I picked up few one at regine's place and added others. This is a work in progress!
meeting with my phd supervisor: - let's test 9 groups (3 without location awareness, 3 with the synchronous tool and 3 without) and then we can refine the methodology: which independent variables using? are the video useful? what can we get from this?
- a good phd = 2 experiments
- think about the fact that CatchBob2 (there will be another name btw) might be developed by students as diploma work
- find scenarios for catchbob2! higher level, semantically richer, more cognitive demand (pierre still mentioned "la grosse boule") because "Even a dog can play catchbob"
- meeting to check the videos on thursday 27th (january)
- since it is a phd thesis in computational sciences, the focus will be headed towards the testing of a tool (in terms of the interface) and we need a model. The conclusion of the first experiment should inform the design of the second. We have to keep in mind the contribution to the field: it's not the system per se (even though it works really well).
I am wondering about a model of spatial awareness that could be decomposed as: 1. past position of the partner 2. present position of the partner 3. future position of the partner
Thanks to catchbob first experiment, we might find what is considered as relevant by the players (1/2/3) and that (for instance) a channel of communication is fundamental for using those location information.
Another dimension is the way the position is captured: automatically (by the system like the WiFi triangulation we already have) or explicitly described by the players. We should test which are more important in terms of task performance or collaborative processes by having other interfaces like: - a queue: asynchronous interface) - a nose: indication of the direction
Then we have the "location awareness modality" has an independent variable with different factors: - nothing - synchronous location awareness (information about the present: just a dot) - synchronous location awareness + direction (information about the possible future) - asynchronous location awareness (information about the past)
There has been a very relevant discussion lately in the geowanking mailing-list "about formal location metadata in blog description area". The point is that since mainstream blog service vendors haven't implemented form input fields for location, it is good enough if we just start sticking raw location information directly _into_ the english text description area of a blog post. . The idea is thus to allow location blogging
For example if you have a blog entry form like this: title : [ Grandma got run over by a reindeer ] link : [ http://www.santaclaus.com ] description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers. ]Maybe it is not unreasonable to include location right in the description in some reasonably machine extractable way:
description: [ Ma grandma jes got run over by one of dem dern reindeers { longitude 0 latitude 90 } ]
To be more specific I'd suggest only two formats: 1) Longitude and latitude
{ long:nnn.nnn lat:nnn.nnn }
2) Geocoder or gazetteer with something fairly strict format-wise so the parser doesn't have to be particularily brilliant:
{ street & cross-street, city, state or province, country }
{ place name , city, state, country }
The author (Anselm Hook) also states that:
Why is this not a stupid idea? Because machines will preserve thisinformation... it doesn't require extending the fabric of the web services. The whole goal is to enable writing aggregators that can geo-place posts - in enough volume that it becomes a business case for larger web service providers. (..) Accuracy is not necessarily the goal of this. The goal is just to provide a transport for metadata that is otherwise being stripped or disallowed by naive transmission protocols - and in part to encourage formalization so that in a year or two more blogging services would do it right.
Something like a "100Gb evening” (see paul baron's definition) meeting with stefano mastrogiacomo and francesco cara. - write up your position in a short paper - when you think about the task: is the weight of the task equal (does one participant has to do all the job?) - grounding = process of incrementally adding knowledge into the person's stack of knowledge - list all the coordination keys/devices (cf. herbert clark) in catchbob - model catchbob's task with Clark's term (task, common goal...coordination keys, coordination strategies= keys put together) - I can try to test 2 conditions: one with a 3 minute discussion before the game and another without. Good to test the division of labor, and the importance of a plan before entering into a joint action. - francesco was wondering about whether there could be a "freerider effect" in catchbob. I answered no because: they have to collaborate to complete the task and the reward is the same for all. - what is awareness in catchbob? it is both location awareness (positions) and drawings/comments - a "think aloud" protocol? by individuals? that can be useful to access to players' minds + to enrich the replay - an audio communication channel in the game: so that we can test what information went from the screen to the audio + what goes on what channel + how the "least collaborative effort principle" applies. - allow permanent annotation? to see what they decide to keep as a footprint like in a social navigation system.
Found on somewhere on http://skyscrapercity.com
(via), a great locative media resource: dr reinhold grether's directory to mobile art and locative media.
netzwissenschaft.de is mapping the emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right.
A very environmental-friendly news:
A 1,000 sq metre former bank vault under an office building in Otemachi, a central Tokyo business district, has been chosen as the site for a high-tech farm growing lettuce, tomatoes, herbs strawberries and rice, the national daily Asahi said on Sunday. The project is aimed at helping the Japanese capital's jobless to train for careers in agriculture, the paper said. The underground location will allow complete electronic control of the environment with artificial lighting and heating. Plants at the "vegetable factory" will be grown hydroponically, or in a solution of nutrients, rather than soil, the Asahi said. If the farm is a success after its first harvest in the spring, Kanto Employment Creation Organisation together with recruitment agency Pasona plan to open more basement farms, the Asahi said
Mediacup, designed and tested by TeCo.
The MediaCup is an ordinary coffee cup augmented with sensing, processing and communication capabilities (integrated in the cup's bottom), to collect and communicate general context information in a given environment. It is an example how to equip everyday objects with computing and communication capabilities. With the MediaCup setup (consisting of several cups and other equipment) we explore the added value of computerized everyday objects.
Dix, Alan, and Russell Beale: ‘Information requirements of distributed workers,’ in Alan Dix and Russell Beale (eds.): Remote Cooperation: CSCW Issues for Mobile and Teleworkers, Springer-Verlag, London etc., 1996, pp. 113-143.
This chapter concerns two groups of workers: the mobile worker using a portable computer whilst travelling or whilst at clients' premises; and the teleworker, working from home or at neighbourhood work centres. These workers are part of a larger organisation and access shared corporate information, and yet they lack the level of communication which would be expected within a normal office environment. In particular their work is often composed of periods of individual work isolated completely from the central information sources interspersed with relatively high bandwidth communications. The means of the latter may range from direct connection of mobile computers to office machines through communication over telephone lines or email links to transfer of media such as floppy disks. In short their communication with colleagues and corporate data is intermittent.The chapter concentrates on two major areas:
- retrieval - making sure you have the right information when you need it.
- synchronisation - updating shared information in a way which makes sense.
Discussion with my adviser a bout the role of space. If you're asleep in an airplane, you wake up and you don't know where you are. Then check the light on the ground, it can depicts the urban structure/organization. If the repartition is like the picture on the right, it could be the UK; if it's messy like the picture on the left, it might be some latin area.
It seems that I am in a design oriented mood today. I just ran across these Virtual Chopsticks. What's interesting here is the analysis of the processes that occurs while people learn how to use these tools.
Tools are expected to provide users with good metaphors in future interactive systems for intuitively manipulating “information” or virtual objects. Moreover, by using a "virtualized" tool, we can investigate varieties of new tools by simply changing the software parameters of the tool with a standardized interface. Through these experiments, we expect to obtain new knowledge to design a good/comfortable user interface. In addition, we also expect to analyze processes that occur while humans learn to use new tools. We adopt chopsticks for one of the trials of our technique because although they are very simple in form, they do have multiple functions.
Since Pasta and Vinegar is in a raging war with regine, I have to use a wild card: a 25 years old table which is still impressice: The Handphone Table made by Laurie Anderson in 1978. It is now part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France.
When the listeners put their elbows on the table and cover their ears with hands, they can hear the sounds coming through wood and bones of their own arms which, similarly to wood, have a porous structure.The principle of the performance of Handphone Table bases on the conduction of sound through bones. Stereophonic music in low ranges is strengthened and processed to the form of impulses, spread through metal bars connecting with four points on the inner surface of the table top.
We ran another test of CatchBob today. Things went pretty well (technically speaking I am impressed by the reliability of the system: the system never crashes!). Today we tried the system without the location awareness tool: players were just aware of their position and not of the whereabouts of their partners. It was interesting to see that the game lasted a bit more and that the players explicitly declared their position by drawing it on the map. The data are so rich, I could not resist to show this one, which is amazingly significant (in terms if the explicitation of the strategy as well as the clarification of the situation).
Since Electronic Arts took a 20% shared of Ubi Soft (a french video game editor), there has been huge complaints from the french government/industry. I think the NYT made a clear point about this:
Splinter Cell, a popular video game based on Tom Clancy's action thriller novels. Would-be Sam Fishers, joysticks at the ready, may be surprised to learn that the company that developed and published the game is based in France. Even odder, perhaps, is the notion that a game celebrating the free rein of United States secret agents may be seen as a French cultural treasure.
Reimann, C.; Paelke, Volker; Stichling, Dirk: Foot-based mobile Interaction with Games. In: ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE). Singapore, Juni 2004
Interaction with mobile applications is often awkward due to the limited and miniaturized input modalities available. Our approach exploits the video capabilities of camera equipped smart-phones and PDA's to provide a fun solution for interaction tasks in simple games like “Pong”, “Breakout” or soccer.
Our lab has 4 positions. If you're interested email pierre dot dillenbourg at epfl dot ch.
I came up with this: Mutual Modeling: process by which an individual (i) picks up facts he/she estimates to be MANIFEST and RELEVANT in his/her cognitive environment (with regard to the partners’ intents), (ii) builds a representation (more or less formal) about the partners’ intents.
That's a question I always think about: how to cope with a too large number of RSS feeds? Roland Tanglao answers:
here's how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload: Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies' and blogs' keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.
The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don't read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.
Of course, as he claims, "There's no need to read everything". I tend to think about this as the first rule. The first month I used a news aggregator I used to read everything and then I noticed that being updated is not a matter of reading stuff once in a while. It is rather to read a bit on a regular basis.
Another thing important is the notion of node, some people can keep track of stuff you're interested in but you don't have time to browse about. For instance, even though I am interested in blogs and syndication I don't really check website about it. Instead of reading specialized blogs on KM or blogs, I aggregate 2-3 of great blogs about it.
In the swiss german part of Switzerland...
Interview in Gamasutra on handheld gaming. The guy advocates for the "small is beautiful" approach.
"With handheld development, the teams are smaller than big console production, and that inherently has appeal for us. This is just because we can focus more on the creative effort, and fun factor, and also working within a small team environment, for each one of our projects. I think that's a good thing. I think that multi-year projects are a difficult thing. Console titles that are multiple years in development can be very big, and the smaller dev cycles also have an appeal, because you can learn and improve your skills, and I think there's a lot to be gained there. Also, it's a good business model for smaller developers."
