Paul Miller

paul — 2006-02-13T15:45:12Z

just seeing if this works...

Change of RSS feed address...

paul — 2004-12-26T20:18:22Z

I've moved over to Moveable Type and my new RSS feed is http://www.paulmiller.org/index.xml

Party Poopers

paul — 2004-09-24T19:47:01Z

Tom Bentley and I have written the cover story of tomorrow's FT Magazine about the fall and fall of mainstream political parties. Our argument is that if they don't radically rethink the way they organise themselves, they could well bite the dust. It's a theme Demos will be talking about more at Labour Party conference.

BedZED blog – part 3

paul — 2004-09-20T21:01:15Z

I’ve been living in my new flat at BedZED for just over two months now. I have most things you need: furniture, stuff to cook with, Playstation 2 (okay maybe you don’t need one of those) and I have to say I’m loving it. Of course there’s the fact that you do get a bit bored of seeing your house in the newspapers and on the TV. I turned on BBC1 yesterday to see Sue Riddlestone (co-director of BioRegional – one of the organisations who made the place actually happen) on the Politics Show and thought the background looked familiar. Then I realised there was an outside broadcast unit parked just outside the flat and Sue was on the balcony opposite being interviewed live. There are still a lot of people coming on guided tours even though the development has been open for two years now. This week it was the turn of an important looking Spanish delegation. Oh, and my mum and dad who were down to visit and tagged along to have a look around the show-home. I haven’t been yet but apparently I need to go and check out the recycled coffee tables. Like every housing estate the world over there are a few problems. Last week I got a bit annoyed with the fancy energy saving electronics when a beeping noise started in the service cupboard just near my flat. It was just loud enough and often enough to mean that I could dose off for a few seconds before being woken up as it beeped again. To be fair, Peabody Trust did get it sorted pretty quickly when I called them though. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the playing field saga yet. Just across the way from my flat there’s an open area which was originally planned to be a junior football pitch. It then got dug up so that a gas pipeline could be put through it and never really recovered so was empty for a while. Now the grass has just about grown back but for some reason a lot of stones have come to the surface and it’s pretty dangerous to play on so still isn’t being used. The discussion in the bar of a Friday night is about what we can do about it. Tune back next month for an update…

When I'm 42...

paul — 2004-09-18T20:28:14Z

My boss has the main article in the Guardian's World in 2020 supplemnent today about what British identity will be like in 16 years time.

The Elephant Vanishes

paul — 2004-09-11T18:43:51Z

Went to see The Elephant Vanishes at the Barbican on Thursday night. Absolutely brilliant. Probably the best thing I've ever seen on stage in London. Mindblowing use of movement, video and sound to recreate Murikami's short stories. I was lucky because we chose the night when Simon McBurney (the director) was doing a talk after the show - also really interesting. He said something that I didn't know but which makes sense - that Murikami translated Ray Carver's short stories into Japanese. Carver is one of my favourite authors and as I was sitting through the show I was thinking that there were similarities with the atmosphere that Carver creates in many of his short stories. Anyway, highly recommended if you're in London town.

Wonk out of water

paul — 2004-08-27T07:58:34Z

So I’m in Paris at a mega academic conference, the first one like it I’ve really been to. It’s called 4S/EASST and is being held at the Ecole des Mines which is an incredibly beautiful rambling old building overlooking the Jardins du Luxembourg in the Latin quarter. It’s all about the social study of science. The scale of the event is huge. Twelve hundred delegates, 187 sessions, over 700 papers being given. In fact, it’s all a bit too much; I’m not quite sure what to go to. And then there’s the question of language. Not the fact that this is a foreign country with its own language, but that this is academia with its own language. Take a look at these for titles of talks that people are giving: “Social organization of access to knowledge and boundary objects: the case of repair technicians of copy machines” “Expert generation. Franz Maria Feldhaus and the emergence of professionalized historiography of technology.” “Deployment of intentionality: the test of subjectification of body in dialysis practice.” You see the problem. The president of the conference is the revered, renowned Bruno Latour. I’ve spoken with him twice so far. Once about the university’s newly installed wifi network (or weefee as he calls it) and once about whether I’ve got my apple widget for connecting my iBook to a LCD projector (I don’t). Weighty stuff. Wednesday night was fun as it was the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris. Loads of dancing and music and fireworks in the parks. An American I was with muttered under their breath, ‘anybody would think they liberated themselves”. Ouch. I’m here with colleagues to talk about the work we’re doing on public engagement in nanotechnology. We’re not on until Saturday so I’m dipping in and out of the sessions that sound, erm, interesting.

Open source everything?

paul — 2004-08-10T20:34:59Z

I'm writing a feature for the Guardian's Spark supplement about how the open source model is being applied to things beyond just software. If you know of any interesting examples or can think of things you think it should be applied to, drop me an email. Afraid I'm still having a bit of trouble getting the comments function to work properly on blogger.

Creepy

paul — 2004-08-05T11:23:09Z

I love this. Low Morale is a "series of animations portraying one man's struggle to cope with the soul-sapping, will-to-live draining, life-force mugging, morale crushing experiences of work". This particular one takes the form of a video for the accoustic version of one of my favourite songs - Radiohead's Creep.

BedZED blog - part 2

paul — 2004-08-04T15:36:14Z

So I've been living here at BedZED for a month and have now gotten round to taking a photo. When I say it looks a bit funny, this is what I mean... On sunny days like today all the windows are and doors are open and kids are running around. There are also a few people in suits peering round corners. They've come from companies and government departments around the world to look at us labrats living in this place. I've started using the car share scheme this week and it all seems to be hunky dory. Very handy for popping down to the shops. I haven't quite got used to having a card rather than a key to open the car yet and I did get sort of told off for not leaving the car in quite the right place when I'd finished with it yesterday but I'm sure I'll soon learn.

I am the Way

paul — 2004-08-03T21:26:54Z

I’m back in London today after a week of walking the West Highland Way in Scotland. If you haven’t heard of it, the WHW is Scotland’s first long distance path officially opened in 1980 although farmers, missionaries and soldiers have been using sections of it for far longer than that. It runs from a station in an unassuming suburb of Glasgow to a roundabout just on the edge of Fort William 95 miles later. But it’s the bits in between that make it special. As well as the scenery there are some great places for eating and drinking. The Drovers Inn must be in the running for ‘best pub in the UK when it’s raining’. A perfect place to sit sipping a single malt with your clothes steaming and toes toasting by open fires. The bizarre stuffed wildlife in the lobby and some of the locals (who look like they’ve been there since the place opened in 1705) add to the ambience. On a more painful note, I now know where Michael Chrichton got the inspiration for the swarms of self-organising nanobots in Prey. He must have visited Scotland in the summer and witnessed the midgies. My arms look like somebody has been practicing voodoo on them. While it took me seven days, and that’s what most people reckon to do it in, the record is a bewildering 16 hours 26 mins. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Oh dear...

paul — 2004-07-16T14:17:36Z

Just typed my postcode into the Labour Party website to "find out what Labour has done in my area". The answer? "Nothing Found".

BedZED blog – part one

paul — 2004-07-10T20:59:51Z

Last Saturday I packed my life into the back of a van and headed for a new home. From Stoke Newington in north east London, where I’ve lived for the past three years, I drove south – past the glass and steel of the City, over the slow meandering Thames, through the urban grit of Elephant, Brixton and Streatham – and eventually popped up in the green suburbs of south London. The flat I’ve moved into is a bit special and you can’t really miss the development that it’s part of as you approach. Peeping out from between the roofs of the surrounding conventional late twentieth century flats and semidetached interwar houses are brightly coloured curved chimneys. Technically they’re called ‘cowls’ and are actually heat reclaimers, harnessing energy from the warm air that rises from the flats and houses below. On a day like today they sway gently in the wind, lining up as if they’re all looking at the same thing on the horizon. The development is called BedZED (short for Beddington Zero Energy Development) and isn’t far from Sutton. I’ve known about it since I was working at Forum for the Future; I remember going to a packed out talk given by architect Bill Dunster just as they were starting to lay the foundations. I was always excited by the prospect of housing that was environmentally sustainable but actually great to live in but somehow didn’t imagine that I’d be able to live here. It’s now been open for two years and general consensus seems to be that it ‘works’. That’s certainly my experience so far (the AAA energy rated washing machine is my favourite gadget of week one). It’s also just a very lovely place to be and very friendly. Yesterday evening I got to meet some of the other residents for the first time at a BedZED barbecue held around a campfire on the allotments. Things are still a bit chaotic for me as I don’t really have any furniture yet and the piles of boxes are only slowly getting emptied. I have managed to borrow a tiny bit of wifi from somebody else though until mine gets installed in a week or so. As time goes on, I’ll try to give you a picture of sustainable living from the perspective of someone living here at BedZED. There have been countless TV and newspaper appearances for the place (a neighbour’s garden was done for a TV makeover show just yesterday) but hopefully I’ll be able to give a slightly more considered commentary over the months and (hopefully) years. In the meantime, you can find out more at these three sites: BioRegional BedZED page Bill Dunster Architects BedZED page Peabody Trust BedZED page.

Political polarization

paul — 2004-06-29T16:07:49Z

Interesting piece in the NY Times today about the structural reasons for political polarization (particularly in the college educated population) in the US. I'm writing a piece about the future of political parties in the UK at the moment and the more I think about it, the more I don't think they have one.

A definition is neither true or false...

paul — 2004-06-28T22:47:59Z

Back from a weekend away to find John Naughton has written a really interesting review of Network Logic in the Observer. He's spotted a recurring Demos dilemma. We agonised for a long time over whether to include a single definition of 'network' but in the end decided to go for a network definition, if you see what I mean. Each author adds something to your understanding of network as noun and verb and once you've dipped in and out of a few essays you should hopefully feel a bit better equipped to navigate our network society. It reminds me of a quote by Stuart Kaufman "A definition is nether true or false; it is either useful or useless". I hope our approach is useful.