Jason Hong's Confabulations

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=7386&pagtype=all By contrast, the new study, Finding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars [jih - we actually spelled it "Phinding Phish"] , was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, backed by organisations as worthily anodyne as the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office. ... Even the best of the bunch - Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Coudmark, and Explorer 7 - detected only 85 percent of fraudulent websites, a good but far from secure level of effectiveness. The rest scored under the 50 percent mark, with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor unable to spot any. Here's a link to our study, Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars

A new study by the CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University, "Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars" shows that anti-phishing browser toolbars are generally not up to the task. The research, carried out by Lorrie Cranor, Serge Egelman, Jason Hong, and Yue Zhang, examined 10 of the 80-90 free anti-fraud toolbars currently available. http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/81635 Here's a link to our study, Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars

FYI, Rich Gold was an artist and designer that was part of the original ubiquitous computing team at PARC. He also helped establish the PARC Artist in Residence program. I just found out that a book he had been working on before his untimely passing away is online (and his wife is also looking for a publisher, if any of you know of one). http://www.o-art.org/Plenitude/ Rich has some really good insights about the nature of art, science, design, and engineering; intelligent houses; and how the act of reading has changed over time.

I've heard a lot about embodied interaction, but until now, haven't yet seen a good explanation of why it is so important. Oddly enough, the article is about the upcoming Nintendo Wii. http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/11/a_console_to_make_you_wiip.php "What kind of an emotion of fear would be left," James wondered, "if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?" James' answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage. For most of the 20th century, James' theory of bodily emotions was ignored. It just seemed too implausible. But in the 1980s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio realized that James was actually right: Most of our emotions are preceded by changes in our physical body. Da...

This looks neat, Yahoo! is providing a way of distilling text into the main terms. However, it's not clear to me how much content you can send it (their demo only has about a dozen words) or how well it works. http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html