While in Genova for the last couple weeks, I only had limited time to read and write e-mails, and now that I am back in my office I am slowly trying to get through everything that was left behind. I have found it inspiring to read some of the blog entries on e-mail handling over at 43Folders. I am now trying to be a bit harder on how much time I spend in my inbox, by following these advice:

I am doing some “house-cleaning” on my computer, and came across the link to the OLPC Sound Samples which were announced last month. This collection covers a lot of different sounds, ranging from the Berklee samples to sets created by people in the CSound community. Obviously, not all the 10GB is equally interesting, but the initiative is excellent, and along with the Freesound project, it makes a great resource for various projects.

On the plane down to Genova I had an interesting tactile experience. It turned out that the box that the lunch was served in had this 3D ornament of a walnut on the top cover (not so easy to represent in a picture, but you get the idea). Interesting how much this enhanced the experience! {width=“400” height=“300”}

The Chronicle reports that Harvard University enforces an Open Access policy for all publications made by the faculty. This is great, and a drastic step towards making research more publicly available. We have an Open Access system at UiO (called DUO), but so far this is mainly used to publish master theses. I have tried to push for the option to upload other types of publications there too, and this is supposed to be possible now from the FRIDA system which we use to document all research activities.

There has been quite a lot of media interest concerning my PhD disputation last week. A Norwegian news search engine reports some 80 appearances, and this is not counting all the radio interviews I have done… Here are some examples: TV: NRK - Store Studio NRK - Østlandssendingen TV Budstikka Nettavisen ScanpixNTB TV Newspapers: Forskning.no Dagens Næringsliv NRK.no Vårt land + 40 something versions of the story that NTB wrote (national news agency) “Dr.

Following an interesting thread on careers in Max/MSP, I came across a link to Joshs Rules of Database Contracting. I particularly like these ones: Ask Not Whats Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait. Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget.

Richard Parncutt is asking for response from ex-music psychology students for the Careers After Music Psychology survey. If you have studied music psychology at any time (even if just one course), we would be grateful for about 20 minutes of your valuable time. Please participate regardless of whether or not your current occupation involves music or psychology in any way. This questionnaire aims to document the careers of ex-students of music psychology to inform current students of music psychology about career opportunities to develop career-oriented strategies for teaching music psychology to promote music psychology among potential employers I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of this research, and I hope (and expect) that they find people to end up in a wide range of disciplines.

I just learned about Eduroam: Eduroam which stands for Education Roaming, is a RADIUS-based infrastructure that uses 802.1X security technology to allow for inter-institutional roaming. Being part of eduroam allows users visiting another institution connected to eduroam to log on to the WLAN using the same credentialsusername and passwordthe user would use if he were at his home institution. Depending on local policies at the visited institutions, eduroam participants may also have additional resources at their disposal.

Earlier today I went to the release seminar of a new book on creativity and idea development called Slagkraft - Håndbok i idéutvikling by Erik Lerdahl. In his introduction, Erik Lerdahl stressed the importance of creativity not being something that happens by random, but rather that it is a “muscle” that can be trained. Nice metaphor. What I found most interesting during the seminar was the talk by Ragnar Johansen, the marketing director from Stabburet, a Norwegian food producer.

Musikkteknologidagene 2007, a Norwegian contact meeting for people working in the field(s) of music technology, will be organised at the Norwegian Academy of Music 10 and 11 October. I initiated the first of these meetings back in 2005, and am happy that we manage to keep the concept alive. Both research on, and use of, music technology is growing rapidly in Norway as everywhere else. However, while many of us working in the field have large international networks in our special branches of the music technology world, we often seem to know little about what is happening in our own country.

{#image457}The MTG group at Pompeu Fabra reports that Björk will use the Reactable in her upcoming tour: With her first tour concert at the Coachella Festival in California, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced the reactable for the first time to a mainstream audience. Our instrument will form a key element of the artist’s current world tour “Volta” which will appear at numerous music festivals during the next 18 months. I have tried the Reactable at various conferences and it is great that this innovative collaborative instrument gets some attention outside the music tech community.

A Microsoft demo of surface computing, showing several prototypes of “gesture control” (what I would call action control) in software.

There are very few items that make me happy every time I use them, but my Sandisk SD memory card is one of them. I have had it for around a year, and it seems to be some of the most ingenious industrial design during the last years. It makes cables unnecessary, as I simple flip it open and connect it to a USB port. Brilliant! In the beginning I was very afraid that it should break, but I have been using it a lot over the last year without any problems.

Reading this post, and viewing the picture below, I came to think about the dynamics of the Max/MSP community:

I have been thinking a lot about GUIs, namespaces and control parameters over the last couple of days. One of the big challenges we are facing is how to make technology more human-friendly. Often it seems that technology controls us more than we control the technology. Creating a user interface of any kind is very similar how we think about mapping in musical instruments. In essence, any type of control is one, or several, layers of mapping between one set of parameters to another.

Tod Machover’s article Shaping Minds Musically is an interesting read, summarising much of the work on hyperinstruments that have happened at the MIT Media Lab during the last ten years. The main point he is trying to make, is that music should be active rather than passive. This comes from the observation that most people’s involvement with music is from a reception side rather than from production. There is more music than ever in the air, but fewer of us actually play music, sing music, or create our own music.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. […] Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 ? k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources.

jill/txt is discussing whether the novelty of blogs is wearing off: For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. […] And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out. I think the comment by Linn is right on the target:

David Mindell’s three secrets to life (via John Maeda): Take 24 uninterrupted hours of rest per week. Don’t travel as it wastes time. Say ’no’ to meetings often.

I came across Brad Garton’s blog via Tim. It starts: Last week I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a fairly bad cancer of the bone marrow. The good news is that I am relatively young to be diagnosed with this disease and it seems that it was detected early. The bad news is that, well, it’s a ‘bad’ cancer to have. I think I’m about to embark on yet another life adventure.

A comment on why university teachers should think critically about Word and .doc: Many of us teach cultural analysis and critical thinking in our writing classes. Our first year readers are full of cultural commentary, and we use these texts to teach our students to question the status quo and understand more deeply the implications of the choices they make in this consumer culture. Do writing teachers do the same when they tell students to submit their documents as .

I wrote this blog entry several months ago, but never posted it because I thought I would have time to go back and evaluate the sounds more. Since I don’t see that happen any time before I finish my dissertation, I just go along and post it now: Microsoft has posted some info and examples of the Vista soundscape. The sounds are designed by Robert Fripp and will be some of the most well known sounds on the planet in not too long.

A great little movie about the internet (html, xml, hypertext, etc.) by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University.

Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with all the major stakeholders within the scholarly communication process (researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, research policymakers, etc.). The Study noted that ‘dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area’ and it made a number of balanced and reasonable recommendations to improve the visibility and usefulness of European research outputs.

What I find most fascinating about Apple’s new iPhone, is the shift from buttons to body. Getting away from the paradigm of pressing buttons to make a call or to navigate, the iPhone boasts a large multi-touch screen where the user will be able to interact by pointing at pictures and objects. Furthermore, the built-in rotation sensor will sense the direction of the device and rotate the screen accordingly, somehow similar to how new digital cameras rotate the pictures you take automatically.

John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity: REDUCE – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction ORGANIZE – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer TIME – Savings in time feel like simplicity LEARN – Knowledge makes everything simpler DIFFERENCES – Simplicity and complexity need each other CONTEXT – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral EMOTION – More emotions are better than less TRUST – In simplicity we trust FAILURE – Some things can never be made simple THE ONE – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

How to distribute things through Amazon. Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89. Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC. Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year. Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside. Ship two copies to Amazon Send cover scan Track sales Register it (optional)

Joel Spolsky writes about flow: We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow”, also known as being “in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration…trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers – especially interruptions by coworkers – all knock you out of the zone.

Last weekend we participated (again) with a stand at a big science fair down in the city centre of Oslo during the Norwegian Research Days. {.imagelink} The most interesting thing, and also what I have spent the most time on lately was a “music troll” I have been making together with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Arve Voldsund. The troll is basically a box with four speakers on the sides, and four arms sticking out with heads with included sensors.

The Eurovision Song Contest (or Melodi Grand Prix as it often called) is a bizarre annual music competition broadcasted over the whole of Europe. The music is rarely in focus, and most people tend to “love to hate” the concept. However, for many of the new countries in Europe the contest is important to show their own existence and bound with their allies this Norwegian commentator writes.

Katherine Wilson writes about how she underestimated blogging when she got started: At the start I underestimated what it could be used for. It’s a database, a diary, a place to jot down notes that don’t fit anywhere else, a place to stake out your research territory, a self-promotion tool, an information bank, an ideas exchange, a support community, a progress-log, a device for self-discipline, confidence-tracker, a complaints department, a file storage system.

Orbicule has some interesting computer theft software for Apple computers. If stolen the Undercover software will take pictures at regular intervals with the built in i-Sight and send to the user together with information about the network location of the computer. It can also cause a hardware “failure” so that the computer will have to be sent for repair where the theft will be noticed.

I often go to concerts, and too often I find the need to use ear plugs because of loud sound levels. I really don’t get it, why is it necessary to play so loud all the time? Usually lots of people around me agrees that the music is unpleasantly loud, and I often see other people using ear plugs. I have bought expensive ear plugs a couple of times, but I always tended to forget them (eventually loosing them…), so now I have just bought lots of really cheap ones so that I can have a pair in every pocket.

From the web site of the Wireless Networking in the Developing World project: The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost. We hope to not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how we have made such networks work, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community.

I have received a number of Word attachments recently. Nowadays, I only touch MS Word when I am forced to by other people, as I rely on TextWrangler, TextEdit, OpenOffice and LaTex for my various text related activities. I started to summarize why I think people should avoid Word, especially as e-mail attchments, but then I found some web pages with more well-thought and well-rounded arguments: - Manuel M T Chakravarty’s Attachments in Proprietary Formats Considered Harmful

{#p101 .imagelink}Some facts about the underground city of Montreal, which I pass through every day: Montreal (Underground city or la Ville souterraine in French) whose 32 kilometres of tunnels connect seven downtown metro stations, seven large hotels and many important office towers and malls on 41 city blocks (12 square kilometres). It is the largest underground city in the World and was built because of the cold winters. Montreal has several smaller tunnel systems in other parts of the city linking other attractions to metro stations.