I have been tweeting since early March, just before Twitter exploded into the mainstream Internet with a strong showing at the South by Southwest conference. Since that time, I have followed the growing interest in the service and saving hundreds of links that I will try to process over the course of the next week. Over the next week, BlogSchmog will explore different aspects of Twitter based on eight months of use.
Lecture Browser
No, it’s not a flying car, but it’s pretty damn cool. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) released a new lecture search tool that facilitates keyword searches of transcripts from about 200 recorded lectures.
New views for Google search
Google is continuing to experiment with the presentation of their search results. It doesn’t work particularly well, but the concept and initial release of Google views is very compelling. By adding view: to the search query, the results are grouped together in one of a few pre-determined ways: as a timeline, a map location, or information filters.
Microwind generators blow my mind
In honor of the Bioneers conference—which is being broadcast as a satellite conference in Bloomington this weekend—here’s a very interesting use of the aeroelastic flutter effect. The Windbelt generator was inspired by the infamous collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a standard cautionary tale for physicists and structural engineers.
Zzzz
It is 4:47a, and I am typing. I just spent the past three hours up and working on tweaking the plug-ins of this blog. My head hurts, and I’m ready for a nap. But first, some thoughts on sleep.
Designing Wiser
In last Saturday’s workshop on early childhood education, the core content present by Bev Bos involved twelve conditions for growing wiser: Belonging, Risk, Passion, Power, Productivity, Presence, Support, Solitude, Humor, Gratification Deference, Mentors and Models, and Re-Seeding. This is also a good scaffolding for design. The user is the learner, in this case, and the interface is both school and teacher.
Free WARC
I got a temporary account on the World Advertising Research Center web site and snagged a few business-ey papers of possible relevance to my academic design work. Access to the full online library is limited to some sample documents, and even then I was only able to download a selected few. Still, it was worth the effort since some of these publications may find their way into a future design document.