Even more quick links

Even more of what has caught my attention recently:

• Spooky but cool research: "Electrical pulses to the brain and muscles ... activate and deactivate the insect's flying mechanism, causing it to take off and land ... Stimulating certain muscles behind the wings ... cause the beetle to turn left or right on command." ([1])
  
  
• Good rant: "Our hands feel things, and our hands manipulate things. Why aim for anything less than a dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate? ... Pictures Under Glass is old news ... Do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?" ([1])
  
  
• Googler absolutely shreds traditional Q&A and argues that the important thing is getting a good product, not implementing a bad product correctly to spec. Long talk, if you're short on time, the talk starts at 6:00, meat of the talk starts at 13:00, and the don't miss parts of the talk are at 17:00 and 21:00. ([1])
  
  
• "There has been very little demand for Chromebooks since Acer and Samsung launched their versions back in June. The former company reportedly only sold 5,000 units by the end of July, and the latter Samsung was said to have sold even less than that in the same timeframe." ([1])
  
  
• With the price change to offer Kindles at $79, Amazon is now selling them below cost ([1])
  
  
• Personalization applied to education, using the "combined data power of millions of students to provide uniquely personalized learning to each." ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6])
  
  
• It is common to use human intuition to choose algorithms and tune parameters on algorithms, but this is the first I've ever heard of using games to crowdsource algorithm design and tuning ([1])
  
  
• Great slides from a Recsys tutorial by Daniel Tunkelang, really captures the importance of UX and HCIR in building recommendation and personalization features ([1])
  
  
• Bing finally figured out that when judges disagree with clicks, clicks are probably right ([1])
  
  
• Easy to forget, but the vast majority of US mobile devices still are dumbphones ([1])
  
  
• Finally, finally, Microsoft produces a decent mobile phone ([1])
  
  
• Who needs a touch screen when any surface can be a touch interface? ([1])
  
  
• Impressive augmented reality research demo using Microsoft Kinect technology ([1])
  
  
• Very impressive new technique for adding objects to photographs, reproducing lighting, shadows, and reflections, and requiring just a few corrections and hints from a human about the geometry of the room. About as magical as the new technology for reversing camera shake to restore out-of-focus pictures to focus. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Isolation isn't complete in the cloud -- your neighbors can hurt you by hammering the disk or network -- and some startups have decided to go old school back to owning the hardware ([1] [2])
  
  
• "The one thing that Siri cannot do, apparently, is converse with Scottish people." ([1])
  
  
• Amazon grew from under 25,000 employees to over 50,000 in two years ([1])
  
  
• Google Chrome is pushing Mozilla into bed with Microsoft? Really? ([1])
  
  
• Is advice Steve Jobs gave to Larry Page the reason Google is killing so many products lately? ([1])
  
  
• Why does almost everyone use the default software settings? Research says it appears to be a combination of minimizing effort, an assumption of implied endorsement, and (bizarrely) loss aversion. ([1])