sardonick

Just do a google image search for happy baby.

Came across Newsmap this afternoon, a google maps mashup by Ben O’Neill today that plots locations mentioned in BBC news on a map of the world.

The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with regional coloring based on density of news events in that area. You’d need a few hacks to make things look nice (normalization for standard-level-of-news per area (different areas of the world have different minimum levels of media coverage) … smoothing so that local news-concentration influences regional news-concentration). And a gradient would do a lot more for visualization than these discrete news-event-bubbles (but I realize that the google maps api limits you to location bubble markers, and remixers are limitted to the tools at hand).

I love to see non-art becoming art. To this day, one of my favorite random conversations was with Tom and danah at a conference a year or so ago, where we discussed a fellow information addict who had covered all the walls of his house with bookshelfs full of books. Information, knowledge became art–and it evolved so both organically and unobtrusively.

This post on boingboing, “Google: our print scan program has no hidden AI agenda”, which points to this ZDNet story cracks me up.

Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence.

When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google’s core philosophy of “Don’t be evil” guides all its actions.

“I think that goes back to the concept that these technologies can actually be empowering and good for the world if the companies implementing them are good,” he said. “Could some of these technologies be used for bad purposes? Yes. But will they by us? No.”

Hehe. As someone who works with AI every day, and who knows the prenatal state of natural language processing and so-called “strong AI”, it cracks me up to see public fears of “omnipotent and malign computers”.

Sigh.

Bibliography Management Linkdump:

• Bibdesk : an excellent BibTeX database management system. Beautiful. But for mac only.
• jabref : an open-source, java BibTeX database management system. Lacks Bibdesk’s panache, but not bad.
• bibtexml: an excellent tool. Takes .bib files, converts them to xml, and then uses DTDs or XSLTs to mark them down to html APA, MLA, or whatever. This is the type of thing that XML was made for. Requires sablotron or another xslt engine to work.
• citeulike : folksonomy + bibliography. A delicious clone built to manage academic paper metadata. Good for storing data, finding new papers to read, and making what I’ve read public