Adam and I are working on a project that we will release to the public soon. First, we want to make sure it does what we think it will, so we’re running a user study.

We’re looking for Google Reader users to try out a new extension that helps you share interesting items with people you know. E-mail the FeedMe team at feedme@csail.mit.edu to participate!

If you are: a Firefox user who uses Google Reader regularly (addicts are welcome!)
You can get: a $30 gift card for using our Google Reader extension at least every other day, for two weeks
We are: an MIT computer science research team
Dates of the study: preferably Tuesday, August 18 to Tuesday, September 1

E-mail feedme@csail.mit.edu if you’re interested. Follow your feeds while you help science!

To help fix this is Sarcastic Font!  Anytime you say something sarcastic, the text should lean to the left (think oppose of Italics). It’s a grass roots movement, but then again, so was the emoticon

<emotion>
    <category set="everydayEmotions" name="satisfaction"/>
</emotion>

Honestly now, what is the driving need for this?  One possible use is for screen readers.  You can read marked up text now with the proper inflections.  The W3C suggests tagging time frames in videos with emotions - could this lead to a Google Emotion Search?

The business of standardization is peculiar in general.  I think it’s clear that the world needs standards, and that somebody has to make them.  One thought to chew on is that standardization is best done after various approaches have been tried, and we begin to know the best way of doing something.

Social Desktop sounds extraordinarily useful but there’s lots to be worried about too. We all know that this is going to lead to many “Oh shit” moments, when people didn’t realize what they were making public.  Right now, however, there’s nothing to worry about - you can’t get Social Desktop.  It’s a research prototype and no, it’s not a feature of Windows 7.

There are a number of different qualities that add to the usability of language in people’s day to day lives. One of them is learnability and ambiguity of various word forms. One of my pet issues has always been English’s reliance on the inclusion of the letter’s ‘c’, ‘k’, and ‘x’, when a combination of two of these would suffice by eliminating the ‘c’ glyph entirely and replacing it with k and s when appropriate, and replacing the glyph for the ‘ch’ phoeneme with the original one, ‘x’. (The ‘x’ glyph has essentially zero places where it cannot be replaced by another letter).

Compactness isn’t everything when it comes to language, however. The graphical representation of languages, and the manner in which different written elements of a language come together, is another important aspect of using languages in modern computing environments. Block alphabet written languages, like Latin derivatives, have an extremely convenient way in which words are constructed compared to pictographic language sets, like brahmic alphabets.

In fact, the impact of this convenience in computing has arguably affected the progression of some languages. Most alphabets have shown a progression towards simplifying the set of glyphs available. This especially impacts languages like Spanish, which has constructs like individual ‘letters’ comprised of multiple letter glyphs, but also some languages like English, which used to share more of the stresses and notations of the languages from which it derived.

Do these potential changes increase the usability of languages, or decrease their ease of use, or breadth of expressiveness? One of the anti-patterns of user interface design is pigeonholing unique constructs into generic interfaces. Is reducing alphabets merely following the same pattern? Or perhaps the need of computers to limit their input options will help hone languages by removing extraneous features. I’d easily take the spelling “Klayton” if it meant I didn’t have to explain the intricacies of “ch”, “ca”, “ci” all using the same letter to my kids someday.

If you missed it yesterday, don’t be upset. MIT cooperates with Yahoo to publish this talk completely online! This online talk does not only gives you the video stream, but also all slides with searchable text contents.

Check it out today!

Also related to Arduino, Max notes that Processing 1.01 has been released. Processing is a nifty java library that is often used by designers (to make cool visualizations easily) and hardware hackers (Arduino).