Samanunga

More women received a PhD in the past fifteen years. In the course of 2004/2005, 40 percent of the dutch PhD’s were female, thrice as much as in 1990/1991. The number of male PhD’s increased with 14 percent.

the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (Statistics Netherlands) presented these figures today. Among staff women are still a minority, among the PhD’s they are catching up.

Women mostly have a PhD in the field of healthcare, welness, linguistics, history and art. There is hardly any woman who defends her thesis in the traditional male sciences like technology, industry and construction and the beta sciences.

Volkskrant article (Dutch)

I just returned from my holidays in France, where I had a encounter with the interface of the washing machine in the appartment. The designers used rotation buttons for the programme and temperature. Both buttons could be hidden in the front panel. Nice, bruizes from walking accidentally into machine in the cramped space were avoided. So far so good.

However, the buttons for switching on and of power and centrifuge needed to be hid in the display too. Not much of a problem, unless you want to hide them when the machine is supposed to be off! Release button=on, Push button=off. AAARGH. The French manual was not much of a help. Due to the time the machine needed after the button set to on to actually come to life it took hours to figure that out.

The company seems to be a multinational, and celebrates it’s 50th anniversary this year. Makes you wonder.
So much for usability by convention!

As a surplus a gangsta gadget; what were they thinking! Even the direction of the remote towards the TV does not make sense gun-wise.

Fagor company
Remote Control @ realtechnews

I saw this for the first time at the Cinekid festival 2005: FlipClips. How it works: Record a movie of a few seconds, print each frame, make a booklet and “flipclip” until your thumb drops. Fun to have, fun to show. However, the interface is not really convenient, as shown in this movieclip. Despite the stable image, the thumb makes the progress of the movie quirky. What we need is a flipclipflipper!

Any suggestions?

flipclips
Cinekid

Fun! A PhD blog, a must read for any PhD candidate. The comics are hilarious and display a great understanding of doing a PhD. Alright, back to work now, got my own piles to work through.

updated: Piled Higher and Deeper website

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.

full article @ wired.com