Each year, TED hosts some of the world's most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now - with our sponsor BMW and production partner WNYC/New York Public Radio we're sharing some of the most remarkable TED talks with the world at large. Each week, we'll release a new talk, in audio and video, to download or watch online. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect...

TEDTalks (audio, video)

The Dunbar number is a measure of the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom a person can maintain stable relationships. The concept has intrigued sociologists and anthropologists since it was first recognized as the correlation between brain capacity and group size in primates. In this talk, social software observer Christopher Allen discusses the interesting implications the Dunbar number theory has for the gathering of humans on line in the digital age.

The number of social groups a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. This observation led British primatologist Robin Dunbar to suggest that there is a species-specific index of social group size, with humans falling about midway in the range. Since then, the concept of a biological basis for effective social group size has been taken up by pundits and business observers, most notably Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Popularization has obscured some subtleties which Allen engages in his exploration of internet communitiies and social software. He compares the factors favoring small, medium and large groupings, and the interplay between people and software on the web in the form of games, blogs, wikis and chat.

On line games such as Ultima On-line and World of Warcraft provide massive amounts of data for measuring the gathering and communication of humans for various purposes. Through social network analysis, Allen hypothesizes that different group sizes impact a group's behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Three nodal sizes emerge, each with pros and cons. Small groups form easily, but are in danger of group-think and echo chamber effects. Larger groups are noisier and require a lot of time and energy in order to maintain reputations and social trust.

Designers of social software have not always been aware of the Dunbar number, yet some tools have hit the sweet spot for intimate or large scale group formation. Allen closes with an interesting comparison of features seen in blogs, wikis and sites such as Slashdot, LiveJournal and MySpace.

Dunbar number

Ease of use remains a barrier to growth and success in IT even in today's business markets. And it is surely the major challenge for emerging markets such as smart phones, home media appliances, medical devices, and automotive interfaces.

Before we explore the future of HCI, it's important to review some key lessons from the past. Many core ideas in HCI trace back to Vannevar Bush's "memex" paper ("As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), J. C. R. Licklider's vision of networked IT as DARPA director in the 1960s, and Douglas Engelbart's amazing NLS (online system) demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968. While acknowledging these pioneers, we're going to jump straight to the "modern era" of HCI, which led directly to popular computing. The incubator for this was, not surprisingly, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).

The Future of Human-Computer Interaction

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task -- we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch -- we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

What is continuous partial attention?

Firefox 2 Beta 2 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly.

Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 2 Release Notes

Marginalia is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text and write margin notes.

Marginalia Web Annotation | geof

Notate is a web-based tool for annotating and tagging words and phrases within documents. It creates a searchable index of all the annotations you make and displays the annotations against the text they refer to when you revisit a site. Annotations can be kept private or can be shared within a group such as a lab or journal club.

Notate Beta Testing - July 2006

Here's an Applescript to make skipping to random tracks in iTunes a bit more like scanning through FM radio stations: it will select a random track and start playing at a random point.

Scan in iTunes

We've opened up Yahoo! from the inside out with our world-renowned Hack Day, and from the outside in through the Yahoo! Developer Network. Now we're opening up Yahoo! itself to a select group of hackers and special guests for a weekend festival of hacking, camping (yes, the tents-in-the-outdoors kind--we have really, really nice grass!), music, and good times.

We'll kick things off on Friday, September 29th with a free all-day developer workshop. Then we'll launch a 24-hour Hack Day with an outdoor party into the wee hours, with special guests providing the soundtrack. (Details to come later, but we guarantee this won't be your usual corporate-wedding-band leading the crowd through 2am group sing-alongs of "Brick House.") We'll hack through the night, keep going through Saturday morning, and wind it all up that evening with hacker demos, judging from a panel of luminaries. and special awards for the coolest hacks. We'll have special guest speakers all weekend, with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch presiding over the festivities. And after nightfall we'll close things out with another round of entertainment that you would be happy to pay for, except that you won't have to.

We have no idea what's going to happen at Hack Day. We never do. We're pretty sure we'll be amazed. We're still working out the final details, but we'll be posting more here soon.

If you'd like to attend, please sign up on Upcoming.org. If you're interested in creating and showing a project at Hack Day, please fill in the form below and we'll be in touch.

Yahoo! Hack Day Is Coming : September 29th and 30th, 2006

It is one of the frustrations of being an academic researcher in a world that has grown highly commercial. Data is everywhere, but there is precious little of it for university researchers to work with. Raw data about people’s online behavior — the grist for many an academic researcher’s mill — remains locked up inside large companies, accessible only to a subset of corporate researchers.

The AOL incident has set off a flurry of divergent opinions in the academic community over the appropriateness of using the data for academic research.

Researchers Yearn to Use AOL Logs, but They Hesitate