My life, my interests, my research
Spent a considerable amount of time today to manipulate the campus map to display the position of the messages. I have partly implemented a class that verify the connections of the messages based on a given criteria. Tomorrow will be the right time to complete this initial part. Good night.
Okay, I have to admit that did not get in smoothly BUT, here is a link with some simple step to fix the problem.
ImageField generates “Decoder jpeg not available” error on OSX.
JN has published a new article on the top usability issues of weblog design. I share some of his points, although I find myself more flexible on points like having in mind the audience. For me a weblog is also a reflexion tool that help myself at first. Audience design cames only after.
Whenever you post anything to the Internet — whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email — think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years.
However here are the points he raises (in bold the ones that I like the most):
I would personally add: a) feeds links not easy to find; b) short texts in the feeds.
Tags: interaction design, usability
I was really interested on this topic, so I decided to reblog this list that I found here.
Tags: tagging
Proximity graphs attempt to represent the overall spatial arrangement of the points in a set. In such a graph, two points are connected by an edge if they are, by a certain measure, “close together”. Specifically, this measure can be: two points are close together if there are no other points in a certain “forbidden region” defined by these two points.
The Gabriel graph (as well as the Relative Neighborhood graph) are particular cases of a continuous family of proximity graphs called Beta-skeletons. In these graphs, the “forbidden region” around two points is defined according to a positive parameter Beta.
Calculating the proximity graph is the first step towards a clustering algorithm. These graphs are used to sparsify the proximity matrix. This is the initial processing for observing an emergence of patterns in the dataset.
Tags: beta-skeletons, information metric, pattern recognition
One of the best book I red this summer is Daniel Pennac’s “La fée carabine” (The fairy Gunmother), where he depicts the story of Benjamin Malaussène. He is a professional scapegoat, and his brood of eccentric siblings, a very smelly epileptic dog and a gang of adopted grandads who he and his family are trying to wean off smack. Like all crime novels, nasty things happen to people ( a nazi cop gets his face blown off by a little old lady; a serial killer is going around cutting throats) but the main theme of the book is that people are all right really.
One of my favorite quote is this one:
Io che sono piuttosto loquace amo parlare del silenzio. Quando il vero silenzio cala là dove uno non se lo aspetta, si sente che l’uomo riconsidera l’uomo da capo a piedi, ed è bello.
Prompted by Andrea Gaggioli, I started looking for this kind of strategic consulting software that would allow to track and visualize the links between people and companies. Nicolas found this one called “connivences“, which I find interesting but of no use. The search is not over, it is just difficult to find this stuff available online (for obvious reasons).
Tags: information visualization, maps, politics
Today I am feeling sad because I realized that intelligence doesn’t belong to our politic group. First, they are still pushing this story of the bridge between Calabria and Sicily, which is an amazing example of propaganda that is going to resolve in a huge political (and environmental) crash. Here two opinions on the subject: [1] Paolo, and Beppe [2].
Reading this I thought really that we are building a second Vajont. A huge disaster that killed many people.
The second link that contributed to my mood is this story from Beppe that Barroso, the european commission president, refused to comment on the issues we were raising over email about the fact that many of our politics are corrupted and definitely condemned as such. Clearly Barroso is a politician as the others, and he doesn’t want to take a side.
“Eggs are to Pythons as Jars are to Java…”
Python Eggs are zipfiles using the .egg extension, that support including data and C extensions as well as Python code. They can be used with Python 2.3 and up, and can be built using the setuptools package
The primary benefits of Python Eggs are:
Tags: Python
Finally I managed to compute my standardized distance matrix. It was a pain because the old Numeric package for Python was moved into the new SciPy. The syntax also changed and the new one is not well documented so far. However here we are:
[[ 0. 0. 0. ..., 0. 0. 0. ]
[ 0.19671462 0. 0. ..., 0. 0. 0. ]
[ 1.20662616 1.0139385 0. ..., 0. 0. 0. ]
…,
[ 1.96727641 2.16355442 3.16890036 ..., 0. 0. 0. ]
[ 1.85301096 2.03765943 3.04722642 ..., 0.58206037 0. 0. ]
[ 1.04944476 1.24583752 2.23884572 ..., 0.93726256 1.00173921 0. ]]
Tags: clustering, Python
After the closure of MLE, my group web site was set offline till today. My ex-advisor, Carol Strohecker managed to set it back online. Some of my papers and projects description are now accessible from there.
Biosphera?microworld for exploring ecosystems?2001-2003?Cherubini, M.; Winters, N.; Strohecker, C. (Media Lab Europe / Everyday Learning) | Mikhak, B. (MIT Media Lab) | Gash, H. (St. Patrick´s College, Dublin City University)
DigitalSeed ?PDA-based toy with graphics and flow sensor – 2002?Cherubini, M.; Rasmussen, J.; Strohecker, C. (Media Lab Europe / Everyday Learning) | Gash, H.; McCloughlin, T. (St. Patrick´s College, Dublin City University) | Lometti, A. (California State University, Chico)
DG is a project of SIEMENS CT, Ars Electronica Futurelab and the Johannes Kepler University Linz. The idea is very similar to STAMPS, except that they are not particularly using a map methapor. I particularly like their user scenario:
Say, for example, that you’ve arranged to meet a friend for a stroll round town. While on your way you can simply leave a digital graffito, for instance at the arranged meeting point: “Just looking at a few CDs in the store opposite, come and join me.” If you wanted to send your friends the same message by SMS you would have to send every single one a separate message. This would be far more time-consuming. Advertising messages could be placed in front of stores to draw attention to special offers. Anyone in the mood for shopping could switch on the advertising mode and wander from one offer to the next. People in a hurry simply switch this mode off.
Giles Lane came out with a new initiative to build on top of the urban tapestries platform. The idea is to build a wearable biosensor kit that should interface with a mobile telephone and transfer rhythmically some parameters to the urban tapestries system so that the parameters can be mapped to a certain part of the city. Basically the idea is to use the mobile as a remote and distributed sensor to gather environmental/personal data.
Sensory Threads aims to stimulate and inform a public debate on how personal biosensor data is collected and used in biomedical science. This project will combine an artistic with an evidence-based approach, building and testing a prototype body biosensor network that uploads data to Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries spatial annotation system. This will allow participants to map experiential and emotional annotations to their readings – adding a whole new layer of sentient knowledge to machine data. It is intended to demystify how data is collected, what it produces and how we can correlate it to other factors affecting health such as environmental pollution.
Connected pasta: I wrote already of this concept here.
UPDATE from Giles: What Sensory Threads will focus on is the ethics of using (and developing) these kinds of systems… how will it affect us socially and culturally — what are the implications of correlating the machine data of the sensors with the human/sentient knowledge of place/context/situation etc…
Tags: ecology, environment, Exploratory Data Analysis, field tools, hack, maps, psychogeography, urban exploration
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.
– Andy Rooney
SciPy_Core is a module for python that replace the old Numeric. It has lots of great features and improvements. I started to use it because I was in the need of some complex matrices manipulations that are just a pain (or impossible) to do with lists.
Travis Oliphant is currently maintaining the project and the documentation.
Tags: Python
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