Probably inspired by the Neighborhood Project and others, Xavi Caballé, developed Vivirama, a LoQUo + Google Maps mashup for Barcelona to provide maps of the Barcelona (lousy) housing market.
King of all nerds, James Gosling, on trying to come up with his PhD thesis topic:
I was falling into a common grad student trap of feeling that I needed to do something grandiose and solve all of the worlds problems. He was into “keep it simple”. So I did, and I came up with a pretty straightforward thesis proposal. The odd thing was that when I finally finished my thesis, I realized that I had only delt with one sentence out of the simplified proposal.
Jim Waldo gave a talk in the NYJavaSIG May meeting about Jini being the base for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA, buzzword alert!).
While Jini does enable all of the advantages promised of a service-oriented architecture, it also enables some others that are somewhat more surprising, such as much higher levels of reliability and the ability to change, upgrade, and extend the system without there being any service interruption.
The mobile phone is the most ubiquitous mobile device and there are millions of them in use around the world. Not surprisingly engineers are researchers are trying to add all sorts of sensor to them. Mobile phones have a huge economy of scale. The cost to add a sensor to a handset is marginal compared to the entire manufacturing cost of the phone. They have built-in capability to geotag (GPS, cellid) the collected data and transmit them (to a GIS for example).
Such an experiments is ran at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Sensor Center. They launched an effort to develop a carbon monoxide sensor for cell phones. Eventually, a combination cell phone/CO detector could enable environmental scientists to monitor and track pollution across densely populated urban centers.
Similar project is Reality Mining that captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects using Nokia Series 60 phones.
Movement and communication visualization of the Reality Mining subjects.
In Inferior Bathroom Technology and UI In The Mobile Space, Shawn Conahan talks about his experience in mobile development with a nice quote:
The mobile environment is like an airport bathroom – it requires a specific technology approach to accommodate a specific use case that is very different from your bathroom at home. The current technology meant to enable us, while nifty, actually slows us down.
Via Cartography, DirectionsMag carries an article on the development of geo-spatial information and the directions it seems to be heading. Where the map was once the data, now the data produces the map.
One scenario of the evolution of cartography
Carlos Castillo, a postdoc at the University of Pompeu Fabra presents the four principles of Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability.
I am especially in:
Uncertainty
Measure implies interacting, and interacting implies a certain alteration. At our scale, that alteration does not matters, but when we go to the very small, this alteration is a very important part of the rules.
Incompleteness
Classical mathematical logic deductive system, and actually any logical system consistent and expressive enough, is not complete, has “holes” full of expressions that are not logically true nor false.
Undecidability
If we want to write a “perfect” program, that never hangs, then one way is to test it to try all different inputs, but this is often impractical as there are too many combinations; besides this, there is a deeper problem and that’s that even if a long time has passed, we can never know for certain if the program is still doing something useful or if it has “hung”.
A Blind Spot
These fundamental principles should not be taken as limitations to science, and they do not exclude the existence of an objective reality. They are rather limitations to some operations, such as making a measurement or working with formal logic, that have to be taken into account to understand natural phenomena. Uncertainty and undecidability govern our capacity of making predictions, while relativity and incompleteness are related to the fact that references are necessary, but prevent us from doing certain operations.
Jonathan Harris has come up with Flash animation that illustrates a world map that alters based on travel time (between 27 cities). The animation is one step short of a real cartographic anamorphosis.
