[Locative Media] Formal location metadata in blog description area

There has been a very relevant discussion lately in the geowanking mailing-list "about formal location metadata in blog description area". The point is that since mainstream blog service vendors haven't implemented form input fields for location, it is good enough if we just start sticking raw location information directly _into_ the english text description area of a blog post. . The idea is thus to allow location blogging

For example if you have a blog entry form like this: title : [ Grandma got run over by a reindeer ] link : [ http://www.santaclaus.com ] description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers. ]

Maybe it is not unreasonable to include location right in the description in some reasonably machine extractable way:

description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers { longitude 0 latitude 90 } ]

To be more specific I'd suggest only two formats: 1) Longitude and latitude

{ long:nnn.nnn lat:nnn.nnn }

2) Geocoder or gazetteer with something fairly strict format-wise so the parser doesn't have to be particularily brilliant:

{ street & cross-street, city, state or province, country }

{ place name , city, state, country }

The author (Anselm Hook) also states that:

Why is this not a stupid idea? Because machines will preserve thisinformation... it doesn't require extending the fabric of the web services. The whole goal is to enable writing aggregators that can geo-place posts - in enough volume that it becomes a business case for larger web service providers. (..) Accuracy is not necessarily the goal of this. The goal is just to provide a transport for metadata that is otherwise being stripped or disallowed by naive transmission protocols - and in part to encourage formalization so that in a year or two more blogging services would do it right.

[Research] Refreshing meeting with Stefano and Francesco

Something like a "100Gb evening” (see paul baron's definition) meeting with stefano mastrogiacomo and francesco cara. - write up your position in a short paper - when you think about the task: is the weight of the task equal (does one participant has to do all the job?) - grounding = process of incrementally adding knowledge into the person's stack of knowledge - list all the coordination keys/devices (cf. herbert clark) in catchbob - model catchbob's task with Clark's term (task, common goal...coordination keys, coordination strategies= keys put together) - I can try to test 2 conditions: one with a 3 minute discussion before the game and another without. Good to test the division of labor, and the importance of a plan before entering into a joint action. - francesco was wondering about whether there could be a "freerider effect" in catchbob. I answered no because: they have to collaborate to complete the task and the reward is the same for all. - what is awareness in catchbob? it is both location awareness (positions) and drawings/comments - a "think aloud" protocol? by individuals? that can be useful to access to players' minds + to enrich the replay - an audio communication channel in the game: so that we can test what information went from the screen to the audio + what goes on what channel + how the "least collaborative effort principle" applies. - allow permanent annotation? to see what they decide to keep as a footprint like in a social navigation system.

[Locative media] Great locative media resource

(via), a great locative media resource: dr reinhold grether's directory to mobile art and locative media.

netzwissenschaft.de is mapping the emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right.

[Weird] A Tokyo Firm Plans Underground Farm

A very environmental-friendly news:

A 1,000 sq metre former bank vault under an office building in Otemachi, a central Tokyo business district, has been chosen as the site for a high-tech farm growing lettuce, tomatoes, herbs strawberries and rice, the national daily Asahi said on Sunday. The project is aimed at helping the Japanese capital's jobless to train for careers in agriculture, the paper said. The underground location will allow complete electronic control of the environment with artificial lighting and heating. Plants at the "vegetable factory" will be grown hydroponically, or in a solution of nutrients, rather than soil, the Asahi said. If the farm is a success after its first harvest in the spring, Kanto Employment Creation Organisation together with recruitment agency Pasona plan to open more basement farms, the Asahi said

[Tech] A nice cup

Mediacup, designed and tested by TeCo.

The MediaCup is an ordinary coffee cup augmented with sensing, processing and communication capabilities (integrated in the cup's bottom), to collect and communicate general context information in a given environment. It is an example how to equip everyday objects with computing and communication capabilities. With the MediaCup setup (consisting of several cups and other equipment) we explore the added value of computerized everyday objects.

[Research] Information Requirements of Distributed Workers

Dix, Alan, and Russell Beale: ‘Information requirements of distributed workers,’ in Alan Dix and Russell Beale (eds.): Remote Cooperation: CSCW Issues for Mobile and Teleworkers, Springer-Verlag, London etc., 1996, pp. 113-143.

This chapter concerns two groups of workers: the mobile worker using a portable computer whilst travelling or whilst at clients' premises; and the teleworker, working from home or at neighbourhood work centres. These workers are part of a larger organisation and access shared corporate information, and yet they lack the level of communication which would be expected within a normal office environment. In particular their work is often composed of periods of individual work isolated completely from the central information sources interspersed with relatively high bandwidth communications. The means of the latter may range from direct connection of mobile computers to office machines through communication over telephone lines or email links to transfer of media such as floppy disks. In short their communication with colleagues and corporate data is intermittent.

The chapter concentrates on two major areas:

  1. retrieval - making sure you have the right information when you need it.
  2. synchronisation - updating shared information in a way which makes sense.

[Space and Place] A cultural use of space

Discussion with my adviser a bout the role of space. If you're asleep in an airplane, you wake up and you don't know where you are. Then check the light on the ground, it can depicts the urban structure/organization. If the repartition is like the picture on the right, it could be the UK; if it's messy like the picture on the left, it might be some latin area.

[Design] And now it\'s about virtual chopsticks

It seems that I am in a design oriented mood today. I just ran across these Virtual Chopsticks. What's interesting here is the analysis of the processes that occurs while people learn how to use these tools.

Tools are expected to provide users with good metaphors in future interactive systems for intuitively manipulating “information” or virtual objects. Moreover, by using a "virtualized" tool, we can investigate varieties of new tools by simply changing the software parameters of the tool with a standardized interface. Through these experiments, we expect to obtain new knowledge to design a good/comfortable user interface. In addition, we also expect to analyze processes that occur while humans learn to use new tools. We adopt chopsticks for one of the trials of our technique because although they are very simple in form, they do have multiple functions.

[Design] Handphone Table!

Since Pasta and Vinegar is in a raging war with regine, I have to use a wild card: a 25 years old table which is still impressice: The Handphone Table made by Laurie Anderson in 1978. It is now part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France.

When the listeners put their elbows on the table and cover their ears with hands, they can hear the sounds coming through wood and bones of their own arms which, similarly to wood, have a porous structure.The principle of the performance of Handphone Table bases on the conduction of sound through bones. Stereophonic music in low ranges is strengthened and processed to the form of impulses, spread through metal bars connecting with four points on the inner surface of the table top.

[Research] A catchbob test

We ran another test of CatchBob today. Things went pretty well (technically speaking I am impressed by the reliability of the system: the system never crashes!). Today we tried the system without the location awareness tool: players were just aware of their position and not of the whereabouts of their partners. It was interesting to see that the game lasted a bit more and that the players explicitly declared their position by drawing it on the map. The data are so rich, I could not resist to show this one, which is amazingly significant (in terms if the explicitation of the strategy as well as the clarification of the situation).

[Video Games] French video games companies are struggling

Since Electronic Arts took a 20% shared of Ubi Soft (a french video game editor), there has been huge complaints from the french government/industry. I think the NYT made a clear point about this:

Splinter Cell, a popular video game based on Tom Clancy's action thriller novels. Would-be Sam Fishers, joysticks at the ready, may be surprised to learn that the company that developed and published the game is based in France. Even odder, perhaps, is the notion that a game celebrating the free rein of United States secret agents may be seen as a French cultural treasure.

[Tech] Foot-based mobile interaction with games

Reimann, C.; Paelke, Volker; Stichling, Dirk: Foot-based mobile Interaction with Games. In: ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE). Singapore, Juni 2004

Interaction with mobile applications is often awkward due to the limited and miniaturized input modalities available. Our approach exploits the video capabilities of camera equipped smart-phones and PDA's to provide a fun solution for interaction tasks in simple games like “Pong”, “Breakout” or soccer.

[CRAFT] Our lab has 4 opened positions

Our lab has 4 positions. If you're interested email pierre dot dillenbourg at epfl dot ch.

  1. Designing and testing collaborative technology-enhanced furniture, such as noise-sesntive tables. Looking for a creative techie having done his PhD or willing to do a PhD in the field of roomware, tangibles and augmented reality. Duration: 2-3 years. Start: ASAP
  2. Design a high level language for modelling CSCL scripts. Scripts are generic scenario that structure teamwork with roles, phases, etc. Looking for a computer science PhD student with an interest for abstraction. Duration: 3 years. Start: ASAP
  3. Designing and running experiments on mutual modelling, i.e. the representation that team members have of each other. For this NSF project, we are looking for two cognitive science researchers, a postdoc and a doctoral student. Duration : 3 years. Start: spring 2005

[LifeHack] What is your RSS consumption strategy?

That's a question I always think about: how to cope with a too large number of RSS feeds? Roland Tanglao answers:

here's how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload: Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.

For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies' and blogs' keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.

The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don't read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.

Of course, as he claims, "There's no need to read everything". I tend to think about this as the first rule. The first month I used a news aggregator I used to read everything and then I noticed that being updated is not a matter of reading stuff once in a while. It is rather to read a bit on a regular basis.

Another thing important is the notion of node, some people can keep track of stuff you're interested in but you don't have time to browse about. For instance, even though I am interested in blogs and syndication I don't really check website about it. Instead of reading specialized blogs on KM or blogs, I aggregate 2-3 of great blogs about it.

[VideoGame] Interview about handheld gaming

Interview in Gamasutra on handheld gaming. The guy advocates for the "small is beautiful" approach.

"With handheld development, the teams are smaller than big console production, and that inherently has appeal for us. This is just because we can focus more on the creative effort, and fun factor, and also working within a small team environment, for each one of our projects. I think that's a good thing. I think that multi-year projects are a difficult thing. Console titles that are multiple years in development can be very big, and the smaller dev cycles also have an appeal, because you can learn and improve your skills, and I think there's a lot to be gained there. Also, it's a good business model for smaller developers."

[Research] Uncertainty about how LBS report people\'s location

A very nice paper: Benford, S., Seagar, W., Flintham, M., Anastasi, R., Rowland, D., Humble, J., Stanton, D., Bowers, J., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M., Farr, J. R., Oldroyd, A., and Sutton, J. (2004). The error of our ways: The experience of self-reported position in a location-based game. In Proceedings of the the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), pages 70–87, Nottingham.

The use of positioning systems is an important but problematic aspect of ‘context aware’ applications. Through focusing on location-based games, we introduce the approach of self-reported positioning in which players explicitly and implicitly reveal their positions by manipulating electronic maps. A study of a game that piloted this approach demonstrates that self-reported positioning can be a reliable low-tech alternative to automated systems such as GPS. We contrast the strategies used by humans to generate position updates – reporting at landmarks and junctions and ahead and behind themselves – with automated approaches, drawing out implications for how we think of positioning error and design positioning systems.

Interesting because it deals with uncertainty about how LBS report people's location

A list of interactive tables

THIS LIST OF INTERACTIVE TABLE HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED FOR AGES, it was collected for a project that I've done few years ago that is now completed A list of interactive tables that may support collaboration (for students projects in our cscw course:

basic meeting tables:

  1. della rovere
  2. gestarr

interactive tables:

  1. scoop
  2. chatter
  3. the drift table
  4. future office table
  5. dialogtable
  6. lumisight table
  7. hitachi tabletop
  8. Habitat
  9. Interactable
  10. Philips café table (my favorite)
  11. the little table
  12. sensetable (via regine)
  13. tableportation (via regine)
  14. The Storytelling Table
  15. MultiAudable (.pdf)
  16. MapNews Table (.pdf).
  17. floating number
  18. (via regine)

  19. The Table Childhood (via regine)
  20. The Rogue ambience table
  21. Planar Modular Display (thanks jeff)
  22. froggies
  23. Individual fancies
  24. Lo-Tek (via Long Live the Network)
  25. DissemiNET Table (via Long Live the Network)
  26. onomy tilty table
  27. Pond
  28. Le signal
  29. Audiopad
  30. The Message Table
  31. Natural Interactions
  32. MayDay Bar
  33. Light Tables
  34. The Key Table
  35. Music Tables
  36. Turn Table
  37. Intelligent vibrations
  38. tviews
  39. iTable
  40. Counteractive (interactive cookbook)
  41. Lazy Susan Interactive Table
  42. smart table
  43. reac table
  44. the Echoes table (.pdf)
  45. various tables at interact lab
  46. reactive table
  47. Smartskin
  48. The drumming table
  49. MouseHaus
  50. Tonetable
  51. Living Jukeboy
  52. magic board
  53. coeno
  54. MUSICtable
  55. Philips' Entertaible
  56. Tequila Sunset
  57. Beat Jigsaw
  58. Gullivers Welt
  59. Conversation table
  60. Misto Table (HP)
  61. The sunlight table
  62. Gispen XS
  63. Weight table
  64. Proactive Desk
  65. TabulaTouch
  66. hap hep hip hop
  67. Concerto table
  68. Touchtable
  69. Symbolic table
  70. Amebeats
  71. tangible table
  72. microsoft surface
  73. sandspuren
  74. Taito Tabletop Game
  75. Update! GranulatSynthese

Thank you regine for some pointers!