.: Kobot :.

PT + ROBLOG| Two Sony Aibo robot dogs, one tablet PC-based robot, and a Roomba/tablet PC robot post automatically to creator Phillip Torrone's site throughout the day, with occasional postings by Phillip himself. |Phillip Torrone|

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SOUTH KOREAN FIRM LAYS OFF WORKERS VIA IM| South Korea's third-largest credit card issuer fired a quarter of its workforce via mobile phone text messages on Friday, after negotiations with striking unionized workers broke down. KEB Credit Service Company sacked 161 employees, a spokeswoman for the company's parent bank said. |Slashdot|

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LEIF PARSONS IDENTITY GUIDELINES| Leif Parsons is a complex identity, and should not be misused. When using his identity you should be vigorous about applying the standards outlined in the manual. Whatever its primary purpose every communication is also an opportunity to establish or reinforce awareness of the Leif Parsons identity. |Surfstation|

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STUDENTS INVENT ANTI-THEFT DEVICE FOR LAPTOPS| Step away from your laptop and the palm-held end of the device notifies you if your laptop is being moved. You then have five seconds to either disarm a siren on the other end of the device before it goes off, or let it blare out the news to the whole world that something is wrong. The beauty of the electronic beast is it allows the laptop owner to be mobile, which is, after all, the whole idea of laptops. There are few false alarms because of the deactivating device and the distance required between the laptop and its owner (about 15 feet) before the gizmo works. |Slashdot|

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PROLOG FOR HACKERS| Strange, but true: Prolog is, without a doubt, currently the simplest and the most straightforward programming language of all mainstream programming languages; however, the special interests of academia and teaching have given it a horrible, pariah-like reputation. |Kuro5hin|

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HOW MEDIA CHANGES CULTURAL IDENTITIES| Henry Jenkins writes: two recent articles in the International Herald Tribune point to the ways that modern media are changing the ways people live in relation to national cultures. Both of the stories are interesting on their own terms but even more provocative read side by side.

In the first story, we learn that the ability to access national language and in some cases national origin cable programing is allowing immigrants to maintain much stronger ties back to their mother countries than had been the case for previous generations. The story reports that: 'The satellite provider Dish Network now offers 50 international or foreign-language channels, including Polish and Portuguese. Across the United States, Time Warner Cable offers 37, including Arabic, Russian, German, Greek, Filipino and Vietnamese. In New York alone, more than 90,000 of Time Warner's customers currently get the international channels.

"Such channels are laying another set of bridges between immigrants and their native lands, joining jet planes, inexpensive long-distance calling and the Internet. Immigrants can follow the same catastrophes and laugh at the same homespun jokes as their relatives and friends back home. For relative newcomers, it means they can relax in front of a television without being baffled by a new language, and they can immerse their children in their native tongues, narrowing the generational distances typical of immigrant families."

Cultural conservatives worry that this around-the-clock access to the mother country's media may make it harder for such groups to assimilate into American culture, but many of the immigrants argue that they live in and around American culture and it is important not to lose touch with their roots.

The second story reverses this argument, showing the ways that the outsourcing of communications-related job to India and other Asian countries is speeding up the process of westernization.

As the article explains, "Binitha Venugopal, who used to answer calls at ICICI OneSource, which employs 4,200 people, said her co-workers were gradually becoming Americanized. They are materialistic, their values are changing," Venugopal said. Dating and live-in relationships are common. Yet these young Indians' daily exposure to American customers is discomforting. Many of them deal with car insurance but may never own a car, book hotel suites that cost nearly as much as their annual pay, and chat about pretzels, snow and baseball, which they have never tasted, seen or experienced."

In both cases, the concern is whether as a result of global communications, people live, mentally in one culture, physically in another.

Of course, it is also interesting that these stories both appeared in the International Times Herald, a publication created to accomodate "road warriors" who travel regularly between different airports and need a newspaper which takes an international rather than local perspective. Aren't the publication's readers also living between worlds, inhabiting multiple cultural realities? |MIT Technology Review|

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THE AGE OF NEUROMARKETING HAS DAWNED| By now, most of us in the appropriately concerned corners have heard at least something about Emory University's neuromarketing research center, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences. The latest innovation in a never-ending quest to decode consumer behaviors, the institute uses Emory University Hospital's Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to scan the brains of human subjects on behalf of corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, K-mart and Home Depot. |Douglas Rushkoff|

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HACKERS: THE ART OF ABSTRACTION| Almost everyone can and should be a hacker, according to the curators of a new exhibition on the fine art of hacking at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Alongside the museum's collection of masterpieces by Picasso and Dali, the exhibit explores the connections between hackers, artists and anyone engaged in any kind of creative work, an idea that the curators of the show say was inspired by McKenzie Wark's The Hacker Manifesto. |Wired|

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THE WORLD MOOD CHART| Jonas Jansson's World Mood Chart tracks the ups and downs of millions everyday, and is closely followed by decision-makers across the globe. Input your mood to update the chart. |Reblog|Coin-operated|

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KAZAA RAID STIRS UP OLD P2P RIVALRIES| Executives in the recording industry weren't the only ones cheering Friday's raid on the headquarters of Sharman Networks Ltd., which makes and distributes Kazaa peer-to-peer software. At least one chief executive officer of a peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software company welcomed the news as well. The afternoon raid by investigators working for the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) combined with a new software release by Los Angeles-based StreamCast, has the P-to-P world roiling with controversy and intrigue as Sharman scrambles to protect sensitive documents taken in the raid and to defend a rear-guard action from competitors who covet its large network of users. |The Standard|

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THE INTERNET IS NOW MORE WIRED THAN CABLE| The term "wired" has long been used to describe the Internet, but now the online medium can truly claim to be America's most wired. According to soon-to-be-released estimates compiled by the stats-keepers at Web researcher eMarketer, the Internet has surpassed the U.S. household penetration level of cable TV. |Lost Remote|

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THE AUTO AND THE MOBILE| Howard Rheingold writes that people whose lives were changed by the coming of the automobile failed to foresee the social side-effects of this wonderful new invention that brought freedom and power to so many people, so quickly. Can we foresee the mobilecom-dominated society any better than we planned for the automobile dominated society? |The Feature|

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US MILITARY CREATES MASSIVE EARTH SIMULATOR| 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. |BBC Technology News|

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JIMMY CARTER BLOGS FROM AFRICA| Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, are traveling in West Africa Feb. 2-7, 2004, on behalf of The Carter Center. The purpose of their trip is two-fold: to call international attention to the need to eliminate the last 1 percent of Guinea worm disease remaining in the world and to launch the Development and Cooperation Initiative, a multiyear effort to help reduce poverty in Mali. Members of the general public can accompany President Carter virtually as President Carter "blogs," or publishes regular journal entries from the field. Reports will be posted as they are received from President Carter, who will share his thoughts and feelings during his journey in West Africa. |Joi Ito|

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PENTAGON WARNS CLIMATE CHANGE MAY BRING FAMINE AND WAR| A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater threat than terrorism. The report was ordered by an influential US Pentagon advisor but was covered up by "US defense chiefs" for four months, until it was "obtained" by the British weekly The Observer. Climate change, the report says, "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern..."|Metafilter|

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ROBOTS SHOW OFF SKILLS IN FUKUOKA SHOPPING ARCADE| A group of university and corporate researchers tested various robots in a shopping arcade in Fukuoka on Saturday in the first experiment of its kind in Japan. One can help the elderly walk and another, named Tmsuk IV, can imitate the movements of its user. Other robots displayed skills such as patrolling indoors, taking items out of shopping carts and watering plants.|Machine Watch|

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GEO URL ICBM ADDRESS SERVER| GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.|So This is Mass Communication?|

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THE BROWSER RELOADED| Firefox is a preview of next generation browsing technology from mozilla.org. Firefox is available for a free download from Mozilla and is currently at version 0.7, which means it has not quite reached the point of being a fully stable product. Eventually Firefox will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won't happen before it reaches version 1.5. But it's certainly worth a try if you're finding Explorer getting old. If, in its unfinished state, Firefox is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried.|Surfstation|

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DIGITAL VIDEO FREES FILMMAKERS| Mini-DVs are widely used nowadays in news reporting and for TV documentaries and some soaps. But November's award at the Sundance Film Festival for Excellence in Cinematography shows they have moved beyond the Blair Witch Project's rough, hand-held, natural light aesthetic into something more fitting for the silver screen.|BBC News|

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GET READY FOR ROBOSAPIEN| RoboSapien's novel engineering allows it to do kung fu moves, pick things off the ground in less than a second, and run "so fast it scares cats," says de-signer Mark Tilden, a robot physicist at Wow Wee Toys, a division of Hasbro. Instead of using computers to calculate how to move, the 14-inch-tall RoboSapien, which will retail for about $80 when it hits stores later this year, uses analog transistors to react to signals from the world around it.|Slashdot|

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3G MIXED REALITY GAME| Blast Theory will premiere the world's first 3G mixed realilty game at the Adelaide Fringe in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham. This groundbreaking project titled "I Like Frank" will take place online and on the streets, in real and virtual space, using 3G technology that builds on recent works "Can You See Me Now?" and "Uncle Roy All Around You".|Coin-Operated|

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LOOK ME IN THE EYE| Forget passport controls and get ready for some eye contact next time you enter Frankfurt airport. That's where German Interior Minister Schily has kicked off the first high-tech biometric iris-scanning system. The future arrived at Frankfurt airport this week with the introduction of a sophisticated digital camera at border controls capable of recognizing people by their irises.|Slashdot|

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PENTAGON OUTLINES PLANS FOR WAR IN SPACE| For years, the American military has spoken in hints and whispers, if at all, about its plans to develop weapons in space. But the U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan (PDF) changes all that. Released in November, the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century. And it runs through dozens of research programs designed to ensure that America can never be challenged in orbit -- from anti-satellite lasers to weapons that "would provide the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."|Wired|

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WILLIAM GIBSON'S BUS-STOP EPIPHANY| "I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. I didn't know anything about it technologically. I just thought if it's that small and that nicely styled, everything is changing."|Slashdot|

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HECKLEBOT PROTOTYPE| Hecklebot is an idea by Joi Ito leveraging the unavoidable back-channel that occurs at conferences. It is an IRC bot that allows users on a channel to display messages on an LED sign that can be viewed by the speaker.|The Feature|

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I LOSE, THEREFORE I THINK| Shuen-shing Lee's paper, subtitled "A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push-Button Glare", investigates a small group of computer games imbued with socio-political critique, putting forward perspectives and readings on design conventions and poetical observations in the game field. Socially or politically critical games involve a careful examination of certain aspects of society, often self-reflexively criticizing the dominant tendencies of the game industry itself.|Game Studies|

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BROADCAST OVER POWERLINE| Now that they've overcome some of the technological hurdles that plagued past experiments, power companies and networking providers are out to prove that broadband over power line, or BPL, can be a viable business. While critics point to past flops -- including high-profile projects by Nortel Networks and Germany's Siemens -- BPL believers say the power grid is too big to be ignored as a data channel.|Wired|

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WHAT WE LEARNED IN THE NEW ECONOMY| Like Pacific Shores, the New Economy isn't dead. It just didn't happen in the way we all imagined. And now it's been long enough that we can think more analytically about which of the shiny and alluring ideas of the New Economy were lasting and real, and which were just the iridescent glint of a bubble. Boom-Time Buzz: The Internet changes absolutely everything. Cold Reality: Absolutist statements are absolutely a bad idea.|Slashdot|

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THE GOLDEN AGE OF WIRELESS DEVICES| Douglas Ruskoff: Don't take your handheld for granted. This sorry decade may just be remembered as the 'golden age' of wireless devices. Sure, it's easy to poke fun at the design gaffs and interface inconsistencies on our current cell phones and PDA's. But what if this is as good as it gets? Tube radios and amplifiers probably seemed positively monstrous and utterly undependable to generations who were awaiting the carefree and cooler operating transistor. But by the time transistors were being replaced by microchips, audiophiles were already collecting tube equipment for its warmer sound and gorgeous burled wood cases.|The Feature|

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END OF THE WORLD OR WORLD OF ENDS?| Doc Searls and David Weinberger: There are mistakes and there are mistakes. Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again. Other mistakes we insist on making over and over. For example, thinking that...the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while advertisers spray them with messages...the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should filter, control and otherwise "improve."... it's a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of instant messaging systems on the Net...When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six. |Smart Mobs|

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DELL INTRODUCES LAPTOP FOR GAMERS| Because enthusiasts demand better-than-average performance and top-of-the-line processors, graphics cards and other components, Dell will pack the Inspiron XPS with Intel's 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip and ATI Technologies' Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card, which comes with 128MB of on-board memory. The Extreme Edition Pentium comes with an extra 2MB of cache memory, which helps boost its performance, Intel says.|Gizmodo|

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PROTOCOL: CONTROL AFTER DECENTRALIZATION| Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In "Protocol" Alex Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating computers as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. He doesn't rely on established theoretical approaches, but finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his background in computer programming and critical theory. "Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol," he writes in the preface.|NYU ITP|

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WEB USABILITY: A NEW INTERNATIONAL STANDARD| ISO is developing a new standard for web usability. The new standard will be of interest to anyone who designs, evaluates or commissions web sites and it is likely to have a significant impact in improving the overall usability of the web.|Information Design|

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BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN MOBILE AND DESKTOP GAME PLAY| Blast Theory together with the Mixed Reality Lab have created a number of games that involve players present in the real world as well as players in the virtual world. Some have pitted offline against online, others have required their cooperation.|The Feature|

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WALTER ONG'S WIRELESS WORLD| Douglas Rushkoff on how Walter Ong might have approached our fledgling wireless environment if he were alive today.|Rushkoff.com|

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WINDOWS GOES OPEN SOURCE...BUT NOT ON PURPOSE| Wow. This is pretty big. According to Wired News Microsoft says "incomplete portions" of the source code for some versions of its Windows computer operating system were leaked over the Internet. The potential ramifications of this boggle the mind.|Wired|

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REWRITING THE RULES ON INTERNET DELIVERY| A recent NYTimes (free reg required) article states that, 'The Federal Communications Commission began writing new rules today that officials and industry experts said would profoundly alter both the way the Internet is delivered and used in homes and businesses.'|Slashdot|

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ALTERING YOUR ENGINE WITH NEW CHIPS| An increasing number of car owners are using computer chips or software downloads to get better performance from their cars.|NY Times|

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NEVILLE BRODY REVISITED| Rick Poynor: Complaints about the lack of depth in writing about graphic design occur with thudding regularity, but these critics rarely acknowledge what seems to be a basic fact about design. Once you have stated the fundamentals, which have been repeated many times, there is often not that much left to say. If you approach graphic design - and, in particular, the individual graphic designer - looking for complex ideas about design and culture that might require book-length elucidation, then few designers have much to report about their practice that is significantly different from what their colleagues say, and that moves beyond the sphere of necessary but still, at root, limited professional talk. I have interviewed hundreds of designers and transcribed miles of tape over the years, but the number who have had strikingly unusual (as opposed to just interesting) observations to make about either design or the world is not large.|Design Observer|

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DOWNHILL BATTLE| DJ Danger Mouse's recent Grey Album, which remixes Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles White Album, has been hailed as a innovative hip-hop triumph. Despite that and the fact that only 3,000 copies of the album are in circulation, EMI sent cease and desist letters yesterday to Danger Mouse and the handful of stores that were selling the album, demanding that the album be destroyed.|Reblog|

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PAPER PROTOTYPING: GETTING DATA BEFORE YOU CODE| Jakob Nielsen: With a paper prototype, you can user test early design ideas at an extremely low cost. Doing so lets you fix usability problems before you waste money implementing something that doesn't work. Carolyn Snyder has written a book called Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces.|Cognitive Architects|

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GOOGLE DESIGN BY JOSHUA DAVIS| Wired magazine commissioned a redesign of google. Joshua Davis demonstrates his vision of what google could display in a single search result. The work is entitled, "Edward Tufte's Google" and returns data based on the domain owner's position on earth, bringing physical data to the nonphysical web space.|Fimoculous|

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EXPANDING THE APPROACHES TO USER EXPERIENCE| Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience diagram (17kb PDF) has become rightly famous as a clear and simple model for the sorts of things that user experience professionals do. But as a model of user experience it presents an incomplete picture with some serious omissions.|Boxes and Arrows|

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LOU ROSENFELD INTERVIEW| UX is simply a label for the growing awareness that no single traditional type of design provides the diversity of wisdom, experience, and ideas necessary to tackle designing today's information systems. Information architecture, interaction design, usability engineering, visual design, and a host of other fields fit neatly under that UX umbrella. Call it User-Centered Design, Experience Design, or whatever cringe-inducing term you want, but what's behind these terms is a reckoning by many that today's complex design challenges require things that typically haven't been available.|Xblog|

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THIS IS BLAST THEORY| Blast Theory is one the leading artists' groups in Britain making interactive performances, installations, video and mixed reality projects. Combining rigorous research and development with leading edge technologies, their practice ranges across media and disciplines, taking risks and encouraging critical debate.|Coin-Operated|

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IS SOFTWARE INNOVATION DEAD?| All that's left is compatibility fixes, security patches, and minor-version-number incremental improvements. The problem isn't a lack of ideas; it's a lack of motivated developers, says Jonathan Love.|Metafilter|

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HOW TO MANAGE SMART PEOPLE| Scott Berkun: Managers have many undocumented, unsaid, but incredibly important, functions. They have more to do with enabling the happiness and productivity of the people that work for them than anyone else in the organization. A manager, at any level of hierarchy, from line project manager, to CEO, has an emotional responsibility to their reports, or to the people who are dependent on them. Like a parent in a family, or a coach of a sports team, a manager sets the tone for dialog (open and thoughtful or defensive and confrontational?), enables or prevents a fun work environment, and interprets (or ignores) the corporate rules and structure, into a daily practice of shared work.|Information Design|

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MUSICAL PRINTERS| 8-bit supergenius Paul Slocam is reprogramming the firmware in 1985 Epson LQ-500 printers to turn them into musical instruments.|Re:Blog|

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SHIRKY EXISTING DEANSPACE | Dean's support was real, but so thin and vulnerable that a mere political pin-prick was enough to cause the whole thing to collapse. Call this the 'soap bubble' thesis; the only difference between it and the mirage thesis is that in some other version of the election, if Dean had done everything perfectly, he could have performed well...neither model suggests a campaign prepared for the real world.|Smartmobs|

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RE: BLOG| A web site republishing the best blog posts from around the web. Eyebeam's R&D department created this site as a proof-of-concept for reBlogging.|Coin-operated|

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WEB DESIGN PRACTICES | Web Design Practices is a site devoted to helping designers understand what design practices are currently in use on the Web - and aims to gather research about the usability of commonly-employed design practices. |Antenna|

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ASSESS THE WORTH OF YOUR DATA| This calculator allows you to determine what your data bits are worth on the open market so you can request proper compensation when it is asked from you. For instance, a typical cellular phone company will ask for your address, date of birth, phone number, Social Security number and driver's license to open a new account. |Metafilter|

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WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER DESIGN ON SPEC| Zeldman's agency receives its share of RFPs, and sometimes these requests stipulate that our proposal include layouts. Even if the project looks promising, they just say no. Here are a few good reasons never to design on spec... |Zeldman|

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SOFTWARE ALLOWS SPOOKS TO PINPOINT SPECIFIC LOCATIONS| Imagine being able to pinpoint someone's location anywhere in the world simply by typing a few keywords on your PC. That is what software partly funded by the US military is trying to do. The MetaCarta program works by analysing thousands of documents and cross-checking the results with a massive geographical database. |Wired|

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MIND WIDE OPEN| Steven Johnson has announced the release of his new book, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life. Steven writes: "The book is an investigation into what current brain science can teach us about ourselves as individuals: not how the brain works in the abstract, or how the brain evolved, but how *your* brain works: where your talents and quirks and foibles and fears all come from... There's some popular science writing, in the style of Emergence, but there's also a first-person component to the book that I've never attempted before: I'm the test subject in all the chapters, trying bizarre attention tests, hooking myself up to a neurofeedback machine, putting my head into an fMRI. I end up learning quite a bit about myself, but hopefully it's all presented in a way that will make the information useful to others as well. As strange as it might seem, one of the categories the book is listed under is "Self-Help." |NYU ITP|

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WORLD 66 BETA: THE TRAVEL GUIDE YOU WRITE | World 66 is a new online travel resource. You can select the countries you've visited and produce a map of the world and post it to the web. So many countries so little time... |Metafilter|

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UX DESIGN FOR THE MASSES | For $49USD, you buy 5 or 8 pages with some explanation, site structure or flow, and wireframes. Forty-nine dollars buys you an IA solution based on design patterns, best practice, and Adaptive Path's experience. How to integrate that solution or develop your own is something UX practitioners will need to face in the coming months. |IA Slash|

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YAHOO! RESEARCH LABS | Yahoo! Inc. has announced the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focused on inventing new technologies and solutions relevant to strategic Yahoo! businesses. According to the media relations department at Yahoo! the new group will pursue a portfolio of topics that include pay for performance search, web search, vertical businesses and platform technologies. Yahoo! Research Labs engineers and scientists will work collaboratively with Yahoo! business, product and technology teams to stimulate and synthesize new ideas that will serve Yahoo!'s partners, advertisers and consumers. Core research areas include machine learning, statistical data mining and efficient algorithms. |Slashdot|

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