The US election cycle is in its last week. Anticipating crowding at the polls, many have already cast their ballot through early voting. The rest of us will wait in line on Tuesday. However, while the political campaigns are drawing to a close, the analysis has just begun.

Over the summer, other members of the Social Code Group and I developed metaViz, a system that analyzes potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs (see the press release for details). The goal is to allow users, particularly those who read political blogs, to see large trends within a blog or across a blog, trends that might not be noticeable when looking at individual posts, and consider what these trends might mean. ...

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I had the honor of attending the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership (CCSIP) in Montreal, Canada as a representative for Calit2. Other Calit2 representatives at the event included Sheldon Brown and Petter Otto.

My participation was as a Co-Chair with Bill St Arnaud of CANARIE of a working group examining how information communication technology (ICT) can be used to address issues of global change. Our panel was highly attended with about 45 individuals in attendance. At the end of the Summitt, UC Vice President for Research Steve Beckwith announced that the UC and Canada would be releasing a new request for proposals to continue the CCSIP work worth approximately ...

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Sabine McNeill was visiting Calit2 UCSD on the day of the Calit2 Summer Scholars poster representations and reception. She is from England and had come by way of Calit2 Irvine, where she attended the 'Everyday Digital Money' workshop and met David Goldberg, cofounder of HASTAC, who suggested she visit Calit2 UCSD.

During the poster session, videos were being made of each student discussing their summer's work with their poster. One of these students was Andrea Tan, who did an environmental engineering project entitled: "Weather Data Management System."

When Calit2 tour director Trish Stone brought McNeill through the short hallway on their way to the StarCAVE, they crossed paths with the filming ...

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The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

Technology and the arts are the focus of two major events this week at Calit2. A new exhibit opens in the gallery@calit2 at UC San Diego... and performers in the Calit2 Building at UC Irvine will participate in a networked performance with an artist and a musician at UC San Diego, in what they're calling an "inter-arts telematics performance". Here's what's coming up at Calit2 on the two campuses...

Monday-Tuesday, October 20-21 UCSD
Biomedical Informatics Research Network All-Hands Meeting
Speaker: Mark Ellisman, UC San Diego and Director, BIRN-CC et. al.
The all-hands meeting is open ...

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Calit2's StarCave is mentioned at about the 2 minute mark in this clip from G4Tv. http://www.g4tv.com/sv3/29322

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From PhysOrg.Com

Taking advantage of the statewide, fiber-based California Research & Education Network (CalREN) and campus fiber-optic connections in and out of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) building on the UC San Diego campus, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) held a two-day workshop showcasing end-to-end advanced scientific applications enabled by CalREN's high-performance "experimental-developmental" (CalREN-XD) and "high performance & research" (CalREN-HPR) infrastructure.

"We brought together the community in order to educate researchers in a variety of disciplines about new cyberinfrastructure ...

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On his three-month sabbatical, Calit2 director Larry Smarr is Down Under, barnstorming Australia's major research universities to talk up why today's scientists need more optical networking and visualization facilities. Writing in The Australian newspaper, Andrew Trounson notes that "Smarr is visiting Australia on behalf of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue to exhort vice-chancellors and government to invest in, and adapt to using, the expanding bandwidth capacity to ensure Australian researchers continue to compete." The feature article is extensive, and highlights Smarr's belief that a social and cultural transformation is needed among researchers and universities, in order to take ...

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Last week my students and I had a journal article accepted to the MIT Press journal "PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments." The article is titled "Richly Connected Systems and Multi-Device Worlds," and will come out early next year sometime. The paper describes a conceptual framework for building multi-device systems, and uses my group's EcoRaft project (which was made possible by a grant from Calit2) as a primary example. The framework is based on the creation of multiple channels of real and apparent connectivity among devices: for example, multiple kinds of data networking, cross-device graphics and sound, and embodied mobile agents that inhabit the multi-device ...

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The elections are less then one month away but it still isn't too late to register to vote in California. Californians can register to vote up until October 20th.

If your a new voter and haven't yet registered I suggest that you pop online and head over to Rock the Vote. The Rock the Vote On-Line Registration Form is an editable form that you fill out, print, and send in to California's Secretary of the State. Remember, this MUST BE POSTMARKED BY OCTOBER 20th for you to vote in the upcoming Presidential election.

If you are a UCSD student you may also be interested in the Ultimate College Bowl. This site, sponsored by a variety of organizations, is running a competition ...

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Our colleague John Orcutt alerted us to a major story we missed last week: Atkinson Hall-based Dorian Raymer (at left), who works for Orcutt on the Ocean Observatories Initiative, made international headlines when he and UCSD physics professor Douglas Smith won an Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. The ceremony took place last Thursday at Harvard, with Raymer in attendance. They were cited for "proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots." This isn't the first big publicity for the study, which Raymer conducted as an undergraduate in Smith's lab. The work was featured by the BBC, and was also selected as one of ...

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Nathaniel Kahn, director of the film "My Architect," paid a visit to Calit2's Atkinson Hall last week for an "Architecture+Cinema" event sponsored by Artpower! at UC San Diego. Following a screening of Kahn's elegiac documentary, Kahn discussed his creative approach and his somewhat strained relationship with his father, the famed architect Louis Kahn (pictured here with Nathaniel as a young boy). The elder Kahn is the subject of his son's feature-length documentary and served as both Nathaniel's muse and the source of a mystery the director has yet to solve.

Joining Kahn for the discussion were Kyong Park, associate professor of Visual Arts at UCSD, as well as architectural engineer Victor ...

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Here are some of the events on the calendar at Calit2, or co-sponsored by Calit2, on the two campuses:

The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

With summer over and students back on campus, we resume our weekly digest of what's coming up in the UC Irvine and UC San Diego divisions of Calit2. These are events taking place in our buildings on the two campuses, or activities co-sponsored or organized by Calit2 entities. This week at UCSD, we kick off the second year of Calit2's well-attended, interdisciplinary Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar Series, and the UCSD division will co-present the West Coast premiere of "Sanctuary" ...

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