IDIOM (Information Diffusion Across Interactive Online Media) is a two-year research project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology group in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and Eutema Technology Management.

The recent interest in social web applications and the Wisdom of Crowds together with collaborative semantic web technologies make it possible to identify and correlate networks of connections into information spaces. IDIOM will provide a framework for analyzing content diffusion and interaction patterns within these spaces, and develop interface technology that enables users switch between semantic and geospatial topologies.

Information diffusion and propagation highlights the interplay of users as consumers and producers. Do metaphors and methods rise naturally from these networks? What other information spaces are ripe for the picking?

blogopole.fr provides an interface into blogs concerning the political blogosphere in France, analized in the context of the 2007 French elections.

This is not entirely new, I spoke about genomic data visualization using spatial topologies to display an analysis of gene expression in my “moving from data to story” presentation to the 2002 O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference.

A semantic analysis of PubMed networks for the purposes of genome scale annotation would still be an interesting exercise.

An article on team dynamics by Steve W. J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen appears in the Scientific American Mind issue for June 2007. Points include:

Organizations reward individuals based on individual performance rather than team performance.

If teamwork skills were ubiquitous, there would be enormous benefits to students and society.

My interest stems from the perspective of creating systems to support geographically distributed research projects. What is a critical mass for such a community? Are there tools we can build, interactions we can support to make these environments more productive?

Bibliography:

A Multiple-Goal, Multilevel Model of Feedback Effects on the Regulation of Individual and Team Performance. Richard P. DeShon, Steve W. J. Koz-lowski, Aaron M. Schmidt, Karen A. Milner and Darin Wiechmann in Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 89, No. 6, pages 1035-1056; December 2004.

An Evaluation of Generic Teamwork Skills Training with Action Teams: Effects on Cognitive and Skill-based Outcomes. Aleksander P. J. Ellis, Bradford S. Bell, Robert E. Ployhart, John R. Hollenbeck and Daniel R. Ilgen in Personnel Psychology, Vol. 58, No. 3, pages 641-672; Autumn 2005.

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams. Steve W. J. Koz-lowski and Daniel R. Ilgen in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol. 7, No. 3, pages 77-124; December 2006.

Articles are beginning to surface describing a growing relationship between Apple, Google, and Mercedes. Building on earlier work with their iPod Integration Kit, sources speculate the new system will integrate vehicle management, Google Maps, and Apple interface software. The systems are said to arrive in 2009.

Will such a device become that AppleTV equivalent for the automobile?

(See also: autoblog.com)
(See also: foursprung.com)
(See also: focus.de)
(See also: gizmodo.com)
(See also: whnet.com)

I’ve installed the latest version of Matlab (R2007a) on a 32GB Sun V880
running SunOS 5.11, Solaris11/64-bit. The license is in place, the license manager is running. The install and finishing scripts completed smoothly.

When you run the application, it produces the following output in the
command window:

    ??? Can't load '/opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwm_interpreter.so': ld.so.1:
    MATLAB: fatal: relocation error: file /opt/matlab/sys/os/sol64/libstlport.so.1:
    symbol __nanosleep: referenced symbol not found
    ??? An error occurred while trying to determine whether
    "matlabrc" is a function name.

The library producing the relocation error appears to be linked correctly. All associated files exist:

    % ldd MATLAB > /tmp/matlab-ldd.out
    % more /tmp/matlab-ldd.out
        libut.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libut.so
        libmx.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmx.so
        libmwservices.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwservices.so
        libmwjmi.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwjmi.so
        libmwbridge.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwbridge.so
        libmwmcr.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwmcr.so
        libmwm_dispatcher.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwm_dispatcher.so
        libmwm_interpreter.so => /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/libmwm_interpreter.so
        libm.so.1 => /lib/sparcv9/libm.so.1
        libw.so.1 => /lib/sparcv9/libw.so.1

Not sure if this is normal output, ‘value too large’ cannot be good:

    % ./matlab -Dgdb
    GNU gdb 6.2.1
    ...
    This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-solaris2.10"...
        (no debugging symbols found)...
    (gdb) run -nojvm
    Starting program: /opt/matlab/bin/sol64/MATLAB -nojvm
    procfs: target_wait (wait_for_stop) line 3937, /proc/22801:
        Value too large for defined data type.
    (gdb) where
    #0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
    (gdb) 

I found a couple of other people who produced a similar error on Ubuntu
boxes:

http://newsreader.mathworks.com/WebX?14@476.ZnZScS6gd8M@.ef59084

I called Matlab support. The issue escalated two layers and then bumped to development. I was given a Service Request number and they will get back to me.

Update: Reinstall Matlab. So far no change. Attempts to install on systems as early as 5.8 were even more problematic.

I was asked to teach an ‘Introduction to Programming: Perl for Biologists’ workshop again this year. Curriculum emphasized extensions interesting to Life Sciences research. The course is a part of Bioinformatics Summer Institute 2007 at the Digital Technology Center, here at the University of Minnesota. The Institute will continue for ten summer weeks. Thirteen undergraduate and graduate students participated in ten and a half hours of instruction and lab.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I think the students learned some useful bits. Kudos and thanks to my TAs, Allison Langham and Daniel Bolintineanu.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
#
print "Hello, world!\n";

If you have an interest in obtaining any portion of these presentations, please contact me directly. I am also willing to travel and train at your location.