Online Reading – Netapedia: Know your neta

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An interesting site containing information on Indian politicians. Includes quite a lot of details like assets, status etc. Should be pretty useful come election time.
It’s an initiative by a bunch of IITB students.

Filed under: knowledge, politics, politicians, information

Online Reading – A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

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A very detailed argument that the current touch interfaces are just an intermediate phase before we move on to more tactile systems that make better use of our capabilities:
“With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?”

Filed under: design, touchscreen, touch, interaction

Online Reading – File:Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre.jpg – Wikipedia

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“The first picture of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show. Note that the image is a mirror image.”

Filed under: wikipedia, photo, history

Online Reading – The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

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The “social” bit of the argument is particularly interesting:
“You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.”

Filed under: social, graph, design

Online Reading – Uncanny valley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

Filed under: technology, robot, wikipedia, science, psychology

Online Reading – Steven Poole: Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?

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Two simple laws to remember:
“If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.”
“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”
And, as Apple showed with its MobileMe to iCloud transition, your data may not be safe even if you pay for the service. So, keep your expectations in check – “The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours.”

Filed under: Google, data, social-networks, ownership, facebook, apple, cloud

Online Reading – I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages — Scobleizer

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It’s really ironic that Google opted to launch one of their mass products minus the “beta” tag when it was clearly incomplete and evolving, and draw so much of criticism.
On the other hand, Apple launched a mass beta (Siri) that everyone’s excited about. How times change…

Filed under: Google, products, social-networks, brands, pages, beta