Ada Lovelace Day celebrates inspirational women in technology. This post is dedicated to Quinn Norton, a journalist who specialises in covering the fields of body hacking and functional body modification. Unusual choice? You bet! Inspirational? Definitely

Body hacking is, like all other forms of volition: the freedom to enact your will upon a system

Quinn embodies (no pun intended) freedom. Her viewpoint is that in our society we often have less control over our own bodies than we do over other objects such as hardware. Medical procedures are tightly regulated and governed not from the perspective of individual freedom, but societal need. She is an advocate of something called functional body modification – implanting devices, taking drugs and having surgery that enhances our abilities.

This has particular importance to me. I have a distance vision of less than 10 inches, am morbidly obese and have a 3 generational family history of premature death due to cardiac failure. My father was one of the first people in Australia to have an implantable defibrillator – a machine which regulated his heartbeat and actively restarted his heart on a number of occasions when it went into nonviable rhythm. Without life there is no technology. I can’t code when I’m dead.

That said, I’m conservative. I won’t get laser eye surgery to restore my vision to 20/20, yet happily underwent gastric banding to reduce obesity. Without Quinn’s view of body modification – that it is an expression of freedom – it would have taken me a lot longer to reach this decision and take a positive step. Would I take Provigil to make myself more alert? I’m not sure, but thanks to Quinn Norton  now I think about body enhancement in a different way and am more open to freeing my body from the constraints that have been imposed upon it by nature.

Using technology to alter the body is nothing new. Surgery has been around for over 100 years. However for the most part it has been mechanical – amputation via hacksaw, bloodletting and debridement via scalpel, relocation of joints with brute force. Technology has only entered mainstream medicine in the last 40-50 years – with lasers for surgery, neurosurgery via telescope, better monitoring through machines. It is a matter of time before the body and technology will merge, perhaps in unexpected ways. Will the next generation be part man, part machine? Will becoming part machine be an evolutionary requirement due to the pace of change – the sheer amount of information that has to be absorbed to be productive? How will social status be changed by the ability to enhance bodies? Thin people are better than fat people!

What it means to be female is also changing. As a female, I can control reproduction and choose to have a baby – only when I want to. If I don’t want children, I can still use my body for the benefit of others and act as a surrogate for a friend or colleague who can’t carry to term – an expression not just of freedom but of altruism. Functional body modification also brings with it new challenges – such as the ability to subscribe to changing societal norms – enormous perky breasts that seem to defy gravity, faces that never sag and bums that never droop.

Quinn Norton is a pioneer – using her own body as a platform with which to experiment, push boundaries and continually question what it means to be human.

Watch Quinn Norton’s presentation on Body Hacking

Donna Benjamin is President of Linux Users’ Victoria and is quite influential in the open source community. Her talk at StixCampNewstead was on the open source product ‘Inkscape‘ – which provides a free alternative to programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Fireworks.

Most people at the presentation had had some exposure to Inkscape which made Donna’s presentation all the more interesting. She demonstrated a number of the features of Inkscape including:

• Bezier curves
• Stroke and fill options

Inkscape produces scalable vector graphics – as opposed to the raster images produced by the likes of Photoshop. This makes it quite a useful tool for large format printing, such as for banners. It can also be scripted, for instance by taking XML input and using it to have dynamic text represented in an image.

Inkscape provides very fine grained controlled over stroke and fill options – I was very impressed by the stroke options available. Often in graphics programs the stroke options go to a minimum of .5pt for stroke – but Inkscape can go much finer which is useful for line art based designs.

The creation above is my first attempt at using Inkscape (keep in mind I’m fluent with Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) and generally it is very easy to use. The interfaces are a little foreign at first, but then any graphics application that’s reasonably mature usually is. The only real difficulty I had was that it does not output PNG natively – it has to first be converted to a raster image. When importing between Inkscape and GIMP, there were also some parts of the image that were not correctly converted.

Zach Miller is based in Chicago and works as a developer. His presentation was on the separation of model, view and controller layers in application design – otherwise known as MVC architecture. He introduced the topic by explaining that programmers and designers have different skillbases – which often conflict. MVC architecture is a method of separating the control logic of an application from the presentation layer so that the developer can be coding and the graphics guru designing the interface without their work conflicting.

Zach provided an overview of MVC architecture and then articulated a little known technology that can be used with MVC – Template Attribute Language or TAL for short. This was originally written for the Zope Content Management System in Python, but is now being more widely applied. A document type definition has not yet been written for TAL, but this is on the development roadmap.

Using TAL means that you can easily prototype the interface of an application to get design approval, before doing the bulk of the work in writing the functionality.

Zach provided examples of TAL.

Personally, I’ve seen MVC work very well in PHP using Smarty.

Paul Fenwick, a consummate and hilarious presenter at past BarCampMelbourne events, lived up to his reputation and had the audience in stitches with his talk on ‘Hacking other peoples’ brains’. The entire premise of his talk is that as geeks, we need to translate inter human communications to some form of protocol – like TCP for Humanz

Using The Sims as an example, he explained how to get better outcomes when communicating with people, we need to understand how they think and feel – what their ’status bars’ are and how people are motiviated. As Paul explains – happy people are more likely to give us what we want. This is why people are more likely to say ‘yes’ when you buy then a coffee or bring them chocolate A lot of the content in Paul’s presentation boils down to common sense – such as trying to create a win-win situation – if you are helping people fulfill their goals and desires, then they are more likely to assist you in return.

A key point of the presentation was that people are more willing to help if they are made to feel that what they’re doing – and hence themselves – are important and valued – which is why recognition should never be overlooked. If this means telling their manager’s manager about what a great job they’ve done – then do it!

Paul recommended HiveMinder.com as a great tool for collaborative to do lists.

Brianna Laugher, the President of WikiMedia Australia – a not for profit organisation dedicated to promoting access to and participation in free cultural networks, presented on ‘So we ruined the encyclopaedia – now what?’.  Her talk first posed the question of whether the encyclopaedia really was dead, and concluded that printed forms of this media are not dead, but are now a niche market rather than a mainstream method of accessing information. The Wikimedia model of user-submitted and user-reviewed content had caused a paradigm shift in the industry – with encyclopadia manufacturers such as Brittanica now moving to a model of reader contributed content. Brianna questioned how long the current business model of enclyclopaedia producers such as Brittanica and Funk & Wagnall would be sustainable given that their product now has only a niche market.

Brianna then explored what had really been ruined with the introduction of Wikipedia and user-contributed content. In short, the quality of content had been diminished – the ‘brilliant prose’ of thick tomes replaced with brief, to the point articles on a much wider range of topics. But, Laugher posed, “is that enough”? Do people still need (or even want) the long-winded entries of Brittanica? In our just-in-time, instant gratification society, a two paragraph overview may be enough to answer somebody’s question.

Brianna went on to outline how the quality control standards at Wikipedia are tightening over time – with the marking of articles as requiring citations, introducing cross-linking so that articles are hyperlinked, and the introduction of ‘featured articles‘ which provide exemplars of the content standard that should be aspired to by budding Wiki-authors.

Challenges with the editing community that supports Wikipedia were also addressed in Brianna’s presentation – such as the high turnover of good editors, and the need to train and attract high calibre volunteers to the project. These are hurdles faced not just in the open source community, but also in the corporate and government sectors.

Brianna’s talk is available online.

Jodi, who has recently completed her Masters in interactive gaming, started her discussion by exploring what pervasive gaming meant to different people. It was clear that while there several gamers (both hobbyists and hardcore) in the audience, there weren’t a lot of people with a lot of experience in this field. From the discussions it was also apparent that the phenomenon had a larger following in Europe and UK rather than in Australia. It is not currently clear whether this is a cultural issue – or driven by the physical environment. For instance, it is a lot easier to undertake pervasive gaming in a built up area as there are more people and locations to interact with.

Part of the discussion focussed on an emerging trend whereby the traditional boundary between ‘game play’ and ‘real life’ is blurring so that real life and in-world activities may be undertaken at the same time. A similar parallel is that of work and leisure time becoming more blended – this just takes it one step further.

One of the challenges Jodi mentioned preventing wider uptake of this hobby is reliability of technology – many games are GPS or mobile depdendent and if there are reception issues gameplay is inhibited.

Gian Wild works in accessibility at Monash University and has been heavily involved in web and accessibility standards development, including the eGovernment web accessibility toolkit for Victorian Government. The point of adhering to accessibility standards is to ensure that people with disabilities are able to achieve the same objective with a website as a person without a disability. This requirement is embodied in the 1992 Disability Discrimination Act (C’th), with which Australian organisations must comply.

At first the need to make websites, applications and user interfaces is not obvious – why spend so much effort catering for a small percentage of the population? However, as Gian highlighted, approximately 19% of the Australian population has some form of disability – including cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, and excluding those with a minor vision impairments – such as those people who wear glasses or contact lenses.

The enforcement of the Act is done by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Their most famous enforcement act is that initiated by Bruce Maguire, who is visually impaired. During run up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, SOCOG (the organising body for the Games) released a website that was inaccessible to those using a screen reader (such as Bruce). HREOC requested that SOCOG take remedial action to bring the site up to standard. They did not, and were fined $20,000 (with around $500,000 in legal costs). Not being accessibility standards compliant can cost you dearly – financially and in terms of reputation. It is not just the fear of legal action however that should drive accessibility compliant websites and applications – making a website accessible and easy to use means that people will want to use it – increasing the chances that the site will meet the objectives it was created for.

One question from the audience was whether open source CMS applications were WCAG accessibility compliant. Gian indicated that generally they weren’t but that WordPress was reasonable, and that she would like to investigate this further. This got me thinking whether or not this work had been previously attempted – so headed on over to check out http://cmsmatrix.org/. I’m  not sure how deep CMS Matrix checks in terms of accessibility, however none of the top CMSs stack up very wel…

Gian went on to discuss the differences between WCAG Version 1 and the newly released Version 2 – essentially Version 2 attempts to be technology agnostic and provide general guidance.

When questions about effective ways to promote accessibility practices, Gian responded

“If you already adhere to best practices – you’re 80% of the way there. If people know what they’re doing, then it shouldn’t cost any more to develop a standards compliant website”

Along with Ben Balbo, Dave Hall (aka ’skwashd’), Donna Benjamin (aka ‘KatteKrab’) and Joshua May (aka ‘notjosh’) I’ve been helping to organise a BarCamp in central Victoria, known as StixCamp. The location for this year’s StixCamp is Welshman’s Reef Vineyard, near Newstead. After swapping cars with my sister, who has a large station wagon that drives smoothly up treacherous hills and handles curves better than my buzzbox, I was off to pick up my passenger, Jackson. All was rosy. Half way to Waurn Ponds and stuck at traffic lights, a stranger came up to me in traffic to let me know that my tyre was flat! Grr! Well, Jackson was very adept at changing tyres and earnt his ride . Soon we were on the road again.

I choose to go through Ballan, Daylesford, Hepburn Springs then Newstead to Welshmans Reef because if anything else went wrong with the car at least it would be in a populated area. These towns are simply beautiful – the scenary is amazing. One shudders to think how close they all came to being destroyed in the recent Black Saturday bushfires.

Finally, we arrived at Welshmans Reef Vineyard where I met the lovely Julia and Ron (Jackson’s parents). The vineyard building itself is pretty amazing – hand built by Ron from mudbrick and timber, with a cellar cut into the ground that has a drive in entrance on the opposite side of the building.

Dave had pitched a tent for me so that I wouldn’t have to pitch one in the dark (thanks Dave) and needless to say I slept like a baby.

Note to self: next time zip up the flyscreen on the tent to stop mozzies biting you.