Roger Hyam

This is a reblog of my Wordpress Site

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FameLab - First Talk

Throttling a cheese cake? Photo: Dawn Smith

A few weeks back Edinburgh Beltane Public Engagement Network offered a free day of presentation skills training with Mel Sherwood. When I say free I mean it was free to participants in FameLab UK. Yes there was lunch and yes it was notionally a “free lunch” so I should have been a little more on my guard.

The day with Mel was really good. We did some fun acting things and I picked up useful tips and probably absorbed a load more subconsciously. The lunch was OK too.

FameLab is a competition for scientists and engineers to present ideas to a general audience in under three minutes. This should be easy and three minutes for a large jacket potato and salad seems a fair trade – but perhaps I should have cooked my own lunch that day.

I spent ages working on my talk and cutting it back and back then dutifully turned up at the University for the Edinburgh heat of the competition. The picture is me giving my talk and below is the text I tried to memorise – but wandered well off.

The sting in the tail is that the judges said we were all good and should move on to the Scottish heat at the National Museum in January where we have to give distinctly different talks! I’m now wracking my brains to think of a new three minute pitch that will enlighten someone off the street about science. Strangely I’m starting to enjoy it.

FameLab: Ten Breaths Project

Let’s try an experiment. Hands up if you are breathing.

But maybe that wasn’t such an interesting question. A more interesting question is why you put your hands up.

There are two possible reasons:

You may have thought: I am alive I must be breathing.

Or you connected with the sensations of breathing and because of this experience you put your hand up.

These are two complementary ways of knowing:

Deductive reason.

Felt experience.

Let’s do another experiment.

Imagine the ideal outdoor space for relaxation. Notice both your thoughts describing what is there and also the feelings they evoke.

Got it?

Now – Humans are rapidly becoming an urban species. Unfortunately, when they live in built, crowded environments people get stressed and sick. We can prove this by measuring stress hormones, brain wave patterns or the correlation between visits to parks with life expectancy.

Urbanisation is also destroying the biodiversity we depend on so greening our cities should be a good thing for humans and biodiversity. But there is a problem. We don’t know precisely what it is that helps people relax.

I could ask you to describe the outdoor spaces you just imagined but that wouldn’t give me access to how you really felt in a real urban green space. And it is the feeling that does us good – not the thinking.

This is where my project comes in. I’m using mobile phones to log the locations of real connection with nature. Using this data we can discover how to get the most from the green places in our cities.

We humans are quite literally building the future. If we use science we can ensure we build the utopia we all dream of.

FameLab – First Talk was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Thanks for the bridge

I had a letter published in The National again today. The text I sent was:

Sir/Madam,

With all the noise and smoke coming from the “blamethrowers” that have been deployed since the Fourth Road Bridge closed I haven’t heard a single word of gratitude spoken and so I’d like to put the record straight.

We are incredibly lucky to live in a country where we have skilled people who can build and maintain such amazing structures and who rarely, if ever, get acknowledged.

I’d just like to say thank you for finding the faults with the bridge before anyone was injured and for working so hard to fix them. Thank you for keeping us safe all these years.

Although it is important to get things moving by the New Year please make sure you take some time to be with your loved ones this Christmas. If we can’t get our priorities right at this time of year when can we?

Thanks for the bridge was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Botanic Cottage: Sutherland

Over the last year my main project has been photographing the people involved in reconstructing the Botanic Cottage. This is Sutherland who is the organiser of community stuff associated with the cottage and also the catalyst for me making the photographs.

I’m getting close to finishing photographing people but still not sure how the final set of images will work out. I may even flip into colour.

Botanic Cottage: Sutherland was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Handy Links for Geneva Meeting

These are just some handy links for me to present at a CETAF Information Science and Technology Committee meeting in Geneva, October 2015.

What RBGE publishes

Example Edinburgh URI: http://data.rbge.org.uk/herb/E00393164

Leads to 303 redirect with content negotiation:

Humans get: Catalogue Page

Machines get: RDF page

Our RDF also contains a link to an image resource which we overload for bigger image.

Main Use Case

The Wallich Catalogue home page. A numerical list of dried specimens of plants in the East India Company’s Museum

Example Entry 2574. Shows links to specimens from three different herbaria.

How do we make these “pretty” i.e. more useful?

We only want to store specimen IDs on the Wallich server (though may cache a little)

Radical Suggestion

I always come up with something that is overly simplistic so here it is:

Most important thing is ubiquity. It is no good coming up with a specification for minimal data if 4 out of 10 providers implement it. We need 10/10 for it to be worthwhile.

Things that server two purposes are more likely to thrive.

FaceBook have a meta tagging standard based on open graph that they use to provide rich links to web pages and other resource.

Here is an example of my implementation on another project. Took twenty minutes to add to the page.

The Facebook approach meets my main use case. It could be done along with any other stuff with RDF. i.e. Every collection needs the URIs to redirect to human readable page and this is trivial to add to that page.

Second Use Case

This is a bit vague and others may know more.

Afghan Specimens Portal

Centre for Middle Eastern Plants

Dagmar Triebel  @ Botanische Staatssammlung München

& others

Could it be implemented as “just” a list of specimen IDs?

      Handy Links for Geneva Meeting was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail » Botanics Stories

Just posted this about the apps I’m working on.

First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail

This is also a test of the new WordPress oembed feature.

First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail » Botanics Stories was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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The role of the artists

I came to see that the human imagination is not paramount in the creative process: that what is paramount is “The Creation” and He who created it and that what the true artist is expressing is not himself but his response to this eternal continuing process of Creation … I believe that, in the humblest way, we are collaborators on Earth in God’s continuing Act of Creation, and that this is the role of the artist in Society.

Hew Lorimer (the guy that did the sculptures on National Library of Scotland)

  The role of the artists was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Freedom of Choice

We are constrained by the choices we have made but the most constraining choice is choosing not to choose.

Freedom of Choice was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Sister Coa Nghiem

I’m just back from a week at Plum Village. I’d hoped to do some portraiture but didn’t really have time. Retreats are busy places what with all the meditating and the Mindfulness.

My working meditation was in the vegetable garden with Sister Coa Nghiem. She is from Thailand and speaks Vietnamese but not much English or French. We worked in the evening as the sun was going down as it was too hot at other times. She laughed a lot. Possibly more than anyone I have ever met so it was a challenge to capture some stillness.

Sister Coa Nghiem was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Buddha - a life of and for peace

I gave a talk to the Uniting for Peace Inter-Faith group meeting at the Theosophical Society in Edinburgh. I made a recording so I can improve on it if I ever give a similar talk. Here it is:

Summary

[Brian Cooper asked for a 300 word summary for his report. The words below are roughly related to the talk but way more concise and probably gets over what I wanted to say better.]

Buddhism has spread widely from its origin in Northeastern India 2,500 years ago. Despite this there is a striking concordance at the core of all Buddhist schools even if they are culturally quite different. The Buddha summarised his teaching simply as the reality of suffering and its transformation. He refused to discuss metaphysics. He said that only by practicing the teachings and seeing the results for ourselves can we know if they are true. We should not accept them on the basis of argument or authority alone.

The cause of our suffering is that we don’t see the world deeply enough. If we look deeply we will see the truth of impermanence and no-self and transform our suffering. A rose is made up of water, sunshine and soil. A multitude of conditions manifest a rose for a short period. When those conditions cease the rose transforms to compost. The rose does not have an independent, permanent self. This applies to anything that we can conceive of. Reaching this world view on an intellectual level is easy but far more challenging on a spiritual and emotional level.

Not seeing the world in this way is the root of all violence. The very first thing we need for conflict is to differentiate “them” from “us”. The Buddha’s teachings point to the fact that they are always dependent on us and us on them. With this view conflict becomes as reasonable as fighting between our right and left hands.

The teachings of the Buddha provide an approach that is applicable across faiths and the secular world. The current popular adoption of Mindfulness as route to well-being may be the start of a new phase of Buddhist influence for world peace.

Buddha – a life of and for peace was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Unsung Hero

Can’t believe I haven’t embedded this before:

Unsung Hero was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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First of the Five Mindfulness Trainings

This is me starting to record the Mindfulness Trainings. I’m doing this so I have it as a resource but also to learn about recording speech and using my voice effectively.

listen to ‘First of the Five Mindfulness Trainings’ on audioBoom

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First of the Five Mindfulness Trainings was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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You are not what you look like

Mia shared this because it seemed relevant to my photography. I love it.

You are not what you look like was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Vlasta Jamnicky: June 2015

Vlasta is the interpretation officer at the Botanics so she tries to bring order to leaflets and signs and stuff.

Vlasta Jamnicky: June 2015 was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Paul Nesbitt: June 2015

Paul is curator of Inverleith House gallery at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh a (surely THE) leading contemporary gallery in Scotland.

Paul Nesbitt: June 2015 was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Josephine: May 2015

Final day of the Wiston retreat.

  Josephine: May 2015 was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Jerry: May 2015

Just having received the 5 Mindfulness Trainings.

Jerry: May 2015 was originally published on  Roger Hyam

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Roland: May 2015

Is this Roland? Looking out the door at the end of the Wiston Retreat.

Roland: May 2015 was originally published on  Roger Hyam