Archives: August 2006
Wed Aug 30, 2006
Manifesto Games
Manifesto Games has now launched. This is an attempt to sell computer games written by individuals or SMEs direct to us, and avoid the stranglehold of the major retail chains and the 'amrs race' of the major games makers. More...
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Earth Simulator: how comprehensive can a simulation be?
Interview in NZ Computerworld with Tetsuya Sato, director of the Earth Simulator Centre. He claims it has 'changed the concept of simulation'. More...
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Tue Aug 29, 2006
Amazon's Elastic Compute cloud
Maluke reports this new service from Amazon. It offers instant massive server capacity for short-term work - eg for simulations or render farms. In effect you set up andadminister the server using some Java tools you download and a key, wait for it to give you an IP address, the connect to that and off you go. Sounds better than their Mechanical Turk More...
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Is 'Second Life' pointless?
A post on Web 2.0 Blog Network argues that "frankly, there is no end, no purpose in Second Life". Second Life (SL) is based around consumerism, pointless and mechanical activity, and offers no real interaction. I've never entered SL so I don't know: but surely this argument can be applied to most uses of simulation on the web? What is the 'purpose' of MMPORGs, for example? Or most 'non-serious' video games? More...
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Zeppelins, the World Cup, and traffic simulation.
According to this press release, vehicle traffic during the recent World Cup series in Germany was monitored from a Zeppelin, and simulations used to smooth traffic flow More...
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Mon Aug 28, 2006
If London Were Like Venice
Marvellous reprint on Forgotten Futures of an article published in Harmsworth's Magazine in 1899 by Somers L Summers, which imagines London partly sunk under the sea. More...
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The visual expression of emotion
Do we naturally show our emotions by facial expressions, or did we learn to? And if so, when did we learn, and did we learn through simulations (in this case, visual arts?) More...
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Sun Aug 27, 2006
London cabbies' brains.
Can't resist quoting this piece from Retrospectacle. The size and shape of the brains of London taxi drivers who have done 'the knowledge' is significantly different from others. More...
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Wed Aug 23, 2006
Can we handle very large datasets safely?
Cryptome quotes a statement by the (London) Metropolitan Police a about the recent anti-terrorism arrests. The quantity of evidence gathered is interesting, and raises questions about human ability to handle large datasets and the social implications of generating them. More...
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Tue Aug 22, 2006
Cyberstorm exercise
Cryptome leaked, and Wired wrote up, details of a Department of Homeland Security led "international cyber terror simulation involving 115 public and private organizations in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand", held last year. More...
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Mon Aug 21, 2006
Big computer systems
This story about the FBI's failed $170 million computer system. Yes, this may have been a bad example, but are any successful huge systems really possible? More...
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Tue Aug 15, 2006
An example of repurposed data
The Enron Email Corpus is an excellent example of 'repurposed' data: generated for one purpose, published, and the re-used for another. More...
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Mon Aug 14, 2006
Using simulation to cure PTSD
Wired and Business Week both report that the US military are using simulators to help PTSD victims. More...
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Wed Aug 09, 2006
Change blindness
Fascinating example on Cognitive Daily of how we find it difficult to see change over time. More...
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