Queen Elizabeth 2nd, a photo by AndyRobertsPhotos on Flickr.

I must have been in a funny mood when I stopped to photograph this damp patch on the pavement just because the shape of it jumped out at me for looking a bit like the Queen’s head. It’s a phenomenon called “Pareidolia” which I’ve written about before in evidence-of-life-on-mars-and-figures-found-in-rocks Pareidolia is when a vague or random image is perceived as recognisable. The old ink blot phenomenon beloved of psychologists in old films and comedy. Maybe you can’t see the face at all? It’s not quite as obvious as the previous example, the face in the rock:

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Queen Elizabeth 2nd

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time capsule April May iPad and Podcast

Leaving the house I could feel the air was cold but on approaching the green open space that is the flats I could see layers of mist suspended over the frosted grass. When the sun poked up over the lines of trees it lit up the landscape with golden light.

Wanstead Flats Sunrise October 15th

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Sunrise on Wanstead Flats

Many more Kew Gardens photos are amongst my photosets on Flickr such as :

Kew Gardens October 2011

Kew Gardens

Collection of Kew Gardens Photosets

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Kew Gardens

With videography by Evan Roberts, this youTube is pretty self explanatory.

The actual location is a campsite at Camping Moreiras, O Grove, Pontevedra, Galicia. The fish, a whole monkfish, came from the fish market on the harbour at O Grove itself, as did the vegetables and the cider is an Asturian Sidra Natural obtaine en route from one of many Eroski supermarkets.

Just a bit of fun really, but it captures one of many happy mealtimes from a memorable holiday touring Asturias and Galicia in September 2011. There are loads of photos online  at both my collection and Linda’s Flickr  photostreams.

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Cooking Monkfish with Cider in Galicia

via posterous

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Time capsule for July 25th to August 8th, 2010

via posterous

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time capsule June 8th to June 22nd, 2010

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time capsule from May 25th to June 8th, 2010

This Red Breasted Goose appeared on Alexandra Lake in Wanstead Flats today, having a rest on its way home to Siberia.

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Red Breasted Goose

Here’s a snapshot of my Instagram stats.

You’re on your iPhone right now?
- Save the image in your library
- Open your Instagram app and share your snapshot with your community
(You can even give it your favorite filtering option! )

See you soon on Statigr.am

via posterous

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My Snapshot Statigr.am

February the Fifteenth

Originally uploaded by AndyRob

February the Fifteenth

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February the Fifteenth

On a steep part of a popular walk, many human footsteps began to wear away the turf. At some point it became slightly easier to walk in the same footprints as previous walkers, and then the effect magnified and the pattern locked in.

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Emergent Staircase

I know the venue from the Tuttle club, which I have attended once or twice there. The Open Day was due to kick off at 09.50 with a presentation by Frankie Roberto about “How We Got To Where We Are” which I didn’t want to miss. Well, I did manage to get there in time, despite the fact there were no trains at all on the Circle, Hammersmith and City, and District Lines in that direction. (Weekends are a bad time to get about in London, midweek breaks are better).

So Frankie talked a bit about how he sent out a tweet once wondering if there was a database somewhere of Blue Plaques, and how the answers came in suggesting things, none of which were at all adequate. The best resource available was a single page on one of the plaque erecting organisation  sites. So he scraped the list into a database and started trying to parse it into meaningful data, using his linguistics abilities.

Lenin by Simon Harriyott - Plaque #2210

Another useful source of information would be the pictures on Flickr, and these could be geotagged which then provided a link into the new Open Plaques database. Once the people at Flickr had made a blog post about the Open Plaques group and integrated the special tag

ging into Flickr itself, then there was no turning back. Open Plaques could not be switched off, it was now more than just an experiment. The provision of an api to send the data out again meant that satellite applications could be built by creative people

and these would find new and unthought of uses for the growing system. There was also a graph which showed the steady growth in numbers of plaques added during the lifetime of the project. This graph could be expected to turn dramatically upwards once there is an easy way to add new plaques, which at present requires somebody from the “core team” to do it!

Morning Agenda

09:50 – 10:05 – Frankie Roberto, ‘The Story So Far’
10:05 – 10:20 – Ian Ozsvald, ‘The OCR Challenge’
10:20 – 10:35 – Richard Vahrman, ‘Games based on Open Plaques data’
10:35 – 10:50 – Emily Toop, ‘Open Plaques the iPhone app’

Next up we had Ian Ozsvald using a subset of the pictures of plaques as an AI research project to see how well they could get OCR software to recognise the writing in the plaques. This makes a nice real world example dataset which can help to advance the science of artificial intelligence and character recognition in the real world. The vision is that one day soon you will be able to simply wave your phone camera about in a room and it will automatically detect any faces present, take a picture of each of them and store it with their names and the geolocation of the place on a map, as well as read any text that is being displayed in the room, on the walls or from a projector for example, and store that as well with the date, time, place and list of attendees etc. It can’t be done yet, but this will be mainstream in just a few years, he said. Is that scary? Then an iPhone app which is being built to show all the plaques nearby as pins on a map which you can get information about. The future is mobile, and anybody who isn’t intending to get a smart phone within the next twelve months might as well just go and live in a cave somewhere, cut off from all of technical society. And a mobile app that turns it into a game, which has gone through some transitions. Based on a treasure trail type model, the app ended up giving out directions for how to get to the next plaque, so that was just too easy and not fun. The clever idea was to take a picture with your back to the plaque, of the view from the plaque as it were, which can then be used in a “Guess where Plaque” game, with the numbers on the plaques adding up to link references which tells you where the pub is. Some of the people just wanted to take a short cut to the pub though, which is fair enough.

So then we broke up into groups to try and further the project from different angles. One team discussed the future direction from from the developers point of view, one looked at design I think, and the group I joined discussed content. We brainstormed about “who are the different types of users” who may have an interest in Open Plaques, both current and potential, came out with some wistful ideas for addons and expansion, hammered out the concept of what a plaque is, looked at the different page types, the additional information that could be included within the database or on a specific page, and suggested new functions and concepts. If it came down to just one new facility that would make the biggest difference that would be the ability to Nominate a New Plaque which would then sit alongside the existing plaques as a ‘virtual plaque’. I chose this as the most important because it’s a disruptive move which takes the initiative out of the hands of the few organisations who very slowly make the decisions as to which locations or historical figures are worthy of a plaque, and puts it into the hands of the ordinary person, or the ordinary Open Plaques user. It was interesting to note that most of the small group of people present, some of whom admitted to being mildly obsessed with plaques, one who described herself as being a “plaques widow” and half of whom seemed to come from Brighton, all had a clear idea that somewhere out there would be the “ordinary Open plaques user” for whom the grand service is being refined and must be orientated. What the ordinary user, should such a group of people come into being at some point, will make out of of all this, of course has yet to be seen.

I found the whole topic a lot more interesting than I had originally anticipated to be honest, and far from feeling that I wouldn’t have anything to contribute, did my best to add in and highlight what I felt to be the most pertinent ideas. Using the theory of Social Objects it seems fairly clear that the principal page type and the url at which the casual visitor arrives should be the plaque itself rather than the person or place. The verbs then need to encourage contributions in order to help build out the community around plaques in general, and perhaps temporarily around individual plaques, probably asynchronously. “Add a Plaque”   “Edit this Page” or even “check in here” are contenders for prominent verbs on the page, but you have to remember that this is a small and in some ways unlikely project, that just happens to have gained enough momentum to become sustainable, but is unlikely to attract enormous resources for development and maintenance. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

Open Plaques Open Day on other blogs:

• Clairey Ross : Open Plaques more than plaques on a wall, more than points in a map?

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Open Plaques Open Day

You can treat this as a caption competition if you like, as I was genuinely baffled as to what exactly was being forbidden here.

Is it anything to do with this one?

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What does this sign mean?

…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.

I’ve got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.

The second picture I’m considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.

The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.

Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.

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Weather Photography Competition

Bar Head Goose at Wansted Flats, originally uploaded by Andyrob.

The barhead or barheaded goose is an exotic species, probably an escape but there are reports of some breeding in the UK. They are specially adapted for flying at altitude, migrating over the himalayas at 26,000 feet on a regular journey from Tibet to Pakistan!

This one is hanging out with the greylag geese at Alexandra Lake on Wanstead Flats, East London. It doesn’t seem to cohort with the Canada geese though.

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Bar Head Goose at Wanstead Flats

This is the picture referred to in the book, and it came in for a lot of attention on the day itself, July 7th 2005.

The book relates directly to the topic we’ve been discussing in the “End of Organisations” debate, and there’s also a blog by Clay Shirky which recently published an insightful article about the cognitive surplus caused by forty years of watching crap TV, which I can relate to. It’s called Gin, Television and Social Surplus although the permalink reveals a subtitle “looking for the mouse”.

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That photo in Here Comes Everybody

Better than youTube?

Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field. So is Flickr video better than youTube or just different?

My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.

Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video, and something that youTube does not really have is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.

Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related. All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.

To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.

I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?

Yes or no?

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Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube?

In both of the freeby London newspapers yesterday on the tube there was a story about the picture from planet Mars which seemed to show a human like figure walking across the Martian surface. At first glance the picture looks like a joke or a fake, reminding me of the “Elvis found on Moon” headlines from the launch of a new tabloid in the eighties. But in the articles they seem to claim that it’s a genuine photograph from a Mars Explorer that shows a part of the rocky terrain that just happens to look very much like a bipedal torso with head and arms. Here it is again on the BBC website. Now the newspapers may have enhanced the illusion slightly in their image processing, but it does beg the question what are the chances of a randomly formed piece of rock looking so much like a recognisable figure competely out of context?

Then I remembered the rock I saw with my own eyes when travelling along the Canyon de Sil in Galicia, northern Spain. This photograph is straight from my own camera in 2005

It’s the old ink blot phenomenon again, like seeing faces in clouds. Our human brains are so wired by evolution up to recognise the specific patterns of faces and human forms or figures that we tend to over-detect them, and given enough random material to look at, we’ll eventually notice one somewhere. So is there really any evidence of Life on Mars? – that’s for another post!

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Evidence of life on Mars and figures found in rocks

I just had my Flickr Pro account extended by three months for free. That’s not exactly going to save me a fortune in general internet running expenses, well not in terms of dollars or pounds, but little things like this can help keep me going, so I thought it would be worth telling you how to do it.

It’s all because Yahoo! are closing down Yahoo! Photos in favour of Flickr, which they bought last year and is much better. So closing down the old one is a sensible thing to do. You wouldn’t keep google video open if you’d just bought YouTube would you…?

The three months free Flickr Pro is a reward for agreeing to import any old photo sets I might have had on Yahoo! Photos, into my Flickr Pro account. That’s all there is to it. The old photos are all imported with privacy set to “private” at first, so I can decide whether I want to make them public or not, and no mention of the reward was made until after the photos had been imported, so you wouldn’t know about this nice little bonus unless somebody like me blogs about it.

Here’s the FAQ

http://www.flickr.com/help/yahoophotos/

It’s nice to have more of my photos all in one place, and a Flickr Pro account extended by three months for free.

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Three months Flickr pro for free