[dorkbotnyc-announce] 1601216th dorkbot-nyc meeting!

[douglas repetto]

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

The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

We're always looking for (and playing) more dorkbot theme songs! Bring 
or email one and we'll play it at the meeting.

Featuring 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
     	
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