science & technology

johanna blakley studies the impact of mass media and entertainment on our world. as the deputy director of the norman lear center (a media-focused think tank at the university of southern california) johanna blakley spends much of her time exploring how our entertainment interacts with our political, commercial and social habits. she is especially interested in the surprising impact of intellectual property rights on innovation, organizing conferences around the lack of creative ownership in fashion as well as technology and the ownership of creative content.[ted]

at some point you need to change the size of the objects on your website as you change or modify the template to accommodate the advancements in browsers and displays. however, if you use THE embed CODE provided by youtube, the size of the video object will be static which means that in order to change the width and height of all the videos in the posts you SHOULD edit them one by one; that is a lot of work and stupid.
i tried to replace the static width and height values of youtube videos with php variables but i failed. i didn’t know that wordpress doesn’t let you embed php in posts. today a friend of mine told me how to get around that by installing a plugin that allows using php in posts. just before looking for that plugin i thought to myself: “wait a second! isn’t there a youtube plugin that does what i need? mayBE better and fancier?” the answer: there are so many of them! INstead of reinventing the youtube plugin, i now post a video about reinventing the wheel using the existing youtube plugin called: smart youtube.

gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as “funware”), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. it also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications.gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. the technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.
[wikipedia]

a see-through mobile device by merl: mitsubishi electric research laboratories.

in this talk from 2003, design critic don norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure, and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. he names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.