• Construction of a talking robot which has mechanical vocal organs
• Realization of an autonomous vocalization learning based on an auditory feedback
• Execution of a singing performance

Maybe that’s what they’ve done, maybe not.  Who am I to judge?  Looks to me more like they hooked a soda bottle to some sort of crude sexual aid, set a tortured air pump blowing through the thing, and started squeezing it with model airplane servos so it’d wail like the cries of the damned.  I have trouble looking past the monstrosity they’ve created to see the real research behind it.  See for yourself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the title of this article indicates, I’m clearly not convinced it’s a good idea.  I don’t mean to dismiss the talent of the students/researchers working on this thing, or even its potential to increase our overall knowledge of robotics, but the fact is- it’s creepy.  I’m downright disturbed.  A quick perusal of comments on the various YouTube videos indicates that I’m not the only one feeling that way.

I’m not sure whether or not the goal was to make the device seem lifelike in addition to producing somewhat realistic sounds, but it seems to me they’ve accomplished it enough to push deep into the uncanny valley.  The dead, silicone lips are repulsive in a still photo, but they are a full on horror show once they start to move.  The loud whirring from the servos probably makes it better, because I can see people totally wigging out if it wasn’t obviously being mechanically actuated.

Which brings up another point- I’m no expert in anatomy, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how people create speech.  Admittedly, we do have a resonance cavity (the big nose thing on it), we have some sort of lips (mine look less like a lamprey), we push air from our lungs (usually not soda bottles), and we have tongues to actuate airflow (the diagram shows that this thing has one).  Given that, the overall shape of our mouths and vocal cord are vastly different and I’m fairly certain that no part of our speech process involves the sort of crushing demonstrated in this device.

From listening to the YouTube video above and a recording of their target song on Wikipedia (Kagome Kagome) it seems to me like they’re on the right track to demonstrate at least two of their goals.  I am seeing a mechanical voice organ, of some sort, and I’m hearing something that seems vaguely like the song they’re after.  Of course, I’m totally unfamiliar with the Japanese language and am mostly useless as a judge of the enunciation the device is accomplishing.

To me, the truly impressive part would be how they accomplish the objective of creating “autonomous vocalization learning”.  Maybe their meaning is getting lost in translation, but the diagram on their site indicates that they are using a system that adjusts the vocalization through something other than the operator listening and tweaking each phoneme.  I’ve not been able to find more detail on this, but it seems intriguing and perhaps more valuable than the specific machinery they’ve chosen for this version of a speech organ.  Anyway, once you’ve accepted the idea that it’s possible to create superior speech through a fake, flopping flesh-hole… you just have to balance it with something cool like an autonomous feedback system.

With Chromebooks, I’d say that things are completely different.  Essentially no one has seriously considered a web only operating system and application suite until very recently.  Outside of Google and their die-hard fans, it’s still uncommon to see it as likely.  Google is truly attempting to create a new paradigm in computing, not just roll out a new form factor or interface method.  I don’t think they are alone among tech companies in pursuing bits of this vision, which I’ll discuss in some later posts, but for now I’m going to focus on common critiques of their plan.

An editorial at MIT Technology Review, by Tom Simonite, offers six points for comment.  While they aren’t necessarily the points I’d have picked to debate were I thinking about this in a vacuum, I think they are representative of the commentary brought up across the net since Google started seriously talking about ChromeOS.

It won’t work with your iPod.

At first glance, this seems to be an overly specific argument.  No matter how popular a particular accessory is, not supporting a particular system has never proven sufficient in and of itself to derail a new idea.  Furthermore, it’s not the case that Chrome couldn’t support the iPod, iPhone, and iPad… it just can’t support installation of the iTunes desktop client.  In the end, that’s a good thing.  iTunes is a terrible piece of software anyway, and if using ChromeOs would convince you to avoid it you should probably thank whatever God you believe in for small favors.

In a larger sense, this is an issue of hardware support far beyond Apple’s products.  Many peripherals require are designed to use locally installed software in their regular operation, particularly portable media devices.

For corporate users, it’s not clear that this is a problem.  Many enterprise environments would restrict the use of media syncing applications anyway… or even completely disable port connectivity.  Given that Google is at least somewhat pushing their ChromeOS toward business and education applications there are areas of their rollout where this won’t matter much at all.

They’re too expensive.

This is a recent statement brought about by the release of pricing information for the first Chromebook models by Acer and Samsung.  They do seem a little pricey when the headline specs are compared to Windows netbooks, then again it’s not clear that the comparison is fair.  These machines aren’t netbooks… they aren’t even really computers in the traditional sense.  They have features that no traditional netbook offers, most notably hardware OS verification, that probably aren’t even possible in a Windows machine.  The comparison of ChromeOS to Windows as “open source and should be free” isn’t quite correct and it’s not appropriate to assume that the operating system should be discounted versus Windows.

People aren’t ready to trust the cloud.

Really?  You could have fooled me.  Adoption of cloud based services is rampant in both retail and corporate world.  While the move has mainly been through the use of distinct applications (think Gmail) instead of unified application frameworks (think Google Apps) it is pretty clearly an unstoppable force.  Like many such articles, the source referenced by Mr. Simonite uses the recent example of failure in one of Amazon’s EC2 regions as evidence that the cloud can’t be trusted to maintain data but there are some key problems with the argument.

To begin with, nobody ever said the cloud was invincible and anybody who expects web based services to be available 100% of the time is unrealistic.  Purely internal IT services aren’t available 100% of the time, regardless of how physically close you are to the servers.  The question isn’t whether the SaaS model or devices intended to rely on it are disaster proof, it’s how they stacks up to the real world disasters that can befall data stored on traditional machines or local networks.

It’s a goldmine for hackers.

I’m also not clear how this is the case.  The author cites an expert from Kaspersky on the matter, but her argument is focused on single sign on, distributed environments in general.  It’s not an issue endemic to Chromebooks and the fact that Google offers a single-sign-on app environment doesn’t fundamentally alter that.

Google can’t do hardware and support.

Citing Google’s history with products like the Nexus One, the article points out Google’s poor history of offering customer support.  Nothing about the recent announcements indicate that Google is intending to take over hardware, versus relying on the product manufacturers to do so, but the technical support argument is valid.

In general, Google doesn’t believe that it’s possible to provide traditional customer support and essentially never really attempted it.  As a user of Google Apps, I can tell you that this hasn’t changed as they’ve moved from gratis services to paid support for enterprise environments.  They claim to be offering full support for their business and education users, but they say the same thing about Apps.  You still can’t get live support for Apps and they haven’t figured out that you can’t submit tickets through the service if the service is totally inaccessible.

I’m something of a Google fan-boy, but I’ve got to call a spade a spade.  They are bad at support and it’s not entirely clear whether they care.  Then again, it hasn’t mattered much for their other services.

Google gets too much control.

While the nerd in me rages over the idea of not owning everything myself and wants badly to agree, I have to bow to reality here.  This is the case with all manner of devices and services… but most customers don’t really care.  From a retail perspective, companies like Apple would have never been even remotely successful if users really cared that “Big Brother” owned all their data and had their hand on a kill switch.  From a corporate perspective, the idea of outsourcing data has only been problematic where it hasn’t been clearly proven to save money.  Good business owners trust real results, not simply believing that handling everything themselves makes it better or safer.  Most large enterprises already have some level of outsourced IT that is vital to their enterprise data maintenance, moving to the outsourcing of individual employee workstations isn’t really that much of a step.  Google has some tasks it needs to focus on to make this work well for most consumers, such as clear ways to back up  to traditional machines or migrate data to other services, but there seems little real world evidence that this sentiment will slow them down.

It’s worth noting that this year’s Forbes survey of corporate reputation placed Google as the 9th most trusted company in America.  The only tech company ahead of them was Amazon, another provider of cloud services, in the first spot.  Notably, Apple and Microsoft were 46th and 47th respectively.

Ultimately, only the trial and error of bringing a new device into the market will determine whether internet only devices will be a part of the future.  It’s going to be a huge shift if the public starts to adopt these new “computer-like devices”, but it’s going to be a waiting game to be for sure.  Speculation will serve to help drive decisions to test the waters or take business risks by choosing to support the platform, sales will make the final decision.

IE10 Platform Preview

Well, I suppose I’m not going to get all that much into the technical details… mainly because they aren’t really all that important.  The point is that Microsoft introduced support for a proposed CSS3 Grid Layout Specification in their recent release of the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview.  As is often the case with updates of this sort, I read about it at Css3.info.  The Grid Layout spec had been proposed by Microsoft and introduced by W3C only days before.  CSS3.info has a short article on some of the recent module updates discussing it.  No other browser supports it, but this will most likely change very quickly.

Support for developing websites in a grid layout is a big deal.  Every design team goes through a brief moment of despair when they switch from their prototype or Photoshop layout and move to the coding stage.  The neat little boxes sized and lay out perfectly in a wireframe seem to offer a quick path for creating sites, but it’s harder than it looks to duplicate a design template with current coding techniques.   A lot of layout is currently done by CSS but it’s somewhat via workarounds, isn’t terribly intuitive, and is fraught with complications from various positioning interactions.  Grid layouts solve this by giving a way to translate the rows and columns of typical wireframes into a position oriented codebase relative to the screen resolution the site will be targeting.

960 Grid System - 12 Column Layout

There are several frameworks out there to help designers create grid layouts with current techniques, most notably the 960 Grid System.  Personally, I’ve been known to use the 960 Grid implementation in RocketTheme’s Gantry framework, for both WordPress and Joomla.  In Gantry, the grid offers a quick and easy way to add content exactly where you want it and is extremely attractive for news or magazine style sites with a lot of content or article teasers to organize.  I’ve used it in a corporate social intranet site and it’s a key part of the layout control in a marketing site I’m developing for a group of small businesses.  It would have been very difficult to achieve the target layout without a grid, especially since I had to quickly change it in response to client feedback!

Microsoft is hoping to leverage the ideas and techniques developed by the design community into a single, cogent specification.  Providing support for this improved spec will make their browser a more attractive target for web developers and increase the likelihood that Microsoft’s other technologies will be chosen to support more complex sites.  It’s an arcane business proposition without immediate or easily tracked results that most folks don’t think about very often.  It’s also a vital part of improving everyone’s experience on the web.

This is the new way web standards are introduced, tested, and finally enshrined as specifications.  It’s not the way the W3C originally intended to operate, but I’m fairly certain it’s better than allowing them to spend years in academic debate hoping that someone still cares when they’re done.  Ultimately, browser manufacturers are key to introducing and guiding new web technology.  Without their choice to embody an idea in their rendering engine, specifications are moot.  Without their design teams collecting feedback from real world users and adjusting their implementation of a spec, it can easily become detached from reality.  Like much of our current web technology, CSS was originally introduced by Microsoft.  The teams behind Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have repeatedly introduced new technologies well before any spec was ready, many of which support common design techniques today.  Though Microsoft tends not to use it themselves, the CSS vendor prefix is designed specifically to encourage this sort of experimentation.

Incidentally, this also provides a good insight into Microsoft’s new commitment to driving web standards.  Microsoft is dealing with a lot of challenges to their supremacy in key markets,  chief among them may be browser support.  No longer holding the majority of users, IE has serious competition from multiple fronts.  After losing significant market share to Firefox, Chrome is expanding at an impressive rate among desktop users and Microsoft doesn’t have a large enough device presence to play into the continued rise of mobile browsing.  With their position among users, developers, and the research community Microsoft has a lot to offer the future of the web… even if they aren’t the “new cool” nowadays.  It’s good to see them stepping up to match their competitors’ zeal for experimentation and even their fervent development schedules.

Notepad++ is an open source solution based on the free code Scintilla framework.  It has all the features you’d expect of an editor targeted to coders.  These range from simple tools like code highlighting, with a variety of user selectable language templates, to advanced replacement routines.  It also has fancy tricks like a macro recorder, collapsible sections, and advanced splitscreen functions.  It even includes the little bits of polish missed on many open source tools, like the feature that automatically finds and highlights instances of whatever you select.  I find that last bit particularly useful when changing parameters, like color, in my CSS.  It doesn’t have anything truly unique, but it has everything right where I want it.

Notepad++ also pairs very well with my favorite FTP manager, Filezilla.  When set as the default editor for common code files, such as .CSS and .PHP, it offers a seamless way to open text with appropriate highlighting and demarcation.  I can find code references in Chrome’s element inspector, select to edit files in Filezilla, watch them open in a new tab in Notepad++, make the edits I need to, hit save, select Filezilla to have the automatically copy the new file, then return to Chrome to see the changes.  I use this workpath quite a bit.

Of course, Notepad++ isn’t unique in this aspect.  Most any editor can be set as default from Filezilla and many work reasonably well in this capacity.  High end development suites have more direct integration between FTP and their editor, which saves a few clicks, but I personally prefer the Notepad++/Filezilla combination.

The features of both Filezilla and Notepad++ cover essentially every task I would want to undertake, but both are very lightweight.  I like the ability to quickly open and close the applications, especially since I tend to work in short bursts and like to clear my workspace in between sessions.  It’s also nice to use the same text editor to keep notes and code snippets, which I’ve always found difficult with development suites.  Ultimately, it’s a personal choice.  Being free helps too.

Notepad++ is worth a close look, especially if you do much in the way of code creation or review.  It’s a free download from the author, Don Ho’s, site.  If you decide to make it your new favorite editor, keep in mind that every version of windows offers a couple ways to set default applications for every filetype- including .txt.  Oddly enough it seems that most everyone on the Notepad++ forums doesn’t know this and you’ll want to avoid their advice to edit the registry or replace your system’s default notepad.exe file.  The simplest way to reset a file type is the right-click a sample file, select “Open With…”, select “Choose Default” from the bottom of the dropdown, choose the program you’d like to use going forward, and make sure the “Always Use…” option is checked before you hit “OK”.

Happy writing.

Wikipedia Article On Watson

IBM’s Watson Site

Watch Watson on YouTube

There’s a lot of debate about what Watson’s performance means.  On one hand, IBM clearly created an amazingly powerful natural language based A.I.  Jeopardy! represents an extreme challenge for people, let alone machine intelligence.  The sort of questions posed in the contest require extreme linguistic skills and a deep understanding of cultural references.  Winning against the best human players was far from an easy task.  The competition focused on the skill humans are best at… and computers have traditionally fared poorly in such contests.  On the other hand, Watson has absolutely no general intelligence.  The DeepQA system it’s based on is merely an expert system.  Watson’s domain was very broad, but required limited reasoning beyond language comprehension.  It’s a fantastic leap forward, but doesn’t quite herald the arrival of our computerized overlords.

Watson on Jeopardy!

Given that, there is one thing very clear about Watson’s victory- it was the most publicly visible demonstration of machine intelligence ever.  Events such as the Loebner prize or the series of human computer chess matches happened more or less in the background.  This one happened on national TV against popular champions.  Whereas chess matches are battles of phenomenal logic and Turning Tests are essentially academic exercises, this was fast paced, exciting, and full of cultural relevance.  It was an entirely different sort of contest for an entirely different audience.  Turing tests are purposefully done through chat windows and chess moves are enacted by solemn human assistants, but this was right out in the open.

Watson needed to be different from ALICE or Deep Fritz, it needed a face to show the world.   Watson needed to do more than answer questions in the form of answers, it needed at least a few more “human” traits to show the audience.  It needed a voice and a physical appearance.  It even needed a bit of personality.  One of IBM’s YouTube videos describes how they created all of these things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watson was clearly “excited” with certain categories.  It was happy to answer questions correctly.  It was sad when things went wrong.  This was obvious without the video, because the designers did their jobs well.  Hundreds of thousands of of people will remember that more than the technical details of the accomplishment or the myriad products IBM will roll out in the wake of their success.  Millions will one day interact with intelligences through faces whose designers were inspired by Watson’s animated version of an IBM trademark.  Ever since we began dreaming of intelligent machines we’ve personified them somewhat, initially to ensure they made sense to science fiction readers and increasingly as part of real world user interfaces.  If we assume that artificial intelligence will continue its advance there will soon be a lot more faces in need of making.  At this point, it’s not clear what they will look like.

Cues From History

A vintage toy robot

Maybe history provides a good place to figure that out.  Robots have long been envisioned with expressive faces, even when there wasn’t much of a mind behind them.   There have always been some robots without faces, both in fiction and reality, but many of them were rather expressive.  (Think R2D2) Only truly utilitarian devices, not intended for human interaction, are constructed without some sort of shell to give them a personable visage.  It is extremely rare to see a fictional intelligent robot without a face, voice, and personality.  There are about as many projects developing real world intelligence for the purpose of interacting through expressions as there are for developing autonomy.  However, intelligence based solely in a computer was not always envisioned the same way.

Many early concepts of advanced computers were very similar to the mainframes that existed at the time, meaning there was little visual interface or interactivity.  Computer based intelligence was envisioned without significant display of any sort. This can be seen in TV series such as Star Trek where the computer is merely a disembodied voice.  It’s not uncommon in 1960s Sci Fi to see a computer communicating largely through dot matrix printers.

Disembodied Voices

The eye of HAL 9000

Of course, for many people the archetypal image of an artificial intelligence is HAL 9000 from the A Space Odyssey.  HAL’s glowing red eye and smooth, synthetic voice made him seem more real… and helped him reach #13 on the list of all time greatest movie villains.  HAL’s eyes were present throughout the ship he monitored, heightening the sense of threat behind his character.  Realistically, this is a useful feature for a computer designed to monitor a facility and is common with real life intelligences.  It’s not fundamentally different than the Microsoft Kinect sitting on my TV right now.

In most of these early examples speech was the only intelligent interface.  Unless the computer was saying something, or possibly blowing someone out an airlock, it was hard to tell what it was thinking.  Regardless of what it did, an intelligence of this sort seemed more than inhuman… it was outright disconnected.  Real A.I. developed to compete in Turing Tests tend to have this issue as well, as mastery of language is the key in these events.  Essentially all of these tests work by dehumanizing the people participating in them, as opposed to tying their results to the creation of artificial faces.   Intelligence designed primarily to converse with others are called chatterbots, and the blinking cursor in a chatterbot’s input field is in many ways just like the watchful sensors of a machine like HAL.

Virtual Assistants

Avatars for Zabaware's Ultra Hal Assistant

In the last ten years, reasonably intelligent chatterbots have began to proliferate.  Using technology developed for  Turing Test style competitions, like the ALICE technology developed by Richard Wallace for the Loebner Prize, these programs have offered a more personable way to interface with artificial intelligence.  When these were brought to the personal computer by companies like Zabaware, the “brains” of  chatterbots were quickly tied to the faces provided by animated characters.  Many of these were courtesy of tools like Microsoft’s Agent  system.  Zabaware’s Ultra Hal Assistant helped popularize the idea that a chatterbot could read mail, assist in searches, and perform other simple tasks.  Options ranged from cute to crudely human, and were never really accurate.   While these Virtual Assistants did not become widely popular, they are still being developed and it is rare to see one without some sort of face.

Guile 3D's Virtual Assistant Denise

Guile3D’s Virtual Assistant Denise is a newer example of these agents.  Denise has a fairly realistic face with a set of simple expressions.  Denise is a reasonably capable product with a variety of input options under development, including face recognition through the increasingly ubiquitous webcam “eyes” appearing in everyone’s homes.  Denise has a voice as well, which can be swapped out using commercial voice packages.  (I’ll be offering a review of Denise in the near future.)

Denise exemplifies a trend toward making more human avatars as chatterbot interfaces.  There are several advantages to doing so, as humans automatically understand the expressions and actions of humanlike figures.  Whereas Watson’s designers had to recreate happy and sad with color and position of swarming elements, Guile3D only had to render a smile and frown for Denise.

Siri iPhone App

Of course, rare as it is, not all virtual assistants have faces, voices, or significant personalities.   For instance, the Siri iPhone application merely uses text and voice.  In it’s case, the device it runs on is in many ways its face.  With Apple’s purchase of Siri, their legendary restriction of software interface design will likely keep it that way.

Online Chat Agents

Simple machine intelligence has been applied to phone trees for some time with fairly good voice synthesis, speech recognition, and simple expert systems at a variety of financial institutions and corporate service centers.  These machines are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible in order to disarm callers’ angst over not speaking with a live person and, of course, they are only experienced as voices.  When these machines went online, that had to change.

French Virtual Web Assistant

Web sites offer a perfect space to feature artificial sales and support bots .  Without a whole lot of fanfare, companies have been introducing simple intelligence to the question and answer sections of their sites and in many cases giving it a face.  While I have little statistical evidence to support it, these seem to be more popular in Europe.  Chat agents are created by firms like DoYouDreamUp and CreateMyAssistant for a variety of sales and support sites, turning an F.A.Q. section into an expert system.  Newer versions of these bots are designed to lead browsers into more traditional support tools, like live chat or ticketing systems.  This development is currently bringing chat agents into more mainstream sites.

GoArmy's Sgt. Star

A good example of mainstream usage would be the virtual assistant at GoArmy.com, Sergeant Star.  GoArmy is a site dedicated to the somewhat difficult task of recruiting for the United States Army.  The Sergeant features a very complex animation set and user specific personalization options.  Based on the way he works, it seems that GoArmy expects users to interact with him multiple times.  His designers seem to have put a lot of work into his image, which is important given the variety of prospective soldiers who are expected to chat, and maybe identify, with him.

Thoughts On The Future

Will all intelligent machines have avatars?  Probably not.

However, there are already enough simple AIs in need of faces that a few businesses revolve around creating them.  Some intelligences will continue to be molded to resemble realistic people.  Some may be embodied by clearly fictional characters.  Some may be humanoid whereas some will be more abstract.  A good number will probably carry on a key element of their creators’ branding, like Watson does.

The important thing is that we’ve started creating intelligences complex enough that there is an advantage in giving them presence and expression.  Now that we’ve started, there’s probably no stopping it.

HP Mini

During the bits of downtime between sessions I tended to read on my netbook.  I have an HP Mini I picked up as a discounted display model at WalMart.  I only got it because it was cheap and I needed something for a long trip, but it turns out that I rather enjoy it.  I like to turn it on its side like an open book and read full screen PDFs.  Other exhibitors read on their machines, with quite a few leaving their laptop attached to demonstration screens and pulling out an iPad.  It happened like clockwork when the rooms cleared out, my netbook went over on its side and the iPads came out of their sleeves.

Over time I started to notice that a few people were looking strangely at me reading the way I was.  Before too long someone sat their iPad down and came over to ask me how I liked the HP.  They said they’d been thinking of getting a machine like it.  It wasn’t too long before someone else came over and asked if they could try it out… then another… and another.  A total of five presenters asked me about my netbook over the course of the conference, three with iPads at the conference and one who owned one for personal use.  All seemed very interested in getting a netbook.

Why?

This isn’t a crazy story about a group of professional presenters abandoning tablets in favor of tiny laptops with tinier touchpads or oddly frustrated users ceding to the difficulty of using Apple friendly web browsers in an IE centric industry.  It’s a story about people replacing their Windows based laptops with netbook class Windows machines despite their total adoption of the iPad for reading, browsing, and entertainment.

Most of the exhibitors carrying iPads also used full sized laptops to demonstrate their product or, more importantly, to run their displays.  A couple of the folks asking about my netbook also regularly used their laptops to present in larger sessions.  Only one mentioned having a keyboard for their iPad and another mentioned that they still used their laptop for email. While they had taken most of their activities away from the machine, the iPad wasn’t replacing everything.  They needed a more portable machine than their laptops, but still needed it to perform the same functions.  While they might be able to use their iPads for that purpose, it would take it out of their hands to do so… which was unacceptable.

What’s it mean for the future of tablets?

Beats me… probably nothing.  I didn’t exactly have a great view of the entire tech world from my booth.  What I saw was a group of people with a particular need choosing devices multiple devices on different platforms to meet their needs.  Because available devices now have different underlying capability they may have chosen a new way to divide tasks among them, with traditionally intense processes like games going to the tablet.  It should be expected instead of some big deal.

Every one of the devices involved will be obsolete in two years.  All the key aspects of their operating systems will be horribly outdated in five years.  The entire class of device will be outmoded in ten.  The truth is that people make too much clamor over platform wars.

Gawker’s popular blogs, such as Gizmodo and Lifehacker, recently underwent a major redesign in an attempt to modernize their layout.  Apparently, they were concerned that their inability to feature content in an orderly fashion was causing difficulty in accessing popular content and possible loss of advertising revenue.  Instead of solving the problem the same way every other blogger in the word has, via magazine style layouts, they decided to go with something revolutionary.

So far as I can tell, it was a bad idea for them to do it.  Their devoted readership hates the new design, it doesn’t seem necessary to solve the issues that were facing, I find it extremely difficult to use, I haven’t been able to find the search feature since day one, and it seems a bit buggy.  An established blog should have moved with a lot more care and they may very well come to regret their decision.  However, I think the overall idea has significant merit.  In order to explore the concept, I decided to build a WordPress theme that used many of the same ideas.  Scattertech’s designer, Sahas Katta, beat me to it.  When his work was featured on Gizmodo, I decided to use it as a starting point.  The mess on my blog is courtesy of the Qawker theme he created.

I say mess with the kindest regards, because he seems to have done very good work.  It was obviously a rush job and lacks some of the things that Gawker made theirs for in the first place, like an easy way to pin features, but I’m ecstatic to be using it.  There’s a lot of work to be done before I recognize my vision, starting with a bit of CSS styling for widgets below the articles and quickly moving to switch the sidebar to the lefthand side of the page.  I’ll also be working to add more indication of place with the site, converting it to use more HTML5 syntax, and doing a good bit of restyling.

It might be that the design really is pointless and my site will always be a mess, but for now I prefer to think of it as a laboratory searching for a new way to display information.

Seen on New Scientist's One Per Cent

A new electronic toy manufactured by Tomy will soon be encouraging Japanese users to touch each other, in groups of up to four, as a way to create music.  As described on New Scientist’s One Per Cent, the device apparently passes a slight electric current through the users’ bodies, allowing signals to be received by the synthesizer when touches complete the circuit.  Depending on where the users’ bodies connect, different sounds are evoked.

If I hadn’t actually seen one of Mattel’s Harry Potter Vibrating Broomsticks I’d have said that things like this only seem like good ideas in Japan.  Unfortunately, asking for trouble is a vice common to all humans.

Discussion of industries with particularly bad websites always piques my interest, so when my morning research brought me to an article titled The Ultimate Ugly Showcase of Current Government Websites I jumped right on it.  Turns out the article isn’t all that current, being from November 2009, but I was intrigued nonetheless.

The article provides screenshots of the homepage from a variety of countries’ sites and offers some simple commentary.  Most of the comments revolve around general accessibility, use of garish banners in the site’s head, and the presence of useful tools like RSS feeds.   The author doesn’t seem to have been terribly impressed and, given the number of countries with sites in the article, had little good to say about government sites in general.  The reviews ranged from sites that were listed as totally nonfunctional to those that were tagged as “butt ugly”.

Reading through the list I initially connected the author’s comments to my personal thesis about what happens when designers serve an industry where they don’t believe they face real competition.  Of course, I’m basing this on my experience with websites used by independent advisors and securities representatives.  In my industry, the general difficulty in approaching new technology and the artificial barriers to quality have seriously retarded progress and led to a prevalence of badly outdated web presence.  Given that not too many folks will switch nationality based on web presence, I started to assume I was looking at a similar situation.   However, when I took a deeper look at the screenshots of the sites in the list, I wasn’t seeing what I expected.  These sites weren’t really that bad, especially given that many of them represented countries with a poorly developed internet economy in the first place.

It is common for me to see small financial firms without any web presence at all.  While some of the government sites were inaccessible it was most likely due to poorly designed country level firewalls or censorship software.  It probably doesn’t always apply given the way countries use their provided domains, but I certainly didn’t see the sort of domain parking pages I’m used to.  Only the Solomon Island’s Drupal site seemed clearly broken, which isn’t really all that odd to see in a Drupal site anyway.  Many of the sites listed were fairly out of date, but not as badly as the article seems to suggest.  Few of them were using cutting edge technology or even contemporary design techniques, but none appeared greater than 5 years from current.  Those with reference to badly out of date web browsers were sometimes in countries where newer browsers are restricted due to their encryption technology.  (Which says something badabout the country all by itself.)   Sites designed for monitors with extremely low resolution were mostly in countries with such low standards of living that I’m surprised anybody there has a monitor at all.  Spot-checking many of the sites, including USA.gov and the incomplete one from the Solomon Islands, most of them had seen updates in the last year.  America’s site is actually pretty nice now that they’ve dropped the split menu and the composite header graphic.  Most sites seem to have stepped up to the plate on the more egregious failures and started to deliver a news feed.

The more I looked, the less I agreed with the author. Compared to the average site run by Rep/Advisors of independent broker dealers, or often the broker dealers themselves, these weren’t bad at all.

Resources for W3C’s new marketing campaign for HTML5 and related next generation web technologies are available at http://www.w3.org/html/logo/index.html