A Swan.

This is the best place I have found in Switzerland so far … I like a lot to walk around the lake and sit for a while looking at this while rambling around with my thoughts.

Il Po passa lento …

Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, by Marc Auge,

Translated by John Howe

Verso

Due/Published June 1995, 128 pages, paper

ISBN 1859840515

As an increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports, hotels, on motorways or infront of TV and computer screens. Marc Auge investigates the profound alteration of awareness that has resulted from this invasion of non-places.

Marc Augé

Marc Augé a présidé l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de 1985 à 1995. Directeur de recherches à l’ORSTOM jusqu’en 1970, puis directeur d’études à l’EHESS, il a effectué de nombreuses missions en Afrique, principalement en Côte d’Ivoire et au Togo. Depuis le milieu des années 1980, il a diversifié ses champs d’observation, effectuant notamment plusieurs séjours en Amérique Latine et essayant d’observer les réalités du monde contemporain dans son environnement le plus immédiat (Paris, la France).

Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages, dont : Génie du Paganisme (Gallimard, 1982), La Traversée du Luxembourg (1985), Un ethnologue dans le métro (1986), Non-Lieux (Seuil, 1992), Domaines et châteaux (1992), Le sens des autres (Fayard 1994), Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Aubier 1994), Fictions fin de siècle (Fayard, 2000), Journal de guerre (Galilée 2002)…

TinyLine provides Mobile SVG Applications and Development Tools for J2ME devices. Mobile SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a new vector graphic format developed by the W3C. Mobile SVG defines images in XML as shapes with attributes like colors, sizes, and line thicknesses. In compare with other vector graphics formats like Macromedia Flash or AutoCAD, the advantages are that Mobile SVG is XML based, open and designed for wireless transmission and display.

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Today I discussed with Pierre about the methodology of making sense of the data coming out of the TeamFrames questionnaires. Just looking at the categorisation I made of the respondents with the relative profile, he expressed the opinion that what we called “collaborators” are more cooperators and that our “cooperators” are more individualistic person. His approach is more to understand if the tool’s log may predict the study style and vice versa. He dislike the idea of validating the data through the results of the shs project because he feel that the students were too detached from a constant usage of the tool, consequently the outcomes might not connected with the usage patterns. Nevertheless a validation of the found clusters is possible and desirable. To achieve that we can try to follow the following paths:

a) clustering the users using the usage patterns and comparing the obtained clusters with the one already got;

b) asking a different bunch of question in the second questionnaire and see if the answer patter are kept the same;

c) find external validation in the literature.

Other interesting things to look at are:
1 – comparing the usage patterns with the clustering we have got: “Do cooperative people respected more deadlines?”

2 – compiling the matrix of matrix of group number X number of people for each cluster.

Russell is the author of headmap (www.headmap.org), a blueprint for wireless location aware devices and one of the founders of the Locative Media Lab (www.locative.net).
Previously head of the silicon valley office of the game physics company Mathengine (Mathengine physics is used in ‘A list’ games including ‘Enter the matrix’, ‘Unreal’, ‘Planetside’ and ‘Rainbow Six 3’. Mathengine physics is now a part of the Canon subsidiary Renderware’s advanced middleware solution for game developers).

Leader of the GPSter project, currently at the Banff center heading development of an 802.11 based location sensing platform. Also leader of the critical discourse surrounding locative media and organiser of a series of international locative media workshops.

[link to gpster]

Today I discovered that Nokia is thinking about enabling the 60s series of its mobile phones to interpret Python programs. I always have been a fan of Python for its easy to use and understand. So I decided to take out my python books from the shelf and start studying back.

There is already a couple of things I want to try out. For instance I would like to add an interactive capability to my site to inform the visitor of my location. This will be my first exercise.

The second exercise will be to try to get some serial data over a Bluetooth communication. To this extent I discovered that there is a specific Bluetooth protocol developed by Nokia which is called Affix and which is distributed via GPL kinda. The good thing is that apparently there is already a module for python which is able to play with this Affix protocol. Cool.