situate.us

Apr
20th

Mon

newsmap

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

“in the future we will use our computers in an ubiquitous-, maybe even pervasive way. in the attached video, Paul Saffo (Stanford University) and Dr. Michio Kaku give a great overview about ‘how computers might look like’, ‘how we will use them’ and ‘how they will change our day to day life’.

very interesting is the idea of “swallowing” a computer in form of a pill; that analyzes your body from the inside and shares the information with the computer on the outside. just imagine the possibilities for the health care sector.”

- from the blog: version.alpha.0.1

The AlloSphere is an environment for situating investigators within their data. Conceived by JoAnn Kuchera-Morin (a musician/composer), the AlloSphere construct enables the integration of music, sound, visualization, art, navigation and data. Kuchera-Morin refers to the AlloSphere as a microscope, but this decription fais to capture the salient inversion of this device, namely the way it re-situates us in relation to what we know or seek to understand.

Clay Shirky on Situated Software

Shirky wonders if software that can scale to large demand in large markets represents an outmoded constraint. In an ecology where development costs are dropping to zero and it is easy to create and conceive single-use software: why don’t we? Which begs the question, what does a foundary for single-use, or situated software, look like?

Apr
18th

Sat

Learning is not a process of accumulation of representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through continuous change in the capacity of the nervous system to synthesize it. Recall does not depend on the indefinite retention of a structural invariant that represents an entity (an idea, image or symbol), but on the functional ability of the system to create, when certain recurrent demands are given, a behavior that satisfies the recurrent demands or that the observer would class as a reenacting of a previous one.

— Humberto Maturana

Sentient City Survival Kit:

http://www.survival.sentientcity.net/

Robots controlled by brain waves…yeah.

Apr
15th

Wed

iPhone Arphid Demo

Stewart Brand narrates the BBC series “How Buildings Learn” based on his book of the same name

Matt Jones from Dopplr takes us for a journey on the future of cities with some mobile and sensor tech thrown in for good measure.