Mind controlled robotic hand now better

Now that Jan's tests are done, the scientists are looking for more volunteers in an effort to further improve the technology. They still need to fix an issue that causes it to stall when it's holding an object, as well as to find a way to turn it into a wireless, wheelchair-mounted device, if they want it to be useful outside a lab. Of course, they aren't the only research team working on a bionic limb controlled by thoughts alone. BrainGate isdeveloping a very similar limb, while Duke University scientists have created a mind-controlled exoskeleton that Juliana Pinto used to open the World Cup in June.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/17/darpa-mind-control-robot-arm/?ncid=rss_truncated

Falcon9 on a barge?

SpaceX's next test flight hopes to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a platform -- in one piece. The company puts the odds of success at around 50 percent "at best" but it's apparently a major step towards reusable space rockets - and cheaper trips to space. While it's already been able to demo two soft water landings, on a solid surface (and one that's not tethered to anything), things get trickier. The rocket will be coming in at a speed of around 1,300 meters per second, making stabilization, well, tricky.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/17/spacex-rocket-landing-x-wing-supersonic-autonomous-spaceport-drone-ship/

The Pirate Bay shutdown

For the past decade, if you wanted to download copyrighted material and didn't want to pay for it, it's likely you turned to The Pirate Bay. Up until a police raid took it offline last week, it was the most popular place to grab Sunday's episode of The Newsroom or Gone Girl months before the Blu-ray hits stores. You didn't have to log in to some arcane message board or know someone to get an invite -- the anonymous file-sharing site was open to everybody and made piracy as simple as a Google search. That's what scared Hollywood.

The movie industry claimed that in 2006 alone, piracy cost it some $6.1 billion. Naturally, it went after the biggest target to exact its revenge: the Sweden-based site known as The Pirate Bay. Given Sweden's lax laws regarding copyrighted materials, Hollywood had to enlist the United States government for help cracking down on the site. The US threatened that unless something was done to take the site offline, it'd impose trade sanctions against Sweden by way of The World Trade Organization. That led to Swedish police raiding the outfit in 2006, confiscating enough servers and computer equipment to fill three trucks and making two arrests. Three days later, the site was back up and running and more popular than ever thanks to a swell of mainstream media coverage.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/16/pirate-bay-shutdown-explainer/?ncid=rss_truncated

Design Principles: Space And The Figure-Ground Relationship

If you see graphic design as a process of arranging shapes on a canvas, then you’re only seeing half of what you work with. The negative space of the canvas is just as important as the positive elements that we place on the canvas.

Design is an arrangement of both shapes and space. To work more effectively with space, you must first become aware of it and learn to see it — learn to see the shapes that space forms and how space communicates. This is second part of a series on design principles for beginners. The first part covered an introduction to gestalt; the rest of the series (including this post) will build on those gestalt principles and show how many of the fundamental principles we work with as designers have their origin there.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/05/16/design-principles-space-figure-ground-relationship/

Design Principles: Visual Weight And Direction

Every element on a web page exerts a visual force that attracts the eye of the viewer. The greater the force, the more the eye is attracted. These forces also appear to act on other elements, imparting a visual direction to their potential movement and suggesting where you should look next.

We refer to this force as visual weight and to the perceived direction of visual forces as visual direction. Both are important concepts to understand if you want to create hierarchy, flow, rhythm and balance in your composition.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/12/12/design-principles-visual-weight-direction/

Design Principles: Connecting And Separating Elements Through Contrast And Similarity

Similarity and contrast, connection and separation, grouped and ungrouped are all ways to describe the varying sameness and difference between elements. Based on the information they carry, we’ll want some elements to look similar, to indicate that they are related in some way. We’ll also want to show that some elements are different and belong to different groups.

Key to showing both is the visual characteristics of elements and their relationships. If two elements are related in some way, then they should show similar visual characteristics. If the elements are different, then they should look different.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/09/22/design-principles-connecting-and-separating-elements-through-contrast-and-similarity/

Workforce changes

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Modifying CSS Sharepoint & Scholantis

How to add an Alternate Style Sheet in SharePoint 2010

by Nigel | posted: July 15, 2013 0 Comment

Alternate Style Sheets in SharePoint 2010 allow us to easily apply some branding to the SharePoint interface by overriding the default styles.
To define the style you wish to change use Firebug for Firefox or Internet Explorer’s Web Developer Tools.
Once you know the style you wish to change then create a new CSS file on your local machine with that style in it. If you only want to change one descriptor for that style then you only need to include that descriptor.
For example:
If you wanted to change the font size of the .ms-WPTitle style.
The default style is:
.ms-WPTitle {font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; }
All your new css file needs to contain is:
.ms-WPTitle {font-size: 10pt;}
Follow these instructions to add the new CSS file as an alternate CSS file.

1. Choose Site Actions > View All Site Content
2. Choose Style Library > XSL Style Library
3. Upload your new CSS file making sure it has a descriptive name such as custom-styles.css
4. Choose Site Actions > Site Settings
5. Under the Look and Feel section choose Master Page
6. Under the Alternate CSS URL section choose ‘Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it’
7. Click the Browse button and locate the custome-styles.css file you uploaded a few moments ago and choose OK
8. Click OK on the Site Master Page Settings Page

Your alternate styles will now appear.

http://blog.nigelgentry.co.uk/add-alternate-style-sheet-sharepoint-2010/