Etherwatch monitors your Ethernet traffic, looking for images, and Google search terms, and displays these on screen in a mosaic format. It’s a cool way to see what’s going on over your network.

When the terror bubble meets the LBS? MapShop for Homeland Security is a tool for crisis management and situational awareness. This application provides crisis management centers the ability to create a common operational view with accurate street data, imagery, census data, and real-time weather, without having to load any GIS software onto their desktop.

Java Location Services is a portal that features the emerging market of Location (Based) Services. Location Services combine Web, wireless and GIS technologies to provide the means to exploit location information anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Java and XML are key enabling technologies.

Keyhole’s technology (recently acquired by Google) combines a multi-terabyte database of mapping information and images collected from satellites and airplanes.

Keyhole’s rationale for its EarthViewer 3D product is that maps are the stock and trade of most geospatial solutions, but it’s important to remember that map reading is an acquired skill and maps leave out as much as they include. It uses 3-D viewing as a vehicle to present users with answers to complex geospatial queries. Users can enter addresses or query the EarthViewer “yellow pages” for points of interest, and they will receive a “video-game-quality” realistic view of the location with “fly over” capability. “Find all French restaurants,” for example, yields icons placed at locations so users can “fly” to and around locations.

The first version of ShoutSpace on laptop.

Via Slashdot a resourceful guide on Usable GUI Design targeted to Open Source Software developers.

From Hembrooke, H. & Gay, G. (2003). The Lecture and the Laptop: The effects of multitasking in the classroom. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 15(1), 46-65. [link]

“Students in the open laptop condition suffered decrements on traditional measures of memory for lecture content”.

“Broadbent proposed that there is a limited processing channel that information is filtered from a sensory processing stage on it way to a short-term memory store or buffer.”

“In two studies, students performing multiple tasks performed significantly poorer on immediate measure of memory for the to-be-learned content”.

“In the follow-up analysis we discovered that page-relevant content di not predict better performance, and spending the majority of class time on class related content did not result in better test performances”.

“Grace Martin & Gray (2001) similarly found that longer browsing sessions throughout the course of the semester resulted in lower overall class perfomance, and that many and shorter browsing session during a class period, irrespective of content, led to higher class grades”.

“While students were obviously distracted by having access to the Internet, e-mail, IM, and browsing as evidenced by their performance on traditional tests of memory, their performance in the class overall does not reflect this same disruption.”

If students can become “better browsers”, or at the very least become more facile at self-monitoring their browsing behavior, the typical decrement found under multitasking conditions might be negated”.

Finally, these results clearly indicate the need for setting boundaries and stablishing “tech-etiquette” for using wireless technologies in the classroom. High-tech doodling for some students can defeat the purpose of using them in the first place”.

Some very nice election result maps which adjust the size of the states due to population. Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results.

A simple class to give transparent backgrounds to images in Java graphics. Make a color transparent.

Blogstreet just launched a new tool that uses Java to let you view your Blogstreet “neighborhood” and click on your neighbors to expand and see their neighborhoods. Most probably uses TouchGraph.