(Catalan below)

Yesterday Bestiario attended to the ceremony of “Premis Ciutat de Barcelona” (City of Barcelona awards) where we received the award in technology innovation for the Impure project. The ceremony took place at the “Saló de Cent” of the city hall and the award was delivered by authorities leaded by the mayor of the city Jordi Hereu.

From Bestiario we want to thank the city of Barcelona and the members of the jury for such an important award, which encourage us even more to continue innovating in the field of information visualisation.

(English above)

Bestiario va atendre ahir a la cerimònia d’entrega dels Premis Ciutat de Barcelona on va ser guardonat amb el Premi a la innovació tecnològica pel projecte Impure. La cerimònia va tenir lloc al Saló de Cent de l’ajuntament de Barcelona i el premi va ser entregat per les autoritats de la ciutat encapçalades per l’alcalde Jordi Hereu.

Des de Bestiario volem agrair a la ciutat de Barcelona i als membres del jurat per haver-nos atorgat aquest premi tan distingit, que ens anima encara més a seguir innovant en el camp de la visualització d’informació.

Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more. Impure is a tool to be in touch with data around internet, to deeply understand it. Within a modular logic interface you can quickly link information to operators, controls and visualization methods, bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way.

more information:

Project
Gallery
Blog
Videos

Next thuesday (october 5, 2010) we will participate in SIMO. This event presents itself as a “platform aimed at fostering professional networking, with a range of content designed to prescribe technology and demonstrate a global perspective of technological products, services and solutions to business managers, which allow them to identify the resources to make their businesses more competitive.”

more information

Este sábado 12 de Junio participamos en el evento Innosfera, una iniciativa de la UOC cuyo objetivo es reunir a profesionales que desde diferentes ámbitos trabajan en el campo de la innovación para proporcionar un espacio de debate y compartir de esta manera conocimiento y experiencias. El tema de la mesa redonda fue “Aprender en un mundo en cambio”.

Last Friday (May 28), we were amongst five Spanish entrepreuneurs invited to a roundtable with the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Businses Affairs, Mr. Jose W. Fernandez hosted by the American Embassy in Madrid. This event took place in the contex of the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship of the U.S. government.

During this meeting each guest presented their company and shred their experience of entrepreneurship in Spain. This gave rise to a very interesting discussion including issues such as the management of intellectual property in Spain, accessibility to US-based funding bodies and investors and the Spanish labour market. The outcome of this discussion was the creation of a communication channel between Spanish entrepreneurs and the US through the American Embassy in Madrid.

The reMap interface we used to visualize visualcomplexity projects can be applied to many other collections. In fact the conditions are:

- to be a list of contents (more than 80)
- each content is tagged
- contents share tags
- each content has an associated image (or it is an image)

Therefore image collections and in particular photography collections are ideal sets of contents to be displayed using this interactive method. Our aim is to open the app to be freely used with any content set that observes the conditions. Off course Flickr and its sets is a big resource (but there are much more). In order to be informed about please follow Bestiario´s blog and twitter account.

By now we want to share three photography collections we fell in love with: Link Tessera

- Changing New York, 1935 – 1938, Berenice Abbott, from the New York Public Library’s photostream open

- Chicks, by merkley open

- Proyecto agua (water project), Antonio Guillén and students from the Instituto Batalla de Clavijo open

The Natural Science Museum of Barcelona Data Base contains 50.000 records so far collected along one century. Most of the register are mollusc, vertebrata and artropodes. They belong to places all .over the world. The Data Base will be updated until reaching the total amount of collections registered (around the million).

The information is structured following the Darwin Core Standard, developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF (for whom museum is one of the information providers).

Bestiario developed this interactive space that allows acces to the records collections in the Museum Data Base.

The interactive options are:
-drag and zoom the map to selected geographical location and scale
-select/deselect geographical layers in order to have different views
-click on an active (containing registers) square to download all the registers located in the selected area.
-a zoom-in framing the selected square will display more detailed locations (with a depicted precision radius) of the registers. Zoom into selected square is activated by clicking arrows in corners.

link map project
link treemap project

Yesterday (17.12.2009), the Education Minister, Mr Angel Gabilondo, and the Scretary of State, Ms Eva Almunia, presented Cosmolema at the Ministry’s headquarters. Cosmolema is a new application developed by Bestiario and it makes part of a new set of tools with which Escuela 2.0 is being equipped. In Ms Almunia’s words, “Cosmolema is the Ministery’s Chrismas gift to the pulpits”. This event was attended by Juan Aguado public school’s (Torre de Esteban Hambran, Toledo) pupils as well as the school’s head teacher and director, Ms Eva Garrido.

In its first version, Cosmolema, a complete lexicon of the Castilian language (730.000 words and over 10.000.000 interrelation) was used and the focus is on alphabetic relations of words. Alphabetic relations are those which arise by word transformation: addition, subtraction and change on the way letters are ordered in word. For instance, the words paro (a first person conjugation of the verb to stop) and ropa (clothes) are related because they are made out of the same letters ordered in a different way (this is known as an anagram).

Cosmolema has two main environments: exploration and games. The application allows navigating the Castilian language through these relations, thus promoting the discovery of its combinatory and generative richness. This allows the user to experience the tension and forces that give rise and transform our language, as well as giving him access to a huge vocabulary source.

Last sunday (13.12.09) I gave a talk about interaction and complexity in the Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona. In this 2.5 hours talk I also presented the project Canvi i Temps as an integrated content, since it is a project about complexity in sciences.

In the talk I presented a lot of examples, from math, physics, biology, ecology, social sciences and arts fields that explores some or many of the main concepts of complexity, such as:

emergence
cellular automata
orbit
dynamic system
fix point
attractor
fractals
chaos theory
strange attractor
genetic algorithm
free scale network

I promised to the audience I will publish a list of links to some of the resources I presented, and more and less in the same order. Among them: interesting topics, free software to download, interactive applications, videos, articles, etc…

EmergenceIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
The look and say Conway´s numbers
Cellular automata
life game: definition, online app, a lot of cellular automata, and a simple one.

FractalsIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Cantor set, created from the I-CHING transformations.
Some images
Xaos for Mandelbrot Set navigation

Chaos theory IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Logistic map
Dynamic system

BiologyIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Mitozoos
Other bugs, and birds
Karl Sims evolved virtual creatures

NetworksIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Scale-free networks
Gnom

TransdisciplinaryIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Visualcomplexity
reMap
Map of complex sciences
RNA triplets
The I-Ching and RNA triplets