Introducing the Microsoft Visualization Language

Vedea is a prototype of a new experimental language for creating interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational art. 

It is designed to be accessible to people who are either new to programming or whose primary domain of expertise is something other than programming. 

Microsoft wanted to give those users a tool that they can use to realize their own vision and visualizations without having to engage skilled programmers, but have it be an environment that skilled programmers would not find limiting.

for more information visit :

• Link 1
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Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of ‘SixthSense’ technology

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop".

In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Watch the video – click here

About the Genius

Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher; he’s a graduate of IIT. Mistry is passionate about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.

Some previous projects from Mistry’s work at MIT includes intelligent sticky notes, Quickies, that can be searched and can send reminders; a pen that draws in 3D; and TaPuMa, a tangible public map that can act as Google of physical world. His research interests also include Gestural and Tangible Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, AI, Machine Vision, Collective Intelligence and Robotics.

to know more about him : click here

Firebug like tool for IE , Safari & Crome

I always use firebug in firefox to check my web pages while developing my applications. I became use to of that. So I thought there must be some tool for IE also. So I googled on that and I came to know that IE Developer Toolbar is the tool that I works like firebug.

Download link : here

Same way I have searched Tools that work like Firebug on Crome & Safari. I have found that Web Inspector can help me to do so.

Web Inspector

The Web Inspector allows you to view the page source, live DOM hierarchy, script debugging, profiling and more!

•    Safari — Enable the Develop menu option in the Advanced preferences. Use the optional toolbar button, Develop menu or Inspect Element context menu to access to Web Inspector.

•    Google Chrome — Enabled by default, use the Inspect Element context menu to access to Web Inspector.

For download & more info : here

What is PageGlimpse ?

PageGlimpse is a service providing developers with programatic access to thumbnails of any web page. The thumbnails can be virtually used in any kind of applications that require the display of website screenshots: web sites, windows/linux/mac applications, iPhone/mobile utilities, browser plugins, etc.

Including web site thumbnails in your application will dramatically improve the user experience. The service is easy to use, fast and reliable, no restriction on thumbnail sizes or number of hits. Click here to see how it works.

 

Click here for more info……

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

 

Click here for more info…..