Archive for the 'technology' Category

It was rather silent here the last weeks, mainly because i have finished my diploma thesis recently and defended (successfully) shortly thereafter. The title of the thesis is Towards a Better VIEW: Visual Information Exploration on the Web. The core idea is the combination of multiple interactive visualization widgets or VisGets that are used to explore web content, for example, from RSS feeds. If you want to know more about it check out the thesis page, where i have put abstract, thesis, and defense slides.

I just stumbled upon these two interactive art installations by Uta Hinrichs and Holly Schmidt: memory [en]code and EMDialog. I think both projects showcase how interactive tabletops and large displays can be engaging and inviting in public settings. I am excited to see more of this. Check out the websites for photos and videos.

I am kind of undecided about Flickr’s recent move to allow small video snippets. Quite a few members are at least not amused. Flickr sells the very short films as long photographs which seems kind of ridiculous at first. The video service Vimeo tries to focus on high-quality, original short movies. There i just went through some of Philip Bloom’s videos and they are amazing! Great perspectives, interesting people, wonderful colors, and good music. In particular, Autumn in Richmond, Piccadilly Furs, South Bank, and Kew Gardens. While only paying pro members can upload video on Flickr, i wonder if this approach towards video – videos are just photos that move up to 90 seconds – will attract such good videos, or better their makers. Right now the video group on Flickr is dominated by mostly snapshot videos.

This saturday the third see conference on visualization of information is happening in Wiesbaden. It features quite a speaker list including Ben Fry, Bruce Sterling, and Frank van Ham. I really wanted to go, so i got my tickets well in advance, but something came in my way and now i hope for good video streaming. By the way, i was promised to get the money back. Very nice.

Ich habe hier vor einiger Zeit einmal das eingebaute Wörterbuch von MacOSX gelobt. Damals habe ich mir gewünscht, dass die Wikipedia und die deutsche Sprache darin gut vertreten sein könnten. Und das sind sie jetzt auch. Wikipediainhalte verschiedenster Sprachen können seit MacOSX 10.5 abgerufen werden. Darüber hinaus gibt es jetzt auch ein Plugin, das einen deutschen Thesaurus und ein deutsch-englisches Wörterbuch bereitstellt. Vielen Dank an Wolfgang Reszel, der diese Wörterbücher für das Lexikon aufbereitet hat und auf einer Tippsseite dessen Funktionsumfang detailliert beschreibt. Nun bedarf es nicht mehr das in die Jahre gekommene Dilo.

Somewhat in a similar vein as the last post: danah boyd calls for a boycott of closed (i.e., not open) access journals and venues to make academia a venue for free exchange of ideas and knowledge open to anybody. She seems kind of disgusted by publishers profitting from scientists’ work while locking down their contributions in repositories that are only accessible to those who have the privilege (i.e., money or position) to do so. Instead, scholars should turn to Open Access publishers that do away with those vomitous access restrictions while still providing the peer-reviewed process.

Peter Suber points to some more options for scholars beyond comepletely boycotting closed-access publishers. One of the major one is self-archiving online – which many publishers actually allow. Putting papers on one’s own personal or research group Website is usually accepted. There are also OA repositories that facilitate the self-archiving process. Through services like CiteSeer or Google Scholar it is then possible to make these contributions available in an OA fashion without actually submitting them to an OA venue. Good thinking. Take a look or two into Peter’s short and longer primers on Open Access to learn more around OA principles and practices.

By the way, i have ranted and chanted about Open Access before.

D’Arcy Norman makes an interesting observation how institutions take on exceptional efforts to keep content such as class slides and video recordings shut away from the public because the slides would violate some copyrights and not necessarily to keep ideas for themselves. I support him in pointing out that avoiding copyrighted material would open up so much content. Putting Creative Commons like licensing in place would prevent those cycles of closures.

On my old email address (word at anarchitect dot org) i get a lot of spam these days. So i thought i discontinue it, as i don’t use it that often anymore anyway. I added this auto-reply so that my contacts that don’t have my new address are directed to the right location and nasty spammers would not just parse it from the auto-reply message:

I have suspended using this Email address.
Please, go to my contact page to get in touch with me.
Thanks for your understanding!

…………………………………………………..

I habe dieses Emailadresse eingestellt. Um mit mir in
Kontakt zu tretten, benutze bitte dieses Formular.
Vielen Dank für dein Verständnis!

…………………………………………………..

Terminé usar esa e-mail. Por favor, visite esta pagina
para poner en contacto conmigo.
Gracias por tu comprensión.

Only problem is that spammers use existing sender addresses they found on the Web. Hence, my auto-responder would automatically increase spam-caused traffic and annoyances for those whose email address was hijacked. Therefor i will just discontinue the mailbox silently and hope that people that want to reach me would remember my name and search for it and would somehow come to this page.

And by the way: this is, of course, proof of my capitulation to the state of email these days. It seems as if email is broken, yet, it still works well enough considering its importance and relevance in professional and personal communication. May somebody have mercy and fix it?

Letzte Woche haben mich noch die retrofuturistischen Bilder von Klaus Bürgle fasziniert und vorgestern hat Tim einen Chaos Radio Express zu diesem Phänomen veröffentlicht (Blogeintrag), in dem er mit “Gregor Sedlag und Christian Heller über die Zukunft und warum Science Fiction Schnee von gestern ist”, spricht. Ich habe die Sendung noch nicht gehört, lade sie aber jetz auf mein tragbares MP3-Abspielgerät, damit ich auf den Weg nach South Dakota auch was spannendes zu hören hab. Frohe Weihnachten allerseits!

There are a number of ways that allow you to visualize music so that you can explore and listen to new or almost forgotten music. Magdeburg based designer Hannes A. Jentsch came up with a cool way how to filter and display music titles according to recommendations, mood, intensity and number of beats, personal popularity and play order. Check out the description, screenshots and ask for the demo app.