November 30, 2012

Transit Visualization

Interesting visualization of transit systems.  Mute the video's, the soundtrack is atrocious. 





Andrew Walker is the programmer behind these visualizations and has dozens and dozens of them for various cities around the world (linkHe uses GTFS data (General Transit Feed Specification) as the basis for the plots. 

via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/transit-visualizations/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru&pid=5563


November 28, 2012

Vox Populi

Realized I hadn't posted this installation yet... 

vox populi uwsa from Andrew Azzopardi on Vimeo.

It was done by co.labs for the Mayors Celebration of the Arts in Cambridge this summer.  

-G

November 26, 2012

Transits



How it is done is confusing... but it looks neat!

Thanks to Azzo for the link.

via: http://www.ignant.de/2012/11/26/transits/

November 25, 2012

uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic Map



Hi Everyone who goes to uWaterloo, or knows people who do:

I need your help. We are about to begin making a pedestrian traffic map of students on uWaterloo's main campus from Monday November 26 to December 7th.

Seeing how students naviga
te campus will allow us to make better design decisions and provide us with a valuable tool for planning the design of the new Student Services Building.

We have developed a mobile app to make participation easy. If you are a current UW student, please consider participating. There is up to $10 in compensation for the first 300 students!

If you are not a UW student please consider recommending this to someone who is.

More info: uwaterloo.ca/sso/map

To download app: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=uwaterloo+pedestrian&c=apps

* The iOS app is coming... we are waiting for Apple to put it up (US Thanksgiving).

Thanks, 


Geoff

November 22, 2012

Britain from Above

Via BBC



"Satellite technology reveals how the network of city streets is being pushed to the edge of capacity. Watch the GPS traces of 380 London taxis over the course of a single day."



"On a typical day, over 400 ships pass through the straits off Dover. This visualisation shows 24 hours worth of shipping recorded as it passes through the Channel."



"Every day, more than 7,500 aircraft crowd into Britain's skies"



"Activity of British Telephone System over the course of one day."

November 19, 2012

Open Street Map

Watch crowd-sourced cartography fill in environments:

Russia:
Russia: Edits to OpenStreetMap 2007-2012 from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

USA:
US edits to OpenStreetMap 2007-2012 from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Wordlines of Rome and Ancient City

Overlay of the GPS data I collected from volunteers on top of Ancient Rome (photo from Gismondi's giant model of Rome in EUR, Italy)



Just a sketch... something might come out of it related to how even old, no longer extant physical artifacts effect our path...

-g

Reality Games

A few examples of smartphone based games, in which you play the game within the "real" enviroment.  The games are location aware: objects, tasks, or effects are stored at locations within a city: but you can only see these objects, tasks, or effects when you have you are looking at the enviroment through your smartphone screen. The thought of people running around the city, fighting off the attack of deamons and mages which only they can see, is terrifying. 




From the article: 

The idea of playing in an area that you are intimately familiar with or to explore your city more was intriguing. While other apps use geographical location purely for reference, Shadow Cities really emphasizes your particular neighborhood and surrounding ones. After all, there is an inherent desire to defend what’s ours, and neighborhoods are a good place to start. By using actual location, the iPhone becomes a window to a parallel world, hence the name of the game.

The iPhone is a magical device that allows you to become a mage and take part in battles against mages from the other faction, of which there are two, the Animators and Architects. You discover friends on your team near your location and working together through in-game chat, you conquer your city neighborhood-by-neighborhood. There are NPCs, which are roaming spirits, and real players around you that you can fight. You fight by learning spells, which you cast my using the iPhone’s touch surface to draw the rune shape. When you are on the move, you can patrol areas for enemies.

via: http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/08/players-rule-their-real-neighborhoods-with-shadow-cities-a-location-based-mmorpg-for-the-iphone-video/

And Google is getting involved (obv). 



AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!1111111

and: http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/17/a-google-surprise-worldwide-alternative-reality-game-ingress-revealed/

November 16, 2012

Geno 2.0 - DNA testing


In order to understand the story my genes tell about my ancient ancestors: where they lived and when, I am participating in the Genographic Project.  While the rhetoric of the Genographic Project is hubristic and trite, the actual science behind it, as well as the implications of the data base as a whole is interesting and important.

 I am sending in my DNA samples tomorrow (from cheek swabs mailed to me) to the lab to be analysed.  Fingers crossed everything goes well... and I have the results soon.

-g

Ant

Photos by Gier Drange, from the Nikon Small World Photomicrography website:





Subject Matter: 
Two ants of different genus meeting on a twig


Technique:
Reflected Light, Image Stacking

Subject Matter:
Myrmica sp. (ant) carrying its larva
Technique:
Reflected Light,  Image Stacking
 (5x) (2.5x)

More from the Nikon Small World website: 


Anna Franz
University of Oxford

Subject Matter:
Ink injection into yolk sac artery of 72 hour-old chick embryo to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature

Technique:
Reflected Light


Dominik Paquet
German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases Munich & The Rockefeller University New York


Subject Matter:
Time lapse movie of transport of mitochondria in nerve cells of transgeniczebrafish with nerve cell membranes labeled in green and mitochondria labeled in blue.

Technique:
Widefield fluorescence microscopy


via http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/people/bio/geir-drange



November 13, 2012

Bionic Leg



via http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/08/bionic-limbs-step-up-thought-controlled-prosthetic-leg-climbs-2100-stair-building/

November 11, 2012

Vacuum Maglev Train

"The National Power Traction Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University is developing a vactrain, or a maglev train that runs through in an airless tunnel, allowing it to run at speeds of 600 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers per hour, Beijing Times reported."

From: http://www.china.org.cn/china/2010-08/02/content_20624621.htm

Also see:

Trans-Atlantic Maglev Train: 

Norway has studied neutrally buoyant tunnels (concluding that they’re feasible, though expensive), and Shanghai is running maglev trains to its airport. But supersonic speeds require another critical step: eliminating the air—and therefore air friction—from the train’s path. A vacuum would also save the tunnel from the destructive effects of a sonic boom, which, unchecked, could potentially rip the tunnel apart

...Then air would be pumped out, creating a vacuum, and alternating magnetic pulses would propel a magnetically levitated train capable of speeds up to 4,000 mph across the pond in an hour...

From: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlantic-maglev

November 5, 2012

Photographic Timelines

A photographic technique developed by Jay Mark Johnson.  



From the site: 

"In the image, anything that is stationary is repeated throughout the sequence (that’s the horizontal lines across the image), but objects that move are only in part of the scene. Furthermore, the faster they move, the thinner they appear. In this way, a single image is capturing objects and their rate of motion through a sliver of space. The leftmost edge of the image is the furthest back in time." 



via http://singularityhub.com/2012/10/29/camera-technique-captures-new-view-of-space-and-time/