Richard Dawkins first suggested that since Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, was born on Christmas Day, Newton’s Birthday could therefore be an alternative for a winter holiday – the Newton Festival.

Linked Data stuff…

Content Modelling and Storytelling [R4isStatic.com]
“I like to imagine that the ultimate would be something where every character, event and place in the fictional universe of a programme has an address – and then just like taking toy models of those things, we and the audience could make our own stories from them. You want to add your own characters to the mix? Sure, give them an unique address (for instance, in your own webspace), and start linking them to other characters, events etc. …

I’ve made it my mission to explore these ideas, and experiment with making them a reality. Thanks to a great presentation the other day by Yves Raimond, Nicholas Humphrey and Patrick Sinclair, I’m getting to grips with ontologies such as FOAF. I’m going to be using FOAF and the Events Ontology in particular to try and express stories in a semantic way, and see whether we need a new ontology for storytelling, and what we need from it.”

Fascinating idea, I can’t wait to see where Paul goes with all this.

lcsh is no more… how sad — there were so many lovely URLs [lcsh.info]
“On December 18th I was asked to shut off lcsh.info by the Library of Congress. As an LC employee I really did not have much choice other than to comply.” I really hope we will see an official version returning very soon.

ETHAN: the Evolutionary Trees and Natural History Ontology [ebiquity.umbc.edu]
Large-scale ecological modeling and evolutionary studies often rely on scoring taxon-level characteristics of a wide variety of organisms. Compiling such data is laborious and may involve finding and reformatting data tables in original literature, or personally exchanging spreadsheets or ASCII files with researchers. Compiled taxon-level data is beginning to be shared digitally and efforts to support wide data sharing in ecology and evolution should make even more compiled data available in forms useful to scientists. However, retrieval, integration, transformation, and validation of shared data in traditional archives remain difficult and largely manual processes. Discovery of new insights from such data is therefore delayed if it is even possible. Our interest in natural history information stems from our work on a suite of tools to support invasive species biologists…

…and from the BBC

BBC Builders: Tristan Ferne, and his ‘startup’ team at audio, music and mobile [guardian.co.uk]
Tristan’s interview for the Guardian… as you would expect interesting stuff (Radio Pop, Olinda and Moose 6) from the lovely Mr Ferne.

Watching the Rockterscale [BBC – Radio Labs]
“Video documentation for a little two day electronics workshop using various components, arduino boards and Processing. The brief was – to build a device which measures how much rock bands ‘rock’!!”

Desktop iPlayer for the Mac : Experiments in Cocoa Development #1 RadioAunty [whomwah]
RadioAunty is a Cocoa Application that lets you listen to the radio, BBC radio, on your desktop. You can change networks via the Menu bar and via the Dock. You can also set preferences to decide which should be your default Station to start with, and whether you would like to receive updates to the application when they are available.

…this is cool…

3D light field display [ICT Graphics Lab]
The system works by projecting high-speed video onto a rapidly spinning mirror. As the mirror turns, it reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer. Our rendering algorithm can recreate both virtual and real scenes with correct occlusion, horizontal and vertical perspective, and shading.