Being a speedy cyclist I hope this phenomenon stays on the other side of the Canal: British police is using a lasergun to catch speedy cyclists in Bournemouth; preferred speed is 10mph (16,1 km/h). That is s-l-o-w—m-o-t-i-o-n!
Okay okay, that is on a promenade along the seaside.
Scientific findings can be visually appealing. Probably you are familiar with the beauty of for example fractals. But what about design with nano-technology to create hairy nails. Tissue engineering brings beautifully grown steaks, or leather coats without spilling a drop of blood. Design for debate brings dolls forward with which we can explain modern practice in human fertilization like IVF. TED just released Paola Antonelli with her introduction into the state of the art in design by science of december 2007: “Design and the elastic mind”.
On a cold, windy and rainy evening, with 267 people breathing fire at once, the record attempt was successfully broken. Now we have to wait for the Guinness book of records to acknowledge.
My sis, and a good friend of mine watched it all and took some pictures and shot a movie of the event.
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Several media picked up on it as well (updated):
a short movie with nice slow-motion scenes on Edtv
NOS
Elsevier
Telegraaf
Kidsweek
nu.nl
20081016_vuurspuwverslag metro 16 okt 2008 (pdf)
Hart van Nederland
omroep brabant
Is it a hoax, or is it true horror…
A relatively unkown species of ants is invading Texas, and it is eating Electronic Equipment! Computers, burglar alarm systems, gas and electricity meters, iPods, telephone exchanges, nothing seems safe for these hungry little creatures.
They are hard to extinguish, because they pile their dead to create a safe path through pesticides. SMART!
Some people… spammers are really doing a good job at my most popular email address (4000 spam mails per month, no kidding!) and apparently now my website too! Have to admit that I did not update it too often but hey, molesting my account is rude isn’t it?
(more…)
Women have been in the news lately. At the TU/e a special event on women in science, to involve more women in technical sciences. In sports, the Netherlands celebrated the birth of a female professional soccer team in Twente. Furthermore there is a majority of women involved in online gaming (CNET)!
However, this hit me.
A study on 5000 computer users, asking questions about virusses, spyware and e-mail shows that:
The next time a female computer user asks me something about their computer, I’ll try the more psychological approach: How would you solve it yourself?
Norman wrote an article at uigarden that doing user observations first is wrong. Oh deary. Well of course there is some more nuance to that. In a way he is right, we should not ask the user what to design, because he does not know. True, but as soon as you start designing, you will have to make decisions. And that is what this is about. How do you make your decisions. With or without consulting the users. Presenting users with your decisions will evoke reactions. Users will provide you with feedback that in many cases could improve your design.
Therefore I still think that a good contextual analysis of the user helps a designer in coming up with good solutions. The user should still be consulted, on a regular basis and preferably in early iteration too. Nevertheless I agree with the Don that the very first steps into a designproject should be set by the designer.
don norman @ uigarden – article
Noooo way. Microsoft tries to Patent verb conjugation… Wow. Would they have made so much progress in their grammar checker, they need a patent to protect it? I wonder how they would conjugate “Googling”.
Thanks to slashdot
patent description
Hintjens, the CEO of iMatix, has launched the Capsoff organization in a campaign urging hardware manufacturers to ditch the oft-abused and misused key. “The Caps key is an abomination,” Hintjens writes on his blog. “It’s a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers.”
The antagonism toward the Caps Lock key extends beyond its misuse by 13-year-old trolls and naive users. Caps Lock is also responsible for failed entries of passwords and other case-sensitive phrases. Users of word processors are forced to retype any text that was entered with Caps Lock accidentally turned on.
