navigating in games.

Instreasting set of slides. Would love to hear the talk that went with it.

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg3w5bqn_5995dwkxf9

Ambiguity

William W. Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford. 2003. Ambiguity as a resource for design. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '03). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 233-240. DOI=10.1145/642611.642653 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/642611.642653

Pondering over experiment

Pounding if I should make the experiment more complex. I spent a lot of time making it simpler. Now its too simple.

Also  found this link to time management for dyslexics.

Rebutals and Outage ( and dyslexia)

We had a Chi rebuttals meeting.

Interesting that everyone had to by buoyed up when getting knocked back. I had this too to one paper. Very low marks and unlikely to get in but the rebuttal was invited so I did it anyway. Naturally you feel outraged - this version was given lower marks than last time and we did improve it. So yes everyone feels quite hurt at how unjust the system is. In another year the paper will be out of date. It reminds me of how little science and academia is capable of approaching an external problem. You can't say solve X and still get a paper out of it. 

The interesting part was how everyone was still in the doldrums about it. I had that on friday but I had also sprung back much quicker and have written a really positive reply. 

Ruth suggested it might be a dyslexic thing I'm more used to having my work rejected as inadequate when to my eyes I can't see that its no more inferior  than the work of my peers. Perhaps I'm just feeling more militantly dyslexic after that BBC program on dyslexia. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11721272 )  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vy8c7  download at BBC iPlayer . 

I found there is quite a big wages gap between dyslexics and non dyslexics or as one paper put it"s. Socioeconomic status and IQ were not predictive of adult outcome among these men in contrast to their effect in the general population" or As Mellard and Woods put it "adults with SLD no longer earn more; rather they earn less than their non-LD peers (Goldberg et al., 2003; Goldstein et al., 1998)." more interesting there is as Dickingson and Verbeek said "Our results show that much of the observed lower wages for individuals with LD is due to differences in productivity characteristic s.However,there isa n unexplained portion of the wage gap that could possibly be considered wage discrimination against individuals with LD." basically dyslexics earn 77% of everyone else's salary.

Just a note to say we had a network outage on the sensor net. Yesterday and today it looks like. 

Cool stuff mobile table top with Xbox as input.

Kind of interesting - point it down at a table and get position/hight info ( good enough to get finger up/down? ) Cheap too

XBox Kinect running on OS X ( with source code ) from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

Robots and the BBC

One of my favourite MPhil students sent me this link after my post about Robot Skype. Very nice and just in time for XMas.

Good day so far. Submitted a grant application, then had a nice meeting with the Team from Bang! ( on BBC 1 ).  It sounds more cool than it was ( there were representatives from all the science departments there). I did bring a few of the BBC team and did an impromptu tour of the labs and they where very fascinated by the results.

Did I give out my business cards ? Yes
Did you come over as a typical shy nerd - Well I tried.
Did I take names ? No
Am I going to follow this up ? - OK well no.
Am I useless as self publicity ? - yeah
Are academics expected to show real world outcomes of their research as part of their funding: yep

Still I need to get back to rebutting CHI paper and that is the bottom line.

Lost and found: Notre Dame psychologist studies how we get our bearings in buildings // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame

This is a link to a paper Ruth has published about getting lost in buildings. Notice the role of signage.

Lost and found: Notre Dame psychologist studies how we get our bearings in buildings // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame

PyMT

Groovy demo of multi touch python toolkit


PyMT - A post-WIMP Multi-Touch UI Toolkit from Thomas Hansen on Vimeo.

Be nice to have some more demos/table top/ inspiration.

Version control for hip people.

http://code.google.com/p/gource/wiki/Videos

Not sure what the pretty colours mean - might be age.