- XBox One Kinect Controller (Guardian) — the new Kinect controller can detect gaze, heartbeat, and the buttons on your shirt.
- Surveillance and the Internet of Things (Bruce Schneier) — Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how it will change society for the better. It’s true that it will make a lot of wonderful things possible, but the “Internet of Things” will also allow for an even greater amount of surveillance than there is today. The Internet of Things gives the governments and corporations that follow our every move something they don’t yet have: eyes and ears.
- Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps (extract) — How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” 2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). 3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
- New Data Science Toolkit Out (Pete Warden) — with population data to let you compensate for population in your heatmaps. No more “gosh, EVERYTHING is more prevalent where there are lots of people!” meaningless charts.
ENTRIES TAGGED "UI"
Four short links: 22 May 2013
New Kinect, Surveillance of Things, How to Criticise, and Compensating for Population
Four short links: 13 May 2013
Exploiting Glass, Teaching Probability, Product Design, and Subgraph Matching
- Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he returned a little later I asked him about the Debug Mode option. The reaction was interesting: he kind of looked at me, somewhat confused, and asked “wait, what version of the software does it report in Settings”? When I told him “XE4″ he clarified “XE4, not XE3″, which I verified. He had thought this feature had been removed from the production units.
- Probability Through Problems — motivating problems to hook students on probability questions, structured to cover high-school probability material.
- Connbox — love the section “The importance of legible products” where the physical UI interacts seamless with the digital device … it’s glorious. Three amazing videos.
- The Index-Based Subgraph Matching Algorithm (ISMA): Fast Subgraph Enumeration in Large Networks Using Optimized Search Trees (PLoSONE) — The central question in all these fields is to understand behavior at the level of the whole system from the topology of interactions between its individual constituents. In this respect, the existence of network motifs, small subgraph patterns which occur more often in a network than expected by chance, has turned out to be one of the defining properties of real-world complex networks, in particular biological networks. [...] An implementation of ISMA in Java is freely available.
Four short links: 3 May 2013
Intelligence and Entropy, Trademarked Memes, Wink UI, and Swiss Cheese Military Security
- Causal Entropic Forces (PDF) — new paper from Sci Foo alum Alex Wissner-Gross connecting intelligence and entropy. (via Inside Science)
- Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat Are Trademarked Memes (Ars Technica) — the business of this (presumably there will be royalties in the end) is less interesting to me than the murky tension between authorship, ownership, sharing, popularity, and profit. We still lack a common expectation for how memes can be owned and exploited.
- Wink UI — Mike DiGiovanni wrote a Glass app to take photos when you wink. (via Ars Technica)
- Stealing US Military Secrets (Bloomberg) — One former intelligence official described internal Pentagon discussions over whether another Lockheed Martin fighter jet, the F-22 Raptor, could safely be deployed in combat, because several subcontractors had been hacked. The article is full of horror stories about Chinese penetration of US military contractors.
Google Glass and the Future
I just read a Forbes article about Glass, talking about the split between those who are “sure that it is the future of technology, and others who think society will push back against the technology.”
I don’t see this as a dichotomy (and, to be fair, I’m not sure that the author does either). I expect to see…
Four short links: 18 April 2013
Bitcoin Bundle, HTML Escaping, Open as in Gongkai, and Glass Reflections
- The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto — I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis block. It can be identified by constant slope segments that occasionally restart. Also this entity is the only entity that has shown complete trust in Bitcoin, since it hasn’t spend any coins (as last as the eye can see). I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M USD at current exchange rate. Author’s credible. (via Hacker News)
- Houdini (Github) — C library for escaping and unescaping UTF-8-encoded HTML, according to OWASP guidelines.
- The $12 Gongkai Phone (Bunnie Huang) — gongkai isn’t a totally lawless free-for-all. It’s a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching. It’s very different from Western IP concepts, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it.
- Jan Chipchase on Google Glass (All Things D) — Any idiot can collect data. The real issue is how to collect data in such a way that meets both moral and legal obligations and still delivers some form of value. An interesting observation, one of many within this overview of the usability and third-party user experience of Google Glass-like UIs.
Four short links: 4 March 2013
Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation, Multivariate Dataset Exploration, Augmediated Life, and Public Experience
- Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation — do hard things and risk failure. What else are we on this earth for?
- crossfilter — open source (Apache 2) JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records.
- Steve Mann: My Augmediated Life (IEEE) — Until recently, most people tended to regard me and my work with mild curiosity and bemusement. Nobody really thought much about what this technology might mean for society at large. But increasingly, smartphone owners are using various sorts of augmented-reality apps. And just about all mobile-phone users have helped to make video and audio recording capabilities pervasive. Our laws and culture haven’t even caught up with that. Imagine if hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people had video cameras constantly poised on their heads. If that happens, my experiences should take on new relevance.
- The Google Glass Feature No-One Is Talking About — The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.
Four short links: 4 February 2013
Enlightened Tinkering, In-Browser Tor Proxy, Dark Patterns, and Subjective Data
- Hands on Learning (HuffPo) — Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. (via BoingBoing)
- FlashProxy (Stanford) — a miniature proxy that runs in a web browser. It checks for clients that need access, then conveys data between them and a Tor relay. [...] If your browser runs JavaScript and has support for WebSockets then while you are viewing this page your browser is a potential proxy available to help censored Internet users.
- Dark Patterns (Slideshare) — User interfaces to trick people. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Bill Gates is Naive: Data Are Not Objective (Math Babe) — examples at the end of biased models/data should be on the wall of everyone analyzing data. (via Karl Fisch)
Four short links: 15 January 2013
Gadgets Over Time, Telco Evil, Open Source Savings, and Plus-Sized Husky Tablet
- Electronic Gadgets in the NZ Consumer Price Index — your CPI is just as bizarre, trust me. (via Julie Starr)
- Captive Audience: Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Gilded Age (Amazon) — Foo camper and former Washington insider, now truth-teller about broken telco industry in the US. From Time’s review of the book and interview with her: Meanwhile, Comcast has sharply reduced its capital expenditures, which have now fallen to 14% of revenues from over 35% a decade ago, even as it enjoys a whopping 95% profit margin on its broadband service. “They’re not expanding and they’re not enhancing their service,” Crawford says. “They’ve done their investment, now they’re just harvesting.” Not surprisingly, Comcast’s stock price increased over 50% in the last year, and nearly 200% over the last four years. “Shareholders are doing well,” Crawford says. “The rest of the country, not so great.”
- Barclays Cut Software Expenditure 90% With Open Source (The Inquirer) — “We’ve been making significant savings in our technology platform by doing a lot of the work in-house to develop and launch our own applications rapidly,” he said. “It means we can write new applications once and then develop them using an open source model, rather than rewriting them again for legacy systems.” (via The Linux Foundation)
- Lenovo Has a 27″ Tablet Due This Summer — USD1700 and I want one. The label “tablet” is a tough pill to swallow (ho ho) but it’d make an awesome table. That you could never put anything on. Hmm.
Four short links: 20 December 2012
SQL Indexes, Instagram Effects in JS, Evil Fake Keyboard, and Preschool UX
- Use The Index, Luke — free ebook on tuning SQL database access.
- CamanJS — Instagram-like filters in Javascript, permissively-licensed open source. (via VentureBeat)
- Don’t Stick That There — USB device pretending to be a keyboard. The benefit of this is that even with USB auto-run disabled, our exploit will still work as it emulates a keyboard. No one ever blocks USB keyboards! (via David Sklar)
- Best Practices: Designing Touch Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers (Sesame Workshop) — the good people at Sesame Street Workshop tell what works and what doesn’t when you make tablet touch UIs for kids. Double Tap: Children expect immediate feedback from their touch and tend to think the app is unresponsive when a double tap is required. We suggest only using double tap to prevent a child from accidental navigation (e.g., leaving an activity, accessing parent content).
Four short links: 12 December 2012
Evidence-Based Movie Arguments, Open Source on Github, Reality Glitches, and Lens-Up Displays
- Kiwi Bond Films Are The Most Violent (Peter Griffin) — it wasn’t always furry-footed plucky adventurers in Middle Earth, my friends. Included to show that you can take an evidence-based approach to almost any argument.
- Are Githubbers Taking Open Source Seriously? — nearly 140 of the 175 projects analyzed contain such an easily findable license information, or more precisely 78%. Or, alternatively 22% of Github projects don’t have easily findable license information. zomg. (via Simon Phipps)
- The Oh Shit (Matt Jones) — the condition of best-laid plans meeting reality. When all the drawings, sections, detailed drawings and meticulous sourcing in the world clash with odd corners of the physical world, weather, materials and not least the vagaries of human labour. It’s what Bryan Boyer calls the “Matter Battle”. He puts it beautifully: “One enters a Matter Battle when there is an attempt to execute the desires of the mind in any medium of physical matter.”
- Text Messages Direct to your Contact Lens (The Telegraph) — I want this so bad. It’s a future I can believe in. Of course, the free ones will have spam.
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