I've run across several very good academic search engines lately dedicated to largely postscript documents. I'll be extending my bounce list from searches to incoporate some of these, though in my view postscript is a hassle. Cora Research Paper Search is the most topical of the bunch, check out this page of 50 interaction design papers.
11/30/1999 8:56:22 PM



Precision Searches covers the high end market for web search tools. Ask Jeeves, Google, and Northern Light are all cashing in -- interestingly, NL claims to be based on neural net technology.

The early workings of google have been well documented on the net. Ask Jeeves uses a proprietary process combined with their software, though natural language searching has also been well explicated in the academic community.

The Verity system that powers this web is largely satisfactory for me, and is particularly effective for commercial sites when combined with Allaire's Spectra, which solicits custom meta data about every content or product in a site. (forgive the moment of commercial intrusion, I work for a high end cold fusion development co.). I'm planning to enhance the help files for this engine's syntax, but quote, plus, and minus all do what the veteran searcher would expect.
2:21:38 PM



Salon ran a story in '98 on a biofeedback device of the computing age, a brain implant in fact:
"It's an electrode and a couple of wires that come together in a glass container," says Kennedy about the device, which is designed to stay in for a lifetime. "The container has trophic factors in it. These induce growth into the tip, so the brain tissue grows in there, and the wires record across the tissue. And we transmit those signals out across the skin with another transmitter, pick them up, amplify them, run them through a computer."
Slashdot discusses it a year later. The implications are immediately medical, intrigueingly artistic, and destined to be interfacual?
11/29/1999 7:07:45 PM



I just finished a power read of Bruce Sterling's Distraction. It was a great ride, dealing with one of my favorite topics, hippocampal function combined with a new 2044 scenario of political intrigue.

Dug into the HF and the Web archives. Indexed selections from 2nd and the 3rd conference.
5:42:11 PM



OpenGRID is a proposal for a open source collaborative page ranking system combining the best of Google and the Open Directory.

I've done lots of indexing recently, including selections from UIDesign.net and the 5th Human Factors and the Web proceedings.
11/28/1999 9:20:41 AM