New Scientist reports that a new mysterious signal has been identified, that is the most likely candidate for contact by intelligent alien life so far.
The signal detected by astronomers at SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) has been identified 3 times but, could possibly be signals from an unknown astronomical phenomenon.
There are some useful usability tips when considering RSS in a blog post at helge.at.
Some of the considerations include disguised links, too few textual information, too many articles per day and nested feeds.
An interesting article in MIT Technology Review which comments on how researchers in France, Israel and China have found flaws in the MD5 encryption.
An algorithm and encryption that up to now has been thought to be impossible to break into, and is most widely used in security algorithms today.
An interesting journal titled, The NextD Design Journal looks at a variety of topics and areas, including human-centered design, navigation, innovation, interaction and research.
Some of the interesting medical papers and research of human visual perception currently being undertaken at the Dept. of Ophthalmology at the Medical school of the University of Freiburg, Germany.
The projects and papers look at Human perception such as visual dimensions, luminance and colour, visual acuities including the Bach, Meigen, Strasburger paper on CRT and Vision Research.
A new computer virus called, Rbot-GR uses webcams to literally spy and snoop at victims. It appears to be capable of turning on webcams and sending images and video via the internet.
I’ve been reading up on a variety of projects whilst here in the UK. One I found particularly interesting is the IBM History Flow research project.
The project is part of the collaborative user experience research group here and aims to visualise the relation of document change. It is currently aiming to visualise changes of documents, by analysing the wiki site, Wikipedia. Some of the results are quite interesting.
A similar project is that of the Latex Wiki which also indexes and visualises relationships of document changes.
The Laurence Lessig new book Free Culture has now been translated into Audio Chapter recordings in various languages by individuals wishing to allow others access to it.
Brian Doherty from Reason speaks with John Perry Barlow regarding the legalities of intellectual property, intellectual products and the development of culture.
There is a summary from the interview via Tim Wu, guest blogger on the Laurence Lessig site.
An experimental website and project, Colorcell, which aims to find the most popular color combinations.
A great and useful online tool that creates a browser favourite (bookmark) icon from an imported JPG of GIF. These icons are those 8×8 pixel images that appear next to a bookmarked item and a tabbed window in a browser.
IBM have developed a JAVA tool called aDesigner for web designers that lets you ensure that pages pages are accessbile and usable to the visually impaired.
A review of the tool can be found in InternetNews
Lou Rosenfeld has posted a really interesting blog post on some of his experience regarding Enterprise IA and certain differences in the way culture, language and business models affect the use and access of information.
I managed to last week buy a copy of Bill Bryson’s, A Short History of Nearly Everything, whilst on my way to Zurich, Switzerland.
It’s one of those books that is hard to put down. This, his latest book is a walkthrough of science covering the subjects of geology, chemisty, paleontology, astronomy and physics from the curious mind of Bryson.
The book is more a way to possibly understand, appreciate, marvel and enjoy the wonder and accomplishment of science and to render it comprehensible to people, like Bryson, made bored (or scared) stiff of science at high school.
His interest is not simply to discover what we know, but to find out how we know it – It is a great read.
A copy of the Bill Gates speech from the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2004 in Redmond, Washington on August 2, 2004.
His speech challenged academic researchers from around the world to join Microsoft in developing the breakthroughs that will define the future of software computing in the Digital Decade.
