Tag Archives: Twitter

Ask a museum curator today, Sept. 1, 2010

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There’s a special Twitter event called, Ask a museum curator. From the article on the Fast Company website by Jenara Nerenberg,

“The inspiration is really a frustration I guess; in the museum world you have a movement towards more open and engaging museums which is often referred to as Museum 2.0 — the idea that a museum can evolve and get better by interacting and involving the public,” says [Jim] Richardson [Sumo design company], whose design firm works mostly in the arts and creative sciences.

“In too many institutions social media is seen only as a marketing tool, and people like curators don’t seem to be given the chance or want to use this kind of digital tool to engage with the public. With Ask a Curator we are, on mass, taking Twitter out of the marketing department and putting it in the hands of curators, and at the same time giving the public the chance to hear about interesting subjects from these passionate individuals,” he continues.

Richardson has pulled together all kinds of museums (art, science, health, police, etc.) from around the world  for today.  You visit the Ask a Curator website here or if you want to view the conversations you can go here.  You do have to be a member (or join) to participate in the conversations.

ETA: Took a quick look at the convo, not too excited right now but maybe it will pick up. I was surprised at the amount of obscenity but then I wasn’t expecting to see any on this type of a feed. Who knew?

FrogHeart now tweets as well as ribbits

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I have a couple of announcements. First, I finally took the plunge and started a Twitter feed here. Once I figure how to put some sort of click-through or even the feed onto this site I will do it.

This brings me to my second announcement, I don’t expect to be publishing on this blog at the same vigourous pace that I’ve maintained for some months now. I think it’s time for a break and I want to make a few background (i.e., readers may not notice anything much) changes to this site.

Happy summer!

Interacting with stories and/or with data

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A researcher, Ivo Swarties, at the University of Twente in The Netherlands is developing a means of allowing viewers to enter into a story (via avatar) and affect the plotline in what seems like a combination of what you’d see in 2nd Life and gaming. The project also brings to mind The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and its intelligent nanotechnology-enabled book along with Stephenson’s latest publishing project, Mongoliad (which I blogged about here).

The article about Swarties’ project on physorg.com by Rianne Wanders goes on to note,

The ‘Virtual Storyteller’, developed by Ivo Swartjes of the University of Twente, is a computer-controlled system that generates stories automatically. Soon it will be possible for you as a player to take on the role of a character and ‘step inside’ the story, which then unfolds on the basis of what you as a player do. In the gaming world there are already ‘branching storylines’ in which the gamer can influence the development of a story, but Swartjes’ new system goes a step further. [emphasis mine]The world of the story is populated with various virtual figures, each with their own emotions, plans and goals. ‘Rules’ drawn up in advance determine the characters’ behaviour, and the story comes about as the different characters interact.

There’s a video with the article if you want to see this project for yourself.

On another related front, Cliff Kuang profiles in an article (The Genius Behind Minority Report’s Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech) on the Fast Company site describes a new human-computer interface. This story provides a contrast to the one about the ‘Virtual Storyteller’ because this time you don’t have to become an avatar to interact with the content. From the article,

It’s a cliche to say that Minority Report-style interfaces are just around the corner. But not when John Underkoffler [founder of Oblong Industries] is involved. As tech advistor on the film, he was the guy whose work actually inspired the interfaces that Tom Cruise used. The real-life system he’s been developing, called g-speak, is unbelievable.

…

Oblong hasn’t previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video [available in the article’s web page or on YouTube], including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate an SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00).

Do go see the video. At one point, Underkoffler (who was speaking at the February 2010 TED) drags data from the big screen in front of him onto a table set up on the stage where he’s speaking.

Perhaps most shockingly (at least for me) was the information that this interface is already in use commercially (probably in a limited way).

These developments and many others suggest that the printed word’s primacy is seriously on the wane, something I first heard 20 years ago. Oftentimes when ideas about how technology will affect us are discussed, there’s a kind of hysterical reaction which is remarkably similar across at least two centuries. Dave Bruggeman at his Pasco Phronesis blog has a posting about the similarities between Twitter and 19th century diaries,

Lee Humphreys, a Cornell University communications professor, has reviewed several 18th and 19th century diaries as background to her ongoing work in classifying Twitter output (H/T Futurity). These were relatively small journals, necessitating short messages. And those messages bear a resemblance to the kinds of Twitter messages that focus on what people are doing (as opposed to the messages where people are reacting to things).

Dave goes on to recommend The Shock of the Old; Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton as an antidote to our general ignorance (from the book’s web page),

Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present.

I’d also recommend Carolyn Marvin’s book, When old technologies were new, where she discusses the introduction of telecommunications technology and includes the electric light with these then new technologies (telegraph and telephone). She includes cautionary commentary from the newspapers, magazines, and books of the day which is remarkably similar to what’s available in our contemporary media environment.

Adding a little more fuel is Stephen Hume in a June 12, 2010 article about Shakespeare for the Vancouver Sun who asks,

But is the Bard relevant in an age of atom bombs; a world of instant communication gratified by movies based on comic books, sex-saturated graphic novels, gory video games, the television soaps and the hip tsunami of fan fiction that swashes around the Internet?

[and answers]

So, the Bard may be stereotyped as the bane of high school students, symbol of snooty, barely comprehensible language, disparaged as sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, representative of an age in which men wore tights and silly codpieces to inflate their egos, but Shakespeare trumps his critics by remaining unassailably popular.

His plays have been performed on every continent in every major language. He’s been produced as classic opera in China; as traditional kabuki in Japan. He’s been enthusiastically embraced and sparked an artistic renaissance in South Asia. In St. Petersburg, Russia, there can be a dozen Shakespeare plays running simultaneously. Shakespeare festivals occur in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey, to list but a few.

Yes to Pasco Phronesis, David Edgerton, Carolyn Marvin, and Stephen Hume, I agree that we have much  in common with our ancestors but there are also some profound and subtle differences not easily articulated.  I suspect that if time travel were possible and we could visit Shakespeare’s time we would find that the basic human experience doesn’t change that much but that we would be hardpressed to fit into that society as our ideas wouldn’t just be outlandish they would be unthinkable. I mean literally unthinkable.

As Walter Ong noted in his book, Orality and Literacy, the concept of a certain type of list is a product of literacy. Have you ever done that test where you pick out the item that doesn’t belong on the list? Try: hammer, saw, nails, tree. The correct answer anybody knows is tree since it’s not a tool. However, someone from oral culture would view the exclusion of the tree as crazy since you need both tools and  wood to build something and clearly the tree provides wood. (I’ll see if I can find the citation in Ong’s book as he provides research to prove his point.) A list is a particular way of organizing information and thinking about it.

nanoAlberta tweets

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Joel Burford at nanoAlberta contacted me yesterday with the information that nanoAlberta can now be followed on Twitter the usual way (having a Twitter account of your own and ‘following them’) or by RSS feed if you don’t have an account.

http://twitter.com/nanoalberta

Here’s a sampling of their latest tweets,

# Handling nanomaterials? Check out the GoodNanoGuide: http://tinyurl.com/2c5n5ej about 19 hours ago via web

# Dr. Paul Burrows in Edmonton, Alberta speaking about nanotechnology on Citytv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-iASnf9nY about 19 hours ago via web

# state of the art electron microscopy product development centre established at the NINT. http://tinyurl.com/2b8rah5 about 19 hours ago via web

# Gary Albach and Dr. Paul Burrows speak on the Global News “Morning Edition” : http://tinyurl.com/2g56b26 about 19 hours ago via web

Dr. Wei Lu, the memristor, and the cat brain; military surveillance takes a Star Trek: Next Generation turn with a medieval twist; archiving tweets; patents and innovation

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Last week I featured the ‘memristor’ story mentioning that much of the latest excitement was set off by Dr. Wei Lu’s work at the University of Michigan (U-M). While HP Labs was the center for much of the interest, it was Dr. Lu’s work (published in Nano Letters which is available behind a paywall) that provoked the renewed interest. Thanks to this news item on Nanowerk, I’ve now found more details about Dr. Lu and his team’s work,

U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can.

Lu previously built a “memristor,” a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now, he has demonstrated that this memristor can connect conventional circuits and support a process that is the basis for memory and learning in biological systems.

Here’s where it gets interesting,

In a conventional computer, logic and memory functions are located at different parts of the circuit and each computing unit is only connected to a handful of neighbors in the circuit. As a result, conventional computers execute code in a linear fashion, line by line, Lu said. They are excellent at performing relatively simple tasks with limited variables.

But a brain can perform many operations simultaneously, or in parallel. That’s how we can recognize a face in an instant, but even a supercomputer would take much, much longer and consume much more energy in doing so.

So far, Lu has connected two electronic circuits with one memristor. He has demonstrated that this system is capable of a memory and learning process called “spike timing dependent plasticity.” This type of plasticity refers to the ability of connections between neurons to become stronger based on when they are stimulated in relation to each other. Spike timing dependent plasticity is thought to be the basis for memory and learning in mammalian brains.

“We show that we can use voltage timing to gradually increase or decrease the electrical conductance in this memristor-based system. In our brains, similar changes in synapse conductance essentially give rise to long term memory,” Lu said.

Do visit Nanowerk for the full explanation provided by Dr. Lu, if you’re so inclined. In one of my earlier posts about this I speculated that this work was being funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which is part of the US Dept. of Defense . Happily, I found this at the end of today’s news item,

Lu said an electronic analog of a cat brain would be able to think intelligently at the cat level. For example, if the task were to find the shortest route from the front door to the sofa in a house full of furniture, and the computer knows only the shape of the sofa, a conventional machine could accomplish this. But if you moved the sofa, it wouldn’t realize the adjustment and find a new path. That’s what engineers hope the cat brain computer would be capable of. The project’s major funder, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [emphasis mine], isn’t interested in sofas. But this illustrates the type of learning the machine is being designed for.

I previously mentioned the story here on April 8, 2010 and provided links that led to other aspects of the story as I and others have covered it.

Military surveillance

Named after a figure in Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes (the sentry with 100 eyes), there are two new applications being announced by researchers in a news item on Azonano,

Researchers are expanding new miniature camera technology for military and security uses so soldiers can track combatants in dark caves or urban alleys, and security officials can unobtrusively identify a subject from an iris scan.

The two new surveillance applications both build on “Panoptes,” a platform technology developed under a project led by Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The Department of Defense is funding development of the technology’s first two extension applications with a $1.6 million grant.

The following  image, which accompanies the article at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) website, features an individual who suggests a combination of the Geordi character in Star Trek: The Next Generation with his ‘sensing visor’ and a medieval knight in full armour wearing his helmet with the visor down.

Soldier wearing helmet with hi-res "eyes" courtesy of Southern Methodist University Research

From the article on the SMU site,

“The Panoptes technology is sufficiently mature that it can now leave our lab, and we’re finding lots of applications for it,” said ‘Marc’ Christensen [project leader], an expert in computational imaging and optical interconnections. “This new money will allow us to explore Panoptes’ use for non-cooperative iris recognition systems for Homeland Security and other defense applications. And it will allow us to enhance the camera system to make it capable of active illumination so it can travel into dark places — like caves and urban areas.”

Well, there’s nothing like some non-ccoperative retinal scanning. In fact, you won’t know that the scanning is taking place if they’re successful  with their newest research which suggests the panopticon, a concept from Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century about prison surveillance which takes place without the prisoners being aware of the surveillance (Wikipedia essay here).

Archiving tweets

The US Library of Congress has just announced that it will be saving (archiving) all the ‘tweets’ that have been sent since Twitter launched four years ago. From the news item on physorg.com,

“Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006!” the Washington-based library, the world’s largest, announced in a message on its Twitter account at Twitter.com/librarycongress.

“That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions,” Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress added in a blog post.

Raymond highlighted the “scholarly and research implications” of acquiring the micro-blogging service’s archive.

He said the messages being archived include the first-ever “tweet,” sent by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and the one that ran on Barack Obama’s Twitter feed when he was elected president.

Meanwhile, Google made an announcement about another twitter-related development, Google Replay, their real-time search function which will give you data about the specific tweets made on a particular date.  Dave Bruggeman at the Pasco Phronesis blog offers more information and a link to the beta version of Google Replay.

Patents and innovation

I find it interesting that countries and international organizations use the number of patents filed as one indicator for scientific progress while studies indicate that the opposite may be true. This news item on Science Daily strongly suggests that there are some significant problems with the current system. From the news item,

As single-gene tests give way to multi-gene or even whole-genome scans, exclusive patent rights could slow promising new technologies and business models for genetic testing even further, the Duke [Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy] researchers say.

The findings emerge from a series of case studies that examined genetic risk testing for 10 clinical conditions, including breast and colon cancer, cystic fibrosis and hearing loss. …

In seven of the conditions, exclusive licenses have been a source of controversy. But in no case was the holder of exclusive patent rights the first to market with a test.

“That finding suggests that while exclusive licenses have proven valuable for developing drugs and biologics that might not otherwise be developed, in the world of gene testing they are mainly a tool for clearing the field of competition [emphasis mine], and that is a sure-fire way to irritate your customers, both doctors and patients,” said Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the IGSP Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy.

This isn’t an argument against the entire patenting system but rather the use of exclusive licenses.

Nanotechnology metaphors and understanding visual data

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I found a typesetting metaphor today in a media release titled, ‘Molecular typesetting — proofreading without a proofreader‘.  The number of publishing, writing, and reading metaphors associated with nanotechnology has always startled me.  As for the article, it is about how proteins are built with a minimal number of errors in a process that researchers compare to typesetting. If you want to read more, you can go here to Nanowerk News.

I looked at Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog and found a posting that presents some visual data about science twittering. He has three spheres made of bubbles or smaller spheres representing the number of followers that science twittering attracts. He’s done this before and I’m still not sure how to interpret the data and I mean that from two perspectives. I don’t understand the visual data being presented very well (Maynard does provide an explanation in a screencast) and while I find the whole Twitter scene interesting I’m waiting to see if it becomes something more substantive (which seems to be Maynard’s stance as well).

With regard to visual data, I think this will become increasingly important and it was one of the reasons I was so interested in Kay O’Halloran’s talk at the 2009 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences about mathematics and using visual data to communicate about it. Unfortunately, the organizers were not able to arrange a webcast but I’ll  see if I can dig up so more information about what she’s doing.

As for the Twitter phenomenon, it seems interesting to me that MySpace has just downsized itself (more here) as I can recall when it was as a big trend as Twitter is now. I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from the popularity of any social networking phenomenon. I think it is clear that people are interested in each other (and sometimes for the oddest of reasons) as for anything else I need more data.

One brief note, I had occasion to email Andrew Maynard last week and during the exhange I asked him why the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies is having fewer events. (I figured their Chief Science Advisor would know why.) He says there is a reorganization taking place.