Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy museums seb_schmoller ]

New research shows that babies’ perception of color changes once they learn language.

This is not surprising, is it? We already knew that cultures classify colors differently. In fact, this research was done by one of the lead investigators in that field. Pretty clearly, this is an environmentally-caused difference. Language learning is the obvious culprit. Still, this helps to know:

When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain’s language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them.

Here’s an article that cracks the code on Bestiario’s ultra-cool tagcloud visualizers (AKA 6pli). I still have no ear (so to speak) for the graphical display of information, but this article helps.

Hanan Cohen spotted this at Last.fm:

When the artist is listed as ‘Undefined’ this is probably a poorly-tagged mp3.
Otherwise, Undefined is a Spanish progressive death metal band. The first Undefined EP is called Saturnism Unfolds and is avalaible to download at http://www.definethenoise.tk.
UnDeFiNeD is also a Belgian underground band, bringing a variety of urban styles

[Tags: undefined definitions humor ]

Tim Bray has a terrific piece on the development of XML, now in its tenth year as an official standard. He focuses on the people, not on the technicalities of the standard.

It’s worth it just to re-read Tim’s words about Yuri Rubinsky, an SGML advocate of enormous energy and passion, without a mean bone in his body.

It’s also worth it to learn the off-the-mainstage history of XML, of course.

Let me disambiguate that title: Reuters is offering a Web service, called Calais, that will parse text and return it in a form (RDF) that can be utilized by Semantic Web applications. It uses natural language processing (from ClearForest) to find structures of meaning such as places, jobs, facts, events, etc. It apparently has its own metadata schema, but it allows users to extend it. It’s an open API, and Reuters is being quite generous in how much they’ll let you submit during this beta period. It’s English only for now, although they plan to support other languages, opening the exciting prospect of being able to find items of interest in languages you don’t understand via a unified metadata framework.

I’m going by the site’s FAQ. I haven’t tried it and can’t tell how well it works, how accurate it is, how comprehensive or detailed its metadata are, and how much post-processing cleanup uses will want to provide (which of course depends on the application). There are some points I just don’t understand, such as the claim “Calais carries your own metadata anywhere in the content universe.” But if it works within some reasonable definition of “works,” and if it gets widely adopted, Calais could make a lot more information a lot easier to find, and to process for further meaning. [Tags:semantic_web semweb reuters calais nlp ]

Doc has a nice post about the fact that everybody is miscellaneous (to use his phrase), and why being lumped with others gives him aggregaphobia (another nice turn of phrase). [Tags: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/02/10/aggregaphobia/ ]

Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool. [Tags: visualization social_networks ]

Here’s an article about businesses glomming on to the virtual worlds thang…

Of course, this is a little past tense this morning — with an emphasis on the tense — but here’s a very cool mashup of election results, Google maps and Twitter.. It’d be more useful to me if it would only show me tweets from the people I follow, but, well, maybe next election…[Tags: twitter election politics mashup ]