Geographic search is becoming an hot topic in the blogosphere and in research. One of the typical scenario:

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today, you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at.

One of the companies behind this product is GeoVector.com. We will see …

Tags: geographical serach, Location Based Services, new technology, search engine, ubiquitous computing

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta’s GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg’s enormous body of literary classics.

Below, the mapping of “A Tale of Two Cities” of Charles Dickens. It is possible to spot some little problems in the parsing algorithm used. See the “us” flag in Croatia …

Tags: data mining, map algorithms, maps, text data mining

This is something I was thinking about for quite some time. This portal allows the user to browse and search the content of several news feeds that are displayed attached to a world map. At a glance it is possible to have an understanding of how certain topics are discussed in the globe. Nice.

Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps, geographical serach, search engine

The UML stencil for Microsoft Visio supports symbols of the UML 2.0, specified in OMG UML Superstructure Specification, formal/05-07-04, as well previous UML versions 1.5, 1.4, 1.3 and 1.1. The stencil also contains several non-normative UML symbols, that are not specified in the standard, but used in some UML books and papers. These non-normative symbols are always last items on the right-click menu, below the menu item called “non-normative”.

Paolo pointed me to this nice post (in Italian) that aims at outlining some costs sustained for the war in Iraq and how these money could have been spent for something different. Personally I buy the cause and I translate an interesting quote below:

“It is a theoretical reasoning but if the 200 billions of dollars ‘trashed’ for this war were used to buy solar cells, we could have installed 40 gigawatt of solar energy, able to produce 1000 terawatt/hour of electrical energy: 2,5 times the energy derived from Iraq’s crude oil.”

Below the text in Italian:

“E’ un discorso teorico, ma se i 200 miliardi di dollari buttati nella guerra (a cui ha dato il suo contributo servile anche l’Italia di Berlusconi) fossero stati utilizzati per comperare dei pannelli fotovoltaici, si sarebbero potuti installare 40 gigawatt di energia solare, capaci di produrre 1000 terawatt-ora di energia elettrica, 2,5 volte l’energia proveniente dal petrolio iracheno. La cosa più sconvolgente è che per via dell’economia di scala, una tale quantità di pannelli sarebbe sufficiente a ridurre il prezzo del kilowatt- ora fotovoltaico da 20 a 8 cents, rendendolo competitivo col petrolio nella generazione di potenza su larga scala. Addirittura, se questi 200 milardi di dollari fossero stati utilizzati per installare fattorie eoliche offshore, si sarebbero potuti produrre circa 5000 terawatt-ora di energia elettrica, come dire il 5% del fabbisogno energetico italiano primario corrente, per 50 anni. Le emissioni di CO2 verrebbero ridotte così di circa 3700 milioni di tonnellate, una quantità sufficiente a mantenere l’intera Unione Europea entro i limiti di Kyoto (-8% sui 4245 MMT di CO2E del 1990) per i prossimi 10 anni. ”

Finally I managed to find a couple of minutes to post some of the pictures I took during our last week end in Vancouver and Victoria. The trip started awfully as we had to wait 2 hours in the car due the cue at the Canadian border (Davide was not very happy). Finally we managed to reach Vancouver. We lodged at University of British Columbia. All the student, in this period of the year, spend the whole afternoon doing picnic on the sea side :-). The weather was amazing. The next day we could meet some Italian friends that cooked for us “Gnocchi”: something incredible compared to the “junk” food to which we got used.

We had the chance to visit Vancouver, a truly beautiful city. Lots of skyscraper in Granville but no chaos at all. The air was really clean. On the way to the ferry we spotted Buckminster Fuller‘s dome (one of my little passions), a construction hosting a science museum. On the ferry heading Victoria we spotted some Otters swimming close to the boat.

Victoria was amazing. I could not believe to find so many interesting things to visit and British people all in one place! The Royal BC museum was wonderful as well as the seafood.

Hundhausen, C.D., & Brown, J.L. (In press). Designing, Visualizing, and Discussing Algorithms within a CS 1 Studio Experience: An Empirical Study. To appear in Computers & Education. [pdf]
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This paper presents an empirical comparison of art supplies and the ALVIS Live! algorithm visualization software within the context of a “studio experience”—a novel CS 1 pedagogical activity in which student pairs develop solutions to algorithm design problems, create accompanying visual reprsentations, and finally present their visual solutions to the class for feedback and discussion. The centerpiece of the article is a series of post-hoc content analyses of the presentation sessions. These analyses highlight not only the pedagogical benefits of visualization-mediated discussions, but also the pedagogical tradeoffs of art supplies and ALVIS Live! in this context.

The PyNSource python code scanner and UML modelling tool can generate UML text diagrams, which you can paste into your source code for documentation purposes. You can use an Text Art editor to arrange your text UML pictures into properly laid out diagrams and embed them in your doc strings inside your source code.  Here is an example of a UML ascii doc string:

Provides the API for talking to the game, from the AI’s point of view.

Tags: art, ASCII, software visualization

TheBroth connects you with people around the world to interact in a massively multiplayer, real time global mosaic, made of 1000 colorful tiles. Tow aspects of it are interesting: the choice between a constructive and destructive behavior and the social rating of the behavior of the users.

Tags: art, collaboration tools, human computer interaction, interaction design, maps

I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.

Duke Ellington, jazz pianist, composer, and conductor (1899-1974)