The Pink Tentacle blog writes (update: currently getting a quota exceeded message there):

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there’s now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.

Google released a well-working iGoogle gadget in which they extract text information from video content. The Elections Video Search gadget – its standalone page can be accessed as well – lets you search for keywords across YouTube’s US politician channels, like Barack Obama’s. Clicking on a result item will load the video in question into the player embedded in the widget, with the specific occurrences of the word in the video color-marked on the timeline.

For instance, I searched for the word “friendship” and got a result titled “Obama Anniversary of Israeli Independence”. Moving the time bar line towards one of the yellow markers, I’m hearing Obama say, “… let us renew the friendship between our nations …”. Another search for “bubble sort” returns a quip from a Q&A Obama held at the Google headquarters, where Obama is answering a programming question.