Category Archives: movies

Canada Aviation and Space Museum’s Legacy Project (crowdfunding)

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Dec. 19, 2014 is the last day for contributing to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum’s crowdfunding campaign for their Legacy Project. Here’s more from the Canada Aviation and Space Museum Foundation’s Legacy Project webpage,

What happens when people divided by generations unite to share our country’s history? The Legacy Project is a documentary being created by Canadian film students and the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. Through first person accounts from Canadian Veterans — airmen and women who served in the RCAF, RAF, WAAF, and the Polish Air Force — as well as from former European civilians, the documentary will showcase the people and stories of the Second World War through the lens of aviation. What began as an oral history project has transformed into a documentary that also includes the personal impact these stories have had on the students who have been involved in the production of the film. Formatted in five separate segments, the documentary can be viewed as a whole or in parts. These segments, along with classroom resources, will be available for download by schools across Canada.

The Museum believes there is a need to better connect today’s youth, who are poised to build the future, with their history and heritage. It is important to capture and understand the legacy that the last living members of the generation that experienced, served in, and lived though the Second World War forged and are leaving behind. The Museum takes the responsibility “to never forget” seriously, and this project endeavours to capture and share this legacy with Canadian students from coast to coast to coast.

The Legacy Project has become a labour of love for the Canada Aviation and Space Museum and the film students who have so far recorded over 35 interviews with Veterans and civilians since filming began two years ago. Funding is required to complete editing, transcription, translation, and dubbing, and to secure the necessary copyright for music and images.

As a Crown corporation, the Museum’s operational costs are covered by taxpayer dollars, but the funding for special projects such as this documentary comes from donors like you. The Museum is passionate about this project and would be grateful for any community support to finalize and distribute the documentary for 2016.

A campaign video has been produced,

You can find the Legacy Project on indiegogo here.

The notice I received form the museum states this about the funds raised so far,

The Museum’s crowdfunding campaign for The Legacy Project, a documentary being created by students, for students, ends tomorrow. So far, over $18,000 has been gratefully received from across Canada, but your help is still needed to reach the fundraising goal of $35,000.

I notice the inidiegogo campaign has a different total and one reason I can think for the disparity is the museum is receiving some of the donations directly. In any event, I wish them good luck and hope they reach their total.

Peter Sircom Bromley’s documentary: No Carbon Nation released December 2014

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I don’t usually include information of this type, a documentary about policy, energy, and sustainability (in other words, no nano, no research focus, no art) on my blog. However, one good turn deserves another. and Peter Bromely offered me a good turn a few years ago.

Here’s the text of the Dec. 1, 2014, news release sent out in support of No Carbon Nation,

The conceptual framework for climate action is straightforward and applies to all jurisdictions around the world. However, in order to coordinate effective action, and gain political support for it, it’s important that people everywhere be clear on that framework. This is one of the main ideas behind No Carbon Nation: pathways to sustainable energy, an independent documentary released on the internet today.

No Carbon Nation focuses on energy transition, which is the centerpiece of climate policy in progressive jurisdictions worldwide. Beginning with an introductory overview of climate diplomacy as organized by the Kyoto Protocol, the documentary offers the viewer a basic understanding of the energy sector and summarizes the technological and regulatory tools available to make the required changes to it. No Carbon Nation also identifies institutional behavior as a major barrier to change. “Individuals and institutions tend to rely heavily on what they’ve done before. There is no reward for making the effort to change,” says the filmmaker, Peter Sircom Bromley, based in Vancouver, Canada. “The world has all the technical and regulatory tools it needs to avoid dangerous climate change. We just need to collectively bite the bullet.”

As a documentary, No Carbon Nation is a distilled, tightly edited, relentless, and sometimes lyrical compilation of what progressive jurisdictions and industries worldwide are doing – and not doing – to reduce human impacts on the climate. It is punctuated by interviews with professionals on the front lines of energy transition, including management personnel at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the US. The LADWP operates in a jurisdiction with some of the most ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction policies in the world.

The demand side of energy

Fossil fuel producers get scant attention in the film. “Oil, gas and coal suppliers are simply feeding the world’s energy systems. So stopping fossil fuel combustion, the main contributor to climate change, means changing those systems. In other words, we need to deal with the demand side,” says the filmmaker, a former Sierra Club director who has been engaged with climate policy since 1995. “And that means transforming energy systems across all sectors of the world economy: electricity generation, transportation, buildings and heavy industry.”

The film is “sort of like dots on a map, identifying pressure points where action is more effective and actually taking place. In that sense it’s not complicated,” says Bromley. “Call it a feature length public service announcement. Hopefully viewers who manage to sit through it will find the film a useful primer for climate action – be it buying an electric vehicle, giving clear directives to their government representatives, or switching off a light.”

Internet provides significant content

Almost half the footage used in the documentary came from diverse online sources including the US Department of Energy, the European Commission, and The Newsmarket, as did eight of 24 interviews and sound bites. “Lots of people are making excellent material on the topic available. Why duplicate their efforts?” Bromley says, adding that the project was largely a writing and editing challenge. “The main thing was to make a highly complex and diverse set of issues easy to understand – both for the viewer, and for myself,” he chuckles. “It’s like McLuhan said: give people too much information and they instantly resort to pattern recognition.”

The documentary, in 720 HD, is free to watch online (www.NoCarbonNation.net) as a complete film, or in four parts for those who prefer to pace themselves through the full 94 minutes. A website is built around the documentary, and provides viewers with links to explore the subject in greater detail. However, a more leisurely viewing experience can be had with a large screen and a good sound system. The documentary and website will be updated from time to time. “Things are changing pretty fast,” says the filmmaker.

contact: Peter Sircom Bromley

pbsky@telus.net

From what I’ve seen of part one, this is a deeply felt and intense piece of filmmaking dedicated to a topic, energy policy, that would seem highly unsuited to this treatment. Bravo to Peter Sircom Bromley for finding a way to make it cinematic and accessible!

Science and the arts: a science rap promotes civil discussion about science and religion; a science movie and a play; and a chemistry article about authenticating a Lawren Harris painting

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Canadian-born rapper of science and many other topics, Baba Brinkman sent me an update about his current doings (first mentioned in an Aug. 1, 2014 posting featuring his appearances at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, his Rap Guide to Religion being debuted at the Fringe, and his Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the creation of an animated rap album of his news Rap Guide to Religion), Note: Links have been removed,

Greetings from Edinburgh! In the past two and half weeks I’ve done fifteen performances of The Rap Guide to Religion for a steadily building audience here at the Fringe, and we recently had a whole pile of awesome reviews published, which I will excerpt below, but first a funny story.

Yesterday [August 14, 2014] BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] Sunday Morning TV was in to film my performance. They had a scheme to send a right wing conservative Christian to the show and then film us having an argument afterwards. The man they sent certainly has the credentials. Reverend George Hargreaves is a Pentecostal Minister and former leader of the UK Christian Party, as well as a young earth creationist and strong opponent of abortion and homosexuality. He led the protests that got “Jerry Springer the Opera” shut down in London a few years back, and is on record as saying that religion is not an appropriate subject for comedy. Before he converted to Christianity, the man was also a DJ and producer of pop music for the London gay scene, interesting background.

So after an hour of cracking jokes at religion’s expense, declaring myself an unapologetic atheist, and explaining why evolutionary science gives a perfectly satisfying naturalistic account of where religion comes from, I sat down with Reverend George and was gobsmacked when he started the interview with: “I don’t know if we’re going to have anything to debate about… I LOVED your show!” We talked for half an hour with the cameras rolling and at one point George said “I don’t know what we disagree about,” so I asked him: “Do you think one of your ancestors was a fish?” He declared that statement a fishy story and denied it, and then we found much to disagree about.

I honestly thought I had written a hard-hitting, provocative and controversial show, but it turns out the religious are loving it as much as the nonbelievers – and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I asked Reverend George why he wasn’t offended, even though he’s officially against comedy that targets religion, and he told me it’s because I take the religious worldview seriously, instead of lazily dismissing it as delusional. The key word here is “lazily” rather than “delusional” because I don’t pull punches about religion being a series of delusions, but I don’t think those delusions are pointless. I think they have evolved (culturally and genetically) to solve adaptive problems in the past, and for religious people accustomed to atheists being derisive and dismissive that’s a (semi) validating perspective.

To listen to songs from The Rap Guide to Religion, you need to back my Kickstarter campaign so I can raise the money to produce a proper record. To check out what the critics here in Edinburgh have to say about my take on religion, read on. And if you want to help organize a gig somewhere, just let me know. The show is open for bookings.

On Sunday Morning [August 17, 2014 GMT] my segment with Reverend George will air on BBC One, so we’ll see what a million British people think of the debate.

All the best from the religious fringe,

Baba

Here’s a link to the BBC One Sunday Morning Live show, where hopefully you’ll be able to catch the segment featuring Baba and Reverend George Hargreaves either livestreamed or shortly thereafter.

A science movie and a science play

Onto the science movie and the play: David Bruggeman on his Pasco Phronesis blog writes about two upcoming movie biopics featuring Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking respectively, in an Aug. 8, 2014 posting. Having covered the Turing movie here (at length) in a July 22, 2014 posting here’s the new information about the Hawking movie from David’s Aug, 8, 2014 posting,

Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking are noted British scientists, well recognized for their work and for having faced significant challenges in their lives.  While they were in different fields and productive in different parts of the 20th century (Hawking is still with us), their stories will compete in movieplexes (at least in the U.S.) this November.

The Theory of Everything is scheduled for release on November 7 and focuses on the early career and life of Hawking.  He’s portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, and the film is directed by James Marsh.  Marsh has several documentaries to his credit, including the Oscar-winning Man on Wire.  Theory is the third film project on Hawking since 2004, but the first to get much attention outside of the United Kingdom (this might explain why it won’t debut in the U.K. until New Year’s Day).  It premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month [Sept. 2014].

David features some trailers for both movies and additional information.

Interestingly the science play focuses on the friendship between a female UK scientist and her former student, Margaret Thatcher (a UK Prime Minister). From an Aug. 13, 2014 Alice Bell posting on the Guardian science blog network (Note: Links have been removed),

Adam Ganz’s new play – The Chemistry Between Them, to be broadcast on Radio 4 this month – explores one of the most intriguing friendships in the history of science and politics: Margaret Thatcher and Dorothy Hodgkin.

As well as winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her pioneering scientific work on the structures of proteins, Hodgkin was a left-wing peace campaigner who was awarded the Soviet equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Order of Lenin. Hardly Thatcher’s type, you might think. But Hodgkin was Thatcher’s tutor at university, and the relationships between science, politics and women in high office are anything but straightforward.

I spoke to Ganz about his interest in the subject, and started by asking him to tell us more about the play.

… they stayed friends throughout Dorothy’s life. Margaret Thatcher apparently had a photo of Dorothy Hodgkin in Downing Street, and they maintained a kind of warm relationship. The play happens in two timescales – one is a meeting in 1983 in Chequers where Dorothy came to plead with Margaret to take nuclear disarmament more seriously at a time when Cruise missiles and SS20s were being stationed in Europe. In fact I’ve set it – I’m not sure of the exact date – shortly after the Korean airliner was shot down, when the Russians feared Nato were possibly planning a first strike. And that is intercut with the time when Margaret is studying chemistry and looking at her journey; what she learned at Somerville, but especially what she learned from Dorothy.

Here’s a link to the BBC 4 webpage for The Chemistry Between Them. I gather the broadcast will be Weds., Aug. 20, 2014 at 1415 hours GMT.

Chemistry and authentication of a Lawren Harris painting

The final item for this posting concerns Canadian art, chemistry, and the quest to prove the authenticity of a painting. Roberta Staley, editor of Canadian Chemical News (ACCN), has written a concise technical story about David Robertson’s quest to authenticate a painting he purchased some years ago,

Fourteen years ago, David Robertson of Delta, British Columbia was holidaying in Ontario when he stopped at a small antique shop in the community of Bala, two hours north of Toronto in cottage country. An unsigned 1912 oil painting caught his attention. Thinking it evocative of a Group of Seven painting, Robertson paid the asking price of $280 and took it home to hang above his fireplace.

…

Roberta has very kindly made it available as a PDF: ChemistryNews_Art.Mystery.Group.7. It will also be available online at the Canadian Chemical News website soon. (It’s not in the July/August 2014 issue.)

For anyone who might recognize the topic, I wrote a sprawling five-part series (over 5000 words) on the story starting with part one. Roberta’s piece is 800 words and offers her  account of the tests for both Autumn Harbour and the authentic Harris painting, Hurdy Gurdy. I was able to attend only one of them (Autumn Harbour).

David William Robertson, Autumn Harbour’s owner has recently (I received a notice on Aug. 13, 2014) updated his website with all of the scientific material and points of authentication that he feels prove his case.

Have a very nice weekend!

Turing film, Imitation Game, gets European première at London Film Festival; will world première be at Toronto International Film Fest?

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There’s quite a cast associated with “Imitation Game,” a film which focuses on Alan Turing’s years as a codebreaker during World War II and will be enjoying its European première at the BFI [British Film Institute?] London Film Festival on Oct. 8, 2014 according to a July 21, 2014 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) news item online.

The cast includes Mark Strong as,

Major General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, KCB KCMG DSO MC (/ˈmɪŋɪz/; 30 January 1890 – 29 May 1968) was Chief of MI6 (SIS), British Secret Intelligence Service, during and after the Second World War. (see the rest of Menzies’ Wikipedia entry here along with all the links)

Strong always offers a compelling performance and he is billed alongside, Benedict Cumberbatch (BCC Sherlock) as Alan Turing, Keira Knightley as Turing’s friend and colleague in what are described in the BBC online news item as “extraordinary performances,”

The Imitation Game follows the race against time as Turing and his team at the top-secret codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park attempt to decipher German naval messages and help end the war.

Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Rory Kinnear and Charles Dance also star.

Festival director Clare Stewart said the film featured “extraordinary performances”.

A July 21, 2014 news item by Nick Vivarelli for Variety describes the film and upcoming première (aka preem; Note: A link has been removed),

Norwegian helmer Morten Tyldum’s Alan Turing drama “The Imitation Game,” with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, will open the 58th BFI London Film Festival on October 8th, marking the pic’s European preem.

The biopic based on the life story of the crypotgrapher and mathematician who cracked the German “Enigma Code” during WWII, and was later prosecuted by the British government in the early 1950s for being a homosexual, will screen in London’s Odeon Leicester Square, with key cast, Cumberbatch and Knightley, and helmer Tyldum, expected on the red carpet.

A July 21, 2014 article by Andrew Pulver for the Guardian notes the emphasis on the Oct. 8, 2014 event as a ‘European’ première,

Directed by Morten Tyldum and co-starring Keira Knightley as Turing’s friend and fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, the London film festival screening is being billed as a European premiere, which suggests the film’s world premiere will be held outside Europe, most likely at the Toronto film festival in early September.

The London film festival runs from 8-19 October [2014].

Here’s a trailer for the film; (it looks pretty good to me),


Widespread release for the film is scheduled for early November 2014. I have not been able to confirm that “Imitation Game” will be at TIFF in early September 2014.

Turing has been mentioned here many times but my June 20, 2012 posting is the most comprehensive,

Alan Turing led one of those lives that seems more like an act of fiction than anything else. Born June 23, 1912, the centenary is being celebrated in the UK and internationally as he was an instrumental figure in the field of science.

He had quite an extraordinary life unto a death, which could be described as enigmatic. It is not clear whether he committed suicide or accidentally killed himself with cyanide. A half-eaten apple was found by his bedside but never tested for poison. (Snow White was Turing’s favourite fairy tale.) His death came after shortly completing a court-ordered course of chemical castration (he could have chosen imprisonment instead) on being found guilty of homosexuality.

You can find out more about the BFI London Film Festival here and about the Toronto International Film Festival here. There is a July 21, 2014 posting by Sarah on Lainey Gossip speculation about this film and Benedict Cumberbatch’s chances of an Academy Award (Oscar) nomination along with speculation about possible competitors.

ETA July 22, 2014, 1130 PDT: Imitation Game is getting its Canadian première at the 2014 TIFF (media release PDF p. 5). H/T Lainey Gossip (scroll down about 40% of the way.

Canadian filmmaker Chris Landreth’s Subconscious Password explores the uncanny valley

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I gather Chris Landreth’s short animation, Subconscious Password, hasn’t been officially released yet by the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada but there are clips and trailers which hint at some of the filmmaker’s themes. Landreth in a May 23, 2013 guest post for the NFB.ca blog spells out one of them,

Subconscious Password, my latest short film, travels to the inner mind of a fellow named Charles Langford, as he struggles to remember the name of his friend at a party. In his subconscious, he encounters a game show, populated with special guest stars:  archetypes, icons, distant memories, who try to help him find the connection he needs: His friend’s name.

The film is a psychological romp into a person’s inner mind where (I hope) you will see something of your own mind working, thinking, feeling. Even during a mundane act like remembering the name of an acquaintance at a party, someone you only vaguely remember. To me, mundane accomplishments like these are miracles we all experience many times each day.

Landreth also discusses the ‘uncanny valley’ and how he deliberately cast his film into that valley. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the ‘uncanny valley’ I wrote about it in a Mar. 10, 2011 posting concerning Geminoid robots,

It seems that researchers believe that the ‘uncanny valley’ doesn’t necessarily have to exist forever and at some point, people will accept humanoid robots without hesitation. In the meantime, here’s a diagram of the ‘uncanny valley’,

From the article on Android Science by Masahiro Mori (translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato)

Here’s what Mori (the person who coined the term) had to say about the ‘uncanny valley’ (from Android Science),

Recently there are many industrial robots, and as we know the robots do not have a face or legs, and just rotate or extend or contract their arms, and they bear no resemblance to human beings. Certainly the policy for designing these kinds of robots is based on functionality. From this standpoint, the robots must perform functions similar to those of human factory workers, but their appearance is not evaluated. If we plot these industrial robots on a graph of familiarity versus appearance, they lie near the origin (see Figure 1 [above]). So they bear little resemblance to a human being, and in general people do not find them to be familiar. But if the designer of a toy robot puts importance on a robot’s appearance rather than its function, the robot will have a somewhat humanlike appearance with a face, two arms, two legs, and a torso. This design lets children enjoy a sense of familiarity with the humanoid toy. So the toy robot is approaching the top of the first peak.

Of course, human beings themselves lie at the final goal of robotics, which is why we make an effort to build humanlike robots. For example, a robot’s arms may be composed of a metal cylinder with many bolts, but to achieve a more humanlike appearance, we paint over the metal in skin tones. These cosmetic efforts cause a resultant increase in our sense of the robot’s familiarity. Some readers may have felt sympathy for handicapped people they have seen who attach a prosthetic arm or leg to replace a missing limb. But recently prosthetic hands have improved greatly, and we cannot distinguish them from real hands at a glance. Some prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation. So maybe the prosthetic arm has achieved a degree of human verisimilitude on par with false teeth. But this kind of prosthetic hand is too real and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness. So if we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature. In this case, there is no longer a sense of familiarity. It is uncanny. In mathematical terms, strangeness can be represented by negative familiarity, so the prosthetic hand is at the bottom of the valley. So in this case, the appearance is quite human like, but the familiarity is negative. This is the uncanny valley.

Landreth discusses the ‘uncanny valley’ in relation to animated characters,

Many of you know what this is. The Uncanny Valley describes a common problem that audiences have with CG-animated characters. Here’s a graph that shows this:

Follow the curvy line from the lower left. If a character is simple (like a stick figure) we have little or no empathy with it. A more complex character, like Snow White orPixar’s Mr. Incredible, gives us more human-like mannerisms for us to identify with.

But then the Uncanny Valley kicks in. That curvy line changes direction, plunging downwards. This is the pit into which many characters from The Polar Express, Final Fantasy and Mars Needs Moms fall. We stop empathizing with these characters. They are unintentionally disturbing, like moving corpses. This is a big problem with realistic CGI characters: that unshakable perception that they are animated zombies. [zombie emphasis mine]

You’ll notice that the diagram from my posting features a zombie at the very bottom of the curve.

Landreth goes on to compare the ‘land’ in the uncanny valley to real estate,

… The value of land in the Uncanny Valley has plunged to zero. There are no buyers.

Well, except perhaps me.

Some of you know that my films have a certain obsession with visual realism with their human characters. I like doing this. I find value in this realism that goes beyond simply copying what humans look and act like. If used intelligently and with imagination, realism can capture something deeper, something weird and emotional and psychological about our collective experience on this planet. But it has to be honest. That’s hard.

He also explains what he’s hoping to accomplish by inhabiting the uncanny valley,

When making this film, we knew we were going into the Uncanny Valley. We did it because your subconscious processes, and mine, are like this valley. We project our waking world into our subconscious minds. The ‘characters’ in this inner world are realistic approximations of actual people, without actually being real. This is the miracle of how we get by. My protagonist, Charles, has a mixture of both realistic approximations and crazy warped versions of the people and icons in his life. He is indeed a bit off-kilter. But he gets by, like most of us do. As you probably have guessed, both Charles and the Host are self-portraits. I want to be honest in showing you this world. My own Uncanny Valley. You have one too. It’s something to celebrate.

On the that note, here’s a clip from Subconscious Password,

Subconscious Password (Clip) by Chris Landreth, National Film Board of Canada

 I last wrote about Landreth and his work in an April 14, 2010 posting (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) regarding mathematics and the arts. This post features excerpts from an interview with the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) mathematician, Karan Singh who worked with Landreth on their award-winning, Ryan.

Worlds in the making at FACT in Liverpool

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It’s quite the week for finding art/science/technology projects in the UK. This time I’ve found the Worlds in the Making exhibition at FACT (from their About page),

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) has been leading the UK video, film and new media arts scene for 20 years with groundbreaking exhibitions, education and research projects. The organisation aims to pioneer new forms of artistic and social interaction with individuals and communities.

Frank Swain’s July 1, 2011 article about the exhibition  for The Guardian notes,

Artist duo Semiconductor launch a major exhibition at the Fact [sic] gallery in Liverpool on Friday [July 1, 2011] portraying the subterranean, primeval world of geology.

“We’re really interested in the material nature of the world around us – in what the natural building blocks are of the visible physical world, and how we create an understanding of them,” says Ruth Jarman, one half of British artist duo Semiconductor [Joe Gerhardt is the other half].

One of the works on display features an audio representation of gems being created in the Earth’s subterranean depths. I think they’ve included the sound in their video preview of the show,

As for Swain’s (aka @sciencepunk on Twitter) provocative closing question,

Worlds in the Making is certainly art, but does it do anything for science? Can artists like Jarman and Gerhardt inspire wonder in the same way Brian Cox [BBC science presenter/programme host] does?

I think one of the answers is that there are many ways to inspire wonder and that artists such as Semiconductor and presenters such as Brian Cox can co-exist inspiring wonder each in their unique fashion. Thank you to Frank Swain for asking the question in such a way as to expose a false dichotomy.

FACT was last mentioned here in my October 1, 2009 posting.

Science in the British election and CASE; memristor and artificial intelligence; The Secret in Their Eyes, an allegory for post-Junta Argentina?

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I’ve been meaning to mention the upcoming (May 6, 2010) British election for the last while as I’ve seen notices of party manifestos that mention science (!) but it was one of Dave Bruggeman’s postings on Pasco Fhronesis that tipped the balance for me. From his posting,

CaSE [Campaign for Science and Engineering] sent each party leader a letter asking for their positions with respect to science and technology issues. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have responded so far (while the Conservative leader kept mum on science before the campaign, now it’s the Prime Minister who has yet to speak on it). Of the two letters, the Liberal Democrats have offered more detailed proposals than the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have also addressed issues of specific interest to the U.K. scientific community to a much greater degree.

(These letters are in addition to the party manifestos which each mention science.) I strongly recommend the post as Bruggeman goes on to give a more detailed analysis and offer a few speculations.

The Liberal Democrats offer a more comprehensive statement but they are a third party who gained an unexpected burst of support after the first national debate. As anyone knows, the second debate (to be held around noon (PT) today) or something else for that matter could change all that.

I did look at the CaSE site which provides an impressive portfolio of materials related to this election on its home page. As for the organization’s mission, before getting to that you might find its history instructive,

CaSE was launched in March 2005, evolving out of its predecessor Save British Science [SBS]. …

SBS was founded in 1986, following the placement of an advertisement in The Times newspaper. The idea came from a small group of university scientists brought together by a common concern about the difficulties they were facing in obtaining the funds for first class research.

The original plan was simply to buy a half-page adverisement in The Times to make the point, and the request for funds was spread via friends and colleagues in other universities. The response was overwhelming. Within a few weeks about 1500 contributors, including over 100 Fellows of the Royal Society and most of the British Nobel prize winners, had sent more than twice the sum needed. The advertisement appeared on 13th January 1986, and the balance of the money raised was used to found the Society, taking as its name the title of the advertisement.

Now for their mission statement,

CaSE is now an established feature of the science and technology policy scene, supported among universities and the learned societies, and able to attract media attention. We are accepted by Government as an organisation able to speak for a wide section of the science and engineering community in a constructive but also critical and forceful manner. We are free to speak without the restraints felt by learned societies and similar bodies, and it is good for Government to know someone is watching closely.

I especially like the bit where they feel its “good for Government” to know someone is watching.

The folks at the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) are also providing information about the British election and science. As you’d expect it’s not nearly as comprehensive but, if you’re interested, you can check out the CSPC home page.

I haven’t had a chance to read the manifestos and other materials closely enough to be able to offer much comment. It is refreshing to see the issue mentioned by all the parties during the election as opposed to having science dismissed as a ’boutique issue’ as an assistant to my local (Canadian)l Member of Parliament described it to me.

Memristors and artificial intelligence

The memristor story has ‘legs’, as they say. This morning I found an in-depth story by Michael Berger on Nanowerk titled, Nanotechnology’s Road to Artificial Brains, where he interviews Dr. Wei Lu about his work with memristors and neural synapses (mentioned previously on this blog here). Coincidentally I received a comment yesterday from Blaise Mouttet about an article he’d posted on Google September 2009 titled, Memistors, Memristors, and the Rise of Strong Artificial Intelligence.

Berger’s story focuses on a specific piece of research and possible future applications. From the Nanowerk story,

If you think that building an artificial human brain is science fiction, you are probably right – for now. But don’t think for a moment that researchers are not working hard on laying the foundations for what is called neuromorphic engineering – a new interdisciplinary discipline that includes nanotechnologies and whose goal is to design artificial neural systems with physical architectures similar to biological nervous systems.

One of the key components of any neuromorphic effort is the design of artificial synapses. The human brain contains vastly more synapses than neurons – by a factor of about 10,000 – and therefore it is necessary to develop a nanoscale, low power, synapse-like device if scientists want to scale neuromorphic circuits towards the human brain level.

Berger goes on to explain how Lu’s work with memristors relates to this larger enterprise which is being pursued by many scientists around the world.

By contrast Mouttet offers an historical context for the work on memristors along with a precise technical explanation  and why it is applicable to work in artificial intelligence. From Mouttet’s essay,

… memristive systems integrate data storage and data processing capabilities in a single device which offers the potential to more closely emulate the capabilities of biological intelligence.

If you are interested in exploring further, I suggest starting with Mouttet’s article first as it lays the groundwork for better understanding memristors and also Berger’s story about artificial neural synapses.

The secret in their eyes (movie review)

I woke up at 6 am the other morning thinking about a movie I saw this last Sunday (April 18, 2010). That doesn’t often happen to me,  especially as I get more jaded with time but something about ‘The Secret in Their Eyes‘, the Argentinean movie that won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film woke me up.

Before going further, a précis of the story: a retired man (in his late 50s?) is trying to write a novel based on a rape/homicide case that he investigated in the mid-1970s. He’s haunted by it and spends much of the movie calling back memories of both a case and a love he tried to bury. Writing his ‘novel’ compels him to reinvestigate the case (he was an investigator for the judge) and reestablish contact with the victim’s grief-stricken husband and with the woman he loved  who was his boss (the judge) and also from a more prestigious social class.

The movie offers some comedy although it can mostly be described as a thriller, a procedural, and a love story. It can also be seen as an allegory. The victim represents Argentina as a country. The criminal’s treatment (he gets rewarded— initially) represents how the military junta controlled Argentina after Juan Peron’s death in 1974. It seemed to me that much of this movie was an investigation about how people cope and recover (or don’t) from a hugely traumatic experience.

I don’t know much about Argentina and I have no Spanish language skills (other than recognizing an occasional word when it sounds like a French one). Consequently, this history is fairly sketchy and derived from secondary and tertiary sources. In the 1950s, Juan Peron (a former member of the military) led  a very repressive regime which was eventually pushed out of office. By the 1970s he was asked to return which he did. He died there in 1974 and sometime after a military Junta took control of the government. Amongst other measures, they kidnapped thousands of people (usually young and often students, teachers [the victim in the movie is a teacher], political activists/enemies, and countless others) and ‘disappeared’ them.

Much of the population tried to ignore or hide from what was going on. A  documentary released in the US  in 1985, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, details the story of a group of middle-class women who are moved to protest, after years of trying to endure, when their own children are ‘disappeared’.

In the movie we see what happens when bullies take over control. The criminal gets rewarded, the investigator/writer is sent away for protection after a colleague becomes collateral damage, the judge’s family name protects her, and the grieving husband has to find his own way to deal with the situation.

The movie offers both a gothic twist towards the end and a very moving perspective on how one deals with the guilt for one’s complicity and for one’s survival.

ETA: (April 27, 2010) One final insight, the movie suggests that art/creative endeavours such as writing a novel (or making a movie?) can be a means for confession, redemption, and/or healing past wounds.

I think what makes the movie so good is the number of readings that are possible. You can take a look at some of what other reviewers had to say: Katherine Monk at the Vancouver Sun, Curtis Woloschuk at the Westender, and Ken Eisner at the Georgia Straight.

Kudos to the director and screen writer, Juan José Campanella and to the leads: Ricardo Darín (investigator/writer), Soledad Villamil (judge), Pablo Rago (husband), Javier Godino (criminal), Guillermo Francella (colleague who becomes collateral damage) and all of the other actor s in the company. Even the smallest role was beautifully realized.

One final thing, whoever translated and wrote the subtitles should get an award. I don’t know how the person did it but the use of language is brilliant. I’ve never before seen subtitles that managed to convey the flavour of the verbal exchanges taking place on screen.

I liked the movie, eh?