Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Emotions and mental states are simply perceptions of the body, says Antonio Damasio, chief neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center, in a new book, “Looking for Spinoza.”

Could we have a round of vodka mojitos, please? She holds her hands up helplessly. “So sorry, but I can’t get you a drink. I don’t have a Palm Pilot,” she says, as though she were informing us of some obvious and terrible disability, a disability so crushing that it prevents her from turning and taking three steps to the left to the service bar and speaking with the bartender.

“You have to have a Palm Pilot to place an order,” she explains before vanishing.

Several minutes later, a young man in a crisp white shirt bumbles up to our table. For a dozen seconds, he doesn’t look at us, but instead stares at the screen in his hand, stabbing it with a small, black plastic stick. “Hang on a second,” he says. “I’m still trying to figure this thing out.” Finally, he takes our order. The vodka mojitos appear in due course.

The battle for dominance in the instant messaging space continues expanding into the wireless arena, as the three leaders in desktop IM ink new alliances that seek to land them mobile users.

Soon residents of a remote village in Laos, where they have lived for years without electricity or telephones, will be jumping on stationary bikes to pedal their way onto the Information Superhighway. Custom-built computers — running on bicycle-powered generators — will transport villagers from rice fields to chat rooms and Web sites worldwide. They’ll be able to monitor rice and vegetable prices, sell handicrafts and e-mail relatives.

Searching for sudden “bursts” in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently, says a US computer scientist. Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents. Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging trend.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed computerized atlases and associated tools for visualizing and analyzing the brain. The 3-D maps outline structural and functional areas in the cerebral cortex and the cerebellar cortex. Detailed maps such as these will help physicians better understand the implications of brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy, trauma and other causes, and will help guide neurosurgeons in the operating room, says David C. Van Essen, Ph.D., the Edison Professor of Neurobiology and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology.

At a daylong presentation to analysts Wednesday, Yahoo! revealed plans for premium services that appear to compete with the AOL Time Warner unit’s own strategy for managing Americans’ transition to high-speed Internet access from home. Additionally, Yahoo! disclosed one sign of its success in making the transition from an Internet content company to one identified with Internet access services as well — just like AOL.

Google, which runs the Web’s premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created Blogger and Blogger Pro, some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs. The Thursday buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing — also known as “blogging” — that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. At least this is the opinion of Dan Gillmor.