I finally got around to digitizing the X-ray image I took of the magnetic implants I have in the fingers of my left hand. The image below shows the location of the implanted disc magnet within the pad of the ring finger.

It has been a year and a month since I had a tiny magnet implanted into the middle and ring fingers of my left hand as a central part of my MEng research project in which I was exploring a novel man-machine interface based on these subdermal magnetic implants. The magnets are still in there, safe and sound and still allowing me to "feel" magnetic fields everywhere around me - like around wires, washing machines, microwaves, ATMs, supermarket checkouts, power supplies, hard disks, fans etc. The research is still continuing as we now have another student at the University of Reading Cybernetics department who has gotten the same implants and are providing a second set of data on the properties of the interface.

Anyway, I wanted to share the video of the implantation procedure (blood-filled as it maybe) just posted on YouTube by Mac McCarthy who had performed the procedure on me. The doctors at the university medical practice had refused to do the procedure due to safety and insurance concerns so I had had to find an alternative means of getting the magnets implanted. It took a fair bit digging and looking around before I found Mac's Punctured Body Modification shop. I was slightly nervous at the start since it was the first time that Mac was attempting to perform a procedure of the kind but luckily everything went quite smoothly. It was an interesting experience; sitting in a chair, watching keenly as my fingers were cut, probed, magnet shoved in and incision stitched while blood oozed out...

Thaana Common Fonts Research (CFR) is a Thaana related research project I launched late last month and has been running since. Today, I finally got around to writing down some introductory information on the project, so here it is.

Introduction

This project will conduct some basic research into the prevalence and distribution of Thaana fonts.

Purpose

The investigation is aimed at obtaining:
- An understanding of the prevalence of individual Thaana fonts
- An understanding of the co-occurrence dynamics of Thaana fonts
- The distribution of Thaana Unicode and non-Unicode Thaana fonts
- The OS dependence of the fonts

Significance

This study will help us to:
- Get a first look into the distribution of Thaana fonts
- Develop recommendations for the use of fonts on the web
- Develop recommendations for the use of fonts in software and in documents
- Formulate plans for improving the reach of Thaana (and hence, Dhivehi)

Method

The research is conducted via the World Wide Web by sampling the fonts installed on the devices used by Maldivian web users.

The process goes like as follows:
1) A small, invisible Flash-based data collector is embedded into websites.
2) When a user visits a participating website, the data collector automatically compiles a list of the fonts installed on the system. This is done once per user device.
3) The font names and the operating system of the user is sent to my server where the data is logged for later analysis.

It is intended that data sample collection will be carried out until the end of this month (June 2009).

Participate

Webmasters and website owners can participate and contribute to this research by embedding the Flash-based data collector using the HTML code shown below into their website. Please change the DOMAINHERE bit to the domain name of your site so that I know who to chase if there are issues. The field is also used to note your contribution and participation in the project.

<object data="http://labs.jawish.org/cfr/cfr.swf" height="1" width="1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
	<param name="flashvars" value="site=DOMAINHERE" />
	<param name="movie" value="http://labs.jawish.org/cfr/cfr.swf" />
</object>

If you operate a high traffic Thaana-based website, I urge you to consider participating and help make this project a success. My thanks in advance!

Statistics

As of writing this post, 2293 data samples has been collected and 269 Thaana fonts have been identified and is being tracked.

You can see LIVE stats on the CFR project home.

I mentioned briefly but vaguely in a recent post that I was playing guinea pig in some work I was doing as part of my research project at university. Well, it turns out being the guinea pig in this case translates into getting two tiny neodymium (rare-earth metal, high field-strength) magnets implanted into the pads of the middle and index fingers of my left hand!

Magnetic implants (of the sorts I have) are by no means new - a body modification artist called Samppa is said to have experimented with them in the late 90's. However, I became aware of them around 2006 when Wired carried an article by Quinn Norton about her getting such an implant. I was very intrigued by the experiences reported in the article and and by the time I finished reading everything about magnetic implants I could find on the net, I had a few experiments I wanted to run and was itching to get one myself. As I had mentioned in a blog post I made back then, I was mostly interested in the sensory extension that was reported to be brought on by the magnet responding ever so slightly to external electromagnetic fields (such as that produced by current-carrying wires, motors etc). The work I'm doing now essentially involves basic scientific exploration of the effect and building on the ideas I had originally towards a practical application.

The video below shows me playing around with magnets similar to which I have inside my fingers. No real point here, other than just play and a little demonstration of the strength of the implanted magnets I'll post more details on the type of magnet and the implantation process a bit later...

Here is a quick mashup I cooked up today, displaying the geographic distribution of political party membership on the map of Male' on Google Maps. To view the distribution for a party, open the link for the visualization, select the name of the political party from the drop-down menu at the top right. The addresses of members of that party will then be flagged with a little red marker. You will be able to zoom in-out, pan and do all those other things typically seen in Google Maps. Click a red marker to see more details about that address, like the number of people belonging to the selected party that are registered under that address.

The party membership information used for this is a snapshot of the data (taken 7 February 2009) published on the Members of Political Parties web portal by the Elections Commission. There were a total of 4,447 people belonging to 2,711 addresses in Male' listed in the Elections Commission data. Each party had membership numbers (given in brackets) in Male' as follows: Adhaalathu Party (175), Dhivehi Qaumee Party (261), Dhivehi Rahjeyn Fageerukan Nahthaalumah Masahkaikuraa Party (650), Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (243), Gaumee Ih'thihaadh (592), Islamic Democratic Party (89), Jumhooree Party (246), Maldivian Democratic Party (507), Maldivian National Congress (386), Maldivian Social Democratic Party (25), Peoples Party (476), Peoples' Alliance (422) and Social Liberal Party (375). The maximum number of persons listed on a single address for a party was 12 and the average was 1 person per address (per party).

The geo-location information for the addresses was derived from the excellent services at Male-map.com and EAtolls.com. A total of 1,928 addresses were successfully mapped using these services, leaving a difference of 783 addresses which were then discarded. It is worth noting that of these addresses left out, 478 were just Dhaftharu numbers.

Please note that I neither claim nor guarantee the correctness or the completeness of any of the information used. That said, I did my best to ensure data integrity throughout the whole process of generating the visualizations.

- Click here to view the visualization

I got curious today after reading an amusing blog post about an unsolicited SMS message someone had supposedly received from a mobile phone number registered to the current President of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Now, this is a time of intense political competition between the various candidates camps and an originating number on a SMS is pretty easy to spoof, so I'm not sure if it really did originate from the said number. But that's not what really struck me...

What got my attention was the fact that there now was a publicly listed mobile phone number registered to Maumoon. I've never before seen a mobile number registered to him listed on the Dhiraagu e-Directory and a quick search through various old snapshots of e-Directory data that I had confirmed that there indeed had been none - atleast none up until early June which was the last e-Directory snapshot I had. Anyway, I grabbed a fresh snapshot of the e-Directory and spent a little while running some interesting queries on the data.

Here is some of what I found:

Numbers listed on e-Directory:

Mobile	305198
Landline (Male')	24423
Landline (Islands/Resorts)	8750
Phones/Customer on Avg	2.9

Political parties:

Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party	92
Maldivian Democratic Party	11
Social Liberal Party	6
Adhaalath Party	6
Islamic Democratic Party	6
Jumhooree Party	2
Peoples Party	2

Registrants (Top 5):

Dhivehi Raajjeyge Gulhun Pvt. Ltd.	833
Maldives Police Services	200
State Electric Company Ltd.	191
Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital	167
Maldives Customs Service	164

Most common names (Top 5):

Mohamed Rasheed	1273
Ibrahim Rasheed	1250
Ahmed Rasheed	1089
Ahmed Mohamed	1088
Mohamed Ali	1087

Government (Top 5):

Maldives Police Services	200
Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital	167
Maldives Customs Service	164
Min. of Defence & National Security	141
President's Office	139

Ministries (Top 5):

Min. of Defence & National Security	141
Min. of Atolls Development	114
Min. of Health	76
Min. of Finance & Treasury	76
Min. of Environment Energy and Water	67

Businesses (Top 5):

Villa Shipping & Trading Co. Pvt. Ltd.	163
Universal Entp. Pvt. Ltd.	156
One And Only Reethirah	149
One & Only Kanuhura	125
Kurumba Village	124

And finally...

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom

Mobile	16
Landlines	3

Note: The information presented was obtained using the entries on the Dhiraagu e-Directory (as available today).

What is the frequency of characters in a typical Dhivehi writing? What is the most commonly used Thaana akuru/fili in Dhivehi? Is there a general pattern of akuru and fili to be expected in any given Dhivehi document?

These questions, and especially the latter, kindled my curiosity yesterday and had me off to explore a little bit. Although seemingly trivial and of no practical use, these are serious questions that probe into the finer details of Dhivehi and help produce computational models of Dhivehi - which have practical applications. Even the generalizations and patterns that result from the simplest statistical analysis transcend the (quirks of) individual writing and give a broader picture of what a language is really like. For example, I'm employing a statistical fingerprint of Dhivehi that was generated during this little exercise as part of an experimental procedure that identifies (the presence of Dhivehi) content in web pages. It takes advantage of the fact that the fingerprint for Dhivehi and that for English are dramatically different thus allowing a computer program to discern the type of content it is dealing with - all without really "understanding" a language.

I conducted the analysis on a dataset consisting of ~5000 Dhivehi articles from Haveeru Daily and ~7000 Dhivehi articles from Jazeera Daily. They may not represent the whole varieties of Dhivehi literature available but I think they are a very good approximation - especially of Dhivehi web content which is what I was mostly interested in. My focus was on the individual character level and ran basic mean, mode, variance, standard deviation and frequency calculations with a further character correlation analysis. Despite these being quite simple analyses, I don't think anyone's ever explored as much before and hence the following should make for (exciting!) new information.

Enjoy