(If you have time, you can watch the full-length version of Gordon Ramsey: Shark Bait)

This is one aspect of Chinese culture we can do away with. And the swelling numbers of affluent mainland Chinese does not bode well for the worldwide shark population at all.

If you have not said no to shark fin soup yet, this is a good time to take a stand. It might make for some awkward wedding dinners but it also provides an opportunity to talk about this problem when people ask why you’re refusing the soup.

If we don’t start to make a difference now, they may not be around by the end of this century. No bowl of soup is worth that.

- Gordon Ramsay

I remember when I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was just another new instant messaging service (think ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype etc.), joining the already crowded market of IM services. Now that Twitter is 5 years old, the full influence of the service is slowly beginning to be understood. Not many 5 year old tech companies can make a star-studded ad like that.

Now, whenever there is breaking news, my first source of information would be Twitter. Updates on traditional news sites like CNN and BBC seem to take ages, compared to the near-instantaneous speeds that information travels on Twitter. Sure, not all the information posted on Twitter is reliable but since when is that the case for any source of information? It simply means that I perk my ears up a bit more when I read the news on Twitter but I believe that only serves to improve my own critical analysis on the reliability of information I come across.

Besides keeping updated on news, I also use Twitter to follow experts in my domains of interest. Photography, web design, mobile technology, entrepreneurship…the list goes on. Now, instead of having to click through thousands of websites to look for all these information, they simply show up on my Twitter stream, helpfully shared by people who deem the information useful for others. I have probably learned more useful things spending 30 mins going through my Twitter stream than I have from a day at university.

What do you think? Am I overstating the usefulness of Twitter? If you’re not using Twitter, why are some of the reasons you don’t think it is useful?

Owner’s manuals have always been drab pieces of documentation written in the most boring language possible. I usually find that they seem to be thrown in almost as an afterthought for many products and come in a multitude of languages that I’ll never be able to read, making at least three quarters of the pages useless to me. And the troubleshooting section at the back of most manuals usually feature the most inane problems and solutions possible. However, owner’s manuals are usually the first thing a user of a device sees when they open the box for a product and they are also the “first line of defence” for a manufacturer when a user runs into technical problems with the device.

A user manual that is designed well can create a favourable first impression of the product and also entice the user to find out all the capabilities of the device that they might not know about from playing with the device themselves. It could also reduce the cost of providing technical support over the phone, email or in person if the included documentation covers a wide range of issues. I don’t know why companies don’t put more resources into designing their user manuals. Is it because the costs of doing so outweighs the perceived benefits?

To that end, it’s heartening to see that Hyundai is willing to try something different and put an end to the days of the boring old owner’s manual.

Wired has a pretty cool post and video, linked below, giving a glimpse into how all the visual effects were done.

via Wired.

In an extremely simple yet effective manner, the ad showcases how Google’s technology touches our everyday lives. A series of search queries turn out to tell a story, with a slight surprise at the end.

This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age.

An interesting way of putting things into perspective, including looking back at early uses of computing. And very nice animations to boot!

It reminds me about a reading I did a few days back for my technological entrepreneurship class about legacy costs for a company and how it can come back to bite the company. I think if we’re building for trillions in the future, using legacy infrastructure carried over from the past (or even the present), the legacy stuff is going to come back and bite us hard. The film is basically saying that we have to build for the trillions from the ground up. That requires a complete rethink of the way we build our networks and devices now, which is very challenging to do as we’re so invested in the current way of doing things.

It’s also interesting how the film is also saying that everything that we need for building for trillions is already present in nature. The complexity of God’s creation is just so staggering that I wonder if we can ever come close to building something like that, and have it work as efficiently as nature does.

The group has even come up with a rather cute video to promote their campaign. The clip features cartoon drawings of people from all walks of life (even an alien!) peeing in the shower and is narrated by children’s voices. The ad ends with the campaign’s tagline: “Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic rainforest!”

Alongside the video, they also have a fun-looking website for the campaign. Although I can’t understand a word of Portuguese, the website does seem very well-designed.

So remember, the next time you want to save the rainforest, start by peeing in the shower.

When Endeavour docks with the International Space Station (ISS), it will set a record for the most humans in space at the same time in the same vehicle, the first time thirteen people will have been at the station at the same time.

This mission also carries Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, a graduate of McGill University. Her launch into space also marks the first time two Canadian astronauts are in space at the same time, the other being Robert Thirsk, who is in the middle of a 6 month stay on the ISS.