Yesterday was an amazing day. I headed down to the Science Museum in London to facilitate the start of the BBC Blast Science Week which is being held over five days between the Science Museum’s Dana Centre and the Serpentine Gallery.

In the morning I worked to facilitate the bonding of the group of 18 young people, who were from all over the region and not met each other before. I started by challenging the young people to undertake our “12 Photo’s” digital creativity challenge in groups after asking each person in the room to recollect their earliest memory.

In the afternoon I had the absolute pleasure to witness the work of Christian Nold in one of his fields of work, Bio Mapping.

Christian says on his website:

Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own biometric data.

The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights point of high and low arousal. By sharing and reflecting on this data, we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?

So what do you do with 18 young people and an afternoon? We sent them off round London (with adults) wired up to Christian’s Bio Mapping equipment. In pairs the young people walked around a region surrounding the Science Museum with a A Galvanic Skin response sensor/data logger on a finger which was connected up to a commercial GPS unit (more about the technology here).

The data captured by the technology includes the sweat levels from the walkers finger, and the exact location (in the world) where they are. On return to the Science Museum Christian downloads all the data and feeds it into Google Earth.

Here is a screen grab from Alli’s Map as it is in Google Earth —>

The spikes demonstrate Alli’s level of anxiety along the route as he reaches a busy road to cross. On other group members maps from the day we noticed that those walking through Hyde Park felt much calmer with less spikes appearing in the map.
The devices detect the change rates of the galvanic skin response.

On Christians FAQ page he states the following:

When its hot outside or you are exercising it simply raises your baseline but your GSR still changes according to mental events. Believe me I tested it myself in Bangalore, India

If during the middle of your walk you suddenly started running you would see a momentary arousal increase which would flatten out again pretty quickly.

Click to leave this site and watch Christian’s Documentary.

Click here to review the pictures I took on my phone camera.

Or check out the below phone camera movies I took during the day…

It is nearly half past seven on Friday evening, I’m sitting at my desk in Cleveratom’s offices in Ongar, Essex. What a seven week rollercoaster it has been for Alex, Hal and myself as we’ve worked hard to establish and build up Cleveratom from scratch.

People often ask us ‘what exactly is it you do’? We do three things, as listed on our evolving website!:

Digital Creativity: We know how to empower and enhance learning and teaching through new and emerging technologies and we continue to conduct our research. Our team have been working in the field of Digital Creativity for the past seven years. We work with and advise learning institutions, governments, broadcasters, charities, community groups, corporate organisations and individuals on the impact it can have on learning and teaching. We also run workshops and present at conferences and seminars. Our track record, details of projects and research findings are all available at our digitalcreativity.org website.

Last Wednesday I wrote here about Witham Rivewalk in the Frost. Today I headed along a different part of the ‘Witham Riverwalk’, this time I headed towards Witham Railway Station, leaving the walk at the junction with Armond Road. Today the river level was high and some parts ot the walk were flooded, with patches of ice.
View the Riverwalk pictures.

0870 numbers are expensive.

Why would anyone want to call a company on their 0870 number…. which is sometimes automatically answered by a machine for us all to listen to some horrible loud and crackly music…. and every now and again an automated voice pipes in to tell us that our call is so very important to them and that’s why they are making us wait for absolutely ages before we press some more buttons and then finally talk to a human…..who happens to then the wrong person in the wrong department…..so we then get passed through to somebody else via another long wait in a phone queue with lots more button pressing along the way?

To avoid the big 0870 con I’ve been using the following service now for a couple of years , and have to say that it is brilliant.

saynoto0870.com is a website full of alternative telephone numbers. Rather than having to call the expensive 0870 numbers that so many companies now expect us to call (and some raise themselves a bit more revenue). Saynoto0870 is populated by you and I, the callers. If we know a local or free telephone number to call we simply suggest the number to the site and help out other callers. So for most 0870’s there are local numbers which reach the same people, saynoto0870 tells us those numbers and we save money calling those numbers.

I quote from the site the following:

“Many people don’t realise that there are many phone providers offering cheaper calls to standard telephone numbers (those beginning with 01 or 02), which don’t apply to 0844, 0845, 0870 or 0871 telephone numbers. - Please see the links page and click on Cheapest Call Provider for price details. This shows that by using multiple providers, you can reduce your call cost on standard telephone numbers to as little as 3p fixed cost (regardless of duration), whereas the cheapest provider to 0870 numbers during the day that I am aware of charges 4p/min (+ 3p connection fee) to call.”

Annoyingly ‘TV Licencing’ have been sending a regular letter to my flat every three months, it is an empty flat which is being repaired and renovated. On the letter they request I phone them, to confirm that the property is empty, and they quote an 0870 number for me to call. OK, so they want me to phone an 0870 number, join a queue, listen to some music, pay for the privilege and then tell them that I don’t have a TV in the property? What is in it for me? No way. I check out saynoto0870.com and look up a replacement local number, which happens to be “0117 3021758″ and call that instead, which happens to be free for TalkTalk customers to call anyway. Job done.

Check out the site, well worth bookmarking.

I wrote earlier about my experience with the snow this morning here on the blog. Now I’m at the Cleveratom offices in Ongar I can’t express just how pretty the surrounding fields look under a blanket of white.

Here is our building caked in the white stuff:

Here is the view from one of the upstairs windows when I arrived this morning:

Here is the same view at 1:30pm:

Yesterday I wrote about the thick frost in Witham…and today? Snow!

Very rarely do we get snow in Witham, and today a thick blanket of the stuff had fallen overnight.

The road journey to the office in Ongar was a bit slippy this morning, I wish the council had gritted the main roads out of Witham, I lost control of the car a couple of times. Braintree District Council, get a grit.

Click this link to look at my snow pictures taken on the phone camera this morning.

Below are some movies to watch too…

Witham in Essex has an area well known as ‘the Riverwalk’.

The Riverwalk is a bit of countryside that stretches right through the town, it will never be developed on with new buildings.

Bridges cross over the river at various points, linking off to various parts of the town.

In 1995 the cracking old path was replaced with a foot and cycle path. Red for bikes, grey for walkers.

When I was younger I would walk along it on the way to school.

People use the route to walk dogs, cycle, jog and chat as they pass down this traffic free route each day.

These days I walk along it in the other direction from my school days from the flat to pick up my car from the parents house before driving to work, this gives me some exercise.

View the pictures of the Riverwalk this morning in the cold frost.