Yesterday at the WMTE Conference, there was a banquet showing a “Wearable Computer Fashion Show” produced by Mizuko Oe (fashion producer, UEDA College of Fashion, Osaka, Japan) and Prof. Masahiko Tsukamoto (Kobe University, Kobe, Japan). Some weird future costumes had been demonstrated, including wearable musical instrument (Piano, Koto, etc.)
The IHT has a strange story about a device, called the Mosquito (“It’s small and annoying,”), that emits a high-frequency pulsing sound which can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30.
So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in south Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.
“On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers,” said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. “On the high end, they’d be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff.” (…) The results were almost instantaneous. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.
(…)
Stapleton is considering introducing a much louder unit that can be switched on in emergencies with a panic button.
It would be most useful when youths swarm into stores and begin stealing en masse, a phenomenon known in Britain as “steaming.”
Kind of scary, will we see that in France to avoid car fires?
A new noticeable blog has popped out: petistic. The tagline is “fantastic pet stuff for animal lovers – a collective blog about user-centered pet gear“. It’s about “intriguing things, stories and artefacts about animals. There will be a peculiar emphasis on pets“.
Jacobs N, Mcfarlane A. (2005) Conferences as learning communities: some early lessons in using `back-channel’ technologies at an academic conference – distributed intelligence or divided attention? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, No. 5., pp. 317-329
researchers attend conferences as a part of their practice, and yet it is an under-researched activity. Little attention has been paid either to developing a theoretically informed understanding of conference practice as knowledge building, or to assessing the extent to which conferences are successful. This paper addresses these issues in the context of a small empirical study of the introduction of mobile, interactive (‘back-channel’) technologies into a conference setting. Science studies and learning theories literatures are used to develop an eight-point statement describing the aims of an idealised conference. This is then used as a framework through which to make sense of what happened when ‘back-channel’ technologies such as internet relay chat (IRC) and blogging were introduced into the 2004 Colston Symposium ‘The Evolution of Learning and Web Technologies: Survival of the Fittest?’. Focusing on sequential issues and the conference as a forum for knowledge building, the analysis shows that conference order is disrupted by the introduction of the back-channel technologies. Nevertheless, other pressures on academic and professional practice (the governance agenda, calls for greater collaboration and a more consensual approach, and so on) suggest that the potential of the new technologies to help open up the black box of scientific and professional practice will be seen as increasingly important. If these tools are to be used effectively in the future, conferences will need to be supported by new skills and practices.
Why do I blog this? my interest in this is twofold. First because we’re organizing a conference (LIFT) and we’re wondering about setting a backchannel system. Second because I think it’s an interesting CSCW topic.
Two weeks ago, Matt Tiessen wrote this thoughtful post about spatial concerns in the city of Lyon, France. Wandering around in Japan, I tried to adopt the same perspective to briefly describe some intriguing phenomenon related to space and culture in Japan.
Tonight, Hiroaki Ogata will present their paper about an ubiquitous-computing system for learning japanese polite expression. I think it’s going to be close to the demo we had at CRAFT when he visited us last year. At that time he showed us 2 systems:
JAPELAS (Japanese polite expressions learning assisting system). This system provides learner the appropriate polite expressions deriving the learner’s situation and personal information. (…) JAPELAS provides the right polite-expression that is
derived from hyponymy, social distance, and situation through the identification of the target user and the place.The second system is called TANGO (Tag Added learNinG Objects) system, which detects the objects around learner using RFID tags, and provides the learner the educational information.
In those projects, the context (room for instance) is detected using RFID tag and GPS.
Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), short paper for the conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It discusses a system for autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices:
In our approach, songs are treated as individual agents that act autonomously according to input (e.g. listening habits) and given rules.introduce new music based on peoples’ shared music interest. (…) Imagine that you carry a mobile device that has the
ability to store and play back music files, e.g. a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other, e.g. via Bluetooth. Media agents from other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, some other music might spontaneously “jump” from another device to yours (and vice versa), on its own accord. Later, when you listen to your jazz songs, the system also plays a newly obtained Frank Sinatra tune that you had not heard before.
Why do I blog this? this is a clever design, it may be great if there is a critical mass of users.
Via nouvo.ch, an curious project carried out by Hans-Peter Lipp. They studied pigeon navigation using small GPS attached to the birds.This led them to “the best evidence yet of pigeons following roads” as reported by science week:
The authors present an analysis of 216 GPS-recorded pigeon tracks over distances up to 50 km. Experienced pigeons released from familiar sites during 3 years around Rome, Italy, were significantly attracted to highways and a railway track running toward home, in many cases without anything forcing them to follow such guide-rails. Birds often broke off from the highways when these veered away from home, but many continued their flight along the highway until a major junction, even when the detour added substantially to their journey. (…) The authors suggest their data demonstrate the existence of a learned road-following homing strategy of pigeons and the use of particular topographical points for final navigation to the loft. Apparently, the better-directed early stages of the flight compensated the added final detour. .
One of the project I bumped into this afternoon: Smart Planets is a project that aims at enhancing the teaching of astronomical phenomenons like eclipses and motions using tangible interactions. It’s a project carried out by Bjorn Eisen, Marc Jansen and UlrichHoppe.
Usually, the teacher takes different objects and whirls around with these. We provide Smart Planets, which consists of a polyfoam ball and an RF-ID Tag, which looks like a planet, but they can be used as an entrance into the virtual world. In virtuality, the Smart Planets can be animated with two different animation models according to the helio- and geo-centric view of universe. The shadows are also shown to allow for the examination of eclipse phenomena. With the help of Smart Planets the students can design their universe and can have an enriched view of it.
Why do I blog this? I like the project (not because I am crazy of poly/styrofoam) but because I finf interesting to embed such interactions.
Comprendre les échecs pour innover
Comprendre les nouveaux espaces numériques 
