It's the hottest sensation to sweep the nation: Pink Noise! Also known as a signal with even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale, pink noise masks background noise to help you concentrate. Now with source code and white noise, for those less colorful. Drown out annoying roommates and co-workers today!

Blackhole Media - Noise

FreeMind is free mind-mapping software written in Java.

FreeMind

In the face of rising controversy about search engine results—that they are too restrictive, too comprehensive, lacking in certain areas, over-represented in others—this article presents the results of in-depth interviews with search engine producers, examining their conceptions of search engine quality and the implications of those conceptions. Structuration theory suggests that the cultural schemas that frame these discourses of quality will be central in mobilizing resources for technological development. The evidence presented here suggests that resources in search engine development are overwhelmingly allocated on the basis of market factors or scientific/technological concerns. Fairness and representativeness, core elements of the journalists' definition of quality media content, are not key determiners of search engine quality in the minds of search engine producers. Rather, alternative standards of quality, such as customer satisfaction and relevance, mean that tactics to silence or promote certain websites or site owners (such as blacklisting, whitelisting, and index "cleaning") are seen as unproblematic.

Is Relevance Relevant?

The survival of pencils and hinges (and even typewriters), long after the development of alternatives, argues that, in forecasting technological conquests and describing the march of technological complexity, we have a tendency to underestimate what Raymond Williams calls the "social-material complex" of technologies are only a part.[7] Like an exasperated gardener, we snip triumphantly at the exposed plant, forgetting how extensive established roots can be. Pencil and hinge survive technological cuts on the strength of their deep social resourcefulness. And for similar reasons, we may find that the simple hinged book will prove as enduring. The closed cover, turned page, broken spine, serial form, immutable text, revealing heft, distinctive formats, handy size, and so on offer their own deep-rooted and resilient combination of technology and social process and continue to provide unrivalled signifying matter.

Material Matters

Stamen ... is establishing a reputation for its expertise in creating compelling interactive design and data visualization projects.

Launched this week: BigSpy, a view onto Digg that graphically maps current interest in Digg stories as a continously flowing river of headlines.

Trace: Time-based mappings of wireless networks in urban environments

Global Business Network

Dominant political dialogue focuses on events that cross US borders; GBN asked us to focus on flows along the borders, and to use data visualization as a way of rendering visible (and intelligible) these otherwise elusive movements.

Digg Swarm

Digg Swarm is a lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers "swarm" around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size — so the bigger the story, the more active it is. As people digg more stories, they move from circle to circle, and increase in size. You might see enormous diggers moving quickly from story to story; those seem to be people digging without taking the time to read stories...

Stories that are closer together are being dugg by the same users, and you can roll over stories to see these connections. The thicker the line, the more diggers in common that story has—which starts to suggest connections between stories over time.

stamen design | big ideas worth pursuing

Once one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, Sun Microsystems crashed with the dotcoms, but it kept pouring money into R&D. Now there are signs of a revival, thanks to a new CEO and a big black box.

It was a gamble. "But you can't find out if you're right until you take the risk," Papadopoulos says.

Dawn of the Dead

Is productivity sagging at your firm because employees are too busy playing games?

Well, then, why not make work more like a game?

Seriosity's mission is to change the way people work together in functions requiring a high level of collaboration, communication and feedback in today's information-intensive business environment.

Attent™ with Serios™ is an enterprise productivity application inspired by multiplayer online games. It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance. It gives recipients the ability to prioritize messages and a reserve of currency that they can use to signal importance of their messages to others. Attent also provides a variety of tools that enable everyone to track and analyze communication patterns and information exchanges in the enterprise.

The lively marketplace of ideas and communication patterns that emerges from this economy offers new insights into collaboration, teamwork and goal alignment. The Seriosity solution to information overload will give your information workers more time, more thoughtful input and more insight so that they can be more productive.

It's for real! Seriousity!

Seriosity: The Enterprise Solution for Information Overload

If you write software for a living, this might be of interest.

How can software and the systems that rely on it be made dependable in a cost-effective manner, and how can one obtain assurance that dependability has been achieved? Rather than focusing narrowly on the question of software or system certification per se, this report adopts a broader perspective.

The committee thus subscribes to the view that software is “guilty until proven innocent,” and that the burden of proof falls on the developer to convince the certifier or regulator that the software is dependable.

Software, according to a popular view, fails because of bugs; as is well known to software engineers, by far the largest class of problems arises from errors made in the eliciting, recording, and analysis of requirements. A second major class of problems arises from poor human factors design.

The culture of an organization in which software is produced can have a dramatic effect on its quality and dependability.

The focus of this report is a set of fundamental principles that underlie software system dependability and that suggest a different approach to the development and assessment of dependable software. The committee’s proposed approach can be summarized in “the three E’s” -- explicit claims, evidence, and expertise.

Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence?

A new paper by Ross Anderson. May be of interest.

Online fraudsters use a variety of nonbank payment services to launder the proceeds of crime. People had assumed that traceability was the key. However, investigation reveals that revocability is more important. Fraudulent payments within the banking system can be pursued and recovered with a reasonable probability of success; but once stolen funds are used to buy transferable financial assets such as eGold, recovery becomes much harder. This suggests that much of the benefit that could be obtained from regulating nonbanks more closely can be got by greater transparency about counterparty risks. I also look at broader issues; just as adequately regulated offshore financial centres can benefit the global financial system by providing competition, so also nonbank payment systems can play a useful competitive role. A further issue is the confusion between identity and traceability that has crept into compliance procedures since 9/11; I argue that there has been too much emphasis on the former at the expense of the latter. The current FATF rules impose unnecessary burdens, particularly on the poor, while not doing enough to facilitate rapid recovery of stolen assets. Future regulation of nonbank payment services must take account of this. Anonymous or unverified payment mechanisms can be tolerated, particularly for low value instruments, so long as stolen funds can be quickly traced and recovered. One must also be cautious about liability. Many nonbank payment systems use contracts that attempt to make them judge and jury in disputes with customers – risking a race to the bottom that would undermine consumer protection, and moral hazard which exacerbates operational risks. Only payment service providers can fight fraud effectively, as only they have access to all the data, and the ability to evolve their systems. Consumer protection thus cannot be ignored in payment system resilience.

Closing the Phishing Hole – Fraud, Risk and Nonbanks

This report extends research on using scenarios for strategic planning, with experiments in what can be called massive scenario generation (MSG), a computationally intensive technique that seeks to combine virtues of human- and model-based exploration of “the possibility space.”

Enhancing Strategic Planning with Massive Scenario Generation