Nokia’s new search application gives you access to the leading search engines for a richer mobile search experience. The search application is a simple, convenient, and fast way to find and connect to local services. When out and about, find and contact local services like restaurants and shops, then let the advanced mapping technology guide you right to them!
Tags: context, Location Based Services, Symbian
Here is a nice example of application of GoogleMaps hacks: a Pedometer. The idea is to be able to calculate the distance between a series of points without having a GPS in the pocket:
As a runner training for a marathon for the first time, I found myself wishing I had an easy way to know the exact distance a certain course is, without having to drag a GPS or pedometer around on my runs. Looking at Google Maps, and knowing there was a vibrant community of geeks hacking it, I knew there had to be a way. So here it is.
These days I have been working on the optimization of a map of the city of Lausanne to be displayed on the screen of a mobile phone. What we wanted was to keep the details to the level of seeing the contour of the buildings. Not an easy task. After a couple of hacks we managed to scale a 600Mb GIS archive to a 400Kb image … 🙂 You can see a small excerpt in the picture.
© Tele Atlas NV 2005
Tags: maps
R. Cilibrasi and P. Vitanyi. Automatic meaning discovery using google. Online preprint CL/0412098, National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, Amsterdam, The Nederlands, 2004. [url]
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This paper discusses a powerful and simple idea: using google to assign semantic meaning to words. A comparison of this approach can be made with the Cyc project, which tries to creat an artificial common sense. The indexing created by Google, on the other hand, is unstructured and offers a primitive query capability. “What Google lacks in expressiveness, it makes up for in size.”
The authors propose in this paper a method to automatically extract the meaning of words and phrases from the web using the Google page counts. Intuitively each page indexed by the engine may be viewed as a set of index terms. A search for a particular term returns a certain number of hints. The authors put this in a probabilistic framework, building an index called ‘Normalized Google Distance (NGD)’, which is computed using the relative frequencies of web pages containing the search terms and which gives objective information about the semantic relations between the search terms.
The authors provide a matematical formalism for their framework and they demonstrate positive correlations, evidencing semantic structure, in both numerical symbol notations and in a variety of other context.
Related news: NewScientist; SlashDot.
Tags: context, hack, information visualization, natural language processing, text data mining
eRuv is a digital graffiti project installed along the route of the former Third Avenue elevated train line in lower Manhattan. The train line, dismantled in 1955, was more than just a means of transport; it was part of an important religious boundary — an eruv — for a Hasidic community on the old Lower East Side. Using semacodes, the former boundary is reconstructed and mapped back onto the space of the city. Pedestrians with camera phones can then access location-specific historical content linked through the semacodes.
Tags: Location Based Services, maps, tagging
Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations. When arriving at a marked location, Geominder can play an alarm and display a stored text note or a voice note previously associated to the location.
Geominder uses mobile network’s cell id information and doesn’t require an extra GPS device. Mobile Network cell id information is free of mobile operator charges and depends on the cell antenna geographic distribution which is usually suited for most common day-to-day uses (for example home – office – shopping). No mobile operator fees are involved in using Geominder.
 
Tags: context, Location Based Services, Symbian
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Trolley Spotting, by Adele Prince, uses an interactive map to document the artist’s findings from recent ‘trolley spotting’ trips.
The shopping trolleys that have been abandoned (or ‘liberated’) from supermarkets manage to travel quite some distance from their ‘home’ supermarket, and often start to acquire items as they go.
The website allows you an insight into the private lives of shopping trolleys which have escaped the supermarkets. Using GPS, Prince tracks the co-ordinates of each trolley. She takes a photograph of it, document the model and make of the trolley, the date, time, location and distance from the supermarket. This information is then transferred to an interactive map online, where visitors can go on a virtual trolley spotting walk and play a shopping cart game.
This reminded me of a study of a friend: Gabriel Fernandez on the micro-mobility life of the shopping carts:
Trolley and infra-housing: mobile devices and transitory occupation of the social city space
(Abstract) This contribution, fundamentallly based on the working developed by the authors in Quilmes University (Argentina) present an approch to urban mobility, infra-housing, social space. It also draws the attention over the particular effects of this phenomenon in the social space transitory occupation and think about problems and opportunities it´s offering, as a matter that must affect to advance a epistemology discussion and a mobile devices classification
Miso: Miscellaneous software – Mixture of utilities for Symbian OS
Miso is a Python for Series 60 utility library, which was developed in the PDIS project at HIIT. The idea of the library is to provide simple utility functions and classes that are easy to implement using native Symbian OS resources, but which would be difficult or impossible to implement in pure Python.
Antonio Scarponi pointed me to his work on “visual representation as an indirect tool to urban and social transformation”. Below an image from the project “human world“, which I found extremely fascinating.
conceptual devices are the result of interdisciplinary research projects, involving design, architecture and visual culture, with the aim to engage practises and social behaviour in everyday life. A conceptual device transforms information into a visual knowledge that produce and shift symbolic values.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.
Tags: anamorphosis maps, information visualization, maps, politics, society
