Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

Via Tech Nation comes a nice audio interview with engineer, professor and author Henry Petroski. On the heels of his latest book The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems he discusses the differences between Science and Engineering with Dr. Moira Gunn, how they work together, are viewed differently by the media and the public and how they’re funded differently. The 40 minute conversation ends with a discussion about engineering’s role in our world’s infrastructure and in solving problems from energy to agriculture.

The good folks at Carsonified have posted audio and slides of the FOWD London 2009 speakers including Molly E. Holzschlag giving an overview of the status of web standards, Simon Sankarayya on designing interfaces, both online and physical, and Robin Christopherson giving a JAWS demo and discussing design and accessibility in a Web 2.0 world.

The above screenshot of a page from The Jersey Journal shows one of the most annoying web advertising I’ve come across in some time. Whether on purpose, or due to some insane twist of [random] fate the page in question displayed the same auto-playing video ad with audio in two ad spots on the page. Due to page load being what it is the audio was staggered by half a second or so making the unexpected audio even more obnoxious. Particularly as it was loaded in a background tab so I didn’t know where the sound was coming from at first.

The page also gets bonus points for displaying ads for police recruitment on a story about a highly decorated cop getting arrested.

I mentioned last week that audio from the WaSP Annual meeting at SxSW had been posted, well now the audio from the WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel is up too. It hasn’t yet made it to the web page so here’s a direct link to the audio from the podcast feed.