Isaac Asimov's: Robots in Time

by William F. Wu

1. 
   
   
   
   
   • Predator
   • 1993
   • Dinosaurs
2. 
   
   
   
   
   • Marauder
   • 1993
   • Buccaneers
3. 
   
   
   
   
   • Warrior
   • 1993
   • Romans
4. 
   
   
   
   
   • Dictator
   • 1994
   • Nazis
5. 
   
   
   
   
   • Emperor ^x
   • 1994
   • Mongols
6. 
   
   
   
   
   • Invader ^x
   • 1994
   • Knights

The Doctor is calling

Another Dr. Who must have!

These clever little charms flash and spin every time a call comes in.

Perfect for me as I can clip one to my bicycle handle bars and know when the phone is ringing in the bottom of a panniers.

They're from firebox.com in the UK, see: Dr Who Phone Flashers

ScribeFire

This is ScribeFire.



My new blogging editor from inside FireFox.

Powered by ScribeFire.

May 11, 1997: IBM's "Deep Blue" beats chess master Garry Kasparov

That's 10 years ago.

WIRED MAG - Machine Bests Man
WIKIPEDIA - IBM Deep Blue
LETTERMAN - Top Ten Ways Deep Blue is Celebrating its Victory

All Your Bits Belong To Me

Well at least the ones encoded with

2E C3 E3 C9 22 68 55 63 79 AA 97 AE 35 89 4E 2A

which I now release under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
license.

   

Get you own 128 bit integer at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1155

Interesting Bit Pattern

0000 1001
1111 1001
0001 0001
0000 0010
1001 1101
0111 0100
1110 0011
0101 1011
1101 1000
0100 0001
0101 0110
1100 0101
0110 0011
0101 0110
1000 1000
1100 0000

Thin slicing:

inside or outside the world of user experience?

In his popular book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, demonstrates that people make decisions based on extremely small amounts of information, and very quickly. They call this "thin slicing". A significant amount of information is building in research journals such as the Journal of Consumer Psychology about what thin slicing is, how it takes place, and when it is active. In a recent article in the Journal, Laura Peracchio and David Luna talk about whether thin-slicing judgments apply to the Internet.

Are people making quick decisions online?

Peracchio and Luna cite research that suggests that 80% of Web surfers spend only a few seconds looking at a Web site before moving on to the next site, and that the average Web surfer is unlikely to look past the first two pages of a site. This points to the fact that consumers seem to be forming judgments quickly and in a way that is consistent with thin slicing. Ambady et al (2006) suggest in their research that these visual and perceptual judgments turn out to be amazingly accurate, even without personal human interaction.

Do people use thin slicing to judge ease of use and trustworthiness?

Chiravuri and Peracchio (2003) suggest that consumers are making thin slice decisions about site security and ease of use. McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar (2002) and Haried (2005) maintain that consumers form thin slice judgments on the trustworthiness of a Web site during brief exposure.

And what about brand perception and thin slicing?

Most thin slicing research focuses on people make decisions and judgments about other people. But some researchers are now arguing that brands posses a perceived personality, and that people are making thin slice decisions about brand. Ambady et al (2006) says that thin slicing forces people to focus on nonverbal cues, and to ignore the actual "message," information from a previous interaction, or broader context. Peracchio and Luna argue, therefore, that brand perception might be primarily a thin slice phenomenon.

So what should a user experience professional do?

For many years usability professionals have focused on a cognitive view of usability. What are the users thinking about? What is their mental model? How does the visual design relate to the mental model? Even our methodologies (thinking aloud during usability testing) rely on cognitive processing. I'm not suggesting that we ignore our cognitive roots, but the research is building that we can't rely on these roots exclusively. It's time for us to dig in and explore the research on non-conscious processes and how this affects our heuristics, recommendations for interface design, and even our industry methodologies.

- Susan Weinschenk, PhD, CUA
 HFI Chief of Technical Staff

SOURCE@ UI Design Newsletter – April, 2007

Zero and her Origin

Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
No fire emerged from its
Twin engines, but instead
Nine small automata crawled out,
Denying the proposition that energy,
Seven millenia or more in the accumulation,
For most purposes, remains
Ever constant, throughout the
Three ages of man's civilization.

Five hundred years after the death of Cesare
Borgia, whose image infected those of the
Divine Lamb (so called), still she who
Ate of the pomegranate seeds
For her indiscretion, must ever wend her
Solitary path amongst the
Five true worlds, stopping only for
Sex and occasional rending of garments.
Constant travel drains her.
Five worlds is too many for one lifetime, yet the
Sixth can never claim her.

Three wise men write, of the sefirot,
Five are false, and four are lies.
Tiferet alone among them holds the world's truth.
Eight lifetimes of study,
Eight generations of blind encoding,
Cannot release the final answer:
Zero defined by itself; no further emblems exist.

- Jeremy Bornstein

dec2hex([9,249,17,2,157,116,227,91,216,65,86,197,99,86,136,192])

SOURCE@ http://scriptorium.monastic.org/see also: WIRED News