Simon Dobson (Posts about internet)

TIL: Cognitohazards

Simon Dobson — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 11:18:58 GMT

TIL: Cognitohazards

Could social media posts be actively damaging to our mental health? – literally, not just figuratively? That's the premise of a TechScape article in The Guardian, that draws on both science fiction and psychological research.

In Neal Stephenson's "Snow crash" there is a plot device of an image in a metaverse that, when viewed, crashes the viewer's brain. We haven't seen this in social media (yet), but there's an increasing concern about deepfake images and other forms of misinformation. Research suggests that such images are damaging even if viewers know that they're fakes, which suggests that techniques like content-labelling images as AI-generated are insufficient to remove their harm. Other examples include massively engaging artificial images such as the "pong wars" animation of two simultaneous "Breakout" games going on between two algorithms: something that shouldn't be as engaging as it is (as I can attest to myself).

Social media attention grabbing at an industrial scale might therefore constitute a cognitohazard, a way of hacking people's brains simply by being viewed.

TIL: An RSS-focused search engine

Simon Dobson — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 13:10:23 GMT

TIL: An RSS-focused search engine

Today I learned about feedle, a search engine focused on searching blogs and podcasts – web sites that export an RSS feed, in other words. And the search results are themselves RSS feed that can be subscribed to live.

This feels like a quite a big thing for accessing content without resort to the internet giants, and for the IndieWeb in general. It means that search can prefer syndicated and typically small-scale content rather than being influenced by search engine optimisation (SEO) or sponsorship affecting the link rankings.

Of course this also need management, and feedle is a curated source: you have to submit your RSS feed to it for review and (hopefully) inclusion. I've done that for this site's feed.

TIL: The first ever .com domain

Simon Dobson — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 11:44:10 GMT

TIL: The first ever .com domain

Today I learned that the first .com internet domain registered on the internet was https://symbolics.com and belonged to Symbolics, a company that made Lisp machines.

It doesn't relate to Lisp any more, of course. It's been sold to someone who "helps entrepreneurs and investors acquire high-end domain names", which seems about as meta as things can get: the first-ever .com domain name now points a company focused on acquiring domain names.

Symbolics itself has a storied history, spinning-out from the MIT AI lab to sell hardware dedicated to running Lisp: one of two such start-ups actually. The Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

Incidentally, the rest of the top-ten first .com domains can be found here.

A non-prophecy from ten years ago

Simon Dobson — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 14:48:41 GMT

Something I said ten years ago comes back to not haunt me: in fact, I was quite pedestrian about the whole thing.

My friend Rich was house-cleaning and came across an interview that I did with the Irish media about ten years ago, while we were running our company, Aurium. One thing really jumped out at him was the answer I gave to one particular question:

Q: What will we be using to access the Internet 10 years from now?

A: I don't think we'll even think about it in those terms. It's a bit like asking what sort of device you use to access the telephone network. In 10 years the internet will be so ubiquitous that we won't even think about it.

I remember giving this interview, and it feels weird in a number of ways. Firstly, when you see an "expert" being interviewed in a newspaper, don't assume that he's there because of his expertise. He could simply be a randomer with a good PR firm, which is what I was: the article was "placed" as part of our public relations campaign. Secondly, I was right in terms of where the technology was going, but that wasn't due to any vision on my part: it was simply a function of being part of the development of that technology and seeing from the inside where it could go. There are plenty of alternative futures where things happened differently and the internet didn't take off as it did. Had we had a major security crisis or breach of privacy in the first few years, that might have killed people's confidence enough to damp-down the uptake.

What really struck me, though, was exactly how pervasive the technology did become. As it happens I'm in London on business with my colleague Graeme, and it's instructive to look at all the things we did on the internet -- and indeed from mobile gadgets. Firstly, I checked-in on the British Airways cellphone app and so didn't need a printed boarding pass. (This is an application we first suggested ten years ago, incidentally: a boarding pass is just a token, so why not text someone a long number to identify themselves with?) Then we arrived not knowing where the hotel was, but a combination of the Tube Map app and Google Maps soon directed us via train and foot, from Gatwick airport to Pimlico. We looked up places to drink and a place for dinner the next day using TripAdvisor, again navigating there with Google Maps, and made recommendations for the various places for other travellers. (Oh, and incidentally checked in for the return flight while sat in the pub -- very civilised, I must say.) We found a coffee shop while we were waiting for our meeting, which itself took place in a venue whose location we also didn't know relative to our hotel. I collected the different bookings and details in TripIt, which shared them into my Google Calendar so I didn't have to take note of them. And I took some pictures and shared them on Facebook.

But actually the most surprising thing isn't the technology, or the mobile device, or the fact that it all actually works together in practice: it's that real people actually do it, and I don't think I'm unique in using all this mobile internet technology when travelling. We pretty much take for granted the idea of finding our way in a new place without preparation: neither Graeme nor I ever even thought about how we'd find the hotel or the meeting venue beforehand, we just got up and did it.

Looking back, I'm not surprised we (the technology community) got the technology to work; I'm not even really surprised at the availability of mobile internet and a load of apps to make use of it; but I must confess to being slightly surprised that at the acceptance of all the gadgetry amongst the general population, enough to generate an ecosystem of companies who work together and create more value from their interoperability. It's something we always said would happen, but it's quite strange to see it in operation, and it's a positive achievement we shouldn't forget about.

The mirror

Simon Dobson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:00:15 GMT

The internet is just a mirror, and an amplifier It's a commonplace to observe that the internet is changing the nature of discourse. Many of the concerns raised in such as discussions are, in my opinion, severely over-blown, but it's certainly the case that we can observe changes in behaviour in the real world that can be linked back to discussions in the digital world. The mechanisms of this are somewhat less discussed, but they seem to arise from the very nature of the medium and so will be hard to change quickly. The future-watcher Ester Dyson once made the following observation:

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

Perhaps we can generalise this slightly, and say instead that the internet is both a mirror and an amplifier. It identifies distinctions between people, reinforces and amplifies them. How does this happen? It begins from the observation that every niche community is globally large. No matter how specialised one's interests, they will be shared by others elsewhere in the world. This has been an enormous boon to many people, most notably those who have (or who have relatives who have) rare illnesses: no matter how rare a condition is in the local gene pool, globally there will be a substantial population in a similar position who can provide understanding, advice and support. Often these will include individuals with access to and understanding of the latest research and treatments, often the scientists and doctors themselves: expertise that can be world-beating, and may completely overshadow what's available locally. What makes such communities possible is the low cost of setting up and maintaining a web site, and the power of search to allow such sites to be found by anyone sufficiently interested in them to spend some time crafting the right search terms. That is, the internet provides for the construction of specialised, distributed, communicating communities such as have never existed before: it's hard to conceive of doing something similar through the postal service, or even the telephone. So the internet mirrors the human condition, from porn to poetry, and also democratises it. If you want to write poetry, you can hang out in communities that resemble the Bloomsbury Group in terms of their intellectual depth -- and you can do so from wherever you live, limited only by your ability to contribute. You can get feedback on your work or comments from others, perhaps more experienced than yourself, and so improve your own understanding and ability in your chosen field. The same thing has happened since that start of the internet: Conscience of a hacker, a poem of praise of meritocratic technical communities, still resonates with many computer people (including myself). There is a side-effect of this specialisation, however, that's less positive. By forming a dedicated niche exactly suited to the needs of a particular community, the internet often removes those people from the general forums of discussion. Why engage with a general community when one can be with people exactly in tune with what you want? The answer, sometimes, is that what you want and what you need may be different, and that groupthink is far easier and more prevalent in smaller groups than in larger ones. This is where amplification kicks in. If everyone in a community is kind of the same as yourself, it's harder to stand out -- and many people love to stand out. You can do so by being more helpful than anyone else, or by be more perceptive and insightful -- or by being more extreme. The very specialisation of internet communities, combined with the ease of communication, the partial or complete anonymity, and the desire to stand out can be very disinhibiting, and can amplify discussion quite quickly to the extremities of what that group considers acceptable. If you hang out in some subcultural chat rooms, what's acceptable is very elastic and discussion will quickly head to the extremes: more extreme than most people can easily imagine, in many cases. So amplification seems to be a direct result of specialisation -- one of the things that makes internet communities so powerful in the first place -- and can operate both positively and negatively, making the good better and the bad worse. Actually these effects are becoming more widespread than discussion groups, through the phenomenon of "search bubbles". Google and other search engines now perform substantial pre-processing on search results before presenting them, for example including factors of localisation, user preferences and history. This means that the results you see in response to a search aren't the whole story: you're seeing what Google thinks will be of most relevance and interest to you. This is simply another form of specialisation: more discreet than happens with discussion forums, but still separating out a sub-set of the whole internet's information that's closely targeted to you. This certainly suggests that it might be subject to the same amplification effects, as people perceive (wrongly) that a large amount of content on the internet agrees with them and fits their pre-modelled interests and preferences -- and prejudices. It's hard to know what to suggest to deal with these issues. Actually I'm inclined to say that nothing should be done, other than to be aware that the mirror magnifies, as it were. The good of specialist communities almost certainly outweighs the disadvantages of these (or other) communities pushing extremism, but it'd be good if those engaged in such discussions keep the amplifying effects of internet discussions in the backs of their minds for when things start to get weird.

Wikileaks as reality television

Simon Dobson — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:30:30 GMT

There's something very 21st century about the Wikileaks/Julian Assange affair. And not in a good way. The Wikileaks saga dominated the airwaves for the last months of 2010: the revelation of a huge mass diplomatic communications between the US and the world, drip-fed to newspapers and searched incessantly for data to support each and every pet theory in the world. The story undoubtedly has enormous colour, and superficially is a story for our time. The data is released on the web, and the authorities strain to close the offending site down. Pressure is put on service providers to withdraw support. This only leads to extensive mirroring of the site, frustrating any attempt to close-off access to the data, while the service providers are the subject of distributed denial-of-service attacks by outraged groups of hacktivists. The site's founder has on-again/off-again troubles with the law, being threatened with everything from espionage to treason in the US (despite not being in the US, and despite not being a US citizen, which would seem to make treason rather a long shot), but is arrested and bailed in the UK on foot of a warrant from Sweden for a seemlingly unrelated matter. It sounds like a soap opera, and I'm rather afraid that that's all it really is. Let's start by recognising the legitimate tension between a desire for transparent government and a desire for anonymity and even secrecy in government communications. On the one hand it's clearly in the public interest to have the whistle blown on unsavoury or illegal State activities, and a blanket claim that national security trumps this interest is absurd. On the other hand, some of the Wikileaks data identifies individuals who may be endangered by having their names publicised. Anonymity is often essential for people to reveal information; similarly, it's in the public interest to have diplomats be able and willing to express their opinions openly without fear of public censure or ridicule, since the alternative would be to distort the open exchange of ideas. This is the principle that underlies scientific and other meetings held under what in the UK are referred to as Chatham House rules: any comments may be used in any context, but with no individual or institutional attribution. The Wikileaks disclosures are still on-going, but what strikes me about what's been seen so far is the almost complete absence of anything that would justify disclosure -- or indeed secrecy. It's simply a recitation of diplomatic chit-chat that sometimes supports information already in the public domain but certainly provides nothing of any additional significance. It's surely not a revelation, for example, that Arab governments are concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme, or that UK diplomats suspected that Sinn Féin knew about the Northern Bank robbery by the IRA (to take two stories at random): we either knew or could surmise this already. Many have made allusions between Wikileaks and the release of the Pentagon papers in 1971, classified information leaked to the New York Times which fuelled the growing sentiment against the Vietnam war. But in that case there actually was information revealed -- the extent of the military's prior analysis and its subsequent dilution -- that could be argued to be of importance. Wikileaks lacks this sense of solidity. To me, the whole affair feels like a piece of reality television that happens to have happened over the web, happens to have a frisson of illegality, and happens to have a link to the diplomatic and intelligence communities. The chatter that we're seeing is just that: chatter. It's surprising only to the extent that it's unsurprising. There are no smoking guns, no support for conspiracy theories, no examples of significant ineptitude or corruption -- nothing. It is to a real journalistic coup what "Big Brother" is a television documentary. Perhaps we can draw three conclusions from this, The first is the fascination that the 21st century has with real-world data, regardless of its information content. People watch "Big Brother" despite the fact that most of the time nothing happens, and when something does happen it's probably been contrived by the participants or the producers. But even when nothing is happening it can be obscurely compelling. Wikileaks is similar: no real content, but a compulsion to keep looking just in case. And of course if (for the sake of argument) some interesting revelation does surface, how will we know whether it's real or contrived? How will we tell information from dis-information? The second conclusion is that data is no substitute for interpretation in context. The Pentagon Papers' significance came from the fact that the journalists involved could see there was a story there, and link it to the rest of the news happening alongside, to the people and organisations involved. This journalistic addition is conspicuous by its absence in relation to Wikileaks. This of course goes against Tim Berners Lee's recently-asserted position that the future or journalism is basically data analysis. I have the greatest respect for Tim, but on this point I think he's badly mistaken. The problem is that real journalism isn't exclusively, or even primarily, about the data: it's about the people, their motivations and behaviours, which often aren't represented in the raw data with which web science concerns itself. Thirdly, even though the Wikileaks affair is really just an old-fashioned leak to the press, we can see that the web has changed things somewhat. The US authorities moved quickly to attack the site initially hosting the data, but only succeeded in triggering its replication to a enough geographically-distributed sites to defy further suppression. Once data is out there and judged to be significant, it'll stay out there through the independent actions of concerned individuals. This makes further analysis and contextualisation possible, but doesn't guarantee that it'll happen -- and that's where the real value lies.

The view of the internet, 15 years ago

Simon Dobson — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:00:54 GMT

I was just sent a link to an article from 1995 on how the internet is over-hyped. It's a fascinating read, not just in terms of the things it gets wrong but also of the ways in which the views expressed were plausible at the time. The article in question is "The Internet? Bah!" by Clifford Stoll, and appeared in Newsweek on 27 February 1995. For those whose memories of computer culture don't stretch back this far, Stoll has form. He was a system manager at Lawrence Berkeley laboratory in California during a serious attempt to crack US military computers -- one of the first examples of modern cyber-warfare. Rather than shut-out the crackers when he found them, he instead worked alongside a largely uncomprehending law enforcement community to help track them down, and brilliantly tells the story in his book The cuckoo's egg. He then got concerned about the over-selling of computer technology for his next book, Silicon snake oil. His Newsweek article is in this latter vein. The crux of Stoll's argument is that the internet will never replace traditional off-line activities like shopping for books, accessing a newspaper and the like. The internet is simply

...one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.

It's barely worth noting that many of these arguments have been invalidated by events. That's hardly surprising, and while a technologist of Stoll's standing should perhaps have been more wary about some of his predictions, the more important point is how the internet evolved to address points that, from a 1995 perspective, seem completely natural. Stoll's comments on electronic publishing are perhaps the most interesting:

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

And, of course, he's right: who would want to read a book on a 1995 green-screen, or indeed on one of those then fairly new-fangled windowed displays? That's only changing now, where displays have similar resolution to paper as far as the eye is concerned, and when e-paper displays can be read in direct sunlight -- and when one can take an iPad or a Kindle to the beach, albeit rather carefully, and buy books not only straight over the internet but even completely untethered over the cellphone network. A similar argument can be made to take down the article's discussions about e-shopping for airline tickets and restaurant reservations, e-government and access to information, and so forth. But the fact remains that Stoll's analysis of the internet circa 1995 wasn't too far off the mark. Where did things change? I suspect the clue is in the last paragraph:

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. ... Computers and networks isolate us from one another.

Again, not an unreasonable view in 1995. No-one I can remember really suggested that social networks would flourish, and indeed come to almost define the web and internet in the early 21st century. And that's rather surprising, given that the first "killer app" for the internet was e-mail, and not (as was expected) scientific data exchange: a social technology rapidly took off in a place where no such socialisation was expected. The surprise is that we were surprised again -- and I include myself in that surprise -- when the history of the internet clearly showed that it's users see it as a social enabler as much as, if not more than, as an information source. Clearly we shouldn't abandon the sorts of critical comments that Stoll was making, or worry that predictions about technology are almost always overtaken by events we had no idea were coming. But it does mean that whenever we hear comments on the social value of technology and the impact it will have on society -- as is happening over internet reading and other technologies at the moment -- we should pause and think whether the negatives identified are somehow intrinsic, or whether they rest solely on the systems as currently deployed and conceived. We're familiar with the idea of a network effect. The strongest network effects are in the abilities of people to re-use and re-purpose technology beyond the bounds conceived of by its inventors. It's only really surprising when this doesn't happen.

Call for panels in integrated network management

Simon Dobson — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:32:59 GMT

We're looking for expert panels to be run at the IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management in Dublin in May 2011.

IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2011)

Dublin, Ireland, 23-27 May 2011 http://www.ieee-im.org/

Call for panels

Background

IM is one of the premier venues in network management, providing a forum for discussing a broad range of issues relating to network structure, services, optimisation, adaptation and management. This year's symposium has a special emphasis on effective and energy-efficient design, deployment and management of current and future networks and services. We are seeking proposals for expert discussion panels to stimulate and inform the audience as to the current "hot topics" within network management. An ideal panel will bring the audience into a discussion prompted by position statements from the panel members, taking account of both academic and industrial viewpoints. We are interested in panels on all aspects of network management, especially those related to the theme of energy awareness and those discussing the wider aspects of networks and network management. This would include the following topics, amongst others:

Multi-transport and multi-media networks
Network adaptation and optimisation
Co-managing performance and energy
The uses and abuses of sensor networks
The science of service design and implementation
Programming network management strategies
Tools and techniques for network management
Socio-technical integration of networks
Energy-efficiency vs equality of access
Network-aware cloud computing
The future of autonomic management
Coping with data obesity
Managing the next-generation internet

How to propose a panel

Please send a brief (1-page) proposal to the panel chairs, Simon Dobson and Gerard Parr. Your proposal should indicate the relevance of the panel to the broad audience of IM, and include the names of proposed panel members.

Important dates

Submission of panel proposals: 20 October 2010 Notifications of acceptance: mid-November 2010 Conference dates: 23-27 May 2011

Getting rid of the laptop

Simon Dobson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:00:02 GMT

I've been ~~playing with~~ evaluating two ~~new toys~~ important new pieces of technology: an iPad and a Pulse SmartPen. The combination almost makes we ready to ditch my netbook -- or at least got me thinking carefully about why I still have one. The iPad is well-known; the SmartPen perhaps not so. It's made by a company called LiveScribe, and works with special notebook paper. A camera in the nib watches what's been written and tracks the pen by looking at a background of dots arranged to provide location information about the pen on the page. The pen can also record what's being said, and cleverly links the two data streams together: later you can tap a word and hear what was being said at the time. I've been using one for a fortnight. I used to keep written notebooks, but moved to taking notes purely on my netbook when I realised I was forgetting what I'd written where: a notebook is just a dead tree with dead information on it, and I've become used to everything being searchable. However, getting searchability meant converting my note-taking style to linear text rather than mindmaps or sketches, since that's what the tools typically support. (There are mindmap tools, of course, but they're completely separate from other note-taking tools and so get in the way somewhat.) There's also a barrier to note-taking in having to get the netbook out, rather than just picking up a (special) pen and (special) paper. The resulting data is searchable, since the desktop tool does fairly decent) handwriting recognition: I can "tag" pages in the margins, writing slightly more carefully than usual, and search for the tags even if full content searching is a bit aspirational. For what I do this is a lot, but not quite enough, as I spend a lot of time reading, looking up information and writing emails, papers and the like. A Kindle or other e-reader would be great for the reading, but not for the net access. That's where the iPad comes in: can it replace the need for a more traditional web-access and writing device? It's certainly a lovely piece of kit, fast and stable, and allows easy browsing. The keyboard is pretty good for a "soft" device, and one could easily see writing email and editing small amounts of text using it. I can also see that it'd be an awesome platform for interactive content and mixed media books/films, assuming the editing tools are available elsewhere. Of course neither netbooks nor iPads are really optimised for the creation of content: they're very much consumer devices intended for the consumption of content written on other, bigger machines. I don't think that's a criticism -- no-one does smartphone software development on a smartphone, after all -- but it does mean that neither is optimal as a device for someone who creates a lot. But the combination of a digitised paper notebook with an internet-access device is extremely attractive. Both devices are extremely portable and friendly, and link well to the larger "back office" machines I use for "serious" work. I have two worries, one about both devices and one about the iPad alone. The first worry is the almost completely closed nature of the software. The Pulse loads its recorded sound and images into its own desktop tool, which are than only available through that tool despite (I imagine) using standard data formats internally with some clever hyperlinking. The tool does provide important value-add, of course, specifically the links from written text to recorded audio. But that should be separate from the actual content, and it isn't. One can "archive" a notebook, or turn individual pages into PDF, but not (as far as I can tell) get access to the content programmatically as it stands. That's simply obstructive on the part of Livescribe -- and also a little shortsighted, I think, since their linking technology could clearly be applied to any print-linked-to-sound data if their tool was open and able to access arbitrary content. I think this is a great example of where openness is both friendly to the community and potentially a commercial virtue. (Oh, and the Livescribe desktop only works on Intel Macs: who exactly writes non-universal binaries these days? and why?) The iPad has a similar ecosystem, of course, which is "open" in the sense that anyone can write programs for it but "closed" in the sense that (firstly) access to the App Store is carefully constrained and (secondly) there are features of the platform and operating system that aren't freely available to everyone. I can understand Apple's contention that -- for phones especially -- it's important to only download apps that won't brick the device. This doesn't of course imply that there should be a single gatekeeper as has happened with the App Store: one could provide a default store but allow external ones, as happens with Android Market. A single gatekeeper is basically just a way to extract rents from the software ecosystem. This can stifle both innovation and price, to Apple's advantage. What worries me more, though, is the extra, non-commercial dimension in terms of content control, which I think is more broadly damaging than just software. I was looking at an app for cocktail recipes (Linda's a big fan). There are several available, of course, but all come with a rating of 17+ because of their mention of frequent drinking or drug use. There's a suggestion of the illicit becoming the illegal there. It's also well-known that Apple enforces a "no porn" rule on the App Store. Whatever one's attitude to pornography, much of it isn't illegal and it's not clear that a software company should restrict the uses of a device above and beyond the law. The whole experience reminds me very strongly of Disneyland: safe, beautiful, welcoming, friendly -- and utterly fake, and utterly anodyne. One can choose not to go to Disneyland, of course -- and certainly not to live there -- but it's another thing to hand control of access to information and information technology off to a commercial third party. Anything can be disallowed on a whim, or for the greater commercial good -- and can of course be disallowed or edited retrospectively. Whether we like it or not, human culture includes material, that is distasteful for many people. That's why we have critical faculties, and diversity, and laws on free speech. Commercial device providers and operators are not constrained by requirements to fairness in the way that newspapers and public broadcasters are, and could easily be persuaded to silence some forms of speech on the basis of commercial interest regardless of their wider legality. For the present I'll be keeping the netbook for internet access, but using the SmartPen for note-taking, and thinking a bit more about a dedicated ebook reader. It's a compromise between openness and convenience that I'm conscious of making, and not without some hesitation. Time will tell how the choices play out and evolve, and maybe I'll buy an Android tablet when they mature a little :-)

The power of comics

Simon Dobson — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:00:06 GMT

I've been fortunate enough to spend some of the past couple of days with a comic-writer who studies the academic experience, and who might well have a greater aggregate impact on science than almost anyone else I've ever met. This week has been the SICSA graduate student conference, giving SICSA's PhD students to share their ideas in front of a friendly audience. As well as the science, one of the goals of the event was to improve the student experience in social ways, letting them find new collaborators and share their experiences and worries. And what better way facilitate this than by inviting the writer of PhD Comics, one off the most popular internet comic strips, to come and talk? The man behind PhD Comics is Jorge Cham, whom I have to say is one of the nicest guys you could want to hang out with. Jorge has a PhD himself, of course. His research topic was robotics, specifically small, fast robots mimicking cockroach locomotion to move over uneven surfaces. These sorts of systems have huge potential applications, from space missions and environmental rovers to accident-victim location and disaster recovery. However, his main passion even during his PhD was cartooning, reflecting on and responding to the graduate student experience. It started as a print comic in a Stanford newspaper and predictably did well in a place where the student density is so high. But it was only when he put it onto the internet that it really took off. Like many things on the internet, there's a law-of-large-numbers effect that can come unexpectedly into play. The number of graduate students in any particular place is usually small, but integrated over the world you have a respectable audience -- and PhD Comics now sustains around half a million hits per day. The goal of PhD Comics is to act as an encouragement to graduate students. For anyone who's been through it -- as I have -- it's overall an extremely rewarding, liberating intellectual, social and life experience; it's also a lonely, frustrating, depressing, isolating and self-critical one. It takes an effort of will to believe that you're making a contribution, making discoveries that others will find interesting and worthwhile. Even those with unbounded self-confidence -- which most certainly does not include me, not now and certainly not then -- will find themselves questioning their motivations and capabilities over the course of their PhD. Often the most sobering part of the whole experience is the realisation of how smart other people are. Most graduate students come from being top or near-top of their undergraduaate class. They then land in an environment where everyone was top of their class: the average suddenly lurches upwards, which can be disorienting. Not only that, but graduate students generally mix, on fairly equal terms, with postdocs and staff who have enormously more experience and who may in some cases be quite famous within the limited bounds of their fields, putting further strain on self-confidence. I have a quite visceral memory of going to my first graduate-level presentation on a topic (type theory) that I thought I understood well -- as indeed I did, at an undergraduate level. Three slides into the talk, I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about type theory as it actually is, its important concepts, challenges and uses. It was quite wrenching to realise the extent of my own ignorance. Conversely, though, when I now talk about my own work I'm conscious of the gap that exists between people with a reasonable (in every sense) knowledge of a field and those with an expert knowledge, and try to pitch the material accordingly. Which brings us back to PHD Comics. Every individual graduate student will feel overwhelmed at some point, and may not be able to reach out locally to find support. But they can reach out to the shared experience that is the comic and its archive and see how others feel about the same situations and challenges that they face -- and do so in a way that's far more entertaining than talking to a counsellor. I suspect this is an incredibly valuable service, and one that I'd've welcomed when doing my own PhD. Does this help with the process of doing science? The completion rates for PhDs is high --over 99% for Scottish computer science, for example -- but the time taken, and stress endured, in that process varies widely. Anything that helps mitigate the strain, helping students cement their self-confidence and deal with the challenges, is very much to be welcomed. This got me thinking. Robotics is an important field, and it's impossible to say what we lost in terms of research and innovation when Jorge followed his passion. But it's almost certain that he's influenced more scientific activity, more widely, as a cartoonist than he ever would have done as a researcher or an academic. Not everyone can be a researcher, but even fewer can provide insight and entertainment as cartoonists, and even fewer can spot and take the opportunity to become the voice of graduate students worldwide. Following this logic a little further, I suspect that bringing Jorge over to SICSA may have been the single most effective "soft spend" in the whole programme to date. We don't have a problem with completion, but we do, like all universities, have issues with confidence and motivation, and anything we can do to improve those is money well spent. I wish I could think of a way to confirm that value empirically, but I can't: but that's not going to stop me recommending Jorge as a speaker to anyone wanting to improve their research environment.