Recent Links: December 14 to December 17

Have you ever wanted to find more information on government spending? Have you ever wondered where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go? Or perhaps you would just like to know, as a citizen, what the government is really doing with your money. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act) requires a single searchable website, accessible by the public for free that includes for each Federal award:1. The name of the entity receiving the award; 2. The amount of the award; 3. Information on the award including transaction type, funding agency, etc; 4. The location of the entity receiving the award; 5. A unique identifier of the entity receiving the award.

Very cool effects that I call “light threads” can be achieved in Photoshop with very little effort. You can layer the effect to acheive an organic-looking image, or hue it for an underwater effect. If you layer the effect correctly the end result has a great sense of depth. The tutorial is quite short and incredibly simple. It takes less than five minutes."

Use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote control for your Mac, including iTunes, presentations and any other apps configured within the Remote Buddy app.

Part of the role of today's UX manager is to ensure the UX team has all the necessary skills, at the best level possible. To do this, they need an easy way to assess the current skills of the team. Once they've got their assessment in hand, it's fairly straightforward to design a coaching and training curriculum to fill in the gaps.To help managers with the assessment, we've created a simple 130-point scoring process. They can just walk through the various skill areas, rating their team on a 0-5 scale, based on the teams current level of competency. When done, they'll not only have an understanding of the team's overall effectiveness, but a clear idea of where to improve.

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