Photographer Michael Wolf chronicles worn out, improvised, screwed up, tricked out, workhorse street chairs from his travels in and around China. Junk but not junk. Something in this work reminds me of what Amy does so well – revealing all of the humanness we leave behind in the inanimate objects with which we spend time.
Robot B9
$25k for a hand-crafted life-size replica of the famed “Danger, Will Robinson!” robot from Lost in Space… and the reservation list is full. Perfect in every detail, and featuring (partial list):
- Acrylic bubble based on the existing original.
- Laser cut steel brain with polished stainless steel top cover and crown.
- CNC machined light rod ends brain cup and neck bracket.
- Accurate acrylic collar & vents, hand formed based on the original jigs used.
- Fiberglass torso based on the original stone molds.
- Welded steel torso hooks.
Fully controllable, and with “over 500 voice tracks by Richard Tufeld, the voice of the original Robot” built in.
Thanks David Huff
Summer New Media Lecture Series
We’re up for another big week of webcasting and multimedia training for mid-career journalists. The lectures/talks tucked into the meal times are open to the public and will be available as both live and archived webcasts.
Featured speakers are Dan Cox of World Online, Terry Moore of the Orange County Register, Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio, Bob Cauthorn of City Tools, Regina McCombs of Startribune.com, Dave Buonfiglio of Internet
Broadcast Systems, Deb Mullins of the Alameda Newspaper Group, and a panel of Oakland Tribune reporters and editors. More info.
Finally made the decision to switch to another webcasting package – now using Vara Software’s WireCast, which supports multiple layers, multiple cameras, has much better titling controls, and a bunch of other goodies. I have distant ties to Vara Software — its lead engineers were also the lead engineers at Adamation, who made the amazing video editing package personalStudio for BeOS and, later, Windows. The past keeps reverberating…
Google Trends: Monk vs. Coltrane
On the surface, Google’s new Google Trends service seems like it could be really powerful. By graphing the relative search frequency of comma-separated terms, you get instant snapshots of the collective consciousness. Trouble is, Trends does a terrible job of reading your mind.
The problem isn’t that the service is in beta — it’s the difficulty of crafting queries that turn up results that actually do demonstrate search trends. Is “diesel” really searched on so much more frequently than other fuels? ethanol, hybrid, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel. Change “gasoline” to “gas” or “petrol” and the chart changes so dramatically that you realize the apparent “trends” are virtually meaningless.
This result seems plausible on the surface: emo, hardcore, punk, alternative. But look at the associated news items and you’re reminded that the word “alternative” can mean virtually anything. Remove it from the query for better results.
Comparing the popularity of mac, linux, windows is really hard. Should you have used “OS X” or “Mac OS” rather than “Mac?” How could you consolidate all three terms to act as one in the query?
More so than with normal searches, the ambiguity or double meanings of certain kinds of words have huge potential to skew results. Try comparing the popularity of internet video formats: quicktime, real, windows media. The results don’t work because “real” means so many things. And it’s very hard to tune the search with variants like “real media” or “realvideo.”
Here’s one that actually is relatively unambigous: beefheart, zappa. None of the terms have other meanings, and people searching on these terms would probably almost always use exactly those terms. Expanding this to captain beefheart, frank zappa yields almost exactly the same chart.
On the other hand, here’s one that can totally invert results if you’re insufficiently specfic: thelonious monk, john coltrane. Now compare: monk, coltrane. In the first query, “coltrane” is way more popular. In the second, “monk” is. But according to the related news items, few of the “Monk” results refer to Thelonious Monk at all. Pay attention.
How does it do with politics? democrats, republicans reflects an even split — it’s captured the zeitgeist. But house, senate does something surprising: I expected the word “house” to screw things up since it’s so generic, but the associated news items indicate that it seems to be contextualizing the query — the graph might actually be limiting the the term “house” to political contexts.
You don’t have to use the service comparatively. Bush approval rating doesn’t reflect the arc of Bush’s approval rating, but how often people searched on that phrase (though I’m not seeing the upward spike in recent months I would have expected).
Gross differences in popularity can also result in less meaningful graphs. If you chart mp3, ogg, aac, wmv, MP3 so mightily outweighs the others that the alternative trajectories are virtually indiscernible. Ditch the string “mp3” for a clear reading of how other formats stack up.
My attempt to find out which of the Banana Splits is more popular was a total flop, since there isn’t enough search data available for any term but “bingo” in bingo, drooper, fleegle, snorky.
Nor was I able to figure out whether more people prefer paper or plastic. This one can be better refined as paper bags, plastic bags, but the associated news items reminded me that the query really wasn’t addressing the question I thought I was asking. And besides, I would have to be careful to remember that people searching on “plastic bags” more than “paper bags” would only mean that people have more questions about plastic, not that people actually do choose plastic bags more often at the grocery store.
Fair enough, Trends throws a prominent disclaimer:
As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
The disclaimer should probably start with something like “Do not use Google Trends to settle bets!” The trouble with Trends goes deeper than it being in beta. Google is going to need a boatload of amazing AI to figure out the context problems. Amazing toy, but mired in caveats.
Bozo Filter for RSS
In the days of usenet, people found that it was nearly impossible to make bozos go away, but it was very easy to set up a bozo filter to eliminate them from one’s view of the universe.
Cory Doctorow is very excited about Feed Rinse — an RSS pre-scrub service that “Automatically filters out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in.” It’s a cool idea, but subject to “the Tivo effect”: by intentionally gravitating toward your own interests and shutting out everything else, you lose the serendipity of chance encounters.
Flipping through LPs in dusty bins is a very different experience from searching for MP3s on a P2P network. Not because the dust is missing, but because you greatly diminish the number of accidental discoveries. With Tivo, you have the same problem: Your plate is full of stuff you like, so you stop channel surfing, i.e. stop finding things by accident.
I may not be interested in reading your posts about baseball, but I prefer to skim over those rather than miss the opportunity to read your post about some freak baseball accident I never would have heard about otherwise.
These problems are parallel to the echo chamber effect, where people in online communities expose themselves only to information that reinforces their existing world view, rather than challenging it.
Federal Marriage Amendment
Against all common sense and human dignity, Congress is once again considering the discriminatory and barbaric Federal Marriage Amendment. The Senate will vote June 5 whether to define marriage in the Constitution as being between a man and a woman. Once enshrined, it would be very, very difficult for states to rise above. John McCain:
The Constitutional Amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them, and which they feel capable of resolving should it confront them, again according to local standards and customs.
The Human Rights Campaign is running a postcard campaign to counter a similar one being run by FMA supporters. Whatever you think about the efficacy of digital postcard campaigns, it’s at least worth ensuring that the numbers aren’t grossly skewed by vigorous religious campaigns. HRC also has tips on setting up a meeting with your congress critter.
Music: Velvet Underground :: Some Kinda Love
Technorati Tags: fma, gaymarriage, hrc, humanrights
NewsGator Sync
Been a while since I updated my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. Went to do that today only to find that it had been purchased by NewsGator. Great, I thought – here goes another simple/fast/excellent tool, about to be ruined by upstream acquisition. Stoked to find that not only is NNW basically the same product as ever, but NewsGator has done a brilliant job of integrating desktop code into their online service.
First launch required me to create an account on newsgator.com, then allowed me to sync my locally stored feeds to them. At home, was able to do the same and merge my subscriptions into the same collection, giving me access to one constellation of feeds from both work and home.
Icing: NewsGator’s web UI lets me browse the same collection from any browser. The power and smoothness of desktop apps, the universal access of a web app. Nice to see a merger gone right for a change.
Music: Funkadelic :: Back In Our Minds
awkward.org
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes awkward.org, home of Andrew Kimpton, former Be, Inc. engineer and Director of Development for BIAS, Inc. (makers of BIAS Peak and other cool tools). Kimpton’s blog is here.
Music: Dinosaur Jr :: Freak Scene
DeYoung
Spent Mother’s Day at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park – first visit since it re-opened a while ago, and the transformation is radical. Spacious, inviting, tasteful, playful. Miles increasingly interested in art, especially sculpture, and able to comment in small ways on what he likes or doesn’t like about various pieces. Found myself mesmerized by the endless mirrored folds of Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock – a sea of meditative possibilities. The DeYoung’s center tower pokes up through the center of the park, affording a view of San Francisco unlike anything we had ever seen – absolutely gorgeous. Decided to “do the right thing” and take public transportation, only to get stuck interminably on a broke-down Muni train with the AC kaput. That aside, a miraculous day. Flickr set.
Music: The Fall :: C.D. Win Fall 2088 AD
Brain Scan for President(s)
The president of the United States has the power to destroy life on earth. It follows that we should have some assurance that the president has a healthy brain, and that the public should therefore be entitled to view brain scans of candidates.
Dr. Daniel Amen is sitting on a database of 29,000 brain scans, including those of healthy people, drug addicts, schizophrenics, liars, geniuses, alcoholics, and the mentally challenged. No one has a better picture of the connection between healthy brains and functioning humans.
In a talk he gave at Accelerating Change 2005, Amen lays out the connections in stark terms, arguing that allowing children to play tackle football or to hit soccer balls with their heads is tantamount to child abuse (from a brain health perspective), that techniques for developing and maintaining healthy brains should get more emphasis in schools than all the mundane stuff we’ll never use later in life, and that lawyers need to stop fighting to keep brain scans out of court cases for fear of muddying the prevailing idea that either we have free will or we don’t (Amen argues that brains span a huge spectrum of health levels, and that damaged brains exert less predetermined action (free will) than healthy brains).
Amen can tell at a glance how well an individual is functioning in life just by looking at their brain scan. The correlation between the appearance of the brain on a scan and the functional health of the individual is direct. So Amen also argues that Descartes — who made the point that the mind and brain were functionally separate — was wrong. In fact we now have the technology and the data to see for ourselves exactly how wrong Descartes was; the mind/brain connection is not a matter of philosophical debate, but of direct analysis.
The descriptive text at IT Conversations doesn’t do justice to the power of the talk. Juicy. Worth 45 minutes of your time.
Music: Steve Coleman :: zec