I have always enjoyed public lectures and was lucky enough to go to schools and a university where they were encouraged.
Some public lectures on the web that I have really enjoyed over the last year include:
Hans Rosling at TED 2006 and 2007 discussing world development using the best stats since Peter Snow hit newsnight.
There are things that humans do well that computers do poorly. Harnessing all those 'human computing cycles' is an extraordinary challenge and opportunity.
I came across this talk by Luis von Ahn, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon a year ago and it was one of the most interesting and thought provoking I had seen in years.
Having enjoyed it so much, I was ecstatic to see recently that the the task of digitising the world's books is being helped by the reCaptcha programme.
In a previous team, thinking about how to manage the resizing of thousands of photos automatically and intelligent was central to what we did. Of course if you automatically resize, you basically can only set a target for one dimension and have to exclude images whose aspect ratio will not fit into your target template.
This video represents an extraordinary breakthrough in that area and one that I have no doubt will be part of Photoshop / Picasa and hopefully GIMP in no time at all. This is great innovation and we will all be printing off holiday photos using this in the next couple of years.
As for the early and easy ability to erase objects from photos - amazing if not a little scary. See for yourself at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc.
I am not a fan of reading too much into the journey between the airport and a capital city. It flatters dictators with aspirations of grandeur and seldom is an accurate reflection of a county. Some experiences however stand out.
Arriving in Beijing recently I turned up to to passport control and was greeted by 'Good Afternoon!'. The 2008 Olympics have clearly focused the minds of all agencies in China but my surprise over the welcome was completely overshadowed by my amazement seeing a survey tool build in to the passport control cabinet.
That's right,the panel says 'How satisfied were you with the service?'. Very happy | happy | unhappy | very unsatisfied. Smiley faces that allow you to feedback on how friendly and helpful the officer was. Oh if these existed in the US.
I should be clear - you can not vote until you have your passport back. The buttons simply do not light up.
This of course does not outweigh not being able to log into Wikipedia and the BBC - both of which were blocked on my short stay but it is striking.
I use an Lenovo Thinkpad X60S with Ubuntu 6.10 extensively while travelling. The following are some tips that have worked for me when using Ubuntu / Thunderbird on the road:
