I got a Kobo Glo eBook reader some time ago. I find it quite awesome: With numerous public libraries in Paris and this device (together with sources of free books like FeedBooks, Baen Free Library or less authoritative sources), it is hard to think I will ever buy another physical book again.
The SPA Unified Network (Spaun) model demonstrates how a wide variety of cognitive and non-cognitive tasks can be integrated in a single large-scale, spiking neuron model. Spaun switches tasks and provides all responses without any manual change in parameters from a programmer. Essentially, it is a fixed model that integrates perception, cognition, and action across several different tasks.
Impressive work! The singularity must be near… although it is not quite as fast as the brain yet: According to the website of the project, it takes about 2.5h of computer time for one second of simulation. Nengo, the software used to implement the brain model, is open source and is available here.
HAZUS-MASAS is not a magic incantation used by GIS wizards, just the name of an interesting project I was involved with (on the data engineering side of things) when I worked at Galdos Systems, back in Vancouver. I just saw CEO Ron Lake has written an article about it on the company’s blog. In short, the goal of the project was to enable the distribution of HAZUS files (created with a FEMA-provided ArcGIS plugin for the estimation of potential losses from natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods) through the Canadian Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS), used by emergency managers. Some of the UI was done with the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex (screenshot above): In the backend, it connected with INdicio (a CSW-ebRIM implementation), which provided metadata about indicators extracted from HAZUS files, as well as the contents of the indicators themselves, stored as KML documents.
For April 1st, Google has released Google Maps 8-bit for NES, along with the tongue-in-cheek promotional video above.
I learnt today that Stamen Design have released new map styles for Open Street Map data. I really like the watercolor one, as it is quite different from what is usually seen on web maps.
Urban Sound Ecology is a research initiative dedicated to exploring, examining, and understanding the sonic spaces of Canadian cities. At once an archive, database, and creative remapping of the city, Urban Sound Ecology is free to join and free to use. We invite interested participants to construct lines of inquiry into the aural landscape of Canadian cities by producing sequences of geo-referenced ‘soundwalks. (more)
SmartBird is an ultralight but powerful flight model with excellent aerodynamic qualities and extreme agility. With SmartBird, Festo has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds - one of the oldest dreams of humankind.
I recently bought a new Windows computer and, since there is no AppleScript on Windows, I have to do without the Doug’s scripts for ITunes that I used on Mac OS X to automate the management of my music library. But Apple has made available a COM API, that can be used by any language to script iTunes, as long as it supports COM. This includes Ruby MRI, with the Win32OLE package in the standard library. But I was curious about IronRuby, the .NET implementation of Ruby, which recently reached version 1.0 and therefore, I decided to reimplement with it some of the scripts I used the most.
Very cool 8-bit map of New York City. More details about this project can be found here.