My life, my interests, my research
Sensacell is a human interface technology that can be easily embedded in furniture, floorings and walls. It consist of square modules that contains sensors and leds and can interoperate between each other. Thousands of possibilities are possible. [more]
C. Zhou, P. Ludford, D. Frankowsky, and L. Terveen. An experiment in discovering personally meaningful places from location data. In A. C. Machinery, editor, Proceedings CHI2005, Late Breaking Results: Short Papers, pages 2029–2032, Portland, Oregon, USA, April 2-7 2005. [url]
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This article present an empirical evaluation of clustering algorithms used in location based services to discover meaningful location for the user. Their methodology rely on a quantitative methods of user tracing combined with a semi-quantitative technique of interviews used to validate the collected logs. Results shows that the identification of the places by density of points is accurate but only for those locations that are considered by the user as highly important. Other locations visited only for a limited amount of time received a lower degreed of recognition by the software.
Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways. Suppose the following scenario:
You’re meeting up with a friend for lunch before working together on a business plan. You’d like to locate a restaurant serving some particular cuisine that’s close to a coffee shop of your favorite chain that you know offers free wireless service. Unfortunately, although you can locate restaurants by cuisine using one web site and coffee shops in another, there is no single web site by which you can map both restaurants and coffee shops of your favorite chain together.
What can I do with Peggy Bank:
• Combine information from several web sites and browse it all together:
• Browse and search through an existing web site in better ways than the site allows you to.
• Save information you have found on the Web, not as bookmarks but as full “database” records that can later be sorted and searched by any attribute they carry.
• Tag each item you save with several relevant keywords rather than filing it into one single bookmark folder.
• Share the information you have saved by publishing it onto a Semantic Bank with just one mouse-click.
• Do all that, and more, right inside your current, familiar Web browser.
[more]
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Definitely related project on how to increase the user experience through inferring interests based on the previous activity. I might go for the same kind of approach for my thesis:
Researchers have noticed that readers are increasingly skimming instead of reading in depth. Skimming also occur in re-reading activities, where the goal is to recall specific topical facts. Bookmarks and highlighters were invented precisely to achieve this goal. For skimming activities, readers need effective ways to direct their attention toward the most relevant passages within text. We describe how we have enhanced skimming activity by conceptually highlighting sentences within electronic text that relate to search keywords. We perform the conceptual highlighting by computing what conceptual keywords are related to each other via word co-occurrence and spreading activation. Spreading activation is a cognitive model developed in psychology to simulate how memory chunks and conceptual items are retrieved in our brain. We describe the method used, and illustrate the idea with realistic scenarios using our system.
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Sometimes, when working with graphics, it may be of hand to know the ISO definition for the different paper format. Here is a nice explanation with a comprehensive table.
A0 841 × 1189
A1 594 × 841
A2 420 × 594
A3 297 × 420
A4 210 × 297
A5 148 × 210
A6 105 × 148
A7 74 × 105
A8 52 × 74
A9 37 × 52
A10 26 × 37
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loopcity: describing the city with repeated everyday actions
The Project which I propose is a subjective description of the city as a set of repeating actions and events on different scales. A space composed of closed loops, intersecting each other. each loop is a thematic entity, a story: a stroll through the shelves of a local supermarket.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.
This is the final list of the participants at the workshop CAIF (Collaborative Artifacts Interactive Furniture) we are organising in June in Switzerland.
BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format. In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.
BibDesk integrates well with TeX for creating citations and bibliographies. This integration includes a Citation search completion service, and drag & drop (cut & paste) support for adding citations to TeX files.
Other great features includes PDF archive management, annotation, HTML exportation.
I got it. It took me a while but at the end I found was I was looking for. Well, the story is that I have to work with maps. People at our topography lab, suggested me to use two different programs, one for working with the vectorial files of the database, and the other for scripting any interaction with it. Well, I was quite disappointed when I saw that these two packages works only on windoz machines. Today, googling around I found their Open Source alternatives:
There are nice ports for OSX for both of them. As in many cases the installation will be more than few clicks but still is a small price to pay!
As a side note: the GRASS porting was developed in Italy, which makes me proud!
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.
Some time in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world.
Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent.
This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots. [more]
Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.
[more]
Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. Please note the nice filter option and the rss export. Supa cool+
Nice post on Regine’s blog on using puppets to control appliances or specific interfaces. I see a trend recently of this kind:
- Office Voodoo, a my ex-colleague Michel Lew;
- Voodoo dolls controlled game;
- Teddy bear used as remote control.
I was astonish when I discovered that the USA military force published the report on the Calipari incident with lots of “omissis”. Here we are talking about the life of a Man that was lost by an accident / lack of coordination / maybe else ….
The least thing Italians expect is to have a report with missing parts. I feel treated as a moron by the States. But I am not, I hope. Fortunately, an italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, was able to remove the black stripes covering the text from the published PDF of the report. Now is possible to see the differences between the two versions.
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