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A new digital art project with a techie bent has sought to discover the effects of globalisation on identity by taking 100 photographs of people in cities around the world and combining them using a computer to make a single average face for each city. A fascinating open source project.

ON APRIL 6, 1966, students from Westall High School and Westall State School claimed to have seen a mysterious metallic flying object hover above them before descending behind trees in Clayton South. Many more say they later saw the perimeter of a perfect circle singed into the grass at the Grange Reserve near Westall State School.

The new web-centric PCs made by Samsung and Acer - dubbed "Chromebooks" - were announced at Google's I/O event overnight. The computers, which boot in seconds, will be available in the US and Europe next month.

When Scott Trickett's MacBook Pro containing a top-secret project was stolen from the boot of his car in an inner-city parking garage, he thought he had no chance of getting it back.

"The biggest downside to Windows 7 on tablets is that Microsoft has failed to offer a specialised tablet user-interface. This is a huge oversight as Microsoft was first to push tablets over a decade ago but has completely failed to make an impact on the new generation tablet market pioneered by Apple and Google."

UNIVERSITIES that fail to embrace new technology will lose students and die, former federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner has warned. Mr Tanner, now a vice-chancellor's fellow at Victoria University, told a Melbourne audience last night that while Australian universities were using the internet to deliver study materials, they were not yet fully exploiting the potential technology offered for new ways of learning.

"Women continued to debate the question of whether formal quotas are needed for their rise to technology leadership roles at last week's Cisco Empowered Women's Network lunch in Melbourne. However, some believe it's the work teachers are doing in schools and universities that will have the greatest effect in growing the next generation of female leaders. "

"Although most homes have video games there's been a lot of resistance to them entering the classroom, but that's changing as teachers recognise their educational benefits."

"The Senate has forced the Australian Electoral Commission to disclose the source code of the software that counts Senate preference votes after the organisation refused to release it in response to a freedom-of-information request. "

The team behind Google Maps won't stop until it has every last inch of the planet stored on its servers. Would we really be so lost without it?

"Reckon you can spot a YouTube video captured on a smartphone camera? It's not hard - they're often the ones that look like they're shot on "spin cycle". Many new, dedicated video cameras include optical image stabilisation (OIS) that takes out much of the shake from video clips. Even most budget models now include a digital version that can remove minor hand-shaking. But unless you have a HTC One, iPhone 5 or Nokia Lumia 920 in your pocket, most smartphones have nothing to offer for video stabilisation. But it can be fixed - even if you've already captured your video."

"Kate Crawford of the MIT Centre for Civic Media goes behind the numbers to debunk five myths about big data."

"The implementation of an effective national broadband network is critical to economic development and the federal opposition must not fear it, the founder of a high-profile "intelligent community" think tank has told IT Pro."

"Two recent innovations suggest the next few decades will be more disruptive than any other time in living memory. Right now, Bitcoin and 3D printing seem the province of geeks and hobbyists. But they're omens of revolutions to come."

"After watching surgeons perform these experiments, it is chilling to watch the Google Glass promotional video showing a cyclist riding between cars in heavy New York City traffic, while being bombarded with head-up navigational data. Our attention is a resource that is extremely limited in supply and instinctively overestimated. Inevitably - as with mobile phone use while driving - accidents will occur and we will be left to legislate use after a string of tragedies. The biggest challenge with Google Glass and similar devices is us. When we divert our gaze to our smart phones, we do so consciously and alter our thoughts and actions, hopefully in a safe way, to compensate. If information is to be projected directly in front of your eyes, it needs to be filtered to avoid accidents."

Age article about non web based app for teachers to use rubrics with iPads.