Rorschach test: hidden structure or noise?
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Category Archives: Technology
K-means test in Octave
Matlab comes with K-means clustering ‘out of the box’. The GNU Octave work-a-like system doesn’t, and there seem to be quite a few implementations floating around. I picked the first from Google, pretty carelessly, saving as myKmeans.m. These are notes from trying to reproduce this Matlab demo with Octave. Not rocket science but worth writing [...]
Querying Linked GeoData with R SPARQL client
Assuming you already have the R statistics toolkit installed, this should be easy. Install Willem van Hage‘s R SPARQL client. I followed the instructions and it worked, although I had to also install the XML library, which was compiled and installed when I typed install.packages(“XML“, repos = “http://www.omegahat.org/R“) ‘ within the R interpreter. Yesterday I set [...]
Exploring Linked Data with Gremlin
Gremlin is a free Java/Groovy system for traversing graphs, including but not limited to RDF. This post is based on example code from Marko Rodriguez (@twarko) and the Gremlin wiki and mailing list. The test run below goes pretty slowly when run with 4 or 5 loops, since it uses the Web as its database, via [...]
Video Linking: Archives and Encyclopedias
This is a quick visual teaser for some archive.org-related work I’m doing with NoTube colleagues, and a collaboration with Kingsley Idehen on navigating it. In NoTube we are trying to match people and TV content by using rich linked data representations of both. I love Archive.org and with their help have crawled an experimental subset [...]
A Penny for your thoughts: New Year wishes from mechanical turkers
I wanted to learn more about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service (wikipedia), and perhaps also figure out how I feel about it. Named after a historical faked chess-playing machine, it uses the Web to allow people around the world to work on short low-pay ‘micro-tasks’. It’s a disturbing capitalist fantasy come true, echoing Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific [...]
XMPP untethered – serverless messaging in the core?
In the XMPP session at last february’s FOSDEM I gave a brief demo of some NoTube work on how TV-style remote controls might look with XMPP providing their communication link. For the TV part, I showed Boxee, with a tiny Python script exposing some of its localhost HTTP API to the wider network via XMPP. [...]
How to tell you’re living in the future: bacterial computers, HTML and RDF
Clue no.1. Papers like “Solving a Hamiltonian Path Problem with a bacterial computer” barely raise an eyebrow. Clue no.2. Undergraduates did most of the work. And the clincher, … Clue no.3. The paper is shared nicely in the Web, using HTML, Creative Commons document license, and useful RDF can be found nearby. From those-crazy-eggheads dept, [...]
‘Republic of Letters’ in R / Custom Widgets for Second Screen TV navigation trails
As ever, I write one post that perhaps should’ve been two. This is about the use and linking of datasets that aid ‘second screen’ (smartphone, tablet) TV remotes, and it takes as a quick example a navigation widget and underlying dataset that show us how we might expect to navigate TV archives, in some future [...]