry two or more lumps of plastic. But then a year or two ago you may well have been carting a similar-size hardback or paperback around so there's no massive difference.

What will persuade you to go for the Barnes & Noble badge rather than one of its competitors is the ecosystem you're buying into. And that's top tip one in the e-reader buyer's guide: don't be beguiled by size, weight and look if you can't have a go at browsing what's available and how portable it's going to be. Before parting with any cash make sure you've ascertained what stock's on the shelves and whether it can be moved between platforms.

Which brings us back to those disappointing Barnes & Noble figures. For the nine-week American 'holiday' period ending on 29 December 2012, sales through B&N's bookshops and website totalled $1.2bn, down 10.9 per cent on the same period in 2011.

B&N admits that this was partly due to sales of Nook devices tailing off in December after starting promisingly. While revenue from digital content like e-books, magazines and apps were up by 13.1 per cent on the previous year, revenue from device sales was less than the same period in 2011.

What that means for the prospects for e-readers in the age of affordable tablets is unclear, because B&N treats them both as one big happy family.

"We entered the holiday with two great new products, Nook HD and Nook HD+, both highly rated media tablets of phenomenal quality," said CEO William Lynch. "Nook device sales got off to a good start over the Black Friday period, but then fell short of expectations for the balance of holiday. We are examining the root cause of the December shortfall in sales, and will adjust our strategies accordingly going forward."

It'll be interesting to see whether Lynch shares with customers what that root cause turns out to be.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50021 2013-01-02T16:59:00 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=50021#comments 0 hordes of bed bugs are getting a free ride from home to home by hiding in the spines of books and it turns out that all the talk of heat treating new returns and re-upholstering furniture may be an over-reaction.



Cornell University entomologist Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, who is apparently an 'internationally known bed bug expert' and has served on New York City's official Bed Bug Advisory Board, has reassuring words for readers living in fear of Cimex lectularius emerging under cover of darkness from the pages of the latest Stephen King. (The scary scanning electron micrograph image above comes courtesy of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library via Wikipedia.)

Bugs could use books as a way of getting around, Gangloff-Kaufmann acknowledges, but paper's not a hospitable environment for a bloodsucking insect so they won't stay hidden for long. A simple inspection of the cover, spines and page edges of a book as it's returned to the library will reveal any hidden nasties. (And give librarians a new way of humiliating the public.)

Gangloff Kaufmann's advice to anyone who suspects a book is infected is straightforward: "Place the book in a Ziploc bag of the appropriate size and put it aside or return the item to the library and have the librarian put it aside. Eventually, and by that I mean within 1-2 weeks or sooner, bed bugs that are hiding on the book will start wandering around the bag looking for a way out. The eggs will have hatched. Keeping the item in a warm, sunny area (as opposed to a cool, dark area) will speed up their death from dehydration."

Any sign of a media scare story about electromagnetic emissions from e-readers being harmful to health yet?]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49663 2012-12-10T17:53:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49663#comments 0
The woman in the Nook advert appears to be just settling into the first chapter of David Copperfield while her out of focus partner slumbers alongside her; but more of that another day when I talk about my own experiences with the Nook, and in the run up to Christmas why e-reader companies are obsessed with Dickens.

Those manufacturers would probably love us to have a Pavlovian feeling of revulsion towards the idea of snuggling up with a paperback, let alone a smelly old library book. They must be delighted then that New York Times journalist Catherine Saint Louis has uncovered the terrifying new pheonomenon of bedbugs hiding in the spines of hardcovers in an infested home before emerging by night to colonise the next borrower's headboard.

Los Angeles jewellery designer Angelica McAdoo is so fed up having survived a scare earlier this year when she had to hire an exterminator to spray the perimeter of her bookshelves with pesticide, says she will now only buy new books from discount chain Target. "I will not step foot in a library ever again," she's quoted as saying.

Library funding must be healthier in the USA than Britain, because apparently they're heat-treating returned books, vacuuming seats thoroughly and even getting library furniture reupholstered in less hospitable fabrics like vinyl.

No sign of any canny marketing people exploiting the scare yet, but then claiming that any electronic device is 'bug free' is a boast that's usually destined to come back and bite anyone who makes it.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49638 2012-12-07T17:08:28 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49638#comments 0 whoever it was stepping down from his boat and onto their deck. The door to the cabin slid open and, framed in the opening, stood the person who they would soon learn to call, 'Noosum Foosum!'.'

When Katie and Danny discover a secret path through the woods near their home, they don't realise they're soon to meet the fabled engineer whose adventures are related in a new book for children by IET member Jon Harris. We talked to him about the story and what inspired it.



Wirebound: Let's start by talking about your background in engineering.
Jon Harris: I had an early interest and ability in STEM subjects, going up a year in maths at primary school and taking maths O level at 14. My parents gave me a Sinclair ZX81 when I was 11 and from that time onwards I was hooked on computers and technology. I took computer science at O level and electronics at AO level, and was surprised to discover that I preferred the electronics - there was something about creating a circuit that I loved. So after A levels I went on to study electronics at Southampton University. I was accepted for the masters programme and graduated four years later with a masters degree in electronics.

Of my time studying at Southampton, one moment stands out over all others: As part of a first year 8 bit microprocessor lab, the university had a bare board multi-chip processor - it was laid out so that you could probe different parts of the system with an oscilloscope; the program counter, address bus, accumulator register and so on. I distinctly remember, as I worked my way through the lab, the feeling of understanding growing in me, as each part of the processor laid bare its secrets. I realised how the instructions were fetched and decoded, how the ALU performed its operations and how the registers and memory-mapped I/O were accessed. Suddenly the computers that I had been programming all these years were no longer a 'black box'. It was an epiphany!

After this revelation in the first year, I chose options that were mostly concerned with digital logic, processors and software. My third-year project was to create an ARM-based processor card for a NUMA multi-processing system. After graduating I wanted to design processors/computers and went to work for ICL in Bracknell. After four years at ICL I switched to Sony Semiconductors for a few years and after that tried my hand at consulting and a couple of start ups before finally joining Altera's European HQ in High Wycombe, which is where I currently work.



What was the inspiration for 'Noosum Foosum'?
As with so many authors, I started by telling bedtime stories to my children. One Christmas I decided to write a few down and have them printed and bound as a surprise. After I had shown the finished product to a few friends, I was encouraged to write down some more of the stories and try and have them published. The result, 'Noosum Foosum', is my first book!

Noosum Foosum is the eponymous hero of the book. He is an engineer and inventor after my own heart. The children in the stories don't get to meet him until a third of the way into the book, as first they encounter his boat, which is beautifully engineered and crafted and which takes them on a couple of adventures.

When they do meet Noosum Foosum, that's when the fun with science and engineering really starts as he begins to introduce them to some inventions. Without giving too much away, there are special sprays and paints that can be applied to objects which then affect their properties such as their friction or gravitational attraction - these inventions are key to helping the children in their on-going adventures.

How do you think it'll help get children interesting in engineering?
I think simply having a hero of a book who is an engineer provides a very positive role model, which children don't often see in books or the media. When the inventions themselves are used, the children in the story realize more about the physics of the world about them, they see that physical laws can be understood, harnessed and used to do things. My hope is that this message will be equally impressed upon the children reading the book.

How did you manage to get a publisher interested?
Hardly any publishers are accepting manuscripts from new authors, but I did find two or three who were. I got some very positive feedback, but was told that the publishers already had other books occupying the same 'marketing space' and did not want to compromise their existing sales. Finally, I discovered Troubador publishing, who have a different business model. So long as a book meets the quality criteria, Troubador do all the usual publishing activities such as typesetting, cover design, ISBN registration etc. but the author, not the publisher, meets the costs. When the books sell, the author then gets a higher than usual percentage of sales revenue.

What are you working on now?
I have many ideas that I want to include in future Noosum Foosum stories. I have a second book planned out in a reasonable amount of detail and have started writing it. This will introduce Boolean logic and electromagnetic induction, but in a way that I believe a child can follow. Children are very adept at picking up new concepts especially if these are expressed in a fun, engaging way without over-use of baffling terminology.

One of the innovations in the book is that after reading it, children can 'follow' Noosum Foosum himself (@NoosumFoosum) either directly on Twitter or via his Twitter feed on his website. On this feed, little snippets of story are released, either referring back to previous adventures or giving little tasters of what will follow in future books. I will be interested to know how many 'followers' Noosum Foosum gets!

Read all about it...

'Noosum Foosum' by J.M. Harris (Matador, £6.99, ISBN 978-1780883601) is available now direct from the publishers via www.Noosum-Foosum.com or online and in all good book shops. An e-book version is available from Amazon. Follow @JMHarrisUK on Twitter to find out more about the progress of the next book in the series.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49566 2012-12-04T17:49:55 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49566#comments 0
Interesting then that a search on the online version (this is one of those works that looks good on the bookshelf but is much easier to use electronically) finds more people using the word technology to describe what they've done in their career than choose 'engineering'.

www.ukwhoswho.com lets you trawl the database of living people for keywords in their name, family, education, career, recreations or address. A quick search finds 1140 using technology in their profile compared with 976 who use engineering (or variants like engineer).

Include the Who Was Who element to check deceased celebs and engineering increases to 5,827 while technology scores only 2,418. Only a rough check, but it does suggest that one, once popular, is now in decline while the other is on the way up.

Today's gift recommendations are genuine stocking fillers, in the shape of some new additions to the pocket-size Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press (the people behind Who's Who online) which I've raved about before.

At numbers 330, 331 and 335 in the range which look so nice lined up together are Robotics, Civil Engineering and Networks. Quick reads that any engineer who wants a break from the festivities might find it tempting to slip away with to a quiet corner when it all gets too much for them.

Mustn't forget to mention a new title in MIT Press's similar but slightly larger Essential Knowledge series. In 'Waves', coastal engineering expert Fred Raichlen offers an account of the evolution of waves from their generation deep in the ocean to their effect on the land. Excellent beach reading, perhaps, but not one to leave for the summer.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49516 2012-11-30T16:37:05 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49516#comments 0
E-book readers are shifting away from dedicated devices to multi-function tablets, according to a survey carried out in the US by Bowker for the Book Industry Study Group. The latest instalment of BISG's Consumer Attitudes Towards E-Book Reading research found that tablet popularity in terms of being respondents' first choice for reading e-books on had risen by about 25 per cent over the past year while single-function readers had declined by a similar amount.

Amazon, whose Kindle Fire was responsible for fuelling the switch according to BISG, had a busy week. Having celebrated a Cyber Monday that recorded the biggest single day's sales to date for Kindles (helped by a $129 deal on the Kindle Fire), the company filed information with the UK House of Commons Public Accounts Committee showing that net sales through amazon.co.uk in 2011 totalled £2.91bn. The company's director of EU Public Policy, Andrew Cecil, was asked to submit additional information having failed to satisfy MPs with his responses to questions at an enquiry earlier in November. Meanwhile, The Bookseller reports that Amazon has written to agents saying that it plans to open a European publishing wing, headquartered in Luxembourg and focusing on English-language titles aimed at the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

In an interesting piece at The Digital Reader, long-time professional editor Rich Adin considers speculates that one way for publishers and high street retailers to take on the growing might of online bookstores would be through 'first edition' clubs that would give bricks and mortar shops the exclusive opportunity to sell collectible signed first editions that would include and e-book copy. "I think, however, publishers would blow it simply because they seem to blow everything else," he concludes.



One of the most significant artefacts from the history of the written word is making its first trip to the US next year. The Cyrus Cylinder, which apart from going on loan to the National Museum of Iran between 2010 and 2011 has resided in the British Museum since it was unearthed in modern-day Iraq in 1879, will be touring five American museums during 2013 in a trip supported by the Iran Heritage Foundation.

Inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of the Persian King Cyrus the Great after he captured Babylon in 539BC, the clay cylinder is often referred to as the first bill of human rights as it appears to encourage freedom of worship throughout the Persian Empire and to allow deported people to return to their homelands. Long considered a symbol of tolerance, a copy is on display in the United Nations building in New York. The real thing will visit the city's Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as venues in Washington, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49512 2012-11-30T14:44:12 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49512#comments 0 the Natural History Museum's superb new 'Treasures' exhibit, I was too slow with my phone before a train pulled in to catch some more evidence of gentle Amazon bashing from within the book trade.



I'm grateful to Twitter user Jo Warner - aka @JoWarner01 - for pictorial evidence (see a bigger and better photo ) of a new campaign by The Folio Society that resonates with the Booksellers Association's posters reminding shoppers that high street stores - unlike some big companies - are scrupulous about paying their taxes.

'Rekindle your love of beautiful books' is the strapline. You see what they did there? Even if it doesn't inspire any weary commuters to invest in a sumptuous hardback edition of one of their favourites this Christmas, it at least provides a distraction from the rigours of Tube travel by challenging you to identify as many of the pictured books as you can. If you want, you can even feel smug about how many of them you've actually read.



While I'm rounding up books that got away during 2012, I should mention The Universal Machine: From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness by Ian Watson (Copernicus, £22.00, ISBN 978-3642281013).

This one was just too late to make it into Paul Gannon's article in the July issue of E&T looking at several of the books published to tie in with the centenary of Turing's birth. To be honest, the picture of Turing on the cover is slightly misleading, and while it may work in marketing terms to link with a topical subject it sells the book short.

As satisfied customers on Amazon point out, this is a comprehensive but readable account of the history of computing from Victorian times to the 21st century, in which Turing is just one player. The five-star reviews praise it for covering each episode in just enough detail without getting bogged down in, say, the minutiae of Turing's academic career (which is well covered elsewhere), so this may be one for the general reader who nervertheless wants more than a cursory review of the story of computing.

What I really like about this book is that it covers the whole history of computing from Victorian times to the present day. I can't think of another book that does this so well. There are many individual books that cover parts of this story in depth - but do you really need to read 600 pages about Steve Jobs or a whole book just about Facebook! The author has done a great job taking each topic and highlighting the most important parts and writing individual chapters that capture a time and a place but without too much unnecessary detail.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49490 2012-11-29T15:23:25 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49490#comments 0


Just opened in what used to be the tree gallery, hidden away up the stairs behind the dinosaur in the museum's Cromwell Road entrance hall and overlooking the statue of Charles Darwin, 'Treasures' brings together 22 of the most significant and valuable objects in the world, let alone in the Natural History Museum. The Cadogan Gallery where it's housed is named in honour of the Cadogan Charity's investment of £2 million in the museum. It's not a huge space, but the curators have used technology cleverly to make the most of it. Every display is accompanied by a touchscreen that any five year old will quickly get to grips with telling the story behind it in words and pictures.

The actual exhibits read like a track listing for Natural History's Greatest Hits. The 147 million year old Archaeopteryx fossil is the most valuable in the museum's collection and will be recognisable to anyone who's ever picked up a biology book.

Yes, this blog's about books, and 'Treasures' has a couple of the best. The museum's first edition of Darwin's 'On The Origin Of Species' is the rarest of almost 500 editions of that single book that it holds in 38 languages including Braille. There's also a page from Audubon's stunning 'The Birds of America' the double elephant folio size collection of life size paintings published between 1827 and 1838 that remains the world's most expensive book.

If that's not enough to tempt you away from the dinosaurs, there are the first dinosaur teeth ever to be found (by Mary Ann Mantell in 1822), a dodo skeleton, the skull of a Barbary lion that lived in the menagerie at the Tower of London and the only piece of Apollo moon rock owned by the UK.



At the exit you can stop to take a picture with Guy The Gorilla, who lived at London Zoo from 1946 until his death in 1978. There's more technology at work alongside his case. Before you leave you can vote for your choice of the most significant of the 22 exhibits on an interactive display that keeps a running score. (When I was there for a preview day the Blaschka family' glass anatomical models were the runaway favourite.) Then pick a few favourites from another screen and you can be issued with a bar coded 'NaturePlus' ticket with a unique number that lets you find out more about them online when you get home.



There was another bookish connection, for me at least, in the shape of the first ever Neanderthal skull ever discovered, which is on display for the first time. Having just read William Golding's imagining of the first encounters between Neanderthals and modern humans, 'The Inheritors', it was fascinating at the preview to be able to chat with someone who's a specialist. Golding notoriously made up a lot of how he thought Neanderthals would have behaved, assuming his publisher would insist on some fact checking and a rewrite. The publisher decided a scientist would get in the way of a good story and the book was published as it was.

'Treasures' opens on 30 November and is free of charge during the museum's normal opening hours. For full details see www.nhm.ac.uk/treasures..]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49447 2012-11-27T16:02:50 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49447#comments 0 my personal tip, James Gleick's The Information, take first prize and a cheque for £10,000 in a ceremony at the Society's headquarters.

The Winton, as its organisers no doubt hope it'll one day become familiar to the public, recognises books written for a non-specialist audience. As Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, chair of the judging panel, explained: "The Information is an ambitious and insightful book that takes us, with verve and fizz, on a journey from African drums to computers, throwing in generous helpings of evidence and examples along the way. It is one of those very rare books that provide a completely new framework for understanding the world around us. It was a privilege to read."

Currently selling at a shade under £7 on Amazon, the paperback edition of The Information would make a good gift for someone who's interested in the impact technology has had on civilisation rather than the technical detail of how the science behind it works. (Bill Bryson is among the previous winners of the Winton Prize and operates in the same area of science writing.)



Also in today's pre-Christmas round up we've got a book that'll help engineers gear up for next year's summer holiday, and a more portable guide for anyone planning a trip to London.

Mathematical Excursions to the World's Great Buildings by Alexander J Hahn (Princeton University Press, £34.95, ISBN 978-0691145204) is just the ticket for anyone booked on a vacation that will take in structures like the Parthenon, Colosseum or the US Capitol Building.

Hahn is professor of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. From the pyramids to the Sydney Opera House, he takes readers on an eye-opening tour of the mathematics behind some of the world's most spectacular structures. Beautifully illustrated, the book explores the milestones in elementary mathematics that enliven the understanding of these buildings and combines this with an in-depth look at their aesthetics, history, and structure. Whether using trigonometry and vectors to explain why Gothic arches are structurally superior to Roman arches, or showing how simple ruler and compass constructions can produce sophisticated architectural details, Hahn describes the points at which elementary mathematics and architecture intersect.

Even if you're not expecting to see any of the buildings covered it's still a fascinating read. Just bear in mind that each chapter concludes with a series of problems and activities to demonstrate what Hahn's written about. So if you find your nearest and dearest shining a torch against a flat wall for no apparent reason, it could be that having read about how the Parthenon was constructed their following the instructions about how to get a sense of the conic sections that the Greeks used in their architecture.

Jonglez Publishing's 'Secret' travel guides to the less well known parts of the world's great cities have been a long-time favourite with E&T, covering as they do some of the technical sights that lie off the usual tourist trail. Vitali Vitaliev reviewed Secret New York - An Unusual Guide recently, and now Jonglez have released Secret London - An Unusual Guide and Secret London - Unusual Bars and Restaurants as handy apps, both currently priced at £2.99, that you can download to your iPhone.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49384 2012-11-23T18:12:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49384#comments 0
Nearly 40 per cent of American parents with children aged between 2 and 13 who already read e-books are planning to buy their kids a new e-reader or tablet before the end of the year, according to a study by research firm PlayScience and Digital Book World. Preliminary figures released ahead of the full report due to be unveiled at a conference in New York in January show Amazon's Kindle Fire leading the pack as the preferred device of 28 per cent of parents. The iPad Mini and iPad are close behind at 21 per cent and 18 per cent respectively.

The Publisher's Association is enthusiastic about plans for an industry-led 'copyright hub'. "This initiative promises to do more to improve access to creative works online, and in a way which is sustainable for creators, than any proposals to expand copyright exceptions," said PA chief executive Richard Mollet.

Macmillan has confirmed that its dictionaries will no longer appear as physical books and will be available online only from next year. "While printed dictionaries only get updated every four or five years, Macmillan's online presence means we can add new words and phrases on a regular basis," promised editor-in-chief Michael Rundell.

JRR Tolkein's estate and his publisher HarperCollins have filed an $80m lawsuit in California against Warner Bros, its subsidiary New Line and Middle-earth Enterprises that focuses on online slot machines based on Tolkein's works. It's alleged that licensing rights granted in 1969 don't cover digital products, and that games available at a number of casinos harm the author's legacy.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49364 2012-11-22T16:52:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49364#comments 0 Kurt Vonnegut's 90th birthday Amazon is offering Kindle owners the chance to subscribe to a series of Vonnegut stories that haven't been available before.

Sucker's Portfolio: A Collection of Previously Unpublished Writing is the latest addition to the Kindle Serials line. Part one, a 25 page tale in which a young artist grieving for his recently deceased wife becomes obsessed with traveling back in time in an attempt to regain the love of his life and the happiness they once shared, is out now. Six more pieces of fiction and one non-fiction article are expected to follow on a weekly basis, while the appenidix will include an unfinished science-fiction story.

According to Amazon: 'These stories trace trivial human lives and mundane desires, which is precisely where Vonnegut's inimitable perspective as a humanist shines, illuminating his alternating hopeful and dismal outlook, although undoubtedly focusing on the latter. Here as in his greatest novels, Vonnegut's writing takes us to the darkest corners of the human soul and with wit and humor, manages to remind us of our potential to be something greater.']]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49343 2012-11-21T15:30:13 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49343#comments 0 how Britain's independent bookshops can compete for customers with web operations that don't have the costs of running bricks and mortar store was idea that they can make a virtue of the simple fact that they pay their taxes.



With some big online retailers among the businesses in the spotlight for the way in which they manage their finances to minimise the amount of tax they pay in the UK, BA has gone on the offensive with a range of posters that members can download from its website.

Part of the ongoing Keep Books on the High Street campaign, the posters have a distinctive red 'Keep Calm and Carry On' style and aim to give a not so gentle nudge to customers who might go to a shop to browse but then nip home to place an order with another retailer. Or these days, even use their smartphone to order while they're still standing in the shop.

Will the message get through? To those of a certain age it's reminiscent of the suggestion in the 1980s that home taping was killing the music industry, which still seems to be soldiering on. In this case though, web sales are having a clear effect on the viability of high street shops. If you want to keep a friendly independent in your town, why not forget about the question of tax and buy books from them just because they offer things you can't get from a website?]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49335 2012-11-21T12:05:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49335#comments 0


First up is 'A Little History of Science' by William Bynum (Yale University Press, £14.99, ISBN 978-0300136593), which largely does what it says on the cover. by taking the reader from the Babylonians to the digital age in a not too intimidating 250 pages split into 40 digestible chunks.

Bynum is emeritus professor of the history of medicine at University College London, which means his book is weighted slightly towards the biological. If you're buying for an engineer who wants an overview of how those disciplines complement the more techie ones that might not be a bad thing.

Whether discussing Galileo (described here as 'the rebel with a cause) or nuclear physics the style is reasonably light and engaging. If nothing else it'll give the reader a lot of useful ammunition for the science round in any Christmas quiz they might end up engaged in.

You can listen to me talking about 'A Little History of Science' at greater length in my regular book review slot on the Pythagoras' Trousers radio show and buy from Amazon.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49197 2012-11-13T16:48:09 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49197#comments 0


The two landscapes may look pretty different in the picture above, but the valley isn't as lush as it appears. Despite being one of Earth's most inhospitable regions, however, it's home to some particularly hardy bacterial communities that have survived since the beginning of life on Earth.

Any signs of life might provide clues to what's gone on on the red planet. In both areas, it's likely that gypsum was formed when extreme geological activity or meteorite impact allowed sulphur in the planetary crust to combine with a mineral-rich sea millions of years ago.

Since then - as researchers analysing the genomes of different populations of Mexican bacteria have revealed in the journal 'Astrobiology' - distinct types of life can exist in close proximity having adapted to the harsh environment in different ways. One strain of bacteria is 'green', formed by cyanobacteria and proteobacteria that have adapted to the lack of nitrogen. Another is 'red' and is made of Pseudomonas and other micro-organisms that survive with hardly any phosphorous. There are also blue springs which are generally deeper and lacking in nutrients.

Understanding how this came about will shed light on what's happened in the past on other planets with similar conditions, they believe.



Unlike their biologist counterparts, the scientists looking for evidence of life on Mars have to work at a distance using the remotely operated Mars Exploration Rovers. A new book by NASA's William Clancey describes how the 'robotic geologists' have changed the nature of planetary field science.

Clancey argues that the actual explorers were not the rovers but the scientists, who projected themselves into the body of the machine. Drawing on his extensive observations of scientists in both field and laboratory, he investigates how the design of the rover mission enables field science on Mars, explaining how the scientists and rover engineers manipulate the vehicle and why the programmable tools and analytic instruments work so well for them.

For a taste of what to expect from the book, you can hear William Clancey talk about the people who control the Mars Exploration Rovers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the experiments they are conducting in a lecture at the Tech Museum in San Jose in this YouTube video.

Read all about it...

Buy Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers by William J Clancey (MIT Press, £20.95, ISBN 978-0262017756) at Amazon.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49150 2012-11-09T17:53:39 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49150#comments 0


A new collection of personal correspondence 'Kurt Vonnegut: Letters',
spans 60 years and includes the letter the 22 - year old Vonnegut wrote home on being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden, the incident that became the subject of his best known book, Slaughterhouse-Five.

Like a lot of his work, Slaughterhouse-Five is hard to categorise, easy as it would be to pigeonhole it as a literary take on science fiction. It's no surprise though to find out that he was a writer with a sold background in technology - his father and his grandfather both attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as architects, while Vonnegut himself majored in chemistry at Cornell before enlisting in the army, who transferred him the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

All this came into play in his first novel, the dystopian Player Piano, set in a mechanised society of the near future where the engineers and managers who keep things running are in permanent conflict with the labourers who have been replaced by machines. A more conventional sci-fi story, the cover of the first edition describes it as being a tale of 'America in the Coming Age of Electronics'.



As Vonnegut told Playboy magazine, the inspiration came when he was working for General Electric shortly after the end of the war:

I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes.

You can read the letter Vonnegut wrote from a repatriation camp in 1945 at Letters of Note. Given his experiences, the opening warning that 'Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do' is probably one of the great literary understatements.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49140 2012-11-09T09:37:53 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49140#comments 0
EU regulators are on the point of agreeing an offer from Apple and four publishers that will end an antitrust probe into e-book pricing, Reuters has reported. The agency's sources said that the settlement, described by one ebook publisher as "another win for Amazon", would terminate arrangements that prevented Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and MacMillan from undercutting Apple's charges.

US e-book sales continue to show signs of tailing off, new figures from Bowker Market Research suggest. E-books accounted for 22 per cent of all book spending in the second quarter of 2012, up from 14 per cent in the same period last year but having risen by a single percentage point on the first three months of the year.

The UK Publishers Association has told the government review of e-lending that it expects a mixed economy to develop in which commercial services operate alongside public libraries, but that further evidence on demand and potential impact on publishers, authors and booksellers is needed. The review launched in September will see a panel led by Forward Publishing founder William Sieghart and including Janene Cox, president of the Society of Chief Librarians, and author Joanna Trollope advising the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey on the benefits of e-lending, current levels and expected future demand, and possible consequences for libraries, publishers and the public.

E Ink, the Taiwan company whose display technology is used in the Kindle, Kobo, Nook and other e-readers has filed an intellectual property lawsuit in Mannheim against Trekstor of Germany. It contends that Trekstor's Pyrus and 4Ink e-readers, whose displays are manufactured in China, infringe two of its European patents.

And finally...



Language and mathematics are much more closely related than previously believed, according to researchers who found that fully bilingual people resort to their first language when manipulating numbers. Scientists from Europe's Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language and the University of Texas used electrophysiological techniques to assess two groups of English and Spanish speakers as they worked through some sums to see which parts of their brains were working.

Suggesting that learning a concept in a particular language creates a memory footprint which persists throughout life, they say the phenomenon may throw light on learning disorders such as dyscalculia.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49127 2012-11-08T12:47:56 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49127#comments 0
Critics have picked up on the fact that while there's still plenty of violence and a bit of sex, the former is largely smoke and loud bangs, the latter toned down from previous outings. The masterplan for the franchise, they reckon, is to appeal to the many boys, and lots of girls, who've enjoyed Charlie Higson's terrific Young Bond books but wouldn't go near the Ian Fleming originals.

So it was hardly surprising to learn from the assortment of Higson-reading teenagers I saw Skyfall with that much of the backstory revealed in this episode of the Daniel Craig rebooting (don't worry, no spoilers here) ties in with what they already knew from their own reading but which the average fan would be unaware of.

It'll be interesting to see where the producers go from here, given that they've given up even pretending to reference Fleming's stories in the title. In the meantime, if you haven't had a look at the espionage-themed issue of E&T out this month to mark the release of Skyfall, there's plenty of Bond-related stuff in there as well as several articles on how technology is developing in the real world of spying. (Ben Whishaw makes an entertaining debut as the new Q in Skyfall, by the way, even if at times he comes a bit too close to channelling Richard Ayoade as Maurice Moss in TV's The IT Crowd.) We've even included a short story bringing a classic Bond scenario up to date with our own masterspy Ian Tee.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49024 2012-11-01T17:44:00 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=49024#comments 0
Kobo has partnered with retailer Pick n Pay to sell its Touch e-reader in South Africa. A localised online store will offer books in English and Afrikaans.

Writing at publishingperspectives.com, Influential Software CEO Andy Richardson warns that unsustainably low prices, self-publishing imprints and half-thought out lending schemes mean e-reader vendors risk killing the book business in pursuit of ever larger markets.

Announcing third-quarter results in the wake of the agreement to combine its Penguin imprint with Bertlesmann's Random House, Pearson reported that e-book revenue at Penguin was up 35 per cent on the same period in 2011. The company said it expects sales to remain strong in the key fourth-quarter Christmas period, boosted by new titles from Patricia Cornwell, Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy and Jared Diamond in the US and Jeff Kinney, David Walliams, Pippa Middleton and Dawn French in the UK.

And finally...



Pearson and Bertelsmann's decision to stick with the conservative 'Penguin Random House' as the name of their megapublishing joint venture disappointed those who were hoping for the more quirky 'Random Penguin' but reminded me that on a trip to London Zoo this summer I came across a genuine random penguin house in the shape of the Grade 1 listed 1930s pool that now stands immaculate but empty since its former residents moved to a less striking but more comfortable beach-style enclosure in 2004. Designed by soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin and Danish structural engineer Ove Arup, its construction is described in a nice article at engineering-timelines.com from which the picture above is taken.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48999 2012-10-31T15:48:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48999#comments 0 rats whose brains have been genetically engineered to glow when they experience fear sounds tailor-made for Halloween, so it was a bit of a surprise when it turned up in my inbox a couple of weeks ago.



From Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, taking in HP Lovecraft, James Herbert and even George Orwell, rats have always been a reliable standby when writers need something repulsive to scuttle into view and elicit a shudder amongst most of their readers.

That shudder's vitally important in evolutionary terms, fear prompting a fight or flight reaction to a potentially harmful stimulus in an unfriendly environment that improves an animal's chances of surviving. A good scary book or film can be entertaining too, but becomes a problem the response becomes irrational and leads to anxiety disorders.

The resulting phobias can be treated with behavioural therapy where the patient is repeatedly subjected to the problem stimulus in a safe environment like a clinician's office. The problem is that even when a phobia's been suppressed there, more often than not it'll reassert itself next time, say, you encounter a huge hairy spider in your kitchen. In as many as 70-80 per cent of people, fear re-emerges within a few years from treatment completion.

The sinister-sounding Eastern European scientists are in fact perfectly respectable Polish researchers at the Nenki Institute of Experimental Biology and the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw who are investigating how brain circuits responsible for suppressing a specific fear differ from those that are involved in its recurrence.

Their chosen technique, reported in a paper in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, involves observing connections between neurons activated in the brains of animals experiencing fear. And that means being able to see what's going on in their grey cells.

These rodents are scared, not scary. Bred from a strain with its origins in the US, their brains incorporate a fluorescent protein that accumulates in the synaptic endings of active neurons, persisting for days after the rats have been subjected to the stress-inducing stimulus that makes them literally glow in the dark.

The experts already know that it's likely the all-important memory trace of fear is established within the structures of the part of the brain known as the amygdala, which process emotions. They're controlled by the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, the areas that tell the animal where and when it has previously encountered the situation it finds itself in.

The summary of the project doesn't tell us what the 'stress stimulus' that the rats were exposed to was, but post mortem analysis of their brains found two areas of neurons within the amygdala glowing with fear that were partially mixed but responsible for different functions. This suggest the connections activated at the time of the reoccurrence of the fear reaction are different from those activated when fear is extinguished, which explains why conquering a fear my not mean it's gone forever..

The point of all this is that by identifying the precise parts of the brain responsible for fear and its inhibition may make it possible to create drugs which, unlike existing anti-anxiety medicines, would be able to target specific neural paths.

Last word goes to Dr Ewelina Knapska, one of the leaders of the research team. "Our method of marking active neurons is flexible. In the future we plan to use it to gain knowledge about neuronal connections typical for behavioural contexts other than fear".]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48952 2012-10-26T14:45:32 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48952#comments 0
Barnes & Noble reassured customers that evidence PIN pad devices in its US stores had been tampered with had not affected purchases made using its website or Nook e-reader devices. An internal investigation of what the company described as "a sophisticated criminal effort to steal credit card information, debit card information and debit card PIN numbers" found that a single pad in each of 63 of nearly 700 stores across the country had been affected. It recommended however that customers who had swiped their card at any of the affected outlets should change their PIN numbers and review their accounts for unauthorised transactions.

The European Commission has ordered Luxembourg to close a loophole that allows Amazon to pay only 3 per cent VAT on e-books sold to British readers because it is registered there, rather than the UK rate of 20 per cent, The Guardian reported. Luxembourg has been given 30 days to increase its tax rate on digital services, which has attracted companies like Skype and Netflix to the country, to 15 per cent.



While the unveiling of Apple's iPad Mini attracted most press attention, Amazon went after a new market with the launch of its first Japanese language e-reader and a Japanese Kindle Store, as well as making its Kindle Fire devices available to Japanese buyers. The Paperwhite is being made available with Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and 3G and will be one way of buying titles from the selection of 50,000 Japanese-language books at amazon.co.jp.

The American Library Association, eBay and the American Free Trade Association are among US businesses, academic organisations and pressure groups that have signed up with the Owners' Rights Intiative, a new coalition operating under the slogan 'You Bought It, You Own It!'. The group will lobby government on ongoing efforts to decide whether 'first sale' rights, which transfer the right of ownership and ability to resell goods including physical and electronic books from seller to buyer, extend to those manufactured overseas. Last year, John Wiley & Sons successfully sued a US student who had imported and resold foreign editions of its textbooks on the basis that first sale only applies to titles that have been 'lawfully made' in territories where the US Copyright Act is law.

Jacob Dahl at Wolfson College, Oxford is close to decoding proto-Elamite, the world's oldest undeciphered writing system. A reflectance transformation imaging that uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing allowed the researcher, based at the Ashmolean Museum's Oriental Studies Facility, to create detailed images of symbols cut into clay tablets around 5000 years ago in an area that is part of modern-day Iran.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48938 2012-10-25T16:52:52 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48938#comments 0 The Wedding Present overlap with digital publishing enthusiasts.



To coincide with the band's latest UK tour, HarperCollins's 'experimental imprint' The Friday Project has brought out an innovative making of book. Available today (25 October), Valentina: The Story of a Wedding Present Album is a diary and photo journal by lead singer and founder David Gedge documenting the recording of the March 2012 release and providing a track-by-track commentary.

With the book or e-book comes a code for downloading the music, which looks odd (who'd buy a book about the making of a record they don't even own?) until you see that it includes an exclusive EP of four songs that didn't make the album and video footage. So a value for money, indie-style spin on the established ploy of getting hardcore fans to fork out for the same record twice by bunging in a few hard to find out-takes.

I'll admit to having lost track of what Gedge and co have been up to for the past 20 years or so, but I'm sure Valentina is a fine piece of work. A third on the bill appearance with them at Reading University in the 1980s as part of a short-lived ropey student covers combo has always stood me in good stead with ageing indie saddoes as "that time my band supported the Wedding Present", and for that I salute their efforts to bring something a little bit new to the world of publishing.

Read all about it...

Buy Valentina: : The Story of a Wedding Present Album (The Friday Project, £12.99, ISBN 978-0-00-749413-2) at Amazon.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48927 2012-10-24T16:35:30 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48927#comments 0 Paul Clifford, you misread it. Or at least you would have done if it had been part of a school test.

Strom is just one of a series of pseudo words that 5 and 6 year olds are challenged to decode in the new phonics screening check designed to test their progress in learning to read.

The scientific basis for including what have already been dubbed nonsense words, and which are flagged up in the test as 'alien' in the hope that youngsters won't try and read them as similar real words, is that the provide a pure assessment of phonic knowledge, or the ability to decode groups of letters and work out how they sound. Without context or pictures to help guess, the child has to use the rules they've been taught, which the experts claim is a better way of identifying problems like dyslexia.

It took a bit of digging, but according to a lively thread on Mumsnet a typical test would consist of: pib, vus, yop, elt, desh, chab, poil, queep, stin, proom, sarps, thend, chip, jazz, farm, thorn, stop, truck, jump, lords, kigh, girst, baim, yune, flods, groiks, strom, splaw, fair, flute, goat, shine, crept, shrubs, scrap, stroke, index, turnip, waiting and portrait. Half real words and half made up.

Teachers aren't keen. A survey by unions found that almost nine out of ten think they should be dropped on the basis that they "did not tell them anything new, did not test children's reading ability - only how well they decode words - took up teaching time, took teachers out of the class and cost schools money to implement". Children learn to read in a number of different ways, they say, and having a test that relies on just one technique will force them to rely on synthetic phonics at the expense of other approaches which are just as useful.

There's a debate to be had about the fact that fewer than six in ten pupils reached the benchmark set by the government as a 'pass', indicating that they don't need additional help with reading. Is it a weakness in teaching, the test itself, or children's ability to read? Mumsnet's not short of Tiger Moms that their infant prodigy who can whizz through Harry Potter at home has been diagnosed with a reading difficulty because they couldn't get their heads round words that aren't even real.

On the face of it though, this systematic approach to the skill of reading would appear to favour an engineering mindset. So why not take it one step further and embrace pseudo-English by giving these made-up words real meaning. After all, there are so many things being created every day that don't yet have names, so why not use terms that youngsters will already be familiar with? Desh, chab, baum and splaw all sound tailor-made to describe the pinching, jabbing and sweeping actions that could one day leave the nation crippled with repetitive strain injury.

There might even be a whole new language here. We could call it Govian.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48839 2012-10-18T10:25:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48839#comments 0 control of the content of school textbooks to shape young people's opinions. Amazon's announcement of its Kindle Whispercast tool gives administrations one less excuse for not changing controversial sections of approved texts.

There are many examples of where governments with a strong commitment to ideological control dictate how different subjects are covered in the classroom. In the West it's topics like sex education and evolution, elsewhere shifting borders and disputed boundaries may make maps out of date almost as soon as they're printed. Not to mention the speed with which political opinion is changing in the Middle East: Libyan schools need to replace books produced with maps that, because of former leader Muammar Qaddafi's insistence on pan-Arab unity, show no national borders.

The response to criticism is often to kick the issue into the long grass of school spending, claiming that changing one section of one book would mean pulping and replacing a print run that could be intended to have a liftetime of years.

Enter Whispercast, an enterprise-level tool that lets organisations distribute electronic texts to a community of Kindle users. Essentially, it's a single access point through which a school, say, can buy, generate and distribute books and documents not just to people with an Amazon device, but to anything with a Kindle reading application, including iPads, iPhones, Android phones and tablets and even the humble PC.

A school providing pupils with the hardware in the hope of reaping benefits - "with Kindle books, students no longer need to carry heavy textbooks," is one of the advantages highlighted by Amazon - can use Whispercast to manage settings, add password and configure wireless connections. A lot less hassle than getting students to report to an IT support department when they can't get the book they need for their homework assignment to open.

Crucially though, it also supports 'bring your own device', where students, or staff of a firm using the technology, can opt in to join a user group that receives content direct to a phone, tablet or e-reader that may be more sophisticated than the corporate option.

So needing to wait until a book has survived being handed down from pupil to pupil enough times to justify its original cost need no longer be an obstacle to updating it. That raises the Orwellian spectre of a child opening their book one morning to find that history has changed overnight. Perhaps that'll be a useful lesson to them in the need to assess where information comes from and how much faith they should put in it.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48809 2012-10-16T17:32:58 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48809#comments 0


This book is a rare treasure. I've been trying to get hold of it for years, and once - at an auction in Hay-on-Wye - was even able to handle a copy and quickly leaf through it before carefully putting it back on the shelf: the starting price for the original volume was £1,600! Collectors were dying to own this pre-World War I 1913 blueprint of Europe and its railways, for neither were ever going to be the same again.

The 1910s were not the best times for guide-book publishers, simply because, with the political and administrative map of Europe changing on a nearly daily basis, the guides were bound to get out of date shortly after (or sometimes even before) they saw the light. As a rule, they were never reprinted which made them extremely rare and coveted - if not by their contemporaries, then definitely by bibliophiles and book collectors. To give you an example, "Baedeker's Russia, 1914" had only one edition in English, and the original (if you are lucky to find one) would now set you back five or six thousand pounds (I was fortunate enough to acquire a second-hand reprint edition for £200 about 20 years ago).

George Bradshaw, a Manchester Quaker and engraver of maps and city plans, started his Continental Railway Guides in 1847, seven years after he issued his first ever monthly railway guide to the UK. To oversee the publication of the new title, a special office was opened in Paris. By 1894, the Continental Guides had grown over 1000 pages each (the 1913 one had 1106 pages!) and - alongside train timetables, descriptions of Europe's main countries (plus those of Egypt, Morocco, the Levant and the Holy Land), cities and stations, travellers' tips etc. - they started featuring hand-coloured maps.

All changes were tirelessly monitored from the Paris office, and the latest updates incorporated into monthly supplements. Even by modern standards, it was a very impressive enterprise, and I still find it hard to comprehend how they were able to collate so much data with very limited (by modern standards) early-20th century means of communication and zero information technologies - through pure diligence and legwork.

The 1913 edition contains 382 pages of train timetables, nearly 400 pages of fascinatingly dated ads and over 300 pages of the countries' descriptions and advice for the travellers, like this rather friendly tip for those travelling from Jerusalem to Nablus, Nazareth and Haifa: "For this journey it is usual, and where ladies are concerned absolutely necessary, to employ a dragoman. Not that there are any perils, but travellers replying on their own resources would find the inconveniences very troublesome."

Ownership of this spectacular volume would have remained an unachievable (and utterly unaffordable) dream had it not been for the Oxford-based publishers Old House Books specialising in quality reprints of rare and vintage guides and travel books. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that "Continental Railways" has been reprinted not just thoroughly, but also lovingly, with maps placed in special plastic pockets and even the original bookmark, with an ad of South Eastern and Chatham Railway ("short sea routes to all parts of the continent"), carefully reproduced!

I cannot think of a better present for anyone interested in history and railways. At £25, it is an incredible bargain, promising hours and hours of happy vicarious time-travelling.

Read all about it...

Buy Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide and General Handbook (Old House, £25, ISBN 978-1908402479) at Amazon.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48738 2012-10-11T14:49:37 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48738#comments 0


Wirebound: Tell us a bit about your background in engineering.
Caroline Alliston: I come from an engineering family - my grandfather, father and brother were all engineers, and we used to spend a lot of time in the garage designing, building and fixing things. When I came to choose a career I knew I needed something creative, intellectually challenging and practical, so engineering seemed the obvious choice. I studied engineering at Cambridge University, and then completed a postgraduate course in machine design at Cranfield. I've spent 24 years working in a variety of industries including wind turbines, mechanical seals and four years in India working for Tata Consulting Engineers, which was an amazing experience. I then spent seven years designing test equipment for industry and the educational market, testing it, getting it to work, writing the instruction manuals, installing and commissioning the rigs and supporting them on site. My next move was to Renishaw, who make precision measuring equipment; I was very excited at being given the opportunity to run the test rigs department.

How did that experience lead to you creating projects designed to get young people interested in technology?
Four years ago, with the help of some other engineer parents, I started a technology club at my younger son's primary school to get the children excited about science, technology and engineering. Every week we came up with a new and exciting project for the children to complete, from a simple hovercraft made using an old CD, a sports bottle top and a balloon, to a small ballista that fires lolly sticks. We used cheap and recycled materials so that the children could take their creations home to keep. The club soon became so popular that there were more children on the waiting list than in the actual club! Later, one of the parents came up with a great idea - each child purchased a basic electrical kit of their own, which was re-used to make fan-powered boats, torches (a bulb circuit mounted in an old drinks bottle), vibrating brush monsters, chair-o-planes etc. These projects formed the basis for the second of my 'Technology for Fun' books.



What inspired you to write the books?
I was looking for a book of simple technology projects as a birthday present for one of the children. I tried the bookshop, the library and asking all my friends, and I kept getting the same answer, 'There isn't one - why don't you write one?' I realised that I had quite a unique skills set; as well as the experience of running the club I had many years' experience in design and development, computer-aided drawing and writing detailed, illustrated instructions manuals for customers around the world. Eventually I managed to find the time to sit down and start writing 'Technology for Fun'. When I finally delivered the birthday present, a mere one and a half years late, the child was 'completely blown away', spent the whole evening reading it from cover to cover and then the entire weekend in the garage making a magnificent marble maze!



What's the aim of the books?
To give children the opportunities that I had as a child, to enjoy creating their own toys and learn through making things and trying them out. Most people are kinaesthetic learners - they learn best by doing rather than listening or seeing. I wanted to give them lots of ideas of things to try, as a springboard to creating their own designs. In the books I've tried to give them a framework to create something that actually works, whilst encouraging them to develop and customise the designs themselves. I want to show children how much fun STEM subjects can be; most of the projects include a brief explanation of the science or engineering behind them, giving the children an understanding of what they are doing and helping them produce designs that work.




Why did you decide to produce them yourself instead of getting a publisher interested?
I wanted full control as I had very specific ideas I wanted to implement. Firstly, books of this type are often quite expensive and I wanted to produce it as cheaply as possible so that anyone who wanted one wouldn't be deterred by the price. Secondly, I had in mind a particular format based on the old 'Learn to Cook' books, with a list of 'ingredients' followed by step by step instructions, illustrations and safety warnings where appropriate. Thirdly, I wanted the actual children from my technology club on the cover, with projects they had made themselves. I asked my elder son to do the cover designs; I love his artwork, which is very vibrant and appeals to young people.

Who's buying the books?
A lot of the customers at present are parents buying the books for their children, grandparents buying them for their grandchildren, and primary school teachers using the ideas for design technology and science. A lot of engineers and scientists buy them to do the projects with their children and grandchildren, and several just bought them for themselves! However my biggest customer at present is not one I envisaged at all - the Scout Shops. Lots of Explorer, Scout, Cub and Beaver leaders use the books to run activities with their groups.

And what are you working on now?
I'm currently developing downloadable lesson plans and worksheets and trying them out in local schools, to help teachers who want to use the projects as part of the science and technology curricula. Last week I posted a sample lesson plan on the Times Educational Supplement website; it's been recommended by TES Primary and already downloaded over 250 times. I'm running a number of clubs and workshops in my local area to enthuse as many children as possible, and was very pleased to be invited to do a workshop at the Association of Science Educators annual conference in January. Also my younger son has just moved up to senior school, and I'm starting to look at exciting projects at that level, which will support what the children are learning at school.

Read all about it...



For more details of the two 'Technology for Fun' books and how to buy them, or to contact Caroline Alliston, check out www.technologyforfun.co.uk. The site includes free sample projects, a photo gallery, a video page and details of upcoming workshops.]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48721 2012-10-10T11:24:03 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48721#comments 0 Oxford University Press is adding content from Stanford University Press to its University Press Scholarship Online platform.

Stanford Scholarship Online will make books published by SUP searchable across a single UPSO site that already hosts more than ten thousand XML-formatted titles, cross-referenced and downloadable as PDFs.

Many users will be researchers hunched over library terminals or their own laptops. Increasingly though, the hard-working academic needs sexier technology to get their work done.

Highlighting the "cutting edge search and discovery functionality" that the UPSO offers, OUP says that the number of users accessing the site from mobile and tablet devices including iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android has risen dramatically over the past year. And consistently the most popular is the iPad, with visits increasing by a whopping 5,000 per cent year on year between March 2011 and March 2012. (Although admittedly they don't say what the 2011 figure was, so it may be very low starting point.)

Has an iPad become standard-issue kit for academics, or are they having to shell out for one themselves to avoid being left behind in the research technology arms race?]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48714 2012-10-09T17:55:36 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48714#comments 0 deep analysis of US e-book trends, released this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which signals that the 'doubling days' of exponential growth in sales have come to an end.

Consensus seems to be that the period in which US e-books saw massive year on year growth came to a halt this time last year, and the market is expected to increase by only around a third in 2012. On top of that, as trade bodies start to refine estimates they made of sales in recent years based largely on statistical models rather than solid figures, their initial assessments look to have been overoptimistic.

Several factors have conspired to slow things down. The early adopters who piled in and loaded their devices with lots of books are realising they've got more than they'll ever have time to read, and the overall novelty of being able to carry the equivalent of a small library in your pocket has worn off.

At the same time, the arrival of tablet computers at a price not that much more than a top of the range e-reader has given consumers a tricky choice. And those who go for an iPad tend to spend their money on sexy interactive apps, not boring old books.



Take the recently launched Shakesperience, for example. A Kindle lets you download the text of Romeo and Juliet free of charge in seconds. You might get some notes, annotations and other functionality, but if you're studying the play (and let's be honest, why else would you be reading it?) how can that compete with a version that shows clips from great performances, lets you wander off to research the background to the play and a host of other digressions?

Which reminds me that you've only got a month or so to catch the British Museum's superb 'Shakespeare: Staging the World' exhibition, which uses eye-catching exhibits and technology to put some of Shakespeare's best known work in the context of the time it was written. As an experience, it's the equivalent of an iPad version compared with the e-reader-like static displays of a traditional museum. In the world of books, what are Kindle & Co going to do to woo the readers back?]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48698 2012-10-08T17:34:38 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48698#comments 0 GCHQ director Iain Lobban squeezed a couple of literary quips into a speech he gave at the University of Leeds last week as part of events to mark the centenary of Alan Turing's birth.

Lobban's account of the achievements of GCHQ forerunner the Government Code and Cypher School encompassed Turing's contribution to the wartime codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park. Recognising in the run up to the second world war that the forthcoming conflict would call for a new sort of cryptanalyst to complement existing staff, the School's director, Alasdair Denniston, put out the call to veterans of first world war cryptanalysis who had returned to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to identify suitable academics engaged in mathematical research, Lobban explained.

"In the first list of names drawn up in response to his request we can see the hint of what was to come: Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Max Newman. Turing was, without doubt the keenest of the three and attended a series of taster sessions and short courses in early 1939, promising to report to Bletchley Park - already earmarked as the war station for the Code and Cypher School - on the outbreak of war. Another prospective employee was JRR Tolkien: he was marked out by staff as "keen" but in the event, his services were not called on, perhaps because on 3 September 1939 the UK declared war on Germany, not Mordor."

Pause for laughter.

What made Turing stand out? There might be a clue in the list of books the young Turing took out from the school library when he was a pupil at Sherborne between 1928 and 1931, courtesy of writer Alex Bellos, the author of popular mathematics bestseller 'Alex's Adventures in Numberland'.

As Bellos points out, the list is much as you'd expect, with AJ Evans's account of his escape from imprisonment in the first world war, 'The Escaping Club', the only-non-scientific book. (I'll buy the case for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland being a 'maths' book.)]]> Dominic Lenton http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48554 2012-09-26T16:28:45 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=365&threadid=48554#comments 0 The Royal Society has just announced the shortlist for its 2012 Winton Prize for Science Books ahead of the announcement of the overall winner in November.



Covering subjects ranging from human memory and the human genome to parallel universes, viruses and the nature of violence, it's a wide-ranging field. The prize is deliberately designed to recognise books written for non-specialists, and each shortlisted author receives £1,000 with the winner collecting £10,000.

The judges seem to be fairly liberal in their interpretation of what constitutes 'science' for the purposes of the competition. So why is the only vaguely technology-related book to make the final half dozen James Gleick's 'The Information?

I reviewed Gleick's excellent account of the history of data and how we use it, from African talking drums to Twitter, as long ago as April last year and talked about it on Rhys Phillips Pythagoras' Trousers radio show at the same time.

Good to see it getting the recognition it deserves, but what about all the equally good engineering-themed books that came out in the same 12 month period? If they're somehow excluded from the Royal Society award, maybe we need a similar one that favours people writing about technology. There's a lot of it about, and a lot of good new books coming out all the time.

Something the IET, E&T magazine, or both could do to raise the profile of engineering? We'll see what we can do about it, but in the meantime let me know what recent non-fiction you think deserves the prestige and big cash prize of a prize like the Winton.]]>