[Research] Uncertainty about how LBS report people\'s location

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A very nice paper: Benford, S., Seagar, W., Flintham, M., Anastasi, R., Rowland, D., Humble, J., Stanton, D., Bowers, J., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M., Farr, J. R., Oldroyd, A., and Sutton, J. (2004). The error of our ways: The experience of self-reported position in a location-based game. In Proceedings of the the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), pages 70–87, Nottingham.

The use of positioning systems is an important but problematic aspect of ‘context aware’ applications. Through focusing on location-based games, we introduce the approach of self-reported positioning in which players explicitly and implicitly reveal their positions by manipulating electronic maps. A study of a game that piloted this approach demonstrates that self-reported positioning can be a reliable low-tech alternative to automated systems such as GPS. We contrast the strategies used by humans to generate position updates – reporting at landmarks and junctions and ahead and behind themselves – with automated approaches, drawing out implications for how we think of positioning error and design positioning systems.

Interesting because it deals with uncertainty about how LBS report people's location

A list of interactive tables

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THIS LIST OF INTERACTIVE TABLE HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED FOR AGES, it was collected for a project that I've done few years ago that is now completed A list of interactive tables that may support collaboration (for students projects in our cscw course:

basic meeting tables:

  1. della rovere
  2. gestarr

interactive tables:

  1. scoop
  2. chatter
  3. the drift table
  4. future office table
  5. dialogtable
  6. lumisight table
  7. hitachi tabletop
  8. Habitat
  9. Interactable
  10. Philips café table (my favorite)
  11. the little table
  12. sensetable (via regine)
  13. tableportation (via regine)
  14. The Storytelling Table
  15. MultiAudable (.pdf)
  16. MapNews Table (.pdf).
  17. floating number

    18. (via regine)

  18. The Table Childhood (via regine)
  19. The Rogue ambience table
  20. Planar Modular Display (thanks jeff)
  21. froggies
  22. Individual fancies
  23. Lo-Tek (via Long Live the Network)
  24. DissemiNET Table (via Long Live the Network)
  25. onomy tilty table
  26. Pond
  27. Le signal
  28. Audiopad
  29. The Message Table
  30. Natural Interactions
  31. MayDay Bar
  32. Light Tables
  33. The Key Table
  34. Music Tables
  35. Turn Table
  36. Intelligent vibrations
  37. tviews
  38. iTable
  39. Counteractive (interactive cookbook)
  40. Lazy Susan Interactive Table
  41. smart table
  42. reac table
  43. the Echoes table (.pdf)
  44. various tables at interact lab
  45. reactive table
  46. Smartskin
  47. The drumming table
  48. MouseHaus
  49. Tonetable
  50. Living Jukeboy
  51. magic board
  52. coeno
  53. MUSICtable
  54. Philips' Entertaible
  55. Tequila Sunset
  56. Beat Jigsaw
  57. Gullivers Welt
  58. Conversation table
  59. Misto Table (HP)
  60. The sunlight table
  61. Gispen XS
  62. Weight table
  63. Proactive Desk
  64. TabulaTouch
  65. hap hep hip hop
  66. Concerto table
  67. Touchtable
  68. Symbolic table
  69. Amebeats
  70. tangible table
  71. microsoft surface
  72. sandspuren
  73. Taito Tabletop Game
  74. Update! GranulatSynthese

Thank you regine for some pointers!

[Tech] Turn old-handsets into useful gizmos

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The Guardian on "Unwanted mobiles to get new lease of life ".

The communications giant Nokia has developed technology that turns unwanted mobile phones into a range of useful electronic gizmos, including alarm clocks, handheld games and TV remote controls. The move is designed to help dispose of the growing number of obsolete handsets thrown away or forgotten in drawers by people striving to keep up with new technology.

That's a nice move and a smart initiative.

Nokia says redesigning old handsets makes the most of extra functions such as the clock and memory while hiding communication features. (...) The casing of the phone can be reshaped to "provide a more stylised device", alarm clocks could get a snooze function and software could be reprogrammed to talk to remote-controlled devices. (...) "The cell phone is transformed from something having a short lifespan to a device with an undeterminable lifespan."

[Space and Place] A micro-sociological look at how pedestrians walk around towns

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When our steps merge meaningfully with the urban spaceOn perception and expression when walking in town, a paper (in french) about urban walking.

This study takes a micro-sociological look at how pedestrians walk around towns. The aim is to highlight the various ways in which city-dwellers gain access to public places and the practical and perceptive dimensions that this accessibility calls upon. From our point of view urban mobility is based on a process by which pedestrians bond with their surroundings: mobility involves the perceptible environment of the public urban space, the perception of the pedestrian and the ability of his or her body to express itself. It is consequently necessary to characterise and describe precisely the ambient atmospheres in which such activities develop, the forms of motive action and perceptive attention they generate, and ultimately the types of relationship with the city that they bring about. Drawing on recurrent observation and description of public behaviour in the city of Grenoble this work proposes six perceptible figures of urban accessibility. Each one reflects the individual rationales of pedestrians and the special role of sensory perception in the choice of one's route across town.

[Tech] Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire

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Today I am focused on semantic web tool. One of the winner of the Technorati Developer Contest. Dave Sifry announced the winners. I am particularly interested in what Niall Kennedy did: AppleScript plugin that you add to NetNewsWire which will subscribe to the Technorati Cosmos RSS feed for the item a reader is currently reading.

Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos!</blockquote

[Tech] Durl: a RSS feed for del.icio.us URL queries

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(via roland), a new tool that seems really promising: Durl. To put it shortly, it's a search engine for del.icio.us.

Enter a url to retrieve information about people who delicious'ed it. del.icio.us already provides this service, Durl completes that with an RSS feed containing those results and trend history graphs.

As Roland points it the added value is related to the keyword (metadata) added:

And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas.

[Tech] Behavior towards IM in France

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A paper about IM and MSN messenger in the french newspaper Le Monde. They report that :

If your had to keep just two media, which one would you choose? 12-15 years old answered: Internet (61 %), television (49 %), cinema (35 %), radio (29 %), daily press (17 %) and magazines (9 %). (...) In France, between may 2003 and december 2004, the number of MSN messenger users went from 2.7 to 6.8 millions (from all ages).

. Besides, the paper quote the work of Anne Cohen-Kiel, the design anthropologist for MSN. Which is interesting because it is not so often that french press describes user-oriented design techniques like the collaboration of software designers with anthropologists.

[Research] ACM Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference 2005

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A place to be? ACE 2005:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing. The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, as well as computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment.

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website: http://www.ace2005.org by 15th February 2005

[Locative Media] Capture the map!

in

(via), a new geo-related game:

From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo [1] which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page. -- http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003534.html
1: http://www.caida.org/tools/utilities/netgeo/

[Tech] Passionate ethnography of power outlets situations

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The NYT has a great piece about electric plugs. It is indeed le nerf de la guerre as we say in french; I mean the crux issue when you're out of you're regular living/working bubble.

Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.

Where do I put the stuff below? Thus, some people develop a passionate ethnography of electric plug situation. I really fancy this kind of technosocial situation:

Sean Spector, a vice president and founder of GameFly, an online video game rental service, said he tries to book flights that have power adapters near the seats so he can plug in his electronic gadgets.

I tend to wander around before seating at the perfect place in the train to be clsoe to a power plug. Unfortunately as I travel a lot both in France and Switzerland, I noticed that only french trains provide them (not all).

[Prospective] Did IBM make no effort?

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A Wall Street Journal columnist argues that IBM should have made an effort to innovate rather than selling its PC unit to the chinese. The author describe how they could have improved the PC. One of the option would be to deal with portability:

Like many people, I have several PCs in my life--and I constantly need to ask such ridiculous questions as, "Where did I leave the latest version of that file? By what clumsy method should I move it from where it is to where it's needed?" Such questions are like asking "Where did I leave the starter crank for my Huppmobile?" If you have to ask, your (formerly) hot-shot machine is ready for the folk-art museum. (...) IBM might have done well selling PCs with built-in "transparent information sharing." As soon as you connected such a machine to the Internet, all your electronic documents would immediately be available--no matter where you created or last worked on them.

[Tech] A short history of buzzers

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Boxes and Arrows on sound design. The best part of the paper is about the history of buzzers.

There were many innovations in electronic sound during the early 20th century, but until the 1950s it was impractical for any product that wasn’t a radio to produce an amplified, electronically generated sound. Reproducing even the simplest electronic tone required bulky and expensive vacuum tubes, transformers, and speakers.

We also learn that "current research is focused on understanding people’s assumptions about what their environment ought to sound like". That kind of research is funny!

[Research] Research Management for companies

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I found a very well positioned company called Acies. This seems really appealing, the core business of this company is research promotion and management consulting:

Leader in Research Promotion and Management Consulting, ACIES contributes to the development of research by promoting its knowledge and results, and so generates value at economic, scientific and societal levels. Through its two activities "Research Tax Credit" and "European Research Projects", ACIES assists the key players in Research and Innovation in setting up and managing their projects, optimising and securing their financing. ACIES’ customers can be split into 3 categories: major industrial groups, innovative SME-SMIs, top research organisations and universities.

...might be interesting to work for this kind of company.

[Weird] Structure of chocolate unravelled with a synchrotron

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There seems to be chocolate-addict research: Structure of chocolate unravelled at the ESRF

A team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam, with help of the ESRF, has made a major step forward by identifying for the first time the crystal structure of one of the three main triglycerides that make up chocolate butter (...) “This work is expected to be highly relevant to confectionary research and industry and the first step to a better understanding of the mechanism of the fat bloom phenomenon at the molecular level.”

[Future] A Classification-Based or Community-Based WWW?

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I came across this interesting debate while reading a paper by Andy Oram:

Two ideas, diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, have seized the attention of Internet companies and technologists over the first few years of this century. (...) But these two ideas are attracting both money and attention. One stresses classification, the other community. Neither has borne much fruit yet. (...) The first idea goes by such names as the "semantic web"—coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web—and "Web Services." It leads to infinite meetings of standards bodies, taking up hours of valuable technologists’ time, who report year after year on the tremendous progress they are making toward ever receding and ever more audacious goals.

The other idea goes by the name "social networking," and brings out breathless talk of a revolution in social relationships, supposedly to be opened up by "frictionless connectivity": the ability to find almost instantly the person who can meet your specific personal or career-related needs. After several years of experiments in each area, outlines are emerging for the domains where each idea may prove valuable.

The article also expresses critics about social software: "The public has mostly lost interest with the first wave of sites that offer social networking, probably because what they offer seems to add little except extra overhead to current Internet services such as email and newsgroups.". I think it's definitely true, my ultimate social software is my blogroll. I like this kind of statement: "I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed." because it definitely summarizes what I felt after trying those tools.

But the author is still positive on it:

These criticism apply to social networks they way they’re currently implemented. Because viral marketing and new media have an excellent possibility of becoming important social movements, I think online social networks will grow in importance, and at some point somebody will make one that works. We can also move to yet another stage where we statistically measure our network and learn from aggregate facts about the people we know. There’s plenty there for a century of innovation

[Research]A french seminar about call-center activity analysis

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On January, 20th, there's going to be a seminar about call-centers activity analysis. It will be held (in french) at Telecom Paris .

* Josiane Boutet (Université de Paris 7) et Christiane Legris (EDF/GRETS) : "L'activité de travail et le travail du langage dans les centres d'appels EDF" * Lorenza Mondada (Laboratoire ICAR, Université de Lyon II) : "Modes d'alignement et de désalignement dans les appels téléphoniques à un call centre" * Christian Licoppe (GET-ENST, département EGSH) et Marc Relieu (Laboratoire TECH/SUSI France Telecom R&D) : "Techno-conversations : rendre observables les compétences des téléopérateurs dans une hotline d'assistance technique internet" * Emmanuel Kessous et Alexandre Mallard (Laboratoire TECH/SUSI France Telecom R&D) : "Les appuis conventionnels de la relation marchande : la vente médiatisée par le téléphone dans un centre de télémarketing"

[Locative Media] geourl is back!

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It seems that geourl is back from the grave: geourl reloaded! Update: after hubert's comment, I checked if it's related to geo-url and it's indeed something different did by other people (thanks joshua for the update).

Update 2: Hubert found the real author of geourl.info, it's Daniel Schaller:

Many amongst us bloggers know the the service www.geourl.org. It offered a way to register your blog in a directory for certain geographical coordinates. Furthermore, there was a way to get a list of other blogs which are near to your blog.

However, for what reason ever, since May/June this year, the service is down for renovations and has not relaunched yet so far. Since I liked the idea of this services and I realized that others do as well, I was setting up a re-making of it, which I have launched at the URL http://www.geourl.info now.

Please feel free and register your blog and tell your blog buddies to register their site, too.