Small Worlds – A New Tilt-Shift Time-Lapse Video by Keith Loutit

If you live in the Sydney (AU) area, you’ll definitely want to go and check out [GaS] friend Keith Loutit’s new “Small Worlds” exhibition at Sydney’s Customs House starting April 27, 2010 and ending July 7, 2010. Here’s the awesome video he created to promote the event. Enjoy!

Oh, and for those who want to learn more about Keith, he recently had his whole site redesigned, and it now looks quite amazing. It’s also the perfect place to watch all his videos while enjoying some really nice music tracks.

Canada (and everyone else) to Google: You Suck

For anyone who’s not familiar with the huge privacy kerfuffle involving the launch of Google Buzz in February, here’s the basic timeline:

Feb. 9: Google Buzz launches
Five minutes later: Someone notices a major privacy flaw.
Ten minutes later: The world promptly freaks out.

Feb. 11: Google makes a small change that doesn’t go far enough (basically making it easier to opt out of the problematic feature).
Five minutes later: Everyone still freaking out.

Feb. 13: Google finally fixes it by making the feature opt in.

The speed at which this happened was actually kind of impressive for such a huge company; four days is pretty darn good compared to the three weeks or so that it took Facebook to deal with the outcry over Beacon. But people were still really pissed off, perhaps because in some cases the damage may have already been done – like the much discussed blog post from a woman for whom Google Buzz may have revealed information to her abusive ex-husband. Here’s a good overview of the privacy problems that popped up after launch.

And now Google has been officially (and publicly) scolded by some government officials in a number of countries. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada sent a letter to CEO Eric Schmidt. It was also signed by data protection authorities in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom. They’re making some serious demands, that as a company entrusted with people’s privacy information, Google should “incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of new online services.” They even enumerated some suggestions:

  • collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service;
  • providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent;
  • creating privacy-protective default settings;
  • ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use;
  • ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected, and
  • giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honouring their requests in a timely way.

So what do you think, are these good guidelines? Are you worried about features that Google might roll out in the future, or do you think that they learned their lesson? And for those of you who use Buzz, did the information-sharing actually affect or bother you?

How Brains Cope with Multitasking

If you’ve ever heard somebody scream “I can’t do two things at once”, you’re wrong… but only just.

French scientists now believe the brain has the capacity to work on two tasks at once, but that it can’t cope with more than two. That’s because the limited multitasking which people can carry out is based on a physical characteristic of the brain, which then becomes a limitation beyond two tasks.

Staff at the Pierre et Marie Curie university in Paris carried out a study (published in Science) where subjects had to look at a set of uppercase letters and keep track of whether they were in the correct order to spell out set words, with a cash reward if they succeeded. The task was then made harder with two sets of letters, which proved manageable.

However, when the task was increased to three sets — effectively creating three separate tasks — subjects not only couldn’t cope but, rather than make a bad job of all three tasks, simply acted as if one task didn’t exist.

MRI scans of brain activity during the tasks appeared to give an explanation. When the subjects increased from one to two tasks, the two frontal lobes of the medial prefrontal cortex (part of the brain which responds to rewards) showed separate activity, suggesting the tasks had been divided across the brain. When a third task was introduced there was literally nowhere for it to go.

The researchers believe that as well as showing why multitasking is limited for humans, the results may also explain why most people struggle to cope with decisions that have three or more options. It appears that the brain cannot simultaneously compare the consequences (specifically the rewards) of more than two options at once.

While the brain can cope with two tasks, it usually comes with a notable performance cost. A recent study at the University of Utah found that just one in forty drivers have the ability to “supertask”: that is, they can carry out two tasks simultaneously, both at a high degree of competence.

The Utah study looked at the skills of driving and conducting a phone conversation. Its conclusions suggested that while there are some people who can drive safely while using a phone (whether hands free or handheld), they are so rare that they shouldn’t affect decisions of distracted driving laws.

[Picture credit: Etienne Koechlin, INSERM-ENS, Paris, France, 2010.]

Facebook Relationship Etiquette Rules [Video]

Rule #1: Don’t change your relationship status without consulting the other person.
Rule #2: Don’t post embarrassing photographs of other people.
Rule #3: Be discreet when posting messages on another person’s wall.
Rule #4: Don’t steal other people’s friends.
Rule #5: Don’t start hate groups.

Got any other rules to add to this list? Let us know about them!

[Via Bitsandpieces]

Robotic Mouth Simulates Human Voice + Trolololo Guy Mashup

Designed by engineers at Kagawa University in Japan, this creepy robotic mouth simulates the human voice by using an air pump, artificial vocal chords, a nasal cavity, a resonance tube, and a microphone. Check it out:

Oh, and naturally, it didn’t take very long before people on youtube used the footage to create some pretty awesome mashups, such as this one featuring the voice of the trolololo guy.

[Via Neatorama]

Facebook “likes” ad possibilities

Facebook is said to be looking at ways to turn its “like” button into a multi-million dollar bonanza.

The feature, which is currently used simply for giving a thumbs up to user content such as status update, could be the key to breaking through in the contextual advertising market.

The company wants to make it possible for websites to put a Facebook “like” button on their pages, similar to those which many already make available for social media sites such as Digg.

While a user “liking” a web page could publish a link on their profile and act as a form of promotion for the site — as already happens via a “post to profile” or “share” button — , it’s got a more valuable potential use for Facebook itself.

Though the company has said “we have no announcements or changes planned to our ad offering and policies”, there’s a strong suspicion it would like to use the data from the buttons to learn more about individual users’ tastes and interests, further refining the personalized adverts it shows users when they log-in… and further increasing the rates it can charge advertisers for ever more targeted advertising.

It’s notable that the scheme would require users to specifically click on a Facebook-branded button, which means they shouldn’t be surprised when the details appear on their profile. That’s in stark contrast to the much-maligned Facebook Beacon program which updated user profiles with details of activity on partner sites such as when they ordered a book or CD from an online store.

In that situation, Facebook’s biggest blunder was making the scheme opt-out, meaning users, whether or not they knew about it, were enrolled by default. To make things worse, the scheme launched just in late 2007, meaning some users surprise Christmas gift purchases were revealed to the recipients.

It’s not just Facebook which will come under scrutiny from the new scheme, though. There’s also a possibility that the websites displaying the “like” button will use the details for marketing purposes. After all, it’s one thing to know somebody has visited your website, but quite another to know exactly which pages earned their approval.

Your Next iPhone?

So someone leaves a phone on a bar, someone else picks it up and plays with it, and the next thing you know Gizmodo is taking it apart and declaring that this disguised iPhone is a test model of the not-yet-released 4G iPhone.

They’ve delivered many of the features people have been waiting for—that damn front camera!—while at the same time upgrading everything else. Flash, better back camera, better battery life and another microphone for better voice clarity. People who bought the 3G two years ago and are now in the perfect position to upgrade and get a dramatically different, and better, phone. If confirmed this summer, and if it performs as we expect, this next-generation iPhone looks like a winner.

Gizmodo has a list of specs, features, and the story of how they determined what it is and what it does. And a couple of videos. Engadget compared the missing (leaked? stolen?) iPhone with an earlier photo posted online and pictures they had in their files and confirmed that yes, it is what it is.

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School Laptop Spying Case Just Keeps Getting Creepier

You’ve probably heard by now about the school district in Pennsylvania that was using webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students. And they might never have known except for one observant administrator who saw a student engaging in behavior mistaken for pill-popping and confronted him – at which point it was revealed that those “pills” were actually candy. Unsurprisingly, the student’s parents were wondering how the school knew about something that had happened in his house – which is when it all came tumbling down.

The school still maintains that the remote-webcam-activation was actually a “security feature” intended to help them recover lost or stolen laptops. Of course, the student in question didn’t have a lost or stolen laptop – just one he’d failed to pay the $55 security deposit for.

But now there’s a lawsuit, which means there’s discovery, and a motion filed by the students’ attorney last week claims that the school might have thousands of images collected by the school, many of which featured students who did not have lost or stolen (or uninsured) laptops. And according to the motion, “There were numerous webcam pictures of Blake and other members of his family, including pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping.” Which is just, you know, kind of creepy.

The motion itself is an attempt to get to the personal computers of school technology coordinator Carol Cafiero, who recently took the Fifth during a deposition. She was one of a very few administrators able to access the images, and the students’ attorney is calling her a “voyeur” – largely because of an email exchange between her and a colleague, who noted that seeing the webcam footage was kind of like a “soap opera” – to which Cafiero replied, “I know, I love it!”

I wrote some time ago about the iPhone tracking that some schools in Japan were implementing and noted the similarities to Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Little Brother.  I think the comparison is even more apt here, and I think a lot of people are unsettled by the situation.  The post from Threat Level on this subject included with permission one of the images that a laptop recorded, of a student sleeping. The schools might have seemed like Santa Claus, giving away laptops for free… but now they see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

[Image Source: megathud (CC)]