• A BayCHI talk on eye-tracking usability was noted at http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20100127/, correcting an earlier misreport that the session covered eye-tracking for data entry.

• Participants explored extracting social-network graphs directly from film audio by identifying speakers and measuring inter-speaker timing, referencing IBM transcript experiments and the open-source PieSpy IRC visualizer (http://www.jibble.org/piespy/).

• MakerBot released open-source conveyor-belt automation for continuous 3-D printing; code is available in SVN at http://svn.makerbot.com/users/charles/conveyor/ and a demo video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njE9dYSMPwA.

• A Y Combinator attendee (later identified as Benjamin Tilly, co-author of the IEEE Spectrum article) challenged Metcalfe’s Law, arguing network value scales closer to n log n rather than n² because individual connections have heterogeneous worth.

• Roger Penrose’s Google Tech Talk on consciousness and microtubules drew criticism for conflating computability with “computational,” invoking the halting problem, and claiming flowers exhibit consciousness because they “know” what bees like.

• A scraped corpus of ~60 000 C-SPAN closed-caption files (~1.9 GB raw, 200 MB gzipped) was shared at http://designfiles.org/~bryan/cspan.tar.gz for accessibility and text-mining research.

• Open-source hardware resources discussed included HeeksCAD .deb packages (http://highlab.com/~seb/heeks/), the Adafruit/MAKE “Citizen Engineer” video series (http://citizenengineer.com/), and Noisebridge’s polycaprolactone materials list (https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Polycaprolactone).

• A debate on concept maps versus mind maps used RPG plot diagrams as concrete examples of relationship mapping, while participants questioned how abstract notions like “espionage” or “world peace” could be represented.

• Shared research indicated that larger baseline social networks correlate with higher depression scores and that a higher proportion of very close ties predicts lower happiness in younger cohorts, prompting skepticism about causal direction.

• The chemistry blog “Things I Won’t Work With” (pipeline.corante.com) was highlighted as a cautionary reference within open-source science and biohacker circles for its entertaining coverage of dangerously reactive or impractical chemicals and experimental procedures.