A crop circle google montage, from Montage-a-Google again.

Montage-a-Google

Gotten off tingilinde, the Montage-a-Google and the game based on it are pretty sweet.

This is my spring montage for "lilacs."

Other pretty ones are "apples", "leaves", "petals", "stars", and "trees."

A Web Design Process Animation

If you haven't seen this, it's strangely compelling: a guy captured stages of his design of a web page from start to end, and animated it, so you can see the process at many checkpoints. His explanation is at MBoffin.com, A Design Timeline. His animation is here.

This kind of thing would make for very nice portfolio material for anyone interviewing for a UI design job. One is supposed to be able to show stages of development and talk to them. Without a little more "documentation" of what's going on, it's not quite sufficient as is. But for supporting material in a website resume, for example, it would be pretty cool.

Mirror Neurons

Apparently some scientists say humans can read minds:

"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been implicated in a broad range of phenomena, including certain mental disorders. Mirror neurons may help cognitive scientists explain how children develop a theory of mind (ToM), which is a child's understanding that others have minds similar to their own. Doing so may help shed light on autism, in which this type of understanding is often missing.

Networks and Creativity

A link from Boing_boing on the value of fresh perspectives in creative endeavors, studied from a social network perspective: Dream teams thrive on mix of old and new blood.

"You need someone new to get the creative juices going so you don't get trapped in the same ideas over and over again." Uzzi added, "If your systemic network has teams with only incumbents, and especially incumbents who have worked together repeatedly, your field tends to have low impact scores. The fact that we found this across fields with equally powerful minds suggests that how the brain power of a field is organized into different kinds of networks determines the field's success."

Twenty Things about Software Design

I've been thinking a lot about previous jobs and about the interaction design class I'm putting together. These are a few conclusions I've reached over the past few years, from working on different products in different domains at altogether too many companies: Here are Twenty Things I Think about Software Design.

Exploring Enron Email

This is how I found Mark Newman's stuff and it well deserves linking to in its own right. Jeffrey Heer, the main author of the prefuse network visualization toolkit that I linked to a few weeks ago, has this cool paper: Exploring Enron, visualizing social networks from the Enron email corpus at UC Berkeley.

He implemented one of Newman's fast algorithms for detecting community structure in Java and it worked out fairly well.

Mark Newman is Hot

I found Mark Newman's web page while tracking down some references on social network graphing algorithms, and was wowed by his list of pubs. I scanned through a bunch before finding the home page, noted he is quite cute, boggled he is in a Physics dept., and then saw he was one of the characters responsible for the widely linked to blue & red election results maps of the country.

Coolness AND attractiveness factors, ok; but back to the substance that convinced me I wanted to date him before I even saw his picture. He's applied his general network analysis algorithms to analysing wide ranging network data, from biological pathways to animal behavior to routes in cities to physics paper citations to web site linkage. The papers tend towards the math-full, but the points are pretty interesting nonetheless. And his math gives me hope I can crunch my enormous pile of LiveJournal network data into something tractable, eventually!

On his pubs list, look for the "Why social networks are different from other types of networks", "Finding community structure in very large networks" (in which they analyse Amazon.com buying patterns and find community-like structures), and the sweetest one, "Identifying the role that individual animals play in their social network," a study of dolphin communities.

Apparently one individual (SN100) acts as the broker between 2 dolphin groups. (Other dolphins had names like "fish" and "thumper"; so why couldn't SN100 get a real handle?) Dolphins hang with other similar dolphins, just like people do. Here, I'll make it easy to get to the dolphin story.

Impress your social circle: rentagerman.de

I got this one from Danah Boyd's site: Rent a German.

Rentagerman.de offers a wide range of Germans for your personal and social needs.

You can select the German of your choice for an exclusive lifetime experience: Imagine to appear with your German at parties, family events, or just hang out with them at the local shopping center.

No matter which occasion you choose, you will surely impress your environment by presenting an original German.

If you are german or know a German who wishes to participate in the rentagerman network, please don´t hesitate to add your German to our site. On success, you will receive 40% of the rental fee !

So enjoy our human resources and make the rentagerman community grow fast !

Edited to add: I can't leave this site alone, I'm too enthralled.

Carl Hagen, 58 (New York): “After dinner, we watched TV together with the entire family. Suddenly the German started to cry. It was such real and pure emotion. I’d never seen this before. The support package cheered him up again and we read German poems together ‘til 3 am. Even Grandma stayed up and enjoyed the exotic sound of words like "Rasenmäher, Motorsäge or Solidargemeinschaft". Rented again, before our new friend left.”

So, rent-a-nice-scot would go over quite big among my friends. I smell a business plan.

London's Abandoned Tube Stations

If you're a fan of the underground, or the Underground, this is an interesting collection of trivia and old photos: London's Abandoned Tube Stations. (Scroll down past the cartoon to the content links.)

Gotten from the wonderful Things.

WorldChanging: Stories of wallpapers

There are enough cool technology pieces out there to draw on for decades of product innovation; what we need now is for designers to come up with clever ways to combine them in artistic and provocative ways... Here's another set of fun idea aggregations: some very cool wallpaper evolutions posted on Worldchanging in Stories of wallpapers:

"By embedding electroluminescent materials into the pattern of the wallpaper and incorporating a light sensor, the wallpaper responds to the lighting requirement of a room, acting as a decorative element when a room is naturally bright, and as a wallpaper light when the space requires more light. With power supplied from a solar charged battery or standard electricity, it can also be manually controlled to increase or decrease luminosity."

Other good ideas in there: "The Activity Wallpaper, by Tobias Skog, explores how a place can get an electronic "memory" of how it is inhabited: how people move around, socialize, make noise or spend time there." (This is an oldish theme from the HCI literature, in which documents or objects or places record previous usage or interactions for later users to see. Nicely applied to wallpaper, though.)

And then there's "The Not-So-White Walls, by Dario Buzzini, is an interactive wallpaper that works like a display, giving you the possibility to change patterns and content as you wish. Resistors placed behind the paper surface make the color of the paper change according to your fantasy: you can dim lights, turn on home appliances, read email on the wall, view pictures taken with a camphone, etc." Yes, but can I watch a movie on it?

Democratizing Innovation

Released under CC license and on MIT Press 2005, here's Eric Von Hippel's manuscript for Democratizing Innovation, which argues that we should be paying attention to "lead users" to see what they do with our products. Lead users "are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate.

Journal of the H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771

Captain Cook's journal is scanned and online from the National Library of Australia. The part I dipped into seemed to be full of recipes, and I later gathered this was the doctor's section on the effects of portable soup and port on scurvy. Go to: Digital Collections - Manuscripts - Cook, James, 1728-1779.. Journal of the H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771 [manuscript].

Life's top 10 greatest inventions

A good article in New Scientist on the best inventions of evolution, from brains to death to sex to parasites. It's readable, and fun if you know any biology (apparently I really am learning some!): New Scientist-- Life's top 10 greatest inventions.

Trends in Terms for MMORPGs

At brunch last weekend some friends and I were trying to talk about MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) and couldn't figure out what to call them or how to pronounce it. Ken suggested "MUD" was the best pronunciation. Out of curiosity, I tried that Blogpulse Trends mapper on the terms MUD, MOO, and MMORPG and got this (look, MUDs and MOOs aren't dead, Ned):

Notice the trendlines are quite sensitive to whether you use the plurals or not:

Check it out yourself: Blogpulse Trendline for MMORPGetc.

ajax & web applications

Wondering how the latest cool web stuff works? Doesn't it seem like things suddenly got a lot better out there? Look at the ajax explanation for a bunch of Google technologies and A9, the yellow pages app on Amazon. Then go try Google Suggest if you haven't yet. It's like they combined a random text search engine and directory listings in one UI -- amazingly useful due to low interaction overhead and very simple in concept. (Although note that it piggybacks on a UI/IE feature from which many users may expect different behavior -- which worries me a tiny bit.)

adaptive path-- ajax: a new approach to web applications.

BlogPulse Trends, Memes, Trackers

Infoseek's BlogPulse has some tools to watch the memes and activity on the blogosphere. There are a handful that are of direct interest to me, in my attempt to analyse meme spread on LiveJournal.

The Conversation Tracker: Another in the collection of tools to show threaded conversations, this time at the meta-level, across sites. While very difficult to do in the general wide open system of the Internet, tracking topic spread and threads is far, far simpler in relatively closed systems like Usenet (see Marc Smith's Netscan stuff, of course) and LiveJournal. I'd like to see more tools for handling LiveJournal's sprawling disaster of a conversation space.... Now THAT would really benefit a lot of users who are frustrated, and with good reason. (Difficulty following conversation across LJ's was one of the major issues raised by users in my survey results, which I'll digest and post sometime in the next month.)

The Trend Tool: Their tool for simple graphs of topic spread over time. What can I say, I love graphs, especially time series data. I haven't played with it enough to know what I think of it as a general purpose tool, though.

HP Labs Empidemic Analyser: Yevgeniy Medynskiy of Cornell pointed me to the HP Labs work on meme spread, which seems to be evolving into some cool tools. Their thesis is that viral memes and topic memes spread similarly. I'm going off to play with this thing now.

For all these links: BlogPulse Tools, scroll down for the items in question.

"So tonight I spied on Area 51"

If you haven't seen Google's satellite photo addition, this is a fun way to get introduced: some guy goes looking for Area 51 and posts pics (and directions) for where he thinks it is, complete with landing fields and bunkers.

the_unexplained: So tonight I spied on Area 51.

Longmire does Romance Novels

Here's great LOL-inducing set of spoof romance covers, pointed out by Ellen Kushner on LiveJournal: Longmire does Romance Novels.

More googlemania: If this was the future....

A very amusing wish for Google that happens to tie right into some current (BUZZWORD ALERT) ubicomp ideas: If Matt typed in "where are my car keys?" into Google: blackcustard LJ post: if it was the future already....