Past Cider festivals and Events 2011 http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Past_Cider_festivals_and_Events_2011
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Past Cider festivals and Events 2011 http ukcider…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/past-cider-festivals-and-events-2011-http-ukcider/
February 24 2012, 2:54am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6231427352/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
- Tags:
- october
- 2011
- kewgardens
October 10 2011, 12:14pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6231422844/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
- Tags:
- october
- 2011
- kewgardens
October 10 2011, 12:12pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6231420284/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
- Tags:
- october
- 2011
- kewgardens
October 10 2011, 12:11pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6231414460/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
- Tags:
- october
- 2011
- kewgardens
October 10 2011, 12:10pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6230891535/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
- Tags:
- october
- 2011
- kewgardens
October 10 2011, 12:08pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Kew Gardens 10th Oct 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6230887921/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Kew Gardens
Bar headed Geese
October 10 2011, 12:07pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Last Day of Summer 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6227551461/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Last Day of Summer 2011
Blue House Farm Nature Reserve North Fambridge
October 9 2011, 4:50pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Last Day of Summer 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6228066828/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Last Day of Summer 2011
Blue House Farm Nature Reserve North Fambridge
October 9 2011, 4:49pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Orbit Tower August 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6045389056/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Orbit Tower August 2011
August 15 2011, 5:17am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Orbit Tower August 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6045387694/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Orbit Tower August 2011
August 15 2011, 5:16am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Orbit Tower August 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6044807967/
AndyRobertsPhotos posted a video:
Orbit Tower August 2011
August 15 2011, 5:00am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
The Orbit Tower 12th May 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5713579794/
AndyRob posted a video:
The Orbit Tower 12th May 2011
May 12 2011, 11:18am | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
History Hack Day
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/openplaquesblog/~3/XsiB8QTu8Dk/history-hack-day
This past weekend was the world’s first History Hack Day at The Guardian offices in London. This follows on from an increasing specialisation of hack days: we’ve gone from general hack days to hack days specifically on mobile technology (Over the Air), Twitter (WarbleCamp), science, music, charity, culture and now history. The weekend was put together by Matt Patterson who started the event by describing a vision of how a now ubiquitous web tool like Google Maps could have layers of the past attached. Imagine pulling out your smartphone and in addition to showing you the route from the railway station to the pub, it’d also show you what the streets used to be called, the industries and trades that used to operate where the identikit shopping centre now lies, a few glimpses into the sort of people who lived here and the ideas, rituals and objects they centered their lives around.
Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and I were there to fly the flag for Open Plaques. We helped a few hackers use the Open Plaques data but also worked on our own projects. But for me, as well as slinging Ruby and SQL and Java and what not, it was interesting to see what people were building on a purely academic level. While there are APIs and open data sets becoming available for pots and pans and buildings, the next step for me is to integrate the history of ideas: I think the history of philosophers, religious figures, writers, scientists and most importantly their ideas frame the world as much, if not slightly more, than kings, tyrants and presidents. With that said, let’s have a look at what people did build, some of which used data from Open Plaques: First up, Simon Cross (from Facebook) and Seyi Ogunyemi built an Open Plaques hack in Python called Plaquathon which used Facebook Places to let you check into plaques. At the Open Plaques Open Day last year, integration with location-based social networking or some kind of social game aspect to Open Plaques seemed like something we’d like to have, so it was nice to see this being put together so quickly. Data from Open Plaques was also used by Morena Fiore and Chris Lock in a hack called “Price Re-enactment Adjustment Tool” (or “PRAT” for short) which showed (with a good deal of guesswork and fiction!) the effect of the Blitz on house prices. Buildings getting blown up nearby tended to lower house prices, while a celebrity moving in bumped the price back up. And by ‘celebrities’, they mean someone with a plaque. Finally: a piece of software that thinks Bertrand Russell is more worthy of the title ‘celebrity’ than Kerry Katona. There were two trains-related hacks: Paul Downey and his son Jed attempted to uncover details about historical railways, while Simon Harriyott built geStation, which shows the evolution of the UK’s rail network from 1786 onwards and used dbpedia, the RDF version of Wikipedia. (We’ll have to wait for “transport hack day” before someone builds a hack to make the trains actually run on time!) Wikipedia data was behind some other hacks too: Mike Stenhouse’s Pokemonarchs attempted to build a Pokémon-style card game from people, with importance derived from the number of results from Google Scholar, while the amount of edits to the person’s Wikipedia article measuring the amount of controversy they cause (George W. Bush, who has 40,723 edits, squarely beats both Jesus and Adolf Hitler on that front). Also using Wikipedia data was Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin’s History of the World in 100 Seconds which plots geotagged historical events on a map over time and shows how Western-centric history is, how Western-centric Wikipedians are (they acknowledge that), or possibly both. My own modest little hack is one to try and get more people out there creating free culture by photographing objects and places in the real world that have been requested by free culture projects in response to them “checking in” on location-based services like Foursquare. Currently, it is for Wikipedia, but will hopefully also integrate with Open Plaques. With a bit of luck, someone will check into a café for lunch and their phone will tell them to go and take photos of plaques and Roman ruins and other bits of urban miscellany. Rather than tie myself down to any specific mobile platform, I’m building a web front end and also a Twitter interface because that’s a lot easier than learning, oh, Objective-C, Cocoa, the Android APIs, C#, XNA and the Windows Phone APIs. Interestingly, I don’t think we saw any hacks presented that were built for a specific mobile platform rather than for the Web. Cristiano Betta produced a hack that was rated ‘Best of Show’ by the judges: a mobile version of A History of the World in 100 Objects, such that you can listen to the BBC programmes on a smartphone while seeing the real object in the British Museum. Cristiano has written it up for his blog. One of the more surreal hacks was Brian Suda’s ‘Titanic Matching’ app which lets you call up on a phone and matches you to a Titanic passenger, then tells you what happens to them. No hack day would be complete without something very silly from Tom Scott, and this time it was an app called “The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator” which takes your postcode and shows you all the mystical ley lines you might be on. ‘Mystical’ being a code word for bullshit, of course. While hack day projects often do not turn into enduring projects (Open Plaques itself is one that did!), they do showcase what amazing things people can do when dosed up on caffeine and pizza and given access to data. For me, they vindicate the openness of projects like Wikipedia and Open Plaques, and hopefully serve as an invitation to companies and governments to join the web of linked data, preferably linked open data. Also, be sure to go and read Jeremy Keith’s blog post about the event. [image courtesy of Adactio on Flickr]
- Tags:
- 2011
- Events
- #hhd11
- history hack day
January 25 2011, 7:07am | Comments »
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