randomosity

Naru Shiode from the University at Buffalo gave a spellbinding presentation on spatial-temporal analysis at the Centre for Spatial Analysis (CSpA) on Friday. Shiode is trained as architect and urban planner and finds himself in the Geography department at Buffalo. He has been associated with projects such as Digital Egypt and the Virtual Ryoanji projects exploring ancient historical reconstruction as well as time-based recremorphing. His current project is the 3D Buffalo project which allows a user to interact via a chronoslider that triggers time points for each building within a multi-block area surrounding downtown Buffalo. This project is only in its early stages, but the potential for historical analysis is tremendously promising.

Read the complete article… »

Geoffrey Reaume from York and University of Toronto gave a fascinating talk in the History of Health and Medicine Lunchtime Seminar Series today. “From Activists to Archivists: Documenting Mad People’s History Since the 1970s,” explored both the formation of psychiatric survivors organizations from the 1970s as well as the collection of artifacts allowing for study of these movements.
His talk reminded us of Allen Markman in NY, Kenneth Donaldson in Portland then more directly of local personalities such as Mel Starkman and Don Weitz. Reaume’s talk provided me with a wonderful exposure to the more human side of the mental health world and also put it into the context of other groups within society that battle with naming conventions. Very poignantly, Reaume also exposed the tremendously contentious area of attempting to remember the past when treatment has often been undertaken to eliminate such remembrances.
Reaume is currently engaged in two ongoing attempts to ensure that those that have been participants (willingly or unwillingly) in Toronto asylums past are not forgotten. The walls of the old Queen Street Asylum have been the site of local development over the past decade.
Read the complete article… »

When is a tool, not a tool? Apparently when it is a quasi-tool or a proto-tool. A tool provides functionless functionality.
These were a couple of the epigramatics Barry Allen shared during a talk on technology, culture and civilization.¹
I could not possibly do justice to philosophical reflections on the nature of a tool, so I stop there on the philosophical and refer you to my footnote, but as an economist I was particularly drawn into his discussion of the progression from first to second order machines. First order being ‘devices that extend human capacities by exploiting a mechanical advantage’ and second-order featuring ‘an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to produce a multiplying effect.’ This form of organization seemed to dovetail with a similar discussion that Allen raised about our ability to effectively fix prices, but our seeming imability to determine the true cost of a tool.
Read the complete article… »

1. Quasi-tools as I understand are objects used by beings without conscious or intelligent awareness that the object provides any particular function. Innate use of a pebble by a wasp to block the entrance to a birth chamber for example. In contrast, a proto-tool, is consciously chosen for use, but has not be fashioned to perform that function, lacking deliberate design to enable that function. A ‘tool’ per se shares two descriptive aspects: that its function is manifold and not limited by purpose, instead extended by technique to form cultural technology. Secondly, the tool is an artifact that lacks definition without having a place within an economy - that is, it has been previously linked to others in an economy of socially complimentary action (design, manufacture, sale, license, etc.) when we engage with it. [↩]

What a treat! I had had the honour of meeting and spending the last two days chatting with Fernanda Viégas from the Visual Communications Lab. Her work has been and continues to be inspirational for me personally and to the information visualisation community more substantially. She presented a tantalizing talk at the Social Network/ing conference at OISE/UofT. ‘Visualizing and Analyzing Social Networks’ quickly demonstrated a small facet of Many Eyes to a new audience and gave us a sneak preview of a new tool soon to be available through ManyEyes called PivotGraph. The logic of the PivotGraph is one of those ah-ha moments - it makes all the sense in the world, but leave it to Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg to visualize the problem, and come up with a brilliant way to solve it. Consider that social networks have traditionally been visualized in two ways: the node-link map and the matrix. The common to node-link method is very intuitive, but also becomes quickly cluttered and loses visualization value as the scale of the network being mapped grows. The second is the representative matrix, which scales very well, but sacrifices intuition for clarity. Realizing that there had to be a way of combining the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses, the PivotGraph hybridize these two forms using a collapsible node-link metaphor that, interactively aggregates like nodes and allows for focus on individual vectors. It’s nothing short of amazing to see in action!
Read the complete article… »

Avi Goldfarb presented a fast, concise and effective discussion of what conclusions could be drawn about multi-institutional collaboration between US universities during the era of BitNET adoption, 1981 - 1990. A bit of internet history, my ears perked up immediately. His more general framing question: How do changes in collabouration cost change how we produce knowledge.
His study examined 270 institutions as they connected to the BiTNET during this period and cross-indexed this with the number of coauthored journal articles subsequently produced. Goldfarb’s paper ‘Restructuring Research: Communication Costs and the Democratization of University Innovation’ concludes that collaboration was enhanced, but that the gain to institutions was not uniformly realized and physical distance between collabourators remained a factor.
Read the complete article… »

Despite technical difficulties (presenter’s worst nightmare - LCD projector bulb burnout), Steve Easterbrook demonstrated the usefulness of comparing software structures to social networks of developers to measure operational effectiveness. His well argued and logical presentation ‘Increasing Shared Understanding in Software Teams through Informal Knowledge Transfer Networks’ extended Conway’s Law to social network analysis. This technique of measuring socio-technical congruence is especially valuable in larger scale development projects, where it is probably less obvious about whether a development process is functioning effectivelly. By mining the data rich environment of communication and revision logs, it is possible to generate a social network map of developer interaction that can be connected to a software development schematic to determine Socio-Technical congruence.
Read the complete article… »

Social Network/ing Week at the University of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fascinating keynote by Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg. ‘The Geography of Social and Information Networks,’ was one of the most fascinating applied mathematical lectures I can say to having ever attended (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approachable for a layperson such as myself). His introducer indicated that he invented algorithmic sociology and although this sounded rather presumptuous (an Al Gore and the Internet sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite willing to give this some credence after listening to this presentation.
Kleinberg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emergence of cyberspace and the world wide web was like the discovery of a new continent.” Kleinberg was quite deliberate in this juxtaposition of the geographic with the technological and he then teased this into a further merge with the social. But he questioned whether maps are actually an appropriate metaphor for something as aphysical as social networks - but chose to let this stand on the need to have some common vocabulary with which to be able to relate.
Read the complete article… »

Information Aesthetics, a consistently clickable and notable blog, has Fernanda Viégas reporting back from the InfoVis Conference in Sacremento this week. She has posted a geat summary of the keynote address by Matthew Ericson. Brent Fitzgerald blogged yesterday about the panel that he, Fernanda, Martin Wattenberg and Hans Rosling are presenting as well. Taking a look at the conference programme, I could not but wish I was there. Thanks for Fernanda (and hopefully Brent) for giving us an experience as close to being there as possible.

By the way, today is the day of Fig, 7 Brumaire, An CCXVI.

Update: Something local and exciting: Social Networking Week at the University of Toronto. Fernanda is speaking on Friday.

The Wilson Centre for Canadian History was privileged to have John H Thompson speak today on “Managing in the Bush Leagues: The Canada-US Relationship since 2001.” Thompson’s lively talk was marked by his personal reflections on what it’s like to be an advising Canadian, one who has moved permanently to the US and on his perspective as a student of United States - Canadian relations from one living in the heart of the beast.
His pithy presentation was enfragranced with a number of well chosen editorial cartoons from both Canadian and American papers and by a couple of rather loaded quotations. His talk was loosely framed by an exploration of the relationship between countries during the presidency of George W Bush, and introduced by a short retrospective of relations between Canadian Prime Ministers and Presidents from Mackenzie King.
Read the complete article… »

The History of Health and Medicine Seminar series continued today with a rather provocative paper by Dr. Ann Herring and Stacey Lockerbie. “The Coming Plague: Global panic, local repercussions and avian influenza,” contends that globalization and spread of information has preceded the potential epidemic with outcomes that alarm potentially unduly and have enormous local economic and social impact.
Herring is well known for her work on the history of infectious disease and very specifically on its impact on native populations. Lockerbie work involves the transition of aquaculture in central Vietnam from local to a global commodity. Their work coincides as a result of Lockerbie’s first-hand experience in Vietnam with the impact of poultry culls and the movement towards larger state-controlled factory operations as the government (over)reacted to the bird flu.
Read the complete article… »