BigShinyThing

Photos from Scott Haefner’s Flickr. Via Gawker.

The BBC reports that British over-55s are letting the side down abroad. Apparently, older people on holiday are increasingly indulging in binge drinking and (gasp!) extreme sports. It’s a nice antidote to the constant barrage of teen-villification and MySpace Party Destroyed Our Home hysteria. Our favourite bit:

Foreign Office Minister Meg Munn said: “The Foreign Office is all for over-55s having fun on holiday, but it is crucial they make some simple preparations to help avoid encountering difficulties whilst abroad.”

Consider yourselves told.

Pictured: the wonderful Daphne Selfe.

We love the muppet wiki… and not just because thanks to it, we now know which episode our favourite muppet number ever is in (it’s Episode 401, hiking pigs). No, we love this particular wiki because it shows what wikis are all about: sharing knowledge.

People often complain that wikis aren’t ‘visual’ enough and that (ouch) they are even ugly. This is a typical web 1.0 vs 2.0 argument. Take that much-loved beast of web 1.0: Flash. We’ve written before about how misappropriated flash actually hides knowledge from both search engines and users. For evidence, see… oooh, pretty much any ad agency website you care to think of! At the core of what makes wikis tick is sharing knowledge and unless your site was designed by Eric Gill, concentrated knowledge (generally) ain’t pretty: it’s functional. Even a wiki about something as visually brilliant as the muppets on first look, looks, well a little vanilla. It’s only once you start to engage with the content (i.e. search ‘hiking’… the key signifier of our favourite muppet skit) that you start to see the real beauty of the knowledge within.

Horse Meat Disco’s 2008 Drag Ball attracted a huge (and vocal) crowd and inspired entries from all competing Houses. More photos on Flickr.

[Photo ©2008, Darrell Berry]

MIT’s Technology Review highlights the new web service Make3D, which does a truly amazing job of extracting 3D data from normal 2D images.

A spinoff from research at Stanford, Make3D works its magic using:

a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example [...] grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.

Note the key phrase ‘machine learning’. They haven’t tried to understand the world — they’ve built a tool which can learn to understand depth cues in visual imagery. Cool.

Currently the system only understands scene cues in outdoor landscapes and (rather curiously, we think) indoor scenes which feature staircases (but why not?). Future work will help their system learn about other kinds of scenes. But what it does, it does very well indeed as proof-of-concept. See the Make3D site for demos, or to upload your own scenes for processing.

Impressive as it stands. But as we see it, the most exciting place for this technology to turn up will be at the point of capture — in cameras. Our Nikon D200 already features a ‘programme’ mode for autoexposure, which uses scene cues to understand something of what’s in front of the lens: a big blue rectangle top of image , for example, is probably the sky, and should maybe be overexposed relative to the lower half of the scene so that whatever’s underneath doesn’t come out pitch-black in the photo. Add in Make3D, which could profit from a whole slew of data available at time of capture (by, for example, capturing more depth data before and after the photo is taken by playing with autofocus…) and you’ve got consumer 3D photography done and dusted. We can’t wait.

The protest came after Nwabisa Ngcukana, 25, was allegedly attacked by a group of taxi-drivers and street hawkers for wearing a miniskirt.

“What we want to highlight is that women have rights — they have the right to choose what to wear,” said Nonhlanhla Mokeona from the People Opposing Women Abuse (Powa) organisation. She urged men to take part in the protest, to show they supported women’s rights.

Source: BBC. Fantastic photo of mini-skirted protestors (amongst many) from Czerwoni’s Flickr stream (of course).