Catmachine

As I’ve mentioned many times before, receiving my autism diagnosis about ten years ago was a real game changer. It may have come very late, but nevertheless it made me feel a lot better about myself. I came to realise that it wasn’t me being useless or crap at life. The reason I didn’t fit in was that in general the world wasn’t optimised for people like me. It was as if my mind rolled along on wheels, but there were a lot of mental staircases to negotiate and no lifts. Once I’d realised this it meant I could stop burning up so much energy trying to fit in and please others, right? In theory. I certainly no longer tried to hide my eccentricities, but the people pleasing part of the equation was more difficult to overcome. I rationalised it as avoiding emotional outbursts from others because my own disappointment was easier for me to cope with than their potential reaction to not getting what they wanted. (Far from being non-empathic, autistic people are in fact often overwhelmed by oth...

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea. This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!” In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here. “What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.” It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other ...

Most people would agree that supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is good practice from both DEI and accessibility viewpoints. An organisation with awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity – let alone policies in place – will undoubtedly be a positive nurturing environment for all employees; an example of the Curb Cut Effect in action.   Image by MissLunaRose12 via Wikimedia Commons In addition, neurodiverse people bring unique viewpoints and talent to the table. Many individuals have superb attention to detail and excel at both being able to see the big picture – which leads to unseen pattern recognition and problem identification – as well as being able to drill down into the minutiae of an issue, diagnosing and solving it. As an autistic person and neurodiversity advocate I’ve always been keen to highlight both the advantages and the challenges of maintaining a supportive environment for all employees whatever their neurotype. The flow and communication paradigms ...

As a child I was obsessed with many things. Continental Drift was one of them. I suppose it stemmed from my love of maps, especially maps of imaginary worlds such as those found in the front of fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea , Lord of the Rings or some of the Narnia books. I always thought it was a shame that no map of the Great Eastern Ocean was included in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , but in retrospect that makes sense—it would have been mostly blank. I would spend hours drawing my own maps even though I don't think at any point I was planning to write an epic fantasy. I just liked drawing the maps. Some of them had peculiar features (probably inspired by The Isle of the Ear and The Hands from the Earthsea map) and all of them spanned continents, although I don't recall ever drawing a map of a complete planet. This was an odd omission given how obsessed with space I was. I can only surmise that for some reason I didn't like mixing these particu...

 It's surprising what can catch your attention and become of special interest – especially during childhood – when you've got the kind of brain that thrives on that stuff. In 1981 I narrowed my focus in on the bands appearing on Top of the Pops not least because I wanted to know when and how often Toyah would be appearing. So I became very familiar with the rules surrounding how often an artist could appear. The only way a song would be played two weeks on the trot was if it was number one. In order to get two plays (including the viewers' holy grail of both the video and a mimed studio performance) the song would have to be going up the chart three weeks in a row and ideally by leaps and bounds. To get three plays it would have to have been at least five weeks in the chart and probably be heading into the top 10 at least. I used to write down the lineups in my diary despite parental scorn. This meant I was watching when someone cheated. The Jets' song "Yes Tonigh...

Sometimes a craze is just a craze. In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium. I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before. In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong. However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do. I don't think it has a place...