Category Archives: Blog

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Get your space opera poetry on at the SpaceWesterns.com Senryū competition

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I don’t know how many budding (or even accomplished) science fiction poets we have in the audience here at Futurismic – but if there are any, they should take heed to this announcement from Nathan Lilly: ?

“SpaceWesterns.com is holding another poetry contest. This time we’re looking for your Space Western Senryū! All submissions must be sent electronically via our contest form by July 15th, 2008. The winners will be published on August 6th, 2008.

Our judges will be:

  • Alana Joli Abbott—comic-writer, Cowboys and Aliens 2; game-writer Steampunk Musha, Serenity Adventures
  • Mark L. Van Name—author, One Jump Ahead, Slanted Jack
  • Seamus Kevin Fahey—screen-writer, Battlestar Galactica; comic-writer, Battlestar Galactica: Origins

More details on the contest page at the site.”

In case (like myself) you’ve never heard of senryū before, here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

“Senryū is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku in construction: three lines with 17 or fewer “on” (not syllables) in total. However, senryū tend to be about human foibles while haiku tend to be about nature, and senryū are often cynical or darkly humorous while haiku are more serious. Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word.”

I tend to stick to iambic pentameter myself … but then my poetry’s never won anything or been published! Good luck, if you choose to enter.

Blog

Of Mice, Men, Women, Children, and Bacteria: Are Microbiota Linked to Obesity?

fatmouseThis isn’t likely to let us off the hook for diet and exercise. But reseachers at Mayo Clinic Arizona and Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute say the trillions of bacteria in your gut may play a role in regulating your weight. Mice that lack certain bugs tend to be fatter than their germ-free laboratory counterparts, and exposing lab mice to the germs makes them fatter. How much they eat, and how often they hit the exercise wheel, don’t seem to have an impact.

What about people? One study of children from birth to age 7 found:

The children who were normal weight at age 7 had distinctly different bacteria in their [stool] samples than those collected from overweight-obese children, suggesting that differences in the composition of the gut microbiota precede overweight-obesity.

The usual caveats apply: The bacteria/obesity connection has yet to be proved, and more research is needed before this leads to obesity treatments. SFnal scenarios about genetic engineering, nanotech, weight regulation, or gypsy curses are good to go.

[Illustration: deletem3]

Blog

Where in the World?

Finding photos in old books and not having any clue as to the locations they depict could become yet Earthanother mild annoyance thrown into the furnace of perpetual progress.

Comp-sci boffins at Carnegie-Mellon University have developed a system called IM2GPS that can identify the probable geographic location of a given image. From the abstract of the paper:

In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earth’s surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban/rural classification.

The trend is towards every piece of data being tagged with a location: here we see a way of legacyqrcode information (old photos) being given a “probable geographic location” without having originally being created with a time/GPS location stamp. It would still only be a general guess as to a geographic area, but it is better than nothing.

This is part of a more general trend towards what Bruce Sterling calls Spimes. From the Man himself:

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

In the case of IM2GPS it is the data itself that is being recorded and tracked, and potentially the objects the data describes (the objects in the photos) which connects with another loosely related concept: the panopticon. Imagine if you combined IM2GPS technology with facial recognition software and put CCTV archives through this kind of process. You could essentially Spimify the population retrospectively!

Hysterically delusional paranoia aside this is a fascinating development. Read the paper in full (pdf), it’s well worth it.

[story via PhysOrg][images by Reto Stockli and QR-Code Generator]

Blog

Crowd Sourced Apps for the Mobile Web

Think of this as R&D in real time.  Says Nokia:

Spotting an opportunity to make their phones more indispensable to consumers, Nokia is investing in crowd sourcing. It sees the most promise in services that leverage global positioning system (GPS) technology, mapping and the mobile Web.

and furthermore:

People are using their cellphones to review restaurants, share their favorite hometown hangouts, discover new jogging routes, even dodge speeding tickets…”Mobile is about pushing that even further out to the ultimate edge: an individual, at all times, with his device.”  Such crowd-sourced applications point up the power of mobile networks to relay data in real time. “Nearly everyone has a mobile that they carry with them all the time,””Phones are perfectly suited for this type of automated reporting, and potentially a much more pervasive device than the online Web.”

How will they go about using crowd sourcing in developing smart applications?  Well, consider this:

Crowds are now being tapped to develop mobile applications before they reach consumers. Mob4Hire connects developers with new applications with tech-savvy testers around the world. Founder Paul Poutanen estimates there are 12,000 different cellphone models and 700 different wireless carriers globally, forming a byzantine system that can take two years to navigate. Mob4Hire’s decentralized system helps developers deliver new applications to consumers faster and catch bugs along the way.

Honestly, the coolest thing about this is the real time nature of the testing.  Crowd sourcing seems to be the most organic extension for testing out these so called smart applications, and it will be interesting to see what new projects come along, as more developers jump onboard.

 

Blog

Question Surveillance, Go to Jail

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london-cameraNormally I’d leave surveillance-outrage stories to BoingBoing, but really:

Four young residents of a North Philadelphia house who circulated petitions questioning police-surveillance cameras were rousted from their home Friday and detained 12 hours without charges while police searched their house…. 9th District Police Capt. Dennis Wilson…was quoted …as saying of the residents: “They’re a hate group. We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we’ll probably have to let them go.”

If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be asking questions.

[Thanks, Eschaton; London ’05 photo by nolifebeforecoffee]