…This is a major bummer to me, because the cluttered Facebook user interface is so difficult to use I don't get much value from this service. In face, in order to read Facebook (rather than post content) I typically view it on my iPhone, rather than visit the site on my laptop, because iPhone interface is far more usable and easier to interpret.
"Thursday, he designed a simple prototype and created groups within FriendFeed related to various government departments and agencies.
"Friday, he met with Ryan Waggoner, and they discussed a simple way to execute the idea. Ryan set up the site in WordPress and customized it to Luke’s design. Ryan then did some custom coding to integrate the FriendFeed groups into the WordPress site. GovFresh launched that day, Friday, May 1, 2009.
"The Problem: Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability."
"Paul Collier of Oxford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes, a study of democracy and violence. Collier lays out the incentives facing a dictator who is considering the seductive appeal of holding an election. He defends his empirical work that forms the basis for many of the policy ideas in the book. Collier then makes the case for international military intervention to support democracies in poor countries."
“These are all very standard tasks in psychology,” said Nass. “In the first, there’s lots of evidence that if people do poorly, they have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. For the second task, there are many demonstrations that this is a good reflection of people’s ability to organize things in their working memory. The third task shows how fast and readily people switch from doing one thing to another.”
As for what caused the differences — whether people with a predisposition to multitask happen to be mentally disorganized, or if multitasking feeds the condition — “that’s the million dollar question, and we don’t have a million dollar answer,” said Nass.
"Now here’s the part where my friends who are journalists, research librarians, and just dogged diggers can help: What else or where else should we look for? Is this the best option? What do you know?"
Official blurb: "ipadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. Phone blog, collect audio data, record and update the world, or simply let your mates know what you're doing – ipadio is integrated with Social Media & Blogging platforms."
"Text is a UI: It's a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. As our earlier research has shown, URLs and email both contribute strongly to the Internet user experience and thus require close attention to usability to enhance the profitability of a company's Internet efforts. In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability."
"Its objective is to create and distribute open-source, web-based tools for mapping, analyzing, and intervening in this industry based on supplementing data obtained from state and federal agencies with user generated reports, complaints, and experiences.
"All of these tools, though accessible individually, will share information through a unified database. Given that these tools will be serving both urban and rural populations, we are also developing innovative paper and phone interfaces to the web-services. To develop these tools we are working with a network of lawyers, citizen’s alliances, national activist organizations and environmental health experts in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas.
"But, of course, those links to the landing pages would come from member news sites with excellent PageRank, the key metric used by Google to determine search results. (For instance, CNN, which carries AP content, has the maximum and extremely rare PageRank of 10.) It’s easy to see how the AP’s landing pages could, in short order, shoot up near the top of results for popular, news-related search terms."
"For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing."
"Here's why PC giants like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and everyone else all want a piece of the smartphone market: By the end of 2011, worldwide smartphone sales will pass worldwide PC sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimates, approaching 400 million annual shipments of each."
"If somebody asked you to name the ten most powerful companies in the Bay Area, would you be able to do it? We're launching an investigation of the elite social networks surrounding the biggest corporations in the Bay Area. Using LittleSis as a research tool, we will create an interactive database detailing the channels of money and influence that sustain these companies and tie them together. Our research will map the key relationships…"
"LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you. We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated organizations."
"As someone who lost a college friend on Pan Am 103, and who flew home from London on the same flight the next day, I feel no outrage over Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi's release to Libya. He'll be dead soon enough, and not in a pleasant fashion. I see no need to physically torture the man — and I'm fairly certain that dealing with terminal cancer in prison would amount to torture. The penal system should not be about revenge."
