Ubiquitous computing in the city, evaluation

A smart paper about empirical study of ubiquitous computing: It's a jungle out there:Â practical considerations for evaluation in the city by Melanie Kellar, Derek Reilly, Kirstie Hawkey, Malcolm Rodgers, Bonnie MacKay, David Dearman, Vicki Ha, W. Joseph MacInnes*, Michael Nunes, Karen Parker, Tara...

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Baby cage?

Tahnks regine for pointing me on this awful resource: baby cage, "specialized in infant confinement system since 2001": At BabyCage.net we believe that the most important tool you need in life to succeed is discipline. Without discipline and structure, a child may become succeptible to liking rock ...

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Korean electronics company and innovation

When the cutting edge frightens the customers is a clever piece on innovation in the FT. It's about Korean electronic company and they way they're thinking about new products: both companies are now at a critical juncture as they face a fundamental contradiction: they are concentrating on high-end ...

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Networked home usage

Riad pointed me on this paper: The Work to Make a Home Network Work by Rebecca E. Grinter, W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman and Nicolas Ducheneaut at ECSCW 2005. Recently, households have begun to adopt networking technologies to interconnect devices within the home. Yet little is known about the c...

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Atrocious skateboard mouth protections

Via mouthguards, impressive skateboard mouth protections (called SKATEBOARDING PROTECTION: Gumshields for Serious Sports): Welcome to the Gumshields.com portal for protecting teeth in serious sports and extreme sports. SKATEBOARDING MOUTHGUARDS PROTECT YOUR TEETH: SERIOUS SKATEBOARDING needs seriou...

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Corrupted FTP

Brendan Dawes's work about FTP seems to be cool: Corrupted: Ftp As Art: Mistakes often lead to new insights and new thinking. This project came out of a complete mistake. Whilst uploading some pictures to my server via my usual FTP software, I mistakenly had the transfer type set to TEXT. It should...

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Are location-based services boring?

A very relevant blogpost by Russell Buckley on Mobhappy adresses an important fact in the 'location-based services' world: there is little user-centered application that really worth it. Russell exemplifies this thanks to four services supported by BT: Child and elderly people tracking: founded o...

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Temporary Habitat

I find this kind of device utterly marvelous: Temporary Habitat [02] by Saranont Limpanont (NYT): Because human is the most important factor in any habitats, habitats cannot illustrate their value If nobody utilizes it. The concept of this temporary habitat is to use human body as a part of its st...

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Life-hacking in the NYT

An insightful article in the NYT about life hacking. The article begins by summarizing the work of Gloria Mark who studied office work and came up with an atrocious description of how people work (or can't work): When Mark crunched the data (...) Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given pro...

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Kleine Basel wind experiment

In the BUBBLE (Basel Urban Boundary Layer Experiment) project, there is an intriguing study meant to understand the effects of wind on a city (in this case: Basel, Switzerland): Wind tunnel studies offer an excellent opportunity for systematic and extensive turbulence measurements with boundary con...

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