Friends of the High Line (FHL) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and reuse of the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long historic elevated rail structure on the West Side of Manhattan.

[watch the movie…]

From Wired.com: Below: “Starting with the premise that  functional urban design has many parallels to good game design, students studied urban renewal by creating computer games at Eyebeam‘s seventh annual Digital Day Camp, or DDC, a summer program that teams students with computer professionals.”

The Coccinella is a cross-platform whiteboard application written in Tcl/Tk, using the Jabber protocol to transfer data:

Cognitive Coupling is the act or the situation in which two agents are brought together in the same distributed cognition system: a link is set between the pair.

Nice post of Beppe Grillo reporting on the presence of USA Atomic boms in Italy. Please note, that we decided with a referendum to ban the nuclear technology!

Funny I found that the Swiss Italian television shot a video on this.

However my point is that this is once again a sign of the lack of Italian foreign politics. We just do whatever our “chief” tell us to do. We are not able to express our disagreement against the States. This is so sad …

Last but not least (unfortunately) is the story of the secret services agent Nicola Calipari, killed by US army in Iraq during an operation to free an hostage: Giuliana Sgrena. I expect no justice for this crime, because we are not in position to ask for it. Sad …

Internazionale is one of those review that is worth 200% reading. This time I found an article signed by Pagan Kennedy of the Boston Globe, reporting this crazy project called Manzanar. The idea is so foolish to be genial: planting Mangroves on all Eritrea’s costs to overcome the lack of food of the country and deforestation.

Artificial mangrove swamps are created by digging large areas to the depth of one foot below the average high tide level. Mangroves, which grow into five foot tall bushy shrubs in about six months, are planted using the fruit and propagules. The mangrove trees provide nourishment and shelter for large numbers of fish, shrimp and crab which feed indirectly from the decomposing leaves. 

Next to the mangrove swamps, deeper ponds are dug which are fertilized with a mixture of camel and goat dung. The algae that grow in this environment support a fish that is related to the algae-mud eating carp, mullet. These fish grow from the fingerling stage to one pound in four months when they are caught, cleaned, and shipped to the highlands. The viscera and heads are used to feed crab, shrimp and carnivorous fish that are cultured in other ponds or in cages anchored off shore.

What I like most of this project is that it was ideated and implemented by a revolutionary thinker: Dr. Gordon Sato. He is one of those persons, to whom goes all my admiration, that one day starts thinking out of the box. His project is one of those simple little ideas that can change the world we live in.

Theories of global warming, polar cap melting and coastal flooding have been linked to global rain forest destruction and consumption of fossil fuels. Remedies under consideration related to rain forests and reduction of consumption of fossil fuels are unlikely to be adequate for economic and political reasons……a replacement approach, e.g. to convert the great deserts of the world to mangrove forests, might be a more positive and politically, even economically, acceptable approach to counter de-forestation—Dr. Gordon Sato

[Manzanar web site]

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

[more]

Focusing on how to infer context with a pragmatical approach. We can use agents, modeled with simple instruction like in Breitenberg’s  Vehicles. We leave the distributed cognition system to select the relevant rules of context capturing, while we leave the others to be naturally selected and excluded. ….

I should develop on this point.

I started writing the following as a plan for a position paper, but then I realised that it seems more the plan for all my PhD work…. Funny!

Title: From Guiding to Cognitive Coupling: a mutli-agent context aware system to enhance inference and co-reference for collaborative interaction.

1. Introduction

Briefly the story

1. CSCL CSCW

[CSCL, Mirroring and Guiding Systems, Limits of such approach, Cognitive coupling]

2. Multi-agent theory and definition of a distributed cognitive system

3. Human communication for knowledge construction / problem solving

[lack of co-reference, lack of procedural thinking, etc.]

4. inferring from spatial context: a pragmatic model/approach

5. A possible implementation

6. Experimental setup

Because research does not proceed in a linear way 🙂 , I came back to my old idea to implement an ubiquitous game on top of my annotation system. Then the objectives have to be differentiated necessarily to fit the different target of the task and the PhD research behind.

OBJECTIVE of the Game: Learning a working principle of Urban Development

OBJECTIVE of the Thesis: demostrate the concept of artificial cognitive coupling

The game constraints that I set up are the following:

1. The game should be based on a shared map;

2. The game should be ubiquitous (providing support for Mobile Learning theories)

3. Interactions between participants should be based on Messages plus pre-defined actions like: -Move -Buy -Sell

4. There can be coordination between different players in the system

5. Each block is an unit

The underlying working principle may be: the Land Price model.

From a discussion I had with Patrick two options are possibles:  a) programming the system in such a way that the underlying working principle emerges spontaneously; b) embed in the simulation a model of the reality developed by someone else.

The picture was taken from: F. Wilson. City Planning: the games of human settlement. Van Nostrand Rehingold Company, 1975.