Alan Brandon

I wish they’d had this competition when I was in college: The SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge has teams of college engineering students competing to produce greener sleds without sacrificing performance or handling. I had a great time researching and writing this piece for Gizmag.com

I’ve been doing some work for nPulse Technologies, including this datasheet for their Dragonfly FlowMeter sensor. nPulse designs and builds high-performance network monitoring systems that can capture, record, and process traffic up to 10 Gbps. The FlowMeter is available now, and I’ve done some more collateral that will be released soon.

The words used to describe major events seem to propagate through the blogosphere in the much the same way that earthquakes affect our planet. So says a study done by physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna.

The study looked at the frequency of words in political blogs, and found that the topics emerged and decayed in a manner similar to the Gutenberg-Richter law, which describes the relationship between magnitude and number of earthquakes in a given region.

As reported on Wired.com’s Wired Science blog:

“We show that the public reception of news reports follow a similar statistic as earthquakes do,” the researchers conclude. “One might also think of a ‘Richter scale’ for media events.”

However Duncan Watts, a researcher at Yahoo! Research, … notes that drawing mathematical analogies between unrelated phenomena doesn’t mean there’s any deeper connection. …

“But they’re all generated by different processes,” Watts said. “To suggest that the same mechanism is at work here is kind of absurd. It sort of can’t be true.”

See the full article on Wired Science, and the published report on arXiv.org.

I just discovered Gabriel Smy’s blog and the first post I read was a doozy. The principal of “show, don’t tell” is key not only for website design, but for good writing and Smy’s got a great summary of why it’s important and how to make it work for your online writing.

You simply don’t need to talk at your visitors so much. Don’t write ‘click here to download the document’– simply write the name of the document and make it a link. Don’t write ‘to get in touch with us click on contact’ – simply put the word contact somewhere prominent and expected, say the menu bar.

Good stuff! And I can’t resist one more quote:

People are after something. If you’ve got it, give it, instead of asking them to solve your web site clue by stupid clue.

I wrote an article in Gizmag about Quest Visual’s Word Lens app, an augmented-reality translator that uses your phone’s camera to view printed words and translate them into another language as you watch in real time.

According to reviews the app is not fully baked yet, but it seems to be off to a great start.