"Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music previously ignored in the music information retrieval literature. We developed a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We used this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line-final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrated the performance of this method compared to rules-based models. We then calculated higher-level rhyme features and used them to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists. We found that these detected features corresponded to real- world descriptions of rhyming style and were strongly characteristic of different rappers, resulting in potential applications to style-based comparison, music recommendation, and authorship identification." Awesome, and something I am going to sit down and read properly.

"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.

"Ben O'Steen's talk from OKFN; lots of nice little things in here about preserving data and opening it up into a variety of forms."

"...books are souvenirs of themselves." dingdingding.

Really interesting interview on game localisation and translation, with lots of examples; from Euldamos, an academic journal on games.

Castronova's paper on whether the Law of Demand, as it works in the real world, also works in the virtual.

"Hackers across the country are buying up old old receipt printers and imaginatively repurposing them into something new. We call them microprinters." pbwiki site for gathering resources around microprinters. Nice! Still waiting on mine (from the same load as Roo's) to arrive, though...

danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.

"The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web. I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work." Tom writes up his printer in more detail.

"The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases." Not super-accurate, but not bad; the bit when it starts the comparison against GPU word length is a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise: fun!

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"The Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad is made for visual designers, interaction designers, and information architects... These pages are great for sketching, but also work well when producing high fidelity drawings. The grid consists of 24 columns with gutters, so you can easily divide your canvas into common divisions..." Oh, yes please.

"Use this website to create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a paper CD case." Lovely - and even has a lookup database, to save on typing...

Wonderful paper about the creation and development of Crowther's "Adventure", and also the real Colossal Cave in Mammoth, which almost certainly inspired the geography of the game-cave.

"In this paper, I ... argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means"

What sort of interface semantics would move computer-human interaction design out of the often awkward, frustrating Proterozoic era we currently inhabit, into a more habitable, lively, human-scaled era for computer-human interfaces?

Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally.

In the paper we present two taxonomies of tagging, the first dedicated to design decisions in tagging systems, and the second to the incentives that drive people to tag therein.

Awesome! From Make magazine 04

Awesome. Super-detailed working V8 engine made of paper.