Just do a google image search for happy baby.
Information, Knowledge as Art
28-Nov-05Came 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.
AI Scaremongering
16-Nov-05This 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.
Bibliographic Management
13-Nov-05Bibliography 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
Bye, Leonard
27-Oct-05(Wow, rare moment of exposing my personal world to the interweb…) This afternoon I took a bit of time off of work to grab lunch with Leonard and help him pack up the last of his stuff for the move up to San Francisco. Good times, and as always I said goodbye with my brain buzzing with new ideas. I think that’s the thing I enjoyed most about knowing Leonard: you always leave him with more ideas than when you came.
In other arenas of life:
- there’s a little turkish supermarket near my house. they sell not only turkish food, but all the yummy non-American stuff that Ralphs lacks: cheap, bad-looking, but wonderful tasting produce… indian spice mixes (mm, muragh cholay), and, most awesome, dried loose-leaf yerba mate. I love living in LA.
- Wedding planning is getting hectic. Just a month and a few days.
Painfully Learning Zope
25-Oct-05My research demands that I write an interface for native speakers to annotate sound files of learner speech. Up until now, my poor annotators had been using an excel sheet I generated via a python script, with one column that pointed to sound files on the web. It worked, and it had nifty features like excel’s builtin autocomplete, but it was easy to run into versioning problems with the halfway-completed excel sheets floating around.
Now, much of our project’s work is done in python, so the powers that be say “hey, write us a web app in python that does this job”. No prob, python has lots of web app frameworks (cherrypy, twisted, django, snakelets, mod_python (and .psp pages) ). And, it was actually a Good Thing, because I’d always wanted to learn web app programming (It’s embarassing, actually. My ivory-tower programming experience has been a lot of working with statistics, machine learning, natural language processing, but I’ve never done things like web programming, database programming, etc; I’ve read php and mod_perl code, but reading is of course much different from writing). So, mod_python and psp it was. They proved to be intuitive enough to get some working teach-myself-how-to-do-this stuff code in a couple hours.
However, project requirements change. “We want you to do it in Zope or Plone” became the new order of the day. Been wrestling learning zope/plone for the past 4 days or so… The architecture has a lot of promise, but in many ways it’s frustratingly immature. It can make things look really slick… but documentation is disappointingly unclear/convoluted. There are many links out there for learning this stuff, but very few good ones.
After much searching, dev shed ended up having a high concentration of good links. I wish I had found this howtoCreating Basic Zope Applications, in particular, 5 days ago.
Zope seems full of inconsistencies. And it’s not very pythonic. Take, for instance, a mishmash of “here”, “this”, and “self” used hodgepodge to fulfil the function of python’s “self”. What’s up with that?
Newspapers, Magazines, and Books
19-Oct-05I have been thinking about differences in media, specifically differences in the way we value them.
Everything about a book says “I value this”. An author will invest more time/effort writing a book than a magazine article or a newspaper column. Books are made of better materials, expected to be kept around the house for years and passed on to the grandkids eventaully. Likewise I pay more for a book. While books might be about current events, the majority are meant to be more timeless. I am less tolerant of typographic/layout errors in books than in other media.
Magazines are a midpoint between books and newspapers. They’re printed on material that will last a relatively long while–but no one keeps them around for more than a couple months. I expect good, artistic layout from magazines. With a few exceptions, they’re printed to be consumed, enjoyed once or twice, and discarded. They are relatively timely.
Newspapers? The only reason I keep a typical newspaper for more than a day is because I forget to throw it out. They are the timeliest of information, so much that they’re up-to-date and out-of-date very quickly. The production cycle of newspapers versus books is an interesting contrast seen in this light.
Of course, all this is yesterday’s news. What really has me thinking about things is what the web is doing to all this. Long web page or little blog post, wikipedia or mefi entry… All the traditional factors that we use to gauge value are being remapped. Advertisements are in the long as well as the short. Likewise constraints are being tweaked. We throw out newspapers because they’re of little use–but would we keep magazines around if we had all the space in the world? How do we choose what to keep and what to discard in this new world? Media: the long, medium, and short can all blur and co-exist. Bandwidth is so cheap there’s no difference in production cost.
More thoughts on this when I’m less sleepy.
Lazyweb, I want http://gtd.ning.com. Kthnxbye!
A good op-ed was in the NY Times a couple days ago: Recipe for Destruction.
The article doesn’t address this point specifically, but i think a manhattan-project like thing that this article recommends is the only way that we’re ever going to get a cure for the common cold.
In the existing System, there’s just no economic motivation for a cold or flu cure-all–the existing medicine industry is too entrenched in providing maskers-of-symptoms, cures for specialized diseases, etc, that they’d never want to give up a revenue source for something like a panacaea.
things elecronic
06-Oct-05I think part of the reason I enjoy programming so much is that there is no entropy in what I create. Information gets out of date, standards change, yes, but that’s just a synchronization problem, not a Universe problem.
Or is entropy a bad thing? It’s the enemy of order and structure, yes. But it does keep things clean, and as the old stuff wears out, it gives us an excuse and a drive to innovate the new.
Huh.