Midnight has been met with the shame of being hungry, which is appalling considering everything I’ve eaten in the last few days. I’m being tempted by a Lindt chocolate reindeer in my bag, which my good conscience is flatly denying.

My Christmas vacation has been good. Unfortunately I’m having an academic vacation which isn’t the same as a vacation in the canonical sense: it involves having to do (gasp!) work. Needless to say, my motivation is whimpering in the face of port, Christmas cake, chocolate reindeer and good TV. All of those have been indulged, and work has limped along.

As for good TV: I really enjoyed watching Misery, a gripping psychological thriller based on a novel by Stephen King, and Summer Heights High, an Aussie ‘mockumentary’ which is very, very funny. In the last few years I’ve ignored TV and film for reasons I’m not sure: it’s just taken a backseat to the entertainment foraging I do online. I need to catch up on lots and lots of films and I’m not sure where I should begin.

I’ll keep the mandatory reflective bit brief.

2009 delivered amazing adventures and some amazing disappointments. It’s been the same as every year up to now: a mixed bag. Positives: I made new friends, travelled, learned stuff, started a course I love in an amazing city.

• Goals for 2010: Maintain good work-life balance (emphasis on work). There’ll be time for life when this MSc is finished, right? Other goals: strive to be the best person I can be; push myself academically; get better at public speaking; get a distinction.
• Goals for 2011: Travel lots. Re-visit Hong Kong. Re-visit San Francisco. Say “yes” to stuff. Pounce madly at opportunities.

I’m in the middle of an intensive two week project: working in a team to redesign a library checkout desk and self-service kiosk. The end result will be a 3D model made out of cardboard that is to 1:1 scale.

Learning applied ergonomics is the point.

The other point is team-work.

Navigating personality conflicts, communicating well, and trying to understand everyone’s take on how to solve a problem.

I’m getting to know everyone in the team well. Everyone gives feedback on each other’s performance, participation, strengths and weaknesses. I’m pushing myself to learn from this — which we’re encouraged to do: it’s supposed to be a reflective learning experience.

Reflecting on the term, it’s been amazing. I’m pushed academically and personally. I’ve met fantastic new friends. I love UCL. I love London. At the same time, I’m a little restless for the future. But it’s heavily outweighed by just enjoying life at the moment. Happy.

(Not mentioning, definitely not mentioning various possible futures in short and long term: travelling to Hong Kong, Beijing, Guangzhou, San Francisco, New York, PhD…)

Biology seems the next natural step for computing. It’s inevitable that we’ll try to model computers on biological systems. Today I followed a link from Rachel Armstrong to The BioBricks Foundation. In their own words:

“Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.”

It’s not quite genetic engineering for casual dilettantes, but you can order your own assembly kit for $235.00. From the sound of it you need an advanced degree in biology to use it.

So, Frankie Stein’s monster has been on my mind mainly because I’m taking Affective Interaction as a module option next term, and I’m reading (in preparation) a book called Affective Computing. Frankie’s monster, Monnie, isn’t a computer, but she seems to symbolise the way the field is going.

Affective Computing

This book introduces the bold idea that computers should have feelings. This is contentious in a field that has a reputation for cool, detached rationality and logic. The last thing you’d want your computer to do is have a tearful sulk after it corrupts a file, right? But what if it responded to your irritation by “feeling bad”, and learning to avoid future mistakes?

Picard makes a convincing case for designing computers that have empathy and evolutionary qualities.

One thing Picard mentions is the little smiling Mac icon that appears when you boot your Mac. A person might look at that and think (either consciously or unconsciously) “The computer is happy because I’m fulfilling its goal of me using it.”

This is an act of projection: of course my Mac doesn’t have feelings or emotional awareness. If my Mac actually had moods, emotions, and emotional awareness, it would drastically change how I interact with it. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t like it.

Would computers with high emotional intelligence still be good? Would they still execute programs on command? Would they fall in love with its user? Would they rebel? If you dropped it by mistake, would it decide to punish its user by deleting files? (Etc.)

To break from the trend of grad studies posts, I want to recap the story of one of my favourite books. It is actually not unrelated to my studies, and I’ll explain why in my next post.

The Monster Garden (Vivien Alcock)

Amazon UK. I first read this book when I was eight or nine, a few years before I got a computer. In the days before I got a computer I used to read a lot of books. The story remained in my head and heart for years, and I love it; possibly because I empathise with Frankie: scientist family, geeky child. No test tube monsters though. Unfortunately…

The Monster Garden is about Frankie Stein, the alienated daughter of a genetic engineer. She is teased at school for having an unfortunate name, and because her father works in a secret lab. There are rumours that her father works on contentious  genetic engineering projects like germ warfare. Although he says he works for the good of mankind, Frankie and her brother are suspicious.

In order to find out what their father does, Frankie’s brother steals a test tube from the laboratory. They split the contents of the test tube between them.

Frankie takes her portion away on a glass slide, as her brother would not give her a petrie dish (“my monster would have to rough it”). Her brother also refuses to give her blood agar to feed the living cells, so Frankie uses her own blood. She leaves the glass slide on the windowsill.

Overnight, there is a terrific thunderstorm. Frankie wakes up to find bites taken out of a pot plant, and the culprit: a small monster that’s grown out of the cells on the slide.

The benevolent monster, Monnie, drinks with its foot, whistles, and brings Frankie small gifts. Frankie ends up loving the weird monster, in spite of its strangeness.

Monnie’s description:

I laughed. I expect I was hysterical. Or mad. I can’t think of any other reason why I did not scream and run from the room, like any sane person would have done. I just sat on my bed and watched it.

It was playing now. It sat in the upside-down lid as if in a boat, and rocked backward and forward until the lid tilted too far and tumbled it onto the floor. It seemed to enjoy this and did it several times.

Then it looked at me. Its eyes were very round and a clear, light crimson. Quite a pretty colour, really. It began twisting its slit of a mouth in a most ridiculous manner. Now it would bend the corners down until it looked like a croquet hoop; now into a capital U. Once it even managed to twist it into a figure eight. I couldn’t help laughing at it. It did not seem to know what a mouth was for. It never opened it, not once. Perhaps it was not a proper mouth at all.