Peter's Site

I my first post about Cph, i wrote about the discount you get at the Føtex supermarket for buying two ore more pieces of a kind. Today at the bakery inside Føtex I wanted to buy 4 bread rolls, but the salesgirl told me it would be more expensive than buying six, because if you buy six, you get a discount. It took me not long to accept her offer.. Someone encoutered such things in Germany?

Update 23/06:
Today, the discount mania reached new heights: 1 piece of ice cream for 15,00 DKK and 3 pieces together for just 10,00 DKK! I took three. (-:

Since I am in Copenhagen some days now, it's obviously time to write something.

After some ten hour trip from Leipzig (the train got broken in Lübeck) I finally arrived at my room at the student residence hall. My room isn't that big (considering the price), but it's enough for my decent demands. I have my own small kitchen including a fridge and a small bathroom. Not to forget free internet and access to laundry. Pictures will come later, I managed to mess my room up pretty fast (-:.

Of course, the first thing for me to do was buying some food. After a quick walk around, I encountered both Aldi and Netto, but I finally went to the Føtex supermarket. It compares well to a standard supermarket in Germany, except of the higher prices especially for beer. One of the things I haven't seen for a long time: beer cans. Yes, that's right. And you don't have to return them. A closer look at the cans revealed that they indeed have a deposit of 1 DKK. Another nice thing about Føtex are the built in discounts when buying two pieces of a product instead of one.

The place where I work is the Faculty of Live Sciences of Kopenhagen's University. Until 1st Jan. 2007 it was an independent university named Den Kongelige Veterinær- og Landbohøjskole (KVL). It has a very nice campus with an own botanic garden, a paddock and slaughterhouses. Right. Slaugtherhouses. A lot of animals, especially dogs and pigs, are dissected by the students.

The picture shows the main building of the faculty: A view from inside the campus:

Getting around

One of the things that surprised me with Cph is the big amount of cyclists. And Cph provides a very good infrastructure to them, nearly every road has an bicycle lane and there are even some smaller streets for cyclists only. Thus my decision to get a bike felt already on the first day. Since there are so many bikes in the streets, a considerable amount regularly gets lost or is abandoned. These bikes are collected by the police and are sold at auctions nearly every week. That's where I got my bike from.

And here it is. Not the newest model, but it does its job quite well. The hammer felt at 350 DKK.

Sightseeing

Of course, Copenhagen is one of the tourist's favorites while visiting Denmark. First of all, it's a really big city although it hasn't that much residents. I still miss some pictures, e.g. of the little mermaid, Copenhagen's landmark.

This is the main entrance to the Tivoli, one of the oldest theme parks in the world. Indeed it looks a little bit battered inside, but when it's dark and all the thousands of lights turn on, it looks pretty nice. The next picture shows a view of the Radhusplads (city hall square). The building shown is not the city hall. And finally, we have the Amalienborg, where the queen of Denmark resides. The place consists of four palaces surrounding a square.

Some demonstrations

During the last days, I even encountered some small Anti-G8 demonstrations. Most of the protestors are pretty young and probably most of them come from Christiania, which is an partly self-governing neighbourhood in Christianshavn.

For all of you who haven't yet registered the massive lack of good websites on the internet today, it's due to an unexpexted shutdown at seerose.biz. The downtime is reportedly caused by a failed kernel upgrade earlier this night.

Update

Since 14:22 CEST the server is up and running again. Stock prices are expected to settle down until late afternoon.

The renowned computer scientist and Turing award winner James N. Gray has been reported missing on sea after not returning from a solo boat trip outside San Francisco Bay on January 28, 2007. The coast guard of California searched for his vessel a couple of days, but did not succeed in finding any signs of his boat. Since he has water and food supply for some time, chances are not too bad to find him alive even after being lost for a week now. Thus a big effort is made by lot of people at various places - among them Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com) - to find him on the ocean using any intelligence data available. The search mission focuses primarily on the analysis of satellite and spy plane images. Since a huge area of ocean was captured, thousands of images need to be examined for a some pixel sized boat shape, which cannot be done reliably by image processing software, because the noise of waves and clouds masks possible hits. Thus the images were split into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned by a human. These tiles were made availabe at the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service, which provides a platform for exactly this kind of tasks.

Artificial artificial intelligence

The Mechanical Turk is a commercial service by Amazon that lets users assign various little tasks to helpers - in the Amazon jargon called Turkers. These Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) are typically repetitive and require almost no special skills but having a brain. This is also the reason why computers are not capable of solving these tasks, since in some rare cases the human brain is still superior to silicon chips. Hurray, the machines still need us.. (-:

The name Mechanical Turk is derived from an 18th century hoax robotic chess player. Its inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen claimed that his automaton - called The Turk - was intelligent enough to beat even best chess players, but it turned out to be controlled by a human chess master which was hidden inside the box (see picture). Likewise, Amazon's Mechanical Turk service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren't capable of, yet.

Among typical Mechanical Turk tasks are image annotation, simple yes-no-questions or selecting one of possible alternatives. More time consuming jobs include transcription of podcasts or producing text content for blogs, trivia questions or restaurant critics. Since most of the HITs are no-brainers and can be done in almost no time, the reward is typically far below one dollar per HIT. Only by completing a considerable number of HITs the Turkers can supplement their income, which has been one of the main critics about this service. But typically Turkers do their mechanical work in their free time and not as a major source of income.

In the case of the satellite image analysis for searching Jim's boat, no reward is offered at all for completing HITs, because its completely based on volunteer's work. As of February 4th, over 6000 individual workers examined over 100.000 assignments.

I have completed over 100 HITs for myself and it is truly fascinating helping in a rescue mission from my comfortable chair at home. Weird, huh? (-: It seems to be one of the phenomena of Web 2.0 and all of that social network stuff. The Wired magazine titled a story The Rise of Crowdsourcing about this new form of outsourcing jobs among people on the Internet. I think it is a very cool way of getting stupid work done that computers won't do and the Amazon Mechanical Turk seems to be a good prototype for such a generic task distribution platform.

After all, I hope the story comes to a good end and Jim is finally found even if chances are decreasing with every day.

Update

More than 12,000 volunteers participated in the image analysis and completed altogether more than 560,000 asignments. Unfortunately no signs of Jim's boat were found. Since the other search efforts had no luck as well, the active search has been suspended.

Experten des Instituts für Medizinische Informatik, Statistik und Epidemiologie (IMISE) haben heute ein neues Feature der Website des Kompetenznetzes Maligne Lymphome (KML) freigeschaltet: die Zentrensuche.
Mit Hilfe dieser Spezialsoftware können Patienten endlich im Umkreis um ihren Wohnort nach Behandlungszentren suchen, die mit den Studiengruppen des KML zusammenarbeiten.
Folgende Krebserkrankungen werden in den Zentren behandelt:

• Hodgkin Lymphome
• Hochmaligne Non-Hodgkin Lymphome
• Niedrigmaligne Non-Hodgkin Lymphome
• Chronisch Lymphatische Leukämie

Seit dem Wochenende haben wir eine neue Wohnung in der
Hofer Straße 9, 04317, Leipzig.
Das ist natürlich gleich ein günstiger Zeitpunkt mal GoogleMaps auszuprobieren..

Von Montag bis heute fand in Leipzig die 51. Jahrestagung der GMDS statt. Gastgeber ist natürlich das mächtige IMISE. Als Veranstaltungsort diente das Gelände der Fakultäten für Sport und Wirtschaftswissenschaften an der Jahn-Allee. Sehr gut gelungen fand ich die Kombination aus Poster- und Industrieausstellung zusammen mit dem Catering in der Ernst-Grube-Halle. Da alle Besucher sich gerne und oft in der Nähe der Futterstelle aufhielten, waren die Poster und Industriestände ebenfalls im Interesse der Aufmerksamkeit. Insgesamt hatten wir 5 Poster produziert und pünktlich Montag Vormittag zum Drucken gegeben, sodass wir sie mittags in der Grube-Halle aufhängen konnten. Ich habe zusammen mit Sippe das Wiki-Poster produziert, wobei ich viel Spaß mit dem Open-Source DTP-Tool Scribus hatte. Hier sind alle unsere Poster zum Download:

• Untersuchung der Eignung von Wikis für die vernetzte Forschung (Abstract)
• Verzeichnis von Studienzentren (Abstract)
• Einfluss von Content Management Systemen auf die Qualität der Informationsportale medizinischer Forschungsnetze (Abstract)
• Content Syndication am Beispiel der Kompetenznetze in der Medizin (Abstract)
• Automatische Erfassung verteilter RDF Beschreibungen von Klinischer Studien mit GRDDL (Abstract)

Dienstag und Mittwoch war jeweils ein offizieller Poster-Lunch vorgesehen, bei dem die Poster begutachtet wurden. Das Lunch war auch o.k.: Nachdem gestern Nachmittag zur Plenarveranstaltung J.J. Cimino einen sehr interessanten und lustigen Vortrag über sein Infobutton Projekt gehalten hat, war heute der letzte Tag der GMDS mit vollem Programm. Bei der ersten Session heute nacht.. äääh.. vormittag ging es um Ontologien und ähnliches. Frank hat in seinem Vortrag das Konzept der Rollen in der GFO und in HL7-RIM verglichen. Letztendlich sind sind beide Ansätze prinzipiell ähnlich, im Detail allerdings doch verschieden. Beim zweiten Poster-Lunch versuchten sich 8 Wagemutige an einer Partie Simultanschach gegen den Leipziger Großmeister Lothar Vogt. Es waren auch einige IMISE-Mitarbeiter dabei, blieben jedoch zuletzt chancenlos. Zwei Spieler schafften immerhin ein respektables Remis, was auch beiden von Herrn Vogt hoch angerechnet wurde. Während der Abschlussveranstaltung wurden zahreiche Preise verliehen, darunter auch hoch dotierte Nachwuchspreise und nicht zuletzt der Publikumspreis für das beste Poster. Und jetzt ratet doch mal welches Poster insgesamt 9 Besucherstimmen bekam und damit die meisten Stimmen hatte.. Richtig! Das Wiki-Poster!!!! Das ist natürlich umso erfreulicher, als das die sich die ganze investierte Arbeit und Zeit am Ende ausgezahlt haben. Zugegebenermaßen war der Heimvorteil nicht unerheblich für den Sieg. Andererseits gab es tatsächliche mehrere Besucher, die sich für das Poster interessiert haben und unsere Flyer gingen auch weg wie warme Semmeln. Die nächste GMDS findet im September 2007 in Augsburg statt.

After having a some fun with the Page Graphs, I eventually made an old dream of mine reality: Builing a small program which does link checking and page validation while spidering a website. Combined with the particle graph visualization method, it is a great tool to get a quick overview of a website's structure and validation status.
Look here for more