Thread by a PhD student trying to track Naked Mole rats in NYC by using a MakeyMakey system (conductance). They say “Apparently naked mole rats have an incredibly high electrical resistance”
Not sure this is of any use to me, but may be worth contacting them to compare datasets etc…
A Taxonomy of Data Types – Statistical Machine Learning and Visualization.
A table of data types that refers to distribution, for example:
type: categoric atom example: word in Eng Lang distribution example: Multinomial (1,theta)
This taxonomy at the technical end of the data type spectrum and is unlikely to be used by artists.
—
It is useful to separate machine learning and visualization techniques (k-NN, PCA, etc.) from specific data domains (text, images, etc.). We should be able to come up with a taxonomy of data types on one hand and a library of techniques suitable for each data type on the other hand. Then, given a specific data domain we can identify the appropriate data type and follow up with one or more appropriate analysis/visualization techniques.
This is by no means completely satisfactory as each data domain has its own peculiarities and any attempt to come up with a short taxonomy is bound to be a “lossy approximation”. But as many approximations I believe it is one that is useful and worthy of consideration.
Ed Carter and Matt Jarvis
Global Sequencer Overview from Matt Jarvis on Vimeo.
via Global Sequencer Overview on Vimeo.
Commissioned by CultureCode, Ed Carter and Matt Jarvis created an audio visual experience from a dataset of their previously commissioned EyeProject.
Using latitude and longitude coordinates, the map is designed to create sound from any location-based dataset. In this beta version, the data represented is animal sighting from the EYE Project where young people geotagged animals in the wild. Melodies are created by playing the coordinates as a step sequencer, with each number relating to a specific pitch. The type of oscillator creating the sound wave relates to the hemisphere in which the coordinate is located. Other layers of audio are created by passing the dataset through simple text-to-speech software, with amplitude of the digital voice controlling pitch, or by using an envelope which allows only percussive elements to be heard. The aim was to create a code which could theoretically be reversed, making it possible to extract the data back from the sounds.
The map can be moved freely, creating a music sequencer where the melodies are created by the dataset, but the order and speed of playback are controlled by a performer.
This is an important concept when considering data as an art material. Should the data take the lead in the work, will it be the defining factor rather than something plugged-in afterwards (this is an issue for my current thinking in constructing a physical work that can cater for various data streams)…
Data Engineering
Posted: April 1, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason
Data engineering is when the architecture of your system is dependent on characteristics of the data flowing through that system.
It requires a different kind of engineering process than typical systems engineering, because you have to do some work upfront to understand the nature of the data before you can effectively begin to design the infrastructure. Most data engineering systems also transform the data as they process it.
Developing these types of systems requires an initial research phase, where you do the necessary work to understand the characteristics of the data, before you design the system (and perhaps even requiring an active experimental process where you try multiple infrastructure options in the wild before making a final decision). I’ve seen numerous people run straight into walls when they ignore this research requirement.
Forget Table is one example of a data engineering project from our work at bitly. It’s a database for storing non-stationary categorical distributions. We often see streams of data and want to understand what the distributions in that data look like, knowing that they drift over time. Forget Table is designed precisely for this use, allowing you to configure the rate of change in your particular dataset (check it out on github).
http://stonelab.osu.edu/_media/stonelab/courses/51/gibbons-andrews-pit.pdf
http://www.conservation-science.com/products/Sci%20Pubs/Boarman%20et%20al%2098-WSB-PIT%20System.pdf
Thematic analysis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Thematic analysis is the most common form of analysis in qualitative research.[1] It emphasizes pinpointing, examining, and recording patterns (or “themes”) within data.[2] Themes are patterns across data sets that are important to the description of a phenomenon and are associated to a specific research question.[3] The themes become the categories for analysis.[4] Thematic analysis is performed through the process of coding in six phases to create established, meaningful patterns. These phases are: familiarization with data, generating initial codes, searching for themes among codes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the final report.[5]
Air Muscles. from Shadow Robot Company
The Air Muscle is an extraordinary actuator that is small, light, simple and ‘friendly’. It is soft, has no stiction, is easily controllable and exceptionally powerful. It is a linear actuator, producing motion along a straight line and opening a whole new range of design possibilities.
Inspiration for forms:
Videos from the SMART research group: http://www.youtube.com/user/SMARTQMUL actuators and sensors
Queen Mary SMART research group – head – Federico Carpi
The main research focus of the group is on biomedical & bioinspired mechatronic devices made of smart materials. The group moves from the experience that Dr Carpi has matured in twelve years of research activity at the University of Pisa, Italy.
The activities of the group are oriented to the development of innovative devices based on electromechanically active polymer transducers (EAPs) and, in particular, dielectric elastomer (DE) transducers. DE actuators exhibit a mechanical response to an electrical stimulus, while offering, at the same time, light weight, mechanical compliance, compact size, simple structure, low power consumption, acoustically silent operation, and low cost. Because of their ability to exhibit significant actuation upon electrical stimulation and emulate the main functional properties of natural muscles, DEs are referred to as ‘smart materials’ as well as ‘artificial muscle materials’.
We study DE transducers as a highly-promising solution to the need for new electromechanical transduction technologies to enable a huge variety of applications not feasible or even imaginable with conventional technologies. The activities of the group cover the design, prototyping and testing of new devices and applications.
via SMART Home.
Biosensing deals with the collection of information from living systems. Due to advancements in the life sciences, electronics fabrication and data management, deeper and deeper levels of bio-data can be gathered. Pervasive sensing systems, and biosensing in particular, define a new chapter in the use of technical systems to monitor life and the human body. Because of the scale (health and environment) and intensity (ubiquitous distribution) with which biosensing can be expected to operate in the data saturated 21st century it is likely to have a major impact on our relationship to technology.
This paper summarizes some of our experiments and insights as of 2012.
via SiReBi.
marc böhlen: glass bottom float.
The Glass Bottom Float (GBF) is a floating public robot with the mission of making the critical assessment of recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience W.G Sebald might have appreciated.
GBF cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean enough for swimming. Over time it maps paths of least contamination and highest relative pleasure for fish and people. GBF assesses the current state of the waters with a three-tiered sensing system informed by best practices of recreational water quality assessment science: Established metrics (algae, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen and others), experimental metrics (near real-time in-situ e-coli, wave motion) and untested metrics (the presence and sounds of fish and crustaceans) are combined and compared with post swimming experience surveys to create a qualitative measure of water quality; the swimming pleasure measure (SPM). All results are public domain. Data is available for mobile phones to give SPM locative agency, allowing for on-demand inquiry of swimming pleasures, discourse on water quality and our limits of understanding it.
marc böhlen: advanced perception.
Advanced Perception ( 1999 – 2000 )
early animal machine interaction experiments
This project was an early experiment in mixing machines and animal societies. Three chickens, Rhode Island Red hens, were held in a spacious cage together with a mobile robot for 60 days. The robot was programmed to share the space with the animals and to not infringe on their habits and movements. A camera mounted above the cage continuously monitored the state of affairs, the positions of all the chickens and the robot. Information from the camera was linked to a computer where the interaction scenarios were monitored. Corrective actions and plans were sent via radio signal back to the robot.
The results from these experiments were presented to both the scientific (see adjacent link) as well as the art communities. A gala omelet dinner was held in an art gallery where a world-famous chef, Rudy Stanish, created omelets according to his own secret recipes with the eggs from these chickens.
This experiment was called “Advanced Perception”. It was left to the visitors to ponder where the advanced perception was to be found, whether it was in the machine vision system guiding the robot in the cage, the chickens’ perception modalities (in some ways superior to our own), or in the idea of advanced/alternate modes of perception necessary to contemplate solutions for a future in which our technologies kindly intertwine with the world of simpler creatures.
Blog | The Shape of Data | Exploring the geometry behind machine learning, data mining, etc..
Douglas Rushkoff – Blog – CNN: Ed Snowden – Human Hero Intervenes on Machine Logic.
Yet it wasn’t just fear keeping people from talking about the growing cyber-surveillance state, but a sense of inevitability. This is just how technology evolves – at least when it’s uncontested. Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they’re corporate gifts? We pay with our data.
The rush to employ technology has become automatic.
Notes:
Data isn’t all bad. Nor are machines and other technology. Use this as a ref (or bounce off point) to detail which data artists are using, why do they pick it, what are they saying.
The word data used in the way of the article above incites worry…how can the data collected in a scientific experiment compare to the data collated by Verizon for instance? How can the public determine what is an what is not safe?
Matthews, who signed himself “James, Absolute, Sole, Supreme, Sacred, Omni-Imperious, Arch-Grand, Arch-Sovereign … Arch-Emperor,” thought French agents had placed a magnet in his brain and were manipulating his mind, and those of other important figures, with waves of animal magnetism emitted from an Influencing Machine, which he termed an “air-loom.”
via CABINET // The Influencing Machine.
Cells as living calculators – MIT News Office.
MIT engineers have created synthetic biology circuits that can perform analog computations such as taking logarithms and square roots in living cells.
OpenWorm aims to develop a fully digital lifeform – a virtual nematode – in a completely open source manner.
OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is alive. If and when this project succeeds in modeling the worm successfully, we’ll be faced with a new and fascinating concept to think with: a virtual organism. Imagine downloading the worm and running it in a virtual petri dish on your computer. What, exactly, will you be looking at? Will you consider it to be alive? What would convince you?
Perhaps creations like the digital C. elegans will start to break down our binary conception of the matter in the world as either living or not living. We’ll discover that we can create systems that exist in-between these two spheres, or that certain aspects of life as we know it are not required to meet our definition of being alive.
Article with contextual refs: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/is-this-virtual-worm-the-first-sign-of-the-singularity/275715/
Paper on Monoaminergic Orchestration of Motor Programs in a Complex C. elegans Behavior
Semantic Networks by John Sowa
Definitions of various networks. Also good early diagram of this semantic network drawn in 1329.
A Life in AdWords, Algorithms & Data Exhaust. An interview with Erica Scourti. | http://www.furtherfield.org.
Ontobee: A web server aimed to facilitate ontology visualization, query, and development. Ontobee provides a user-friendly web interface for displaying the details and its hierarchy of a specific ontology term. Meanwhile, Ontobee provides a RDF source code for the particular web page, which supports remote query of the ontology term and theSemantic Web.
Ontology Development 101: A Guise to Creating your First Ontology [pdf]
OntoDM – Ontology of Data Mining. – also link to PhD thesis on this
Ontology of General Purpose Datatypes
Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology [pdf]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art
Oscar Wilde’s quote discussion: http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/all-art-is-quite-uselessoscar-wilde-55699.html
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wikiquote.
The Uselessness of Art (paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2010.01412.x/abstract
I like the way Sara talks about herself and her work, and separates her blog and her own work.
Use for framework for Trans Nature and Trans Data
Humans Show Empathy for Robots | Human-Robot Interactions | LiveScience.
Article about how we empathise with robots – contains refs to studies on monitoring emotional responses.
Nice quote near the end: “[Alexander] Reben compared trends in robot development with breeding dogs for companionship. “We have been doing this for millennia,” he said. “I think we’re doing the same thing with robots.”
MathFoundations 18: Geometry – YouTube.
How to begin geometry? What is the correct framework? How to define point, line, circle etc etc?
These are some of the issues we will be addressing in this first look at the logical foundations of geometry.
This lecture is part of the MathFoundations series, which tries to lay out proper foundations for mathematics, and will not shy away from discussing the serious logical difficulties entwined in modern pure mathematics. The full playlist is athttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…
(May 21, 2010) Professor Robert Sapolsky gives a lecture on emergence and complexity. He details how a small difference at one place in nature can have a huge effect on a system as time goes on. He calls this idea fractal magnification and applies it to many different systems that exist throughout nature.
Cowsourcing: tracking the health of the herd in real time (Wired UK).
Zebra Technologies Corporation and GEA Farm Technologies have developed Cow View for tracking location (to 30cm) and behaviour.
Slide deck of talk about data and SF. Some useful refs: Asimov’s The Foundation Series, which contains the idea of psychohistory (Psychohistory* is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, etc., and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people), and the CBS TV show Person of Interest.
slides: Science Fiction and Data.
*also see post on microhistory
Incredible video on how and what the Internet Archive archive. Huge, huge data collections.
Timescales and evolution. Differing ratios of life periods.
The adult males are snapping rigid plates on their abdomens to produce their courtship song. The females are clicking their wings to signal approval.
Marvels and a Few Mysteries in Cicadas’ 17 Years – NYTimes.com.
NYT_Cicadas_1894 [PDF] Details of how the dissemination of moles and birds and other insect predators have led to these large swarms of insects being able to live uneaten and then hatch en masse. From over 100 years before – very early environmentalism in the New York Times.
Due to the non static surface the metronomes all sync over a short period of time.
This could be a really interesting effect for triggering perceived emergent motion over objects.
http://io9.com/5947112/watch-32-discordant-metronomes-achieve-synchrony-in-a-matter-of-minutes
Big Data Definition – MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Information Development
Small Data – by Steve Coast (Open Street Map)
What is Open Data? – The ODI
Open Definition – OKFN
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/ – IBM Big Data –
four dimensions: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity.
“Who are the algorists?” Simply put, algorists are artists who create art using algorithmic procedures that include their own algorithms. This page presents an account of the origin of this usage and the algorithm serving as the “algorist manifesto”.
&
Very loose article that doesn’t tell us what an idea or a dream may comprise, so hard to know if the software is indeed creating them. It’s interesting to see how the software is described – very evocative words, but hard to penetrate any actual meaning.
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“THE FUTURIST recently spoke with Stephen Thaler, inventor of the Creativity Machine and president and CEO of Imagination Engines Inc., about the principles behind this powerful form of artificial intelligence, the reasons why consciousness itself may simply be a neurologically induced illusion, and the technology’s potential for both good and evil.
THE FUTURIST: To begin, could you explain a little about how the Creativity Machine works, and how you designed synthetic neural networks capable of generating ideas?
Stephen Thaler: In 1975, I discovered that trained artificial neural networks spontaneously “dream” potentially useful information that transcends what they already “know,” once they are properly stimulated by random disturbances (i.e., noise) to their internal architectures. Such disturbances within an artificial neural net are tantamount to heat in the biological neural networks of the brain.
Essentially, one artificial neural network, an “imagitron,” is stimulated via computationally simulated heat to dream new ideas, while another network, a “perceptron,” perceives value or utility to this stream of candidate ideas. The perceptron can micromanage the simulated heat in the imagitron so as to coax the imagitron to cough up its best ideas.
To those unfamiliar with the concept of an artificial neural network, this very concise description may not pack much punch. After all, a computer algorithm can be written by a computer programmer to generate a crapshoot of possible solutions to a problem. Furthermore, the same programmer can write another algorithm to filter for the very best of the ideas generated by the first (i.e., a genetic algorithm). But a Creativity Machine is composed minimally of two neural nets, a perceptron and an imagitron, and neither of these algorithms is written by human beings. Each is self-assembling.
For me, coming out of the culture of physics, this theory of the mind and the accompanying AI paradigm send shivers down my spine: It is a simple, elegant, and immensely powerful concept, accounting for the breadth of human cognition and consciousness while supplying the core principle for many future generations of artificial intelligence.”
ANIMACY (plural animacies) [wiktionary]
ANIMISM [mirriam webster]
The Question Concerning Technology – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Platonic Solid — from Wolfram MathWorld.
The Platonic solids, also called the regular solids or regular polyhedra, are convex polyhedra with equivalent faces composed of congruent convexregular polygons. There are exactly five such solids (Steinhaus 1999, pp. 252-256): the cube, dodecahedron, icosahedron, octahedron, and tetrahedron, as was proved by Euclid in the last proposition of the Elements. The Platonic solids are sometimes also called “cosmic figures” (Cromwell 1997), although this term is sometimes used to refer collectively to both the Platonic solids and Kepler-Poinsot solids (Coxeter 1973).
These concept videos show connected objects, effectively browsing all at once using different semantic web searches (nostalgic, future-thinking, etc).
The use of the word animism is odd, as they are simply device given anthropomorphised descriptions.
Animism as a Metaphor for Interaction Design | Philip van Allen.
“In order to get into the hang of academic writing it is sometimes helpful to examine closely the way in which other writers structure their work.
Swales and Feak offer the use of skeleton sentences to achieve this. This where all of the content is stripped out of a paragraph in order to reveal the syntactic moves. They suggest that those wishing to improve their writing should experiment with putting their own content into these skeletons. This is the equivalent of walking in someone else’s footprints.”
Examples and more: writing skeletons
Noted on Big and Small data, and why we aren’t following micro/macro naming conventions?
In my view Micro Data tells us about the minutiae of life, the plot of an ant, a single twitter user, a packets route to a remote server. Micro gives us a story from a specific POV, and the context is often implicit and visible. Compare to a Microhistory: “Microhistory is the intensive historical investigation of a well defined smaller unit of research (most often a single event, the community of a village, a family or a person). In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires to “[ask] large questions in small places”, to use the definition given by Charles Joyner.[1]“
Macro Data can provide us with an overview effect, it is often this that the data visualisers and data journalists are looking for – broad generalisations, and statistical analyses of vast data sets to detect patterns.
To compare: Macro-history (also known as Big History): “Macro-historical analysis seeks out large, long-term trends in world history, searching for ultimate patterns through a comparison of proximate details. […] Macro-historical studies often “assume that macro-historical processes repeat themselves in explainable and understandable ways”.[1]“
“Macrohistory is the study of the histories of social systems, along separate trajectories, through space and time, in search of patterns, even laws of social change. Macrohistory is thus nomothetic and diachronic. Macrohistorians — those who write macrohistory — are to the the historian what an Einstein is to the run-of-the-mill physicist: in search of the totality of space and time, social or physical. Macrohistorians use the detailed data of historians for their grand theories of individual, social and civilizational change.”
src: http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/MacrohistoryandtheFuture.htm
EUCLID’S DATA is the first in order of the books written by the ancient geometers to facilitate and promote the method of resolution or analysis. In the general, a thing is said to be given which is either actually exhibited, or can be found out, that is which is either known by hypothesis or that can be demonstrated to be known; and the propositions in the book of Euclid’s Data show what things can be found out or known from those that by hypothesis are already known; so that in the analysis or investigation of a problem, from the things that are laid down to be known or given, by the help of these propositions other things are demonstrated to be given, and from these, other things are again shown to be given, and so on, until that which was proposed to be found out in the problem is demonstrated to be given, and when this is done, the problem is solved, and its composition is made and derived from the compositions of the Data which were made use of in the analysis. And thus the Data of Euclid are of the most general and necessary use in the solution of problems of every kind.via The Elements of Euclid – Euclid – Google Books. (written around 300BC, translated in 1838 by Robert Simson)
A RadioLab DIY maker project that encourages people to build a cicada tracker to register the 17 year appearance of Magicicada Brood II when the ground 8″ down is a steady 64° F.
The project suggests citizens help predict the arrival by planting a homemade temperature sensor in the ground and reporting findings back to the Radiolab website.
http://project.wnyc.org/cicadas/
Would love to hear the sound that these swarming cicadas will make all the way up the east coast… 7khz of cicada love hum
