Prototyping Weeknotes #34 (01/10/10)
It's full steam ahead on the Springwatch companion prototype this week; user testing has been scheduled next week so the pressure is on. Theo is frantically wrapping up his work and Chris B and Duncan are trying to sort out some possible library clashes. I'm pulling together a plan to get us from user testing to a possible public trial. Sean's heads down finalising the tech post for Zeitgeist and making some final mods to the code after some peer review; you can read the final outcome here.
Tristan attended the at the Royal Society at the start of the week. It's a field of study that looks at the World Wide Web from the multiple perspectives of computer science, psychology, biology, sociology, ecology, economics, law, media and political science. Here's some of the standout talks:
- MIT's David Karger with his call for simple publishing and presentation of data on the web. This is encapsulated in the for simple publishing of data with filtering and visualisations just using static pages and a javascript library.
- talk on social science research on the web was a very positive look at how several studies have found a positive correlation between internet use and happiness, primarily due to the increased opportunities for sociability and autonomy.
- Luis Von Ahn's great talk on "Human Computation". He invented the CAPTCHA and it's more productive sibling the , which is currently digitising about 80 million words per day. His team is now working on a language learning project that will attempt to translate the web.
- And finally, on the threats to the future of the Web.
Back in the office, Chris N continues to do battle with colour conversion on the Android camera; there's not much documentation out there but he seems confident he'll work things out by the end of the week. Mark has split out his audio stream fingerprinting work into client and server apps and is now working on capturing real data from a device's microphone. Next step is to give the server a DVB-T source.
Tris and I spend most of Wednesday locked in a room talking, thinking and scribbling strategy related things. Chris N demo's the recent work on RadioDNS to some visitors from , the German public service broadcaster. Springwatch is taking shape, the issues seem to have been resolved so it's now just a case of bashing through the remaining templates. The aim is to do an end-to-end run through on Friday morning.
In other news, Dan Catt from the Guardian comes to see us and we compare , Duncan has updated our account and Tony is out and about recording things with a soundfield mic. By Friday, Chris N has managed to get the marker tracking working fully on the phone; we'll demo it to our R&D colleagues next week and discuss possible next steps. We do a run through of the Springwatch prototype; everything is working as expected and it looks fantastic. A good week all round.
Comment number 1.
At 2nd Oct 2010, Briantist wrote:I met someone from the reCAPTCHA a few years ago, and still can't get over how they managed to take two rather intractable and unpleasant problems - poor OCR and the deluge of spam, and joined them together so elegantly.
If anything demonstrates the ability of the internet to both cause and solve problems, reCAPTCHA is it.
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