links for 2009-09-28

Best overview of WikiCity I have found yet:

"In the past decades, real time control systems have been developed in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time control system? This is the aim of the WikiCity project at MIT, which deals with the development of real-time location-sensitive tools for the city."

"We can get seduced by an explanation, even a bad one. People often believe explanations because they find them intuitively satisfying, not because they are accurate. Other factors of seduction include: use of technical words, even if irrelevant; longer explanations, which people tend to rate as more similar to experts’ explanations; and people’s bias to look for a simple reductionist structure. "

"We are creating a flexible data collection campaigns for the modern, connected citizen scientist
Citizen Science allows individual volunteers or groups to observe, measure, and contribute to scientific environmental studies. How have we made this experience even better?
Networked Naturalist is a collection of tools that allows anybody to participate in the growing list of popular citizen scientist projects, all designed to harness the power of people who are not only concerned about their environments but also want to do something about it.
On-the-go, flexible data collection schemes, tailored to your busy schedule, allow you to use your cell phone text, email, and picture messages for data collection, as well as sending us email or web forms from your computer.
See your data, see how your data fits in with other people’s data, and see how involved scientists interpret those data — all in real-time."