Build worlds, tell stories … that’s what I love about cinema and that is what Tim Burton delivers in his vision of Alice in Wonderland. This is a visual feast with director Tim Burton painting with light and colour and imagination tumbling from the screen through the rich art design and numerous small touches of detail. It works as both a genuine source of wonder and as an intriguing critical text rattling along at a rollicking pace full of incident and adventure whilst leaving me thinking about it long after I’d left the cinema.

This is also one of the first 3D films I’ve seen (and I haven’t seen the all conquering Avatar) that begins to use the depth provided by 3D to pull you into the screen not just extend outwards and uses the extra dimension to add to the narrative rather than merely decorate it. Perspective is put to powerful use to convey the sense of expectation that Alice feels crushing her at decisive moments. For this is a story of a girl coming to terms with the pain of grief and growing up within a society that doesn’t suit her.

The world can be complex, difficult and emotional something we explore through fairytales and deconstruct through allegory (except when we are criticising it directly: “Do you know what I fear most”/”The decline of the aristocracy?”). The turbulent world of childish emotions come together better in the surreal juxtapositions of Wonderland than the social critique does as one weakness of the film is this it is a rather simplistic and cartoonish treatment of Victorian society. It is hard to contrast fact and fantasy in the same way as Pan’s Labyrinth does for example, which uses it’s alternative world to throw reality into ever darker relief. This gives the latter film a far more darker and tragic edge, whereas here you get the impression all that is glossed over in favour of the fun stuff as Wonderland spills so far into Alice’s reality it is hard to tell the difference.

For me more Labyrinth and less Narnia would have given the film a bit more edge without spoiling the fun and it works best when it does so. So this is another slight criticism as Burton’s originality gets a bit threadbare in the middle section as he draws upon The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings and The Wizard of Oz to line up his plot pieces and you begin to start mapping Wonderland to these other imaginary worlds rather than be immersed in it. In one scene the White Queen throws ingredients into her potion pot, (some buttered fingers, two spoonfuls of wishful thinking) and you get the same impression the film is being put together in the same way for a while.

On the acting side this is a richly talented cast but many of the characters seem less filled in, sketched to provide colour and nudge the plot along, or act as canvases on which to project these themes and Mia Wasikowska does a good job to not let the eponymous lead become a total cipher. The exceptions are Burton’s close collaborators Johnny Depp who plays the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter who plays the Red Queen. The depth of their working relationship with Burton is clear as both have a great time with their characters pulling them in all sorts of directions from the outrageously funny to the touchingly poignant.

I never thought I’d criticise a film for being too feminist but Alice’s proto-independepence at the end is too complete to be swallowed. More successful is the narrower gaze Wonderland throws over just how awful a family can seem to a teenage girl by being ‘made to be’ by others whilst wrestling with her own raging feelings. The two sisters, the Red Queen and the White Queen both come across responses to this. Both are petulant children and the former chooses “fear over love” rather than face her insecurities about her ‘grotesque’ appearance, whilst the latter elects to abdicate all responsibility in the hope that the trippy vacuity of drugs and longing for a champion will abdicate her from responsibility. Neither is perfect and when they clash the film sides with one, but you can’t help feeling that the strong willed Alice who rejects the social determinism of her class is much more like the other.

All of these thoughts and themes swim in and out of focus giving this film a long and provocative aftertaste but mostly, whilst I was watching, I just thought how fantastic and entertaining it all was. This Alison was definitely filled with wonder.

Today…

The anecdote of the Cardiff Giant .. fakes can be popular and travel faster than the truth.  Fake identities and identity theft is a growing problem.

The Consumer Factor

Why have consumer organisations jumped into federated identity … because it is lucrative.  Double click and personalised advertising is still most of Google’s income.  Second generation is email companies like Gmail and hotmail and now Facebbok and Twitter are becoming the largest repositories of personal information and have been very successful at monetising this.  They have also done a great job of raising user expectations that everything should be free and easy and powered by ads.

Universities and Identities

Universities house both applications and identities and are the natural home for much user data.  We may outsource the systems that run these but we are not going to outsource the business capability – it is too core.  We also host a number of applications but increasingly not all of them will be locally hosted.

The Important Players in Academic Identity

• Government


• Faculty


• Applications


• Users

“These groups will collectively shape identity in learning over the next 10 years”.

Nate is now unpicking the different perspectives and goals these groups might have.

Governments want strong data protection, assertion and protection of digital identity.

Faculty want good learning resources by the easiest possible route, but they also want undivided attention – do they want social networking in the classroom?  Tension between both stronger IPR and freely circulated intellectual property.  Functional IPR is essential to the cretaion of knowledge – probably not in current form though.  The incentives for creating knowledge are less than previously.

Commercial applications want a user base to make money from, licensing fees and advertising is a nice plus.  Other applications aren’t really sure what they want but would be happy to be helped with the username/password problem.  They talk vaguely about security and usability.  However Identity Services are critical – indeed, foundational – for “cloud computing”.  Whatever the cloud is one thing your organisation needs to do is have good identity management and federating of that identity.

Users want CONSISTENCY. There is agreement that users want consistency, but huge disagreement as to what that consistency should be.  There more screaming there is hopefully the faster this will get resolved.  Users get confused.  They like buttons.  They do get the concept of work and personal personas and are able to switch between them – they may not want these to be converged.  Privacy and security are very important to users – particularly in countries where privacy laws are weaker.

Consumer Identity Today… Facebook Connect or Facebook/Twitter.  Facebook Connect is the most successful consumer identity and is built on a proprietary protocol via a single identity provider. Their inducements for applications are sweet.  The key component of both is the news stream.  Type pad have been collecting stats on the consumer identities used to login to their service – and they offer a lot!  73% are still using their legacy Typepad ID.  However in the last month over 62% of new signups have used one of the consumer federated identities on offer.  MAny consumer applications seem to be promoting three 1. Their own profile 2. Facebook Connect 3. Twitter with other offerings shoved under more…

Convergence between Academic Identity and Consumer Identity?

Google Apps is an example of this.  Every Google Apps domain is an OpenID provider.  Shibboleth access into Google Apps.  Users are being ‘trained’ in their consumer habits … to click on Facebook.  Others will be pushing for their buttons to be more prominent.  We don’t have a BUTTON we can put on this landscape (seems like this comes back to Rhy Smith’s work on the Publisher Interface Study and the need for an academic identity ‘brand’).

Assurance is gravitating to the lowest common denominator.  Non-bouncing email address is the lowest consumer identity provider level of trust.  We need to have modernisation of these systems and their Level of Assurances (LoA).  We aren’t sure what peer validation of identity like in Facebook provides in terms of assurance.

Consumer world is rapidly realising that attributes are the key.  We are going to have to solve the attribute aggregation problem.

There are multiple convergence options

• separate identities, applications, personas


• side by side with extended discovery


• attribute plumbing from campus to consumer providers (Google keen here)


• outsource entirely

Nate is whizzing through this now as he runs out of time.  There is a lot of big ideas and jey concerns in here so this presentation is definitely worth revisiting and reflecting on.

How to prepare for the future?

• Be protocol agnostic.


• Expectations and functionality are driven by commercial and consumer identities.


• Users and Governments are unlikely to influence change


• Faculty will use best tools available


• Applications like money

If we want something more benign we have to consider the motivations of these key players and push them towards an outcome we think will be better.  Nate is not sure what this better outcome is yet but does say that whatever happens DISCOVERY is the key control point.  We need some sort of eduID although opinion divided here, but we must proactively consider partnerships with other identity sources.

Our current course is excellent.  Our infrastrucutre will be key to most possible convergence routes and will be useful.  Hence why this is a paranoid/cycnical presentation but not a downbeat one.

Phew interesting/exciting stuff but that was rapid and brain is definitely full now.  Need a lie down/sleep on the train.

So question how does all this relate to Microsoft’s Forefront/Generva.  Basically not sure lies behind the huge Forefront Marketing wall that Microsoft have built up.  Internet2 is doing some interoperability testing with Microsoft’s stack.  Microsoft wants to get into doing this attribute plumbing.

This was a really interesting event with some good keynotes and mix of parallel sessions, opportunities for discussion and a lot of fun.  Thanks JISC … now to go back and wonder what to think and do about it all.

• Adds complexity to user interface
• IDP must still create defauly Attribute Release Policy (ARP) and face quasi-legal questions
• SPs must handle revocation

• Basic Identitifer Set (BIS) at the core provides proof of uniqueness
• Next layer is other Personally Identifying Information (PII) e.g. Address
• The next ring is attributes.  Example is blood type – a person only has one but it by no means uniquely identifies them.

• Privacy is not a state but a relationship
• These relationships are contractual
  
• It is highly asymmetric and involves conflicting interests and motivations
• It is highly contextual – and context changes.
• We have social relationships and networked relationships but these are not the same.
  

• When we give consent do we understand what we are consenting to?
• What means to we have for enforcing consent?
• What means to we have for withdrawing it?
• How can we make our conditions of disclosure stick to to those attributes, particularly beyond first disclosure.

• Independent review of the WAYF login process
• Conducting usability tests to assess usability in the context of the user journey
• Aim is to improve usability and accessibility for all users.
• Prioritised recommendations for next steps by July 2010
• Passed onto Rhys Smith to link into the JISC Publisher INterface Study and to Shib developers working on SP discovery.

• WAYF is a backstop but encouraging IDPs to deploy a portal so that users have a consistent method to login and access resources.
• Expert team will consider technologies and definitions of portal to provide a best practice guide for the deployment of discovery services.
• Possibly also publish brandable codebase.
  
• Recommendations published by April 2010

• Centralised metadata does not scale.  The size of the UK Federation makes this a growing issue.

• Federation needs to justify its existence!  So…
• Allow IdPs to visualise how the service is used.
• Anonymous central database of usage statistics.

• Canvass opinion
• Create a benchmark of customer satisfaction
• Has the federation met its objectives?
• Highlight areas for improvements.

• user centricity
• granularity – fine grained access control
• delegation of authority
• n-tier – transferring attributes across systems
• accounting/auditing

• Technology and Tools
• Interoperability
  
• Use Cases
• Policy
• Licencing

• Configurable T&C splash screen
• Let users choose the privacy they want
• Don’t ask in advance, remember choices
• Let users change their mind
• Configurable defaults
• Tell the user what will be released not what could be released
• Distinguish what we must be released from what could be released
• Identitfy everything from the user’s POV
• Some attributes are more equal than others
• Seamless IdP plugin or part of IdP
• Easily skinnable
  

• Subscribe
  
• Publish
• Aggregate
• Transform
• Consume

• Behavioural trust in large systems
• Trust relationships between aggregators
• The discovery problem
  

• Definitions of IdM terminology and concepts (good.  Does it cover different approaches to access e.g. discretionary, role based, claims based?)
• Service Usage Models and how they relate to the rest of the other e-Framework model (interesting and may be useful in providing examples of scenarios and business drivers – but not many of us in the room familiar with the e-Framework model).
• Governance and Policy guidance (good.  This is a key area.  Does it cover just writing formal policies or organising and tracing business rules and governance structures).
  
• Guidance and Templates for an IdM Audit of current practice (useful)
• IdM Requirement Specification Guide (ok)
  
• Gap Analysis guide (ok)
  
• Preparing an IdM Business Case (good)
  
• IdM Roadmap for universities and colleges (ok)
  
• IdM Procurement guide to systems solutions (ok)

• example policies
• network/wi-fi access for ‘walk-in’ users (third stream visitors etc).
  
• IdM related job descriptions
• How to run the ‘Passwords for Chocolate’ test.  this was the test they did to see if you could get people to tell you their passwords in exchange for chocolate.

• Strategic message at the highest levels in the institutions.  Federation is too often seen as just an Athens replacement and therefore a library thing but you need to consider the other drivers and use cases.  Multiple federations: global collaboration with other federations for example.
  
• Benefit/impact analysis
• A longer road map

• Technical architecture: centralised vs distributed.
• Policy: federated identity and data protection

• to enable interoperability between international federations
• Web SSO use cases
• non-Web SSO use cases

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

I have read many glowing reviews of District 9 but I have to say I just hated it. First time I felt like I’d wasted my time in the cinema since 28 Weeks Later. Maybe it’s not my genre (but I love Terminator, Alien, Blade Runner, Minority Report), but I found this mind numbing rather than though provoking.

The concept starts out interesting – a faux-realist documentary showing archive footage and talking heads commenting on a retrospective incident involving the alien colony that lives in District 9, a ghetto just outside Johannesburg, after their ship becomes stranded over earth. This is good – situating an alien/human engagement some time after first contact takes out the element of shock and awe and opens up the promising exploration of social issues such as immigration, racism, apartheid, genetic research and concerns like the horribly contemporary blurring of government, ngo and private roles particularly in the military complex. The small leap from UN to MNU is disturbing.

However I found that the film rapidly loses it’s way. The satire and social commentary wasn’t subtle enough but increasingly laid on in simplistic and stereotypical lumps that made be both cringe and snigger and the thrills become increasingly crash bang wallop shoot ‘em up rather than suspenseful.

Ultimately I thought this film couldn’t really decide what it wanted to be, throwing in tropes referenced from earlier films across many genres, much as the aliens scavenge amongst the human waste dumped in their ghetto. I didn’t care about any of the protagonists and by the end I was simply bored. The film progresses through acts like levels in a computer game and it probably would make an interesting concept game, but I didn’t find it a great evening at the cinema.

So I was interested in coming across Personas from the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab via Shirley Williams.

this tool is part of the Metro(pathologies) exhibit so it is an art project “about living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication”. It allows visitors to become part of the exhibit by contributing their identities. It’s a neat intersection of both my academic and professional interests.

Which personas to we make and which personas are made? Many of us will create carefully crafted personas that operate in different contexts: family, friends, professionally, publically. Can there ever be a sense of an authentic sense amidst the kaleidoscope of carefully calibrated masks that we put up in front of ourselves as social contexts demand or encourage. This behaviour is multiplied as we create profiles and personas for every web service and social application we use. We may think we control these views of ourselves but we don’t because we will never really have any idea what other people see.

Using data mining techniques this tool attempts to show us what the internet sees when it’s given our name. It is notable that this is what the internet sees of our name not of us. The name as identifier is pretty poor. Algorithms without names authority cannot easily distinguish one individual from another with the same name; but the whole point of the Personas tool is to illustrate this and reflect on how “digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant”. Perhaps we might want them to be socially ignorant, because the other fear – of having a unique identifier always attached to our name element as an attribute in an xml rich semantic web would leave us with little place to hide and expose all data related to us whether controlled by us or not. This is where are need to be may be undermined by a much greater fear of being made to be if our every interaction is sharply rather than fuzzily exposed.

As it runs there is a lot of stuff that definitely isn’t me, although I know there are other Alison Popes working in the same sector so they ‘could’ could have been me. I know enough to know that they weren’t, but would you?

This page though is definitely me!

My day got better as it went on as meetings I was supposed to have melted away leaving me with a working day to concentrate on my tasks in my own time frame without interruption. Even better I didn’t break anything. Headphones on I worked my way through a Moodle upgrade listening to the full Gladiator soundtrack on Spotify upgrading to Premium on the way. Much as I absolutely agree with giving blood (when mine decides it wants to come out) I didn’t want the Give Blood advert spoiling my music stream any more. So now I have a world of music at my finger tips simply and instantly (and their upgrade and payment process was simple and instant – oh joy).

Then surprisingly I find Microsoft are doing something interesting to make me late leaving work. Hello Education Labs a kind of marginal space for interaction between Microsoft and the education sector. Their first offering is a plugin that integrates Microsoft Live services into Moodle: access to email, messenger and single sign on using a Live ID. Kind of interesting if you are a Moodle developer whose users complaining they don’t get Moodle messaging and whose email team is just about to outsource all student email to Live@edu. It’s even licensed under the GPL and has already been downloaded 1011 times. It’s gone on my product backlog. Still old habits die hard – click on the RSS feed to subscribe to Education Labs updates and yes it will launch and subscribe you in Outlook without giving you the option to use any other reader without good old cut and paste. Boo.

Home time towards glorious blue skies and a warm summer evening and for the first time in a long time an evening with nothing planned, no responsibilities – more of that freedom. Actually not true I did have some things to do last night so apologies to all who have asked me to do things I was supposed to do that I ignored – the evening just unfurled in a more chilled direction.

Now my Australian housemate has lived over here for 20 years – I’ve been her friend for 12 and it’s probably a good thing she is going home in 2 months because when I got back was she outside firing up the barbie taking advantage of this rare summer evening delight. No. She was sat inside cooking roast pork in the oven. Talk about role reversal – thank goodness she’s still baiting me about the cricket otherwise I’d be really worried.

Chores done, wine poured I’m out there throwing some sweet red peppers and seas bass onto the barbie and eventually tempt her outside for 2 hours of wine, conversation and exploring music joy as dusk falls. I love Spotify – legal access to all the music you could want evening’s like this demonstrate its genius. We didn’t know what we wanted to listen to we just went from track to track exploring artists, themes, decades, memories – the whole lot a soundtrack to our lives and friendship. We started with Erasure and The Innocents (1988) and ended with Elvis. In between we challenged Spotify to play us Australian classics (it failed on the whole) and had a debate about which was the best version of Angel of the Morning (I went for The Pretenders Jen for Jill Johnson although I do like the Blackman and the Butterfly version which isn’t on Spotify and the German version is absolutely hilarious).

Recent research suggests the 14-24 year olds aren’t falling for Spotify because they want to own not stream music. This is kind of a false dichotomy, because unless you are the originator of music you never actually own it. You purchase a license to listen to it for your own personal use. Whether you choose to store a licensed copy of a manifestation of it on a local device or storage medium yourself, or let someone else do the storage and stream it will probably become increasingly redundant particularly as streaming services become embedded in devices themselves. For the work of art in the age of digital reproduction licenses and links matter more than bits.

* Days Like These – The Cat Empire