Recording your kid's promises with a digital camera: Parent Hacks | Parenting tips

If your kids tend to forget their promises, this might help: My husband came up with the idea of using the video function on our digital camera to record her promising not to get upset when we say "no" to candy later because we're letting her have a piece early. It worked! We've started doing it other times, too. She loves the digital camera, and it reminds her about the whole "delayed gratification" thing.

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Educate your kids with Google Video

Kim's husband introduced their toddler to the wonders of Google Video:

My husband was searching Google Video for different animal videos (child-friendly ones - hence no SHARK ATTACKS SURFER ones). Our son was in a trance, and he learned the difference between a shark, a whale and a dolphin, he got to see deer, penguins, brown bears, etc. -- it was like watching National Geographic personalized and up close.

Our son's absolute favorite was Matrix Cow - very funny rendition of a cow in a Matrix-style fight - he laughs so hard from the moment the cow snorts and jumps on his back two legs. I have to agree it was pretty funny the first time or two - but he got a bit too attached to this one… "AGAIN, do cow AGAIN".

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The 7 deadly sins - and the 21 secondary sins

If you plot the 7 deadly sins as 7 nodes in a graph, and then convert it to a fully connected graph, each edge in the graph will represent a secondary deadly sin consisting of a pair of the original deadly sins. Then you get this fascinating diagram from:

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Using web-2.0 to look for missing scientist (Jim Gray)

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful. Now, Amazon has created a novel effort to help find him. They have put up satellite images of that area from the appropriate time frame on the into the Amazon S3 storage service. Then, they created tasks on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service to search for the missing boat in those pictures.

Examples of the object to look for in various orientations. The size of the boat in the sample images is the size of the object you are looking for, even though the images you are scanning are much larger.

See related post on Werner Vogel's blog. (Werner is the CTO of Amazon.)

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YouTube - Jeff Han on TED Talks

Very cool demo of something called "multi-touch" sensing. This could be the future of interaction with the computer (instead of the standard mouse). Click to play the video. Very cool.

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Don't miss the gorilla

See this interesting article on how "focussed" humans become when they have a specific task at hand. Excerpt: Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team - not easy given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enteres the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla? Fifty percent of all observers do not see the gorilla.

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Buying and Selling Software Bugs

The New York Times has an interesting article on how a market exists for software bugs. If you find a new bug in any software (typically a security related issue) you can sell it on the market - either to "legal" buyers like security companies, who do it to plug the holes, or to hackers and other internet criminals who can use the knowledge for identity-theft schemes or spam attacks. Excerpt: The Japanese security firm Trend Micro said in December that it had found a Vista flaw for sale on a Romanian Web forum for $50,000. Security experts say that the price is plausible, and that they regularly see hackers on public bulletin boards or private online chat rooms trying to sell the holes they have discovered, and the coding to exploit them. And also:

“To find a vulnerability, you have to do a lot of hard work,” said Evgeny Legerov, founder of a small security firm, Gleg Ltd., in Moscow. “If you follow what they call responsible disclosure, in most cases all you receive is an ordinary thank you or sometimes nothing at all.”

Gleg sells vulnerability research to a dozen corporate customers around the world, with fees starting at $10,000 for periodic updates. Mr. Legerov says he regularly turns down the criminals who send e-mail messages offering big money for bugs they can use to spread malicious programs like spyware.

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