Today you’ll see a great example of what a woman did with a small piece of land without any “architectural” help: 2 rooms, kitchen, 3 bedrooms with washrooms and a veranda! This narrow house belongs to the lady in yellow - Helenita Queiroz Grave Minho ,designed by her. She live in this 1 meter wide by 10 meter tall house in Madre de Deus, Brazil. At first, the municipality refused, but in the end with the plan allowed the construction, that became a touristic spot of the small town of 12 thousand people. I think that this project is a very unique idea and something like this could be designed in big cities where the space is really a problem, but to live daily in a house like this would be exhausting. - Via - Ahboon

TAKEN FROM freshome.com

How to Spot a Photoshopped Image

BountyFishing works like so:

• Participants go fishing and photograph what they catch
• Participants then submit these photos to the BountyFishing website
• BountyFishing awards cash and prizes for the longest validated catch

The biggest hurdle we faced was how we were going to validate and authenticate the fish photos our users submitted. Photos altered with Photoshop can be incredibly convincing. With a few simple clicks of the “Quick Selection Tool” the fish shown below (top left) was selected, dropped into a separate layer, and stretched to add more than an inch to its length. With a little more work to move the shadow and soften any rough edges, the resulting image (top right) shows no signs of tampering.

Unaltered image

Photoshopped image

The solution we found was to use a piece of software developed by Hany Farid, a professor at Dartmouth College who is renowned in digital forensics. When the fish was stretched, Photoshop filled in the missing pixels by interpolating their values from the original recorded pixels. These regularly spaced new pixels are a specific combination of their surrounding pixels. Such regularities rarely occur in natural images, so their presence can be used as evidence of tampering.

Shown below is the output of the BountyFishing software that detects these correlations – the red-coded regions corresponds to the doctored portion of the image.

This software is used by federal law enforcement agencies and can detect various forms of tampering.
We have exclusive rights to the software for measuring fish, but if you really feel like getting your hands dirty with digital forensics Hany Farid’s website has an interface to MatLab for manipulating and analyzing digital images. In addition to the software above, a few other dead giveaways that a photo has been altered are:

• Excessive cloning - repetition of a particular piece of the photo, often used to stretch or morph images.
• Inconsistencies in lighting and noise. The easiest way to spot altered lighting is to increase the contrast of a photo so all the differences in lighting are exaggerated.
• Look for shadows that don’t match up what’s casting them.
• Optical aberrations, including patterns that aren’t seamless or appear to be inconsistent (or artificially consistent) with the surrounding area.
• Using human anatomy and other reference points BountyFishing verifies the authenticity of the ruler’s length.

We’ve got a flash demo of how we authenticate photos that gives a little bit more information about how this all works.

TAKEN FROM www.bountyfishing.com

Construction is nearly complete on the Beijing Olympic Stadium, shaped like a massive steel bird’s nest, and the swimming-pool-filled Water Cube, which looks like a piece of glowing alien machinery. This is an actual photo of the buildings at night. We’ve also got some less-surreal glimpses of them too.

Here you can see people posing in front of the Nest last week. And here’s a closeup of the crisscrossed steel girders that form the exoskeleton of the Nest. The Water Cube is actually made of high-tech materials that emulate bubbles to keep the heat inside the building.

TAKEN FROM  http://io9.com

Lester Chan’s GaMerZ has announced that he has unleashed the first wave of updates for 11 of his WordPress plugins. These include:

• WP-EMail 2.30
• WP-PageNavi 2.30
• WP-PluginsUsed 1.30
• WP-Polls 2.30
• WP-PostRatings 1.30
• WP-Print 2.30
• WP-RelativeDate 1.30
• WP-ServerInfo 1.30
• WP-Sticky 1.30
• WP-Stats 2.30
• WP-Useronline 2.30

The remaining four plugins, WP-Ban, WP-DBManager, WP-DownloadManager, and WP-PostViews will be updated in wave two. Lester has stated that all of these plugins should work in WordPress 2.5 only and they have not been tested in any version below 2.5. Also worthy of note is that the folder path of some of the plugins have been fixed. Previously, the path was nested in another folder which generated a ton of hate mail for Lester because it broke automatic updates. Now that the path has been fixed, the automatic plugin upgrade feature should work correctly.

*Note* I updated my GaMerZ plugins today on my personal blog through the plugin upgrader in 2.5 and all of them were upgraded successfully.

Lester has been developing plugins for WordPress for quite some time now. We have praised Lester’s work at various occasions and we use many of his plugins actively on this site (including the post rating system you see below). He is a meticulous coder, provides extensive documentation, download options and demos and even provides his own support forums. Please be patient with his server, it takes a while to load the linked page but the downloads are mirrored, so they should be quick.

On my own blog, I’m using at least seven of his plugins. If you are using one or more of Lester’s plugins, let us know in the comments.

It’s not quite a glass-domed city yet, but St. Petersberg has taken the first steps towards that goal. British architecture firm Wilkinson Eyre, best known for the design of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge in Newcastle, unveiled a bold new plan to revamp the old market of St. Petersburg, Russia by putting it entirely under glass. Over the next few years they’ll be putting a giant sheet of reinforced glass over Aprasin Dvor, a shopping district. A matching glass bridge will span the river. We’ve got some interesting facts about the project.

Here are some deets:
- A glazed crystalline glass tensegrity roof reflects weather conditions but keeps pedestrians dry.
- A new building on the Fontanka River will replace the decaying 60s Publishing House.
- A lightweight tensegrity footbridge will be built over the river. It’ll look like a shiny cloud. Images by Wilkinson Eyre

TAKEN FROM io9.com

Samsung has come up with a sexy landline phone with all sorts of net capabilities. The SMT-i8080 can give you two-way video calls via Ethernet thanks to its flip-up LCD and embedded video cam, as well as allowing users to buy stuff, reserve movie tickets, stream audio and watch internet TV, using the phone’s navigation buttons below the screen.

Although only available in the Far East right now, Samsung has plans to roll out the phone throughout the US and Europe, saying that it sees a market for for the i8080 worldwide. Prices will depend on the service you choose, and will probably include a subscription to the phone’s special Internet features.

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

I’ve always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it’s a no brainer—it’s been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do.

Simple as that.

So, it catches me off guard when people question something so fundamental. I’ve had people email me to settle disputes over the issue, such as the time a reader told me about an argument he was having with his boss. The employee thought it was archaic to tell people to “click here,” and his boss thought otherwise.

I politely replied that for once the boss was right. I never heard back.

Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.

Someone has the wrong idea.

It’s been a bit since I’ve seen any actual test data on the use of actionable link anchor text, so I thought I’d share the results of a Marketing Sherpa experiment performed with their newsletter readers. The goal was to find out if the wording used in hyperlinks could make a difference in clickthrough rates.

The answer is yes. They found that the right two or three click link words can lift clickthrough rates by more than 8%.

Here are the results:

• “Click to continue”: 8.53%
• “Continue to article”: 3.3%
• “Read more”: (-)1.8%

The lesson is clear. Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response. Click here to read the original Marketing Sherpa article in its entirety, and have a good Monday.

TAKEN FROM www.copyblogger.com

If you ever thought about visiting something other than your usual summer destination, do avoid the following beaches. These places in India are not what would consider a vacation spot. And, among all the residue and trash, people fish there.

TAKEN FROM www.wackyarchives.com

The Scottish Highlands are one of the most sparsely populated regions in Europe and are popularly described as the most scenic. The winding roads guide travelers and residents alike through purple-speckled mountain ranges, tall forests, rolling hills and along lake sides.

Like Ireland, the Highlands are lush with green grasses, but also see a number of colorful shrubs. Most commonly purple, heather — a type of perennial shrub — sweeps the area, from mountain tops to roadsides, also appearing in a range from white to pink, and sometimes even red, contrasting with the surrounding green meadows and forests. Although they may brown, the heathers’ flowers don’t necessarily fall. Other shrubs that sweep the Scottish Highlands range from grey to brown and green to yellow, but when the rain comes, the hills are alive with a vivid green.

But it’s not just the plant life that has colour. Carved from thick ice age glaciers, the mountains stand tall, pouring their tumbled grey and brown rocks into the almost purely blue lochs, some of which can even have white sand. The sparse population means that light pollution is minimal, allowing the mountain-crowded sky to feel expansive and blue.

For a land so beauteous, it shouldn’t arrive as a surprise that the mountain top views are breath-taking. Being a land so different from even its lowland counterpart, the Highlands are packed with so many unique views and colour blends.

taken from www.colourlovers.com

Wow, I don’t even know where to start with this lamp. Its awesome factor is just out of this world. The Alien Abduction Lamp consists of a metal UFO containing the light (complete with an array of alien pilots) which is supported entirely on a frosted glass tractor beam. The cone shaped beam serves to diffuse the light and spread it around, and by turning the intergalactic communication antenna on top of the saucer (also the on/off switch), you can set the light inside the saucer to “pulse” the beam. Why would you want a pulsing beam? Well, how else would you propose to abduct the cow or human who are available as accessories?

If you’ve ever wondered just what the heck those aliens are thinking, abducting cows and stuff, the lamp’s designer Lasse Klein explains it all:

“We know that martians abduct hundreds of cows each year. We also know that Elvis lives on Mars. Put these two facts together, and you’ll realize that the Martians are busy collecting Earth cows to keep Elvis with a steady supply of hamburgers… It is well known that Martians abduct humans. We also know that Martians have useless hands. Combine these facts with the previous conclusion, and it becomes clear that humans are abducted to serve as burger flippers to keep the King happy on Mars!”

The Alien Abduction Lamp is only a concept at this stage, but I don’t see how it could possibly fail to be produced for purchase. And if we never hear about it again, it will be for one reason and one reason only: a government conspiracy, man.

TAKEN FROM www.ohgizmo.com