You know who you are

A few years ago I talked about traffic-circle haters. You know who you are.

Still doubting? Spend five minutes of your life with this Ted talk. Not only are traffic circles safer, they save time and money.

Three bits of inspiration this week

Three good talks found me. The first is "The Art, Technology and Science of Reading" from this week's MIX user experience conference. The talk is a really nice research-driven presentation about reading from a display, fonts, and how our visual system works. It's DS07 on the list of conference videos. The presenter's blog is here.

Not as research driven, is a talk by the always interesting Seth Godin about "Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department".

At school we've been talking about classroom or lecture capture systems. We currently use NCast, as did CENIC for their conference this week. Most of the presentations were captured and are available for viewing. I highly recommend Ed Lazowska's keynote about e-science it was 11am Tuesday. He's given similar talks before, but he's definitely worth watching if you haven't.

ICT

Where else would but Freeman SD would you see a Schmeckfest shirt. Yes, the Wichita airport. And that wasn't the only "interesting" thing in ICT last weekend, Brett Wagner, actor, and spokesperson for Bad Boy Mowers waited to take the flight to DFW.

Coming in to ICT was actually interesting. Preflight the flight deck door was open and I could watch the pilots go through the checklists using CRM techniques such as pointing and repeating settings aloud. More exciting though was the missed landing coming in to ICT.

Speaking of airports, it would be great to get the FAT-HNL nonstops back. It's been a long time.

Three more things: an article about JPL using formal methods on Mars mission code, an essay on breaking the rules from Harvard Business Review, and one of my HCI students' favorites, a treemap (this time of the top 100 Internet sites).