“I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it’s a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.

Haven’t you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you’ve never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren’t in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your … faith?

Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?

Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place.”

“What would you say if I told you that you can create your own diagnostic tools using nothing more than commonly available software you can download over the Internet and some simple CSS? You’d probably say I was crazy. You might be right, but so am I. You really can save yourself a lot of time and headaches with a combination of a browser and some fairly simple CSS.

How? As we’ll see, simple user stylesheets can be used to:

• See exactly how tables are structured
• Figure out how table cells are aligned
• Quickly see which images on a page still need ALT text
• Point out where you still have FONT tags lurking in your markup
• Expose the overall page structure

“

“Adar and Huberman argue that the anonymous nature of Gnutella is a key
factor in its apparent demise. “In order for distributed systems with no central
monitoring to succeed,” they conclude, “a large amount of voluntary
cooperation is required, a requirement that is very hard to fulfill in systems
with large user populations that remain anonymous.”

While Gnutella may indeed be suffering from a tragedy of the commons, I don’t
believe that removing anonymity would make much of a difference. Leaving
aside the obvious legal implications of adding user identities to the Gnutella
network (wouldn’t the RIAA just love that), it’s not the ideal architectural
solution to the Gnutella problem. Even if there weren’t legal repercussions to
logging on as Michael Sippey and sharing that bootleg copy of Kid A that I
happened to get my hands on, I’d still just log on, point my Gnutella client to
an empty directory on my hard drive, and search away. After all, the incentive
of people knowing that they swiped Kid A from me isn’t enough to encourage
me to share. And conversely, the disincentive of people knowing that I’m
searching without sharing isn’t enough to encourage me to point my Gnutella
client to a richer directory.

A more appropriate solution to the Gnutella problem would be a market-based
approach, where the content itself is used as currency.”

“Home-brewed currency, or “Mojo,” lies at the core of this new
world. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with
Napster and every other file-sharing service. Rather, those who
download the free, open-source new release in November
must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they
themselves determine.

This is how it works: Download a free Mojo Nation “agent”
and set it loose. The 2,000 users who are testing the beta
version earn 1 million Mojo just for signing up, but new
members can earn currency only by sharing what they already
have — unused computer power on their desktop. Mojo
Nation will pay users Mojo for letting the network “rent” their
computer’s disk space, processing power or whatever else the
system needs. The prices change according to the rules of
supply and demand: The more people want of what you’ve got,
the more you can expect to earn. ”

“Common sense dictates that you shouldn’t stick anything in your ear, not even your finger – unless you want to make a phone call with the latest innovation from a Japanese telecom researcher.”

“To hear incoming calls, the wearer puts a finger in one ear. The caller’s voice is converted to vibrations, which travel through the hand, the finger and into the ear canal. The wearer talks back via the wristband’s microphone.

That’s not the only sleight of hand necessary. To answer the phone, called Whisper because incoming calls cause the wristband to vibrate, the wearer taps their thumb and index finger together.”

“In an earlier work (Buxton, 1986), I speculated on what conclusions a future anthropologist would draw about our physical make-up, based on the tools (namely computers) used by our society. The
objective was to point out that these tools reflect a very distorted view of our physiology and the motor/sensory skills. For example, the near absence of pressure sensors reflects a failure to exploit a
fundamental and well-developed capability of the hand. The impoverished use of sound reflects a waste of our ability to use audio to make sense out of our environment.

The paper dealt primarily with the domain of the visible and tangible. Nevertheless, things have changed very little in the intervening years. Furthermore, it can well be argued that things are even more distorted
if we look at how the technology reflects less visible human traits such as cognition, or social interactions.

In what follows, we use a technology-as-mirror metaphor. One intent is to provide some human-centred criteria for evaluating designs. Another is to help foster a mind-set that will lead to improved designs
in the future. ”

“Our metaphor is one of three separate mirrors, each reflecting one of these levels. In order to be judged acceptable, designs must provide an acceptable degree of fidelity in how they reflect each of these
three aspects of human makeup and activity.”

“This study compared voice browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing. It attempted to identify
which of three common hypertext forms (linear slide show, grid/tiled map, and hierarchical menu) are well suited to voice navigation, and whether voice navigation is helped by numbering links. The study shows that voice control adds approximately 50% to the performance time for certain types of tasks.”

“The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide a mathematical rule explaining how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. In other words, it allows scientists to combine new data with their existing knowledge or expertise.

The canonical example is to imagine that a precocious newborn observes his first sunset, and wonders whether the sun will rise again or not. He assigns equal prior probabilities to both possible outcomes, and represents this by placing one white and one black marble into a bag. The following day, when the sun rises, the child places another white marble in the bag. The probability that a marble plucked randomly from the bag will be white (ie, the child’s degree of belief in future sunrises) has thus gone from a half to
two-thirds. After sunrise the next day, the child adds another white marble, and the probability (and thus the degree of belief) goes from two-thirds to three-quarters. And so on. Gradually, the initial belief that the sun is just as likely as not to rise each morning is modified to become a near-certainty that the sun will
always rise.

In a Bayesian analysis, in other words, a set of observations should be seen as something that changes opinion, rather than as a means of determining ultimate truth.”