(via), a new geo-related game:

From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo [1] which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page.
– http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003534.html
1: http://www.caida.org/tools/utilities/netgeo/

The NYT has a great piece about electric plugs. It is indeed le nerf de la guerre as we say in french; I mean the crux issue when you’re out of you’re regular living/working bubble.

Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.

Where do I put the stuff below?

Sean Spector, a vice president and founder of GameFly, an online video game rental service, said he tries to book flights that have power adapters near the seats so he can plug in his electronic gadgets.

I tend to wander around before seating at the perfect place in the train to be clsoe to a power plug. Unfortunately as I travel a lot both in France and Switzerland, I noticed that only french trains provide them (not all).

A Wall Street Journal columnist argues that IBM should have made an effort to innovate rather than selling its PC unit to the chinese. The author describe how they could have improved the PC. One of the option would be to deal with portability:

Like many people, I have several PCs in my life–and I constantly need to ask such ridiculous questions as, “Where did I leave the latest version of that file? By what clumsy method should I move it from where it is to where it’s needed?” Such questions are like asking “Where did I leave the starter crank for my Huppmobile?” If you have to ask, your (formerly) hot-shot machine is ready for the folk-art museum.
(…)
IBM might have done well selling PCs with built-in “transparent information sharing.” As soon as you connected such a machine to the Internet, all your electronic documents would immediately be available–no matter where you created or last worked on them.

Boxes and Arrows on sound design. The best part of the paper is about the history of buzzers.

There were many innovations in electronic sound during the early 20th century, but until the 1950s it was impractical for any product that wasn’t a radio to produce an amplified, electronically generated sound. Reproducing even the simplest electronic tone required bulky and expensive vacuum tubes, transformers, and speakers.

We also learn that “current research is focused on understanding people’s assumptions about what their environment ought to sound like“. That kind of research is funny!

I found a very well positioned company called Acies. This seems really appealing, the core business of this company is research promotion and management consulting:

Leader in Research Promotion and Management Consulting, ACIES contributes to the development of research by promoting its knowledge and results, and so generates value at economic, scientific and societal levels.
Through its two activities “Research Tax Credit” and “European Research Projects”, ACIES assists the key players in Research and Innovation in setting up and managing their projects, optimising and securing their financing.
ACIES’ customers can be split into 3 categories: major industrial groups, innovative SME-SMIs, top research organisations and universities.

…might be interesting to work for this kind of company.

There seems to be chocolate-addict research: Structure of chocolate unravelled at the ESRF

A team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam, with help of the ESRF, has made a major step forward by identifying for the first time the crystal structure of one of the three main triglycerides that make up chocolate butter (…) “This work is expected to be highly relevant to confectionary research and industry and the first step to a better understanding of the mechanism of the fat bloom phenomenon at the molecular level.”

I came across this interesting debate while reading a paper by Andy Oram:

Two ideas, diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, have seized the attention of Internet companies and technologists over the first few years of this century. (…) But these two ideas are attracting both money and attention. One stresses classification, the other community. Neither has borne much fruit yet. (…) The first idea goes by such names as the “semantic web”—coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web—and “Web Services.” It leads to infinite meetings of standards bodies, taking up hours of valuable technologists’ time, who report year after year on the tremendous progress they are making toward ever receding and ever more audacious goals.

The other idea goes by the name “social networking,” and brings out breathless talk of a revolution in social relationships, supposedly to be opened up by “frictionless connectivity”: the ability to find almost instantly the person who can meet your specific personal or career-related needs.
After several years of experiments in each area, outlines are emerging for the domains where each idea may prove valuable.

The article also expresses critics about social software: “The public has mostly lost interest with the first wave of sites that offer social networking, probably because what they offer seems to add little except extra overhead to current Internet services such as email and newsgroups.”. I think it’s definitely true, my ultimate social software is my blogroll. I like this kind of statement: “I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed.” because it definitely summarizes what I felt after trying those tools.

But the author is still positive on it:

These criticism apply to social networks they way they’re currently implemented. Because viral marketing and new media have an excellent possibility of becoming important social movements, I think online social networks will grow in importance, and at some point somebody will make one that works. We can also move to yet another stage where we statistically measure our network and learn from aggregate facts about the people we know. There’s plenty there for a century of innovation

On January, 20th, there’s going to be a seminar about call-centers activity analysis. It will be held (in french) at Telecom Paris .

* Josiane Boutet (Université de Paris 7) et Christiane Legris (EDF/GRETS) : “L’activité de travail et le travail du langage dans les centres d’appels EDF”
* Lorenza Mondada (Laboratoire ICAR, Université de Lyon II) : “Modes d’alignement et de désalignement dans les appels téléphoniques � un call centre”
* Christian Licoppe (GET-ENST, département EGSH) et Marc Relieu (Laboratoire TECH/SUSI France Telecom R&D) : “Techno-conversations : rendre observables les compétences des téléopérateurs dans une hotline d’assistance technique internet”
* Emmanuel Kessous et Alexandre Mallard (Laboratoire TECH/SUSI France Telecom R&D) : “Les appuis conventionnels de la relation marchande : la vente médiatisée par le téléphone dans un centre de télémarketing”

A nice arty project: Underground Treasures: New York City’s Subway Art by Catherine Fredman

What do you notice on your way to work? Does it help you get inspired for the day? In New York, subway commuters see a diverse collection of art, thanks to the Arts for Transit program that was started in 1984.

This is example is Deborah Brown’s Platform Diving - 1994 Glass mosaic murals:

It seems that geourl is back from the grave: geourl reloaded!

Update: after hubert’s comment, I checked if it’s related to geo-url and it’s indeed something different did by other people (thanks joshua for the update).

Update 2: Hubert found the real author of geourl.info, it’s Daniel Schaller:

Many amongst us bloggers know the the service www.geourl.org. It offered a way to register your blog in a directory for certain geographical coordinates. Furthermore, there was a way to get a list of other blogs which are near to your blog.

However, for what reason ever, since May/June this year, the service is down for renovations and has not relaunched yet so far. Since I liked the idea of this services and I realized that others do as well, I was setting up a re-making of it, which I have launched at the URL http://www.geourl.info now.

Please feel free and register your blog and tell your blog buddies to register their site, too.

I am eager to see this kind of parasitism phenomenon happening in an urban environment:

Some crazy folk threw his shoes in the air, close to my window:

Have a glance at some location-based services scenarios in geo-community. It’s a bit rusty and cliché, but it appears to be a good summary of what was expected in 2001. Applying LBS to people alwas tend to lead to safety applications. I think it’s a pity, there would be more interesting scenarios (not only with game). Mobile learning would be a nice direction.

GeoModeTM (www.geomode.com) or miniature GPS technology can be imbedded into items of clothing and footwear to support child-tracking services i.e. “Tell me if my child strays beyond the neighbourhood.” (…) Other similar personal and commercial examples of people tracking, where the person being tracked provides tracking permission, can improve customer service and public safety.

B.Brown, I.McColl, M.Chalmers, A.Galani, C.Randell, and A.Steed (2003). Lessons from the lighthouse: Collaboration in a shared mixed reality system. In Proceedings of the CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 577–584, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. ACM Press: NY.

These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration.
(…)
Shared awareness of location also allowed users to quickly move to their friends. Participants used this to quickly find what their friends were looking at and then move so as to look at the same thing.
(…)
Location awareness allowed participants to talk about and use each other’s context and navigation
(…)
Awareness of location also meant that users could better understand what their co-visitors were looking at; each could simply look at the map or 3D display, and see which exhibits the others were viewing. Location awareness might be similarly useful for other collaborative settings where current activity can be inferred from location

It’s close to what I study in my research.

In CatchBob, we are interested in an activity (depicted on the figure below) that fits 4 constraints:

1. space constraints: the activity occurs on the field, people are highly mobile
2. time constraint: the activity does not last very long: few hours maximum
3. organizational constraint: decentralized team (with no operators at a upper level in a control room)
4. communication constraint? no audio communication (noise in the background…)

Apart from military stuff, are there any other activities that fits those constraints?