“Rhonda“, a 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru circa 2003.

(See also: Rhonda Project)
(See also: pitaru: sonic sculpture)
(See also: Drawn: Drawing in 3D with Rhonda)
(See also: The Rotten Fruit Tardis)
(See also: bitforms)

NASA is developing a new integrated Cloud Computing environment they call NEBULA at NASA Ames Research Center. NEBULA is an open-source project, built from the ground up with common tools: Eucalyptus, JAVA, LDAP, Lustre, MySQL, Python, SAML, Subversion, and TRAC. It will provide high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and use a ‘virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies’.

According to the NEBULA website:

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA’s collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

NEBULA extends the Software-as-a-Service to the realm of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In the process, slaying several classic conundrums of computational collaboration.

I wish them the best of luck.

(See also: NEBULA site)
(See also: InformationWeek: NASA Launches Nebula Compute Cloud)
(See also: Open Eucalyptus project)
(See also: Eucalyptus Cloud Computing presentation)

It’s been an interesting evening while Stephen Wolfram launches his new computational knowledge engine ‘WolframAlpha‘. There were some fits and starts, but I have been able to ask it some interesting questions.

The approach reminds me of Thinking Machines Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and Gopher from the late 1980′s. I know that Stephen Wolfram worked at Thinking Machines and I don’t know if he was involved with the WAIS project, but it certainly was a fundamental influence on WolframAlpha. WAIS was ultimately sold to AOL in 1995, just as the World Wide Web was forming.

WolframAlpha is easily stumped. But then you ask it a question that fans out into an amazing array of results from wide and varied data sources. TEDChris has side by side comparison of seven queries given to WolframAlpha and Google. A helpful illustration of the differences between the two philosophies. When the answer isn’t a precise number, WolframAlpha will try to reduce the question to something it can answer precisely. If the answer is a precise or computed number WolframAlpha can produce an elegant and concise response, though much of the supporting data appears to be older sources than those revealed in similar Google searches. While powerful in certain domains (such as math, chemistry, census data), the result is a service that may produce what you need or nothing useful at all. Here are some funny queries of interest:

There is a certain level of hubris in the idea all knowledge can be contained, maintained, and computed centrally. WolframAlpha is a ‘come to the mountain’ experience. In contrast, Google’s shotgun response relies on the distributed nature of the internet, counting and weighing the edges between ideas, often responding with a myriad of links relying on the user to be the final filter.

Both systems have a place in my toolbox.

(See also: WolframAlpha: query interface)
(See also: Introducing WolframAlpha)
(See also: WAIS: Wide Area Information Server)
(See also: TEDChris: WolframAlpha vs Google)
(See also: TechCrunch: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed)

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey conceived and executed a project to assemble 2000 human voices to sing “Daisy Bell”. Tasks were distributed using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and samples were assembled and animated using the Processing language.

“Daisy Bell” was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892 and begins with the line “Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer do/I’m half crazy/all for the love of you”. The song itself is significant since it was the first song a computer was taught to sing at IBM labs in 1962. The song received further geek credibility when it was performed by the fictional computer HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The musical result is less joyful than strangely haunting. The technical result is an interesting illustration of collaboration and aggregation.

(See also: Bicycle built for 2000)

The Social Collider maps cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider is meant to be an instrument which can make visible the creation of memes and their propagation.

Get project status updates on Twitter: @socialcollider

(See also: socialcollider.net)