10×10

Jonathan Harris, an information artist, developped 10×10 (‘ten by ten’) which is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. Via Pascal.

Forum EPFL

Deux conférences lors du forum EPFL:

“Masters, quels changements pour demain?”, lundi 8 à 17h15
“Ingénieurs, qu’attend de nous le monde du travail?”, mardi 9 à 17h15

Location-Based Mobile Phone Games

Paul Baron provides lists of mobile phone games using GPS or cell IDs, and others most location based (or augmented reality) mobile games.

The Conquest of Complexity

Last week’s The Economist survey was about making technology more simple to end-users and mastering complexity being the next big thing in the IT business. It analyses the cuases of technological complexity both for firm and for consumers,evaluate the main efforts toward simplication by IT and telecom vendors today, and consider what the growing demands for simplicity mean for thes industries. I underlined a few quotes:

Ethnology and technology
Today, some 70% of the world’s population are “analogues”, who are terrified by tehcnology, Another 15% are “digital immigrants”, typically thirty-somethings whos adopted technology as young adults; and other 15% are “digital navites”, young adults who have never known and cannot imagine life without IM.

The biggest problem is that most of the people who create these artefacts are nerds, I want to see more artists create these things. The geekiness that predominates in the early stages of any nes technology leads to a nastay affliction called “featurits” This violates a crucial principal of design (man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs).

Anthropology and technology
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel was especially struck by the differences in how westerners and Asians view their homes. Amercians tended to say things like “my home is my castle” and furnish it as a self-contained playground. Asians were more likely to tell her that “my home is a place of hamrnony”, “grace”, “simplicity” or “huminility”. [...] For Americans, adopting technology is an expression of American-ness, part of the story of modernity and progress. For many other people, it may be just a hassle, or downright pretentious.

Complexity and technology
You have to push all the complexity to the back end in order to make the front end very simple (example of the cars and households 100 years ago …).

The way we get rid of complexity is by creating new layers of abstraction and sedimenting what is below.

Version 2004 – SIMulation City

Version, the digital Biennial of the Centre pour l’image contemporaine at Saint-Gervais Geneva will take place between November 11 and December 19. This year it is called SIMulation City and addresses the question of the contemporary urban city as a project of social organization, on the one hand, and as the focus of a number of imaginative worlds linked with the utopian city, on the other. The latest technologies, a source of fears as much as hopes, are the principal supports for these new representations. It is this utopia then that the artists and other participants in VERSION 2004 SIMulation CITY set out to analyze. Work of collectif-fact and Blast Theory will be present. The booklet is available in PDF.

9. NET-ELC Jahrestagung

Things seen and heard at this year’s ETHZ Network for Education Technology (NET) Tagung:

- Technology-centric futurist talk by Hermann Maurer.
- Nicola Döring on learning and emotions and affective computing (computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions)
- WiTeach like ETH Lecture Communicator, a tool to improve the interaction in the classroom between instructor and students with laptops. Presentation slides and material. During the talk, Classroom Presenter, is a distributed presentation system for the Tablet PC was mentioned. As a distributed system, the synchronized versions of the presentation are shared across multiple machines.
- Remote collaboration with mt_EAST a whiteboard made by Ground 15, with the e-Tisch of the ETH World Vireal Lab.

Mobile Application Development Toolkit

I probably will never touch it, but just to know that it exists: The Mobile Application Development Toolkit provides all the resources you need to start building mobile applications for Windows Mobile-based Smartphone and Pocket PC devices. Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Compact Framework enable you to build Windows Mobile-based applications.

Location Blogging with Wavemarket

Emeryville based start-up Wavemarket launched an application for location-based community blogging on mobile hansets.

SeSam, a Multi-Agent Simulation Environment in Java

SeSAm (Shell for Simulated Agent Systems) provides a generic environment for modelling and experimenting with agent-based simulation.

Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons

Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild by the people at Place Lab gives an excellent overview of the current world of device positionning for location-enhanced applications.