cell phones and the map metaphor

A great New York Times article that ties in directly with the post-geographic/hyper-geographic living concept I was exploring last year.

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives

space is the place

Idea for 'mood stabilizing' room

- room functions as RSS aggregator of inhabitant's blogs/Facebook & Twitter feeds, etc.
- based on content of feeds, changes appearance/atmosphere
- looks for keywords in blogs, etc. to gauge person's mood
- puts on comforting/happy music & makes room bright and warm if person is sad
- put on calming music, projects soothing colors, lowers temperature if person is angry
- if person is in the mood for love, well...possibilities are endless
- can also add appropriate images (photos of family, friends, happy stuff, etc.) if user is feeling nostalgic or lonely
- if blogs reflect interest in a particular subject, can project images of subject

Precedent: Michael Naimark - Displacements

internet applications midterm idea

Whoa, I just realized that this is just the midterm project, not the final project. Time to scale back in scope. Sweet!
I would have liked to look into the Netflix API but didn't see any documentation about how it interfaces with AS3. So instead I'm thinking about creating a widget that grabs all the first year DT students RSS feeds (basically, their podcasts) - or maybe just grabs images from their pages or text from their blogs on the a.parsons server and mashes them up.
Cool? Cool.

links

Compulsive note-taker that I am, I inevitably end up writing down a whole bunch of websites, artists, books, concepts, etc. to check out during pretty much every class I'm in. Unfortunately, half the time I never get around to actually looking into any of them. I'm hoping that if I post them here, I'll be more likely to do so at some point.

1/27 Interaction Major Studio

Brainpop website (from Hilary)

Art Backwash blog (from Antoninus)

1/28 Information Design

Bohm on Creativity (book)

Parsons Institute for Information Mapping

Kohei Sugiura

Charles Joseph Minard

Martin Wattenberg

Richard Paul Wurman

Stefan Knecht

1/28 Internet Apps: Client-Side

Gapminder (from Greg)

Ribbit (from...I don't remember his name)

gotoandlearn.com

Papervision!!!

BabyNameWizard - more Martin Wattenberg

Daytum (from Catherine)

Colr.org // kuler.adobe.com

Aviary.com

PrettyLoaded

Firstborn Design Studio

BigSpaceship

1/28 Mobile Media

John Gruber blog

Barcamp.org

Caribou Honig on the "third screen"

Major Studio Interface Final Project Proposal

The prevalence of IT in modern life has had a transformative effect on human interaction in an unfathomable number of ways. It has eliminated some forms of communication almost entirely while giving birth to others. We are now able to interact with other people thousands of miles away without ever leaving our doorsteps. This has led to a speculation that we are now living a “post-geographic” existence in which our actual locations have become irrelevant due to the possibilities afforded by new IT – a new global era. There has been much research done on this topic, with some writers such as Frances Cairncross, author of “The Death of Distance”, being of the belief that the effect of this trend on how we work, play, and live will be absolutely revolutionary. Others, such as geographer Mei-Po Kwan, acknowledge that while IT is definitely having a considerable impact on how we live our lives, the result will not be in a complete elimination of our daily patterns of travel, but rather a restructuring thereof. For my final project, I intend to use questionnaire data to create maps illustrating the effects of ‘living post-geographically’ as it plays out in regards to our scope of daily interaction via the internet and other forms of technology vs. our scope of daily travel. My presumption is that for most of us, the range of people we interact with on a day to day basis via phone, email, social networking, etc. may span many countries and continents, while the extent of our travel over the same period of time may only span a few square miles. I also hope to address one of the criticisms of the “death of distance” theory – that it addresses only those of us lucky to have access to IT. Such theories have no bearing whatsoever for the billions who have no access to IT in their daily lives – the majority of the earth’s population. Data from such individuals in my project will be difficult to obtain due to the obvious aforementioned reasons, but I feel as though having even one or two examples will illustrate my point. One of the exciting aspects of this project is that based on how the questionnaire is structured, it can allow for further exploration into a variety of directions, such as analysis of the data based on location of the participant, their modes of communication, time of day, etc. At this point, I am using Python and the Google Maps API to create maps for each individual, with the intended modes of dissemination being through a website and an interactive display in a gallery space. Due to fascinating and incredibly pertinent subject and the variety of ways in which the project can be expanded upon, I definitely intend to pursue it beyond this semester and possibly as a springboard for my thesis.

http://a.parsons.edu/~dasga383/week2.ppt

A slime draws near!

And this is why I purposely don't stay current with computer games:

If playing the original Fallout can keep me up until 4am (when I have class at 9am), I don't even want to think about what Fallout 3 would do to my sleeping schedule. Likewise, if playing the Realm (one of the first MMORPG's ever) could become as dangerously addictive for me in 2005 while still looking like this:



then I have no business ever going anywhere near anything as pretty as this (Age of Conan):




But either way, I definitely need to see if I can find a Dragonwarrior emulator for my iPhone.

Beautiful Soup is a cruel mistress

So I came upon a much-lauded Python HTML/XML parser named Beautiful Soup that is "designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping". Perfect for my project, right? Probably, except that I'm a complete novice at Python and am having extreme difficulty wading through the documentation about the module, despite how extensive and detailed it is. Ironically, the interweb is a very small place and it just so happens that the creator of Beautiful Soup is my friend Sumana's husband, so if need be I suppose I could make a personal plea for help (albeit at the risk of revealing my total ignorance and losing their respect forever).

Behold, the result of hours of trying to fiddle with Beautiful Soup:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
page = urllib2.urlopen("http://icasualties.org/oif/USDeaths.aspx")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
for para in soup('p'):
print para
print

D'oh.