games

going to be a busy day with TMA's and going off to Ikea to buy tables to convert into smart tables.

had an intreasting talk with paul this morning about video games theory from the theory of fun point of view.

We talked about making both the childrens and adult projects more 'fun'. I saw that what might tie the adult project together is that people need to talk creatievly, brining seperate ideas/stratagies to the table (almost literally) then allowing them to merge and be selectively put together into some kind of consensus. We touched on the idea of a general bussness 'game' allowing a number of bussness elements to be gamed. I also thought through the interface to a disaster planning game but paul says a number of people are doing disaster planning.

thought about ordering an external darwin server ( with webdav ) to facility inter site commiuncation on project. I think Jeff would appricate putting his smalltalk wiki on the server. Rumour is Jeff (the programmer) will be around on 5th of November.

still can't get blogger spell check to work.

research strangeness

I had a research meeting an apprently there is a form I have to fill in to get permission to apply for external funding to do research with.

Central OU also likes to coordinate funding bids accross departments, so that only one group or another ( I guess) can apply to research to one call for funds. I was thinking of apply to do funding from a walking and cycling call for funding and they had to wonder if it was 'what we did' or should we leave it for another department.
'You don't want to go to the workshop to discover other people from the OU are there do you?' I was asked.

Date dyslexia,

I was chatting to Anneli and she mentioned how she misses things because dates/times arrive to her but they don't get into her diary ( the problem being is that it is everywere).

I thought about an application that would fish for dates in your email as it arrived and then tried to figure out where it should go in your diary. ( Dinner tuesday - would make a good guess then let you change it).

Problem we both identified was the idea of doing this with sound - people tell you on the phone or in person when you don't have a version near you.

Perhaps a printable version which could use image recognition from photo capture to read back modifications you made to the paper version.
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Just noticed the new version of mac Mail will fish for dates out of your mail for you.

Technology and objections

I went with Ruth to look at some cybercars in Daventry. I mention them to some of the people I work with who you know are computer scientists but the first reaction I got was. 'Won't muggers run out stop the cyber cab and then mug you in the cab'. I got this a couple of times.

Now I don't want to approach the issue directly - after all you might same the same thing about cyclists or indeed car drivers (if somone comes along waves you down smashes the windscreen are you going to be able to drive away?) - what makes me intreasted is that this was peoples first reaction.

I was looking at some big LCD displays used in an underground station and thought. 'If I proposed that the first recactoin would be whats to stop someone smashing the display then running away?'

I remember the response the PRT system got when I presented it to the students at the london bussness school they thought PRT was a more unusable than a perpetual motion machine (they called a free energy device) someone else had proposed.

Now I guess the probem is should people be blind to possible problems ? One of the victorian objections to rail travel was that traveling at such speeds as 30 miles per hour would make peoples head explode.

I guess people are just not that good at dealing with uncertainty. I said to Ruth about the cybercars is that with the new London Heathrow terminal that they will just have to be able to see them in action for a few months before people can 'adjust' to actual technology rather than anticipate problems.

For me the question is that it appears that certain technologies appear to be less critialcally assessed than others ( the Ultra/PRT system against the perpetual motion machine for example). Is this universal could this be experimentally assessed in some way - perhaps giving people a group of technologies and asking what they thought but how to allow for the same imagined problems? Perhaps the same technology but presented in diffrent ways to diffrent people?