Sorry for the tohubohu in this space during the past couple of days. A major hardware problem knocked out the entire OII blogosphere. By now, everything should be working again. I re-added the (lost) comments from Google cache with original date stamps and hope that all your contributions are in good shape again. If not, drop me a line and I’ll take care of it. Thanks!

• The way we text: Tim Grant and other forensic linguists at the University of Leicester work on something called “forensic authorship analysis“. They basically analyze the way people write text messages on their mobile phones. Apparently, these techniques already play an important role in providing evidence in criminal cases (examples here and here).

• The way we click: In a recent working paper, Balaji Padmanabhan and Yinghui Yang ask whether there is something like a “clickprint” – a unique pattern of surfing behavior based on how long you visited what websites at what time of the day and other actions. They conclude that it is in fact possible to distinguish two persons based on clickstream data, given the optimal level of aggregation as computed by their method.

• The way we walk: Researchers at GeorgiaTech work on “Human Identification at a Distance.” Their focus is on gait recognition and the way we move as an “activity-specific biometric.” They propose “a technique that recovers static body and stride parameters of subjects as they walk.” (No, they have nothing to do with these guys.)

Even though privacy advocates are likely to loose some sleep over such possibilities, one could – perhaps a bit sarcastically – argue that there is also a good side to it: it seems to become harder and harder not to be unique.

rare second
and something
without a tenacious soul
hover in secret

Having been plagued by rather annoying attempts like “Re: Hi”, “you happy?”, and “need V#%GR@” for some time, I found this quite edifying.

As always, I am light years behind. Bloggers like Kristin Thomas, Grant Hutchinson, or Morton Hurley had picked up this trend a long time ago and received media coverage from all over the world. There even is a wikipedia entry on Spoetry as a new art form.

Nevertheless, even though these lines seem to be mainly a reaction to increasingly sophisticated spam filters, they are great fun. If you want to take up the challenge, the comment section is yours.

Hopefully, some of you will take an interest and comment. So fire up your RSS readers and keep in touch!