Just in Time for D-Day . . .
. . . a Romanian professor we know (through correspondence about Jacques’ Donbas) has invented the most amazing visual learning tool: Virtual Omaha Beach. I’m simply going to reproduce in full the press release he just sent us, which includes links.
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Virtual Omaha Beach: Purdue team recreates D-Day battlefield, launches learning environment where information searches for user
Purdue and Indiana University researchers are commemorating the 65th anniversary of D-Day by releasing the first version of a 3-D, interactive model of the Omaha Beach battlefield.
“The model, which includes 3-D pillboxes, beach obstacles, field guns, or ships is, in effect, a Web interface,” said Purdue Professor Sorin Adam Matei, its creator and leader of Visible Past, a project developing similar virtual historical sites. “By simply pointing to an object or location of the virtual battlefield, you can call up more information, collaborate with other learners, or add new information.” Matei, an associate professor of communications, is an affiliate of the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization, part of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) and its Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. Envision Center staff members and students help develop the D-Day and other Visible Past models.
Students using Virtual Omaha can walk or fly through the model of the beach and the French countryside behind it, taking the perspective of the American or German troops who fought during World War II. Users can inspect troop positions from all angles and information about the digital artifacts encountered can be brought up automatically.
“The really novel aspect of the project is that if another group uses the model while you are visiting it, any information that they add to it will become available to you instantly,” Matei said.
Besides the Web, the Visible Past models can be run in 3-D virtual environments like the three-walled, room-sized system at the Envision Center. They also work in Google Earth or through free, open source software for 3-D Web-based modeling.
In the near future, people visiting Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, will be able to use an iPhone application, developed by Matei, to access the model and collaborate remotely with others.
“We will have professors delivering a tour to a group in Normandy, while students in Indiana will be able to see and hear through (an immersive virtual environment) what their colleagues see and do in France,” Matei said.
The iPhone application also can be used as a “location-aware” guide for Omaha Beach or any historical site documented by the Visible Past project. When visiting the Roman Forum, for example, information about the nearest building could be sent automatically by Visible Past to the iPhone. “This is ubiquitous computing, where information searches for you,” Matei said.
Virtual Omaha is one of the more than two dozen 3-D models, including several UNESCO World Heritage sites, that can be used for teaching and collaboration through the Visible Past project. The models, some of which were created collaboratively by a worldwide community of students, scholars and amateur historians, are enhanced with information collected by Purdue students. Among the projects under development are the Roman Forum, the Taj Mahal and the Statue of Liberty.
Directions to Virtual Omaha demonstrations:
To introduce Virtual Omaha to the public in anticipation of the June 6th D-Day anniversary, public presentations will be given at 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 2, at the Advanced Visualization Lab on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. The lab is located on the fourth floor of School of Informatics, 535 W Michigan St., Indianapolis. A Google Map of the event location and directions are available here. Seating is limited. Contact Sorin Matei for a reservation at (317)416-5807 or at smatei@purdue.edu. Please arrive at least 10 minutes early. There are a limited number of parking meters in the lot directly west of the building. Additional parking can be found in the University Conference Center parking garage approximately a quarter mile west on Michigan St. See the IUPUI campus map for more information. At the School of Informatics building, check in with the receptionist on the first floor and request an escort to the Virtual Omaha event.
Source: Sorin Adam Matei, smatei@purdue.edu
Image caption: A screen shot showing elements of the Virtual Omaha Beach project displayed in a Web browser, including an interactive 3-D model of the battlefield, pictures of some structures left there today and a video clip from the film “Saving Private Ryan.” Note: A high-resolution image is available. Contact: Greg Kline, gkline@purdue.edu
Related Web sites:
Visible Past
Omaha Beach Google Earth Model
Omaha Beach historical details in Google Earth
(To experience Visible Past as a teaching environment both links should be clicked in succession.)
Omaha Beach, 3-D VRML model (requires plug-in):
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
As we were saying. What’s an avant-gardiste to do when he, or she, realizes that economics is now the cutting edge of the culture, with technology close behind? Something like this:
I’ve got a longstanding fascination with the way economics haunts literature, and vice versa. You can trace the history of this haunting from Joyce, whose writing is obsessed with credit, debt and forgery, right back through Shakespeare, whose “Merchant of Venice” should be required reading for all economists — especially now. . . . Right now I’ve just installed a “Black Box Transmitter” in an art institute in Germany. It sends out looping sequences of poetry created by cutting up and mixing together stock market prices, weather forecasts and lines of Hölderlin. . . . I’ve just finished a novel about early radio and its relation to poetry and death. Technology is always haunted, too: that’s what makes it so sexy. [Tom McCarthy]
Talk about jumping on a bandwagon with such enthusiasm you almost capsize it. There’s no parody like self-parody (the bolded part, I think, is priceless). This was, of course, in the New York Times.
In Love With Hubble
My new post on Natural History‘s blog, facTotem. (Far preferable to politics. I’m shamefaced at having been sucked back into politics. A hand out of the quicksand, please? )
Is Obama a Threat to Osama?
God, I hate to follow that last post with something tendentious and tedious, so I’ll be really, really brief.
You can view Obama’s conciliatory approach to the Muslim world as naïve, or you can view it as strategic. If you don’t demonize all Islam, or all Muslims, you have a chance to turn perhaps the preponderance of the Muslim world in our favor. It’s not enough; economic and political change on the part of some of our allies (read: jobs for young men) are even more crucial to uprooting militancy. But the former must be the reason why Osama, or his posthumous sock puppet, is slamming Obama just now.
The Future is Here
This 1967 Philco-Ford video was, all things considered, reasonably accurate about what life in 1999 would be like.
~Randy
I Spoke Too Soon.
A few posts ago I wrote,
The part of Sotomayor’s remarks that annoys me most isn’t mentioned much: her *nudge nudge wink wink* tone when she says “Yeah, yeah, I know, we don’t make law, ha ha,” like you and I know better. That’s where she seems to me to give away a weakness for judicial activism. Her self-correction sounds insincere. It’s also so brazenly in-groupy and parochial — subtext, “we right-thinking folks all get it.”
Wrong. It has been noticed. In a mailing from Human Events (OK, so we’re both wrong that no one else noticed :) ):
But what no one seems to be pointing out is that Sotomayor was playing to this crowd of Duke University law students and moved them to laughter and as she concluded her statement, she smirked… she actually smirked.
That telling wink-wink-nudge-nudge moment, caught forever on video… her smirk… the laughter. Sotomayor is not just a left-wing activist judge who is willing to occasionally legislate from the bench.
She’s proud of her judicial activism; so much so, that she wears it on her sleeve and has no problem yukking it up with young impressionable law students when discussing the matter – even when the cameras are rolling.
The Human Events mailing is essentially a call to go to war over Sotomayor’s nomination, because
If conservatives don’t draw a line in the sand and take the fight to Obama over this nomination, Obama will know that he will be able to steamroll his extreme agenda of government-backed corporate takeovers, socialized health care, wealth redistribution and the advancement of so-called “social justice” down the throats of the American people virtually unopposed.
Read the whole thing. No, actually, don’t. I didn’t. Just take a look. Comments?
To GM, Thanks for Everything, Trouble Funk
Trouble Funk’s got the song for this moment in General Motors’ history:
(no actual video, unfortunately)
~ Maxwell
“Too Clever by Half”
Is my initial reaction to this bit of enthusiasm at Mother Jones on architect Edward Mazria and his “14X plan.” What it involves is using stimulus funding to incentivize banks to incentivize homeowners to retrofit their homes for energy efficiency. But that said, I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it at first glance.
So have at it, folks. I’m sure there’s a bunch of unintentional consequences that I’m missing here.
~ Maxwell
Reading Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” Speech
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote . . .While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law.
Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address.
Blacks are “sun people,” Jeffries explains, and whites are “ice people.” New York Newsday quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, “Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history.” Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment, gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.
Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives – no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration . . . [emphasis added]
The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . . I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise.
Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. . . .Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. [OK, but tricky balance to be struck — you can’t aspire if you’re too quick to accept.] I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench.
Ambiance 