What do you get when you put together one of the most talented violinists in the world, a Stradivarius and a Washington DC metro station crammed full of government employees rushing off to work? Not much apparently. Joshua Bell a world renowned classical musician plays incognito at metro station during rush hour.

Read the article at the Washington Post.

Thanks to Matt for this.

Google just launched “Google Voice Local Search” a free phone based local information tool. They are calling it Google 411.

How it works: Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone, the service then asks for city and state. It then asks for a category or business name. It uses speech recognition to input your selections, and returns the results using computerized speech synthesis. The speech is much better than Microsoft Sam, but still sounds computerized.

Verdict: Absolutely brilliant.

I’ve never been a fan of plain jane bulleted PowerPoint presentations. Text bullet points which are read aloud seem like they are really for the speakers benefit and do nothing to help the audience. Instead the speaker should keep bullet points where they belong - on note cards. Instead they should offer the audience additional information on the screen not the same exact information.

Now there is research which suggests that not only is this method an ineffective tool to communicate information, it may actually cause the audience to learn less from what you are saying.

Researchers in Australia have found that when the same information is presented verbally AND visually at the same time, it causes a mental overload which keeps us from learning as much as from one source alone. Instead the researchers favor speaking to information presented on screen not reading it verbatim. Some examples of more effective communication would be showing a graph or photo which inform a particular point you are making.

Sydney Morning Herald article

Professor John Sweller’s Research at the University of New South Wales

Sawatdi Khrap! Sabaidee! Chau! Ni hao! 90 Hours of train rides, 90 hours of bus rides and 7,000 pictures later - I’m back. A full report and my photos will be online asap!

From Flickr

Internet Explorer 7 has been launched by Microsoft. It took me two attempts to install it, it froze during the first. Not too much has changed between the RC1 and now. I’m off to bug-test my personal and client’s sites in the new ie! Grab your own copy over at microsoft.

Google Labs has released a public search code tool, check it out at Public Code Search. It enables searching of source code directly, which will allow website developers to search for examples to particular coding problems or similar code to use as a guide when they get stuck. Obviously this is only going to help with clientside scripting like javascript. I’m going to experiment a bit more and report back any other uses I find.

Update: Patrick has an interesting post about the potential security holes created by codesearch Google Presents Code Search and it’s threat to Wordpress security. This is similar to problems with leaving any file on your server, even if its not directly web accessible (linked to).

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so if you liked the first two movies go see it - BUT its not as good, or even close. The first two were directed by Bryan Singer, but when he exited to direct Superman Returns, the producers had some difficulty finding a replacement. Taking his place is Director Brett Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour series, and thats about it. Singer managed to make the movies as much as about the story as the action. Ratner is all action, and not much else. For a real review check out the onion av club’s review.