The Menlo Briefs

A Truly Unique Remote Control - A computer science Ph.D. student at the University of California San Diego has used facial expressions as a remote control to speed and slow video playback. The proof-of-concept demonstration is part of a larger project to use automated facial expression recognition to make robots more effective teachers. How? The thought behind the experiment is that if a robotic instructor can interpret the facial expressions of students -- detecting confusion, for example -- it is able to react more appropriately. [more]

XP (Support) Lives On! - Despite efforts to retire the operating system, Microsoft senior VP Bill Veghte has said the software maker will provide security patches "and other critical updates" for Windows XP until April, 2014. This is undoubtedly a relief for many home users and small business owners who are waiting to upgrade to Vista. [more]

A Real Dance-Dance Revolution - Mobile phone operator Orange has teamed up with GotWind, a firm specializing in renewable energy, to produce a cell phone recharger powered by dance energy alone. Attached to the user's arm, the charger employs a system of weights and magnets which provide an electric current to top up charge in a storage battery. This can then later be used to recharge the phone. [more]

Behind the Magic Curtain at Google - Google doesn't often talk about it's data center operations, but recently they shed some light on some parts of the operation. For example, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers. According to the article, Google doesn't reveal exactly how many servers it has, but it's easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and growing every day. [more]

Appalling, But Not Exactly Surprising - U.S. information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 percent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role including confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal emails or board-meeting minutes. [more]

Life in the Looking Glass - Sometimes when I look at our industry I start feeling like Alice when she fell through the looking glass. Nearly all companies have failed investments in software initiatives -- many in the six and seven figure range -- and yet they insist on acting as if nothing's wrong! Curiouser and curiouser, indeed! The good news is that the leading causes of these failures can be avoided by applying Menlo's High-Tech Anthropology^® practice. Join us for the next FREE 90-minute presentation on July 18th to learn how our approach creates the right software for the right application.

Adapting Websites to Users - Anyone who has ever built a website knows that you can't please all the people all the time. In fact, you usually feel lucky if you please some of the people some of the time! But what if a website could adapt to match the cognitive style of the visitor? It would watch for traits, such as whether or not the user is detail oriented, and morph to complement that style. In fact, the user wouldn't even know that the website was being customized for them as they surfed. [more]

That's My Kind of Bug! - Cost of gas got you down? There may be a solution coming in the form of genetically altered bacteria. Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide "renewable petroleum." In other words, these bugs eat agricultural waste and excrete petrol. [more]

The Death of the Hyphen? - The BBC reports that in the most recent edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, about 16,000 compound words that once took hyphens have lost them, including fig leaf, leapfrog, pot belly and test tube. What's the cause of all this change? Fast-fingered writers of e-mail messages. (Or is it Email?) [more]

Catching the Bad Guys - Typically people are identified by items such as driver's licenses, passports, or credit cards -- all items that are easily faked. So how to you ensure that the criminal you're dealing with is really the person you think you're dealing with? A Michigan State University researcher has developed an automated image retrieval system to help law enforcement identify criminals and victims by unique identifiers such as tattoos, scars, and marks. Called "Tattoo-ID," each image in the database is linked to the criminal history records of all the suspects and convicts who have a particular mark. [more]

The Ultimate in "High" Fashion - NASA's spacesuits have remained largely unchanged for more than 40 years, but all that is set to change. The current suits were built to solve a different set of problems than those that face today's astronauts. The new suits will take a modular approach, and the suits for launching and entry and those for stepping out onto the lunar surface must share components, including the helmet, lower arms, legs and boots. [more]