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With the coming of virtual reality comes the possibility for collecting enormous amounts of data about human responses in very realistic situations. With that comes the real possibility of creating remarkably rich corpuses of data about normative human behaviour. This, together with increased efficiencies in the searching of these corpuses, might change the world.Could a computer identify how a person...

I'm writing a paper on music at the moment in which I'm using the (fantastic) Music21 analytical tools from MIT (see http://web.mit.edu/music21/) together with R text-mining. Having a tool like Music21 is a bit of a revelation: now we have musical scores encoded in XML (through Musicxml) and we have libraries for processing that XML (for example, to perform harmonic reductions, etc) it becomes...

At my University over the summer, we hosted the annual conference of the American Society for Cybernetics. It was really good - despite some worries I had beforehand. It seems that Cybernetics provides a space for people to play with and break the ordinary rules of disciplinary discourse. That's refreshing and good fun. But Cybernetics has an identity crisis. This can be boiled down to a question:...

I have a fairly ridiculous job title: Reader in Applied Research in Educational Technology and Systems. To be fair, it's descriptive of what I have done over the last 5 years or so. I have written software (applied research) and papers (academic research) for educational technology projects funded by the EU and JISC. Now the funding from JISC is largely gone; EU funding is harder to find. Many people...

Napoleon would probably not have cared that Beethoven scrubbed his name from the dedication of the Eroica Symphony on hearing that the 'great leader' had crowned himself 'emporer'. But it was nevertheless important that Beethoven did this. It was an expression of outrage, and a realisation of the abuse of power in the face of truth. Beethoven might have hoped that Napoleon represented a better way...

I am experimenting with new ways of improvising at the moment. What I am interested in is if there are ways of communicating musically through improvisation whose expressive power can compare with the depth of a Beethoven piano sonata (say). What is in the Beethoven that makes it great? Is it the sheer astonishment that all that complexity could, through some extraordinary labour, be notated? Or is...

The last chapter of Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Classes" is about education. Published in 1899, Veblen's analysis is stark and remarkably prescient. Veblen sees "education" as having not shaken off its sacramental origins, presenting itself to the "leisure classes" as a means of becoming 'priests'. His style is florid (to say the least), but what emerges is a powerful satire which rings...

Perhaps the most valuable thing about the 'knowledge' economy is  that it leads us to ask what an economy is in the first place. 'Knowledge' suggests that learning is in some way central to economic life, and this indeed has been the driver for national investments in education as ways of producing 'knowledge workers'. A similar expansion of education occurred in the 19th century with the growth...

Forgive the hyperbole. But it was an exciting day in the office yesterday. I took delivery of my Oculus Rift development kit (http://www.oculusvr.com/). I haven't been this excited about technology for years.I needed a reasonably modern laptop to use it (the issue is the need for Digital Video output) - but that just meant that trying it out was a team effort (thank you @PaddytheRabbit). A bit...

I entered Manchester University in 1988 to read music. I was 19 and wanted to become a composer. Actually, I already was a composer: in the previous 2 years I had started to become quite productive - nothing completely earth-shatteringly brilliant, but not bad. Then I went to University. What happened? Well, by the end of it, I wasn't composing any more. I felt I had 'dried up'. Not that I didn't...

I think Virtual Reality is about to change everything. I could be wrong, but the visceral reactions to the use of Oculus Rift are very real and powerful: it's a 'wow!' moment - and we haven't had one of those for some time. There will inevitably be similar devices going to market, but this is an experience which is about to become massive and mainstream. The experiential shift to VR is enormous, but...

A nation that gasses its own people is very sick. The question is, "what's the cure?" If a sick nation was like a sick child, a parent would take the temperature, a doctor take blood samples, etc. Parents would examine their diet and get a feel for their mood. A parent and a doctor are in an intimate relationship and a position to act. They understand the consequences of the actions they might take....