A group of students in Wroclaw in Poland have created what might be the world's biggest colour screen by computer-controlling all of the lights in a ten-storey building. It's not exactly High Definition, being only 10 pixels by 12 pixels and only having 4 colours, but it is still quite impressive nonetheless.

You can read about the project in English here, or, if you prefer, in Polish here.

It must be that time of the year again – the human race is about to be ended by a global pandemic. First there was SARS, then it was Avian Flu, then we were all going to be wiped out by West Nile Virus, and now it’s Swine Flu. Nothing sells papers like a good old-fashioned health scare. Clearly those previous outbreaks didn’t put a stop to humanity, so is there any reason to be afraid this time?

Well, perhaps a closer look at the numbers will inform us. Latest reports are that 100 people have died in Mexico. Clearly this is a tragedy for those involved, but 100 people in a country with a population of 110 million is hardly an epidemic. It’s less than a one in a million chance - if you happen to be in Mexico where the disease is apparently widespread. And what that figure conceals is that only 20 deaths have actually been confirmed as Swine Flu cases. And there are currently 1,614 cases of the disease in Mexico. So that’s 20 deaths out of 1,614. That’s a 1.2% chance of dying even if you actually catch the disease.

But let’s be honest – “You’re very unlikely to catch Swine Flu, and even if you do, you’ll probably be fine” doesn’t make for quite as catchy a headline, does it? So instead we get meaningless speculation in The Daily Express that the disease “could” kill 120 million people. Sure, it could kill that many people, but equally the earth could be struck by an asteroid, killing everyone on the planet. The question is, how likely are either occurrence? Probably not very likely. But we can’t let a little thing like statistical accuracy get in the way of a good story. Or the sale of face masks and Tamiflu.

Roche shares are up today if you’ve got any money to invest. 

Google has been offering local search results for quite a while now, so that if you type in a query such as "florists in London" then at the top of the results page you get a list of relevant businesses with their phone number and a map like this:

(try searching for "creative agency london").

However, up until now you needed to specify your location for this to work. But a post on the official Google blog announced that they will be delivering local search results based on your IP address, regardless of whether you tell them where you are. The post reads "When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you. In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location." You will note that Google are being typically vague by saying that they identify a broad location "in most cases" (my emphasis). The recent privacy controversies surrounding Street View have meant that they are keen to reassert their view that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information. But I'm sure there will be plenty of people who will object to being advertised as a skinny latte just because they are sitting in Starbucks.

The question of the day seems to be "Are tweets subject to copyright?" There have been a number of posts around the blogosphere grappling with this concept and no clear consensus has emerged. You might well ask "does it matter?" I mean can you really write anything in 140 characters that someone else would even want to plagiarize? I think it becomes more significant when these seemingly off-the-cuff remarks get published beyond the confines of twitter. For instance, Stephen Fry may, or may not, now be regretting his tweet that Jade Goody was like "a kind of Princess Di from the wrong side of the tracks" but once that sort of comment is out there it is very difficult to control. And don't be surprised if you see more and more of this sort of lazy journalism. And what about Facebook updates? Are these private mesages between friends where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, or are they public broadcasts that can be freely repeated in the media?

Another area of law that is about to embrace twitter is that of libel after Courtney Love allegedly posted messages accusing her former fashion designer, Dawn Simorangkir, of being a "nasty, lying, hosebag thief"; having "a history of dealing cocaine"; having "lost all custody of her child"; and, being guilty of "assault and burglary". Not surprisingly Simorangkir has lodged a libel claim in the Los Angeles Superior Court seeking punitive damages, arguing that the comments have destroyed her reputation and her business. Court papers laying out the claim state: "Whether caused by drug-induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that money and fame allow her to disregard the law, Love has embarked on what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to destroy Simorangkir's reputation and her livelihood."

I think the one thing we can all be sure of is that this wont be the last time that twittering ends up in a court case.

This week Google has invested in a Silicon Valley startup company called Pixazza, who have developed a system for embedding online ads into pictures that appear when a users mouse hovers over them. Pixazza's CEO Bob Lisbonne says that the system "hopes to do for images what Google’s AdSense did for web pages." The system looks a little like this:

Interestingly, rather than using a complex and highly secretive alogorithm to analyse the pictures in order to display relevant ads, it uses "a distributed workforce of product experts" - otherwise known as people.

CTO and founder James Everingham, said "Pixazza’s unique technical advantage is its crowdsourcing platform. No computer algorithm can identify a black pair of Jimmy Choo boots from the 2009 fall collection as well as a person. Rather than rely on computer algorithms, our platform enlists product experts to drive the process."

Surely it can't be long before Google starts to use this to embed ads into StreetView?

You can read more about Pixazza in an interview with Bob Lisbonne here.