Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand, our National Day of Scratching Our Heads and Wondering Whether We Should Scrap This Day and Get Ourselves A Real National Day Instead. Despite the obvious debauchery taking place on such an occasion, I’ve taken the time to bring you four tasty science, art, mobile, and data links. Have a good weekend!
- Add Art — a clever Firefox adblocker hack to replace ads with art work. The selection of art is curated and updated regularly. (via Tim on Twitter)
- Yahoo’s Key Scientific Challenges — Yahoo! offers money and access to PhD students whose projects fall into these categories. For example: “Meaningful Instrumentation: Activity and interaction data are logged by most application and devices as a matter of course. Most logging protocols foreground system operations for debugging and optimization. However, what forms of device instrumentation and from these what kinds of metrics best reflect user experience of the internet across different devices and applications? What does a human centered, internet logging and data analysis paradigm look like? What new forms of “experience logging” are emerging?”
- Golden Age of Cellphones (Tim Bray) — this post is almost a month but I’ve kept the tab open to see whether I still believe it. I do. We’re seeing the door open to mass adoption of cellphones that fail to suck (even though the mobile phone market dropped 12% in Q4 2008, smartphones grew) and the more open the device in your hand, the better chance there is that something good for the user can be made.
- Personal Data Integration (Toby Segaran) — another oldie but goodie, this one from 2008. Toby pulled contacts from phone calls, email, contacts, social networks, etc. and built a visual representation of who he talks to and how often. His friend groups show up as clusters, which leads me to wonder how much of the pain of building groups in social networking apps could be replaced with simple observation and analysis (“you talk to these people who talk to each other, what would you like to call this group?”).