Radar Roundup

I'm trying a new idea here, a summary of news about Foos and the themes that we're tracking on Radar (It's testament to how well ETech reflects our Radar that so many topics show up there). Hope it gives you some interesting reading.

• Nathan Eagle's Reality Mining slides on Slideshare. Nathan will be speaking about reality mining at ETech.
• Adam Nelson discovers face detection is hard. He was thinking of it for the Gallery 2 PHP image gallery software, but OpenCV's sample code is still pretty unreliable. CV is still in the early days of going mainstream, and the code is more for early stage proof of concept than deployment. In other words, you still need a masters or better to know how to tweak it so it works. At least, that's what I think. It'll be fun to hear Gary Bradski who wrote OpenCV talk about it at ETech.
• GestureTek is one of many companies out there selling new interface technology. They let you shake your mobile phone, multitouch a screen, wave a Wii-like remote around, or point with your finger. Others we've had at Foo Camps include Jeff Han and Onomy Labs. At ETech we have Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path talking about Designing Gestural Interfaces. See also this survey of hand posture and gesture recognition techniques from Pankaj's Haptics blog.
• Barack Obama is given an easy question at Google. It reminded me, if incidentally, of a nascent movement to press Foo Larry Lessig into running for office. Larry will, of course, be at ETech.
• Boston Globe article on synthetic biology. Precis: we're not creating life yet, we're barely starting down that road. Great quote from Venter in 2000: "we know shit about biology". See yesterday's post on Personal Genomics and Synthetic Bio for more.
• Jade, a Mac image correction program. Significant because they're working towards making it all automatic. Worth watching, and interesting because they're Italian and running this from a gorgeous place to visit.
• PhotoSketch Google TechTalk from June last year.
• Jon Gregorio's "Me", an aggregation of all his readily-remixable online traces. Fascinating idea. I see the Social Graph API heading this way (wish I could have been at Social Graph Foo Camp to hear more of the plans for the API). Hopefully it'll also make companies like Spock unnecessary.
• Kevin Kelly on the need for Top Down as well as Bottom Up.
• Tinkering School teaches kids to take control of Make-ing things. As seen at TED. Fantastic. I wish I could send my kids.