Nice summary of experience with Orkut, the new social networking site from Google. Conclusion is that perception of “security” is perhaps an intangible emotional construct much as a functional one. Paging BJ Fogg!

Appearing soon at the SF Indie Film Festival, Value-Added Cinema “a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots…insinuated into dialogue, thrown front and center like loss leaders, even engulfing entire features until they become little more than cross-promotions for toy manufacturers”

Tags: compilation, film, negativland, product placement

NYT article about spelling errors on eBay.

Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although the auction house flags common misspellings online, Mr. Griffith said, the most common question he gets is, ‘When will eBay get a spell checker?’ His answer? ‘You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary.

Now that’s a customer-oriented attitude!

Urban Outfitters is guilty at least of rather poor taste if not outright racism.

I got the same blank stare from a friendly clerk when I hit the store on Monday. ‘Well, the Irish shirts have shamrocks. The Jewish shirts have dollar signs,’ she patiently explained, saying she figures they’re about the same.

Tags: anti-semitism, racism, uo, urban outfitters

It’s called cyber bullying. Already common in North America, it is about to become rampant, driven by the army of Internet-connected camera cellphones that preteens and teenagers received as gifts over the recent holiday season, experts warn.

I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on Tuesday, February 10. Free and open to the public.

Kawaii: Adventures in a Parallel Universe
When conducting user research, we always strive to get outside our own default expectations and perceptions, to better see the details of what we’re looking at. Some interesting things can happen when you get completely outside your own experiences, perhaps in another country where the language (and food, and everything else!) is beyond your own experiences. In this presentation Steve will use examples from fieldwork in Japan to illustrate some of the advantages of being a bewildered and naive outsider, and will suggest some tactics for best managing a foray into a strange land.

Computer-Human Interaction Forum 2004 lecture series program: “Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) has announced its 2004 program series.

Wednesday, Oct. 6: “Whose Line is It Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography, and Improv.”
Researcher Steve Portigal examines how researchers can use improvisation to learn the difference between what respondents say and how they say it.

Internet-Toy is not simply a doll that repeats what you have recorded.
You can connect Internet-Toy to the Internet ot the computer and continuously download diverse contents. That is why kids will not get bored and it is a very efficient early education.
By connecting to the Internet or the computer, a convenient way to download data, Internet-Toy had become a good friend and teacher to your kid .

Tags: Korean, toy, translation

Right now it’s all about action for the actor/director/rapper, who’s starring in the new motorcycle movie “Torque.” But in an interview with Associated Press Television News, Cube, 34, discussed his desire to do art-house movies. He also talked about his music career and his children, the oldest of whom is now 17 and attending the same high school he did.

This still from The Matrix Reloaded is quite surprising…

Visitors to Tokyo sex shops may soon find it difficult to buy schoolgirls’ used underwear

Phase 3 is profit!

Culture jamming here: this person designs beautiful posters etc. that they use to completely mask advertisements in phone booths, subways, etc. Good video of the process, and the results.

(From Craigslist) Little People for Hire

Salon 1941, an intellectual society based in San Francisco, is hosting a Valentine’s Day fundraiser sponsored by SOMA Magazine, Panjandrum Magazine (Paris), Cool-’Eh Magazine (New York), and Only Hearts Lingerie.

Hosts of the masquerede/lingerie ball are searching for Little People to work as waiters in Cupid costumes. Costumes will be provided. Waiters will be well compensated.

Applicants must be shorter than 4 feet 10 inches in height.

A widow has filed a lawsuit with the Okayama District Court claiming about 63 million yen in damages from her husband’s employer for making him work excessive hours of overtime and causing his death in April 2002. In the suit, the woman says her husband died at 57 after being forced to work 200 hours of overtime every month for 18 years. In December 2002, a labor ministry office in Kagawa Prefecture determined that the man died of overwork.
The number of cases of ‘karoshi’ or death from overwork has jumped to record highs in recent years.

Interesting restaurant review

Shortly after, the waitress came in with another large, shallow lacquerware bowl. She placed the bowl in the center of the table. The shrimp were on their sides paddling their legs furiously in the low water. “What the heck are we supposed to do with these?” I thought, looking around for a hibachi. Silly me. We were supposed to eat them — while they were still alive and kicking!

Without hesitation, one friend grabbed a shrimp, deftly pried off the head between his thumbs, pulled off the legs and tail with his other hand, and popped the body into his mouth. “Oishii!” he yelled, which prompted another person to do the same, although it took him a few tries to keep the wiggly thing in his hands while decapitating it.

Everyone looked at me. “Aren’t you going to try it?” I tentatively reached into the bowl and picked up a shrimp, but when it started squirming, I screamed and dropped it. “Um, I’ll pass,” I said, as another shrimp suddenly jumped out of the bowl, did a full mobius and landed on the tatami mat, sending everyone scrambling to retrieve it.

Then came shrimp tempura. Kind of like a before and after episode. I ate the fried shrimp while the live ones continued doing acrobatics in the bowl in front of us. If someone had laid a chopstick over the bowl, it would have been like the high jump at the Crustacean Olympics.

Then came the octopus, live and waving its legs from the bowl. The legs were cut up into small pieces, about 5 cm long, but each had a life of its own. My two Japanese friends dived into the bowl of legs with their chopsticks, yelling “Oishii!”

Everyone looked at me again. “Aren’t you going to try it?” I looked at the octopus for a while. After all, it had no eyes, head or tail, and only one leg. I clenched a piece of leg as it writhed between my chopsticks. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and shoved it into my mouth, concentrating on only one thing: chewing it to death.

But what happened next, I was completely unprepared for: the leg adhered itself to the inside of my mouth! I tried to spit it out, but the octopus held on tightly to my cheek through the tiny suction cups on its legs. All I could do was chew. And chew. And chew. Down to the last suction cup. Finally, I was able to swallow the pulp.