Yesterday I discovered this great service that can add a great deal where there are bandwidth problems or discontinuous connection to the internet. In fact so far, I could not use Skype with my family in Italy because they still have a PSTN connection to the internet which does not allow enough band to sustain a voip call. Thing is, for them, that things are not going to change because is not in the current plan of TelecomItalia to connect rural places like the one my parents live in.

So, this service, Jajah does something even better than skype: you pass to the page your landline or mobile number and you select the landline or mobile number you want to call everywhere in the globe. That’s it. After a couple of seconds your phone rings and when answered you can hear the ringing tone of the number you have selected.

The rates are comparable with those of skype.

Tags: collaboration tools, Italy, new technology, voip

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Tags: education, open source, pedagogy, politics

Visyoual is a web based data visualisation tool, which helps to browse high complex multidimensional data structures. Thatswhy it supports hidden knowledge detection. Because visyoual consequently uses xml technology, it is plugable to different data sources or systems as a web extension. Visyoual offers a network, tree or landscape view of the your data. A comfortable interactive navigation allows easy browsing through data.

Tags: information retrieval, information visualization, machine learning, search engine

Paper-based cartographic maps provide highly detailed information visualization with unrivaled fidelity and information density. Moreover, the physical properties of paper afford simple interactions for browsing a map or focusing on individual details, managing concurrent access for multiple users and general malleability. However, printed maps are static displays and while computer-based map displays can support dynamic information, they lack the nice properties of real maps identified above. We address these shortcomings by presenting a system to augment printed maps with digital graphical information and user interface components. These augmentations complement the properties of the printed information in that they are dynamic, permit layer selection and provide complex computer mediated interactions with geographically embedded information and user interface controls. Two methods are presented which exploit the benefits of using tangible artifacts for such interactions.

[More]

Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps, ubiquitous computing

C. O’Reilly, D. Bustard, and P. Morrow. The war room command console, shared visualizations for inclusive team coordination. In Proceedings of 2005 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (Softviz 2005), pages 57–65, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, May, 14-15 2005. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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This paper presents a study on making the structure of software visible during system development. This is proven to have beneficial effects on building a shared understanding of the context for each piece of work; identify the progress with implementation; and highlight the any conflict between the individual delvelopment activities.

One of the central aspect of improving collaborative work is maintaining the level of conflict up to a certain level. In the author situation they identified this aspect with the code problem handling. Instead of a simple problem notification, it seemed desirable to allow delevopers to have access to each oither’s activities.

The authors identifies several obstacles to communication when trying to coordinate activities between members of a software development team: (a) conveying effort, the scale and complexity of the work involved; (b) determining current progress, to better coordinate activities; (c) identify conflict, to avoid wasted efforts; (d) highlight areas of concern, keep track of the artifacts that are of importance; and (e) translating between viewpoints, reconciliating different perspectives.

The rest of the paper details the experiments the users did with their test interface, which showed a positive effect on some of the points above. The trial also highlighted some important facts: 1) the definition of code complexity is not an easy one; 2) the mapping from the visualization to the code provided good effects on the users.

Tags: collaboration tools, information visualization, software visualization

W. G. Griswold, P. Shanahan, S. W. Brown, and R. T. Boyer. Activecampus: Experiments in community-oriented ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer, 37(10), 2003. [pdf]

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This paper presents the ActiveCampus projects, an experiment of community-oriented ubiquitous computing. Basically, the authors offered to the users an application fot PDAs that allowed them to exchange virtual graffiti over the campus map. The paper details the ecological approach used, the relevant facts which emerged during the trial and the results of the study.

They chose to create a viral community, because as they state, for the project sustainability they had to increase the application value, which increase with the number of users.

One of the most interesting findings is the analysis of the message sender and receiver locations. The analysis showed that for 473 out of 539 pairs the distance when messaging was less than the average distance. In short relative location as a context seems to matter in community-oriented computing.

Tags: collaboration tools, graffiti, location awareness, Location Based Services, tagging, ubiquitous computing

Reading BeppeGrillo.it I realized of this plan to scrap prohibition on seeds that threaten Third World farmers with hunger:

Ministers are trying to scrap an international agreement banning the world’s most controversial genetic modification of crops, grimly nicknamed “terminator technology”, a move which threatens to increase hunger in the Third World.

Their plans, unveiled in a new official document buried in a government website, will cause outrage among environmentalists and hunger campaigners. Michael Meacher, who took a lead as environment minister in negotiating the ban six years ago, has written Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, to object.

Please let’s send  thousands of hate-mail to the British government.

More on The Independent article (payant).

Tags: ecology, environment, politics

OpenGuides is a network of free, community-maintained “wiki” city guides to which anyone can contribute. Here you can find lots of information about places to eat, drink or shop, ways of getting about the city, [major attractions]?, the Arts, hints for those unfamiliar with a certain city.

Tags: collaboration tools, urban exploration

An elegant vertical-axis wind turbine, quietrevolution has been designed and developed by XCO2, an established low-carbon energy consultancy and engineering practice. Virtually silent and vibration free, quietrevolution is ideally suited to both urban sites and exposed locations.

The simple and robust design (patent pending) has just one moving part, maximising reliability and minimising maintenance requirements.

Tags: ecology, environment, new technology

T. Sohn, K. A. Li, G. Lee, I. Smith, J. Scott, and W. G. Griswold. Place-its: A study of location-based reminders on mobile phones. In UbiComp’05: Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 232–250, Tokyo, Japan, September 2005. [pdf]

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This paper presents the Place-Its system, a context-aware reminder platform that is used by the user to define reminders that are triggered by specific locations. This application is said to improve the usefulness of automated reminders.

The aim of this study was to find how location-based reminders are used when available through a person’s day. The study builds on previous work on ActiveCampus, ComMotion \cite{Marmasse:2000fs}, and CybreMinder, highlighting the fact that these previous studies used additional hardware, such as GPS receivers, that people do not carry around or because they are restricted to predefined areas.

The three components of a Place-It note are the trigger, the text and the place. The trigger defines whether the message should be signaled upon arrival or departure of the associated place. The text is the message associated with the reminder and the place is the location defined by the user where the reminder should activate. Location sensing is achieved with PlaceLab \cite{Smith:2005tr}.

The authors conducted a user study with 10 subjects during a period of two weeks. They interviewed the subjects before and after the experiments, collecting interesting facts. One interesting finding was the unexpected presence of ‘motivators’ reminders, a kind of message used to motiva the person to perform a cerain task.

Due to the way location-based reminders were used and the relative inaccuracy of location-sensing in Place-Its, the author could not claim location to be essential context to prompt reminders. The location-sensing ready availability in Place-Its admits opportunistic use by those who can map relevant (but unsensed) context to anticipated, coarse, location cues. Participants who worked by a set time schedule achieved similar results by mapping their relevant context to time cues and modifying their behavior.

Results showed that location was widely used ad a cue for other contextual information. It appeared that the convenience and ubiquity of location-sensing provided outweights some of the current weakness of the system.

Tags: interaction design, Location Based Services, tagging, ubiquitous computing