Latest Irish rumblings on Electronic Voting

From Ryano Stuff
Here's some of the latest news on the state of the Irish evoting issue.

Irish Citizens for Trustworthy eVoting (ICTE) have finally had a meeting with the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and officials from his department. Representing ICTE at the meeting yesterday were Colm MacCárthaigh, Margaret McGaley and Adrian Colley. You can find a preliminary report on the meeting on the archives of the e-voting mailing list.

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Jef Raskin - May he rest in peace

From the press statement:
Pacifica, CA February 27, 2005--Jef Raskin, a mathematician, orchestral soloist and composer, professor, bicycle racer, model airplane designer, and pioneer in the field of human-computer interactions, died peacefully on February 26th, 2005 surrounded by his family and loved ones. He had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
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Raskin was a noted member of the early Apple team and creator of the Macintosh Computer during the 1980's. His work in interface design has influenced many standard techniques of the modern UI such as "click and drag". More recently, his published work The Human e Interface has helped spread his message on how we should consider and approach the communication of information to users. It has had a prime spot on my book shelf since its publishing and now his keen insights and approaches will be missed.

Chilling Effects Project

Here's an interesting web resource:

The Chilling Effects project aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. The Chilling Effects project encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, and George Washington School of Law clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/

BBC Radio Science on Fonts via Real Media

FROM ARIAL TO WIDE LATIN - The secret language of fonts

Ian Peacock explores how the fonts we choose operate as a secret language.

Everything about Card Sorting

Put the "card" back into card sorting: Computer-aided paper sorting (Caps)

(As if you all didn't know this already but!) Card sorting is a powerful technique for assessing how users group related concepts together. In its simplest form, a researcher would write concepts - usually menu items for interaction design - on cards and ask users to group related items together. In a closed card sort, the number of groups and their names are fixed. In open card sorts, the number and names of groups are determined by the participants, although the researcher may specify limits (3 to 5 groups, for example).

Back to Blogging

After too long of an absence I'm back to blogging. This has been due to a mix of project and PhD as well as our move the new Engineering research building.

For pictures of our new space, please check out some of Mikael's shots.

Back from the Kildare trenches for more check out or for the gossip.