Curious.Judith

Today’s installment from macmap (Macintosh Mapping and GPS Group) had a notice about HoudahGeo 1.4.12 release, in turn from MacInTouch.com. I have a few projects from July where i’ve photos and my GPS tracks, and i’ve been experimenting with using iShowU to record the GoogleEarth animation to include in a slide show. So, i’m ready to play with HoudaGeo.

I imported my three hundred plus whale watching photos (from our great Sanctuary Cruises trip) into HoudahGeo. That took noticeable time, but wasn’t long enough to get distracted. Then i imported the tracklog in GPX format (after a quick conversion with MacGPS Pro). HoudahGeo has a function to import from the GPS , but i did not test that. A quick prompt to verify whether there was time difference in the camera, and voila, a lat long for every image. I’ll note that the interpolation wasn’t well tested in this experiment, but it sufficiently automates what one would do without the code. Most importantly, the software is very easy to use. There’s an opportunity to title and write descriptions within the HoudahGeo interface, and since the application makes standard sidecar files or (presumably) will produce new EXIF data, i find that more appealing than creating image data in iPhoto.

Exporting, with the trial limitation of three images per project, was straightforward as well. (Note that the second image i exported wasn’t the nice image of the Risso’s Dolphins i expected. Pout.) My note about “presumably” above is because i produced sidecar XMP files the first time round, and my subsequent change of configuration did not rewrite the image with edited exif. Bug or limitation of trial or user error are all possible explanations.

The Flickr export went well, although i’m disappointed to find Flickr’s map doesn’t import the geolocation tags.

The win is, in my opinion, the kmz export option. Viewing in Google Earth is very pleasant, and it’s a format one can share with others. If you have a place to host your kmz file, you can give folks the URL and they the photos and the track in Google Earth: houdahgeotest.kmz (248 kb). Note that the time line function in Google Earth is supported! With a hosted location, i was also able to import the kmz into my maps at Google Maps. I’m not sure why there’s an offset between the trail and the red dots. If Google Maps is your destination for the images, it looks like you should edit the kmz in GoogleEarth (or your KMZ editor) before posting. Still, it’s a neat way to put your images in a place. I admit that the “featureless” ocean surface may not be the best example of this; the track over the USGS relief map of the Monterey Canyon gives the whale’s view of where we were.

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Christmas in January! Traction for FOAF! I was excited to read Tim O’Reilly’s announcement of Google’s release of the Social Graph API, and immediately went to poke at it. My FOAF, how i’ve longed to have something other than FOAF explorer parse you.

Poke, poke, poke.

Why doesn’t site connectivity see all the sites connected? It turns out foaf:holdsAccount is listed as unstable, and thus — i infer — has not been implemented in Google’s parsing of the FOAF. Perhaps i’ll find out if that was it some day.

I’ll take this as an opportunity to move the following notes about the Social Graph vision and some observations about some specific awkward implementations of OpenId out of my “should make this into a blog entry” and release them into the wild. I’m ready for a widely adopted solution to profile exhaustion.
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The following advice paraphrased from Marin Water’s advice:

Every household should keep a minimum of three day emergency supply of water handy, at one gallon per person per day. The daily ration is divided into two quarts for drinking and two quarts for food preparation and sanitation. Note extra water is needed for pets and/or family members with special needs.

With this calculation, a 2.5 gal container of water is probably a day’s worth for our household of two persons and three cats. From random reading, cats are supposed get their water needs met best by eating moist food. Thus, it’s probably best to have tinned food available for the cats in an emergency. I’ve bought four of these containers. I think we have another similar water container (with very stale water!) in the front closet.

I note other sources say three to seven days of water and the possibly paranoid flutrackers call for a thirty day supply. Um, no. Not thirty.

Tap water, if properly stored in well-sanitized plastic containers like soft drink bottles, can be stored indefinitely, but we recommend cleaning the containers and refreshing the water once a year. Avoid using containers that will decompose or break. You can also purchase commercially bottled or packaged water for long-term storage. Store your emergency water supply in an easily accessible dark, cool, dry area away from any solvents or chemicals.

One challenge has been trying to figure out a storage location that would be reasonably accessible if there was a significant quake locally. Burying the water in a barely accessible corner of a storage closet might be OK if one could assume that the main problem would be interruption of the water supply, but what if there was significant building damage? I’ve decided to store the water on our deck letting it act as a plant shelf, putting a black tarp over it. This experimental solution has some risks. Freezing is unlikely, mitigated by the black tarp. The black tarp should help the water absorb enough solar heat to last through the coldest local night. The warmth, on the other hand, could induce growth of algae. One would hope that commercially purchased water would last without that problem. I think I want to cycle the water in the summer, when i most need to water the container garden on the deck. I’m going to mark these containers for renewal in June through September 2009, so they’ll over a year old by that point. I’ll keep an eye on the containers for algae growth or any other clouding.

If you are unsure about the safety of stored water, you can disinfect it with a 5.25% sodium hypochlorite solution (household chlorine bleach). Use 8 drops for clear water and 16 drops for cloudy water per gallon. Mix thoroughly and let stand for 30 minutes before using. You should notice a slight chlorine odor. If not, repeat the disinfection process.

I’ll add small bottles of bleach for the emergency kits to the list.

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I tend not to proclaim much about myself. Just like i’m not inclined to have “favorites,” there are too many dimensions of identity for me to pick one or two and claim those. However, it’s National Coming Out Day, and i’m concerned about civil rights and the US Congress. I’ll take this as an occasion to point out that I’m queer/bi (if i have to choose a label), and my spouse is transgendered. There are plenty of states where she has no protections against discrimination based on her transgendered status. Currently, Congress is considering an employment rights act, called ENDA. There has recently been an effort to change the language of the bill so that it only protects folks based on who they prefer to have sex with *not* on how they express their gender. Theoretically, the bill will pass more easily by leaving a group at more risk behind. There’s good discussion here at the transworkplace blog. I’ve written my representatives and lobbied for a bill with language that will include the diversity of human expression. I’ll share my letter to Anna Eshoo here:

Dear Representative Eshoo:

I recognize that you are not on the committee involved with the ENDA legislation, but
I must share these concerns. The following article by Dr. Weiss captures my ethical and
philosophi cal concerns about leaving transfolk out of the ENDA bill. My personal concern
is my spouse of fifteen years. I watched her wrestle with her identity for over a decade. She
could be open with me but dared not show that side of herself to the world. She tried
sharing with some friends for a while, but eventually decided it was too hard and tried to
completel y repress her sense of her gender identity so that she would fit in with the world’s
expectations of her.

It doesn’ t work. She was slowly dying.

With encouragement to do what she needed to do to be authentic, to be herself, she’s
started down the path of transition. Even with support from her family and with my
financial support, this is a hard and painful process. Emotional pain, physical pain: but at the
same time, beautiful. When a person is able to shed the shackles of external expectati on and
be themselves, the joy and beauty of the authentic self blossoms. I’ve been honor ed to be
part of my spouse’s transition.

I’ve experienced gender-based discrimination myself. I know ENDA is not magic and
will not smooth the way for my spouse and others like her, but I also know how valuable it
is to have legal support that ones’ fundamental self is not cause for discrimination. Please
don’ t leave my spouse and the many others outside of this legislation.

Sincerely,

Judith E Bush

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Some time last week or the week before i was inspired to post a comment to a JCDL blogger’s notes on a site that used OpenID. Yippee, i thought, and i promptly used my OpenID via MyOpenId.com. Unfortunately, the public profile shown via that service doesn’t have a link back to my blog and it apparently shows an email address. So, i made this correspondent into a guinea pig (poor behavior on my part) and commented again using ClaimID. Much better. I also note that ClaimId allows one to set a web page as a OpenID server which delegates back to ClaimID (instructions). This means that my blog (or my bio) can be my OpenID URL.

That’s very nice.

I continued fiddling with a few other identity aggregators: Explode! and Spock. Spock is indexing LinkedIn and a bit of MySpace. Explode has a larger cluster of social sites — but not LinkedIn or MySpace — which can bee seen in the dropdown on their add me form. Explode also has a way of forcing the indexing of a user account/profile while Spock seems to depend on the email addresses for invitations.

Then, late last week the (not really) Lunch 2.0 at Facebook led to the news that Plaxo was going to release new cool functionality. Impatient, i went ahead and signed up to see the “before.” I’ve not had any luck using OpenIds with registering or aggregating, but Joseph Smarr says ClaimID does work for him. (We were corresponding on another topic where i displayed my absolute troglodyte nature.)

Last night i finally set most of my Plaxo account up. I’ve mixed feelings about the Mac software. On one hand, it’s very slick in how it interacts with Address Book. On the other hand, i’m not sure how much i like loosing control over my data about others. I’m a bit of a data packrat, and i’ve kept old numbers and email addresses. I’ve hopes that someone will take up the development of ZOË and that it will integrate with my address book (or at least a .vcf dump) — thus keeping old emails connected to current is important. (Probably a use case of one, that.) Then there’s the colleague who apparently didn’t trust Plaxo when he used it last. He only has his first name in the system, so when Plaxo synced with my address book, his name was removed.

The Mac software doesn’t stay off, either. I’ll quit it, but if i start my address book or the mac mail client, the Plaxo software starts up again. clearly, i’m supposed to be so enamored i wouldn’t want it off.

Now, i don’t know how much of this is new as i didn’t add the Mac software until last night. The pulse view of others in my address book is intriguing; it’s a slight disappointment that my profile doesn’t show the pulse feeds i’ve marked public. I’m also pondering how i divide up my world into Friends, Family, and Business Network and my identity into Work and Home. I do see that i can use the “old” email addresses to list my special case email addresses such as the one i make available for blog correspondence. And, despite the temptation to pull every RSS feed that might be related to me into one thread — i can’t imagine that anyone would be interested.

It’s all quite intriguing. Still, it’s a pity that the economics don’t support publishing FoaFs. When one begins to be able to link system generated FoaF files like those produced by LiveJournal (http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/data/foaf, but blacklisted by the FoaF explorer) to other system or individually generated FOAFs, we’ll be able to start having programmable agents figure out when everyone can meet for dinner. Well, maybe.

plaxo, explode,ex.plode.us, FoaF, spock, identity aggregator, OpenID, ClaimID

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I’ve been interrupted in going through my notes from the May and June events by a nasty cold. Last night, feeling better but not great, i explored a few beta services i hadn’t done much more than glance at this spring. First, there was Spockwhich bills itself as improving people searches. It appears to have some crawl of some social networking sites and Wikipedia as a seed, and then allows users to tag, add relevant websites, and describe relationships. Know a great deal about some historical figure? You can check the tags made by the “Spock Robot,” vote to make some stronger, add others, add relationships. As best as i can tell, the relationships aren’t automatically reciprocal: if i indicate George Fox is related to Margaret Fell, Margaret Fell isn’t automatically related to George Fox.

This site, which had sent me email to remind me of its existence, reminded me of Metaweb’s FreeBase as i was tagging my friend Kurt Bollacker. Freebase goes beyond people and has a richer set of controlled attributes, and relationships are reciprocal (although it seems to take some moments to propagate). It seems seeded by a wide variety of structured data sources, including Wikipedia.

To see the comparative richness: George Fox at FreeBase and George Fox at Spock. When i checked FreeBase, it said George Fox was the author of the screenplay Earthquake. While i haven’t read George Fox’s Journal, i know enough to doubt it was any inspiration for a 1970s disaster movie. I’ve removed that link. (To be responsible, I’ve clicked through to to the movie, created a new person of type “film writer” named George Fox, and removed the “type” of “film writer” from George Fox, born 1624.)

It’s worth comparing these to George Fox at OCLC Identities. The search for George Fox there doesn’t seem to turn up the filmwriter, but does make me wish i could quickly click next to some of the results and say, “These are all the same person.” Spock doesn’t seem to allow that (Kurt has three entries) whereas it seems Freebase assumes a little too much (all George Foxes are the same). And i suppose another new effort in people search worth mentioning is the NNDB, with no George Foxes, but some fascinating relationships and attributes.

One notable function of these web 2.0 systems like Spock and FreeBase is how they do try to control data entry. When i was selecting a relationship in Spock, I typed “Co” and “co worker” and “co worker and friend” appeared. That some control is needed — and it seems FreeBase has the mechanisms in place to get problems like this fixed — was that later i found i typed a letter more and was presented with “coworker.” Another place where using users to fix the “authority file” to disambiguate among terms would be useful would be the venue list at Upcoming.

I don’t think you could pay me to do data entry, but there i was, spending the evening putting in alternate names for Stevens Creek. If you find this interesting, let me know, and I’ll pass on an invite to Spock and FreeBase, while supplies last.

Spock, people search, Kurt Bollacker, Metaweb, Freebase, web2.0, oclc identities, identities, disambiguation, authority files, nndb,data entry,

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While JCDL doesn’t have a necessary link to geospatial data, i do hope that as time passes we’ll see more. I remember the spatial visualization Perseus Digital Library introduced years ago; with the map APIs and other resources geospatial visualization should be more accessible.

This talk delivered by Rahul Nair about work he and his colleagues have done with a corpus of geolocated and tagged flickr photos crosses a large number of my interests. In very brief, they take the geolocated photos, identify spatial clusters, look for common tag terms, and use those tags to generate place name labels. (One can then browse geolocated Flickr photos with those tags in their interface.)

The textual clustering to come up with labels appeared to be remarkably successful compared to the automatic cluster labeling experience I had using the Recommind engine on bibliographic data. I do believe that the fact that the photos were intentionally geolocated (as compared to auto-captured metadata in a GPS enabled camera) helps to improve the results. Users don’t incidentally but intentionally associate that image with place. I do wonder if this demonstrates that users (at least these who are willing to geolocate their images) are willing to carefully construct their tags to have general location tags as well as more specific. The apparent success is quite satisfying.

Another piece they touched on was the dynamic cartography or neocartography principles in play. Most important was that the labels were scale sensitive. Cities and regions at small scale; neighborhoods an particular features at larger scales. Rahul noted that in user testing there were some labels users identified as “missing,” which they believe the occlusion algorithm removed. In manual cartography, one is able to make subtle adjustments to make those placement decisions. ArcGIS has rules for label overlap — are there other, dynamic ways of identifying multiple labels? Google Earth’s dynamic method of exploding points out is an attempt to do this on mouse focus, but it hasn’t seemed as successful as one might wish.

For the neogeography crowd — tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/ is offering up an API so, given a bounding box, one can receive back the tags for that region. And for wherecamp attendees — it seems that they use a geotude-like tiling, using equal lat-long tiles at fourteen levels of zoom to display the tags.

Rahul spoke about applying their methods to other geo data like geoRSS feeds (and one wonders whether KML might be in mind). I’ll be interested in seeing how that turns out.

(Later in the session was a visualization of citations regarding the Sloan Sky Survey and the “cosmospatial” map view. I’m looking to see where it lives on line….)

World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections (Flickr oriented)
Shane Ahern, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair and Jeannie Yang
Categorization and Analysis of Text in Computer Mediated Communication Archives using Visualization
Ahmed Abbasi and Hsinchun Chen
Delineating the Citation Impact of Scientific Discoveries
Chaomei Chen, Jian Zhang, Weizhong Zhu and Michael Vogeley

JCDL2007

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I’m about to embark on some data explorations and would very much like to set up an XML database and interface on my OS X machine for my own explorations. I’m out of practice, so I’ll be keeping notes here as I explore, as well as making single entries about particular products elsewhere (all tagged “xml on os x“.

I welcome any suggestions.

Tech notes follow.
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It’s about time Amazon really took a look at the moribund wish list technology. No only can one have multiple lists, some private, and with different identities attached, but (even better) one can manage the list with ease from the compact view. It seemed one used to have to click, reload, click, reload to get changes made. Now one can change counts, priorities, and select for a move/copy/delete all on one page with one reload. Pity there isn’t an AJAX popup for editing comments — or perhaps there is and it’s suppressed on Safari.

I’m happy to now have a place to keep a shopping list of things like replacement watch batteries, air filter refills, and favorite paper stock items. I don’t know that I’ll start making wish lists for my alter ego or cats, but it’s nice to know the option is there.

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I’m going to set myself a short reading course in enterprise-wide software foundation architectures. My naïve expectation is that the most important thing is that the programmers and other developers BELIEVE in the architecture design guidelines. Otherwise, folks will keep doing what they do and tack on code to make it fit the “rules.” Unless development practices change, it will be hard to make the design work. I proposed to my boss that issues such as cross group design reviews would be necessary to really connect between whatever grand design and actual practice.

I’ll start with this brief note by Jim Alateras in the O’Reilly web. His notes are a bit more on the “how to” document your architecture;

What an architecture document does:
* addresses the concerns of the stakeholders
* provides a context for planning, construction and testing
* helps identify the architectural risks

How to points:
* do NOT put it away never to be seen again (I recall in RedLightGreen there was a document that specified the interface design. i’d originally kept what i called the “midrash,” commentary that explained why we deviated. I passed it on and it was no longer kept up.)
* since it’s a dynamic document, identify the appropriate tools to maintain it
* consider a modeling tool with the ability to automatically generate the documentation.

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