This is interesting. It turns out that if you put a cylinder in a slow moving water current it will tend to oscillate perpindicular to the flow direction. (For the fluid-mechanically-inclined out there, it’s caused by alternating boundary layer separation). These guys have developed a prototype mechanism for translating these oscillations into a power source. Their site includes some interesting videos of the machine working which looks fake.

The irony here is that it seems a lot of effort goes into eliminating these oscillations from normal structures. This remind me of the piezio-electric vibration harnessing proposed for stairways not to long ago.

Penn State seems to have just started a video series dealing with the emergence of geospatial information as a significant cultural force – it looks very interesting:

We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”

Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

The project will feature a web-based serial release of eight video episodes—each telling an intriguing geospatial story.

There’s a preview video on the site that’s worth a watch.

Infoaesthetics posted about some researchers who downloaded 35 million geotagged images from flicker and did some data mining.  The images below show the paths travelled by photographers in New York, based on images from the same camera taken within a few minutes of each other.

The researcher’s site has links to the full paper as well as a few more images including this heatmap:

This seems like an interesting way to analyze people’s movement patterns – you could make interesting video showing the frequency and location of pictures taken at different times of the day , days of the week, or days of the year.

Imagine 20 years from now using the accumulated photos of billions of people to create time-lapse fully immersive 3d environments which would allow you to ‘slide’ forward and backward in time.  The technology to create 3d models from a set of images already exists:

A virtual reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty, created from tourists

The coming ubiquity of GPS-enabled gadgetry will undoubtedly create all sorts of interesting information visible (for better or for worse).

This is an interesting way of visualizing a landscape (follow the link for larger images):