stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

It’s been a source of considerable frustration for me for quite awhile that many Java applets don’t function properly in Firefox on Mac (nor other non-Safari browsers; Apple seems to have taken a bit of a selfish approach with this one). I keep thinking with each new OS or Firefox update things will get fixed, but I keep waiting. Finally I decided to have a look for a solution, after Matt Patey mentioned to me that he had seen one, and came upon Steven Michaud’s Java Embedding Plugin which I installed and which worked like a charm. (If I understand correctly, Firefox 1.5 will have a version of this plugin built in so that Java will function properly.) Steven Michaud (and team): A+, Apple: F.

I think I’ll decline to get involved in the American debate on Intelligent Design and the public school curriculum, but I did get a hardy chuckle from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website, and in particular a graph showing the obvious correlation (why hadn’t I notice before?) between global average temperatures and pirates:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

Thanks to Sean Gouglas for pointing this out to me.

The October 15th Globe and Mail has an interesting article by Dan Falk entitled Is it art? that joins a long-standing debate about the artistic value of computer-generated works (the article may only be available until Friday October 21st) . The core of the article is about AARON, a computer program that produces paintings, developed by Harold Cohen, and whether or not it demonstrates creativity. Cohen himself admits that AARON doesn’t manifest creativity:

I think a human being is creative if he or she is capable of reformulating their own mental model of the world … So when I say the program isn’t creative, I’m applying a rather high standard.

However, Cohen also believes that the boundary between the machine and human realms keeps moving, and that eventually “the argument will be about whether the machine has a soul,” which certainly suggests that Cohen views computer creativity as an attainable goal.

Similar debates have raged for various other art forms, including computer-generated literature. In many cases there’s a variant of the argument “but if you hadn’t known that it was created by a computer…”

Personally, I think the notion of creativity is too slippery to hope for a conclusive outcome to the debate, but the debate is no less important since it leads to valuable reflection on our assumptions about such things as creativity and algorithmic aspects of art. For instance, I like one of the author’s analogies about the creativity and skill of the programmers:

The scientists who programmed Deep Blue knew how to play chess and knew the rules they were feeding into the machine’s circuitry – but none of them could defeat Mr. Kasparov on his own.

This can lead us to ponder creative programmers who are mediocre artists but who create programs that produce masterpieces of art…

The British Library has made 14 of its books available online using the Turning the Pages system:

Turning the Pages allows visitors to virtually ‘turn’ the pages of manuscripts in a realistic way, using touch-screen technology and interactive animation. They can zoom in on the high- quality digitised images and read or listen to notes explaining the beauty and significance of each page. There are other features specific to the individual manuscripts. In a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, for example, a button turns the text round so visitors can read his famous ‘mirror’ handwriting.

These shockwave-powered files are enormous, but certainly worth a look. The page turning mechanism doesn’t do much for me (in fact I was sort of having problems holding the page long enough to make it turn on my Mac), but I really like the magnification feature. More importantly, interfaces like these lead to some reflection about whether or not it’s best for the digital book to try to emulate its print ancestor, gimmickery aside.

Thanks to Dwayne Ali for pointing this out to me.

After a class where I showed a small collection of Apple ads and parodies that I’ve mentioned before, a student, Chad Fullerton, pointed me in the direction of some parodies of the iPod, including an image of the iPod Giganto and a funny video of the iPod Flea. Also of note: Will Ferrell, Ellen Feiss parody, Macs in schools, and pining for OS 9.

I’ve just returned from a lively meeting in Quebec City of the Réseau.Raison group, whose members are interested in reflecting on the crossroads of philosophy and computing, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Such meetings are a great opportunity to reacquaint with friends, meet colleagues whom one only knows through reading, and catch up a bit on endless tidbits of interest.

For instance, I had somehow missed Massachusetts’ final announcement that all documents produced by the government would have to be in a non-proprietary format in order to help ensure their accessibility and longevity. I suspect that this will be an increasingly widespread trend and that formats such as OASIS OpenDocument will become increasingly prevalent. More importantly, it will mean that functionality and interface will drive our choice of word processors, not just dominant proprietary formats.

My own presentation, whose title translates as “Toward a poetics of textual visualisation”, was an attempt to consider what might be specific about visualisation in the humanities, rather than, say, scientific visualisation. Going through some of my projects, like the Experimental Reading Workshop and HyperPo, I discussed ways of leveraging existing competencies and expectations from humanities scholars in the design and implementation of visualisation systems. More on this no doubt in the coming months.

Ruby on Rails is a web development architecture for the Ruby programming language. It’s well designed and structured, and achieves its goal of reducing coding time by facilitating or automating common procedures.

The new version of my HyperPo text analysis environment will be based on Rails (the one currently available is written in Perl). One of Rails’ greatest strengths is in creating database-driven applications, which, ironically, HyperPo is not. But Rails does encourage a logical structure to the code and provides some web-applications development and delivery enchancements that make it well worthwhile.

A lot of information on Rails is available through videos like the intro one. Matt Patey pointed me in the direction of a cool clip that shows someone building a web application in under two minutes, partly by using Omnigraffle (for Mac) to design the database structure.

Information Aesthetics is a treasure trove (in blog format) of design and visualization links, compiled by Andrew Vande Moere.

inspired by Manovich’s definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as ‘creative information visualization’.

It’s exciting and frustrating at the same time when one is tempted to blog every single item on another blog. Thanks to Audrey Carr for pointing me at this.

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory. Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.

The design of the visualization is aesthetically nice, but informationally poorer that it could be, I think. The maps show interconnected red blobs, but really I’d be interested in seeing:

• how news interrelates between geographical regions (which is vaguely what’s shown now, I guess)
• what geographical regions are reporting on news from what other geographical regions

It would be possible to show more dimensions of information without needlessly complicating the map.

I think the premise is to show that news is globally interrelated, but that’s debatable. News on Hurricane Katrina is geographically focused, even when a group from, say, Montréal is raising money for victims. Much more interesting, I think, is how widely – globally – things are being reported on. For instance, are news items about the Middle East being reported on by sources all over the world? What about things that are making news in Canada – is coverage limited to Canada?

Thanks to Geoffrey for pointing me in the direction of this.

I’ve started migrating my website to my own domain (stefansinclair.name) and to Textpattern for content management. Not that I have time to be doing this at the beginning of term, but I can’t really help myself when I see something interesting.

My old site used WordPress to drive the blog and some PHP snippets of my own rolling to provide a coherent appearance in most of the pages. It worked fine, and I’m certainly a fan of WordPress. What I really like about Textpattern though is that it provides one way of managing both blog and static content – which is precisely what I needed. It has a well designed administration interface and a good separation of content and style. It’s a lightweight content management system (CMS), so it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other CMS packages, but I’m not looking for anything more feature-rich than Textpress.