THAT’s where you’ve gone!. Starting to get really fed up of finding out that mates of yours have gone over to Typepad, and hence have a new URL, but you have no idea.
The Trotts should build in a “change of address” card feature.
Not spiders, but snakes.
“”When a dog loses a leg it’s got a clever enough brain to allow it to adapt,” says computer scientist Peter Bentley at University College London. But robots still lack this adaptive ability and so tend to give up the ghost when circumstances change.
Bentley and his colleague Siavash Haroun Mahdavi borrowed a trick from evolution to allow their robot to adapt to damage. The snakebot is made up of modular vertebral units that “snap” together to form a snake-like body
…The software for making a robot wriggle like a snake is fairly straightforward. But ensuring that the snake will keep moving even if a segment is damaged is trickier, and relies on different segments taking over from the damaged ones.
So Bentley and Mahdavi have created a genetic algorithm (GA) – a software routine that takes a “survival of the fittest” approach – to produce a system that continually evolves to improve itself.”
Braaaaiiinnnsssssss
Picture of kid making mobile phone from clay in Africa from Newsweek, over at my moblog
From this week’s European edition of Newsweek, which is all about tech, kids use of tech and how our tech is changing our brains:
“Is the stimulation of new media preparing kids for a future high-tech worldor turning them into antisocial, superficial dolts? There are no definitive answers. Only in the past few years have scientists begun to plumb childrens brains to see what goes on during the hours they spend engrossed in videogames or surfing the Web. What seems clear is that children are developing a far different set of skills than they had before. They are growing adept at handling visual information and multitasking. And the messaging free-for-all may actually help some kids overcome childhood awkwardness in relating to their peers.”
» Newsweek.com: Bionic Youth: Too Much Information?
» Newsweek.com: Kids: Tuning in, Turning On
» Newsweek.com: Tech: Listening to the Kids
» Newsweek.com: Kids: The End of Make Believe
UI: the next-generation.
Jakob’s latest alertbox: “Mobile Devices: One Generation From Useful” in which he states that GUIs and email must be fundamentally rethought for mobile devices, rather than squishing legacy UIs from desk-based devices. Gives me the excuse to dredge something interesting written by Chris from the comments on this post:
“I’m the external examiner on a couple of undergrad multimedia design courses, and this summer I’ve seen the first set of students who design intuitively for the phone. What I mean is, they don’t need briefs telling them to design for the phone, but because they’re the texting generation, they’re as comfortable with the alphanumeric keypad and txt language as a data entry method than they are with the point and click interface.
The phone-based projects they showed me just worked. when I asked for their research, there was little. They just knew what the best methods were, because they’ve spent their entire teenage lives texting.”
Can’t wait to see some of these projects…
Architecture is not building
Hugh Pearman reminds his readers that the process or tools involved are not always the story:
“Prefabrication is an overhyped subject: it’s not the end, just the means. In the same way, writing is not to do with the pen or the keyboard, but the words on the page. Always remember this: architecture is not the same as building.”
» Hughpearman.com: Creative Lego: are prefabricated homes architecture or building?
“The Myth of Discoverability”
Classic Scott Berkun:
“Most people are glad that the steering wheel in their automobile is easier to discover than the fuse box. They expect that whoever designed the automobile, or web site, is making good basic choices in their interest, so that they don’t have to think about it. In part, thats what theyre paying for.
» UIWeb: The myth of discoverability
[via Anil Dash’s Daily Links]
Mystery Science Former Audience 3000
The NE-USA blackout is being moblogged using TextAmerica. TextAmerica has comments. The former-audience gets a former-audience peanut gallery.
“Google is a bad unix shell”
Stefan on Google’s new calculator feature, and the (perhaps confusing) future of the “one-box” features:
“…what google is now losing (and the bane of all command line interfaces) is any kind of discoverability for all these new functions. I’ll never remember half those features, because there are few visual cues to tell me they’re there, and I can’t be arsed to remember anything. If I could remember stuff, I wouldn’t need sites like google.”
Not unusually, I’m not sure I agree with him. Google’s “one-box” features (generally) look for expressions or formats of information in your query that mean you’re trying to complete a very defined task – like an address, or a mathematical expression. They’re not trying to bind you into the syntax of a programming language or, indeed in many cases leave you with just the returned output of that features – extending (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth^2) = 9.82085555 m / s into Search for documents containing the terms (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth ^ 2); as featured on Google.com as an example for instance.
This is a smart (and getting smarter) conversational interface – if you know the language, the syntax of the query that will drop you right next to the answer – it fullfils it. If not, then Google will probably do it’s damnest to guess.
Not much like a unix shell.
Taglines, pitches, mission statements
It’s always seemed to me that those non-pithy sentences that people dream up to motivate their staff and enrapture the marketplace, are more of a product of what could be agreed upon internally rather than what would work. Their all-too-bland nature is underlined by this survey.
What are the worst mission statements or taglines you’ve come across or worked under?
» 17 top CEOs shared their elevator pitches, but few understood them
“Enough research, time to act”
Jon Udell colourfully illustrates (using Trinity from The Matrix) problems of closure and information anxiety:
“Don’t get me wrong. Too much information is a good problem to have. Beats the hell out of not being able to call Tank and download the pilot program. But it does create an interesting new dilemma. If you like to be well-informed, as I do, it’s getting harder than ever to draw the line and say: ‘Enough research, time to act.'”
From Richard Saul Wurman‘s “Information Anxiety 2”:
“”We live in an age of alsos, adapting to alternatives. because we have greater access to information, many of us have become more involved in researching, and making our own decisions, rather than relying on experts. The opportunity is that there is so much information, the catastrophe is that 99% of it isn’t meaningful or understandable. We need to rethink how we present information because the information appetites of people are much more refined. Success in our connected world requires that we isolate the specific information we need and get it to those we work with.”
We all need Tank.
» Jon Udell’s Weblog: “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter”
Petafloptimism 
