Conrad Barski is working on a new text on Lisp rendeder in comic book form, Land of Lisp, which will be published this Fall by No Starch Press. He posted a teaser back on April first, Functional Programming is Beautiful. I can’t wait to see the final product.

The sixth annual UMBC Computer Mania Day will be held at UMBC on Saturday, May 3, 2008. The event provides a half day of technology-related activities for up to 800 middle school girls and their parents and teachers. Girls are the focus, but boys are welcome. This program is designed to provide a broad-based introduction to the ways in which different careers make use of technology. Several sessions are planned including ones on robotics and on social computing. There is also a separate adult program designed for parents. Computer Mania Day is free, but space is limited and registration is required to hold a place. Free gift bags from Dell will be given to the first 800 students who register and attend!

EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.

They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.

If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).

EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.

You drop a pen on the moon. Does the pen
a) float off into space,
b) float where it is, or
c) fall down?

Disturbingly, a majority answers either a or b. When asked, as a follow up, why astronauts don’t float when they’re on the moon, the majority answer is “because they have heavy boots.”

If you have a hard time believing this, I encourage you to start asking around. I asked some educated teenagers I know, and the first three of them answered either a or b.
“And why don’t astronauts float on the moon?”
“Special equipment.”
“Heavy boots.”
“Heavy boots.”

I mention this because a theme of SciBarCamp was “10 Things Everyone Should Know About Science”. This was motivated by organizer Eva Amsen’s recently surveying a number of people about to receive PhDs, and finding that none of them knew what a gene is. She felt strongly that everyone should know that genes are segments of DNA that code for proteins, and started to wonder what else everyone should know. We all made suggestions on a large poster board at the Friday reception, and then had a panel and heated discussion on the subject Sunday morning. Eva has promised to post the results on her blog.

Strangely (and somewhat embarrassingly) there was not a single scientific fact on the list. Everything was about the process of science, the purpose of science, the practice of science, etc. In everyone’s defense, these are important topics that are fun to argue about. Passionate on the subject, I used my turn to speak about infant behavior as a model of inquiry. But, given the chance at a do-over, would anyone disagree that gravity deserves a spot in the top 10? In fact, shouldn’t it be number 1?

Technorati tags: SciBarCamp

Tim’s away.
The blog is ours!
Now I can finally post about SciBarCamp, held last weekend in Toronto, and the most interesting meeting I’ve attended this millenium. Amongst its many highlights were two talks by Andrew Hessel. The first was about synthetic biology. Andrew helps run iGEM, which every year hands out “BioBricks” to high school and undergrad students around the world, and sees who can build the best genetic machines. Stunning successes have included a group of kids from Edinburgh who created a bacterium that changes the acidity of water, but only if there’s arsenic present. This enables individual wells to be tested at a cost of dimes instead of tens of dollars. (For a sickening account of why this is significant, click here, or here.) Another group invented a glowing bacterium which, I think, has a variety of computational and artistic applications.

The synthetic biology talk was part of a debate with Jim Thomas from etc, a group that monitors technology from a social justice perspective. Jim began by engendering sympathy for the Luddites, reminding us that in 1812, 14 Luddites were hanged near his alma mater in York, England. Before smashing things, Luddites would sometimes ask the people “is this harmful for the common good?”, and that’s the question Jim asked of synthetic biology. He didn’t exactly say yes, but he raised a number of concerns - security, safety, economic disruption, and concentration of corporate power. The only one which I really bought into was security; kids, as we know, do not use their creativity and hacking skills exclusively for good, and neither do adults. Part of Jim’s evidence was the case of Eckard Wimmer from Stony Brook, who built the polio virus from mail-order parts, just to show it could be done. The session ended before Andrew could respond.

Technorati tags: SciBarCamp

Language models are widely used in processing both written and spoken language. They are used for part of speech tagging, sense tagging, disambiguation, text similarity metrics, and many other tasks, including predicting the words a person intends when typing on a telephone keypad. The last application has some interesting wrinkles, as this video we spotted on Language Log explains.

The most popular predictive text system in use today is T9, developed by Nuance Communications. You can check out the video’s examples using this T9 demo.

AP has an article, MIT Creates Picture of NY Communications, that highlights work of New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) project being done in the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory.

“For the past two months, 24 hours a day, MIT researchers have been collecting the electronic communications of millions of New Yorkers — but not for salacious gossip or to protect national security. They’ve been building a census that shows, neighborhood by neighborhood, New York’s telephone and Internet links to other cities across the planet and how those connections change over time.” (link)

Visualizations from the NYTE project are part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which focuses on the use of technology in design.

“New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?” (link)

The data was provided to the MIT researchers by AT&T from voice and Internet traffic after being anonymized to remove any personal information.

I think our nervous systems must be wired up a bit strangely.

A total lunar eclipse will be visible from the US this Wednesday evening, February 20th with the maximal effect at 10:26pm EST. The eclipse will be visible from North and South America, and western Europe and Africa.

(image courtesy of NASA GSFC)

Screedbot is an “animated scrolling typewriter text generator” service. You enter some text, click CREATE SCREED and get an animated gif image. You can define the width, font size and colors of your screed.. Screedbot was written by Zach Beane in Common Lisp. (Spotted on Lemonodor).

The ACM named Edmund Clarke, E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis winners of the prestigious 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their research on Model Checking.

From the ACM announcement:

“Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs. This transformation has resulted in increased assurance that the systems perform as intended by the designers. … Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University, and Emerson of the University of Texas at Austin, working together, and Sifakis, working independently for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble in France, developed this fully automated approach that is now the most widely used verification method in the hardware and software industries.” (link)

Tomorrow’s New York Times has a very positive story on Twine in the business section, An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots.

“How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item? If the answer is “too often,” a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents.”

Happily, the story mentions that Twine is using Semantic Web technology:

“Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web — foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely answer direct questions.”