Where does the money to build and repair buildings come from? How is it controlled? What fights happen about it? In preparation for an exhibition and DVD commissioned by CAVS, Rich has spent the semester learning about mortgage markets, banking regulation, and financial literacy in an attempt to answer these questions.  In this presentation, he’ll do his best to make sense of it.

CUP is a nonprofit organization that does creative education about places and how they change. CUP brings artists and designers together with community-based advocates and researchers to create public education projects ranging from high school curricula and public installations to websites and TV shows.

Recent projects include: an exhibition on the urbanism of Knoxville, Tennessee; historical signage for a Brooklyn hip-hop clothing mecca; and redesigning public school classrooms as nomadic environments. Learn more at www.anothercupdevelopment.org.

CUP works with youth to create collaborative projects that explore the urban environment. Our educational projects build on the everyday experiences of young people to ask questions about democracy, civic participation and social justice. We believe that civic engagement requires a new kind of civic education, one that explains how important decisions actually get made, what is at stake, and how residents can be involved. Our projects use art, design, and technology to draw the connections between everyday life and the decisions that give it form.

Tags: education, eGov, environment, pedagogy, urban, urban exploration, urban planning

Fab pointed me to this interesting post of the Yahoo! Research Berkeley blog. The author played a bit with the most frequent tags that are used to annotate the Flickr pictures taken in London. The tag cloud elaborated with these is then mashed-up with the map of London with the aim of building an analogue of Stanley Migram’s Psychological Map of Paris.

In 1976, social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked his subjects to list places of interest in Paris. Milgram then aggregated the results, effectively creating an “attraction map” of Paris with landmark names appearing in a larger font according to the number of subjects who mentioned each.

…

By taking a photo, photographers essentially express their interest in a particular place. Individual pictures taken at a specific location act as “votes” in favor of that location’s interest, much like the explicit input of Milgram’s subjects. Further, additional information can be extracted from the tags attached to these photos on Flickr. Tags that frequently appear in images from a specific location but are otherwise rare suggest a topic unique to the location.

I found this approach extremely interesting. We can learn so many things from these social platforms like Flickr or del.icio.us, etc. We are just exploring the tip of the iceberg. For instance, I remember another post by Fabien on heatmaps on Google Maps. In the example the authors provided an heatmap of the traffic congestion. The same technique can be used for instance to see which tiles are downloaded more frequently from GMaps or Microsoft Live. These information can have a tremendous value for Urban Planners, but I still have to find a good example of how such information has been set into practice and solution.

The point is that in most of the cases, companies like Google or Microsoft or Yahoo do not allow outsiders to play with their database even for research purposes. Crossing the data from two different services belonging to two different companies is just not possible.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags: data mining, folksonomy, geography, google, map algorithms, maps, psychogeography, research, search engine, tagging, urban, urban exploration, urban planning

Who is paying my bandwidth? :

Enjoy a nice substitute to a hotel and stay in new time shares! Enjoy the sites with your family in amazing time shares for rent . Check out some popular areas and their time share guidelines. Whether you are looking to stay the summer or just a week, time shares for sale are what you are looking for. Read up on how time shares operate before you make your purchase!

Some initial screenshots from the experiment I am conducting with ShoutSpace. We decided to have three experimental conditions: the first where participants can communicate using a standard chat utility. The second where participants enrich the conversation with spatial information and finally a mixed condition where they are free to use a standard utility or the spatialized one.

Running pre-experiments is extremely important to understand how to correctly balance the experiment and how to prepare the descriptions of the setting. A little difference in these documents might result in a complete different result. The next step is to understand how to analyze the tons of data that we are collecting.

J’aime à marcher a mon aise, et m’arrêter quand il me plaît. La vie ambulante est celle qu’il me faut. Faire route à pied par un beau temps, dans un beau pays, sans être pressé, et avoir pour terme de ma course un objet agréable: voilà de toutes les manières de vivre celle qui est la plus de mon goût.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les confessions”

(livre quatrième)

Google recently released a special search portal for code. There are some features of code which are extremely difficut to capture for conventional search engine. Also the display of the results seems to play a great deal on the usefulness of such systems. This last product from google seems to be pretty clean and easy to use. I still have to test it intensively though.

Tags: google, search engine

Social policy makers and town planners will soon be able to play ‘SimCity’ for real using grid computing and e-Science techniques to test the consequences of their policies on a real, but anonymous, model of the UK population.  Dr Mark Birkin and colleagues, who are developing the model at the University of Leeds, will be demonstrating its potential at the UK e-Science stand at SC06, the world’s largest supercomputing conference in Florida, this week.

[more]

Tags: education, eGov, politics, simulation, urban, urban exploration, urban planning

Nothing new here, but still nice to see that people are interested in multemedia content attached on a map:

bliin YourLIVE! is a social networking service where users can spot, trace and share experiences — pictures, videos, audio and text — with one another in real-time on a Google Map.

Users create ‘bliins’ to navigate and monitor their interests in a location or area. bliins can be saved and shared amongst users. bliin is powered by GeoTracing and built on KeyWorx.

Tags: map algorithms, maps, urban exploration

This week I finalized the feedback tool that I am going to use for the controlled experiment for my thesis. I started with a basic set of features and I wanted to keep the tool minimal. However, for a certain design principle, which I still have not named, things tend to get complex as soon as they need to be used by generic users … 🙂

Anyway, it was fun to learn how to properly build client/server applications with Python, and learning how to use the message Queue. Once more, I am confirmed that Python is fun!

The thumbnail below shows the latest version of the feedback tool. I worked on the readability of the graph and I added some detailed information on what could have been causing a low-score. Finally I added some logging features. Still, I am not super-satisfied with the result but time is running short.

In these days I am pretty busy preparing a controlled experiment for my thesis. The setting will involve two participants jointly solving a task which involves a certain degree of reasoning and coordination. I performed a couple of pre-tests using a low-tech prototype and I found that participants were discouraged after a couple of trials because they could not tell whether their proposed solution was correct.

This made me think that in complex situations we need to offer a feedback over the problem-solving process. This seems to be beneficial both for the meta-cognition process and for the engagement that the participants might have with the task. My colleague Patrick Jermann developed his thesis on the subject of mirroring and guidance systems for computer supported collaborative learning.

Subsequently, I developed my own feedback tool for the participant trying to offer some references for the execution of their task. The figure below shows two instances of the tool. The main concept is to show the history of the scores achieved with each proposed solution. The scores are displayed in a graph which evolves over time. In the task I have been designing, there are four main constraints that needs to be optimized by the participants and which contributes to the final score. Each of the four partial scores associated with each constraint are displayed with a different color to offer an additional information to the participants.

Finally the application has some networking abilities to synchronize the actions of the users across the network. The remaining time is also offered in the bottom-lower corner.

Some links:

[1] Tutorial on Threads Programming with Python

[2] Threading with Python

[3] Basic Threading with Python

Tags: controlled experiments, human communication, interaction design, interaction regulations

The easiest program I was told about was Comic Life for Macs (http://plasq.com/comiclife), but Apple’s Photobooth was also mentioned (although I didn’t try it).  I also was given a link to a how to for Photoshop (http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-popart.html) which looks like it is much higher quality than Comic Life but also much more work.

Comic Life let’s you use image filters to make the image look comic-y, but it doesn’t work well with all images.  It does let you put in speech bubbles and stuff, though, and it looks pretty good.

Tags: art, image processing