Edu_Rss

Gallery: Maker Faire 2006
Photos from this weekend's Make magazine DIY extravaganza, featuring blowtorches, Steve Wozniak playing segway polo and live hybrid car mods. Plus: Check out Ye Olde Geek Show Draws Thousands. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 5:45 p.m..

MySpace Predators
If you want to know what the real threat to kids is at MySpace, read todayTMs piece in the New York Times and remember that predators arenTMt always interested in sex: To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox [...] From cogdogblog on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

More enterprise tagging articles
Bill Ives lists a number of recent enterprise tagging articles, pulled together as part of research he is currently doing. To quote: I am writing an article on enterprise social bookmarking or tagging behind the firewall. As part of my... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

BBC reports users lose patience with poor search
Jared Spool has written a blog entry discussing BBC results on search, extending the discussion with his own research results. To quote: No results are the worst offenders. When studying users using on-site Search, we saw, when shopping for clothes,... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Launch of UX Magazine
UX Magazine has just been launched as the latest online-only user experience magazine, published under a Creative Commons license. To quote: UX Magazine was created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience.... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Evaluating website accessibility
Roger Johansson has written a series of three articles on evaluating website accessibility. To quote: Many people, web developers as well as website owners, are new to website accessibility and find it difficult to evaluate. This three-part article series is... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Why are intranets stagnant?
Shel Holtz has written an article that asks: why are intranets stagnant? To quote: The evolution of the World Wide Web over the last five years has been nothing short of astounding. Intranets, on the other hand, haven't progressed an... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Enterprise 2.0 discussion continues
Marcel de Ruiter has written a summary of current Enterprise 2.0 discussions. To quote: Over the Easter weekend the discussion on Enterprise 2.0, or the use of tools like blogs and wiki's behind the firewall, has been engaging more and... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Content management systems used by public sector websites found lacking
Roger Johansson has reported on a Swedish survey that identified problems with CMS and accessibility. To quote: Few standards and accessibility aware web professionals will be surprised by the results of this survey. All of the evaluated CMSs were found... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Coming of age in ethnography
Dave Rogers has written an article on UX and ethnography. To quote: With time, I came to my senses. I learned to distinguish design ethnography from its classic, anthropological forebears. I recognized that it could take many formsfrom contextual inquiry... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Defining "taxonomy"
Patrick Lambe has written an excellent blog post that defines "taxonomy" (including a nice diagram). To quote: Yesterday I made the claim that a taxonomy cannot be defined by its shape, which is mostly how it does get defined eg... From Column Two on April 24, 2006 at 4:48 p.m..

Learning Objects for Introductory Programming
 These learning objects were designed to teach basic concepts in programming such as while loops, if statements, and arrays. Links to other sites with learning objects related to programming are provided, as are evaluations of the LOs and links to papers reporting on the use of this project's LOs. Worth consulting. ____JH _____ "These learning objects have been developed at London Metropolitan University by staff in the Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI) and Department for Computing, Communications Technology & Mathematics, and at Bolton Inst From EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Links for 2006-04-15 [del.icio.us]
DOM Scripting Task Force The DOM Scripting Task Force is an autonomous working group of the Web Standards Project. Our mission is to bring scripting up to parity with XHTML and CSS as a useful and necessary tool for building accessible, user-centric, standards-based web sites. Drupal Programming from an Object-Oriented Perspective Video-Downloader for Youtube, Google, iFilm, Metac From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

3D face recognition from a single video frame
I have a constantly updated presentation about »The future of computing«. One chapter of it is about security and surveillance technology - the face recognition approach in particular. Two computer science students in Haifa, Israel, have invented a face recognition method with a 3D scan. It can radically improve the success rate and it was even able to seperate them apart: they are twins. The problem is that this approach requires a database of 3D scans of the faces to be matched with the current sample: So From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Web 3.0?
While everyone is talking about AJAX and JavaScript there is a very old technology taking up steam that could replace the DOM+JavaScript approach: XUL. Look for example at this application called »Songbird«. The problem with XUL has always been a lack of development tools. XULrunner seems to fill a huge gap here. Anyway it seems that the web browser technology is set out to take over the standard user experience one day. Vendors will be able to deliver grown-up applicatio From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Media war
BBC reports that US secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges that the "war on terror" is primarily a struggle of ideas. He proposes the US propaganda machinery must be capable of fighting down the unfavourable news from offensive media with a "more effective 24-hour propaganda machine". Hm. I was thinking free press and freedom of speech is a core ingredient to freedom and democracy. Obviously it is not enough to pay Iraqi From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Visual explanations
A very nice example of visual explanations: the wave vs. matter paradox of quantum physics.Related: From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

The rediscovery of »function« in product design
The ACM IT magazine publishes an article written by Andreas Pfeiffer titled »Why features don't matter anymore: The new laws of digital technology«. He lists ten fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology. The article begins with this: The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold-mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music in your life. Even when Apple announced the iPod with video, it presented it not as the best multi-media playe From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Which country to invade next?
Like Michael Moore once said: »If you want to bomb a country you should at least be able to point it on a map!«. I would add you should at least be able to name some kind of reason. Just watch this video: It's a little bit hard to see in the video: These people don't recognize the displaced country names on the map. Maybe half From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

The unawareness of lack of skill
This appears to be a funny note, but actually it is really something ultimately true: Unskilled and Unaware of It. Justin Kruger and David Dunning made several studies to support following concepts: 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competenc From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Webmonday ahead
There is another »Webmontag« event ahead tomorrow in Cologne. There are around 54 people planning to attend right now (and another 26 more unsure). I think I need to walk over to Hallmackenreuther and issue a warning. From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

New seminar weblog
I started a new weblog about the project seminar titled »Sound«. It's a seminar covering sound design, corporate sound, sound in film, sound art, etc.Related: From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

3rd webmonday/webmontag in Cologne went well
Yesterday the 3rd Webmonday in Cologne took place. Again we arranged the Hallmackenreuther for this get together, but this time they decided to put us in the cellar (which is a nice location for maybe 50 people, but not 70 or 80; see the images). People start to get familiar with each other. I think I like that development very much. What I don't like is when the presentations take more than one hour alltogether or a single presentation lasts any longer than 10 minutes (including Q&A!). I took some time to ramp up the owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Access point distribution
Today during a train ride between Cologne and Aachen I let MacStumbler scan vor access points that I passed by. During the 70km ride it catched signals of around 65 wireless LANs: Usually regular housing is only close to railways in cities. On the country site buildings are rather sparse. Taking these facts into account I'd suspect the average densitiy of access points in a city here is so high, that you probably would be in the reach of From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Learning & commerce
Nuvvo is a platform where teachers can add an online course and optionally sell enrollments. Nuvvo is free - but once the instructor charges money Nuvvo will keep an 8% commission of all enrollments sold. Besides of the fact that this is a really interesting business model, the Nuvvo web application is designed to be as simple and easy to use as possible. From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Kinja.com
Somehow I missed the site Kinja.com completely: The about page says: Kinja is a weblog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.Weblogs are much talked about, but still chal From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Half of corporate PCs can't run Vista?
If something is really shifting the market share in favour of Apple, than I think it is the fact, that Microsoft does have a real problem with innovating their OS on an outdated base of hardware. According to InformationWeek Gartner estimates that half of the PCs in corporations won't be able to even run Vista. If need to upgrade infrastructure that is actually running well on the current OS (and probably would do so for another two or three years), than this is really be a financial problem.< From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

No one reads what you write?
Dave Winer in this interview makes some comments about his online writing style. His weblog is less a collection of posts, but rather collection of paragraphs per day with. Sometimes he uses headlines to separate content. But generally it seems to be true that people skim blog pages a lot. With Tinderbox it is quite easy to shape the style of a homepage. You can add some fields here and include some if/else-statements in the temp From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Create screenshots with different browsers
There are a couple of web applications out there that allow to test a website in different browsers. I think that is a service the vendors of all theses browsers should pay for, but anyway: Browsershots.org: Free but you need to wait a long time to see results. Browserpool.de: German; Uses remote access, so you can test actual functionality (30¤/month) Browsercam.com: a site to take screenshots of a page with many different browsers.< From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Eye-tracking websites
The statistical output of the eye-tracking survey is colelcted into "heat maps", where hot zones are those areas people tend to look at more often: Nielsens concludes, that most users employ some kind of F-pattern when scanning a page. He concludes: The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:Users won't r From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Ars Electronica 2006: Simplicity
John Maeda is one of the curators this year. On the Ars Electronica Website there is an opening statement from him: SIMPLICITY is a complex topic that has no single, simple answer.We live in an increasingly complex technological world where nothing works like it is supposed to, and at the end of the day makes all of us hunger for simplicity to some degree. Yet ironically when given the choice of more or less, we are programmed at the genetic level to want more.“Would you like the big cookie or the smaller cookie?” or “Would you like the computer with ten From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Feedburned my RSS feed
Most of the traffic on this site is generated by the RSS feed I provide. I wanted to have more reliable stats about this and thus I decided to republish it through Feedburner. There is no need to update the URL of my feed (there is a redirect). It takes a while until I can see some fancy statistics on Feedburner. Right now I can only see how many people are subscribed to the feed. Update: FeedBurner shows how many people have subscribed to the feed with what softwa From owrede_log on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Surfacing
Ok, so by now surely you thought this blog (or I) had died a quiet death... as it turns out, neither of us is ready for that just yet. Lots is new. I've switched jobs and cities. New house, new neighborhood, nice people. The kids spending more of their time outside home, making new friends. My daughter has entered school (and is mostly liking it thus far, much to my relief, though she wishes she had more free activity time) and my son fou From Seb's Open Research on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Montreal Wiki Wednesday January 4
That's right folks, tomorrow is the next Wiki Wednesday, and it's happening in Montreal, too! Socialtext provided the ice cream last time, but doing that again here in January is rubbing salt on the wound, really, so we have a beer budget this time around. Already a few people got wind of the event and signed up on the wiki page. Given a bit of last-minute marketing on my part I wager we can get a nice bunch together. Each time I& From Seb's Open Research on April 24, 2006 at 4:47 p.m..

Comeback, Or: Seb Isn't Dead Yet
Assuming the Radio (blog software) bug that has been plaguing me since the beginning of the year has been fixed by now, you should be able to read this and to find, below, posts from my January attempt to resurrect to the blogging world. More substantial posts to come later soon. :) From Seb's Open Research on April 24, 2006 at 4:46 p.m..

CHI 2006: Scott Cook (Intuit)
The CHI conference is in my hometown this week, and Socialtext is graciously sending me downtown to learn some stuff. Intuit founder Scott Cook opened the conference. Here are my notes from his talk.Speaker intro (paraphrased): In 1984 Scott Cook founded Intuit, which makes the famously successful Quicken software and is among the first companies to have a public wiki, the Seb's Open Research on April 24, 2006 at 4:46 p.m..

CHI 2006: CHI Madness
This year the CHI conference is experimenting with how the (impressively heavy, 8-track wide, and that's just the papers) day schedules are presented to attendees, and they came up with a refreshing idea. Every morning they will line up 42 speakers to present 21 hours' worth of scholarly content, each being alloted 40 seconds to attract listeners to their talk. The end product is packaged as the CHI Madness session. I find the idea deeply clueful. This gives people an occasion to briefly pitch their findings to an audience on the scale of a thousand. Normally you're able to d From Seb's Open Research on April 24, 2006 at 4:46 p.m..

Rants 'n' Raves: Sex Appeal
A reader maintains a video game's appeal is all about its basic all round quality; for another it's all about big breasts. Plus: Steven Edwards is congratulated on his latest column in today's Rants 'n' Raves. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 3:45 p.m..

The Evolution of Spy Tools
The gagdets modern-day spies use may have come along way from invisible ink but they are still based on the same ideas dreamt up 500 years ago. From Forbes.com. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 3:45 p.m..

Ye Olde Geek Show Draws Thousands
With robot back flips, pyrotechnics and strange vehicles from the future, the outdoor Maker Faire is a tinkerer's heaven. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 3:45 p.m..

Active Home Web Use by Country, March 2006
Internet usage experienced a 2 percent growth in March. From ClickZ Stats on April 24, 2006 at 2:45 p.m..

Microsoft: 'We're the Victim'
The software maker begins its attempt to overturn the European Commission's antitrust ruling by arguing that being forced to produce a product nobody wants is both unfair and bad business. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 1:46 p.m..

Surf to Your Heart's Delight
Browsing the internet while at work is the equivalent of reading the newspaper at your desk a judge says, ruling that a reprimand is the appropriate punishment for a man accused of ignoring his supervisors and continuing to surf. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 12:45 p.m..

The Geek Mind Behind Dorkbot
Douglas Repetto's show-and-tell for grownup geeks has spawned dorkbot events around the globe, while his annual ArtBots robot talent show is enjoying cybernetic success. Where does he go from here? A Wired News interview by Rachel Metz. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..

Paralysis Cure Worth Waiting For
Treatments for paralysis and other ailments in foreign countries are tempting for those facing a lifetime of dependence on others. But here's why it might be better to wait before jetting off to China. Commentary by Steven Edwards. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..

Gallery: Hubble's Sweet 16
To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 16th birthday, NASA and the European Space Agency release stunning new images of the starburst Cigar Galaxy. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..

How Lara Croft Steals Hearts
Conventional wisdom says Tomb Raider is a smash success because its cynical blend of prurience and violence plays perfectly to the base instincts of teenage boys. But the reasons for its success may be a whole lot stranger. Commentary by Clive Thompson. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..

RFID 'Til the Cows Come Home
Critics lambast plan to tag most U.S. farm animals by 2008 as a giant boondoggle for the tech industry. Audrey Hudson reports from Washington, D.C. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..

Wi-Fi City Sees Startup Woes
It may be the first city to roll out free internet access, according to analysts, but the new Wi-Fi network in St. Cloud, Florida has enough hiccups many residents are keeping their for-pay service for now. From Wired News on April 24, 2006 at 12:45 a.m..