digitaldust

Every time I listen to it it gets better. I hear a track and think - this is my favourite. Then I hear the next track. Back catalogue hoover time I think.

Amazon link

And talking about collaborative filtering. Here it is on a massive scale. A new plan from Admiral Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office for a Total Information Awareness System(s). And people were asking if collaborative filtering had any applications outside ecommerce.

While not entirely a CF system in itself it would probably include elements of CF in the data mining. It’s remit would be to filter an enormous amount of information and try and fit that to profiles of potential threats to the US. Then to track those individuals more closely. CF would be ideal for the first round matching with probably some human intervention required for second level tracking (in my opinion for sense).

Perhaps up to this point I’ve sounded a little detached and rational about this as it popped back onto my mental radar while thinking about CF. But this is craziness in the extreme, excuse me while I froth in anger for a few minutes. More excellent information is on the epic site, that has a news tracker and some great background.
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I’ve just been doing some poking around on this collaborative filtering based site movielens. Just like amazon spookily accurate with the recommendations. I went through the sign up process and some initial ratings, marking things like Star Wars and Indianna Jones highly, finally they suggest that my top DVD fav would be Scratch… which I love, however nothing like any of the sci-fi, action or noir movies that i rated.

It’s powered by grouplens a research project that’s been investigating collaborative/group-based filtering for the last 10 years (starting with filtering newsnet messages).

The ESA is trawling the history of sci-fi to find out when and where the big ideas in science came from. (PDF Sci-Fi review.) And basically all contemporary space science was dreamed of by authors long before it ever was made possible by scientists and engineers. Then there’s all the crazy stuff… like warp drives and nanotech. Still this is one of the best articles/research I’ve ever seen on the predictive power of sci-fi.

http://www.wolframscience.com/

Great first book. Truly amazing idea, victorian style dogs wandering around on their hind legs speaking german and wearing 19th century prussian uniforms. Good thoughtful style, I was a bit disappointed by the end.

Amazon link

Drifting back to my musings on the future of brands…. Here’s a white paper put together by a bunch of experience designers at some conference of their’s in the states. summary on an attendee’s blog and the PDF whitepaper itself. Haven’t read it fully yet, but a quick skim through shows that it’s not marketing wank and that it is some reasonably thought out scenario planning.

My rant of a month ago has been sitting at the back of my mind wanting to get back out. But I think I will wait until I did a bit of a site redesign and put in a separate a thought/rant section apart from my MLP. It’s confusing enough for me let alone anyone who wants to read this.

I will have to do a whole bunch of looking into this first before ranting again. There are a whole lot of people out there who are doing the same thing as me… albeit maybe not as far into the future as I tend to like to look.

Great New Scientist news piece. Researchers cut off baby rat’s heads and attach them to adult rats. The baby rat heads continue to try and survive for up to 3 week. I love science! (via terry)

Some great suggestions from Scientific American for Xmas presents.

My favourite is this funky physics game - Cat-A-Pults, and yes it is educational, lots of trajectory physics, Newton’s second law, Gravitation, plus foam cats flying through the air.

Other cool stuff are Bat Detectors, and we’re not talking utility belts here, real unltrasonic detectors (bottom of page after all the bat boxes). Having tried a bit of bat spotting in the past this would come in real handy, along with the nightvision goggles. And taking me back… a molecular modelling set.