Category: Uncategorized

If you didn’t know this yet: vienna is one of the coolest places to geek at. Nice town, cheap rents, cool people, free universities, art, recreation. And, most important: free wifi nearly everywhere.

Try it out in vienna: open your mobile computer and in 50% of all times, some nice person will have intentionally have left you an open wifi access point. Yes, these people believe that the world is a nice place and that you can surely use their wifi to read mail and google something up. There is free wifi in most of the cafés I frequent and there are enough public places like www.muqa.at with free wifi.

All this geek-friendlyness of vienna has led to many people using plazes there to check where they are and where wifi is. Vienna is on place four in an in-official statistics with having the most online plazes. Vienna is on a head-to-head race for place four with New York, perfect. San Francisco is second, first is Berlin.

Amazon.de started a service where you can rent DVDs. The idea is – similar to other existing online DVD rentals – that you pay about 10€ per month and can have one DVD at home all times. So, they send you a DVD, you keep it, sometimes you send it back, get the next one.

Now, cool: amazon, one of the biggest web shops has DVD rental. So I would expect that I can rent now all those nice DVDs they have in the shop. It would be perfect: in Kaiserslautern there is no specialised DVD rental service and we cannot get all the interesting movies (for example, the top 100 of IMDB cannot be retrieved in Kaiserslautern).
If amazon rented everything, it would improve something.

But no. Search for all the good titles – you can’t rent them.
A few examples:

• Texas Chainsaw Massacer – DVD at amazon in three different versions, no rental
• Hotel Rwanda – DVD at amazon shop, award winning movie. IMDB place 47. no rental
• Shichinin no samurai – not at amazon.de at all (hm)
• Animal House – one of the most successfull movies ever, part of american heritage, sold in amazon shop but no rental

This sucks. I only signed up there to get “Animal House” but they don’t rent it.

So what will happen? These online DVD rentals will steal income from local rentals, so expect that your local stores will close or get a more limited program. All online DVD rentals probably have the same blockbusting entertainment. I hope that someone points me to a good alternative online DVD rental, where I can get above DVDs.

Go support your local weirdo video rental, where you can meet fellow weirdos and can have interesting conversations.

Old research, still funny. Dr Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Dr Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University created nice setups to trick humans, based on attention.

The setup they created is: tell somebody to watch this video of basketball players and to count, how often the white team has passed the ball.

the video:
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

At the end of the video,they ask: how often? And the (but don’t spoil this by telling it before): Did you notice the gorilla walking from right to left through the scene, banging on his chest?

An article on that.

Some www.hardbloggingscientists.de visited the CeBit Freenet booth party, rocking there. Youtube this yourself:

Was macht das DFKI eigentlich? Wir sind ja etwa 300 Forscher, arbeiten an Forschungsprojekten, publizieren Papiere, generieren Ideen. Also eigentlich Grundlagenforschung und Angewandte Forschung die zu Spin-Offs und Produkten bei Partnern führt.

In einem Satz: Wir sind das DFKI und wir machen Auftragsforschung.

Auftragsforschung! Zuerst hier von Daniel Porta während der Mittagspause verwendet. Ein Wort das die richtigen Neuronen triggert, Endorphine für alle. Testen wir das Wort mal in verschiedenen Sätzen:

• Auftragsforschung
• Wir forschen, aber mit einem Auftrag
• Gebt uns einen Auftrag zum Forschen

The human search engine: enter a question at google answers, set a price and wait until other humans answer the question.

You pay $0.50 per question plus an amount between $2 and $200. Selected researcher, selected by google, will then answer within 24 hours.

read the faq to find it out.

A human web-service, tickling my neurons, this thing.

Andreas Schepers, unser Kommunikationsguru vom DFKI und ich tratschen so auf der CeBit, ergibt sich das er Jan Schmidt kennt, der ja mit Knallgrau und anderen die Blogger Studie gemacht hat.

Knallgrau wiederum ist ja die weblog company schlechthin, wo auch dieses Weblog wo du gerade liest – nämlich twoday.net – herkommt. Beste Grüße an Knallgrau an dieser Stelle.

Kleine ist die Welt, und Bamberg wo der Jan Schmidt her ist hat ja auch die deutsche Monochrom Dependance, nämlich Richard Wientzek. So kommt das alles zusammen.

alsdann: Jan Schmidts Bamblog, lest es um mehr über Weblogs zu erfahren.

And weird – the President of Battlestar Galactice, Laura Roslin is standing behind us. See yourself on the galactica homepage. So this means that the Galactica has found earth, and as Laura looks older, already years ago. Now, if the members of the Galactica have found earth and are living amongst us – where are the Zylons? Probably they settled for a peace treaty and the Zylons are already living amongst us here on earth. General Adama, save us!

The landscape of open source speech synthesizers is growing richer. The
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), partner in
the Network of Excellence HUMAINE on emotion-oriented computing, has
decided to release its emotional text-to-speech synthesis system MARY as
open source.

The system can be downloaded from http://mary.dfki.de

MARY is a multi-lingual (German, English, Tibetan) and multi-platform
(Windows, Linux, MacOs X and Solaris) speech synthesis system. It comes
with an easy-to-use installer — no technical expertise should be
required for installation.

What i liked best is the emotional speaking plugin to play around. Brings up a feeling of c64 speech synthesis but with emotional blendings, great thing to automatically generate the swearword of the day or to motivate yourself by letting mary say how wonderful your work is, repeating for hours.

http://cling.dfki.uni-sb.de/emospeak

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

by way of gunnar grimnes