Over the years these tastes have changed with Furby’s, Cabbage Patch Dolls and programmable robotics taking the top spots for children’s wish lists from Santa Claus.

This year though it would seem that Santa’s elves might have to seek alternative employment in a Chinese Foxconn factory.  New research released by Nielsen into what electronic devices children want has shown that the top three slots on children’s 2011 Christmas wish lists are dominated by Apple.

In the research they say that 44% of children aged between 6 and 12 want an iPad, 30% want a iPod Touch and a huge 27% want an iPhone.  I say huge as most people would hardly think of a child between the ages of 6 and 12 as the target demographic for a mobile telephone.

After this a computer sits in fourth spot and a non-iPad tablet (presumably Android) sits in fifth place.  In fact the list is completely dominated by technology that includes games consoles, portable and static, televisions, non-iPhone smartphones, blue-ray players and eBook readers.

There can be little doubt that tablets have captivated the minds of the young, because of the new and exciting ways they allow people to interact with the technology, be that zooming in on photographs or flinging birds at pigs.  It can also be argued however that the devices offer solitary play opportunities for children and don’t encourage them to build interactions with other children in the way that most people consider healthy.

The research also shows what children aged 13 and over are interested in buying over the next six months.  Again the iPad sits as the most desirable item with 24% of the vote and a computer bringing up second place with 18%.  Again this list is entirely dominated by technology though it is interesting to note that smartphones of all description, including the iPhone which held the number 3 spot for younger kids, are much further down the list in the teenagers age group with the iPhone sitting in seventh place and other smartphones and non-smartphone mobiles sitting in 8th and 17th place respectively.

At the end of the day it is parents who will make the final decisions, so we will no doubt expect stockings to be full of dolls, coloured goo and lego with perhaps a solitary computing or gaming device taking the top gift spot.  Children want what children want but this doesn’t ever mean that they will get their own way.

What have your children asked you for this Christmas?  Are you own family experiences a mirror of the Nielsen research or are your children after a bow and arrow set and a colouring book?

While I’m not 100% sure, I believe that the Liquid Information add-on is the successor of the Hyperwords extension created by the same company.

The add-on has seen impressive reviews on the Mozilla add-on repository with an average rating of 5/5 stars in more than 200 reviews.

The add-on has improved a lot in past years. When you first install it you get a small introduction window that explains some of the core concepts. Here you can open the program’s settings which I highly recommend to make configuration changes (you can access the settings by entering about:addons in the Firefox address bar and clicking on the options button in the Liquid Information row).

You can select how the Liquid Information menu appears in the Firefox browser under General. Options are to make it appear automatically when selecting text, to move the mouse pointer over an icon after selecting text or on right-click. All options work reasonably well in day to day use.

The layout tab defines how the context menu appears in the browser. Some categories, like translate, are not selected by default. Users can select all or some reference sites under each category, New sites and categories can be added easily to the extension. Categories are added right from the layout menu, new sites from their search form on the actual website (with a right-click and selecting Add to Liquid Information).

The Other tab finally offers access to many different settings, from the default search engine over the way urls are copied and shared to how results are opened in the Firefox web browser.

It needs to be mentioned that the extension will use its own Google search engine by default and not the standard Google search in order to make money to fund the development. Users can upgrade to Liquid Information Pro in the add-on options to use the standard Google search layout instead. The developers are asking for a donation but are not enforcing it.

An alternative would be to add the Google search homepage a second time to the add-on’s context menu to bypass this limitation.

The add-on can speed up research in Firefox noticeably, especially since it can add nearly any search engine out there to the add-on’s context menu.

Interested users can download and install the Liquid Information add-on from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

Update: The Firefox add-on has been discontinued. It is no longer available. We are not aware of any comparable add-ons at this time.

The research “measuring the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser” was apparently conducted on 100,000 people who went looking for an IQ test.  As I pointed out at the time the data from this research would have been utterly meaningless, as it completely failed to take into account people using web browsers both at home and at work where they would have had no control over the browser they used.

Now it has emerged that the entire thing was a hoax with the BBC reporting that not just they, but other big media organisations including CNN and Forbes were taken in (not gHacks though I’m happy to say!).

It has emerged that the company website for AptiQuant was only set up recently and that all the staff images had come from a perfectly legitimate, and unconnected, business website for a company in Paris.

The BBC contacted the French firm, Central Test, who confirmed that they’d been made aware that AptiQuant has been using its images with the staff names changed.

It was quite an elaborate hoax with an extensive research document (containing grammar errors) and a very convincing website to back it up.  There is no clue at this stage who was behind the hoax.  In the study AptiQuant said…

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser.  From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

gHacks readers too it seems are a savvy bunch with Jakin posting “This is a stupid study.   Intelligent people can choose to use IE or use another browser”  though Betttie said “IMHO, the study is among the most robust I’ve come across.”

It can be argued that the reason the hoax was so successful worldwide is because of the venom many people have towards Internet Explorer and the knowledge that some users of Microsoft’s browser can be less likely to know about, or know how to find, download and install other browsers.  With the exception of businesses still using Internet Explorer 6, it can be argued that it’s these people who are unlikely to even have Windows Update switched on, let alone download a new version of the browser whenever the update service tells them that one is available.

This is not proof of people having a low IQ however, far from it.  Instead this is merely proof that technology is very confusing and difficult to use for many people.  That these people should be considered “dumb” was something that gHacks users seemed particularly keen to attack, and good on you for it.

The BBC sought an alternative view to the research and asked Professor David Speigelhalter of Cambridge University’s Statistical Laboratory, he said “I believe these figures are implausibly low – and an insult to IE users.”  When the BBC tried to contact AptiQuant on the number provided on their website nobody was available for comment.

Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos commented that “It’s obviously very easy to create a bogus site like this – as all phishers know it’s easy to rip-off someone else’s webpages and pictures.”  He went on to add that this is exactly the type of behaviour exhibited by phishers and malware writers.  Though he added that the PDF file from the website containing the research appeared to be free of any malware.

The research, for which 50,000 people in 46 countries were interviewed showed that Japan, probably the most tech-savvy country on the planet, is also the one where people have, on average, the least number of friends online.

The figures showed that Japanese people had an average of only 29 online friends compared to the top-rated country Malaysia where Internet users have an average of 233.  Elsewhere in the far east, the Chinese have an average of 68 friends. 

Some of the greatest numbers are, in second place, Brazil with 231 and Norway with 217.

The research, which is extremely detailed, found that people are now using social networking websites to communicate more than email and that access via mobile devices is increasing rapidly.

In the United States, 76% of people are online with up to 66% of those people accessing the Internet from a mobile device.  Of those people online 17% said social networking was important to them.

Compare this to the UK where 83% of people are online and, while the number accessing the Internet from mobile devices is broadly the same as the UK, 24% said social networking was important to them.

The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves and then began to pass that knowledge on to others.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” said Professor Sugata Mirta of Newcastle University in the UK, at the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.  He said that follow-up experiments suggest that children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly, and with little supervision.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”  The children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.  “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said.

Professor Mirta has now formalised lessons from his experiments and has come up with the new concept of SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments).  These consist of a computer on a bench large enough for four children to sit around it.  He said the learning doesn’t really take place when you give a child their own computer.

He has tested the spaces in the UK and Italy, with similar results, and now believes it should be tested more widely.

Interested users can perform a text search which can either be broad or very specific. Advanced search parameters allow to specify a timeframe, place of publication, publication section, frequency and language among other parameters. It is furthermore possible to only search for information that are freely available. Free newspaper articles are available instantly while those that are not free require a registration on the site and the purchase of a 24-hour or 7-day pass which are good for 100 and 200 articles during that time (the website selling the passes was unavailable at the time of writing so no information on the pricing scheme)

A free search will only yield a few results compared to a full text search. Searching for Jack the Ripper will for instance displays 23 free results but 2035 free and pay to view results. All contents of the newspaper library are usually available for people in UK higher and further education and in some public libraries.

Newspaper articles can be printed and marked as favorites. The British Newspaper archive can be accessed freely by people from all over the world.

For most of us (at least for me), that research involves the fun little dance of switching between Microsoft Word and the Internet, constantly reading, writing, losing my place, cursing the world, crying uncontrollably, and then getting back to work. But I digress.

One of the best tools out there, of the many I’ve tried to avoid that vicious cycle, is WebNotes. I use it constantly as a student and a professional, and it offers the most features and best usability of any application out there.

WebNotes, at its most basic, is an annotation tool. The first step is to install the toolbar (which works in Firefox and Internet Explorer), or the bookmarklet (which works in pretty much every browser, but with a couple fewer features). When you visit a website, the WebNotes software lets you can either highlight the text on the page, or make sticky notes with comments on the page. Everything you annotate is automatically added to your WebNotes organizer, for easy access later.

Once you’ve annotated a few pages, check out the WebNotes organizer. From there, you can either see the Web pages in their original form, view your highlights and comments on top of the page, or see only your markups. You can also search through your highlighted text and annotations, which makes finding that killer quote you came across an impressively easy proposition.

You can share notebooks, or individual notes (the organization and filing features of WebNotes make sharing them easy), which makes WebNotes great for collaborating on research within a group. There’s no emailing files necessary, no trying to figure out which version is most up-to-date; instead, all your research lives in one constantly-updated place.

For the more professional users, there’s the ability to create a “Report,” which is a well-designed aggregation of all your notes and highlights on a given subject. I’ve used it for giving presentations, or just summarizing research to someone else – it’s much more useful than I initially thought it would be.

The bottom-line of WebNotes is that it streamlines all your research. One, everything goes into one place, meaning there’s no hunting through twelve different Word documents to find what you want. Two, there’s no copy and paste – just highlight or comment, and everything gets saved automatically. The best thing about WebNotes, though, is that it lets you avoid the inevitable hunt through a page you know is useful, but that you can’t for the life of you figure out why.

A few weeks ago, WebNotes launched a “Pro” version, which adds some serious functionality to WebNotes. The biggest update, at least in my own use, is that WebNotes Pro lets you highlight and comment on PDF files. Particularly in school, I do a ton of reading PDF’s, and hate changing between the PDF and Word constantly so I can take notes. With WebNotes, that’s all avoided, and PDF markups go right into my organizer. (If you love the idea of PDF markup, but don’t want to use all that WebNotes has to offer, give Foxit Reader a look – it’s got all the markup love you could want.)

The Pro version also offers better support, and Multi-Color highlighting. It’s aimed squarely at professionals and students who do a lot of research from a lot of different sources, and WebNotes wants to be the source for all your research and informational bookmarking. For me, personally, it’s become indispensable in both cases.

The Pro version costs $9.99/month, but there’s a 50% discount for students who use the promo code “student101″. For gHacks readers, however, there’s an even better deal:

3 FREE months of the full, WebNotes Pro interface. The first 50 people to click this link will get three months free of the Pro features, to test to your heart’s content.

If you don’t want the added features (and the price tag), you’ll be reverted to the free version of WebNotes – which is pretty great itself – after three months is up.

What do you think of WebNotes? Is there a better application out there?

Google adds columns to the spreadsheet that differ depending on the search term. A search for people for example will reveal names, images, descriptions and their dates of birth and death with the option to add new suggested columns at the end of the spreadsheet which can include notable ideas, main interests or schools / interests. A search for metal on the other hand reveals information about the density, cas number, melting point, atomic number or crystal system.

Google Squared is therefor an interesting option when researching information that can be grouped. The conventional way of looking up all American Presidents would be to either perform a search on a search engine and look at the first results that come up or directly visit an encyclopedia like Wikipedia for the information. Most result pages however contain additional text and it is up to the researcher to find the right information.

There is however on problem associated with Google Squared which makes the concept prone to error: There is no quality control. Google Squared fetches information from all over the web which can lead to errors. Take a look at the results in the picture above. The spreadsheet tells us that the philosopher Plato was born on November 7, 1964. A click on that specific entry displays additional birth days including 424-423 BC of Wikipedia. Plato’s birth year taken from Wikipedia’s is however marked as low confidence data in this case.

While it is easy to spot such obvious flaws it becomes more difficulty. Who can say that the density of Platinum is really 21.45, that the maximum speed of the German WWII tank destroyer Jagdpanther was indeed 46 km/h or that Saturn’s orbital period is 29.46 years.

This means that it is always advised to find at least one additional source of information that backs up the information presented by Google Squared.

Update: Google Squared has been discontinued.

Then I spotted a post about PersonalBrain over at Rarst’s website entitled Mapping stuff in PersonalBrain and it seemed to be exactly the software that I was looking for. Both applications are written in Java and available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

The elements are called thoughts and originate from one home thought in PersonalBrain. Each thought, except for the home thought, consists of a name and at least one link to another node in the system. The user can write down notes for every thought on the map that can contain additional information. There is also the option to add attachments like text documents or web links to each node. Additionally users can add tags, set types and colors for each node separately.

The option to add links as attachments to nodes and the ability to write down additional notes are invaluable for my research. Other users might find other features more interesting but those two are the main ones why I have decided to switch the mind mapping software.

PersonalBrain comes with a lot of build in customizations like themes that can be applied to change the looks of the mind map. Something that might appeal to users who use PersonalBrain for presentations but nothing that adds real value to the application. More interesting than that are the options to filter and search nodes of the mind map.

Another interesting feature is the export function. It is possible to export the mind map as simple html or html with XML Information, the former providing simple access to the core information while the latter displays a static mind map.

Words are chosen by probability and suggest alternatives which more often than not make more sense than the first word. This introduces a new technique to spy on users without having to actually access the computer at all, all that is needed is a good view of the hands and the measure of the keyboard.

The second spy tech could come right out of the latest James Bond movie. The researchers at Saarland University managed to write a computer algorithm that is capable of interpreting reflections of the computer screen on objects. The quality of the telescope plays an important role, a normal $500 telescope was able to read 12 point fonts of a reflection that was 5 meters away from the computer and 198 point fonts from a distance of ten meters.

A more powerful Dobson telescope for $27500 was able to yield the same results from a maximum distance of 30 meters. Other tests allowed the researchers to view the monitor from a white wall that was 2 meters away from the computer screen.

The best way to defeat the techniques ? Don’t access a computer in public, always close the curtains when working with your computer and make sure no cameras are installed in the room with a computer.

The first project demonstrated a digital whiteboard, something that sells for several thousand Dollars, emulated by the Wiimote and additional hardware that do not cost more than $10. The software used in the demonstration can be downloaded from the researchers website and it actually has been downloaded about 500.000 times.

The other project demonstrated a head mounted 3d- viewer. This system was also using the Wiimote and some additional hardware. He mentioned that this technique will be included in a game by Electronic Arts as an Easter Egg.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

The homepage of Johnny Lee contains another video that is demonstrating how it is possible to track fingers with the Wiimote.

Hyperwords is giving you access to commands and searches that are able to interact with words on every page that can be accessed with Firefox. Just mark text on a website and the Hyperwords menu pops up automatically with a lot of choices such as translating the text, looking it up at various sites and maps, converting numbers or emailing it.

It is possible to change the default action that is required to make the Hyperwords menu appear which I would recommend. I sometimes mark text for others reasons which is why I changed it to appear only when I mark text and press F2 as well.

This extension is a great asset for everyone who is working with Firefox. It does not really matter if you are a blogger, researching information for the University or a working on sites that are in a language that you do not speak fluently. Should be useful for almost everyone out there.