The del.icio.us subscriptions network visualization is really impressive. This is what mine looks like!

Once you get past the clunky interface you’ll quickly start stumbling onto information you’d never seen before. For example, I’d seen posts tagged sharing_economy before but it was only once I’d seen the who and what was connected to it that I thought to check it out.

And I’m really glad I did because I discovered a link to a Sunday Times article about a local community exchange project.

The Talent Exchange is a community-based trading system using a ‘money’ other than our familiar national one—an alternative money system if you like. There are many similar trading systems around the world, commonly know as Community Exchange Systems (CES) or Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS).

I’ve been reading about these for a while now but never realised that it’s been happening right under my nose all along. One of the reasons these community exchange projects are so interesting is because of the, almost symbiotic relationship they have with technology.

Building a Sense of Community: The increasingly transient, temporary and mobile lifestyle in the world today has seriously damaged our sense of belonging to a meaningful community. Because a community currency builds local relationships it is a powerful means of regenerating a sense of trust among members, a necessary component to the health of any community. As communities become more self-aware and self-reliant through the use of a community currency, isolation, fear and loneliness diminishes and everyone benefits.

Technology is not solely responsible for the decline in community, it’s merely a tool we ourselves have made, a tool which we’ve put to use to serve our own invidual gain. It’s good to see it being put to use for the community again.

All of this sounds like the relationships between shipwrecks and coral reefs

Red Sea researchers have found several shipwrecks have become thriving coral communities. These artificial reefs attract divers, easing human pressure on natural reefs.

“Coral reefs all around the world are experiencing substantial decline, partly due to human activities,” says marine biology professor Yehuda Benayahu, who is studying how artificial reefs become part of the natural environment in the Red Sea. The University of Tel Aviv project is supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

The project is looking at how coral reef communities around ten Red Sea wrecks serve as models of artificial reefs. Benayahu is comparing the artificial reefs with adjacent natural reefs in the area.

“With time, the shipwreck becomes part of the natural environment,” he says.

He hopes the study will provide information for future artificial reef projects aimed at the restoration and conservation of their natural counterparts.

These artifical social networks, aided by technology, could become the ’shipwrecks’ that help restore our natural networks.

Ok, Donnie Darko references aside, these guys believe.

Morlocks aside, how would YOU like to visit, even live hundreds of years in the future? There may be a way, and that is the purpose of The Time Travel Fund(tm).

Q: How does this work?
A: Current scientific theory states that Time Travel may be possible, however the technology is a long way off, perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Now, assume it does become possible in say, 500 years. As with any technology, Time Travel will get less expensive as time goes on. Just as the price of a VCR has dropped to less than $70 from the several hundred dollars it cost just ten years ago, Time Travel, once it becomes feasible, will initially be very expensive yet it will become more and more economical as time goes by.

Q: How does this help me?
A: The concept is that one day, it may be possible for people living far in the future to retrieve you from your current frame of reference (their past - your present) and bring you into the future (their present - your future.)

Q: Why would they want to?
A: That is the purpose of the fund. The simple answer is, we pay them to bring you into the future.

So who wants to buy me a ticket to the future?

The Guardian has a great article about effect technology has had on our idea of personal space.

… inserted firmly in both his ears were the distinctive white buds of iPod headphones. He had been walking peacefully, wrapped in a portable, personal bubble of sound. Physically, he was out in the open air. Birds were singing. The sun shone and the wind sighed in the trees. But he might as well have have been in a soundproofed basement. He was the living, breathing embodiment of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.

We take this kinda scene for grant these days and the writer probably would have too but he’d recently just seen The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon .

What grabbed me most were the urban scenes. They show a world that had not yet been dominated by the motor car nor homogenised by the bland standardisation of retail chains. What’s most striking, though, is not that the streets seem perpetually thronged with people - hardly surprising when you consider what living conditions were like for poorer people - but the extent to which they interact with one another when they’re out and about.

Men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners. The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others.

It’s not clear when all of this changed, but my guess is that technology - in the shape of the Sony Walkman - had a lot to do with it. As the Walkman de nos jours , the iPod is simply continuing what Sony started. But not even Sony could have single-handedly destroyed the notion of social space. The coup de grce was administered by another piece of technology: the mobile phone.

We haven’t really begun to explore the social significance of mobile telephony, but already some things are becoming clear. The first is that the technology provides some people with an opportunity - perhaps even an imperative - to ignore the fact that they are in a public space. This is shown by the readiness with which they enter into phone conversations that in earlier days would be seen as requiring privacy

It’s true that technology has, while connecting us with some, disconnected us from our physical surroundings. But location aware technology is looking to reverse that trend and wants to reconnect us to our physical space. The only thing to be weary of is that that will still be a mediated interaction, a bubble with view. Bursting the bubble might mean simply turning all the gadgets off and going for a walk.

Backseat Playground: So you’re sitting in the back seat of a car staring out of the window - imagine that the world moving past you is a vast game engine - the objects, places and people around you are all part of an intertwining series of episodes that make up an ongoing game plot…

Background Introduction
Future mobile technology will provide more services that exploit the benefits of mobile life. Today and in the foreseeable future, travelling by car is for many families an important part of their mobile life. It is a largely mundane activity involving daily commuting, trips to the weekend house or longer journeys when going on vacation. Children travelling in the car often engage in different means of amusement in order to pass the time. They might read, talk or play mobile games. But current mobile games are often portable versions of classic computer games where the focus is on the interface and screen. Thus, gaming becomes a complete alternative that does not draw on the positive aspects of being on the road. This form of traditional computer game rather obscures the highway experience, than exploiting the journey for fun, exploration, play and creativity

This is a really cool idea! It differs from most other location based projects by not being bound to a fixed location. Most location based projects so far concentrate presenting you informatiom based on where you are. Presenting information to a moving target is a whole other kettle of fish, both technically and content-wise.

This kind of technology could be of value to a driver as well. It would be great to able to get traffic reports and news relevant to where you are on your way in to work for example.

via Anne Galloway

Have you ever wondered what the strangers you pass every day are thinking? The Thought Project, is just that. A collection of random strangers and their thoughts.

Wessels said with dry, hot and windy conditions predicted for the weekend, Capetonians should exercise “great caution and absolute awareness” when doing anything that could cause fires, and not use open fires or carelessly discard cigarette butts.

illustration by adrian johnson

It’s been so hot here. Cape Town is in the middle of the worst drought in years. Many famers have seen entire harvests destroyed. Forests have gone up in flames. I can’t sleep in this heat.

Some rain would be nice.

Last.fm’s most recent stroke of genius.

I remember having read a review somewhere which described the album as having an “intangible dopeness”. This is precisely right. I’m not completely sure what it is about this album that makes it so great; and that’s precisely what makes it so great. As soon as the greatness of something becomes tangible, understandable, it seems to vanish into thin air. It’s like discovering how a magic trick works. As soon as the secret is revealed, the mystery and sense of awe, instantly disappear. Thankfully, the greatness of the album is definitely there, but wrapped in a thick layer of secrecy which has thus far, for me, been impenetrable.

Seven Ark, from South African electronica label Unit.r Recordings, is doing really well these days. I saw him perform live a few weeks ago and he completely did my head in with some of the best music I’ve heard in ages.

If you’re into electronica of any kind you then you should really check him out. He’s got an album coming out on Metamatics (which releases artists like Apparat) and a release on the next Detroit Underground compilation (which has seen the likes of like Richard Devineand Apparat on previous releases). There’s something due to come out at Colony Productions as well.

These should all available at Warp Mart (I think) so keep an eye out and snap them up as soon as you can!

WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

Wordnet is a database that comes with a query command line interface as well as a comprehensive collection of local interfaces. The python interface has been used by Trapdoor to create DrawBot (Mac only unfortunately) which is a Processing-like, but Python based, IDE. The output is simply amazing!

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents right out-of-the-box (without additional statistical training)

ConceptNet is written completely in Python. The site has a flash demo on that demonstates it’s functionatily.

It’s not as pretty as DrawBot but the application itself seems a whole lot more accesable. WordNet is an academic tool where ConceptNet looks to give you more human feedback.

I’ll be playing with them over the next few days to see what they’re like.

I’ve never really been a pop music fan and this article gets into some of the reasons why:

The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can “predict” the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years’ worth of Billboard hit singles - 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

Come on! What happened to good music for good music’s sake? Something about this makes me cringe. Pop music is so driven by sales and marketing that it makes me sick. That’s why pop music is so disposable; it has no substance whatsoever, every song sounds a whole lot like the last one. Pop music is what it would be like to be stuck in a Groundhog Day.

Last.fm introduced me to Seefeel a few days ago. Its some sort of ambient dub electronica backed by sweet haunting vocals. So I went out and got the album last night and I just can’t stop listening too it. What’s truly incredible about the album though is that it’s 10 years old! Show me a pop album with that kind of longevity.

HSS’s crucial design flaw is that it can only look at the past. Those “leftfield”, illogical and grassroots-inspired departures from the norm, such as disco or drum and bass, could not have been predicted - but they shift the mainstream and provide the momentum any culture needs to remain fresh.

I’ll stick to my departures from the norm thank you. What’s really scary / sad is that they’re planning on using this at radio stations by letting the software pick the playlists. It’s bad enough that dj’s have to play their shows from a playlist, now that list is being choosen by a machine. What next?

Sounds to me like a software future is becoming a reality…