Fav5

Classes start on Monday. Here's my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest before the storm begins:

1. Delete 10 of your Facebook friends for a free Whopper. No kidding.
   
   


2. There's an informative article in the NY Times about T.V. Raman and his work at Google to improve technology for the visually impaired. Raman is one of the architects behind AxsJAX, a Google technology to improve the accesibility of AJAX-based web applications. I met Raman a few years ago at the WWW conference in Banff, and I was impressed at how efficiently he seemed to use his computer with the aid of a screen reader.
   
   


3. Here's a reminder of the horrible costs of war and how crazy our world has become: the DOD wants to build an application to allow children to have conversations with their simulated mom or dad who is off to war. Not their actual parent, a simulated version of their parent.



4. Self-powering cyborg cockroaches. Nuff said.
   
   


5. This week I got back last semester's student evaluations. In general they were pretty good, but it's always the negative comments you remember most, even if they are totally unwarranted. A fellow faculty member tried to cheer me up: teachers that get the best evaluations are either hot or easy. Hmmm... was he trying to tell me I'm not very good-looking?