The end of the Internet
Markus Lassnig, head of ANET-Salzburg, the etourism competence centre, pointed me to a nice application. See The End of the Internet (in German only).
Add comment December 22nd, 2006
Posts filed under 'Fun'
Mobile Applications and New Technologies in Tourism
ANET – Austria’s network for eTourism – organised a transfer workshop on mobile applications for/in tourism.
Manfred Bortenschlager of Salzburg Research presented a “software framework for the development of prototypes for early acceptance tests.
He started by describing the difficulties in requirements engineering. See the following images:
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Within the “Mobility Lab” of ANET-Salzburg Manfred and his colleagues will now develop a software framework that focuses on easy and rapid prototyping of mobile applications. The idea is to start as early as possible with “real” prototypes in order to get user feedback about acceptance, etc.
Watch this space …
Add comment October 19th, 2006
Download the Internet
… a nice joke I found on www.w3schools.com (an excellent site, btw!).
Here it is (copied from http://www.w3schools.com/downloadwww.htm). Enjoy!
Add comment October 6th, 2006
Publish or Perish
 (Image taken from http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/landrec/images/publish.gif.) |
 (Image taken from http://studycircle.angeltowns.com/academic.htm.) |
A message I came across recently, posted by Stevan Harnad, Prof. of Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton. He also coined the term “scholarly skywriting”.
The following poem, “Publish or Perish,” has won the (English-language category) prize in the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2006) Poetry Competition, sponsored by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung. The award of 300 euros has been donated by the author to the Alliance for Tax-Payer Access in support of their efforts to promote the adoption of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the US: With UK OA now well on its way, let Euroscience and euros now reach across the Atlantic to help spread OA to the entire planet…
See http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/112-guid.html
Add comment August 9th, 2006
Vacation Reading: “Ants at work”
These days I was on vacation and I happened to read a fascinating book: Ants at work by Deborah Gordon (ISBN 0-393.32132.0).
Here is some interesting facts and arguments of the book. Gordon has a focus on the “rest harvester ant” (she also mentions other species throughout the book but most facts relate to the red harvester ant).
(Picture taken from http://www.tightloop.com/ants/images/pogbar/IMG_7759.jpg)
Basically, ant colonies are fascinating as ants to do not have a central management (“Ants are not smart”, the queen is not an authority). Then, ants (except for the queen) do not get very old: just about one year (the queen can get up to 15-20 years, after her death the colony dies). Still, colonies evolve and older colonies behave differently than younger colonies (even though all except for one ant – the queen – are younger than a year).
Colonies do grow to a certain size (10.000-12.000 ants): why do they not grow bigger? Is there an ideal size?
There are many tasks, an ant colony performs: collection and distribution of food, nest building, next maintenance, caring for eggs, larvae, and pupae. Allocation of these tasks is a dynamic problem and somehow (we do not exactly know how) ants manage that very well.
At the end (final chapter of really entertaining and interesting 182 pages), she concludes that probably we must not overestimate what we can learn by comparing an ant’s society to ours. But researching ant colonies may help us understand how ecosystems work. And the study of ants demonstrates hwo simple individuals form a big society. I guess this is what is fascinating about the book: individual ants (that are not smart) that form societies (that seem to work well, at least from our perspective. We should ask ants!).
The Gordon lab has a web presence.
Add comment July 9th, 2006
