Montreal Events

31 November

12pm (Book Launch)

Canadian Centre for Architecture Bookstore

1920, rue Baile

Montreal, Quebec

(514) 939-7026

Water Launch

This extension brings a new Events panel that lists all of the event handlers on the page grouped by event type. The panel also nicely integrates with other Firebug panels and allows to quickly find out, which HTML element is associated with specific event listener or see the Javascript source code.

I recently wrote simple abstraction for exposing calendar events in Django as iCalendar feeds. It relies on vobject for managing the formatting of the calendar file, so you will need this if you want to try it out. It is available in Debian in the python-vobject package.

Orthogonal to these strategies, which revolve around the nature and scale of content being created, there are those sites with look to aggregation methods across a variety of data types (from weblog feeds to traffic news streams). In addition, there are various services and technologies which can enhance the data and provide some plugin style publishing components (e.g. maps with events pinned on them) for hyperlocal sites to leverage.

VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is influenced by BarCamp, although the emphasis is different. Whereas BarCamps are oriented to demos and presentations, VoCamps are oriented to hands-on technical work and practical outputs; any presentations and demos should be short, highly on-topic to the vocabulary development process, and limited in number, to leave plenty of time for hacking on new vocabularies.

This document defines the iCalendar data format for representing and exchanging calendaring and scheduling information such as events, to-dos, journal entries, and free/busy information, independent of any particular calendar service or protocol.

When the idea came up, we thought “wow, this is really innovative and smart”. But quickly we found out that we had not invented anything: Tupperware has been doing for years. And since 1907 a famous movement has functionned in a similar way, groups of people getting together following guidelines expressed in a book. It is of course Scouting. Scouting spread all around the world based on Baden Powell’s book. So if you thought Barcamp and Pecha Kucha’s concept of decentralized events was new, unfortunately it is not really. Welcome to the frustration of living in the 21st century, almost everything has already been done :)

For example, CAPTCHAs prevent scalpers from writing programs to buy millions of tickets for concerts or sporting events. It is estimated that over 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed every day, each taking roughly ten seconds of human effort - that's 500,000 hours a day. ReCAPTCHA re-cycles this human mental effort into a dual purpose: transcribing books.

This year the Burning Man organization is assisting with the launch of an API. With the API you get access to descriptions and locations of the Streets, Art, Camps and Events. When combined with a map this is everything you need for a local city guide.

Behavioral Inference across Cultures: Using Telephones as a Cultural Lens

Eagle, N.

Intelligent Systems, IEEE

Volume 23, Issue 4, July-Aug. 2008 Page(s):62 - 64

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIS.2008.58

Summary:Most people carry mobile telephones, which automatically capture behavioral data and store it in service provider databases around the world. The different types of captured data can provide insight into human cultures. Examples from various cultures and hundreds of millions of individuals illustrate how phones can serve as a cultural lens, improving our understanding of social networks, outlier events, and a culture's pace of life.