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The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.

Last week at Google I/O we released the Google Maps API (JavaScript version) addition to the Developer Qualification program. Designed for professionals who currently develop or want to develop applications based on Google and Google-sponsored Open Source APIs, the Google Qualified Developer program will help promote developers to the Google community, provide credibility, and leverage the wisdom of the masses in rating and recognizing best in class developers. In this program, we assess developers in four areas, each of which provides a score towards an overall total required for qualification. Developers must maintain a minimum number of points to remain qualified within the program. Points are awarded for examples of development work, community participation, professional references, and scores on examinations.

Michel Mazzoni e-mailed me today with a selection of images from his series' Zones & Fragments Theories. In both these projects, Mazzoni explores the landscape as a place wrought with social alienation. Figures are situated in the landscape as sculptures, often dwarfed by vast and anonymous spaces.

I would also recommend looking through his series Interstices, which has a number of nice images.

or the last few years we have studied the diffusion of private information about users as they visit various Web sites triggering data gathering aggregation by third parties. This paper reports on our longitudinal study consisting of multiple snapshots of our examination of such diffusion over four years. We examine the various technical ways by which third-party aggregators acquire data and the depth of userrelated information acquired. We study techniques for protecting against this privacy diffusion as well as limitations of such techniques. We introduce the concept of secondary privacy damage. Our results show increasing aggregation of user-related data by a steadily decreasing number of entities. A handful of companies are able to track users' movement across almost all of the popular Web sites. Virtually all the protection techniques have significant limitations highlighting the seriousness of the problem and the need for alternate solutions.

The number of new and revised titles produced by traditional production methods fell 3% in 2008, to 275,232, but the number of on-demand and short run titles soared 132%, to 285,394. The on-demand and short run segment is the method typically used by self-publishers as well as online publishers.

littleBits, a growing library of preassembled circuitboards, made easy by tiny magnets!

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

littleBits, a growing library of preassembled circuitboards, made easy by tiny magnets!

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

Application Programming Interface, a phrase that has a number of different meanings to the people build and use APIs, and virtually no meaning at all to those that don't. I like to think of an API as a bridge - one which allows information to flow from one piece of software to another. In the case of the Guardian's Content API, the bridge allows us to send requests to and receive information from the Guardian's huge database of articles, images, and other assets.

Wile working with the GPS track data of the UrbanDiary project, in connection with the series of interviews I am conducting, I suddenly recognized the different shapes and patterns that are being produced by the participants. Really funny shapes and forms, but always with a number of strong fix points. The shape is determined by a number of factors such as the spatial relationship of destinations, the distances traveled, the amount of travel and the intensity of repetition. The first point, relationship of destinations makes for the overall shape and the last point, the intensity of repetition makes for the character of the shape.

The images are all generated from participants that have a track record of two month and are the same scale.

Make PPE milk bottles into good looking LED lights, and use an Arduino to control them. This recycles a number of things, mainly the milk bottles, and uses a very low amount of power: the LEDs apparently dissipate less than 3 watts but are bright enough to see by!

Easy, says Sapolsky. Let's say 10% have done this taboo sexdeed, 90% haven't. Tell your subjects that those who have done the taboo sexdeed should answer the question honestly, ie confess to it. Add that those who haven't done the taboo sexdeed should toss a coin. If it comes up heads, they should say they have done the sexdeed, whether they really have or not. If it comes up tails, they should say they haven't, again regardless of what they've actually done.

This randomizing process will allow the people who have done the taboo sexdeed to confess it, knowing that they have an alibi, should they be challenged, in the shape of the coin. As long as they understand the rules, everyone who did the taboo sexdeed should confess. The researcher then just needs to double the number of people who say they haven't done the non-taboo deed -- everyone else has done the taboo deed.

Mifare RFID tags, like other RFID tags, contain a serial number that can be read using an RFID reader, but they also have a limited amount of memory space that you can write data to, and read back from. This can be handy if you want to do something like keep a user’s account balance or name directly on the RFID tag.