Challis Hodge’s UXblog

New projects that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial include the xDNA molecule, more heat-resistant than natural DNA and glows in the dark; “programmed” living cells that encode instructions using genes rather than binary numbers; fish neurons grown over silicon chips, creating electrical activity that controls a robotic arm and produces “art”; a bioartificial kidney; a three-dimensional sheet of living tissue printed on biodegradable gel using standard inkjet printers; and Craig Venter’s attempt to build a synthetic bacterium.

The government is still financing research to create powerful tools that could mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists despite an uproar last year over fears it might ensnare innocent Americans. Some of the projects from DARPA’s Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices; others went to a $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA.

This looks juicie! Hot off the MIT Press:

Seeing and Visualizing: It’s Not What You Think
by Zenon W. Pylyshyn
ISBN 0-262-16217-2

“In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us “from the inside.” In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us “from the inside.” In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.”

“The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM’s Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success — users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended. To meet the challenges in researching email, we have taken a multifaceted approach to data collection.” Hmmmmmmmm!?

The US Army is building a second version of Earth on computer to help it prepare for conflicts around the world. The detailed simulation will be drawn from a real-world terrain database and will be drawn to the same scale as the original. The software Earth is being created for the US Army by gaming company There, which is currently working on a virtual world for gamers. The first version of the virtual planet should be finished by September.

Nice resource for all of you designers who need to brush up on your golden mean and Fibonacci series. “This is the Home page for Ron Knott’s Surrey University multimedia web site on the Fibonacci numbers, the Golden section and the Golden string.” Thanks Ron!

If you’re interested in Bluetooth GPS hardware, GPS Passion is one of the best sites you can frequent. And if you’re searching for a Bluetooth GPS unit, you’ll want to see the latest version of this article: they’re up to 16 Bluetooth GPS units in the review!

Getting transferred from one automated message to another while stuck in a company’s convoluted telephone system is enough to make even the most unflappable individual’s blood boil. A solution that may prevent violence against handsets comes in the form of a new software program designed to detect callers’ frustration and transfer them to a human operator. The system works by analyzing not only what callers say, but also how they say it. Callers get transferred if they start to spit out expletives or if they simply sound angry.