Code Creating Culture
There’s an incredible project out there that takes a floppy drive and turns it into a turntable. Definately not a project for the weak but apparently the floppy drive makes an incredible motor for this sort of thing – the ball bearings are high quality and the computer power face makes hacking easy.
They are currently suffering from the slashdot effect but a link to the pdf describing the hack is available for download.
Facade, a ‘game’ developed by several ivory tower types is quite possibly the best AI developed anywhere, anytime.
These are the things that I saw the game doing:
* Natural language parsing and conversational interaction. It has been a long time since typing English on a keyboard was the standard way of interacting with a computer game. Even when it was, what you typed were usually simple commands like GO NORTH and TAKE FLASHLIGHT. Façade accepts English input and tries to interpret it as a meaningful part of an ordinary human conversation. This is a gigantic challenge.
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* Natural language generation. Video games often sound stilted because their dialog is written as whole sentences, or long soliloquies by one character. Façade doesn’t make this error. Trip and Grace’s conversation is full of hesitations, sentence fragments and interruptions; it sounds like real people talking, not spoken exposition. Facade produces pre-recorded utterances based on an internal mechanism, but it’s not assembling individual words to create new sentences from scratch. Rather, it’s choosing a line of dialog that’s most appropriate for the current situation.
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* Emotional modeling. The Sims’ emotional modeling is based on needs (food, sleep, and so on) plus some attributes that govern a character’s affinity for another character (neatness, outgoingness, and so on). Because The Sims has to handle any character the player can create, it naturally needs a general mechanism for emotional relations, which consequently produces somewhat general results. Façade, on the other hand, is about two people who already know each other. Their relations are influenced by English-language sentences that they speak to each other, and by those spoken to them by a third party, you. Your physical actions, such as touching or walking away, also affect both Trip and Grace’s emotions.
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* Facial expressions. Façade uses flat-shaded 3D graphics, so no matter at what angle you see Trip and Grace, they look like very simple comic-book characters. However, their eyes, eyebrows, and lips are outlined in sharp detail, so you can see them clearly even from across the room. They reflect the character’s feelings with some precision.
Read on for more. I still have to try this out for myself and see just how close we are to reaching something that could pass a Turing Test. But it is downloaded and just waiting for me on the other machine…
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First there was Time-Shifting television. This is where people would get their personal video recorders (PVR’s like Tivo or Myth TV) that would allow them to watch TV any time they wanted. They were able to shift television content to a time that was convient for them.
Now comes place-shifting. A device called Slingbox allows people to shift their television content to a place convient for them.
I have been testing the Slingbox at home, in my office and on the road. In my tests, it worked exactly as advertised. At my office, about a dozen miles from home, I watched recorded episodes of “Charlie Rose” and “Desperate Housewives.” At an airport, I watched CNBC live on my laptop via a public Wi-Fi connection. And in a Boston hotel room, about 450 miles from home, I watched a live Washington Nationals baseball game unavailable in Red Sox country.
Sweet. Now if the networks would just stream directly over the internet and cut-out the middlemen they might be able to get a piece of the cut.
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What happens when you combine a Sony Walkman (the tape kind), a Game Boy, and a solder iron? Magic.
Master chip musician Gijs Gieskes has outdone himself this time: his second Walkman tape sequencer controls the Game Boy music cartridge LSDJ via various knobs and circuitry.
Bravo!
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I know there are some fans of Douglass Rushkoff out there. He’s teaching a course at NYU this fall that sounds incredible:
his seminar will explore influence techniques from print, graphics, traditional media and social reality as they migrate to the interactive space. We will first study the fundamentals of persuasion, influence, and coercion, and then look at how they have been adapted for use in interactive contexts. These will include email, the web, and cell phones, as well as integrated marketing, “one-to-one” communication, viral media, hacktivism and neuromarketing. We will study a broad range of applications, from simple marketing through online trading, political campaigns, activism, and satire, and discuss the relative ethics of using the same techniques for different purposes.
Sounds neat – I wonder if NYU has an affordable distance learning plan? 
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There’s a lot of people up in arms over video game violence. Although one has to wonder – if the games we are playing are more violent why are crime levels at an all time low?
Something must be missing. That first graph is the overall violent crime rate, and we’re talking about youth violence here. So I found the data sorted by age, and it turns out that through 2002, youth homicide actually dropped across the board, the only increase being among adults. If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, “Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.”
The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever.
Something to think about. Its just a game. What’s next, a ban on football?
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Have you been following the rash of recent online mapping news? First Google released their version of maps, then added satellite imaging, then released Google earth. Now MSN is in with their own mapping solution.
It is amazing to me. For years all we had was MapQuest and everybody assumed that it was enough. Then along comes a few fresh ideas and suddenly its exciting again.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all hoping developers will create applications to run on top of their mapping platforms to attract more consumers. Google and Yahoo said they were opening up their application programming interfaces to that end, but so far Google has wooed the most code tinkerers.
The search providers are in a heated battle for the hearts and minds of the millions of Web surfers who log onto the Internet each day. Localized search is a particularly intense area of competition, with the companies racing to outdo each other in offering the slickest way to find places of interest that are nearby.
Nice. Builders rejoice! 
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Apparently Sony has woken up by all the hack work going on. Having a platform made by yourself instead of Johnny-13-year-old saves some corporate face.
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) will release a system software update for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) next week that will add several new functions to the handheld gaming device, including the ability to browse the Internet and download TV programs, the company said Thursday.
Chief among the additions to version 2.0 of the software will be a Web browser. Accessible from the PSPÂ’s main menu, the browser supports HTML 4.01 and will allow access to most Web sites.
Have you noticed how new Sony movie releases now say ‘Avaialble Tuesday on DVD and PSP’? I think I might like to pick one of these things up just for the ‘extra’ stuff – web browser, document viewer (all the pdf sci-fi novels I’ve got backed up), tv watcher, etc.
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The technology that was supposed to make us better consumers has also lead to us being better producers. A recent BBC article describes how iPod users are using the device in full fledged remix slams:
The pair hit upon the idea of encouraging friends to bring their MP3 players to their local bar in London and give everyone the chance of being a DJ for the night.
“The concept was that this was something anyone could. Music and DJ-ing are very elitist.
‘Share music’
Mr Gower said: “We wanted everybody to get involved, play music to each other and essentially share music. It wouldn’t be about just the DJ playing to the crowd.”
Mr Panjwani added: “It is the crowd playing to the crowd. We started doing it and people started really liking it.”
Fun fun.
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Never heard of MIA? Chances are that if you follow hip-hop you probably have. She is, quite possibly, the first Internet artist to go big completely without the help of radio play, the major labels, or the convential CD distribution system. In a recent interview the questions are pretty soft but there are a few nuggets there:
HOLMES: What do you think… and I guess you’re approaching this more from the art angle than the political action angle… but if people out there want to do things to take music back from corporations, what do you think they should do?
M.I.A.: …I think the only way you can do it is to support songs that are not big on the radio, but to still give that artist alternative ways they can exist. Because that’s really it, you know, the thing is, you can file share and you can bootleg and you can download, but then you have to make the artist survive, long enough that they can sustain themselves, so how do you make someone susain themselves and…feed them, basically. I mean one of thie things is artists are going to have to kind of be humble in what they want, and not start wearing the million pound f*cking diamond necklace around their neck because they don’t need it, you know, and the people have to compromise and be like, o.k., you might not buy the album but you go and see a show, so you keep the… ability for the artist to go out.
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