Improvised bookmarks found in used books.: “

A website I just came across reminded me of an odd interaction I once had with a lady in the subway: I grabbed my book in my bag, opened it, and a $1 bill appeared which I used as a bookmark. I could sense how the lady did a double-take and looked and me saying: ‘You are not really using money as a bookmark, are you?’ ‘Uhm, yes I am…’. She was obviously appaled. Disovering this Improvised bookmarks found and used in books link over at designobserver let’s me sigh in relief. I am not that odd after all. People use MUCH stranger things than a $1 bill to mark a page. Paper Towel bookmarker anyone?

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(Via swissmiss.)

Google News Visualizations

Besides the standard Google News page, there are other ways to explore the news automatically clustered and ranked by Google.

The image version of Google News shows pictures related to the most important news and lets you explore a gallery of images that illustrate a news. This is a great way to find the key elements from a news at a glance, without even reading the text.

Newsmap is a brilliant visualization for the headlines that reflects the importance of a news. Everything is displayed in a single page that is automatically updated. “Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.”

Google News Cloud displays the most important keywords from today’s news in a tag cloud. When you hover over a keyword, other related keywords are highlighted.

Google Trends checks how frequently a word was mentioned in the article indexed by Google News. The results are displayed at the bottom of a chart in the “news reference volume” section.

Buzztracker shows the relation between news and locations. Every day you can see the top cities mentioned in the news on a map. There’s also an archive that goes back to 2004. Baghdad, Washington, Gaza, New York seem to be the most frequently mentioned cities.

An interesting way to explore the evolution of a person, company, idea or event is to use the timeline view from Google News Archive. Even if most articles require paid subscriptions, the snippets provided by Google are really helpful.

(Via Google Operating System.)

Robots via Human Thought: ”

A group of students from the University of Washington have created a robot they can control using their thoughts with a 94% success rate.

Although mind reading robots are a long ways off, this research is the first step towards a future where humans use the most powerful computer at their disposal to control them; the brain.

The in-house built robot is connected to a computer which reads brain wave signals from a person using a cap studded with electrodes. The software can correctly translate the brain signals into simple instructions fed to the robot. Right now a person can instruct the robot to move forward, differentiate between two objects, pick one up and move it to another location. The team hopes with further research, the instructions can become more complex perhaps daisy-chaining them to complete more complicated tasks.

Although the robot they’re using seems innocent and demure, how long do you suppose it’ll be before it somehow becomes self-aware, turning our brain waves against us? In cases like this, I recommend the alpha training technique used for dogs. Always make direct eye contact with the bot, sniff its behind, and force it on it’s back every now and then so it knows who’s boss.

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(Via electro^plankton.)

[tags]brain, control, body, robot, inteface[/tags]