The convergence of communication and multi-media platforms has enabled a key capability: mobility tracking via GPS. Business plans of most major cellular phone manufacturers such as Nokia include embedding GPS in all manufactured cell phones within less than 18 months. Thus, a high penetration rate of GPS-equipped travelers on freeways is expected in the near future. This has major implications for the traffic engineering community, which currently monitors traffic using mostly fixed sensors such as cameras and loop detectors, or location specific sensors such as FasTrak or EZ-pass transponders.

Soon, using universally available equipped cell phones, a new category of location-based services will become possible: multi-modal travel time estimation for commuters using bikes, busses, cars, or trains; itinerary advisories for navigation; geolocalization and context aware applications for social networks; cell phone based monitoring applications for epidemiology in developing countries.

Mobile Century: Using GPS Mobile Phones as Traffic Sensors | CITRIS

What factors should influence the design of a complex system? And what is the impact of choices on both product and organizational performance? These issues are of particular importance in the field of software given how software is developed: Rarely do software projects start from scratch. The authors analyzed the evolution of a commercial software product from first release to its current design, looking specifically at 6 major versions released at varying periods over a 15-year period. These results have important implications for managers, highlighting the impact of design decisions made today on both the evolution and the maintainability of a design in subsequent years. Key concepts include:

* Data show strong support for the existence of a relationship between component modularity and design evolution.
* Tightly coupled components have a higher probability of survival as a design evolves compared with loosely coupled components.
* Tightly coupled components are also harder to augment, in that the mix of new components added in each version is significantly more modular than the legacy design.

The Impact of Component Modularity on Design Evolution: Evidence from the Software Industry

John Markoff:

Cisco Systems plans on Monday to introduce a network switch for corporations grappling with rapidly growing Internet data transfers and the increased use of applications that draw on remote data storage, known as cloud computing.

The switch, called the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.

Cisco has made a significant bet on the rapidly expanding data demands of the consumer Internet. Its Nexus system, which will eventually replace a product line that represents about a third of its $35 billion business, has required roughly $1 billion in research and development costs and the efforts of more than 500 engineers in the last four years, the company said.

Cisco sees the market for the product as corporate computing operations and Internet service providers now struggling to keep up with the torrent of data being produced by a broad range of new online services including movie downloads and Internet video games.

Industry analysts said the system is likely to have a notable impact on the way companies design data centers, and represents the possible dominance of a new version of the Ethernet networking standard that Cisco is designing to handle torrents of digital data.

It's interesting to see Cisco playing up the backplane capacity angle. In practice this is not (only) what providers are really "grappling" with.

Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data

According to futurologist theory, major cities will soon cease growth as technology improves the quality of life and space regulation is improved. This, according to University of Southern California communication professor Manuel Castells, is not only wrong, but it is also contrary to his prediction that cities will soon expand into large metropolitan regions that will connect in many different ways. Castells visited UC Irvine’s University Club on Thursday, Jan. 24 to talk about the evolution of cities and the concept of “urban” today.

Castells holds joint appointments with sociology, international relation, and policy, planning and development at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. He is one of the world’s most highly cited social science and communications scholars in the world. At the behest of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design, Castells gave a presentation on what he believes is the natural progression of the urban world.

According to Castells, the world is becoming a network society, where different networks of interests criss-cross the globe. Studying individual societies is pointless because of the interconnections between nations. These networks meet in giant metropolitan nodes, typically surrounding major cities. They connect the various populations of the world, but there are some who are disconnected and isolated. Those regions not advanced enough to participate or involve themselves in these networks are cut off from the global society of networks. The regions that are cut off are usually too poor or technologically behind to keep up.

“We have shifted from exploitation to something much worse: irrelevance,” Castells said. “At least exploited people can fight. The irrelevant are ignored.”

Spread Technology, Strengthen Networks

Piximilar is software that searches through large digital image collections, without using keywords or metadata, to instantly find visually similar images.

Visual similarity search allows image seekers to find images that share visual characteristics such as colour, shape and texture.

Piximilar leverages the value of any existing image collection, by providing more search options and a clear advantage to image seekers.

Whether used on its own, or in combination with keywords, Piximilar increases the likelihood that image-seekers will find the right image.

Piximilar is easily integrated with any multi-million image collection, archive or website.

Piximilar

We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.

Multicolr Search Lab

WebPath, my experimental XPath 2.0 engine in Python is now an open source project with a liberal BSD license. I originally developed this during a Yahoo! Hack Day, and now I get to announce it during another Hack Day. Seems appropriate.

The focus of WebPath was rapid development and providing an experimental platform. There remains tons of potential work left to do on it…watch this space for continued discussion. I’d like to call out special thanks to the Yahoo! management for supporting me on this, and to Douglas Crockford for turning me on to Top Down Operator Precedence parsers. Have a look at the code. You might be pleasantly surprised at how small and simple a basic XPath 2 engine can be. So, who’s up for some XPath hacking?

WebPath wants to be free (BSD licensed, specifically)

The open biohacking kit project contains information on important protocols in genetic engineering, stem cell research, microbiology and other fields of related interest. Additionally, the archive file -- ready for immediate distribution and diffusion -- contains numerous articles and designs for cheap DIY hardware such as incubators, centrifuges, oligonucleotide machines, microarray chip schematics, and so on. An integral part of the entire package is a cached copy of the BioBrick Foundation and synbio websites, such as OpenWetWare and the Parts Registry -- some may know about these groups from the International Genetically Engineered Machine competitions. Short introductory files are also being included regarding methods of artificial gene synthesis, using online bioinformatics databases, transfections, running ecoli farms, synthetic biology (synbio), ES cell harvesting procedures, quick "where to buy" guides, and one-page documents introducing newbies into the arts.

Open Biohacking Project/Kit

Imagine a one-eyed animal with depth perception.

We consider the task of 3-d depth estimation from a single still image. Depth estimation is a challenging problem, since local features alone are insufficient to estimate depth at a point, and one needs to consider the global context of the image. Our model uses a hierarchical, multi-scale Markov Random Field (MRF) that incorporates multiscale local- and global-image features, and models the depths and the relation between depths at different points in the image.

We show that, even on unstructured scenes (of indoor and outdoor environments which include forests, trees, buildings, etc.), our algorithm is frequently able to recover fairly accurate depthmaps. We further propose a model that incorporates both monocular cues and stereo (triangulation) cues, to obtain significantly more accurate depth estimates than is possible using either monocular or stereo cues alone.

Learning Depth from Single Monocular Images

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

You hear a lot of griping about the decline of critical thinking, but "view rather than read" is an interesting and apt criticism. As McLuhan might argue, it has more to do with the medium than the individuals in question. Interactivity and deep reflection are inversely correlated.

Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth