The 1601216th dorkbot-nyc meeting took place at 7pm on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at Location One in SoHo.


It featured the polarized and kerogenic:


Michael Mandel: MajorMiner -- Automatically describing music
In order to computationally describe music, objective and specific descriptions of the sound must be collected to serve as training data. MajorMiner is a web-based game that makes collecting tags describing 10-second clips of songs fun. When enough instances of a tag have been identified by players (between 20 and 40), we can train a machine learner to automatically identify it in a large database of music. We have trained automatic taggers ("autotaggers") for instruments like saxophone, guitar, and trumpet, descriptions like soft, repetitive, and male, and genres like hip-hop, dance, and rock. I will demonstrate the game itself, discuss the collected data, and demonstrate clip retrieval and "semantic music similarity" using these automatically generated tags. You can check out the game and the autotags at:
http://majorminer.org
http://mr-pc.org

Alison Lewis: Fashion and Craft Tech for the Masses
Alison lewis, the founder and producer of Switch, a Guru for Verizon FiOS' TV Show MyHome2.0, and a electronic specialist at a museum fabrication house will be talking about her new book Switch Craft: Battery Powered Crafts to Make and Sew co-authored with Fang-yu Lin. Switch Craft is a book of 20 DIY technologically infused and inspired projects that mix sewing, soldering, electronic techniques. It is the first book whose goal is to reach a mainstream craft audience and show them the joy of working with electricity without compromising aesthetics or style. Alison will be talking about the book, its projects, and about its strategy for making technology accessible and relatable to a mass female audience.
http://www.iheartswitch.com

Luke DuBois: Hindsight Is Always 20/20
'Hindsight is Always 20/20' is a piece based on an analysis of presidential rhetoric. Constructed as sets of lightboxes and prints, the project has travelled to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and a show in New York City. I'd like to talk about the piece and share some of the experiences I've had showing it in the past few months.
http://www.lukedubois.com
http://hindsightisalways2020.net

Douglas's pics Roberto Tobar's pics

Next meeting: 03 December 2008