Here at Ars Electronica is where we did an unscientific qualitative test of the criteria devised to define New/Interactive Media Art. Now we deliver to you the conclusive results, and do so in the spirit of the David Letterman Top-10 Countdown, only with a Top-15 rather than 10, cause we found 15 things.

Parallax turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Strunk had been born in 1869. That is, he was old enough to read the news when General Custer led his men to massacre at the Little Big Horn. Strunk was a grownup with a Ph.D. when Dracula was first published. By the time White was his student and had to buy the privately published precursor of what would become Strunk & White, the professor had reached the age of 50. It was 1919.

The reason the question can even arise at all is partly that Strunk and White fail to make that connection. The Elements of Style offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn't true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers.

Some engineers and designers are realizing that there are losses that come from virtualizing. There have long been stories of students who design things on CAD that are impossible to manufacture, or that are 10 or 100 times too large, because virtualizing the design process divorces it from actual things.

And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.

To sum up, de-makes are the inverse of the "next-gen" game update. Take a new game, and roll it back to an older piece of hardware. Only we're going to be rolling it WAY back; all the way to the original Game Boy! Goldeneye 2D is a perfect example, and the inspiration for this theme!

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.

Assemblage #1 is music set to a repurposed industrial video found in the Prelinger Archives that shows a 40s telephone being assembled from individual parts. I didn't edit the video at all; it is as it is found in the archives. Rather, I timed the music to follow the video.

This is a Webster Chicago wire recorder. It was manufactured sometime between 1945 and 1955.

Today tillyjane and I went hiking at White River Falls State Park, on the advice of ramblin_phyl. It’s a beautiful little park in a small canyon, which features an electric power plant built in 1901, expanded in 1910-1911, and abandoned probably sometime after WWII. The walk down to the power plant is a short, steepish trail with good footing in dry weather.

I spent the day in Chernobyl. One of my Kiev game dev friends hooked me up with a private tour, so I decided to go for the day to check it out. Every woman in my life told me this was a bad idea. Every man said it sounded awesome.It was awesome, although I really usually fare better when I listen to the women. For the guys, here is a picture of me holding a Geiger counter at the main reactor.

...that a simple technical task - e.g. toasting bread - can be celebrated in so many different ways. I was deeply impressed, how much creativity engineers spent on flipping bread! Being a designer, this fact fascinates and inspires me every day.

The picturesque mode of transport narrowly escaped extinction after the 1906 earthquake, which devastated the city as well as the cable car barn and tracks. New tracks were laid and the system was rebuilt -- despite the advent of more cost-effective electric streetcars -- partially due to cable cars' superior ability to climb the steepest hills in San Francisco.

Terrific speech by the godlike Adam Savage here; he's in his element surrounded by these hacker scofflaws.

Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe and Asia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries.

According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.

What kind of influence has being an IT security professional had on your general attitude towards life? What helps you stay out of pessimism and cynicism? Is protecting existing things really as good as building new ones?"

I chose as my subject the NSA's "secret room" at AT&T's Folsom Street facility. As part of the Bush administration's massive and illegal spying program, the communications of millions of ordinary Americans are illegally intercepted and copied via fiber-optic splitter, and diverted into this secret room, which is controlled by the NSA.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we’ve achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene. Finally, our system allows a user to remove unwanted objects and camera shake from the video.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

The Wiremap is an innovative projection technique that builds a real and interactive 3d image by manipulating light from a projector.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, discussed stateless computing and the evolution of the cloud. He envisions a future in which software processes are abstracted so far from the underlying hardware that companies will discuss processing capacity in terms of raw computational units rather than discrete servers.

What I found, though, was this design discouraged me from posting. If what I had to say couldn't be stretched to multiple paragraphs, I'd as likely not say it. The result was that maintaining my blog became a chore. A lot of things I could have said with just a link, a quote and a (hopefully) pithy comment were never said, or worse were stretched into posts too long to sustain their source material.

I warned you that blogging was inherently unstable. It's built on an unstable platform. How hard is that to understand? ... Man, that much was dead obvious from day one; commentary was the aspect of blogging that never, ever worked.

In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position.

pagetable.com » Blog Archive » How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes really work

The original NMOS version of the MOS 6502, used in computers like the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is well-known for its illegal opcodes: Out of 256 possible opcodes, 151 are defined by the architecture, but many of the remaining 105 undefined opcodes do useful things.

Everyday, bloggers and site editors use statistics to prove a point. How convenient would it be if they could easily support their argument with a chart. This is the type of thing that goes without saying in the print world, but is not that obvious on the web and on blogs.

For those taking the PhD plunge, the prospect of finding meaningful employment has always been a concern. Despite rosy predictions from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), the PhD job market may be heading into another tight period.

For years, Wired magazine has tapped a bevy of designers and artists in the tech field to craft detailed visions of futuristic objects for a monthly showcase at the close of each issue. Now, after hinting as much in the July edition, it is clear that that the tradition of FOUND has been brought to an end. What better way to say goodbye to this whimsical feature than by taking a look back at the full archived run of the series?

(Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)

Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Dykes to Watch Out For, has an interesting observation on movies — a little test she applies to them. It's a very short checklist, viz: 1. Does it have at least two women in it, 2. Who [at some point] talk to each other, 3. About something besides a man.

In preparation for OSCON, I decided to infuse my Eee with new life by installing Ubuntu 8.04.

Besides running the Rhode Island School of Design, that is.

A FOSSCamp session led by Red Hat developers presented the GNOME Online Desktop project, the nexus of GNOME's efforts to integrate support for modern web services into the open source desktop environment.

The goal of the GNOME Online Desktop is to adapt the desktop to become the perfect window for online applications like GMail, Photobucket, Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia, and countless others that user and developer momentum is shifting towards.

O'Reilly, an inveterate prognosticator whose buzzword-laden speeches also offer some valuable insights, spoke about the need for an open web, decentralized cloud computing, and open mobile technologies.

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

A grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution.

"'I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.'"

-- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

"Sophi broke down in tears, like a diesel car that had run out of petrol."

-- Karina Kantas

• How can fundamental and widespread change be accomplished at the national level without being driven by federal (and therefore governmental) considerations and parties?
• Is it possible for colleges and states to act in a coordinated way to solve national problems in more than a scattershot, piecemeal way?
• If so, who leads those efforts, and when and how do they step up?

I’m a huge blog junkie and truth be told, I spend a minimum of 10 hours a week feeding my ferocious appetite. In doing so, I have gone through hundreds of blogs related to the simple philosophy of “passion-based learning”.

It's the filesystem you always wanted. It's a semantic file system.

Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities: in some cases one city has many different personalities -- there are a dozen Londons, a crowd of different New Yorks.

Chainsaw Juggler; Venice Beach, California.

"We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent ... "

-- William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus", 1903

The tenured Nobel Prize winners are pretty happy, but they are a small proportion of the total. The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children. If these folks were experiencing day-to-day joy at their bench, I wouldn't expect them to hold onto so much bitterness and envy.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how distributed learner modelling can benefit from semantic web technologies and which challenges have to be solved in this new environment. Heterogeneity of personalization techniques and their needs raise the question whether we can agree on one common data model for user profiles, which supports these techniques. In this paper we discuss an approach where a learner model can be distributed and can reflect features taken from several standards for a learner modelling. These features can be combined according to the requirements of specific personalization techniques, which can be provided as personalization services in a P2P learning network. RDF and RDFS as key tools of the semantic web allow us to handle such situations. We also sketch an architecture for such a network, where this approach can be realized.

Sanya Weathers is annoyed that game studios can’t deliver well-written MMORPG games on time. After all, people do produce plays.

How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut

CRUSH (Custom Reporting Utilities for SHell) is a collection of tools for processing delimited-text data from the command line or in shell scripts.

How Fair Is Monopoly? Everyone has played Monopoly. But few, I'd imagine, have ever thought about the math involved. In fact, the probability of winning at Monopoly can be described by interesting constructions known as Markov chains.

In several recent posts we've noted the presentation by Google's Jeff Dean at the Google I/O developer event. Google has now published a video of Dean's complete talk on YouTube. The video runs 1 hour.

LuxRender is a new, open-source, free software rendering system for physically correct, unbiased image synthesis.

xmlroff is a fast, free, high-quality, multi-platform XSL formatter that aims to excel at DocBook formatting and that integrates easily with other programs and with scripting languages.

So, to satisfy my own curiosity I asked a number of prominent typographers to send me a scan of their handwriting. This is the result.

The most interesting to me were the bisected lenses and cameras, the insides of which show the precision of a CAD drawing.

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

• The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design — Jon Tan 陳
• How a page gets created (Monoscope)

• Laconica: Can Open Source Save Twitter? | OStatic
• Laconica : Home Page
• 0xDECAFBAD » Getting Laconica up and running

• Why does everything suck?: Dreaming Of Better User Interface
• oiu
• Beeswax - Mind Your Own Beeswax
• 9vx
• A List Apart: Articles: Collaborate and Connect with Subversion
• WiX

• Design View / Andy Rutledge - The Employable Web Designer
• JeffCroft.com: Tools do not a designer make

• Racer
• Pellet: The Open Source OWL DL Reasoner

• Lambda, the Ultimate TA -- Course Notes
• Barcodes as URLs

• Widgify » Blog Archive » Birth of the Social Aggregator
• Slashdot | Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?
• Buzz Networker - Social Web Aggregation

• 5 Big Things Science Fiction Can Do To Improve Its Image
• 5 Small Things Science Fiction Can Do To Improve Its Image