80 Million Tiny Images
Take a look at this infographic created by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman. Torralba teaches in the Computer Science at MIT. His past research centers on creating a lexical understanding of images — linking imagery and language. This work looks at tagged images, and creates an aggregate image, and [...]
Core Memory photography by Mark Richards
Mark Richards has captured the beauty of computer equipment in his photography series, Core Memory.
via coudal
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 11:39AM
Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the “bot” from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” PC Tools senior malware analyst Sergei Shevchenko said in a statement.
Among CyberLover’s creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator.” It can also lead victims to a “personal” Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.
Although the program is currently targeting Russian Web sites, PC Tools is urging people in chat rooms and social networks elsewhere to be on the alert for such attacks. Their recommendations amount to just good sense in general, such as avoiding giving out personal information and using an alias when chatting online. The software company believes that CyberLover’s creators plan to make it available worldwide in February.
Robot chatters are just one type of social-engineering attack that uses trickery rather than a software flaw to access victim’s valuable information. Such attacks have been on the rise and are predicted to continue to grow.
Update 4:10 p.m. PST: Mike Greene, vice president of product strategy at PC Tools, said that the company learned of CyberLover’s existence earlier this week as part of its regular monitoring of IRC chat rooms and other places where talk about malware takes place.
Greene said that it is hard to tell how prevalent use of the program is in Russia.
“We don’t have exact statistics, but I think it’s early on,” he said.
Greene said that the perceived anonymity of the Internet has desensitized people to the fact that information disclosed in an online chat can cause real-world damage.
“People are used to not opening attachments or maybe not clicking on a link that shows up in their IM,” he said. “But this emulates a real conversation, so you more are likely to give over personal information, click on a link or send your photograph.”
infographic earth facts guide
a collection of “moving diagrams” that illustrate basic planetary science & geographic related data, aiming to solve curious questions such as “where is the earth located?”, “how is the earth different from other planets?”, “where does the sky become space?”, or “how big are the oceans?”.
[link: jvsc.jst.go.jp]
see also universal scale & cell biology infographics.
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on May 15, 2007, 11:46PM
Frankenphone: ID lecturer mods phones
Apparently not all college professors are squares. Mehmet Erkok, industrial design lecturer at Istanbul Teknik Universitesi’s Department of Industrial Product Design, hacked the heck out of some Nokia phones to better suit his tastes. We’re not sure about the machine-screw keypad, but that old-school earpiece is the first comfortable-looking phone speaker we’ve ever seen.
via Jan Chipchase
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on May 7, 2007, 1:30PM
boredomresearch’s
the Forest of Imagined Beginnings
boredomresearchs’ latest web project is now live! Go to Explore the Forest of Imagined Beginnings & leave your thoughts embedded in the trees.
boredomresearch are interested in creating landscape environments online that develop over time, where users can explore and manipulate these environments, creating an individual experience which is both contemplative and rewarding. In the Forest of Imagined Beginnings there are no clear rules or objectives. It is simply an online landscape that is vulnerable to the whims and wants of the community that adopt this digital terrain as their own.
Forest of Imagined Beginnings will be exhibited at enter_unknown territories, International Festival & Conference for New Technology Art, Cambridge UK (25th-29th April). During this festival boredomresearch will be discussing the development of this work in a public presentation on Saturday 28th April.
This project has been co-commissioned by folly, Lancaster & enter_unknown territories, International Festival & Conference for New Technology Art, Cambridge UK and supported by the National Centre of Computer Animation, Bournemouth University.
Originally from Networked_Performance by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 25, 2007, 11:32AM
Hairy Displays
When it comes to displays you’ve got LCDs, LEDs, and OLEDs; now make way for Hairy-Ds.
Electronics giant Philips has filed a patent for an as-yet-unnamed “display fabric” that operates by controlling hairs. Each pixel is made of fabric of a certain color, and embedded with hairs of a different color. When the hairs lay flat, all you see is their color; apply an electrostatic charge and the hairs stand up, revealing the color of the fabric beneath.
The initial applications are forecasted to be clothing with changeable displays on them, as there doesn’t seem to be any use in having furry flatpanels. So we can continue to clean our laptop screens with electrostatic rags rather than, say, Pantene Pro-V.
[Via Oh Gizmo]
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Apr 24, 2007, 11:06AM
Flash, Silverlight & The In-Between OS
This morning, Microsoft (re)introduced their WPF/E platform (Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere) as Microsoft Silverlight. Tim Sneath has a nice summary of the feature set.
If anyone doubted that Microsoft is gunning for the a piece of the Adobe Flash empire, there’s no denying it now. This is a relatively light, cross-platform runtime that will handle visuals, video and appears to upscale nicely from the HTML/Javascript world. It’s Microsoft’s version of Flash.
I think what’s emerging is a new territory that has seldom been acknowledged before: the in-between OS. It’s not web and it’s not your desktop. Now that the bandwidth and horsepower hurdles are out of the way, we’re seeing Microsoft acknowledge the power of a potently powerful little runtime. Adobe has focused on re-architecting Flash to go from “cool graphics engine” to a world class runtime. Apollo is how Flash ends up on your desktop. One of the key features of Silverlight is that all that code will elegantly work in the real WPF world (Vista).
For Microsoft, this is all about upsell. If they can get web developers to slowly peek their head into the WPF world, it’s a big win for them. Ultimately, they want you on Vista. This may well be where Adobe’s advantage lies: there is no “light” version of Flash. All the capabilties are everywhere. To really light things up in WPF, you need to be on Vista.
As for the learning curve, Microsoft doesn’t have to deal with any old baggage since this is new stuff. The result is a platform that will probably feel more familiar to HTML/Javascript/Ajax developers. WPF/E seems to build upon the same development paradigm that web developers have gotten accustomed to while the Flash/Flex/Actionscript world requires a fair amount of re-learning.
Oddly (but not surprisingly), the press (and Microsoft’s PR) seems to be focusing on the video features of WPF/E (cross platform, HD, etc.). This part of the story will be pretty interesting. I guess the day is coming when video will not require a browser open and an Internet connection. That’s a good thing.
Microsoft has always had a huge advantage when dealing with competition because they owned the arena (i.e. the operating system) and exclusively possessed the transit system (the precious OS API’s). That’s changing. The success and ubiquity of Flash is forcing Microsoft to think in a leaner, more portable, cross-platform way. Nobody should underestimate Microsoft’s skill or tenacity to compete, but in this case, they’re clearly the visiting team.
This posting is for those students who were asking me if Flash had a competing software. In this situation, Microsoft could actually make things very difficult for Flash. Go ahead, try to browse the Microsoft website using Mozilla.
Originally from Basement.org
reBlogged by michael on Apr 16, 2007, 8:01AM
Music textile
Music textile is a large tactile interface for playing electronic music.
Navigable score on music textile XYi
The XY position of the performer’s hand contact moving onto the surface of the fabric is transmited to a computeur via a 12 Bytes resolution Midi card. This allows 4000 by 4000 points resolution. Two conductive fabrics are fixed on a frame, each one weaved with conductive threads in a different direction. When the performer presses any point of the textile instrument, the upper layer connects with the fabric underneath and the current eletrical value is sent to the computer. 
The videos on the website are pretty impressive. Image gallery.
Developed by Vincent Roudaud and Maurin Donneaud.
Check out the interface during Malaupixel in Paris, the installation will be exhibited at Confluences, on April 16 to 21, 12h-21h.
Related: Sonic Fabric, a musical dress made of textile woven from 50% pre-recorded audiotape and 50% cotton; Sonic City, a wearable piece that enables people to compose music in real time by walking through the city; etc.
Via a place to bookmark/del.icio.us/add to your rss feed: Bioject, Jean-Baptist Labrune’s blog.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 10, 2007, 10:34PM
Soundbytes - Part 2
Yesterday in Soundbytes - Part 1, i gave a brief overview of the art works installed on the ground floor of the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg (Germany) for the Soundbytes - electronic and digital soundworlds exhibition.
Let’s just get to the level below:
Akitsugu Maebayashi’s Metronome Piece is one of the highlights of the show for me. The artist went for a walk around Oldenburg bringing along a metronome. The clicks produced by the instrument work as ’sonar’ which detects information of spaces, and the echoes of tick-tick were recorded binaurally through microphones in the artist’s ears.
In the exhibition room, there’s a table, a chair and headphones. As you walk near the chair the light dims and you’re left with the sound of the metronome. Take the headphones and the experience becomes utterly strange. While you can still perceive the tick-tick (or people coming down the stairs above your head) coming through headphones, you’re suddenly wandering the streets of Oldenburg on the steps of Akitsugu Maebayashi. You hear people walking by and talking under the rain, a truck passing, etc. The first time i even looked behind me to check who was there (no one of course, just an audio illusion). Another layer of space and time was overlapping with what was going on around me.
Harar (annicca), by Thomas Köner (of the Banlieu du Vide fame), is projected in the adjacent room. The work is part of the Péripheriques trilogy which shows patterns in the moves of people in the streets and detects stories in their faces. The videos were shooted in 3 different cities (Harar, Belgrade, and a favela in Buenos Aires), original sounds from the filming location blend with imaginary sounds.
Annina Rüst was showing Rock ‘n’ Scroll, a sound remixing system which allows anyone to use the computer as an acoustic instrument for interventions into wifi-equipped public space. Both mobile phones and computers are connected using a VOIP software. The sound itself is a combination of standard macintosh and windows sounds, as well as sounds included in the Skype software, and pre-made drumloops. There’s also a delay effect that depend on how good the connection is.
There were free softwares to take away!
The person who starts the performance has the most control (over the drum loop and the right mouse-button to turn on the microphone while turning off the rhythm.) Other participants function mainly as triggers. But no one has a total control over the whole performance.
Image fluctuat
A computer was showing the website of micromusic, a low-tech music community initiated by carl (Gino Esposto), wanga (Paco Manzanares) and bacon (Michael Burkhardt), famous for their performances and compositions that use Gameboys or vintage Atari consoles. The micomusic.net website reflects their objective to build an online community where visitors can listen to and download music and chat.
There are two other projects which i like a lot but i’ll pass rapidly on them as i’ve blogged them before:
Jens Brand is showing G-Turns, the online version of the G-Players series, in an IKEA setting complete with price tags and a carpet with a wave-like pattern.
Visitor can lie in Kaffe Matthews‘ Sonic Bed and enjoy the sound properties of experimental electronic music throughout their body. There is also a video of the “making of” of the piece.
In conclusion i’d say that the exhibition is really good. There’s the fun, the loud, the introspective, the obscure, the aesthetically absorbing. It is not meant to be exhaustive but it gives an adequate overview of the many ways in which artists engage with sound materials these days. I guess i’ve been very lucky to visit the show on a quiet Thursday afternoon, i was able to enjoy each piece on my own without having to queue to be able to lay on the bed or having any sonic experience interrupted by other noises.
Flickr set.
At the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, extended until April 29.
Related: Invisible Geographies: New Sound Art from Germany, an exhibition about the “physical” topography of sound at the Kitchen in New York.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 11, 2007, 12:49AM
