A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Claire Zulkey, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $5.50 get yours!

Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle.

The design exploits the bokeh effect, a photographic term referring to the æsthetic quality of point-of-light sources in an out-of-focus area of an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field.
There are two types of Bokodes described in the paper, active tags than use a LED to light the Bokode pattern from behind, and passive tags that replace the LED behind the Bokode pattern with a retro-reflector and use the camera Flash as the illumination source.

The system is targeted for consumer applications, collaborative interfaces, and augmented reality mapping applications. You can read full copy of the paper describing the technology behind it.

Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

Click! is an exhibition in three consecutive parts. It begins with an open call—artists are asked to electronically submit a work of photography that responds to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” along with an artist statement.
After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opens for audience evaluation of all submissions; as in other juried exhibitions, all works will be anonymous. As part of the evaluation, each visitor answers a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise.

Click! culminates in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks are installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process. Visitors will also be able to see how different groups within the crowd evaluated the same works of art. The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.

The exhibition is organized by Shelley Bernstein, Manager of Information Systems, Brooklyn Museum.

I came across this today, hardly news as it is an exhibition from 2008. I love the idea of a crowsourced exhibition, even today this is still exploratory territory, perhaps what I like the most is how the idea has been turned on its head and the public jury was also asked to evaluate or at least state their own level of expertise in the subject. This self-assessment had an impact on how the vote was weighted in the ranking process.

The exhibition website documents the show well, providing tools to explore the process and results of the process.

London Nearest Tube and New York Nearest Subway developed by acrossair, are augmented reality apps that overlay information on top of a real-world view displaying transport information. The application uses the new iPhone internal compass to tell you which stations are in the direction you are pointing the phone to.

TwittARound – an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS, that shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. I can’t wait to see the new wave of applications that will come out of the combination of GPS + compass on the new iPhone.
developer website via TechCrunch

If you wanted to research something—the musician Johnny Cash, for example—would you go to a search engine or a library? There are many studies on search usage. It’s safe to say that at least 50% of people now turn to search engines for information.

findings on searcher behavior helps us to understand why search engines are trying to find new ways to come up with automated search assistance systems, recommendations and query reformulation assistance, such as “Did you mean…”

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is labeled as a “new Decision Engine”. Its technology hopes to help searchers make more informed decisions by being more intuitive. How is Bing reading our minds? They studied how people use the Web.

Success in search engines was never quantity of pages vs. quality. It still is not. Rather, search engine market success is keenly tied to understanding user behavior and this is becoming more and more obvious every day.

The Just Behave column looks into searcher behavior and how search engines constantly tweak their operations to improve user experience. It discusses recent research, searcher behavior stats and future trends such as personalization and more

The article provides a broad introduction and background on user behavior and search engines, interestingly recommendation engines and collective intelligence are barely mentioned on the article. A very direct relation to my work on HINTeractions and the development of value added services based on behavioural data in space.

Johnson-Laird inspired comic “Vagueness is a solution rather than a problem.” P.N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models, 1983.
via Beyond the Beyond

Great project by Jeffrey Warren from MIT Design Ecology group. Cartagen draws maps dynamically on the client side, maps are drawn dynamically as opposed to downloading tiles for every zoom level as most other mapping applications work nowadays. This means a huge improvement in flexibility and data speeds for mapping applications, only layers of data to be displayed are downloaded.

Vector mapping is done in native HTML 5, which runs on the iPhone and the Android platforms. The styling of Maps is done using GSS: geo style sheets.

Just like CSS for styling web pages, GSS is a specification for designing maps. Adapted for dynamic data sources, GSS can define changing geographic elements, display multiple datasets, and even respond to contextual tags like “condition:poor”.

In addition to the technological advantages it provides an API for String-based geocoding making “semantic geocoding” available to a huge range of devices that rely on GPS networks.

String-based geocoding (i.e. “map Bhagalpur, India”) allows users to produce their own maps from in the field with only a basic cell phone. This widens participation to 4 billion cell phone users worldwide, as well as to rural regions outside the reach of the internet. Geographic mapping with text messages has applications in disaster response and health care.