"museums" entries

Four short links: 5 January 2015

Four short links: 5 January 2015

3D Art Reuse, Faceted Data Browser, Robotics Roundup, and Social Signal Interpretation

  1. Lincoln Gallery Reuse — UK gallery placed 3D models of their works online and are sharing what people did with them. Some beautiful art in here! (via BoingBoing)
  2. Kesihif — open source browser for faceted data.
  3. 2014 Robotics IPOs, Acquisitions, and Failures (RoboHub) — good roundup of what happened in 2014.
  4. SSIan open source platform for social signal interpretation.
Four short links: 13 May 2014

Four short links: 13 May 2014

Reverse Engineering, Incident Response, 3D Museum, and Social Prediction

  1. Reverse Engineering for Beginners (GitHub) — from assembly language through stack overflows, dongles, and more.
  2. Incident Response at Heroku — the difference between good and bad shops is that good shops have a routine for exceptions.
  3. 3D Petrie MuseumThe Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology has one of the largest ancient Egyptian and Sudanese collections in the world and they’ve put 3D models of their goods online. Not (yet) available for download, only viewing which seem a bug.
  4. Sandy Pentland on Wearables (The Verge) — Pentland was also Nathan Eagle’s graduate advisor, and behind the Reality Mining work at MIT. Check out his sociometer: One study revealed that the sociometer helps discern when someone is bluffing at poker roughly 70 percent of the time; another found that a wearer can determine who will win a negotiation within the first five minutes with 87 percent accuracy; yet another concluded that one can accurately predict the success of a speed date before the participants do.
Four short links: 12 April 2013

Four short links: 12 April 2013

Wikileaks Code, Account Afterlife, Digital in Museums, and Companies and Conferences

  1. Wikileaks ProjectK Code (Github) — open-sourced map and graph modules behind the Wikileaks code serving Kissinger-era cables. (via Journalism++)
  2. Plan Your Digital Afterlife With Inactive Account Manageryou can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided. (via Chris Heathcote)
  3. Leo Caillard: Art GamesCaillard’s images show museum patrons interacting with priceless paintings the way someone might browse through slides in a personal iTunes library on a device like an iPhone or MacBook. Playful and thought-provoking. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Lanyrd Pro — helping companies keep track of which events their engineers speak at, so they can avoid duplication and have maximum opportunity to promote it. First paid product from ETecher and Foo Simon Willison’s startup.
Four short links: 15 February 2013

Four short links: 15 February 2013

EdTech Startups, 3D Portraits, Interactive Storytelling, and Bizarre Consumer Items

  1. Ed Startups in a Nutshell (Dan Meyer) — I couldn’t agree with Dan more: The Internet is like a round pipe. Lecture videos and machine-scored exercises are like round pegs. They pass easily from one end of the pipe to the other. But there are square and triangular pegs: student-student and teacher-student relationships, arguments, open problems, performance tasks, projects, modeling, and rich assessments. These pegs, right now, do not flow through that round pipe well at all.
  2. 3D Printed Portraiture: Past, Present, and Future — impressive collection of 3D scans of museum collections of portraiture. Check out his downloadable design files. (via Bruce Sterling)
  3. Versu — interactive storytelling, with AI and conversation modeling.
  4. Weird Things Found on Taobao (NSFW) — this is what I never ow my head. (via Beta Knowledge)
Four short links: 11 September 2012

Four short links: 11 September 2012

3D Printing Art, Speedy Web, Display Divergence, and 3D Printing Science

  1. Liz Neely Talks 3D Digitisation, 3D Printing (Seb Chan) — On July 19th, Tom and Mike Moceri arrived at the Art Institute dock in a shiny black SUV with a BATMAN license plate and a trunk packed with a couple Makerbots. Our event was different from #Met3D in that we focused on allowing staff to experience 3D scanning and printing first hand. We began the day using iPads and 123D Catch to scan artworks. In the afternoon, the two Makerbots started printing in our Ryan Education Center and Mike demonstrated modelling techniques, including some examples using a Microsoft Kinect.
  2. Keys to a Fast Web App (Steve Souders) — I’m obsessed with caching. It’s the biggest missed opportunity and so I’m going to spend the next few months focused on caching. Analyzing caching is difficult. In the lab it’s hard (and time consuming) to test filling and clearing the cache. There’s no caching API that makes it easy to manipulate and measure.
  3. So Many Devices (Luke Wroblewski) — so many different screen sizes and pixel densities to worry about.
  4. 3D-Printed Tools in the DeRisi Lab“There’s hardly a microscope in our building that does not have some 3D-printed part on it.” —Joseph DeRisi, UCSF.
Four short links: 28 August 2012

Four short links: 28 August 2012

Javascript Tips, Collections Metadata, Networking Toolkit, and Augmented Notebook

  1. Javascript Tips for Non-Specialists (OmniTI) — “hey kid, you’re going to have to write browser Javascript. Read this and you’ll avoid the obvious cowpats.”
  2. Museum Datasets (Seb Chan) — collections metadata aren’t generally in good quality (often materials are indexed at the “box level”, ie this item number is a BOX and it contains photos of these things), and aren’t all that useful. The story about the Parisian balcony grille is an excellent reminder that the institution’s collections aren’t a be-all and end-all for researchers.
  3. Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit — open source tools for diagnosing network problems. (via Nelson Minar)
  4. Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine — computer vision to straighten up photographed pages of the notebook, and the app recognizes special stickers placed on the book as highlights and selections. Nifty micro-use of augmented reality.
Four short links: 1 June 2012

Four short links: 1 June 2012

Health App, The Met 3D Scanning, Skinnerian Apps, and Visual Programming

  1. BeWell App (Google Play) — continuously tracks user behaviors along three key health dimensions without requiring any user input — the user simply downloads the app and uses the phone as usual. Finally, someone tracking my behaviour for my own good.
  2. Met 3D — the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts its first 3d printing and scanning hackathon. [O]n June 1 and 2, approximately twenty-five digital artists and programmers will gather at the Met to experiment with the latest 3-D scanning and replicating technologies. Their aim will be to use the Museum’s vast encyclopedic collections as a departure point for the creation of new work. THIS. IS. AWESOME. (via Alison Marigold)
  3. The Perfected Self (The Atlantic) — everything you knew about B. F. Skinner was wrong, and you should know about him because you’re using his techniques to lose weight, stop smoking, and do your homework. (via Erica Lloyd)
  4. Google Blockly — (Google Code) A web-based, graphical programming language. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required. Open sourced.
Four short links: 30 May 2012

Four short links: 30 May 2012

CC-Licensed Museum, Bye Bye API, Socket Server, and Free Taxpayer-Funded Research NOW!

  1. Wide Open Future of the Art Museum (TED) — text of an interview with curator at the Walters Art Museum about CC-licensing content: reasons for it, value to society, value to the institution. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. (via Carl Malamud)
  2. Twitter Resiles From API-Driven Site (Twitter) — performance was the reason to return to server-assembled pages, vs their previous “client makes API calls and assembles the page itself”.
  3. Stripe Einhornlanguage-independent shared socket manager. Einhorn makes it easy to have multiple instances of an application server listen on the same port. You can also seamlessly restart your workers without dropping any requests. Einhorn requires minimal application-level support, making it easy to use with an existing project.
  4. Petition the Whitehouse For Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research (Whitehouse) — We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. Sign this and spread the word: it’s time to end the insanity of hiding away research to protect a handful of publishers’ eighteenth century business models.
Four short links: 4 April 2011

Four short links: 4 April 2011

Library Game, Mac Security, Natural Programming, Selecting Metrics

  1. Find The Future — New York Public Library big game, by Jane McGonigal. (via Imran Ali)
  2. Enable Certificate Checking on Mac OS X — how to get your browser to catch attempts to trick you with revoked certificates (more of a worry since security problems at certificate authorities came to light). (via Peter Biddle)
  3. Clever AlgorithmsNature-Inspired Programming Recipes from AI, examples in Ruby. I hadn’t realized there were Artificial Immune Systems. Cool! (via Avi Bryant)
  4. Rethinking Evaluation Metrics in Light of Flickr Commons — conference paper from Museums and the Web. As you move from “we are publishing, you are reading” to a read-write web, you must change your metrics. Rather than import comments and tags directly into the Library’s catalog, we verify the information then use it to expand the records of photos that had little description when acquired by the Library. […] The symbolic 2,500th record, a photo from the Bain collection of Captain Charles Polack, is illustrative of the updates taking place based on community input. The new information in the record of this photo now includes his full name, death date, employer, and the occasion for taking the photo, the 100th Atlantic crossing as ocean liner captain. An additional note added to the record points the Library visitor to the Flickr conversation and more of the story with references to gold shipments during WWI. Qualitative measurements, like level of engagement, are a challenge to gauge and convey. While resources expended are sometimes viewed as a cost, in this case they indicate benefit. If you don’t measure the right thing, you’ll view success as a failure. (via Seb Chan)
Four short links: 23 March 2011

Four short links: 23 March 2011

Health Prediction, Fake Ads, Bogus Patents, and Realtime Graphing

  1. The Heritage Health Competition — Netflix-like contest to analyze insurance-claims data to develop a model that predicts the number of days a patient will spend in hospital in the coming year. $3M prize. (via Aza Raskin)
  2. Historically Hardcore — fantastic fake Smithsonian ads that manage to make the institution sexy. Naturally they’ve been asked to take them down.
  3. Another Plato Innovation Ignored — turns out the above-the-fold doodle has a long and glorious history, culminating in a fantastic demonstration of our broken patent system.
  4. GraphiteEnterprise scalable realtime graphing. Apache 2.0-licensed, written in Python. (via John Nunemaker)