http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html
Chris Jordan - Midway On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth.
7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language A small (yet Turing-equivalent) language The easiest programming language to implement is a minimalist, higher-order functional programming language known as the lambda calculus. The lambda calculus actually lives at the core of all the major functional languages--Haskell, Scheme and ML--but it also lives inside JavaScript, Python and Ruby. It's even hiding inside Java, if you know where to find it. A brief history
Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here” by anthony on 06/20/12 at 10:39 pm Have you ever wanted your users to click your links, but didn’t know how to get them to act? When some designers run into this problem they’re tempted to use the words “click here” on their links. Before you give in to the temptation, you should know that using these words on a link can affect how users experience your interface. “Click” Puts Too Much Focus on Mouse Mechanics Using the word “click” on your links takes the user’s attention away from your interface and on to their mouse.
Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool By Todd Zaki Warfel, Messagefirst Originally published: Mar 18, 2010 Editor's note: This article is a chapter from Todd's book Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide. In 2008, I ran the first survey on prototyping for this book. My goal was to understand what tools UX people are using for prototyping, why they’re using those tools, and what they want from those tools. Just What is a UX Manager? Earlier this week, I wrote quick blog post, calling out seven lessons for UX managers from this year’s MX conference. Then on Twitter, Livia Labate, who leads the experience design practice for Marriott International asked, “Dear @AdaptivePath, what is a UX Manager?” Here’s my not-so-twitter-length response:
Principles of User Interface Design Clarity is job #1 Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you've designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it. While there is room for mystery and delayed gratification in interfaces, there is no room for confusion. Graphene loudspeaker could rival commercial speakers and earphones Researchers in the US have made a graphene loudspeaker that has an excellent frequency response across the entire audio frequency range (20 Hz–20 kHz). While the speaker has no specific design, it is already as good as, or even better than, certain commercial speakers and earphones in terms of both frequency response and power consumption. Loudspeakers work by vibrating a thin diaphragm. These vibrations then create pressure waves in surrounding air that produce different sounds depending on their frequency.
Usage Patterns for Gaelyk Using Groovy on Google App Engine is relatively simple due to Groovy’s compatibility with Java. However, until recently, the framework support has been lacking. Grails now supports GAE through the use of the app-engine plugin and the gorm-jpa plugin. However, in many cases this can be a little heavy weight. Much of the GORM functionality is also lost because of GAE’s usage of a NoSQL datastore and the limitations of JPA. Gaelyk is quickly emerging as one of best frameworks for development on Google App Engine. Digital Scarcity "2 Billion Likes per day on Facebook. 400 Million Tweets per day on Twitter. 50 Million likes per day on Instagram." We live, for most part, a life that is eerily being encroached by the digital. Every day we find a part of the analog being replaced by the digital.
The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is More Important Than Talent In the late ’60s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a now-iconic experiment called the Marshmallow Test, which analyzed the ability of four year olds to exhibit “delayed gratification.” Here’s what happened: Each child was brought into the room and sat down at a table with a delicious treat on it (maybe a marshmallow, maybe a donut). The scientists told the children that they could have a treat now, or, if they waited 15 minutes, they could have two treats. All of the children wanted to wait. Why Responsive Design is Not Built for the User Jeff Hasen is CMO of Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising company. Marketers and designers have been told repeatedly of the benefits of responsive design. I, however, believe these benefits are mostly myths, since the theory hasn’t lived up to all that it’s promised. Some claim that responsive design automatically fits all devices: It is a simple design build that extends across many browsers and devices. In actuality, if a site is not designed for mobile first, users will encounter problems fast.
Download "Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation" May 10, 2006 I'm making my complete dissertation, Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation, available for download as of today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the complete manuscript (284 pages) or to look at selected chapters: You can still access chapter summaries and references (with hyperlinks to sources, where available) by using the drop-down menu at top left. Getting Started with Git and GitHub on Windows - Kyle Cordes (Update: I have a new, related post about the Best Git GUIs for Windows.) I’ve been attracted to, and trying out, various distributed source control tools for the last two years, and have come to the conclusion that the most likely “winner” is Git. Git does a great many things right, good progress is being made in the few areas it is weak, and it has rapidly growing popularity. There are many web sites with extensive information about using Git, learning Git, Git integration, and more. For new Oasis Digital projects, we will generally Git rather than SVN for source control.