Portent

Something a little different. You are shown image after image and have to rate them for life likeness, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is most like a face like and 0 isn’t anything like a face.

I suspect this is some variation of a genetic algorithm. This is a way of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t lend itself to normal computation by using a process akin to genetic selection. Interesting.

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Wikipedia is tremendous though occasionally it gets a bit of a mauling because of errors, quality etc. It has now over 2 million english language articles and by any criteria has been wildly successful.

However the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger decided that he wanted to go back to the roots and create a Wikipedia that was written purely by experts to guarantee the quality. According to Wikipedia (oh the irony!)

“The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring all contributors to do so with their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behaviours, and by providing what it calls “gentle expert oversight” of everyday contributors. A main feature of the project is its “approved articles”, which have each undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic-experts and are closed to real-time editing.”

In other words it’s closer to a traditional encyclopedia albeit online, possibly something like maybe Encarta. It has nearly 3,000 article since it launched in March 2007. More choice is a good thing!

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This is just a reminder that NaNoWriMo is back on again, growing year on year. I covered this last year in Portent so there’s not much to say except to mention the other stuff that is done by NaNoWriMo such as the encouragement of Young Writers- take a look at their programs.

Others have picked up their idea as well, well sort of- it’s much easier to read a novel in 30 days than write it- DefectiveYeti (Remember the Cliche rotation project) have done this with NaNoReMo 2007- where they’re reading Catch-22.

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Sometimes you see something so amazingly well done that you can’t but stare. This is one.

It’s a video, just over seven and a half minutes long of a couple of thousand dancers who are effectively human pixels. They have different colour clothes on I’d guess and turn to face the camera at pretty precise times. Through the seven and a half minutes they move about, change colour and act in a totally coordinated way. It must have taken months of setting up, choreographing and designing it. Amazing!

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Along with video sites, sites like digg, reddit and now Irin are very popular. Irin though is a little bit different as it’s about bloggers. Just like the other sites you can vote on stories.

The emphasis seems to reflect the blogosphere and Apple/Iphone are amongst the top stories. I noticed that thi site has been a little flaky, so if it’s not there have patience and try later.

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This is interesting. A research project to try and work out jokes that match your sense of humour. As they say “Jester uses a collaborative filtering algorithm called Eigentaste to recommend jokes to you based on your ratings of previous jokes.”

Of course I’m not sure quite how they classify humour or rate a joke for a match but the jokes provided I found above average so they must be doing something right.

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This is still in alpha so expect bugs, new features etc but it’s interesting. I love the name- it shows a bit of edginess as freebasing is a drugs term (not that I’m an expert!).

Put simply, it’s the web 2.0 Wikipedia. Using clever searching etc to enhance the user interface. I think Wikipedia is big enough to take competition and it might spur them on, although I love Wikipedia the interface is a little dull and searching is not great. Freebase uses its own API (Application Programming Interface) so users who are developers can create their own applications. This is what Facebook, Flickr etc (what is it with websites starting with the letter F?) do.

So an interesting one to watch. What will Wikipedia do in reaction? (If any).
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So if you get a high def video camera safely mounted in a protective Styrofoam box and attached to a balloon. There’s also a tracker in the box and a parachute to bring it down safely.

This is the 4th BEAR (Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio) and the first one with high def video. Would you travel to a foreign country (whose language you don’t speak) then buy a video camera and send it up aloft? That’s what the guy who provided the video camera did!

I love this sort of stuff; spirit of adventure etc. Sending a balloon up high will always lead to its demise because the air thins and eventually the gas inside has too high a pressure difference. The photo is from the Youtube video when the balloon burst; that’s what you can see! Fascinating Stuff!

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A confession. this is a collaboration between a friend of mine Andy and myself so I’m not going to mention it again after this. I do more of the technical stuff.

The wiki is for information about ship cruises around the world. Not uncoincidentally a bunch of us are doing a cruise next year. Nothing too formal, visiting a bunch of countries bordering the Mediterranean. If you know a bit about ships cruises join up and do your bit.

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This is not Am I Hot or Not but I guess more of an experiment. People upload photos of themselves and judge others. They get to answer 5 question from this list:
* What is my sexual orientation?
* What do you think my name is?
* How attractive am I?
* Do you think I would win a fight with a medium sized dog?
* How much do I weigh?
* What is my ethnicity?
* What is my relationship status?
* What is my political affiliation?
* How intoxicated am I?
* What gender am I?
* How trustworthy am I?
* How smart am I?
* How old am I?
* Describe me in one word.

The interesting part is that you choose 3 of these questions. Ie you can market research your looks! You can post three images to start with and one more per day. You can also earn the right to another bunch of questions such as Will I end up in rehab? or Have I had plastic surgery? and lots more by answering lots of questions.

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If you remember MyMiniCity, a site where each visitor generates a newcomer, well you can see from the photo that things aren’t going well there.

These stats speak for themself- 47% unemployment!

So anyway, if you click on the top picture and visit the employment site it’ll get the jobs up at portent999. Click the stats box and it’ll increase the population. Or you could just visit MyMinicity.com and have your own city.

This is just for fun btw, it doesn’t earn me any more, fame or glory!

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In the UK, the mapping of postcodes to latitude and longitude is controlled by the Post Office who charge you very large sums of money (like several thousand dollars a year) to use it , either commercially or for nion-commercial use. This is the PAF: the Postcode Address file.

Many British tax payers feel that as they paid for this data, they should not be charged for it. The USA for example doesn’t charge for Zip Code to Lat/long mapping. Hence the Free The PostCode campaign was setup. Volunteers use GPS systems to map postcodes to latitude and longitude. It’s been running several years though probably has a while to go until they catch up with the PAF’s 28 million entries 9each accurate to 100M).

Now a Liverpool,UK developer John McKerrell has created a free App to let UK iPhone owners map postcodes to latitude and longitude using their iphone and submit it to the campaign. Just install the App, run it and when accuracy drops below 100M submit it. Easy to use and you can even download the source code that John has published. If you have an iPhone and are visiting the UK, you can also help.

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This takes a few seconds so have patience! Spore is a newly launched game by veteran game designer Will Wright- famous for Sim City and of course the Sims.

Spore is his latest and possibly greatest game in which you sort of play God! Starting with a tiny single cell critter, you evolve it to a bigger critter then move into land, form a tribe conquer the world and then go into space. What makes it so compelling is that you get to select the path of evolution by choosing all sorts of legs, fins, flippers, tentacles; a massive collection of parts which the game is able to animate. that’s the really clever part. And it gets better- you can share your critter or use others and the Sporepedia (pictured) now have over 8.2 million.

Earlier today it had 8.1 million so that’s over 100,000 added today. As the game is being launched thats probably to be expected but still quite remarkable! I have ordered a copy of Spore so the Portentaurus when I have created it might yet grace these pages…

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You can use this as a bit of fun or more serious.

What I liked about the site was just how well it works and how well thought out it is. If I needed surveys, I reckon this would easily be worth $20 a month. As an example, heres a survey I created with it. Only the first 100 respondents can fill it in (limitation of free). As an example of a good Web 2.0 site, I reckon SurveyMonkey.com is up there with the rest.
Click Here to take survey

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The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.

ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.

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