ideambulate

I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees.  Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with  publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger [...]

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I enjoy artistic experiences that communicate some expression of meaningful information.
Maybe this is inherent to all analysis-junkies and artists.  Pretty graphs that explain complex data sets.  Poignant songs that sum up intricate social and political circumstances.  Equations that encompass beautiful realities. Etceteras, etceteras.
In that vein, what could be more meaningful than the blueprints of life, [...]

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I’d like to peek around the next corner in technology.  Specifically, what technological challenges and solutions will arise following the advent/ascension of the mobile web. Let’s fast forward about five years, give or take some technological optimism.
Assumptions

Broadband wireless internet is widely accessible in the developed world.
Mobile audio and visual data capturing devices with day-scale battery [...]

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For those outside the know, lifestreaming is the phenomenon of more or less continuous recording and transmission of observations about one’s life.  It’s the log of a perpetual twitterer, the live webcam someone wears on their hat, the flickr account of a geotagged-mobile-phone-camera-addict.
The side of lifestreaming everyone talks about is the fact that you get [...]

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People remember images more easily than they can remember complex strings of words.  Furthermore, images can automatically evoke complex sets of associated thoughts and emotions.  We should leverage the associative power of images to help sort through thick information sets.
I’m talking about web-searching with an unconventional “semantic” twist.
The tools to make this work are all [...]

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Back as a grade school kid, I was impressed by the array of neat options we had for decorating our desktops on the old Macs.  Patterns!  Colors!  Eventually… whole pictures!  “Cool beans” at the times, really.  Even back then, I was wondering how we’d be entertaining our eyes in between games of Super Word Muncher, [...]

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Wouldn’t it be a good morale-boosting strategy for corporations to encourage the development of in-company gaming groups?  For example, could mean formal all-company-member World of Warcraft guilds,  Team Fortress sides split up by department, or giant free-for-alls in any old multiplayer game.
Certainly seems more entertaining and lower-hassle than the old-fashioned notion of corporate softball leagues.  [...]

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How about an application that made reviewing what you learned in class easy?
People already record lectures for later review, but listening to a whole course worth of class might take way too long.  Students need a way to summarize these audio recordings so that they can better focus their studies.
One technique would be to use [...]

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How about using eye tracking technology to enhance your home theatrical experience?  If we use information about where a viewer’s eyes are focusing as an indicator of attention, we could shift the audio “focus”  of a film in real-time.  Since the projected media information would change from viewing to viewing based on what the user [...]

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The weather affects how long it takes to travel from one place to the next, but I’m not aware of any mapping application that incorporates this fact.  From what I can tell from a brief overview, the standard mapping applications seem to rely on relatively static estimations of expected speed limits and traffic for a [...]

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It would be pretty interesting to visualize brainstorming sessions or problem-solving attempts that don’t quite get the job done.
There’s something oddly tragic and beautiful about the notion of a brain rustling around an issue, prodding it from many angles, and occasionally rebounding with an ache and a “THWRANG” after a head-long charge.  If these thoughts [...]

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A fair portion of schools have taken the effort to mandate/encourage course evaluations, most often submitted by students at the end of a given term.  I’m aware that these reviews are used to help professors brush up on the places where they didn’t do so well, and also to given administrators some means of weeding [...]

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As an adolescent, I invented a silly landmark for myself.  I would only consider myself proficient in a language if I could “get” a joke in that language which had no straightforward translation into my primary language.
Hardly a scientific milestone, but it seemed to make sense back then, since “getting” a joke requires at least [...]

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The challenge is to condense the multi-format feedback loop that exists between various artists into a single experience.  I have two possible solutions, one reasonable, one far-out.
The reasonable idea is pretty straightforward and uses a combination of readily available hardware and relatively straightforward software.
We start with a song, playing on a computer.  Maybe it’s something [...]

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Great works of art often inspire further masterpieces, though not necessarily in the same medium as the original.
A musician sees a  beautiful painting and composes a song that tells the same story.  An abstract artist listens to a masterful concerto and incorporates representations of the music into her next sculpture.   A playwright observes both [...]

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