Idea

This idea is for a synthetic multi-beam microphone, basically allowing to select and amplify sound coming from any, and all, selectable angles and distances, at once, live or replaying the sound, and to detect their LOS velocity. Combined with a speaker, it can be a multi-beam sonar.Physically it would be an array of microphones, as the size of the lattice would define part of the resolution. The rest would come from the software. I thought of this by merging concepts from sounds, nets, radio astronomy, and optical interferometry. ...

Today I went to a lunch meeting with the Apps 4 Climate folks. It is basically a challenge for developers to make apps using the vast archive of open data at the Bank. It was great to see such a motivated team behind the project. We talked about the challenge itself, requirements and timelines. It was very appropriate for Habiba Gitay to point out the importance of rightful sourcing attribution (most times the Bank acts as a portal that archives someone else’s data). Alex Barth also gave a talk about building maps with World Bank Climate Data (slides here). ...

Antonio claimed in the future we´ll use QR-codes and our phones to identify ourselves online: [tweet https://twitter.com/zugaldia/status/157946012005183489 align=‘center’] I tend to agree, and this is one way, I think, it could work. Just scanning 2 QR-Codes either by using your phone’s camera or the computer´s camera. Your computer has a camera. The server (e.g. Gmail) asks who you are. You show your QR-code. That code would be created on the phone using the algorithm that changes the pattern every few seconds. The QR-code is read by the integrated camera most computers now have. The server accepts the ID, but still needs to confirm he is a trustworthy server and that that the login/QR-code was just not used by someone else. The server connects with the phone (since it knows the info from the QR-code) and sends a random number with which the phone makes another QR-Code. The user has to show the new QR-code.You are now sure that the person holding the phone is the person trying to access the account. [Extra] The server (or the phone) shows few pieces of information only the user would know. Some correct, some not. If you click the wrong one, you are out. Both server and phone log you out. If the phone has a camera: ...

This is another quick idea I came up some days ago. I´d love to program this, but got no time... can you help me? A parser to plot the profession breakdown on biographies of people in Wikipedia, along History. The point would be to see a graph that, over time, shows which professions were more dominant for people that went into History (or, quite different in the Internet era, those that are Wikipedia worthy). ...

Name: That´s not really important, but it can be “predictive behaviour logics” or “Guess Action Algorithm” Concept: A big-ish widget on the screen of your smart phone (or computer, but I´ll think on mobiles for now) that shows what you most likely want to do, based on your patterns of use and other information like location, time, weather, agenda, emails, ... Need: Think about it. Phones today can do millions of things. But when you take your phone, you are only interested in one, and many times is highly predictable, based on time and location. Most of these actions are not addressed by the notifications the phone already has, and we all end up with too many shortcuts in too many home screen. -When you commute everyday on the metro, if you get your phone, you most likely want to open the News, the Kindle app, or the Angry Birds. ...