Google’s Crisis Response team has a landing page for the Gulf oil spill featuring overlays for Google Maps/Earth. This joins their pages for other recent natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China. Some support ‘crowsourcing’ by allowing people to upload information, data and queries.

Google Crisis Response page for the 2010 Gulf oil spill

“Working with the input of subject matter experts and in conjunction with like-minded organizations and the development community at large, Google Crisis Response facilitates the development and refinement of crisis response technology—with the ultimate goal of helping victims help themselves and helping first responders/relief agencies/governments/citizens help victims.

When a major disaster strikes, the Google Crisis Response team collects fresh high-resolution imagery plus other event-specific data, then publishes this information on a dedicated landing page.

Google Crisis Response Mission

To develop, maintain, and optimize a worldwide, rapid-deployment protocol to speed the dissemination of situational information and increase the efficacy of rescue and humanitarian aid activities in response to quick-onset disasters.

Google Crisis Response will:

• Coordinate with other platforms, organizations and teams
• Build tools to surface near-real-time data
• Support response/relief organizations
• Respond in times of crisis

There doesn’t seem to be a list of these pages online, but here are a few:

• Typhoon Ondoy
• Chile earthquake
• Haiti earthquake
• Qinghai, China
• Gulf oil spill

Kaggle is a site for data-related competitions in machine learning, statistics and econometrics. Companies, researchers, government and other organizations will be able to post their modeling problems and invite researchers to compete to produce the best solutions. The Kaggle demo site currently has three example competitions to illustrate how it will work and expects to host the first real one in March. Kaggle’s competition hosting service will be free, but the site says that it plans to “offer paid-for services in addition to its free competition hosting.”

Via Marc Olano: The Global Game Jam is into its second day at UMBC with 41 registered participants working on seven games. Keep up from home with our live video feed and games list.

UMBC will be the Baltimore site for the Global Game Jam. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the globe will work to each develop a complete game over one weekend. Last year, the UMBC site fielded five teams as one of 54 sites in 23 countries. This year promises to be even bigger, with 124 sites in 34 countries.

The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

The economist has an article, Gamblers united, on Spain’s lotteries, like El Gordo (“the Fatty”) will will pay out €2.3 billion this year. What I found interesting is that this and other Spanish lotteries are events that enhance social ties.

“Loterías y Apuestas del Estado, the government agency that runs El Gordo and other lotteries during the year, encourages mass participation by dividing each €200 ticket into décimos, or tenths, which sell for €20. This, in turn, allows players to improve their odds by buying small shares in many tickets, often by forming syndicates with friends and colleagues. … All this has transformed the lottery from a glorified tax on the poor, as it is in most countries, into part of the social fabric. Sharing tickets at Christmas has become a way to reinforce social ties, says Roberto Garvía, a visiting professor at Georgetown University. The practice of forming syndicates, which initially started in the 19th century when lottery tickets became too expensive for working-class folk, has become a tradition among all classes. As one banker says, “I don’t want to be the only idiot who has to turn up to work if the office number wins.”

The new Scientist has an article, Learning to love to hate robots, on recent research on how humans and robots interact and ways to improve the relationships. The most popular robot in such “opposite relationships” is, of course, the little Roomba. Searching for roomba on Flickr produces more than 5000 pictures taken by their human friends.

“A six-month study of how Roomba affected households, conducted by Ja-Young Sung at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, backs up that finding. “Some people saw it as a lifetime partner – they had a real emotional attachment to it.” Even those who returned to their previous cleaning routine didn’t blame the robot, instead saying it was their routine that was at fault.”

See their 2009 CHI paper, “Pimp My Roomba”: Designing for Personalization.

The little guy is pretty savvy — it knows how how to get ahead even if it doesn’t have the fastest cores on the block: manage expectations.

“One study by Jodi Forlizzi at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, highlights how popular culture can affect a robot’s reception. People she introduced to Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner made by iRobot of Bedford, Massachusetts, compared it with their knowledge of robots that explore Mars, forming low expectations of Roomba’s abilities. But making a bad first impression seemed to help Roomba; it invariably surpassed expectations, helping people bond with their machine.”

See How Robotic Products Become Social Products: An Ethnographic Study of Cleaning in the Home.

TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter is down due to an attack by someone claiming to be part of the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’. Since Twitter is now down, we can’t show a screen shot, but Techrunch reports that a similar defacement is live at mawjcamp.org.

    Iranian Cyber Army
        THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
        iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
    
        U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By
        Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage
        Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation
        Iranian Peoples To….
    
        NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
        WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST  
    
        Take Care.
    

The foaf:mbox property is very useful since it is ‘inverse functional’ and can thus serve as an ID for a foaf individual. This lets us infer that two foaf profiles with the same mbox refer to the same person.

Since publishing your email address invites spam, many people use the foaf:mbox_sha1sum property instead of mbox. mbox_sha1sum is also inverse functional but doesn’t reveal your private information (i.e., email address).

Abell on developer.it has an interesting post, Gravatars: why publishing your email’s hash is not a good idea, that shows how to crack an MD5 hash of a person’s email address given a little information about the person. (note: The gravitar service supports globally recognized avatars.)

The idea exploits the fact that a few free email services (e.g., gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol) account for a large fraction of email addresses and using a person’s full name, one can generate likely ‘username’ possibilities. Given an email hash and a persons first and last name, one can generate hashes of likely email addresses until a match is found.

Abell was able (!) to crack 10% of the email addresses for 80,871 stackoverflow.com users in an hour with a simple Haskell program.

The same attack can be used on foaf:mbox_sha1sum properties, especially since a foaf profile will very handily provide the other useful information about the person. Given the extra information available in many foaf profile (e.g., nick, school homepage) one might even expect better results.

As vulnerabilities go, this doesn’t seem like a very dangerous one. The use of mbox_sha1sum is usually justified as a way to avoid having your email address harvested by spambots. I doubt that spammers would think it productive to spend an hour of computing time to get 1000 email addresses.