ENTRIES TAGGED "cv"
Science Hack Days, YouTube Doggy Science, Antisocial Software, and Mind Reading with Wikipedia
- Science Hack Day SF Videos (justin.tv) — the demos from Science Hack Day SF. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a Hack Day.
- A Cross-Sectional Study of Canine Tail-Chasing and Human Responses to It, Using a Free Video-Sharing Website (PLoSone) — Approximately one third of tail-chasing dogs showed clinical signs, including habitual (daily or “all the time”) or perseverative (difficult to distract) performance of the behaviour. These signs were observed across diverse breeds. Clinical signs appeared virtually unrecognised by the video owners and commenting viewers; laughter was recorded in 55% of videos, encouragement in 43%, and the commonest viewer descriptors were that the behaviour was “funny” (46%) or “cute” (42%).
- RSS Died For Your Sins (Danny O’Brien) — if you have seven thousand people following you, a good six thousand of those are going to be people you don’t particularly like. The problem, as ever, is—how do you pick out the other thousand? Especially when they keep changing? I firmly believe that one of the pressing unsolved technological problems of the modern age is getting safely away from people you don’t like, without actually throttling them to death beforehand, nor somehow coming to the conclusion that they don’t exist, nor ending up turning yourself into a hateful monster.
- Generating Text from Functional Brain Images (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) — We built a model of the mental semantic representation of concrete concepts from text data and learned to map aspects of such representation to patterns of activation in the corresponding brain image. Turns out that the clustering of concepts in Wikipedia is similar to how they’re clustered in the brain. They found clusters in Wikipedia, mapped to the brain activity for known words, and then used that mapping to find words for new images of brain activity. (via The Economist)
Coaching, Geospatial Tracking, Eye-Tracking, and Networked Objects
- Personal Best (New Yorker) — excellent Atul Gawande column on coaching which has me wondering how to open up different aspects of my life to improvement. Interesting to me because, behind every continuous- or self-improvement technique are the questions: “do you want to get better?” and “if so, how far will you go in pursuit of that goal?”.
- CyberTracker — tool for non-profits tracking things in the real world. Used around the world for ecology, disaster recovery, even crime-fighting. Brings geospatial data capture and analytics to environmental orgs who otherwise could never afford it.
- Eye-Tracking in Painting Restoration — The consequence of the different gaze pattern is that when asked to describe the content of the painting, viewers of the unreconstructed version did not realise it was a painting of an erupting volcano. The painting had lost its meaning and viewers could not view it as originally intended by Martin. (via Ed Yong)
- The Era of Objects (PDF) — a collection of essays around the future of networked objects, from a Blowup event on that topic. Writings from Bruce Sterling, Julian Bleecker, and others.
Telco-less Mobile Calls, Videogames, Open Source Hardware, Facial Recognition
- Viber — more and more people are wanting to talk to me via this, rather than Skype or direct phone call (req. wifi). Can’t tell whether massive disruptor or toy.
- Who Killed Videogames — “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
- Visual Diffs for Open Source Hardware — just what it says.
- Facebook Face Recognition Study — take profile photos from dating sites, facial-recognition match against Facebook photos to find identity, use to predict interests and social security numbers.
Fingerprinting Cameras, Stopping Spambots, Generic Infographics, and Open Source Healthcare Records
- Fingerprinting Cameras Through Sensor Noise — using the pattern of noise consistent between images taken from the same camera to uniquely identify the device. (via Pete Warden)
- Stopping Bots with Hashes and Honeypots (Ned Batchelder) — solid techniques for preventing spambots. (via Andy Baio)
- Most Popular Infographics Generalized (Flowing Data) — it’s only funny because it’s true.
- London Hospital to Deploy Open Source Record System — hot on the heels of the NHS canning a failed expensive development of electronic health records. (via Glyn Moody)
Remote Fingerprint Scans, Playdough Circuits, Update-Sync, and Tweet Failage
- AIRPrint — prototype box scans a fingerprint from six feet away. (via Greg Linden)
- Squishy Circuits — teaching electronic circuits with conductive and insulating playdough. (via Hacker News)
- GraphLab — alternative take on Map-Reduce, called Update-Sync, where tasks run on connected sets of nodes rather than on one node at a time.
- Tower Bridge Closed — the @towerbridge account was a cute hack from Tom Armitage, whereby the public site for the London Tower Bridge was scraped and connected to Twitter, so you would see tweets like “I am closing after the MV Dixie has passed Upstream” and get a feel for the ambient activity in your city. Twitter turned over @towerbridge to the most tediously vomit-in-your-own-mouth-they’re-so-anodyne beige corporate tweets ever (account description: “Leading tourist attraction situated inside Tower Bridge”, sample tweet: “Looking for something to do it the City this weekend, check out http://www.visitthecity.co.uk/ and you’re always welcome at @TowerBridge”) and deleted the past history of tweets. Way to embrace the community of engaged passionate fans, guys! Welcome to Twitter, try not to step in your social media strategy as you cross the threshold–oh no, too late.
Sentiment Analysis, Word Frequency, Design Process, and Plant Recognition
- SentiWordNet — WordNet with hints as to sentiment of particular terms, for use in sentiment analysis. (via Matt Biddulph)
- Word Frequency Lists and Dictionaries — also for text analysis. This site contains what we believe is the most accurate frequency data of English. It contains word frequency lists of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in English, collocates lists (looking at nearby words to see word meaning and use), and n-grams (the frequency of all two and three-word sequences in the corpora).
- Crash Course in Web Design for Startups — When I was a wee pixel pusher I would overuse whatever graphic effect I had just learned. Text-shadow? Awesome, let’s put 5px 5px 5px #444. Border-radius? Knock that up to 15px. Gradients? How about from red to black? You can imagine how horrible everything looked. Now my rule of thumb in most cases is applying just enough to make it perceivable, no more. This usually means no blur on text-shadow and just a 1px offset, or only dealing with gradients moving between a very narrow color range. Almost everything in life is improved with this rule.
- Leafsnap — Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution have pooled their expertise to create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search—Leafsnap. This electronic field guide allows users to identify tree species simply by taking a photograph of the tree’s leaves. In addition to the species name, Leafsnap provides high-resolution photographs and information about the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds and bark—giving the user a comprehensive understanding of the species. iPhone for now, Android and iPad to come. (via Fiona Romeo)
Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking
- Timeline Setter — ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma)
- Return to Shenzhen Part 1 — Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk cell phones. That’s right, you could buy a pile of cell phones. [...] This market was truly amazing. It was one of most dense I’ve been to, shoulder to shoulder with very little standing room. Every device imaginable was available (checkout the pile of iPads) and people were literally negotiating a spot price minute by minute. The raw phones were sold for cash and then taken to other parts of the market for parts, resale, or recycling.
- Suwappu Toys in Media (BERG London) — a concept video for a toy project. This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds.
- Predator Eye-Tracking Video (YouTube) — neat technology. The source was released, retracted, reposted to GitHub by a third party, then retracted but rumours are it will be properly released soon.
Teaching Design Thinking, Client-Side Graphics, Removing Logos, and Tweeting the Revolution
- Design Thinking in Schools — materials to help teach design thinking in schools and education. My favourite: Design MadLibs (though until they can include “fart” in the list of acceptable words, it won’t be as interesting to my kids as the original MadLibs). (via Justine Sanderson)
- PaintbrushJS — Open Source (MIT-licensed) Javascript library for client-side graphics effects (blur, gamma, edge detect, etc.). (via Simon Willison)
- Unlogo — a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. Very clever use of computer vision technology: “if we have all these demos of CV that put logos on blank sheets of paper and otherwise inject them into our lives, why not use the same technology to remove logos from the world around us?” There’s a nifty demo replacing logos with the head of the relevant corporation’s CEO. (via Phil Lindsay)
- Gibbets, Dismemberment, and Dickens (Julie Starr) — evocative and well-written Dickens account of witnessing a guillotining. If the next revolution is tweeted, it’ll be a sad day for journalism, literature, and history. Do read this, it’s not revolting.
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