The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Over at CrunchGear, Peter Ha has been spending some time with inventor James Dyson (he of the famous vacuum cleaners) talking about design and engineering principles. In this hilarious video, Dyson puts one of the new vacuums through its paces, showing how trying to break something is the best way to test it. It also [...]

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Barack Obama made news last week by announcing he’s opting out of accepting public funds for his presidential campaign. Instead, he’ll continue to rely on individual donations.
XPLANE, a company that specializes in explaining complex information in a visual format, has come up with a terrific visualization to illustrate that concept, and show how Obama has [...]

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This Smithsonian article about diamonds grown in the lab that are indistinguishable than those taken from the ground had me thinking in terms of disruptive technology, a la Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma.

Disruptive technology is a term that describes low-end and new-market innovations. Typically, the new technology isn’t quite as good as the existing technology, but [...]

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The Cuisipro® Ice Cream Scoop & Stack has come up with an simple, elegant redesign of the ice cream scooper. Where a flat spatula is enough for gelato and the industrial-strength spoon version is found in ice cream parlors and kitchens everywhere, this scooper elegantly rethinks that model: Plunge the device into the ice cream, [...]

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The latest issue of The Economist takes a look at how Speedo’s new LZR swimsuit has revolutionized the sport in the four months. Forty-two world swimming records have been broken since the suit was introduced in February, and 38 of those record-breaking swims were by competitors wearing LZRs.

The technology that went into the $600 suit [...]

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As IBM researcher John Tang says here, there is “a certain amount of irony” in the fact that top technology firms are banding together to study ways to solve information overload. Even more ironic is the proposal that the solution to this particular technology problem is “simply more and better technology”.
It’s not a technology problem, [...]

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At the end of this video of BMW’s GINA fabric-covered, shape-shifting concept car, designer Chris Bangle describes the philosophy as “Context over dogma”. It’s a nice moment to close a remarkable three-minute video presentation, but there’s something more profound lurking there as well.

Certainly it’s about, as Bangle says, being flexible and acting flexible, but it’s [...]

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Nick Carr has a terrific article in this month’s Atlantic magazine titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“. It’s an insightful look at how the Web is changing the way we think — moving away from deep concentration, understanding and analysis toward short, scannable, sharable bursts of information.

I don’t agree that Google and the Web are [...]

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This week’s Economist looks into the field of open-source hardware: “an emerging class of electronic devices, for which the specifications have been made public, so that enthusiasts can suggest refinements, write and share software improvements, and even build their own devices from scratch.”
Owners of open-source devices benefit by owning something that doesn’t go out-of-date or [...]

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Wired News reports that even though cellphones in Japan have become increasingly difficult to use, and that their owners only use 5 to 10 percent of the functions available, the complexity of the devices remains a positive to buyers.
When the iPhone hits Japan later this year, it’s possible that the simplicity of that device would [...]

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