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Sensing and Modeling Human Networks

And from the INSA list: “[…] the first experiment in learning the face-to-face communication patterns of a large group by equipping the people within the community with wearable sensing devices. The main contribution of this thesis is to have demonstrated the feasibility of learning social interactions from raw sensory data. In this thesis we have presented a framework for automatic modeling of face-to-face interactions, starting from the data collection methods and working up to computational methods for learning the structure and dynamics of social networks.” I haven’t read this yet. Looks interesting.

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Tech Tree/Virtual History

I’ve been obsessing, quietly, about what retro tech says to me. In my current mood, what I think it tells me, is something to which I’ve alluded previously — that once you (we) heft a particular tool and make it a part of your (our) extended being, a world of possibilities closes down around the other potentialities. It’s interesting looking back to the tech that failed, to see some other possibilities, many of which have never been explored subsequently. Or at least an excuse for geek nostalgia. Any such exploration is half taxonomy (or tech tree, as its known in …

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9B

For a couple of years, my main CD source has been my Theta Data Universal Transport — a laserdisk/CD player from the early 90s. Fed through a Meridian 518 for dejittering and upsampling to 24-bit, it has always sounded good through my Yamaha DSP-AX1 amp. But recently, I’ve started to feel it’s been missing something at the top end. Conversely, CDs played on my Arcam FMJ DV27 have sounded mechanical, with a lack of warmth in the bass, and overbright, unrefined treble. Assuming that the Theta’s failings at the top were probably simply masking the limitations of the Yamaha’s power …

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Glanceful Kunstkopf?

Thinking more about glanceful interfaces, and the communication of complex multivariate datasets. For reasons I haven’t gotten around to writing about here yet, I’m veering towards sound cues for a lot of things, particularly binaurally-located vocal cues. I’m looking for a pipelining spatialiser using some simple head-related transfer function (HRTF) that I can feed audio into at approximately realtime. For ‘earcons’, simple samples are easy. For vocal cues, I’m thinking of using FESTIVAL. But I need the spatialiser, and I can’t find one that runs on Linux and accepts a stream input. Maybe I’ll have to hack something in Max. …

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Subliminal Feeds

A question for glanceware practitioners: how to convey multivariate, multistate data at a glance. You have to choose media which we are very good at parsing at a glance. Chernoff faces were an early attempt at this. I guess music would be another good medium to explore. We want users to know things without necessarily knowing how they know, or when they were informed. At one level, glanceware should make knowledge transfer subliminal. Which itself raises the question of when and why we need to convey quantitative or qualitative information. Imagine a glanceware system to monitor a stock portfolio. Do …

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Japanese Reprimanded For Denuding Media

According to the BBC, Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop so-called “digital shoplifting” by customers using the lastest camera-equipped mobile phones. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the practice is “information theft” and it wants it stopped. It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing. The Japanese use their phones for much more than just calling. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think — so they take a quick snap …

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Mental Pictures

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs and wikis. HTML seems so ill-suited to dense intertwinglings of thoughts. Ok for simple document layout, but the chunking/scoping seems at the wrong level for anything very fine-grained. I want to be able to pick this site up by a concept, shake it and see how everything else falls into place around it. Some approximation of that would be possible with heavy metadata and hyperbolic trees, but I feel like the map and the document should be the same thing. At the very least I want those visible interconnections within documents that Ted …

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Digital Test Bed

Attended the launch of the BFI’s Digital Test Bed at the NFT this morning — currently Europe’s only test laboratory for digital cinema. They are justifiably proud that they can now play everything from nitrate to pure digital feed (demonstrating the former with a lovely technicolor excerpt from The Harvey Girls (1946), and the latter with a live connection to ‘The Hall of Edoras’ set for The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, with Jim Rygiel, Weta’s digital effects supervisor). I had to leave before the tour, but from their press pack, it looks as if they have …

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Alan Kay at Etcon

Be inspired: Alan Kay at Etcon this year… We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead,when all the people alive had grown up with the press. A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries *got* the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice […] This stuff is better than anything in our handhelds today. We could implement it from they papers they wrote then, but no one reads …

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