In 2009, Dr. Genevieve Bell, an Australian-born anthropologist and ethnographer, who is an Intel Fellow and heads Intel’s newly created Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) division, was selected as South Australia’s Thinker in Residence. In her assignment, she focused on the ways in which South Australians use new technologies in their everyday lives. Through extensive, often ethnographic, research she helped shed light on new opportunities for broadband and associated...

Nalini Kotamraju, assistant professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, gave an excellent talk yesterday at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the lack of user centricity in e-government services. Individuals and institutions are slower to adopt e-government services due to a lack of user centricity in design and development. Work with PortNL, an integrated e-government service for expatriates in the Netherlands, suggests the core of...

On the way to celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2014, the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (formerly the Winter Palace of the Russian czars) hired legendary architect Rem Koolhaas to modernize the art museum experience for visitors in a way that both respects the storied history of the Hermitage and also positions the museum as a leader of 21st century innovation. As part of the reconsideration of the museum’s structure and function, Koolhaas is operating under a very rigid ground...

Lately we have been working on a redesign of the Arduino identity, including new graphics for the boards, mimimal sustainable packaging, etc… The project will be released in mid September.

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian blogger, journalist and science-fiction author, argues in The Guardian that curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade. Although bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty, the real delight, he says, lies in making your own choices. “The only real reason to adopt coercive curation is to attain a monopoly over a platform – to be able to shut out competitors, extract high rents on publishers whose materials...

Who do you read and associate with online? Ethan Zuckerman argues in this Guardian video that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues.

The conventional public services delivery model does not address underlying problems that lead many to rely on public services and thus carries the seeds of its own demise, argue David Boyle, Anna Coote, Chris Sherwood and Julia Slay in a new report by UK think-and-do-tank nef (the new economics foundation) and NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. These include, they argue, a tendency to disempower people who are supposed to benefit from services, to...

Indrani Medhi, associate researcher in the Technology For Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, was recently rated one of the “50 smartest people in technology” in 2010 by Fortune Magazine. In an interview with Arlene Chang of the India Real Time blog of the Wall Street Journal, Medhi talks about her passion for socio-economic development through technology, how it can improve the quality of life in rural India even for illiterate people, and “why she loves her...

Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, reports in The New York Times Magazine. “We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so...

Facebook is about to celebrate its 500-millionth user, but the social media application has had wide consequences, even for those who have never signed on, writes the BBC. Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of a company which only has a couple of thousand employees to serve half a billion users. Read article

Design consultant Martyn Perks thinks that a UK government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online “threatens to make cyber slaves of us all.” “Is it not possible that some people simply don’t want to participate in this brave new digital world? After all, wouldn’t it be absurd to coerce people into using mobile phones, TVs or cars – these technologies, too, are beneficial, increasing mobility and interaction with the world. Why all this...

I very much enjoyed the reflection of Lee Bryant (Headshift), following the launch of the UK Government’s Big Society initiative. In it, he argues that in the past, UK politics [and not just UK, I'd say] were dominated by two competing visions of the role of the state: “One, on the left, saw state provision as the best way to ensure fairness and protect people form the vagaries of the market, and argued for increasing spending on public services. The other, on the right, saw...

Oscar Berg reflects on the changing role of intranets in knowledge-intensive businesses. “These intranets need to provide flexible access to both information and people by employing pull models for serving as many knowledge worker information needs as possible, including unanticipated information needs. Information supply needs to be maximized by supporting the creation and access to user-generated content as well as by allowing for easy integration of external information sources. The...

Three new articles have been published on the UX Matters site: Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology By Pabini Gabriel-Petit In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of...

Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before they know that they want the information, writes Paul Marks in the New Scientist. “In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences,...

Content strategy is becoming a hot topic (and one I am greatly interested in). Last year, Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic published the book Content Strategy. In her own words, it “offers a pretty straightforward approach to planning for content in your web initiatives.” “Content Strategy for the Web explains how to create and deliver useful, usable content for your online audiences, when and where they need it most. It also shares content best practices so you can get...

A few weeks ago the Communia conference University and Cyberspace took place here in Torino, Italy, with a focus on “reshaping knowledge institutions for the networked age”. Speakers included Massimo Banzi, Joy Ito, David Orban, Bruce Sterling, and many others. The international conference, which is the conclusion and culmination of the Communia Thematic Network project (the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain), was organised by the Politecnico of Torino’s...

“The internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be,” according to Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman at the TED Global (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford. The BBC reports. He said that the web was now contrary to the original utopian vision and users focused on information from a handful of wealthy countries. “It’s making us ‘imaginary cosmopolitans’,” he told delegates. Social networks, he said,...

PARC, the legendary California-based research centre owned by the Xerox Corporation, is hosting a series of talks on ethnography in industry. The three talks that took place are already available online in video. More talks are scheduled tomorrow and next week. Feral Technologies: An ethnographic account of the future [ video | alternate link ] Genevieve Bell, Intel 3 June 2010 What do rabbits, camels and cane toads all have in common? And why might this be relevant to the future of new...

Philips Design has published a downloadable paper on how it uses qualitative research and design thinking to support development of solutions for the ever-changing healthcare landscape. “Our lifestyles are increasingly out of balance and we are placing our health at risk through unhealthy habits. We are ageing as a population and more likely to suffer from chronic diseases as we get older. As a result, our healthcare systems are under increasing demand for costly and complicated care....

Experiments like ‘Please Rob Me’ indicate that what people reveal via location-sharing apps could potentially be harmful to them – and survey finds concerns among users. “More than half of people with geolocation-capable mobile devices worry about “loss of privacy” from using their location-sharing features, a survey has found – even though location-sharing apps such as FourSquare and Gowalla have millions of users checking in every day. Among UK...

As smartphones increasingly penetrate the market, with nearly a quarter of mobile users owning one, data consumption is becoming more stratified: the heaviest users most frequently use their phones’ advanced features while many people hardly touch them, according to a Nielsen report. Read article

Devices could monitor people’s health and step in when needed to help them get better, experts say. “Within a decade or two, researchers at Silicon Valley companies and elsewhere predict, consumer gadgets will be functioning like hyper-attentive butlers, anticipating and fulfilling people’s needs without having to be told. Life would not only be more convenient, it might even last longer: Devices could monitor people’s health and step in when needed to help them get...

The smartest “tech” academic according to Fortune Magazine (“The smartest people in tech”) is Danah Boyd, Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research. “She is the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet, and she’s writing a book on the subject. Boyd’s research is the real deal, a potent blend of theory and ethnographic data. And she has real tech street cred too, courtesy of a degree in computer science from Brown.” Other design...

Big Think is an online think tank, founded in 2007, that presents video interviews with major intellectuals from a wide range of fields. Recent interviews that caught my attention are with Dan Ariely and Clay Shirky. Dan Ariely [39:14] Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University and author of “Predictably Irrational” Dan Ariely is the author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions and is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at...

Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, is the author of this week’s Urban Omnibus feature. In the piece, he uses software design as a base to talk about the ways citizens call out trouble spots in the urban landscape and how we might redesign the performance of that landscape itself. Read article

Jon Kolko was one of the speakers yesterday at the Design Research Society conference in Montreal, Canada. His presentation addressed Sensemaking – the manner in which we make meaning during the design process, and arrive at insights and new design ideas. - Sensemaking and framing: a theoretical reflection on perspective in design synthesis (paper) - Presentation (on Mac, use Acrobat, not Preview)

Today I received the catalogue of the Habitar exhibition, organised by LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries in Asturias, Spain, and curated by José Luis de Vicente with Fabien Girardin as conceptual advisor. “Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller...

The Snuggie Sutra The Amish Curtain Clip the Snuggie onto your clothesline. He lines up with one of the sleeves, and she does the same, so that you can make love without ever gazing upon each other’s dirty, shameful nakedness. Barns won’t be the only thing getting raised.

At the Intel Labs’ annual Research at Intel media event, Intel Corporation Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner announced (video) a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR), that is focused on defining new user experiences and new computing platforms. The innovations coming out of the labs are expected to help re-imagine how we will all experience computing in the future. Enabled by Moore’s Law and the performance advancements now available across...

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy on Tuesday released results of a survey finding that energy use feedback tools are more important than smart meters in reducing consumers’ energy use. Analyzing 57 residential feedback programs since 1974, the ACEEE concluded that “smart meters” are not smart enough to slash residential power use and significantly reduce consumer electric bills. No utilities, they said, have sufficient end-user tools, such as more detailed...

Ever keen to expand the boundaries of their practices, design professionals have been moving in the direction of public policy for some years, writes Lucy Kimbell (blog). But what designers, or multi-disciplinary teams using “design” approaches, can also bring to such projects is a set of assumptions about knowledge, that can have important consequences for how they, and the communities they claim to serve, understand the work they are doing and what happens within it. Social scientists...

THE STROBES — Modular Light Scenography from todo.to.it on Vimeo. client: MTV Italia — MTVDAYS Opening Nightlocation: Environment Park, Torinoyear: 2010

The Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of Information Architecture is now available. In one of the articles “Beyond Findability“, Luigi Spagnolo, Davide Bolchini, Paolo Paolini and Nicoletta Di Blas introduce Search-Enhanced Information Architecture (SEE-IA), a coherent set of information architecture design strategies. This paper details a way to extend classic information architecture for web-based applications. The goal is to enhance traditional user experiences, mainly based on...

From cars to designer clothes to children’s toys, there’s a growing trend towards “transumerism” and “collaborative consumption,” which emphasize sharing, renting and experiencing over owning, writes Simon Smith in a blog post that was republished on Shareable. Is it just a fad? Or is this a significant trend that will reshape our approach to goods and commerce? “What the trend should increasingly bring, however, are options, and perhaps a growing consciousness of...

This fast approaching era of desktop manufacturing via advanced MakerBots and other 3D printers is in part why ThingM co-founder Mike Kuniavsky runs an annual conference called Sketching in Hardware. The event aims to “bring together a small group of people from technology, education, art and design worlds to talk about how to make creating electronics as easy as drawing with a pencil.” Thanks to ReadWriteWeb reader Droom Zacht, who recognizes Kuniavsky’s Orange Cone blog...

The Grattan Institute, an Australian independent public policy think-tank, has published a new report, entitled “The Cities We Need“, that aims to set an agenda for thinking about the future of Australia’s cities. It asks how cities meet the individual needs of their residents, both material and psychological, and identifies emerging challenges to meeting these needs. Abstract The most important characteristic of a city is whether it meets the needs of its residents, both...

“For all of the attention on social networking, there are few social media experiences that match the fun of hanging out together with friends in person,” writes Jon Goldman, CEO of the multiuser content-sharing platform Qlipso, on Mashable. “The old debate about what is more valuable — content or distribution — doesn’t capture the whole picture because it’s the user experience that counts. It’s pretty clear now that social interaction is a key factor in driving...

At the beginning of May, frog design partnered with the Lift conference in Geneva to conduct design research on the conference itself to understand what was working well and not so well about the conference. The organisers wanted to see if a design research approach based on real-time observation and interviewing of attendees could provide better and richer feedback, allowing them to further improve the already highly regarded event. The Lift organisers have now decided to make the findings...

The relationship between researchers and product designers can be a rocky one. Paul Golden looks at how market research can make sure it promotes creative thinking rather than obstructs it. “When handled properly, [the initial exploratory phase of the research process] allows planners and developers to identify potential design territories on which to focus development of more finished (and expensive) prototypes, while providing clues as to the type of stimulus that needs to be...

The current issue of Interactions Magazine is generally on subtlety and change, writes co-editor-in-chief Jon Kolko: “There are some strange changes under way in our world. We constantly hear the refrain of the massive chaos around us, yet the allure of such a large, looming flux may distract us from something more important: the countless tiny, nuanced, and fundamental ways in which our culture and society are advancing. This issue of interactions describes these subtleties and teases...

For nearly three years, selected Putting People First posts — 837 to be precise — have also been published on the website of UXnet. Now that UXnet is being disbanded, the site will be archived and these posts will stay on the archive site. You can also find all UXnet posts directly on the Putting People First blog. We thank the community for their interest in our news and invite all of you to continue reading Putting People First where all the UXnet posts came from.

I have a few minutes to sneak this post in. Just to let you know that I have been teaching Information Architecture at the Ateneo, my alma mater, at their Information Design program under the Fine Arts Department. Here’s a shot of what we’ve been up to:

Artificial Dummies — M HKA, Antwerp from todo.to.it on Vimeo. Guerrilla Projections for the opening of the Animism exhibition at M HKA, Antwerp Contemporary Art Museum. Music: Dimitri Brusselmans January 2010

COTEN, the collaborative online research project exploring service design for higher education in 2010, features some interesting lecture essays: Small change and re-thinking education (audio) by Nabeel Hamdi 17 May 2010 Our first Special Guest is Nabeel Hamdi who, in this interview with Andy Polaine, talks about both his approach to development work, which advocates a bottom-up “small change” approach, as well as giving us his insightful views on education, especially the role of...

Two new articles in UX Magazine: Fusing content strategy with design by David Gillis Context maps and content flow diagrams are just two possible ways to integrate content strategy and UX design—which is really the goal. Content strategy needs to develop its own brand of design thinking and action in order to truly come into its own as an essential part of a holistic UX design process. What’s next for the online experience? by Moira Dorsey & Forrester Research Three types of...

This month Chip Chick, the site that focuses on technology for women, was invited by Intel to its annual Upgrade Your Life Event where the company presented what it is working on. This feature article updates us on how Intel’s healthcare projects aim to transform life for senior citizens in 2050. “Today Intel’s social scientists are studying the needs of seniors and their family caregivers in 1000 homes in 20 countries. [...] From this ethnographic research several personal health...

In this post Adrian Chan “teases apart the objective and subjective dimensions of social media, to examine what’s behind the relational economy we now live in, and its particular mode of production.” “All commerce and much personal and social utility implied by use of social media, writes Chan, owes to the subjective value added to what was, previously, a mode of production of information (publishing). I will try to demonstrate here the manner in which social acts and...

“The ability to explain complex academic theories in palatable layman’s’ terms is the mark of a good teacher—and Don Norman is certainly that,” writes Ken Grobe in his commentary accompanying the video of the interview. “He is, of course, much more than a professor. Often called “The father of User Experience,” Norman coined the phrase some two decades ago. He’s the co-director of the dual-degree MBA and Engineering program at Northwestern University. Professor....

Three new articles have been published on the UX Matters site: Ethnography in UX by Nathanael Boehm, user experience and social interaction designer for the Australian Government, Canberra, Australia “In this article, I want to look at ways in which UX professionals can conduct research, usability testing, and evaluation for the upper rungs of the Human-Tech Ladder—the social elements of technology design and how people interact with a particular technology while working together...

In the end we decided to implement the control interface with TouchOSC on an iPad. Creating a custom UI is a matter of minutes and it’s way quicker than doing it directly from Unity3d.

CuteCircuit at The Queen’s Birthday Party in Rome! The Queen’s Birthday Party took place at Villa Wolkonsky, the residence of British Ambassador Edward Chaplin, on June 9th 2010. Rome was hot and sunny! The Queen’s Birthday Party is a traditional diplomatic event equivalent to a national day for the UK. This year’s event presented an exhibition focussed on the themes of innovation and sustainability in fashion to highlight Britain’s important contribution in this...

CuteCircuit catwalk show at Made in Future Event at the House of Lords. The House of Lords was the backdrop for a catwalk show featuring the best of British fashion innovations, from smart materials for raincoats to CuteCircuit’s very own luminous collection of Twirkle tees. The show kicked off with opening remarks by Lord Simon Haskel. The event showcased UK excellence and talent in smart textiles and wearables and has been organised by the Materials KTN in conjunction with the British...

CuteCircuit at La Rinascente in Rome ! If you are in Rome this summer here is your chance to check out some of CuteCircuit’s exclusive summer fashions at La Rinascente. Walking distance from fashionable Via Veneto of La Dolce Vita fame and the beautiful park of Villa Borghese, La Rinascente is located in Piazza Fiume. In the picture: the Eye Twirkle Shirt, the Disc Twirkle mini-dress, the Armour Purple dress and the Disc leggings. Let us know how you like them!

Tinkering with the lightbox prototype for The Strobes project. Workshop funtime in the Dynamic Factory space. We’re going to have 17 of these pulsing, flashing light-objects for the opening night of the MTVDAYS. (Torino, Environment Park,  June 24th).

As my final project for Joe Paradiso's sensors class, I created a sensors library for Arduino. It provides abstractions for some of the hardware peripherals on the ATmega328 microcontroller on the Arduino: timer 1, timer 2, and the analog-to-digital convertor (ADC). On top of these, it provides higher-level functionality like a sleep function and a function to sample the ADC at regular intervals. I'd eventually like to add something similar to the low-level hardware abstraction to the Arduino...

“Slick, polished and sexy, Im Sangsoo’s The Housemaid is the sort of film simply not made in Hollywood any more. Directed with the same icy precision displayed by the coldly amoral family at its center, The Housemaid is an entirely grown-up thriller - one driven by lust, boredom, and not particularly subtle manipulation. And the general feeling on the street is that it’s also the best film to screen in Cannes so far. … The Hoon’s are outwardly perfect. He is handsome and successful,...

News: Get Your First Taste Of Romain Gavras’ NOTRE JOUR VIENDRA!

News: Death Strikes Silently From The Fjords! The NORWEGIAN NINJA Trailer Is Here!

Silver European Design Award for Spamghetto in Self-Promotion/Self-initiated projects category! We would like to thank our friends at NodeBox: Spamghetto wouldn’t be a reality without their wonderful software tool for generative graphics. http://www.flickr.com/photos/todotoit/4663630100/ http://www.europeandesign.org/

Tonight in Oslo: Safura, the rapidly rising star of the European music world, will take the stage at the Eurovision Song Contest wearing a mesmerising CuteCircuit video gown. The couture dress has been designed specifically for her Eurovision performance and interprets the emotion of her hit song Drip Drop. The song contest will be carried Live on the BBC and other national channels around Europe. Or you can watch it live on the internet at the Eurovision website, starting at 9pm (GMT +1). Vote...

Best Affirmation I Have EVER Heard Bar None (via successlosing) Young motivational speaker.

““No society that loved its children would create places like the typical shopping mall.” No society that loved its children would put them in front of television for 4 hours each day. No society that loved its children would make more parking spaces and less cycling paths. No society that loved its children would think that stopping for its children crossing roads was a problem. No society that loved its children would throw garbage on streets that their children play in. No...

Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge | Video on TED.com: Amazing story from India about empowering children to be change agents.

Katy looked fabulous and glowing wearing a CuteCircuit gown as she entered the MET Costume Institute Gala last night in New York City. The Gala is the event of the year, often described as the Oscars of Fashion, bringing together celebrities and fashion in a spectacular display. CuteCircuit created a couture gown for Katy with meters and meters of flowing silk chiffon and over 3000 LEDs creating a rainbow of colours shimmering around Katy as she entered the ball. Grazia included Katy in the Best...

“rather cool” ubergizmo “Moject: The mobile projection system we’ve been waiting for” Recombu “As if Sony’s PlayStation Move, Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Project Natal weren’t evidence enough, we’re here to inform you that motion gaming is here to stay… for awhile, anyway. One area where it hasn’t quite taken over in full force is the mobile sector, but Dave & Adie are angling to change that.” -...

moject enabled iphone with laser pico projector motion gaming We are very pleased to reveal the worlds first Moject enhanced iphone in all its prototype glory! We have to give a huge shout out to Matej and Ziga for their huge support! The Moject enhanced iphone features a laser pico projector and custom software and hardware upgrades based around our moject IP of ‘interactive projection’. Our demonstrator game is a 3D geolocated experience that shows how Moject can transform any...

Here it is! A very special iPad prototype Apple sent us for testing :D ok it’s not an iPad :( Just a funny mockup made with: - iPad Simulator from XCode - IRTouch Bi-Touch frame with custom made TUIO bridge over its native DLL (using Python and Ctypes), running on Windows 7 - Windows 7 running through Parallels 5 Coherence mode - TUIOMouse application to convert tuio data to mouse events – frameless 40″ LCD monitor

I'm tidying up a few things around my respective websites and wanted to sound a warning in case you read Girlwonder through a feed: it's possible that the URLs for RSS will change. I'm switching blog platforms as well and...

"What, then, is the 'object?'Every object is the nodal point, the boundary point in the relationship between person and person. Whoever really grasps the object and designs, does so [grasps and designs] not only for the individual man and...

Thanks to Silvia Sfligiotti for inviting us! Here’s the agenda: http://oinoi.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/design-talks-2010/ see you there :)

The new digital-signage system for CAC (Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias de Valencia). www.cac.es/ The project is a collaboration with the valencia-based studio Bosco. www.boscographic.com. More (video) documentation will follow (hopefully :-) soon.

A quick post on the interview with Nick Perlas on Rock Ed Radio in NU107. Right click on the link and “save as” to download.Nick Perlas on Rock Ed radio

Our laser modules arrived today, I haven’t seen them yet but early reports are good. This means our next major prototype is tantalisingly close to reality, stay tuned for updates!

Enough with the snow. I'm in Los Angeles, or more precisely, Venice (and I missed the third snowstorm in 10 days in New Jersey). I will be shifting my time to be here more than not in the next several...

It's the second snowstorm in a week and right now, it's the strange moment where I can feel the pressure change and sense the rest of the front that's about to hit. They've closed Princeton today--in fact, they've closed most...

I'm finding that as I sit down to do my weeknotes, it's as much about what's coming up as it is about what I've just done. That's probably to be expected, even though last week was exciting and relaxing and...

There are a lot of sites that cover web design. Some good ones that cover interaction design. There are also a few good ones that cover that cover local design scene. One blog that I subscribe to, and I suggest you do too, is Plus63.net. They post pretty regular articles on Filipino visual designers. Another design blog that seems to beat me in announcing new logo redesigns in the Philippines is One Design PH. So this makes me think of how to position my blog to serve you guys better. I...

Greetings from Mexico City! I'm on vacation, a tagalong for a commercial that Motion Theory is shooting. I keep having dreams about editing and rewriting, but I have nothing to do until February 3, when I have my oral defense....

Animism Projections from Muhka Web TV on Vimeo. From Jan. 22nd until May 2nd Extra City and M HKA present ‘Animism’, an exhibition on 2 locations. Outdoor projections in the city of Antwerp (Belgium) offer an introduction and a public invitation. Computational animation by ToDo (Italy), music by Dimitri Brusselmans (Boenox, Monky Pussy). More info: www.extracity.org, www.muhka.be. P.S. And there’s also a clip from ATV television...

Been curious about this Weeknotes habit that various people are doing on their sites. Given that it's the start of a year, I figure it's time to write about what I've been up to. I wrote this blog post on Saturday...

Hi, we are Dave&Adie, in 2007 we developed the first prototype of Moject | Motion Projection, that you can see in this video but we decided it wasn’t ready for the prime time until we had perfected the experience but after seeing the simple demo by Microvision and Intel we thought why not share our work with you. We are really excited about the possibilities of mobile motion projection and the next evolution of Moject is in our labs and will be coming very soon, if you want to be the...

I did some tweaks on the previous sketches I made before. I was trying to make a “bokeh” effect by blurring the circles a bit. But the filter blur in Processing was a bit too strong and I still don’t know how to control it yet, the result was something far from the original one and still way off from what I want. Sketch 2-1, added some random blur effect. Sketch 2-2, changed colors a bit, still using the follow mouse effect. Sketch 2-3, automated the movement and size of...

I bought the compilation of The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite a couple of days ago because my wife had a subscription of Archie comics which she had to pick up. I was very happy that I did. I rarely read comics so I may not be the best critic for these things. But a couple of months back, I also bought the first of the series of Blackest Night, so I can make that as my comparison. I finished The Umbrella Academy in one sitting, versus Blackest Night which I just got in the middle of. ...

I find myself going back to learning Processing when I feel the need for fresh air or escape. Someone told me that I was too technical to be creative. Working with highly technical people, this was something new to me. I always am thought of as creative than technical. I guess I am absorbing some new skills by working closely with technical people. But I digress. So I open up processing to see how technical I am or maybe exercise and learn to be more technical and creative at the same...

The GalaxyDress by CuteCircuit currently on display in the FastForward gallery at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago receives worldwide press coverage this week. For a brief overview of the press coverage, check out the following links: Visit the HuffingtonPost and vote in the GalaxyDress poll! The GalaxyDress video was also one of the most watched videos on YouTube yesterday. Also featured at FastCompany, Ecouterre, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo and FashioningTech. Stay tuned on...

My submission to the TEI conference was rejected, but I wanted to share the paper anyway. Here's an excerpt: Working prototypes have many disadvantages and difficulties. Foremost among these is the time they take to build. In the course, most of the student groups spent fully two weeks (half of the time) constructing their final prototype. Compared to the hours or days taken on most of their earlier prototypes, this was a large commitment. It can also be difficult to estimate the time...

For a project in my group, we needed to talk to multiple XBee radios from a computer. I adapted the XBee API library for Processing by Rob Faludi and Daniel Shiffman, adding methods for sending and receiving serial data (Series 1 radios only). To send data to a specific radio (identified by its 16-bit address), you use the xbee.sendDataString16(int addr, int[] bytes) function. There's a new constant, xbee.SERIES1_RX16PACKET, that's returned by XBeeDataFrame.getApiID() for incoming data from a...

Wanna speak at a conference? What if it's about cities and architecture? Not your subject? No problem. It can be with the handy Urban Computing Conference Title Generator.(Brought to you by a brief bout of procrastination as I revise a...

Congratulations to the Winners of last night’s awarding ceremony, Luzon leg. No, unfortunately I didn’t win. But I’m still happy to be a finalist among the hundreds of other blogs. :) Here’s the list: SPECIAL AWARDS Best Blog Design – The Site Guy Best Filipino Blog Abroad – The Warped Zone Best Foreign Blog – My Sari Sari Store Blogger’s Choice – Micamyx Best Filipiniana Blog – Pilipino Komiks TEN BEST POSTS OF THE YEAR Karnabal by...

I rarely come across a website that captures my imagination… and Spectra did it for me. I just saw this site by accident while browsing through another site. Spectra is msnbc’s visual newsreader. So instead of showing text and images, spectra presents this differently, via spiral and colored boxes (according to the category of the news item). But this wasn’t the one that got me hooked. If you go in deeper and look at the other ways they present information, you’ll...

The “Future Tech” episode of The Gadget Show aired two nights ago and featured wearable technology from CuteCircuit! In the episode as Suzi and Jason are discussing the future of technology and the discussion turns to wearable technologies. Suzi models the Kinetic Dress from CuteCircuit saying, “It’s Fabulous! And I absolutely love it!” The Future Tech episode is now available on the web for viewing, so enjoy the show! And let us know what you think

MindTrek starts this week in Tampere, Finland. MindTrek is the leading Nordic digital media and business conference, focusing on social media & Web 2.0. At MindTrek you will see the newest trends, innovations, revolutionary business phenomena and hear insights from the most high-spirited visionaries. This year at MindTrek, CuteCircuit is presenting innovations in the filed of Wearable Technology as part of “Visions of Future User Interfaces” at 11:20 on Friday, October...

Please, if you can, try to help out people who were affected by the floods and typhoon. Toni has a very comprehensive list of places that are offering assistance.

I am flattered that I was chosen as one of the finalists for this year’s Philippine Blog Awards. A bit of good news after the tragedy that happened this weekend. Here are the other finalists in the category: Best Culture & Arts Blog Art in Action Bookmarked! Coffeespoons magnetic-rose.net: Japanese Pop Culture for Filipino Fans Perlas Design Studio PinoyTattoos.com – Filipino Tattoo Source SA GUBAT NG NAMIMINTOG NA PATALIM Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy The Spy in the Sandwich Views...

The Connected Body event will take place in the Conference Hall at the PICNIC Festival on the 24th of September beginning at 3:50 in the afternoon. Topics of interest will include the marriage of Fashion and Technology and what new interface experiences this will bring. It should be a very fun event and we are looking forward to seeing you there! Connected Body: http://www.picnicnetwork.org/page/53116/en PICNIC: http://www.picnicnetwork.org/

How am I supposed to slap a hoe without an essential part of my balanced breakfast? (via People of Walmart - funny images )

I Am Your Child (Reddit Remix) (via TheSifman)

I am your child - T-Pain mix (via chooseoneorten)

In July, out of the blue, a friend's cat attacked my leg, biting and scratching it until my friend pulled it off, without provocation. Later in the month, my bizarre allergy to Princeton's mosquitos returned, causing a full-on systemic allergic...

sweet folding bike

Crowdsourced harmony.

Amsterdam 1 - Fox 0

Most open-source hardware projects (including Arduino) seem not to have taken advantage of the distributed manufacturing models enabled by the open nature of their designs. Instead, we mostly see two conventional distribution models: centralized manufacturing and artisanal production. The centralized manufacturing model The centralized manufacturing model is a simplified form of the process followed by most corporations. Here a manufacturer (the small red dot) produces the product and...

GH1 with Som Berthiot Cinor 1.4/25mm (via Astroman’s Photo)

There, I Fixed It.

View more documents from David Mellis.

Russia’s Got Talent (via proshura84) Live sand drawing, a russian story

Rhymefest - Man in the Mirror (Mixtape) | 2dopeboyz

Muslauf: Hydroelectric power station Avce - Fixed gear heaven

“To hell with all hindering walls and doors! Love’s eye sees as feather and wing, walls and doors. My flooded eyes blur the house Doors and walls becoming walls and doors. There is no shelter: my love is on her way, They’ve gone ahead in greeting, walls and doors. The wine of your splendor floods Your street, intoxicating walls and doors. (Translated by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Frances W. Pritchett)” - Spread the word: Obama says he digs Urdu poetry - Abby Phillip - POLITICO.com

In the name of God We will not waste our energy, but act efficiently. We have conveyed our words to the coup-makers to the world in the streets. Now we need to change our strategy. From this Tuesday, at 9 every morning we will all go to the bazaar in our towns all over the country. If they prevent us, the bazaar will close. If they do not, there will be such congestion that the business will get interrupted and the bazaar will close. If they disconnect the telephone lines, again all activities...

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has published its first Podcast to correspond with the FastForward: Inventing the Future Exhibit and the Podcast is all about CuteCircuit and Wearable Technologies from CuteCircuit that are currently on display in the FastForward exhibit at the museum. The interview with Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz was recorded at the opening of the exhibit in Chicago, is about 5 minutes long and discusses wearable technology and the future of fashion! Download...

There are a lot of people creating value around Arduino: e.g. this experimentation kit from oomlout, tons of videos from Make Magazine, various books, etc. When I see all this activity, two questions come to mind, one selfish and one altruistic. The selfish question is: how can I capture more of this value? The altruistic question is: how can I make these things more accessible and useful to the Arduino community? To rephrase the first question, should I (or others on the Arduino team) be...

What could help people share the models they use for generating data so that others can investigate alternative scenarios or presentations of the model (and not just the resulting data)? For example, in the The Economics of Structured Finance [pdf], Joshua D. Coval, Jakub Jurek, and Erik Stafford discuss the impact on the value of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and CDOs-squared of changes in the default correlation and probability of their underlying assets. They present one graph...

/* * Blink - the basic Arduino example. */ int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to pin 13 void setup() // run once { pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the pin as output } void loop() // run over and over again { digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // sets the LED on delay(1000); // waits for a second digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // sets the LED off delay(1000); // waits for a second }

A New York Times article entitled For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern, talks about, well, lead in the soil and how it affects urban gardening.

Ran across The Food Project this evening while looking up bioremediation for lead in the soil.

This is something that Simona asked me recently. To be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't expect that a large portion of the population will ever design a circuit or even assemble a kit. But perhaps it can provide for the creation of many products that would not otherwise have existed, and which have the potential of mass consumer appeal. The possibilities for industry are also fascinating, but something I know very little about. I hope that in a few years I'll have a better...

Recently, I've started running. I've never thought of myself as an athletic person at all -- my parents tell stories about me, age 3 and 4, hiding behind the gymnastic mats in the gym of my nursery school, reading books....

Just call me Fallopia. In early March, I gave an Ignite talk at eTech about pneumatic tubes-- a five-minute talk where the slides advance every 15 seconds. It's shot its way around the Internet, but I haven't yet posted it...

Open-source hardware raises a number of economic questions. Primarily: how do unaffiliated individuals collect and spend money? Presumably, this applies to other endeavors, but what are they and how does the answer differ?

My dear friend Spiro Pina passed away on Tuesday, March 17, after fighting a Type IV glioma, a very aggressive form of brain tumor. He leaves behind many people who love him, not the least of which include his...

Just wanted to note that I've not forgotten to post a recap of the Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces panel we put together at SXSW. A few life things (see next post) have happened. I'll post this week....

I'd been chugging along, updating Girlwonder frequently and then school started up again. Somehow, I'm now midway through my final semester of coursework at Princeton. This month is the month of conferences... today at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, I present...

Some general principles for the development of open-source hardware that I hope to elaborate on in the future: Use common components Use standard layouts and connectors Provide clear instructions Distribute widely (especially internationally) Introduce in person (workshops are good) Grow your community Meet a real need Help others make money Build a brand Keep innovating

....and she's off. My best friend, Jennifer Bove, is moving across the country. She's joined Kicker Studio, a design consultancy that says, "We do interaction-infused product design for: consumer electronics / appliances / mobile devices /kiosks and touchscreens / interactive...

If you’re a fan of Slow Food, or just interested in checking out the scene, then consider Slow Food Nation ‘08. It’s going to be held in San Francisco over Labor Day, and visitors will get to enjoy live music, taste testing, a lecture and teaching series, and live music, among other things. What’s more, if you’re willing to pony up $2,500 and become a Patron, you not only help underwrite the event but also receive a special package as a thank-you. This package...

A very cool cooking video, though not at all what you might be expecting to see:

"I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees thousands of talented programmers and even designers — Microsoft’s decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic to open...

Open-source hardware requires money. This fundamentally distinguishes the nature of its participants from those of open-source software. In open-source software, the fundamental contributor is the developer, many of whom collaborate in order to create a single software application. In open-source hardware, the fundamental contributor is the entrepreneur, who builds on the work of others in order to offer his or her own products. Open-source software is collaborative; open-source hardware is...

"Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever – who had never run a steam engine, the simplest of forces – who had never put their hands on a lever – had never touched an electric battery – never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampère or an erg, or any other...

We’ve written about Rouxbe before (Rouxbe), and it looks like they are set to unveil a new cooking school for members in June. Using a curriculum developed in partnership with the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, the Rouxbe cooking school begins with foundational lessons on kitchen equipment, knives, and techniques and terminology. Having completed those courses, a wide range of courses will cover everything from sauces to legumes, eggs to pork, and custards to cakes. There are...

Salon.com has a review of the book Bottlemania and an interview with the author, Elizabeth Royte. I’d always taken to heart the X glasses of water a day rule (even if I didn’t follow it) and I suppose it comes as no surprise that, having never investigated the origin of the rule, there’s more to the story than a simple equation. Why do you think that water in single-serving sizes became so popular? Marketers hammered home this idea that we need to stay hydrated, and...

A NYTimes article highlights a growing rift between the traditional chefs in Spain and the more avant-garde among them: Santi Santamaría, one of the country’s most prominent chefs, has directed bruising public attacks at his avant-garde counterparts, accusing them of producing pretentious food they would not eat themselves — and potentially poisoning diners with chemicals that he says have no place in the kitchen.

An article on the New York Times website (Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables) suggests that it’s not only what kinds of vegetables you eat, but how you prepare them, which influences their nutritional benefits. In some cases it’s better to cook fruits to release additional nutrients than to eat them raw. In other cases, raw is the better way to go. The confusing bit is that there are no hard and fast rules. Generally, we’ve seen a shift over the years from the...

Some quick items of interest: FoodCamp: The description’s in Italian, and the event itself is in Italy, but it looks like there’s a BarCamp for food, wine, the internet, and big and small distribution of food. A New York Times article (Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World) describes how the transportation of food has traditionally not been taxed. Now, the European Union has announced it will begin to taxed under an emissions trading program by 2012. The goal...

On Wednesday, May 21, I'm going to be the Design Remixed speaker with the AIGA New York chapter. It's from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Apple Store in Soho. I'm going to be talking about my life as a...

Years ago (maybe 1999?), Maggie sent me this poem, "Errata" by Charles Simic, who is the current American Poet Laureate. I believe it was published in his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says. ErrataWhere it says snowread teeth-marks of...

Found via Engadget Mobile: "Enkin" introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices. This project is a submission for the first round of the Google Android Developer Challenge and should not be...

Malcolm McCullough once said that he liked to recreationally reprogram his thermostat. I wonder whether he knows that he has this in common with the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, who told an audience at Princeton last week, "When you create...

The Small Planet Institute recently launched a new project called Take a Bite Out of Climate Change, which connects food with climate change and presents a way to take action: Take a Bite plunges into the heart of the [climate change] debate with a powerful message: If we are serious about the crisis, we’ve got to talk about food. With nearly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from the food and agriculture sector, we at Take a Bite are here to help you learn about the...

Based on this talk, THAT would be a company I'd love to work for: Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo

A heated post-pub debate last night on the potential of mass customization and the echo-chamberness of these little micro-communities on the web took an interesting turn when the good Mr. Sparks and I found ourselves veering into the land of television. So for the last 50 years or so, we've seen the rise of weekly media moments. Those water-cooler, event television moments, where instead of gathering around a warm fire, we all huddled round the blue glow of our TVs. But now that broadcast is...

Via DefenseTech.org One might think that the United States' nuclear weapons — the cornerstone deterrent in the country's arsenal — would be treated with the utmost precision. This comfortable illusion was shaken on Aug. 31, 2007, when crews loaded six live nuclear warheads onto a B-52 bomber and flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, cruising over the nation's heartland. Each warhead was 10 times more powerful than the atomic...

Yesterday, I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC (both the lovely, huge Dulles hangar and the nostalgically tatty one on the Mall), where the second Apollo Lunar Module is displayed. ... which brings us to...

Ralph Rapson passed away this weekend at the age of 93. He left a 70 year legacy as an architect. Rapson studied at Michigan and Cranbrook (under Eliel Saarinen), went on to teach at the New Bauhaus at the Institute...

It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video....

Today's delight is musical. This is my muxtape...Archers of Loaf, "Web in Front." Circa late 1994, Spiro and I drove around listening to this, and I've always loved the lines "There's a chance that things could get weird/Yeah it's a...

On the heels of the iPhone SDK announcement, growing interest in Google’s Android and a whole host of other recent developments, Dan Appelquist of Mobile Monday London and Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage have been organizing a new hybrid conference/hackday for the mobile set here in London. Like Mobile Camp London, this event will be entirely free to attendees. We’ve got a great venue over at Imperial College London, and room for 400+ participants. For those of you who wanted to...

Greetings from Austin! I've just arrived for South by Southwest Interactive. This marks #11 for me and the 10th year I've attended (as well as my 10th on the advisory board). It is my favorite time of year -- I'm...

Letting the data do the work for you. Image models:: James Hayes and Alexi Efros: Scene Completion, here, they created a 10k library of images, and used that to mask and replace parts of images. This didn't work so well till they had Millions of pictures. Finding Canonical Images: Jing, Baluja, Rowley @ Google: Most image searches use key words from meta data. In this case the algorithem looks for like features in images over thousands of images, and asks which features are most like the...

Live, Vast & Deep: Visualization on the Web, Not from the Web Going over Repeatable Actions, Patterns & Processes Show everything Collecting until there is a pattern: - In the News: Grabbed news from google 4 times an hour, and show changes over time - Oakland Crimespotting: Oakland's GIS only stored info for 30 days, so Stamen started caching it for longer periods to get better understanding - Dig Ark, keeps the center clear for the subject, the information flows around, to...

I'm in San Diego for ETech this week and have been hanging out with Michael Shilo from OpenMoko. Those of you who came to MobileCampLondon will remember Michael as the man who took a 30 minute presentation and sparked debate over the possibilities of Opensource mobile tech that raged for two days. Over our pre-session caffine boost, Michael let me know of a new development in the progress of OpenMoko that was announced at 6 am today. OpenMoko has just released the CAD files for the physical...

Appearing to have something one doesn't, or to not have something one does: this is the art of the bluff. The bluff is the bigness of an argument, backed up by a certain fear on the side of the adversary....

Barack Obama's just resonating with me lately, and having the attention span of a gnat, I'm loving the video feeds on Mr. Obama's web-2.0-tastic site.

Via Digg, and served up by YouTube, this BBC story on a car that runs on nothing but compressed air with a 200km range. I don't even drive and I want one:

I’ve now uploaded the slides I recently received from Peter Bond to go with his presentation on Otodio, and updated my post containing the videos of his talk and live Otodio demo to embed the slides. You can alternatively view the slides direct.

I’ve processed and put up all the videos I recorded now - sorry I didn’t manage to record more! Some were on Blip.tv and some on YouTube, so the full list of the lot is here (my post on the weekend from a girl geek perspective!). Or you can see just the blip.tv videos. And I’ve also taken the liberty of making up my own laws of mobileCamp! Many thanks to everyone involved. Imp.

Dale Lane walked away with our final prize for the Hack Challenge: an OpenMoko Neo 1973 handset. How did he achieve such a feat? Oddly enough, by developing a series of plugins for Windows Mobile that allow him to search Google, create TinyURLs and post to Del.icio.us: The aim was to find some more small ways to improve usability in Pocket Internet Explorer - the web browser on Windows Mobile. Anything that we can do to cut out a step, or save the user having to input something, all helps with...

In addition to the Orange Code Camp happening November 6th and 7th and the Future of Mobile occurring the following week here in London, October and November will be busy months for mobile events. Just a quick scan of Barcamp.org’s homepage reveals several mobile camps happening around the globe: Oct. 13th - MobileWebCampParis Oct. 28th - MobileCampLA Nov. 3rd - MobileCampSF Nov. 10th - MobileCampNYC2 If anybody is going to any of the above and blogging, please let me know, it would...

Sam Machin walked away from Mobile Camp London with a shiny new Nokia N95 thanks to his weekend effort - creating an app that pushes notes he writes on his phone, out to his Tumblr blog: I use tumblr for noting down ideas / urls etc when at conferencing events and some one says check out this site… The app was designed so that I could note it down quickly on my phone and then when I`m sat at my PC later I can look at my tumblr feed and find all the links & notes I made during the...

Simon Maddox - our first place winner in the Hack Challenge, and soon to be proud owner of an iPhone, created an amazing way to find television content and then get it streamed to your phone: My hack: TV Shows is an easy way to watch TV shows (such as Heroes, Prison Break etc.) on your mobile. Show details are pulled from TV.com and displayed on the mobile. When you choose a show / season / episode, the system will go off to a video sharing website and pull the content to the server. Once the...

On Saturday, Jure Sustersic gave a talk on Nokia’s LBS services and how developers can access them:

As part of Mobile Camp London 2007, we offered a little design/hack challenge to create a mobile mashup in a weekend. Five teams took the challenge to heart and built some interesting apps, ranging from a way to pull tv-shows from the web to using Tumblr and an N95 to take notes. We taped the presentation for your viewing pleasure:

Two OpenMoko Neos calling each other at mobileCampLondon.

What space does drawing occupy within architecture? Does it exist to support the eventual building of an idea? Or is it something more? Basic architectural education places a heavy emphasis on drawing, on translating an idea out of the...

Not much has been published about Cedric Price's Generator project. In fact, not much at all has been published about (or by) Price (1934-2003), an architect who understood architecture as that which set the conditions for interaction, as opposed to...

Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it? It is not the existential state of eternal ennui or depression-- if it were, it would act like the dejected robot Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy....

It is 11:56 p.m. and Haruki Murakami begins his novel, After Dark, as follows.Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep,...

I just started working at the Mobile Experience Lab at MIT. It’s been a while since I’ve had to fill in governmental-type forms, and it was slightly shocking to see my options as listed in one of their forms: I live a multi-ethnic life every day, so why do I have to choose a single ethnicity for the convenience of this form’s creator? And it’s not about how I self-identify versus how others see me: even if I see myself as multi-ethnic, this form dictates that I can be...

Last night I had a conversation with some friends about the iPhone and whether it will have as big an effect on the cell phone market as everyone else seems to think. Sure, it’s got a cool UI and the touch screen doesn’t hurt either, but I wasn’t so sure there was really that much more to make it stand out from the competition. The ability to play music has made its way into a number of other phones, so that’s not a differentiator. And the Prada phone shows that others...

Following up on an earlier post about the Wii and energy consumption, I ran across the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR or “Producer Takeback”) on the SVTC site: In May of 2001, the European Union (EU) Parliament adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take responsibility – financial and otherwise – for the recovery and recycling of E-waste. Right now, EPR is aimed at E-waste, but one could imagine this extended to include all...

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week I was in San Francisco for CookCamp and Calls For Change at ETel. Now I’m just getting back from a two-day, last-minute trip to Switzerland. I’ve written about my experiences at CookCamp over at Tasty Thinking, but in brief: we pulled it off without a hitch, and more importantly there’s interest in taking CookCamp forward in a variety of directions. One possibility is a larger event in a few months. Another possibility is a...

I’ve had the chance recently to see a lot of live music (or at least what constituted “a lot” for me) and on each occasion I’ve found myself really thinking hard about the experience. As the Music and Memory project demonstrated, music is more than just a sequence of noise. It can conjure emotions and memories and literally transport you to another place and time. Most of my experience with music has been through records, tapes, CDs, and digital files (MP3, AAC, etc.)....

I always forget this, so I’m recording it here for future reference and for the benefit of any other lost souls who are looking for this particular key combination. It’s too late for me, but hopefully it will save someone else from wasting several minutes of their life looking for this information…. To get a line break within a cell in Excel X for the Mac, use the following key combination: Apple-Option-Enter You’re welcome….

Straight from Wired (IPod [sic] Will Be the New CD – the “I” in iPod should never be capitalized, since it’s a trademark, but what do I know): Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs. Flash-memory drives are now so cheap,...

I just ran across a company called Recordant. They use microphones to capture conversations between salespeople and customers. Those conversations can later be analyzed to determine which specific words used at specific times in the course of a conversation led to a sale. From their FAQ: 2. Do you have to tell your customers they are being recorded? Recordant™ is a competitive advantage for your business. It tells customers that you are serious about giving them the best possible shopping...

A flurry of comments attached to this image posted on Flickr caught my eye (via Macrumors). The subject involves a forged Apple event invitation, and I found the depth of analysis contained within the comments to be fascinating, if slightly…well, let’s just leave it at fascinating. Put it this way: when people start talking about the invitation’s kerning, or how the stars in the background are “ugly”, or even how the choice of words is “NOT...

That would be billions of dollars. One amount is how much the United States of America has annually spent on programs or initiatives which address global warming (to be fair, they qualify the amount with “almost”). One amount is this year’s annual budget request from the Pentagon. Or maybe it does. Not that a couple of misplaced billions here or there makes that much of a difference I suppose1. Guess which story was on Page A1 of the New York Times today? Guess which story...