Filed under: Video Games

Bad news Wii-athletes, swinging that little white controller around is no substitute for honest to goodness physical activity. According to a study by researchers at John Moore University in Liverpool, England, playing games such as ‘Wii Bowling’ and ‘Wii Sports’ only burn about 60 calories an hour, or a measly two-percent more than simply sitting on your rear. A half a cup of raisins has 218 calories — you’d have to play the Wii for almost 4 hours to burn it off.

On the plus side the researchers did say these extra calories could help to contribute to weight management, but still suggested kids get out and join little league.

From the BBC

Related links:

• Nintendo Wii Adopted by Physical Therapists for Patients
• Largest Nintendo Wii Accessory Yet
• Nintendo Wii Rehabilitates Injured Soldiers, Stroke Victims

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO)

In November internet search engine rankings by comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) again lead the pack, with 5.9 billion core searches conducted — a 58.6% market share of all searches in the internet. This was almost the exact same level as October.

Coming up a distant second (as usual) was Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) with market share of 22.4%. The next three were Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) at 9.8%, IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s (NASADAQ: IACI) Ask.com at 4.6% and Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) AOL at 4.5%. In November (a seasonally weak month for web searches), U.S. web searchers conducted 10 billion searches — a 5% decline from October.

Do these rankings surprise any web surfer? They shouldn’t — Google continues to dominate internet searches and Yahoo!’s Project Panama — although technically a job well done — is probably too late to the party to put any significant pressure on Google. Microsoft’s Live Search push has garnered it about the same market share as in the past (a decent third place). The power of first-mover advantage is quite evident in Google’s placement, and I’d suspect it’s not going anywhere soon.

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Filed under: Newspapers, Google (GOOG), General Motors (GM), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), Toyota Motor Corp. (TM)

MAJOR PAPERS:

• The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported that last minute shopping in the days before Christmas salvaged a slight increase in overall retail sales for the season, but the total still fell short of predictions with gasoline-price inflation factored out. According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, total U.S. retail sales, excluding automobile sales, rose 3.6% for the holiday season spanning the day after Thanksgiving to midnight Monday.
• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) announced it would pay $4.5 billion for a 60% stake in Marmon Holdings, an industrial conglomerate. The deal, Mr. Buffett said, is Berkshire’s largest acquisition outside of the insurance industry, reported the Wall Street Journal.
• The Wall Street Journal reported that Toyota Motor (NYSE: TM) said it aims to boost global sales by 5% in 2008 to 9.85 million cars, pulling further ahead of rival General Motors (NYSE: GM). Toyota also said it expects global sales this year of 9.36 million vehicles, up 6% from 2006.

OTHER PAPERS:

• Japan’s NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) is in talks with Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) to strengthen its business alliance in a bid to upgrade services for its mobile phone users, DoCoMo officials said Tuesday, reported Bloomberg.

WEBSITES:

• Advanced Semiconductor (NYSE: ASX) has laid off over 40 workers at its flip chip substrate plant in northern Taiwan and has reportedly suspended a plan to expand its FC substrate capacity, DigiTimes.com reported.

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Filed under: Recipes, Spices, Sugar, Christmas

I first spotted this recipe on Tastespotting and knew instantly that it had my name written all over it. I am a sucker for baked goods that incorporate herbs and so this one called to me (I also have a recipe for Lemon Basil cookies that I want to try). I made some adjustments to the recipe. It didn’t come together easily, so I added several tablespoons of milk. For the first time in my life (I normally reduce the amount of sugar in things), I actually added more sugar than the recipe called for, because when I tasted the dough, it tasted like there was hardly any sugar in it at all. I was happy with the way the cookies turned out and I loved the fact that it didn’t hurt the dough at all to hang out in the fridge for a full 24 hour period. Check out my adapted recipe after the jump.

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Continue reading Cookie-a-Day: Rosemary shortbread

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Filed under: Farming, Vegetables, America

Saturday morning I met up with sometimes Slashfooder Sarah Gilbert and her youngest son at the Portland Farmers Market. It was cold and rainy (normal for this time of year in Portland) but that didn’t stop us from first taking a loop of the whole market to see what was being offered before starting to buy in earnest. It was the first time I’ve been to this market and I was totally awed by what I found. I thought that we were doing pretty well in Philly with our Headhouse Square Market, but Portland had put us totally to shame.

I tried to be restrained in my buying, knowing that my mom had already the bulk of the holiday food shopping and I won’t have that many opportunities to cook before I head back to Philly on the 29th, but I still managed to fill the reusable bag I brought with me and spend around $20 on some of the most gorgeous produce I’ve seen in a while. I was particularly taken by the mountain of turnips you see above. There was something about the freshness and sheer abundance that seemed to embody the best qualities of a farmers market.

Sadly, it was the last Saturday for the Portland market until spring. Thankfully, it will be open again when I get out this way again during the summer. I can’t wait!

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Filed under: Vegetables, On the Blogs, America, Europe, Christmas

For most of the years of my life, my family has eaten string beans as the main vegetable for Christmas dinner. We don’t do the traditional green bean casserole, instead choosing to steam them and dress them with butter, toasted almonds, salt and a little roasted garlic. They are so good and my sister, mother and I often fight over the leftovers the next day.

However, this year we’re planning on deviated from our tradition in order to have a huge bowl of these Brussels Sprouts instead. Sadly, according to our friends over at Green Daily, Brussels Sprouts are not a particularly green choice for the holiday table. Apparently the seem to have the ability to cause some people to have a bit of gas after they eat them. If you multiply that gas over the millions of people who eat sprouts for Christmas dinner, it can have something of an effect on the green house effect. Luckily, for those of us who don’t want to give up our sprouts, we can follow these simple cooking tips in order to reduce their gassy effects.

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A child playing with Picture This and his Naruto action figure

Continuing my research on perspective taking and tangible video editing, I recently finished the development of Picture This, a video editing and capturing device designed for young children. It allows them to craft compelling movies through the motion analysis of their interaction with toys. Children’s favorite props alternate between characters and cameramen in a film. As children play with the toys to act out a story, they conduct algorithmic film assembly.

Picture This’s web site.

In my prior work, Moving Pictures, I wanted to offer children the opportunity to gather imagery from their environment in the form of short video clips captured on video camera platforms modified for the application. I wanted to provide a transparent experience for the user, in which the cumbersome process of capturing and editing becomes fluid in the improvisation of a story and accessible as a way to create a final movie.

Web site for my past work on Moving Pictures.

Tangible interfaces combine operations on physical objects with digital data. I have sought to develop interfaces where either digital data can be overlaid onto physical objects in a display space or physical objects can act as handles into the digital space. The tangible handle is more than a marker or place-holder for digital data. It has the power to materialize and redefine our conception of space and content during the creative process.

If the toy had a visual perspective immediately accessible to the child, a new world would be opened to her. The toy could potentially bring the child into exploring visual and narrative perspectives of these character props, expanding her discovery and understanding of social interrelationships.

A video snippet of Picture This and a 6 minutes video for its interaction design.

The Picture this tool is an audiovisual device that combines two digital video cameras and two accelerometers. The tool captures motions, video and sound in real-time while an algorithmic video editing system composes a movie from these inputs. A motion based editing engine fluidly assembles the film as its story is being narrated, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing, namely, a sequence of shots that appear to be continuous.

This style of film editing is made possible in Picture This by detecting turn taking behaviors between the toys. Two toy props are augmented with video cameras and custom accelerometer hardware. They use the Picture This tool both as a doll hand-bag or a doll audiovisual recorder. The tool is flexible for a child to take the perspective of props she selected for her movie.

Also my portfolio for selected projects is finally online!

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Icelandic Rift by new media artist Sabrina Raaf

Cultural Chicago is a community site for the arts based in Chicago. The online journal offers the possibility for readers to contribute with local cultural news. Among other things, it advertises Chicago artists, exhibitions, art events and allows readers to create a local community by sharing similar interests through a forum, regular posts and bookmarks. I wish such a journal existed in Boston. Combining the sharing of local art events with informative interviews to a social network is kind of unique.

Reading and subscribing to the journal, I discovered the spectacular work of Sabrina Raaf on creative machines capable of generating unique and unpredictable manifestations of art.

In her interview by Cultural Chicago, Sabrina Raaf explains:
“Technology (software and hardware) is not only a means or set of tools. It does also necessitate a type of logic-based thinking in order to use it and subvert it creatively. You really have to be a person who is innately fascinated by new technologies in order to be able to suffer through the learning curves and endless upgrades. But, ultimately, new technologies offer an endless string of more and more powerful and flexible tools to make art with. Even beyond that, they offer a new language to speak to viewers with; there are nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., that artists haven’t ever strung together before in the service of art. And, that’s something really exciting.”

Grower is a piece that responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air generated by human breath. It draws individual blades of grass along a wall in varying heights in accordance to the amount of carbon dioxide present. As such it functions as a real time display on people attendance to the art space!

Dry Translator, a sculptural installation piece, is built in response to new trends in ‘smart architecture.’ Smart technology is being created for enhanced human interaction and control of one’s work and home environments. Interestingly what excites many is not the necessarily the enhancement of control, but really more the idea of intelligent responsiveness and heightened personal connection with the rooms they inhabit, dixit Sabrina Raaf.

In the journal I also enjoyed reading the interview of Colleen Plumb, Nature in Urban Spaces. The artist “examines nature in the urban environment, seeking to examine the relationship humans have with animals, how we coexist with the natural world, and the disappearance of it within the urban space.”

Lobby with trees by Colleen Plumb

Being a video game addict at the same time than loving being lost in the countryside, I am always puzzled by criticism on a virtual reality that drives us from our physical reality. Reading this interview was refreshing and the following image by Colleen Plumb talks for itself. The overgrown tree squeezed within walls to provide a relief to humans, an experience of nature, recreated and artificial for the sake of us feeling/being connected to nature.

Laundromat

“We live in a time of games and virtual experiences which I find funny, sad, and, I guess, a reality. What effect could this be having on people? I guess representations are created due to a lack of the actual. We certainly can’t walk through a forest of bamboo trees in downtown Chicago. It seems that almost real will suffice most of the time. It must provide relief, these fabrications, otherwise they would not be so popular: The Rainforest Café. Well, the trees here are real—they are in a fake habitat, a lobby, and seem to be thriving. - Colleen Plumb”

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Akira

Anime are usually perceived either for children, teenagers or pervert adults. In fact, a lot of them are really good: cinematographically inspiring, with rich character development and epics stories. Each of them is a wellspring of interaction design ideas for innovative products. I find them refreshing. From Akira, Ghost in the Shell, to Blood: The Last Vampire. I cannot wait to watch Karas! A few manga series maintain these high standards with similar qualities.

It has been now a year that I started watching Bleach, a manga series written and illustrated by Tite Kubo. In Bleach, a high school student, Ichigo, has the ability to see ghosts and interact with shinigami or death God. I absolutely adore the soul society made of handsome and complicated post-human characters.

The Quincy in Bleach.

I watched Death Note, an anime written by Tsugumi Ohba. A high school student decides to rid the world of evil with the help of a supernatural notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. The shinigamis in Death Note resemble apocalyptic Goths. What strikes me in these anime is the ability the characters have, good and bad, to stick proudly to their initial moral values.

L, my favorite character in Death Note

I adored Noein, a short science fiction anime television series directed by Kazuki Akane and Kenji Yasuda. Two timespaces fight with one another: La’cryma, a possible future of our own universe, and Shangri’la, a dimension intent on the destruction of all space and time. The “dragon Torque”, the child version of a character from the future, is the key to stop Shangri’la’s invasion.

Karasu in Noein

One Piece presents the adventures of “the Straw Hat Pirates”, formed and led by a captain named Monkey D. Luffy. The characters try to obtain the world’s ultimate treasure, One Piece. With each character’s back-story, the adventures become entwined with one another.

One Piece

I am an anime fan. I saw fans gathering at conferences with splendid anime costumes. The Halloween Costumes‘ web site proposes a selection of characters costumes. I must say, I was disappointed by some of them, mainly by the feminine outfits. The Nico Robbin costume looks kind of tacky while she always appear to wear the latest couture piece in the anime!

On the contrary, the Bleach’s simple shinigami costumes are quite good. I had a good laugh at the execution ground outfit for Ichigo (from Bleach). Who would want to wear a broken arm outfit while he/she could enact the bankai form!

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There are rumors that Salman Khan is interfering with girlfriend Katrina Kaif’s latest flick, ‘Welcome’.
Actually, these rumors are false and are creating lot of problems between the couple and also for the director.
“There have been rumours about Salman being unhappy with Katrina wearing a short skirt and all that, but those are only talks. Salman […]

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