First of all:
How Target Can Predict If You’re Pregnant
Fascinating article from the NYT outlining Target’s GuestID and analytics department. Humans very much creatures of habit but there are times in people’s lives when habits are severely disrupted and one of the major ones was having a baby, target wanted a way to know when their customers may be pregnant so they could send them coupons. Subtly.

Then there is this one:
On the growing digital divide
It’s something I hear about a lot, especially from sites such as The Guardian but not something I had put much thought into. California has recently voted to shutter funding for public librarys but this user posts a very insightful account of working in a public library and the risk of an ever larger digital divide as services are closed in the age of austerity that we live in.

And finally:
The case for the James Webb Space Telescope
Hubble came in late, way over budget and at first didn’t work. But when we look back now at the level of information it has given us I doubt many astronomers would say it shouldn’t have happened. Moving on, as Hubble ages and the replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is also facing the same woes this piece tells of the need for a space based telescope to peer into the heavens even further.

All three articles are not short but I would so dearly like you to read them.

The game started well with both sides seeming fairly even matched but the Packers got the first touchdown just under 4 minutes from the end of the first quarter and followed up with another TD from an interception. The second quarter started with a Steelers field goal and finished with a touchdown each for either side and 21-10 to the Packers at half time. Yet with a number of injuries in the packers defense, they couldn’t hold the steelers at bay who scored the only touchdown of the third quarter closing the game to just 4 points. With another TD by the packers three minutes into the final quarter, I felt the game was beyond reach of the Steelers but as I have learnt with american football, a 10 minutes is a long time and plenty of time for the game to change. Change it did as the Steelers got another touchdown and a 2 point conversion closing the game to 3 points and needing only a field goal to level the game. The steelers then held the Packers eight yards from the end zone and ended up scoring a 23 yard field goal kick on the 4th down taking the score to 31-25 and the ball back in the steelers hands. A drive down field then saw the steelers get to their own 13 yard line but an interception on the 4th down saw the ball turned over back into the Packers hands allowing them to run out of the rest of the clock.

Overall it was a very good game with two tightly matched teams, without the two early touchdowns I feel the Packers would not have been able to contain the Steelers offense following injuries but the Steelers couldn’t full capitalise on it and trailed all the game. It certainly got rather tense toward the end of the game and I thought there were a couple of times that the steelers were going to get through but the packers held strong and deserved the win, especially after the departure of Brett Favre.

Yet the Super Bowl is as much about the football as it is about watching the commercials. Here are the ones that I thought were the best.












And here are the trailers for the films I want to see

The full list is here

Tesco’s iPhone Prices
Canvas Given the go ahead
Iplayer on Android 2.2 and flash 10.1
Swype Review
You’re Holding your iPhone Wrong
Estimated Android Market payouts
Why I am Skeptical of iAds
Thankyou Part 1
Thank you Part 2
UK West Ham of Broadband
Longest Tennis Match Records
Youtube wins Viacom case
Why the ipad is not good for content creation
Iphone tarrif comparision spreadsheet
Pandorica opens iPlayer image
Cheap Tablet doesn\’t match up to the ipad
Open source making traction in enterprise
ICANN gives nod to .xxx
Why the iphone\’s aerial isn\’t good
Journalists unite to stop DEA
Examining BT\’s FTTP

Hope you enjoy reading them

I must confess here I have minimal coding skills (nor do I have a tin hat ). I do not know how feasible this is and how you would go about doing it. Anyway here is the idea

The user upon installing the extension can specify a list of 4 -5 five sites that, when the browser restarts, will be loaded in order of preference (preferred priority list). Any other tabs/pages rather than reloading the page display a simple large refresh button that the user can press when they want to load that tab.
Therefore when the browser restarts, in my preferences would open
1. Plurk
2. Facebook
3. The Student Room (Homepage but not individual threads which I usually have open in tabs. Could possibly be done by using some sort of wild cards.
4. Reader

The main disruption to work flow is, not when I boot my computer up first thing and my first point of call would be them above sites, but when I am busy doing something. So to get round this problem the user could then right click on the tab and assign it a priority of between 1 and 3, for reference sake lets call this quick priority. Then when the browser is restarted it looks at the list of tabs in the quick priority list and loads them and then loads your preferred list. Upon closing that particular tab it is removed from the quick priority list and if there is nothing in the quick priority list then it will dive straight in and open up the tabs in the order specified in your preferred list.

And so having just had to restart my computer it would have meant that I didn’t have to wait for 16 tabs to load, half of which are articles that I am going to read another time.

So after watching that I went on to the ted talk builder here (http://get-tedpad.com/) and this is the result. Masterpiece.

How many of you could think this way? It would be a good choice that requires great imagination. (Applause.) Thank you very much. I think that a mirror for the world would help. For every single one of us, I would like to compare our brain to recognize the exact way it’s supposed to think et cetera, et cetera. It is like French phrases such as “et cetera, et cetera”. But I should be more specific when referring to a milky weak coffee that is quite nuanced in the same way that our neurons are. Efficient trimming causes the brain to tell you that it needs to rest a little. But I would like to use the underlying data to create beautiful statistics. All of a sudden, people noticed that in the middle of voyages, there are often beautiful places that you miss. I would like to compare this to a patient who was very comfortable with himself. If you look at the science behind it, happiness is to go along where life takes you.

The Arctic Oscilation (AO) is a pattern of changes in sea level pressure in the Arctic and over the Azores. During positive fluctuations there is low pressure over the Arctic and high pressure over the Azores causing droughts in the Med, warmer than average temperatures over much of europe along with rain in northern parts of the UK and Scandanavia. Durring negative fluctuations however there is high pressure over the Arctic and Low pressure over the Azores bringning cold arctic air to northern europe, drier conditions to the UK and cold arctic air reaches southerly latitudes in the US & Canada.

Take a look at the graph below. This graph shows a 3 month moving average for the AO and you can see at the end of 2009 there is a large negative fluctuation.

This is then corroborated by what we are see. Heavy snow falls have blighted the UK for the best part of a month now. In new york, Washington and Phillidelphia places have been inundated with more than 2 foot of snow in places.

The thing is though no one knows how long it is going to last. From the sites that I have read to gather this information they recon that they snow could be here for anywhere between 1 week to 2 but looking at the BBC weather forcast simulation it shows that the country could start warming up again by the weekend.

In the mean time we’ll all just have fun in the snow.

Now that I have uploaded the photos, you can see all of them here, I think this one has to be my favorite

As you can see, I have a new theme. I have spent a bit of time making it and obviously it is now ready to show the world

I have also been to london and took a few pictures. Here are my favorites so far…