Euro Foo Camp seemed to have an interesting programme

Better Living Through RSS - Brain Hacks - Size Matters: Large Format Cameras - Guerrilla Evangilism - Tell stories with maps - Blogging in Europe - Using a mobile phone to control the BBC^W^W people

Isea Travelogue is a cool blog about ISEA: pictures, notes…
I discovered the cool stuff Ben Russel did:

* Spent the past few months interviewing archaeologists, designers, artists: mapping the space that emerged.
* Mapping as an interesting cross media space: combined real and mediated
* exploring materiality
* performance archaeologists: Capital exchange can only arise through objectness, through our magpie like tendencies of collecting and exchanging
* Objects are artifacts, basically anything that is manipulated by a human is an artifact
* Metadata: we are starting to describe data more thoroughly, discreetly
* Archaologists might have a key ot media theory: Anne Galloway interested in material culture, from an archaeology background
* Architectonic space with interesting materiality
* Traffic warden can address the real car or the digital car
* Googling someone while talking to them
* media textures
* social spaces
* simultaneous addressing
* City as computer: leaving food: price engineering using artists: artists are used as price leverage
* infrathinic

Stumbled across this… you can find Tamagotchi Tricks here

# Never press the button in the back of the toy. It will reset the game and in effect kill your Tamagotchi chick in an instant.
# When the battery power runs out, as long as you change the batteries (2 LR44) quickly, you can still save your Tamagotchi chick.
# Press Buttons A and C together will turn off the sound. Do it again will turn the sound back on.
# Press the “B” Button, you will be able to set the time. When you are in this “time setting” mode, press Buttons A and C together will suspend the game. The Tamagotchi chick will stop all functions. Press Buttons A and C to restart the game.
# Depending on the Tamagotchi chick’s age (or stage), it goes to bed at different times of the day.
…

Not very up to date but still cool: Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model by Craig Reynolds (1987). The guy who coined the notion of BOIDS

The aggregate motion of a flock of birds, a herd of land animals, or a school of fish is a beautiful and familiar part of the natural world. But this type of complex motion is rarely seen in computer animation. This paper explores an approach based on simulation as an alternative to scripting the paths of each bird individually. The simulated flock is an elaboration of a particle system, with the simulated birds being the particles. The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is created by a distributed behavioral model much like that at work in a natural flock; the birds choose their own course. Each simulated bird is implemented as an independent actor that navigates according to its local perception of the dynamic environment, the laws of simulated physics that rule its motion, and a set of behaviors programmed into it by the “animator.” The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is the result of the dense interaction of the relatively simple behaviors of the individual simulated birds.

I am still looking for multi-agent simulations. Yvan showed me what he did: Tank Wars.

The agents are tank-shaped vehicles equipped with mobile gun turrets. They learn to avoid collisions and fire each other in a two-dimensional maze environment. The tanks’ behaviour is controlled by continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN) [Beer 1996] whose parameters are optimized using genetic algorithms.

Other Players is a conference about the multiplayer phenomenon (December 6 - 8, 2004, in Copenhagen).

Combining technical and interface issues to create compelling digital entertainment is in itself a daunting task. In the past years, however, it has become increasingly clear that game designers must also deal with issues formerly thought to belong to fields such as sociology, political science, and architecture.
While many early games - think only of Spacewar! - were multiplayer games, more complex game designs have exponentially increased the challenge of handling social dynamics and understanding the many issues arising when players interact on more ambitious scales.The Other Players conference addresses multiplayer issues - massive, large, and small.

The possible list of topics includes but is not limited to:

• Multiplayer game design
• Multiplayer/collective aesthetics
• Social issues in multiplayer gaming
• Multiplayer interface issues
• Cheating and grief play
• History and development of multiplayer games

Those two pictures represents where the CatchBob players went. I am trying to add this as a news layer above the EPFL map…

Today we had an interesting discussion with Jerome and the KIS (people in charge of the EPFL weblogs). The point was how to improve the Polyblog project.

Fab, Patrick and I have to work on service specifications.

Talking of freak watching, I was wondering whether there are people living underwater (some kind of eco-tech organized secret society) but it seems that it’s only limited to video-games. I googled but nothing interesting emerged…

It is strange since there are some plans to build underwater hotels like the one in Dubai…

Coordinates of the EPFL map

$maxX = 533715;
$maxY = 152714;
$minX = 532660;
$minY = 152220;

I finally computed old data drawn from CatchBob. The first picture shows our path on the campus. The second depicts the number of area visited (Patrick and I worked on a php file to parse the raw data, then we used R to compute the visualization). As we can see on the second figure, we drew a bounding box that just took into acocunt the area where the players went (this is an issue, we should reconsiderate this because it will not be possible to compare all the groups if we keep this). The third figure shows where player A (above the x axis) and player B (below the x axis) sent their messages.

It is the second time, I got this message on my cell phone: “Hi! I found your phone number, could you call ma back?”. This reminds me an old txt Watching the Watcher Watching You (1984-85 NPI/Appa Teleworks I):

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THIS ON YOUR FAVE RAVE PHREAK BOARD:
“LEAVE ME A PHONE NUMBER AND I WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU..WE CAN TRADE SOMECODEZ…”

THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY BLOTTED OUT OF HIS GOURD, OR HE IS TRYING TO GET SOME INFO ON YOU! FEDS WANT TO KNOW PEOPLE AND KNOW AS MUCH ABOUT THEM AS THEY CAN WITHOUT GETTING FOUND OUT. SO, DONT MESS WITH THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE.

fredshouse questions the fact that the very field of Ubiquitous Computing have no sex-related applications…

Museum guides, elder care, memory prosthetics and ornithology, for sure. But how about teledildonics?

- Maybe ubicomp isn’t the right kind of medium…
- Maybe it’s too early. There are almost no commercial ubi-products, and thus no real channel exists yet for delivering the goods and taking money in return
- maybe we haven’t reached the right level of sophistication in our thinking about ubicomp’s potential imprint on the sensual fabric of society.

This is my ultimate statistical guide. It is just a snapshot of a stat summary… It is about how to select statistical tests.

A very odd situation in Geneva, absolutely not clue about what this is.