Yes, finally I can see that things are slowly moving forward. I am trying to complete the python port of STAMPS and somethings seems to work. Thanks to the help of Micah Dowty and Korakot Chaovavanich I managed to put together a working prototype. At the moment I enabled an annotation layer that displays a red dot on top of the Google Map tile and that allow the user to pinpoint a specific point on the tile. From here, it should be possible to implement the rest of the functionalities with a “relative” ease 🙂 .  More info soon …

While farting around the net, as Nicolas likes to say, I found this nice map which is quite astonishing. It shows the cables that have been placed under the sea to connect different countries. It is amazing to see how Africa and the North-East of Russia seems to be poorly connected with other continents. It would be actually nice to see also the terrestrials backbones.

(via)

Tags: maps, new technology

CREUZA DE MÄ (1) [url]

Umbre de muri muri de mainé

dunde ne vegnì duve l’è ch’ané

da ‘n scitu duve a l’ûn-a a se mustra nûa

e a neutte a n’à puntou u cutellu ä gua

e a muntä l’àse gh’é restou Diu

u Diàu l’é in çë e u s’è gh’è faetu u nìu

ne sciurtìmmu da u mä pe sciugà e osse da u Dria

e a funtan-a di cumbi ‘nta cä de pria

E ‘nt’a cä de pria chi ghe saià

int’à cä du Dria che u nu l’è mainà

gente de Lûgan facce da mandillä

qui che du luassu preferiscian l’ä

figge de famiggia udù de bun

che ti peu ammiàle senza u gundun

E a ‘ste panse veue cose che daià

cose da beive, cose da mangiä

frittûa de pigneu giancu de Purtufin

çervelle de bae ‘nt’u meximu vin

lasagne da fiddià ai quattru tucchi

paciûgu in aegruduse de lévre de cuppi (2)

E ‘nt’a barca du vin ghe naveghiemu ‘nsc’i scheuggi

emigranti du rìe cu’i cioi ‘nt’i euggi

finché u matin crescià da puéilu rechéugge

frè di ganeuffeni e dè figge

bacan d’a corda marsa d’aegua e de sä

che a ne liga e a ne porta ‘nte ‘na creuza de mä

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I had a discussion with my PhD advisor today on the goals of my PhD work, which I am trying to summarize on this post. The main goal would be to show the effect of location on communication. In details the effectiveness of spatialized search on the information retrieval of spatial notes.

To this extent I am trying to complete an application that will allow me to collect a database of these messages.

K. Dave, M. Wattemberg, and M. Muller. Flash forums and forumreader: Navigating a new kind of large-scale online discussion. In Proceeding of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW’04), pages 232 – 241, Chigago, Illinois, USA, November, 6-10 2004. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. [pdf]

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This paper report the user study conducted on the ForumReader, an application specifically tailored to support user browsing of Flash Forums. These distinguish from classical Usenet forums in which the group of participants and the lenght and dept of the conversation is much more dynamic.

Flash forums can be defined after the Flash mobs, which are groups of people that gather in a predefined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse. Example can be Slashdot and IBM Jams.

These kinds of forums present specific challenges to the users because the classical authorship and thread structure of newsgroup is missing in these kinds of forums. Forum Reader tried to overcome these issues providing a visual retrieval interface for the messages of these kinds of forums.

The evaluation of the interface in a 2×2 experiment design, where two groups of users were presented a textual interface vs. a visual interface, showed a positive effect of the visual one.

Tags: collaboration tools, graphical user interface, information retrieval, information visualization, interaction design, map algorithms, maps, spatial clustering, text data mining

I watched this movie last night and I have to say that it jumped directly into my ‘Top10’ list. Besides being extremely well done, it gave me strong emotions about what those people may have lived during those terrible days.

The movies is centered on the story of five-star hotel manages Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) that, as its country descend into madness, sets out to save his family. Suddenly he realize that no international intervention will save the minority Tutsi to be massacred. In that moment, he finds the courage to open the hotel to over 1200 refugee that he strives to protect against a rabid militia at the gates, to which he can only offer his wits and words.

G. Venolia, R. DeLine, and T. LaToza. Software development at microsoft observed: It’s about people … working together. Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-140, Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Research, Seattle, USA, 2005. [pdf]

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This technical report describes the results of a survey with developers in different business division at Microsoft. One of the biggest issues that emerges from the analysis is the construction and maintenance of a shared representation of the code structure and workings.

According to the authors this was achieved mainly through social networking and personal effort. Additionaly, it was often the case that a business unit elected a code historian, a person that for expertise or time of presence in the group knew more of the others the story of each component of the code.

One of the interesting closing questions of the paper is: how can we support the externalization of a mental representation of the code?

Tags: collaboration tools, Exploratory Data Analysis, interaction design, modeling tool, universal cognitive distance

Recently a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, has been used by scientists to unveil statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and develop a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country.

… Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

Reading this article I remembered my idea of the ThinkPill project. The analogy I saw is that, to certain extent, we can assimilate the circulation of an idea to that of a virus. So a nice project would be really to map the diffusion of an idea on the planetary geography.

Of course an idea is retained and assimilated for what the carrier perceives and understand of that idea. The context where the carrier lives is also very important to determine how the idea is slightly modified and adapted by the culture or personal situations.

Moreover, this mapping platform would be a terrific tool for tackling this issues from an ethnographical and multi-cultural perspective.

(via)

Tags: context, ecology, education, ethnography, learning technology, map algorithms, mobile learning, modeling tool, pedagogy, politics, psychogeography, inter-culturalism, society, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous game

Yeah, the big news of this week is that Nokia released the code of its port of Python for the series 60 [see also]. The port is now hosted at sourceforge and the latest version has been updated to 1.3.1 which improves stability, audio support, SMS parsing and a lot more.

What can you do with Python on a phone? A lot! You should have a look at Jürgen Scheible generous tutorials on how to access the basic functionalities of the phone and use these small bricks to build very sophisticated applications. Amazing!

Jürgen, used Python in his project MobileLenin and interactive art exhibition where visitors could vote and interact with a piece using the mobile phone.

On a side I am hoping to use Python into my PhD thesis. I am planning to have a Google Map client that allow the user to annotate the maps adding small messages that can shared with friends. At the moment the script I have is very basic but I am planning to improve it and to post some more about it in the next days.

Tags: open source, series60, Python

These are my running notes of Day 2 here at LIFT06. A full resume is going to follow shortly.

The quote of the day is:

Easyjet made Europe much more than what the EU did.

Tags: lift06

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