Blind

Corruption Garden

A PV for Vocaloid Luka ... actually made me cry ...

Spy On Your Camera!

Did you know that digital cameras include tracking information on exactly what camera took the picture? It is public information. You can call it up in Adobe Photoshop and look at it. (Which, by the way, also stores information on who editing the image, but in encrypted format so Adobe can spy on you and make sure you are using a licensed version).

Now, has your digital camera been lost or stolen?

Put the two together and you have a new Web service to offer people, the Stolen Camera Finder.

Multiplayer Learning

Multiplayer High via boing boing.

A very good argument on why we should be looking at MMORPGs for inspiration on improving education.

Distributed Faces

Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

The open source alternative brought to you by a group of enterprising college kids.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Excitement! Drama! Women being good at math!

Historic videos!

Historic Comics!

Historic T-Shirts!

Okay, seriously, a computer used to be a female profession, not a machine. There have been some wonderful histories of computing discussing the images of early computers showing men in uniforms in front of computers who were really the office managers and didn't have a clue as to how the things actually worked. The women were shooed out of the room, or cropped out of the picture because the military thought it would hurt their credibility if computers weren't properly butch. The above linked PDF has one such example. The rise of automated computing removed a significant career path in mathematics from the hands of women and put its tasks in the hands of their (male) managers. And when programming shifted from being the work of mathematicians to the work of engineers, women were not brought along for the ride.

Interesting side note: In the mid-1980s, computer programming was considered a joke degree that you only took because you didn't have what it took to be an engineer. I always wondered how many of those first generation of college-trained programmers were laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh, and links mostly pillaged from boingboing.

Flow

New animations from CCP, makers of EVE Online, make their new Incarna look very promising.

Not to be greedy or anything, but I want a way to do this in Second Life.

via Massively.

Virtual

Have to say that I kind of find this a little creepy.

Space, Time, and Archeology

The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Why Insurance Companies are Just Plain Dumb

$300 for a portable device that people might find alternate uses for versus $8000 for a stripped-down, custom-built, big-box PC with all the software removed ... you do the math. Now guess which one is the one the insurance companies are willing to provide to those who need them.

Insurers Fight Speech-Impairment Remedy

Apparently people with serious speech impairments only need to communicate when at home, because, you know, they might get discriminated against if they set foot outside the house or something.

Fritz Linden's Metropolis

I think Fritz Lang's Metropolis is an interesting landmark of sorts. I mean beyond the normal reason. I am more interested the remakes, interpretations and allusions to it.

Here is one done entirely in Second Life, broken down into bite size chapters for your convenience.

Everyone Wants to Help a Robot

Everyone wants to help a robot.

Art made cute from baekdal.com

The Intertubes

An interesting article from the Sydney Morning Herald on how much juice the Internet takes to keep its tubes full.

Internet is big and has a carbon footprint to match

The End of Solitude

A wonderful read from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Reassurance We Need

More realistic airplane safety directions.

Though you only get this version in first class.

Word of the Day

Edupunk

Avoiding mainstream teaching tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, edupunks bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of '70s bands like the Clash to the classroom.
from Wired

For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk.
Salon

Flock

Started playing with Flock recently.

In part because Opera, no matter how much I love it, has a tendency to bog and crash when using it for news feeds. Especially when you are following 100 different blogs and news sources.

Flock runs off the Mozilla engine and like SeaMonkey and Camino, seems to run much faster than Firefox, which all three are supposed to be built on top of. In fact, it seems both Firefox and Opera have become bloatware in their own right, hogging computer resources and grinding along far more slowly than anything else on my Mac.

So far, I am happy with Flock. It's integration is wonderful, though I still have to try posting to this blog for the built-in blogging tool that comes with it. Still, I have one click connectivity between my daily reading, this blog, my e-mail, and del.icio.us. If I want, I could expand that to include Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, and all the major blog services. It even has as menu-driven set up systems for creating connections with things it doesn't already automatically connect to.

So, yes, as you might expect from all that, the purpose of flock is to more seamlessly integrate technologies for a social Web, sometimes called Web 2.0, as if it were some strange irruption divorced from all that came before.

The only complaint I have about flock so far deals with its newsreader, which is what I am using it for. The reason I was using the Opera news reader until I got sick of bogs and crashes is that it serves the news reader through the mail reader. This gives you three window panes: folders, titles, and content. As with many mail readers, it allows you to filter and hide read items so you only see the unread ones, making it easier to see just how many new items there really are (yes, there is a number in the menu too, but seeing the items is so much clearer). You can, as with any mail, assign labels to important things, and create folders to move things into for future reference. Of course, it doesn't create local copies, so if the threads disappear from their online source you are left with titles that no longer link to content. But still, a very nice, effective way to read the feeds.

Even in its most condensed format, Flock doesn't really let you see more than six news items from a feed at a time, making it very hard to find unread articles you may have missed in a large list.

So, three things that would greatly improve the feed reading experience on flock:

• The ability to switch to three pane, e-mail style reading, or at least the ability to condense all the way down to one headline per line for fast skimming. Even with the controls on s a separate line, two really tight lines would work just fine.
• The ability to create folders in the "Saved Articles" list just like you can in the main articles list so that you can organize important things. Perhaps the point of omitting this is to actively encourage you to use del-icio.us for storage of interesing information.
• The ability to filter / hide previously read articles while looking at new ones.

The only other complaint is that it seems to ignore all posts over 100 from any feed. Bad if you want everything. Good if you have a bit of OCD when it comes to reading the feeds, since it means you can never have a situation where you are now faced with hundreds of new items from one source because you've been busy or away for a while.

So summary: If you are a Web 2.0 person, Flock really seems to be the way to go. A little quirky, but not horribly so. And in the face of a few missing features you get many more in terms of drag and drop subscription tools and one-click connectivity between a whole array of online tools.

Word of the Day

Psychogeography

See also:

• The Imaginary Museum
• Bureau of Public Secrets
• National Psychogeographic
• 3AM Magazine
• The Library at Nothingness

And, of course, some psychogeographers:

• Will Self
• Will Self

Wait, that can't be right ...

Forgotten Technologies

Forgotten technologies: pigeon houses from Dark Roasted Blend.

Don't Mess with the Lab Coat

The McCain campaign seems intent on alienating constituencies one by one.

At first it was just the gamers. After all even those 8-some-odd million people who play World of Warcraft all look down on gamers, right? I lost the reference, but read an interesting article today where someone pointed out that the number of World of Warcraft players in the United States outnumbers the number of U.S. farmers, who get much more attention come the political season. On the other hand, a WoW server-farm failure only feels like the end of the world. So clearly not a constituency to worry about.

Now it is the scientists. Hmmm, mebbe an MSNBC blog is too liberal to be a fair source of information, right out there with the Huffington Post. How about Discover Magazine, they're unbiased ... I think. No? How about boingboing? Oh wait, that's British. Doesn't count. Oh, thank the gods, at least the National Review tries to artfully dodge the issue.

Though I think The Perfect Silence wins the best quotable quote award:

I can just about hear all the hushed "oooohhhs" from the science education community, like Dustin Diamond had just slapped Jack Lambert with a white glove. Oh no, he didn't!

Gamers and scientists do share two things in common:

• Information spreads like wild fire within their respective communities.
• They are very opinionated and vocal when it comes to protecting their turf.

You don't win an election by declaring constituencies to be irrelevant. You certainly don't win an election by saying that funding for science and education is not money well spent.