WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Together with the Omnicorp Detroit Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange in Detroit, WinterRoot is excited to announce our first ever kickstarter project!  A community technology project to explore and catalog wild plants growing in Detroit’s open spaces.  Full Description follows, or link to Kickstarter and consider backing our project!  We have some great rewards planned for backers, so check it out!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Wildflowers of Detroit ??

One pervasive vision of Detroit is it’s ruins - the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. What has gone missing in this narrative is the other side of the coin. In the open spaces left behind, a monumental resurgence of wild-ness is occurring: plots filled with wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing Detroit’s secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this is a story that needs to be told - appreciating this resource is crucial, otherwise it may merely be swept away. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of Detroit’s reawakened ecology.  Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.

An iPhone App?

And even more, we hope! We aim to create iPhone, Android, MMS, and email interfaces (all free) for posting geo-tagged photos of wildflowers, and logging their location and salient details for future study and appreciation. When you spot a great specimen or view of one of Detroit’s varied wild plants, you’ll be able to whip out your mobile device, snap a picture, and instantly upload to our website along with automatic longitude and latitude coordinates, adding your find to an interactive map. Sometimes it’s called “citizen science”, we call it community ecology - residents participating in the study of their own area. There is great value to be found in a community understanding it’s own natural process. An incredible phenomenon is afoot in Detroit, lets come together and begin its study!

Want to see it in action??

We already have an alpha version online demonstrating a proof of concept, but we need your help for the full build out. In order for this project to reach it’s full potential, we need to integrate all mobile devices, provide an interactive map showing the locations of the flowers, solve some technical details like caching of photos in areas of bad 3G reception for later upload, allow comments on each photo for identification and discussion, improve the site layout, integrate with social media, acquire substantial hosting, and get going on some advanced features like searching by species or habitat or providing a good interface for crowdsourced identifications.  It’s a big list, and it just keeps getting bigger, but we think that this project can help us transform our impressions of grand old Detroit’s wild spaces. After backing this project, hop over to http://www.wildflowersofdetroit.org/ and start getting involved!!

If overfunded…

We plan to construct a small community herbarium in Detroit, creating a physical record of what grew where and when. Linking this with the website and database will create a dynamic and growing resource for children, students, and researchers interested in the incredible urban flora of Detroit. The ultimate tool for understanding the history and fate of the spaces these organisms occupy. We are still working out the details of where and how this will manifest, so check back here or our facebook page for updates!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

Just Installed the eXist XML database server.  I’m interested to mess around with this as it supports xQuery/xPath thus allowing for some pretty advanced querying of variously structured data - something that is lacking in databases like the Amazon simple storage service, and also the M-gateway project from what I could tell.  My goal is to attempt a drop in replacement for the mapped MySQL tables we use for MoPCMS, since being able to directly query documents with changing structure is of critical use but is difficult to support in a standard relational database.  xQuery can really change all this.

WinterRoot LLC is very excited to announce, after nearly a year of work, the initial release of ‘Wild Edibles’ - our master foraging app created in collaboration with foraging expert ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill.  The full version of the app contains 165 major edibles plus 52 minor plants, all of the identification and poisonous lookalike information you need to forage safely, and a recipe for every plant in the guide.  It’s an exhaustive field guide synthesizing a lifetime of bringing foraging to the layman, with an easy to use interactive interface for portability and search-ability on your handheld device. iOS 4.2 is currently supported at the links below, with an iOS 3.2 compatible version awaiting approval from the app store and android version currently under development.

Wild Edibles Full:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wild-edibles-full/id431504588?mt=8&ls=1#

Wild Edibles Lite (free!) : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wild-edibles-lite/id431504179?mt=8

Other Versions and Apps by WinterRoot: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/winterroot-llc/id427385326

AMP is a still incubating project for Java Eclipse which I’ve been construction simple agent based models in.  By far the easiest platform for doing so, AMP generalizes a lot of the transition rules and value setting that normally are the grunt work of constructing models, and allows a researcher to quickly spin up a simple (or complex) model.  Java is by nature resource intensive, so this is probably not the best platform for very complex climate models or other types of very large scale systems.  However, for delving into unexpected outcomes of simple processes and rule sets, AMP is a very useful.   It’s also interesting as a developed example of model driven architecture, programming systems where the code itself is generated at compile time.  In this type of system, the programmer is responsible for creating appropriate architectures and specifying them using graphical representation, but not writing source code.  One of the goals in MDA is full portability.  Unfortunately I’ve had some trouble with the code generation in AMP, so I’m not fully convinced.  However this is a useful toolkit which I have been using to explore some simple ideas about energy cycling and pathway discovery.  Hopefully I’ll be posting more on that later, or perhaps some of the models themselves.