This is something for Zeno’s macminicenter portal:
An individual calling himself “Lilmuckers” has posted the process he went through to build a mac-mini into the wall of his kitchen. “It is hidden and everything works perfectly.” he says.
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Monthly Archive for July, 2005
Reposting from Pasta&Vinegar these amazing maps.
Those anamorphosis maps shows the rail travel times in Europe. Taken from Spiekermann, K. and M. Wegener. 1996. Trans-European Networks and Unequal Accessibility in Europe. European Journal of Regional Development 4:35-42.
Tags: anamorphosis maps, maps
The Chronic Poverty Centre has published a Chronic Poverty Report, which measures chronic poverty as the amount of people who spend most or all of the time in destitution, i.e. on an income of less than $1 a day. It’s interesting stuff, but one thing really grabs the attention: this map (click for a larger version) of chronic poverty around the world, where a country’s size represents its number of chronically poor, and it’s shade the proportion of the whole population who are chronically poor.
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Tags: maps, politics, anamorphosis maps, society
I worked in Ireland for two years and a half, I visited Belfast many times. It was a plagued city.
I have to admit that this news astonished me, but at the same time the more I thought about it the more it started to make sense. History is changing rapidly the sense of the word: “terrorism”. If I were in the IR Army I would feel obliged to distinguish my political intentions from this no sensed terroristic activities of killings and bombings.
Time will tell if this act was a collective decision or just a political show off. I hope that the british government will take this seriously and will make their step.
There are no sides of the river, there is only one flow
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.
Tags: interaction design, politics, society
This project really thrills me. The idea is to give to the citizen of a city a place where to share their idea about the places of the city. Here they can collect their impressions, stories, suggestions. A nice interface allows also for a geographical browsing of the posts. France is really ahead on eGovernment! I wonder how these information will be used for the urban planning of the city. To be continued …
“Tout Rennes blogue” est un projet d’expression des habitants créé par la Ville de Rennes, et qui s’inscrit directement dans l’événement “Rennes, une envie de ville”. Cette grande manifestation, qui aura lieu du 14 au 30 octobre 2005 au Liberté, invitera les Rennais au dialogue, à l’échange, à la mobilisation et à la réflexion autour du thème du “vivre ensemble”.
Tags: maps, new technology, politics, society, tagging
I am pretty sure that Nicolas posted already something about this. He was taking a lot lately on how to improve collaboration in these fourth places.
The You’re In Control system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of impact of a stream of urine, enabling the user to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal.
Tags: new technology, wierd
NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, is a suite of Python libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is accompanied by extensive documentation, including tutorials that explain the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit.
Fabien is making big progress on the STAMPS interface. He was able, with the help of Satyndra to pass the CellID information that is collected by a Symbian script to the J2ME midlet of STAMPS. For the moment, it appears in the upper left corner of the screen, coded as (Local Area Information)LAI:MCC:MNC:LAC. Then the Cell ID (CID). This trick works only on MIDP 2.0 devices.
I found this project extremely fascinating: how to visualize graphically conversation undergoing on public forums. Here Andrew Fiore et. al. decided to relate the area of a square to the number of messages in a particular forum. Suddenly the picture becomes a fractal showing the complexity of our world coming out from a simple set of instruction, in the same fashion of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science.
I can summarize the papers I have been reading lately in three categories:
1. Research around the SOM method (Self-Organising Maps): SOM and WEBSOM are efficient algorithms to find correspondence between textual documents and to map these similarities on a two-dimensional graphical representation.
2. Research around the context automatic recognition: studies of Flanagan, reports and details methodologies for aggregating sensory data into arrays and matrices for unassisted clustering.
3. Research around spatial data mining: a canadian research group directed by Han has detailed methodologies like CLARANS for clustering elements with no geographical features using their geographical position.
This last group, in fact, results particularly useful for my research. What I need at this point is to put together methodologies for semantic and geographic clustering in some ways. Is there a priority between these two? Can we define a mixed approach? Are these two techniques independent? How can I merge them?
Tags: clustering, context, spatial clustering
Jamie advised me to read this book, which I found extremely interesting for my research:
“Spatial Cluster Modelling” by Andrew Lawson and David Denison, CRCPress.
Here is a preview on Google Press.
Tags: spatial clustering
J. Himberg, J. A. Flanagan, and J. Mäntyjärvi. Towards context awareness using symbol clustering map. In Proceedings of the Workshop for Self-Organizing Maps 2003 (WSOM2003), pages 249–254, Kitakyushu, Japan, 2003. [url]
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This paper present the Symbol Clustering Map methods that is used to recognizing the context of use of a mobile phone. The authors present an approach for context recognition that is based in a vectorial fusion of sensory information. Two sorts of fusions are presented: a multi-source fusion and a temporal fusion of events. The Symbol Clustering Map (SCM) is based on a lattice structure, generally two-dimensional, with a total of M x M lattice points. For each node k of the lattice, a symbol set is associated, combined with a weight vector.
Tags: clustering, context
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This is a web-based application charting the precise locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. this map tool enables users to plot exact routes that avoid these cameras, thus creating ‘paths of least surveillance’.
Is interesting how technology can help to overcome technology itself. Also, it is nice to see these kind of information displayed on a map.
Tags: maps, new technology
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House_n is a Department of Architecture research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that explores how new technologies, materials, and strategies for design can make possible dynamic, evolving places that respond to the complexities of life. Major House_n initiatives include The PlaceLab and the Open Source Building Alliance.
Lots of cool projects and ideas. One of the most common is that of placing sensors everywhere to monitor and generate a model of people’s activities in home environment. This can later be used for a possible support.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.
Tags: context, new technology, wierd
K. Lagus, S. Kaski, and T. Kohonen. Mining massive document collections by the websom method. Information Sciences, 163(1-3):135–156, 2004. [url]
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This article present a summary of the research on the WEBSOM method, which is a viable salternative to the traditional text-mining methods. The idea behing the WEBSOM is to use a visual two-dimensional display to help browsing the document collections. In such maps, documents are displayed using representative keywords. The distance between these keywords is related to the similarity between the linked documents.
The authors present in the paper a review of the methods currently used for encoding the documents statistically in such a way that they can be represented using the WEBSOM. Some of them include: the vector space method, methods for dimensionality reduction, latent semantic indexing, random projection, word clustering, rapid initialization increasing map size, etc.
Additionally, the authors offer som other computational shortcut of the usage of their method: parallelized batch map algorithm, etc.
The paper contains also an evaluation of the new method with the traditional SOM algorithm, where they used two performance indices: the average quantization error and the classification accuracy.
Tags: clustering, spatial clustering
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