Some information is easy to find. If you want to learn the rules of golf, you can search Google for [golf rules] and we'll return a list of relevant web sites right at the top. But not all your information needs are that simple. Some questions can be more complex, requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need.
For instance, I'm a big fan of roller coasters. In the past I've used Google to search for information about roller coasters, such as which ones are the tallest, fastest, and have the most loops. Finding this information used to take multiple searches — I'd find roller coaster sizes on one website, heights on another, and speeds on a third. By manually comparing the sites, I could get the information I was looking for, but it took some time. With Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, I can find my roller coaster facts almost instantly.
Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.
This technology is by no means perfect. That's why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer. If there's another row or column you'd like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you. As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add. See it in action in the video below:
If you click on any fact, you'll see the sources Google Squared gathered it from as well as a list of other possible values that you can investigate. So even if your square isn't perfect at the beginning, it's easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer in no time. Once you've got a square you're happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.
To give Google Squared a whirl, try searching for [planets] or [romantic movies]. You can try out Google Squared now in Google Labs.
Après Wolfram Alpha, Google propose des évolutions/innovations au niveau de la recherche web. Il s'agirait d'un nouveau service, encore à l'état de test. Celuis construit de l'information sur la base des résultats qu'il trouve sur le net. PAs moyen par contre de vraiment savoir si cette information est correcte directement dans la page "Squared", il faut aller vérifier.
Reading an ASLA interview of Jose Alminana, a principal at Andropogon Associates, we were reminded that Sidwell Friends School, the Quaker school of choice for the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, the Bidens, the Nixons — practically every member of the Washingtonian politocracy, except for the Carters, of course — has in the courtyard of a recently renovated building an artificial wetland.
Not merely an eco-ornament, it's a machine that “manages all the wastewater generated by the building, as well as all the rain water that falls on the site.”
Typically, wastewater is drained away via a complex network of tunnels that requires vast financial resources just for its maintenance, an infrastructure that's undoubtedly deteriorating just as fast as tax revenues get siphoned off away from public works budgets to General Motors and Bank of America. Miles and miles away from its point of origin, the water then gets treated in an energy intensive process. But it still isn't entirely clean afterwards. Thus, when discharged, it still poses a risk to bodies of water, contributing in many instances to elevated bacterial count and eutrophication.
At Sidwell, wastewater is treated on-site, somewhat off-the-grid and using comparatively minimal infrastructure. The treatment cycle begins inside the building in a tank filled with anaerobic bacteria. Among other things, these bacteria help break down solids. The effluent is then pumped outside to a trickle filter before continuing on by gravity to a series of tiered wetlands. To lessen the health risk of contact with students and to mitigate any odor problems, water flows through beneath layers of pea gravel. This planting medium contains phytoremediating plants which, together with the microorganisms attached to their root hairs and to the gravel stones, extract contaminants from the water. After circulating through the system, a process which takes between 4 and 6 days, it re-enters the building and gets collected in storage tank ready for reuse in flushing toilets, among other uses for greywater.
Just as with wastewater, managing urban stormwater typically involves massive infrastructure to dispose runoffs as efficiently and as quickly as possible. In addition to being a drain on municipal coffers, such a method is known to increase the probability and the intensity of a flood event during major storms, endangering human life and property. Moreover, since stormwater isn't allowed to remain where it falls, (1) water doesn't have enough time to infiltrate the soil and seep into waiting, possibly depleted groundwater aquifers, and (2) what may have been clean at first contact with the surface undoubtedly will not remain so as it moves through sidewalks, roads, parking lots and sewers before going on to pollute rivers, lakes and other sources of our drinking water.
At Sidwell, we get a hint of an alternative system for stormwater management: hyperlocal, lo-fi, modular (i.e., implementations at multiple sites would be needed to bring about an appreciable effect on urban hydrology), soft and comparatively cheap.
Runoff is directed to a rain garden and a permanent biology pond located downslope from the tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment.
Some of the runoff gets in an underground cistern. During dry weather, this storage tank provides water to the pond. During heavy rains, excess water flows from the pond into the rain garden, simulating the hydrological dynamics of a floodplain environment. Water seeps through the soil and gets naturally filtered.
Andropogon describes this project as a “working landscape” but we might prefer calling it an “event landscape,” wherein natural processes are co-opted into a cybernetic amalgam of landscape, architecture, geology, biology and institutional pedagogy. Rather than in the inaccessible subterranean voids and in scientific abstractions, this eco-machine is made to perform out in the open for the edification of the elite who, in their dirty, smelly, real-world engagement with the landscape, will hopefully turn them into great stewards of the earth.
"We have come to an era where society breaths technology. Screens are familiar
to us, however we do not know the consequences that tie with their domination".
So begins the LIFT conference blurb. My own take, which I'll talk about, is that
new technology connects us to each other more, but leaves us *less* connected to
the biosphere of which we are a co-dependent part. We need to use digital infra
in ways that reverse this ecocidal divide. Keynote speakers include Euan Semple,
Gunther Pauli, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (the French Digital Economy Minister),
Usman Haque, Bruce Sterling. The event takes place in the Palais du Pharo, a
gift to Napoleon perched on the cliff tops at the entrance of the Vieux Port.
Marseille, 18-20 June 2009
http://liftconference.com/lift-france-09
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Via The doors of Perception (John Thackara)
Personal comment:
Je trouve le statement intéressant: le "biological devide" créé aujourd'hui par les technologies d'information. Pas faut, mais cela pourrait changer radicalement quand on connait les nombreuses technologies environnementales en cours d'élaboration. Et il serait alors intéressant de se poser la question: quels services pour créer cette connection "digitale" entre biotopes, biosphère, infosphère et humanité.
Researchers in Germany have created a display that doubles as a camera.
By Kate Greene
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Two-way display: This image shows a detailed layout of the Fraunhofer display chip, which combines photodetectors with an organic light-emitting diode display.
Credit: Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems
For decades, engineers have envisioned wearable displays for pilots, surgeons, and mechanics. But so far, a compact wearable display that's easy to interact with has proved elusive.
Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have now developed a screen technology that could help make wearable displays more compact and simpler to use. By interlacing photodetector cells--similar to those used to capture light in a camera--with display pixels, the researchers have built a system that can display a moving image while also detecting movement directly in front of it. Tracking a person's eye movements while she looks at the screen could allow for eye-tracking control: instead of using hand controls or another form of input, a user could flip through menu options on a screen by looking at the right part of the screen. The researchers envisage eventually integrating the screen with an augmented-reality system.
"We can present an image and, at the same time, track the movement of the user's eye," says Michael Scholles, business unit manager at Fraunhofer's IPMS. "This is of great interest for all kinds of applications where your hands are needed for something else, like a pilot flying an aircraft or a surgeon wanting to access vital parameters while performing a surgery."
Eye-tracking technology is nothing new, of course. Over the years, researchers have developed a number of systems that follow a person's gaze to allow him or her to interface with a computer. Often, the applications are for physically impaired people, but they can also be designed for a general computer user.
Additionally, researchers have been developing wearable display systems for years, but for the most part, these have been clunky, power hungry, and not entirely practical to use, says Alexander Sawchuck, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. "Anything that can be done to make [wearable displays] more compact or lighter weight and low power is important," he says. And integrating a display and a camera on one chip is a step toward this, he says.
The researchers built the system by first designing a light-sensing chip, which features a pattern of evenly spaced photodetectors. This was then fabricated at a commercial semiconductor manufacturing facility. A wafer containing multiple chips was then placed in a deposition chamber, where layers of organic material were deposited in between the photodetectors. These layers make up the organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, that create the display. The mosaic of photodetectors and OLEDs is then encapsulated in a thin polymer film to protect it.
The idea of integrating OLEDs with a photodetector chip is intriguing, says Sawchuck. "There are a lot of challenges in building wearable displays for the applications [intended by the researchers], and any advances in this field are very exciting," he says.
The Fraunhofer IPMS researchers will demonstrate their prototype at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio this week. The current version touts a simple monochromatic display--about 1.25 centimeters on each side, with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. Scholles says that full-color displays are possible but trickier to create because they require adding color filters to white OLEDs, which are difficult to make efficiently and aren't always reliable. However, the team at Fraunhofer IPMS has partnered with Novaled, an OLED company that manufactures high-quality white diodes, and plans to make future color prototypes using the company's diodes.
The camera in the researchers' current prototype is still fairly rudimentary. It has a resolution of only 12 pixels, which means that it can't yet track a user's eye movements. However, Scholles says that the team has developed a 160-by-120-resolution version of the camera chip that has been tested in the lab, but not yet integrated with a display. The researchers expect to have an advanced version of the system, complete with higher-resolution camera and full eye-tracking capability, by early 2011.
Des display qui "surveillent" si on les regarde, qui peut-être développeront le tracking de la rétine, par défaut. Pas très bon pour la privacité, mais un rêve pour les publicistes! ...
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