Crossing Switzerland

Rail trip crossing Switzerland during a winter cloudless day. Chronological snapshots:

Micro-GIS Need a Mapping Infrastructure

In Indoor LBS and “Smart Places” Need a Mapping Infrastructure, Kris Kolodziej talks about the need to have a modeling language to exchange information that represent indoor settings. He says that the field of indoor LBS is still completly new and calls it “micro-GIS”. He mentionned an issue also covered in GeoNotes of mixing symbolic and geometric data model.

- Such intelligent environments could be the “next big thing,” with a paradigm shift from “anything, anytime, anywhere” to “right thing, right time, right place.”
- Objects are used as landmarks, and relationships among the objects are crucial for symbolic representation of the whole system.
- As a result, traditional geographic information isn’t detailed enough to satisfy user needs in an indoor setting.
- The real issue is whether the underlying data model and services are based on symbolic (adjacency/topology) or geometric reasoning.
- LBS providers have to figure out how to seamlessly provide location content using different (local) location model types and data formats.
- In most cases, a symbolic representation might suffice and be significantly cheaper.
- A hybrid location data model would shield the details of underlying positioning sensors and support applications that need or could use symbolic and geometric location information.
- a common (standardized) model may increase interoperability among applications and make new classes of applications possible (due to easier integration)
- A modeling language is needed to exchange information that represents indoor settings.

Viral Marketing, Classification and Community

In Pay-off from a social web? Andy Oram talks about viral marketing and how it could fit to social networks and Web Services. Currently, two diametrically opposed ideas attract both money and attention: Classification and Community. I completly disagree with him comparing the degree of seperation to trust.

– The public has mostly lost interest with the first wave of sites that offer social networking, probably because what they offer seems to add little except extra overhead to current Internet services such as email and newsgroups.
- No wonder companies chase after viral marketing, looking for ways to leverage the reports of early adopters and harness social networks to create buzz for their products.
- A friend on Friendster is different conceptually from a real-life friend; it basically reflects the architecture of the software and means you can reach this person directly.
- This is the mushy concept of “degrees of separation” turned into a network protocol.
- But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating!
- Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.
- The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.
- But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.
- I find that the “degrees of separation” concept becomes meaningless after the second degree of separation.
- These criticism apply to social networks they way they’re currently implemented. Because viral marketing and new media have an excellent possibility of becoming important social movements

Panorama du e-learning en Suisse par Martin Lehmann

Martin Lehmann président de l’European Knowledge Media Association (EKMA), livre à swissUp sa vision de l’emploi qui est fait de l’informatique dans l’enseignement et la pédagogie dans Les nouvelles technologies pourraient révolutionner l’école!:

“L’ordinateur ne rend pas individualiste. Les enfants s’entraidaient en utilisant leur propre langage, qui n’est pas celui des enseignants.”

“Le métier va changer. Les professeurs créeront des scénarios. Les informaticiens ne vont pas s’occuper de cela!”

GeoNotes: a real-use study of a public location-aware community system

Notes taken on GeoNotes:

GeoNotes is a location aware community system, similar to graffiti, post-id notes, toilet scribble, public notes boards and posters.

Design-rationales
- endorsing an open information space. Allowing users to direct notes to certain users was discarded. The aim is not for personal messaging system but rather a publishing system, tapping into metaphors of public note boards and newsgroups, rather than e-mail. Not possible to read/write notes from remote position, the connection between the note and its spatial context context would be endagered.
- GeoNotes allowed a broad range of play with identity and anonymity
- Comment could only be read and authored from inside the note, ensuring the right conext for the comment. Multiple comments were displayed in temporal order, similar to chat and virtual community systems.
- Content could be searched with a traditional word-based search engine. In addition, meta-data attached to each note were made available to users
- Without a verbal description of the position, the note would still be incomprehensible to its readers. GeoNotes users were free to define the position. This place-label system allowed authors to be quite creative in connecting notes with space, potentially giving another motivation for authoring.

Research questions
The focus was not so much on traditional usability issues, but rather on the experience of the system.
- Why users authored notes, and if the design triggered more or differet motivation.
- How GeoNotes information space related to physical space.
- How did users access, find and navigate notes
- How did users conceptualize thisnew kind of system.

Method and procedure
- 400 potential users (engineering students) with semi-mobile terminals (W-LAN enabled laptops)
- Each access point in the network acted as a GeoNotes location
- Encourage students to download, install and use GeoNotes by arranging an evening reception at the commencement of the test period
- 2 type of data collected: usage of the system (time clients were connected, sorting, searching, notes read, number of friends) and all the notes, comments, signatures and place label of the system.
- Most popular places seemed to be lecture rooms, corridors, lab-rooms and library.

Results

Motivation for authoring
- 182 notes plus 101 comments left in 1 month (below the authors’ expecation). Analisis into categories: Test, Meta-notes, Expressiveness, Information, Commenting notes, Drama, Chat, Situation chat, Talk-to-me chat
- Not enough users and time to heave the vicious circle of all community system: little data, activity and presence in the system scares away users who might have contributed.
- GeoNotes’ playful signature system seems to have tapped into thes humorous and somewhat subversive motivation
- Chat between co-present users created a parallel world, which may or may not relate to actual situation in which it takes place (similar to sending secret notes in a classroom). Location-based chat may also have been attractive to users sinci it enabled chat wih people outside the normal circle of ICQ friends

GeoNotes and space
- The defined spaces became the user’s view of space, not the authors’. However, the heavy dominance of room and corridor labels was a bit surprising since the freedom of the place label system enables quite particular description.

Accessing and finding notes
- While only 115 searches and 20 queries were created during the test period, the sorting functions were used in the thousands
- Several interviewees suggested a notification pop-up whenever a new note was added

Conceptual metaphors
- The majority of subjects did not report frustration
- Most subjects raised concerns about allowing remote authoring and reading in future versions of GeoNotes
- some users got the feeling for location-based information and services, understanding its merits vis-a-vis global-access information systems.

Summary
- The results of this study have implications on how location-aware community systems should be designed in the future.
- Location-based chat with acquaintances and strangers emerged as an important motivator, indicating the need to support meaningful comment and threaded discussions, in addition to anonymous signatures. Some form of place label system is indispensable since it perfors a number of functions.
- Rooms seemed to be more important than buildings and objects

Why Your Code Sucks

If you are like most, and possibly even all, programmers code sucks. Maybe not all of it, and maybe not all the time, but certainly some of it, some of the time. Dave Astels brings his point of view in Why Your Code Sucks.

Una Mirada desde Carabanzo

A Swiss Mobile Monday

Initiative by Jérôme to create a Swiss Mobile Monday.

The Times' World Universtiy Ranking

The World University Rankings 2004 is Times’ first attempt to compare the world’s top universities. The ranking offers a snapshot of the leading institutions on a set of criteria that are valued around the world.

5 measures:
- Peer review
- citations per faculty member
- ability to attract international students
- ability to bring the best academics from around the world

Lessons:
- criterion tends to favour institutions in the US, and, to a lesser extend, other English-speaking counrtries.
- Peer review favours laorge uiversities with a wide range of subject coverage.
- Citations perform less well for some subject than for others. Researchers in fields of social sciences such as law and education, which are based in national systems, tend to publish in national publications
- The English language is a powerfull aid to academic excellence
- The EPFL is top in international faculty
- Many universities in continental Europe are oriented more towards teaching than their North American counterparts are. CNRS or Max Planck and Frouanhofer societies attract reasearchers who might be in universities in other countries.
- While research may be a driver of economic success, it is hard to have the first without the second
- Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are all absent
- The map of US academic exellence revealed here matches the major cnetres of US innovation, with the focus on California and New England.
- US universities gain from political idependence and the clout of their large financial endowments, which are steadily enhanced by a culture of alumni giving and a tax regime that encourages it. The vast sums these universities gring in are being spent to formidable effect.

GPS on a Chip

Via Nicolaus Correll, the HammerheadTM chip is a single-chip Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS) receiver for mobile telephones, smart phones and PDAs. It incorporates radio frequency and baseband GPS functionality enabling emergency assistance and location-based services for mobile phones.