Moon River: Computers and Internet

casual search

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:41:40 GMT

Was talking with a friend about Frappr and it's visual interesting search metohds. and had a serepentidy finding at

a 'casual' media contents landscape, which presents indexed & semantic contents (definitions, related tags, pictures & related news) retrieved from various sources. the system parses definitions & related tags through wikipedia, while images originate from google image search. the contents are positioned randomly, to create a visualization that mimicks how people perceive & browse through reality.

more Visual Search Tools (via greatmap)

Microsoft Ego Trip

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:51:48 GMT

And here is what is an Ego Trip can cause someone

this is how my blog looks like since today.

with windows slogan all over the place

how dare they treat thier users like that????

I'm about to find a new place, just am not sure now which one is mostly recommanded

flash physics

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 14:22:31 GMT

some stunning interactive flash physics

via Creating Passionate Users

retrievr

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:44:18 GMT

I didn't know what to expect when entered the retrievr site after few month of not visiting. then i was all excited about the feature of Search by Sketch. Now you can feed the site with a link to an image and get interesting results.. i choose the one just below:

large view

Now, what RetrivR does is handing me a page with images that to some degree have similarity to my original image...for very long now, i wanted to perform a search by posting an image instead of words and letters, i see we are heading there...

Drive of destruction

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:03:05 GMT

A team of engineers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute has just finished a 3-year project in which they burned, crushed and chemically damaged hard drives, all in the name of national security.

After damaging the drives, they tried their best to read data from them. Their goal being to find the best way to wipe data from a drives to ensure that it cannot be read by an enemy.

Research Engineer David Maybury models magnetic
a data destruction circuit using 3D finite element analysis.
(Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)

via newscientist

Virtual destruction

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:33:00 GMT

David Dessen’s work with VVVV {vvvv is a toolkit for real time video synthesis. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously} has been generating a lot of interest since the first appearance of his shell-like objects on the VVVV pages. With the launch of his own blog Sanch TV he displays a range of hugely impressive formal experiments, bursting with voluptuous curves and saturated color. It is proof not only of Dessen’s personal talent, but also of VVVV’s qualities as a production tool.

David Dessen’s Experimentations with some nice math surface and vertex shader Linear

Play around with the most beautiful Math surface destrukt

Supa formula destrukt

via generatorx

reach beyond the screen-the next big things in the WEB

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:54:24 GMT

Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher

I was talking to a friend last night, about what might be the next thing in the Internet life? we both agreed that the new thing should come, for all what we have is not enough or not exciting anymore, as it was in the past, something of the thrill is gone. he had some very interesting concept and ideas, which i wish not to revel for now...who knows, some one might still it, but better yet, i hope somebody out there is working on this thing on these very moments. i don't want to sound mysterious and any how, the idea was flue and stayed with lots of questions that were left with no answer. but what i can say that it had to do with interaction between people! it will always have to people and their interaction and ways and means of increasing those two. anyhow this technology seen below, might it be a part of our daily use and interaction in the near future? I've shown it before, but I'm mentioning it again, for i found it exciting especially for someone who is not involved in all the cutting edge computer gaming and role playing - which millions and millions of people are addicted to. Maybe we should try to invert this development: instead of pushing reality into virtuality, we could let the virtual worlds bleed out into the three-dimensional physical existence. What happens when we enter in such an 'everted' space and infect it with the movements of our bodies? Could this space grow, mutate and decay, following some hybrid laws of actualised imagination?

There is of course the semantic web, The "Sematic Web" is defined by Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." (ppt demonstration)
Visualising the Semantic Web

Jeff Pulver, the self-described futurist and entrepreneur is saying that the next big thing is Internet video. These days, though, he is most interested in companies that are allowing consumers to get the TV and video they want without turning to broadcast or cable providers.

I will present some of the "bizzar" kind of stuff i believe in:

Hyperfabric is a new interface that lets you reach beyond the screen. It's a very "touchable" surface, made out of an elastic-like fabric called "Hyperfabric". The screen warps like rubber, and can sense how hard your press it, where you press it, and you can even have lots of people using it at once. You really feel like you are going "through" the screen.

You can press, grab, twist, punch and play with the screen. It can even support your full bodyweight. The Hyperfabric screen is specially designed to communicate with a computer to generate interactive computer graphics, in realtime.

What this means is we can create beautiful, magical scenes. You can see sparks fly out of your fingertips. You can cast magic spells from your hands. You can press your face into the hyperfabric to release fairies, or stir up ghosts in the dead of night.

via sensoryimpact

The electric forest

TDB is a forest constructed out of electro-luminescent wire. The two dimensional shapes, resembling line drawings of vanished flora are spread in space and 'growing' from the ground.

From far away, it looks like a database of two-dimensional drawings representing end angered organisms. By entering the forest, the participants bring the biosphere back to life. When the wires are moved, they create fields of light that can be seen as 3d shapes derived from the drawings.

Throughout the forest, there are motion sensors installed, activating motors that move the plants in different speeds.

The shapes vibrate, rotate, move and by doing so gain the third dimension, through the participants' interaction with the environment.

The myth of "keeping up"

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:22:49 GMT

Do you have a stack of books, journals, manuals, articles, API docs, and blog printouts that you think you'll get to? That you think you need to read? Now, based on past experience, what are the odds you'll get to all of it? Half of it? Any of it? A sober gaze at our information and data era

web sites as graphs

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:58:04 GMT

“Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web.” Websites As Graphs.

via

Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 10:28:47 GMT

"I see blogs as part of a unfolding process of ‘massification’ of this, still, new medium. What the Internet after 2000 lost is the “illusion of change”. The created void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through automated software, named weblogs, or blogs... Instead of trying to prove that blogs are, in essence, good, I have taken up the challenge to interprete blogs as nihilist vehicles. Nihilism is not a lifestyle or opinion but a condition in which (Western) societies find themselves. In the Internet context it is not evil, as Rüdiger Safranski suggested, but triviality that forms the drama of media freedom." Read all.

what I am observing is not only the massification of the Internet but a more generalized cultural move toward nothingness that expresses itself through the medium of the blog. Through the blog, we attain a complete and fatal condition, making our comments into the void, thereby affirming our existence while we also emphatically assert our distance from any situation we might act in. Kazys Varnelis

via

Let me in...

Mon, 08 May 2006 22:33:24 GMT

Technorati Profile will it make my map quest satisfied finally?

Wandering Scribe-Trying to silence the moon

Wed, 03 May 2006 14:28:01 GMT

"'Feb, 2006. For the past five months I have been living alone in a car at the edge of the woods - jobless and homeless and totally unable to find a way out of it. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't scream loudly enough, alI I can do is write. So here I am laying down tracks...hopefully the start of an online paper trail out of here"

From this unique blog:

"That big, bright, not-quite-full moon was in full flow last night, saying things I really did not want to hear! There all night, refusing to let me go - the perforated inside of my head lit up with uncomfortable truths, all splattered across it like stars. Tough night — cruel, heartless moon."

posted by WanderingScribe @

via Plep, Ami Ben Basat

Taxonomy of my Room

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:02:47 GMT

A Study in Roomology

"This graph is a taxonomy of my room: a classification, according to my own specifications, of all things in my room. . This taxonomy combines the inventory with the mental map, translated into an object oriented data-model. I would like it to capture the feeling of it as being my home, but that quality is, for now, beyond the means of my abilities in taxonomical expression. "

"Many people have acquired an on-line identity by maintaining a blog or by subscribing to a social network services like Friendster. These identities remain online while we are gone. I would like to have a web identity for my room as well, so I can visit it when I'm elsewhere. Perhaps I can then feel at home, while grinding away at the office; or if my friends make their rooms available online too, we can connect them & turn them into a house.

Personal rooms are rigidly psychogeographically engineered: in our room we are our own Cesar.. Can we understand the trigger of such a place-specific emotional response enough to be able to recreate it?

Here is a relevant quote from AL pioneer Chris Langton: "The ultimate goal of artificial life would be to create 'life' in some other medium, ideally a virtual medium where the essence of life has been abstracted from the details of its implementations in any particular model. We would like to build models that are so life-like that they cease to become models of life and become examples of life themselves."

If it's possible to grasp the soul of a room and make it available online, either as image or as text, we don't recreate space, we recreate experience. ...We are close to a factual representation of our house on the web, a MIT project like house_n, prototypes a dwelling that is constantly aware of where you are & what you are doing. A dreadful vision, but this sensor data can easily be published online as a continuously flowing feed; taxonomies of rooms, may not be able to express psychogeographical atmospheres, they need little effort to be published in a machine readable framework. All this data relates to each other. You can than query peoples room: "show me the e-mail address of all people with a green room, who live in the proximity of 5 kilometres, who are now behind the computer and have beer in the fridge"; 'they must be nice people'. But all the action is outwards here, manipulations on data representing physical objects; I want to move on to the inside world, move from theatre to literature, I want to share the invisible, I want to share sensibility, but how to express this...Perhaps this taxonomy reflects the way I want you to see me: perhaps this taxonomy is nothing but window-dressing. The artificial room has still to be built.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

coulkd that be the answer?

House_n

Most people live in spaces poorly tailored to their needs, and technologies for the home are too often irrelevant gadgets, meeting no fundamental need and developed out of context.

House_n research is focused on how the design of the home and its related technologies, products, and services should evolve to better meet the opportunities and challenges of the future.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are investigating methods for merging new technologies with person-centered design. They are generating new ideas, technologies, and methodologies that support the creation of innovative products and services that satisfy the emerging and future needs of people as they live in their homes. To facilitate these studies, a unique "living laboratory" residential home research facility called the PlaceLab has been constructed near MIT.

Hundreds of sensing components are installed in nearly every part of the home, which is a one-bedroom condominium. These sensors are being used to develop innovative user interface applications that help people easily control their environment, save resources, remain mentally and physically active, and stay healthy. The sensors are also being used to monitor activity in the environment so that researchers can carefully study how people react to new devices, systems, and architectural design strategies in the complex context of the home.

The home is being occupied by volunteer subjects who agree to live in the home for varying lengths of time. While they occupy the facility they have no contact with researchers, and the laboratory has been designed so that data can be analyzed off the site. Researchers have the capability to monitor nearly every aspect of life in the home, particularly what people are doing and the interior and exterior environmental conditions. Tools for the semi-automatic annotation and pruning of data can aid researchers studying the enormous amounts of data that will acquired daily by the laboratory.

The facility is managed as a multi-disciplinary shared scientific tool in the tradition of other scientific facilities developed to study unique environments such as telescopes, undersea vessels, linear accelerators, satellites, and remote inhabited communities in harsh environments such as the South Pole. Researchers in the fields of architecture, computer science, mechanical engineering, nutrition communications, user interface and product design, preventative medicine, social anthropology, and public health have expressed interest in developing studies that use the unique facility, which operates using an open submission process.

The PlaceLab is being used to investigate the following questions about human behavior, among others:

*What influences the behavior of people in their homes?
*How can technology be effective in the home context for long time periods?
*Can technology and architectural design motivate life-extending behavior changes?
*To what degree can measurements of activity in the home be quantified in a way useful for creating new computer applications for the home?
*How can technology be used to simplify the control of homes of the present and future, save resources, and improve health?
*What influences how people adjust to new environments?
*How do people learn in the context of the home?
*What new innovations for the home would most fundamentally alter the way we live our everyday lives?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The Semantic web can be a usfull tool as well:

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

"This new Web will be capable of supporting software agents that are able not only to locate data, but also to “understand” it in ways that will allow computers to perform meaningful tasks with data automatically and on the fly that today must be done manually and episodically by computer users. Or, as summarized in a Scientific American article written by Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila in 2001, “ The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

A9

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 14:23:09 GMT

I'm a Google addict for the past 7 years or so
ever since Google started so it seems.

it is where i start my endless Quest over the WWW
I've read only today about the A9 search engine, and went to check it

it has some cool features, one of them is the possibility to have on the same page
numerous kind search result: (web results, blog results, image results etc..)

but the idea of creating a bookmark and a History of search is even more interesting

Now what to do? My integrating with Google way of being is so strong, i dive and fly in it, with ease and creativity, why would i look for anything else?

route map- 'subset of the Web'

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:28:30 GMT

This article is so fascinating and demonstrate the complexity of flow of content and how we organize it, that no matter how much i tried to give only a glimpse over it, i found my self coping most of it, in here.

"If it weren't for Google Desktop I'd be spending an inordinate amount of time looking for stuff I've written, and then forgotten what I'd named it. But Google Desktop doesn't do the whole job -- I often comment on others' blogs, in forums, in wikis and other places that most tools don't keep track of, and I can never remember where these important thoughts were placed.

What we need is a web page that works kind of in reverse -- keeping track of everything we've 'sent out', in any online medium, regardless of where it ended up.

The closest analogy I can think of is a scrapbook, a place where we keep all our 'memories'. (imcluding: Posts to your own and others' blogs, wikis, forums, podcasts and other sites, Trackbacks to conversations on others' sites that your writing has instigated or which refers to you or your writing, RSS feed subscriptions, e-mail subscriptions, blogroll, your deli.cio.us, your flickr, your 'friends' or 'neighbours' lists, E-mails, chats and IMs you have sent or received, see all)
This massive aggregation would comprise ATSYCA (All The Stuff You Care About), a kind of super-memory or 'subset of the Web'.

All this information needs to be 'virtually' organized in three different ways:

By subject (personal information taxonomy) -- So that if you're browsing for information on a topic you can see a high-level 'map' of ATSYCA/ATPYCA(=All The People You Care About).) on that subject, and zoom in on facets you want to explore or rediscover
By tag (search hook) -- So that if you're searching for some specific piece of information on a topic you can hone in quickly on it
By context and connection -- So that if you're trying to follow a line of thought and see how various articles, points of view or people are connected you can do so

The first type of use, by subject (personal information taxonomy) needs a graphical layout organized according to the tableau at the top of the page, described in this earlier post, a landscape you could navigate from top level and drill down to as much depth as made sense, to organize all your ATSYCA/ATPYCA.

The third type of use (by context and connection) also needs a graphical format, but this time 'parsing' and linking all the content by what (and who) it was connected to, rather than by subject. It would present a 'route map' rather than a 'logical map' of this content. It might also allow you to drill down from a 'colloquium' level to a 'conversation' level to a 'thread' level of granularity, and would provide 'departure points' where you could add and simultaneously share content (by allowing you to 'publish to' and others to 'subscribe to' new departures and amplifications from any node on the map.

The result of both the first and third types of navigation could be (or at least include) what would effectively be 'collective intelligence' of a group, but the map would allow you to tweak it to your personal 'view', deleting or hiding content you didn't find valuable and adding personal annotations 'for your eyes only'.

Although these taxonomic maps and routing maps (and perhaps tag clouds -- you know those things that show the prevalence of tags on a particular site by the size of the font of the tag name) might actually reside on a single web site, or your own hard drive, they could just as easily reside out in hyperspace, where you and others could access them anytime from anywhere, and where they'd be easy to update and maintain.

There are some technical challenges to doing this (notably keeping 'public' web-hosted and 'private' hard drive-located content separate according to each user's personal permissioning rules), but the biggest challenges are likely to be imaginative: keeping the navigation 'Google simple', automating the update of the maps, and enabling interactivity of shared, published and subscribed content.

But it shouldn't be that hard to create such an application. If we don't get a simple tool that can do this soon, we may literally start losing our minds.

Putting the ‘We’ in the Web

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 17:31:35 GMT

what is Web 2.0? everybody seems to be talking about it for ther past 2 year or so.

it can get very confusing for a simple user such as my self to grasps it's meaning, but with this article the evidence of what web 2.0 is all about is Crystal clear! it's all about us, the users-

From “Putting the ‘We’ in the Web” article from Newsweek'-

“What was once the digital equivalent of a shoe box became a vibrant community built around photos and a vast collaborative effort to produce an infinite scrapbook...”

"A more fitting description comes from Mary Hodder, the CEO of a social-video-sharing start-up called Dabble. (Since Dabble has not yet launched, I can't explain exactly what that means.) "This is the live Web," she says."

"Tim O'Reilly, an early promoter of the Web 2.0 idea, says, "The central idea is harnessing collective intelligence." Every time you type in a search query on Google, what's happening under the hood is the equivalent of a massive polling operation to see which other sites people on the Web have deemed most relevant to that term. Magically, it yields a result that no amount of hands-on filtering could have managed. "It's clear that the Web is structurally congenial to the wisdom of crowds," says James Surowiecki, author of a book ("The Wisdom of Crowds," naturally) That's why some people believe that an army of bloggers can provide an alternative to even the smartest journalists, and that if millions of eyes monitor encyclopedia entries that anyone can write and rewrite (namely, the Wikipedia), the result will take on Britannica."

"Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren't places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live. "

NODE

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 10:35:21 GMT

NODE.London defines a season of celebration and acknowledgement of interest and engagement. It illustrates creative and experimental uses of communication media and technological innovation to express ideas and stimulate action in public.

A Huge world to discover in it - i need more then 24 hours per day, or, i need to skip the sleeping phase all togather, too much to see, too much to learn, so many curious-creative-people out there that i want to meet their visions turnning real.

Future-making

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:39:03 GMT

Princess, i hope this one will answer you some of my visions and hopes about the future of web usage, it is taken from a fabulous and inspiring blog

"If we want to change the world, one of the most powerful things we can do is show how the future could be better. One of the most exciting forces for change these days is the speed with which people are making and sharing tools for doing just that.....Craft and experience still matter, chance still favors the prepared, and the demands on our attention drives an overall move towards the eye-grabbing, the witty and the viral, but the point remains: it has probably never been easier to do cultural activism.
We are becoming a culture of makers. Increasingly, we have it within our reach to become a movement of future-makers. "

The author demonstrate beautifully a list of cutting edge tools that we all use in our every day life (such as Film, Digital Video, wireless technologies, Visualizations, Mapping, Games etc..) that we increasingly use today, and he pushes a little farther..

read ALL

I Can Read your mind

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 18:24:07 GMT

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a device that "reads
minds" and alerts wearers to the emotional state of the person
they're conversing with. The research team hopes the Emotional
Social Intelligence Prosthetic (ESP)device will help people with
autism learn to better read the social cues of...

via kurzweilai

The Future of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 20:06:31 GMT

fascinating, breathless hour-long talk (+Q&A) recently given by Sir Tim (mp3 & mp4, no transcript available). For the lazy, this recent interview covers much the same ground.

via metafilter

Portraits of a Universe in Motion

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:27:44 GMT

If you liked my posting on the Electric Sheep, you might like the Gravitas: “An ongoing project to visualize and animate the dynamics of galaxies using supercomputer simulations. Galaxies are complex dynamical objects driven by the mutual gravitational forces between their stars and invisible dark matter. Gravity drives the interactions and mergers of galaxies leading to beautiful transient forms: spirals, tails, shells and ripples. A main goal of this project is to use realistic simulations to illustrate these slow and majestic dynamical processes on an accessible timescale and so breathe life into the snapshots of galaxies.” [via ektopia]

Multi-Touch interfaces

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:17:55 GMT

Click to see a Multi-Touch Interaction Research

via writing digital life

Through the Looking Glass

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:44:32 GMT

So, what does the world look like to the intrepid cybernaut? Whatever he wants! Cyberspace is unlimitedly rich because it can be anything at all. In time we may expect that conventions for cyberspace will evolve, just as they have for command line, menu, and graphical user interfaces, but cyberspace will always provide an arena where anything that can be imagined can be made to seem real. GO

Electric Sheep

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:49:36 GMT

While thinking and trying to make a Dreamcatcher, I remembered once seeing the Electric Sheep amazing site, going back to it stroked me with the resemblance of the Native American dreamcatcher forms to the computerized technology imaging.

Native American traditional belief is that a dreamcatcher filters a person's dreams, letting through only the good ones.

There are many Native American stories and legends about spiders and webs, but the
Ojibwe (called Chippewa by others) originated the dream catcher. ( A lovely story about the Spider Woman, who waved each night a magical web that captured each morning the Sun at dawn)

"We did not weave the web of life. are merely a strand in it. Whatever
we do to the web, we do to ourselves"
--"Walk gently on Mother Earth" --

Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.

All the software is open source and users may participate in the network freely and anonymously. Anyone can download and install it. When their computer is idle and goes to sleep, the sheep animations appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new sheep and sharing its results with all other users.

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. . Now does it mean that computer can dream? :) and even share those dreams?

Now, all i have to do is meditate upon The Sun, The Spider Woman, Shaman stories, Electric Sheeps, Fractals and Randomized Forms, Dreams,The Web, and so on...And Make One of My own...to be followed

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI)

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 09:01:57 GMT

GWEI - Google will eat itself - is a conceptual piece of art attempting to analyse and eventually (in some million years) deactive through tactics of discretisation and self-referentiality the strategies used by the major (.. and simply best) search machine Google. The project specifically addresses Google’s tendencies to collect and synthesize user data information to create an allover strategy for consumer directives....Übermorgen, the initiator of this this smart project attempting to use the nets own weakness of self-referentiality describe in their own text Google as a unique and kind of alarming phenomenon: it’s the only internet subject, which knows how to gain the approval on a determined online content with a basis of calculus algorithms and ranking strategies developed in compliance with totally autonomous criteria. via mindgap

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself Statment:

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares.

We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!

By establishing this model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.

After this process we hand over the common ownership of "our" Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public

Quantum computer works best switched off

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:15:15 GMT

Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running. Read All (via plasticbag).

And If not understood - do read about Schrödinger's cat (it helps me great deal, each time, my logic fades out)

Moon Calling Google

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 14:37:57 GMT

Israel: 04.03.06

time: 16:30

Google is not working.

Feeling rather strange - my "home base" is gone!

time: 17:03 still THE SITE is offline

cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 18:23:15 GMT

Japanese scientists claim that amoeba-like organisms have a primitive form of intelligence, following an experiment where a slime mould found its way through a maze.

Reporting in the journal Nature, Toshiyuki Nakagaki from the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre in Nagoya showed that a slime mould negotiated the shortest route between two exits in a maze, avoiding three longer paths.

"This remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence," Dr Nakagaki said.

via huge-entity

Collective Intelligence

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:00:46 GMT

This article proposes the creation of a new open, nonprofit service on the Web that will provide something akin to “collective self-awareness” back to the Web. The goal is to measure and visualize the state of the collective mind of humanity, and provide this back to humanity in as close to real-time as is possible, from as many data sources as we can handle -- as a web service.

The key to collective intelligence (or any intelligence in fact) is self-awareness. Self-awareness is, in essence, a feedback loop in which a system measures its own internal state and the state of its environment, then builds a representation of that state, and then reasons about and reacts to that representation in order to generate future behavior. This feedback loop can be provided to any intelligent system -- even the Web, even humanity as-a-whole. If we can provide the Web with such a service, then the Web can begin to “see itself” and react to its own state for the first time. And this is the first step to enabling the Web, and humanity as-a-whole, to become more collectively intelligent...via

Can't Find On Google

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:54:16 GMT

If you can't find it on Google, post it on CantFindOnGoogle.com

Playing God

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:43:21 GMT

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Larry Page(the co-founder of Google)have in mind. Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We're not trying to build a better operating system". Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world's information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, google is trying to, “ trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. via kurzweilai

Retrievr - search by sketch

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:02:43 GMT

This is an experimental service.

Retrievr lets you find flickr images by drawing rough sketches of them. Finding images on Flickr is mostly textual (tags, keywords) or social (contacts, friends, groups). Retrievr is, like images, visual. At the same time it's our testbed for image retrieval algorithms, so that when you add an image to a page in System One, it gets you the potentially most similar pictures back in realtime.

this is what i sketched:

and this is what the Retrievr got me:

Now, i got a little bit more abstract:

And this is what the Retrievr got me:

This is so much FUN! via

miniature computers

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 12:00:29 GMT

look closely n' guess what they could be...

you have seen something that would replace your PC in

the near future....

In the revolution of miniature of computers, the scientists

are ahead with Bluetooth technology...

This pen sort of instrument produces both the monitor as well

as the keyboard on flat surfaces from where you can just

carry out the normal operations you do on your desktop.

WHY YOU BLOG

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:53:39 GMT

"This painting by a third grader pretty much sums up the joy of blogging. Like the child with a paintbrush, we blog primarily because self-expression is a satisfying and necessary human activity. More fun than shopping or watching TV or cleaning the house or any number of other things we might otherwise be doing.

And sometimes, dangerously more fun than communicating with the person in the room with us--or (gasp!) reading a book.

As the painting also depicts, we blog to soar over the planet and pick up a few friends along the way. For many of us, the joy of feedback and blog relationships are benefits we didn't expect, but soon learn to relish." more...

an experimental view of Web 2.0 mashups.

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 05:29:42 GMT

Web 2.0 Mashup Center

Mashup Matrix: an experimental view of Web 2.0 mashups.

the new visual ways to view Content

Virtual professors draw student attention

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 07:20:48 GMT

There's a simple reason why computers have not taken over teachers' jobs: They're boring, unpersuasive, unattractive and soulless.

That may soon change if Amy Baylor can perfect the virtual professors she's working on.

"Up until now, the personal computer's potential to be a valuable teaching and learning tool has been stymied by its 'soulless' nature," says Baylor, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning (RITL). "We're using computers to simulate human beings in a controlled manner so we can investigate how they affect and persuade people."

Baylor is focusing on friendly facial expressions, soothing hand gestures, and a "coolly intelligent voice" to create characters that are " both disarmingly lifelike and surprisingly persuasive."

Early tests show Baylor might be on to something.

The characters — Baylor calls them pedagogical agents — will ultimately be more than just 3-D animations and voices. Software will allow them to adapt to a student's skill level in a given subject and provide feedback, both cognitive and emotional.

The sorts of teachers that might be generated are endless and intriguing.

"Unlike a human mentor, we can control all aspects of a pedagogical agent — its gender, age, ethnicity, personality, message, and interaction style — to represent the ideal persona for facilitating learning," Baylor says. "This leads to all kinds of exciting possibilities for simulating and researching different teaching styles and instructional strategies."

to original article

Animated demonstrations of the agents can be seen here. via

Robot lawyers set for trial against humans

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:32:14 GMT

Fiction Becomes real once more:

Next year the Buys legal firm will introduce robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing 3 robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers.

The robots will initially be used to answer basic questions from the public and to present electronic training material.

According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, AI will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions. The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjord, says: “Our intuition is that people won’t mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues — quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work.

“If the case is won, if the deal is done, complaints will be few and far between.”

Via we-make-money-not-art

Drafts: What's in your folder of shame?

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:20:46 GMT

Jeff wants to know what’s in your blog’s drafts folder.

here are some of mine:

I'm not a feminist...

Biology, Brains and Beauty: How Do They (and We) Relate?

Smoke gallery of trans-dimensional forms
nudity in art

ON INTERNATIONAL IMAGINATION

Kokigami, The Intimate Art of the Little Paper Costume.

Einstein's New Clothes

s-e-x art and p-o-r-n

Explaining how the brain creates false memories

Love, Sex and Desire in the Ancient World

Sound and The Mind

D R E A M M A C H I N E

cellular pictures

The Duchamp Dossier
Gothic Charm School?
Exploring the Science of Miracles
How much does the soul weigh?

via greenonions

and it goes On and On...

Web 2.0 and the end of cyberspace

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:34:12 GMT

Some interesting views, the first one, reminds me, of how we describe, the revolution in Modern art and in Cubism, where the artists broke the traditional presentation of an art piece within a frame like of a window like shape....we know, how far it went from there on...

Cyberspace is nicely described in this post by Karl Schroeder. He says:

My personal theory is this: when the only way to use a computer was to sit still and look through a little window (the screen) into a virtual space, the cyberspace metaphor worked best for us. But with cell phones, PDAs and geographical applications such as store-finders and the proposed "taxi" key for cell phones (which simply summons the nearest cab when you press it), we're no longer staring through a window into cyberspace. The window's been broken, and the cyber world has spilled out into our own space.

J. LeRoy on Web 2.0's Oedipal Trajectory:

The assumption of Web 2.0 is that the net is as pervasive in human existence as being on Earth is. I rarely leave Seattle to get to Earth. Earth's existence is pretty important to me, but I never have to leave where I am to get there. So "surfing cyberspace" is becoming similar to saying "going to earth".

So while Web 2.0 is based strongly on its cyberspace roots, it must kill some of the primary concepts of those roots to continue and better serve human interaction.

Dion Hinchcliffe asking "Will Web 2.0 kill cyberspace:"

These days the boundaries between reality and cyberspace are becoming increasingly blurred and the activities on the Web are becoming more two way and integrated with reality, with the canonical example being the hypothetical Taxi button on a cellphone. With going into cyberspace no longer being a discrete step (folks are more and more always there now) and with the primary activity often being to interact with other folks transparently, and you have a folding of cyberspace so severe that it just disappears into the ether. I think Web 2.0 might boil down to something I call the three 'P's: Participation, Presence, and Pervasiveness.Web 2.0 places are broadly piercing the veil of cyberspace in general (examples: uploading Flickr pictures from your wireless PDA camera, getting AIM messages on your cellphone, landline<-->Skype conversations, etc) while at the same time eliding the technical mystique of the Web and just putting it everywhere and surrounding everyone in it without calling attention to itself. Whether or not Web 2.0 is ultimately the label people collectively give these emerging trends (and Fred Wilson encourages us to drink it responsibly), it will likely become so effortless to collaborate in the near future that cultures of collaboration will vigorously thrive and be driven by the greatly increased value generated by collaborating (over not). This must be true, or none of this will go anywhere. And that clearly isn't the case.