Dark data to be set free

A very interesting article by Thomas Goetz in Wired entitled “Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments“. It’s mostly about the publication bias: what is published in research paper is only results that are positive or which have dramatic outcomes. The other goes to the lab drawer but now some initiative aims at setting them free. What about the reasons to do so:

“For the past couple of years, there’s been much talk about open access (…) Liberating dark data takes this ethos one step further. It also makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their “failures.” But in this data-intensive age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs. After all, some of today’s most compelling research efforts aren’t one-off studies that eke out statistically significant results, they’re meta-studies — studies of studies — that crunch data from dozens of sources.
(…)
advocating the release of dark data is one thing, but it’s quite another to actually collect it, juggling different formats and standards. And, of course, there’s the issue of storage.“

Why do I blog this? Great initiative and good material to do research! Hidden stuff is always intriguing anyway.

Beyond the data availability and the possibility to run meta studies, I am strongly interested in this sort of “dark” data, especially about things that failed. It’s IMO a topic spot on the near future laboratory edges: documenting the failures, behavior, issues, artifacts that failed. We’re currently considering a workshop about this in the field of ubicomp/the future of objects.

Andy Clark’s on annexing technology

“Some fear . . . a loathsome “post-human” future. They predict a kind of technologically incubated mind-rot, leading to loss of identity, loss of control, overload, dependence, invasion of privacy, isolation, and the ultimate rejection of the body. And we do need to be cautious, for to recognise the deeply transformative nature of our biotechnological unions is at once to see that not all such unions will be for the better. But if I am right – if it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles – then the question is not whether we go that route, but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it. By seeing ourselves as we truly are, we increase the chances that our future biotechnological unions will be good ones. “

In Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Mind, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cardinal directions stuck on pavement

Seen last week in Paris, near République:

A piece of street art (made out of stickers) that indicates cardinal directions.
I know it’s not meant to be an urban sign but it’s a curious user-generated/DIY city elements. Standing around it for half an hour (I was waiting for a friend there), it was funny to see people avoiding walking on it: the status of the sign was higher than expected.

Criticizing Paul Virilio

In Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Nigel Thrift highlights the problematic tone of Virilio’s work on modernity (his book City of Panic in particular).

The author raises two issues:
- Virilio’s arguments are more jeremiads than an answer, which reminds me of Adam Greenfield statement that “nostalgia is for suckers” in his talk at PicNic 2007 (where he expressed that lamenting about the past of cities is not an answer).
- The phenomenology of despair described by Virilio is not very well rooted in social or cultural research, as if the only evidence he was relying on were newspapers and books from other authors.

Some excerpts that I found interesting:

“Almost everything he says about the modern city would have to be seriously qualified or reconstructed or just plain retracted. (…) there is a veritable legion of careful empirical studies of information technology that very often show the polar opposite of what Virilio would have us believe. (…) each time he goes round the park, he exaggerates and this exaggeration is not just of the “well, this is an illustration of a general trend and should not be expected to play out equally everywhere,” or of the “well, take this as a warning of how things could become,” or of the “well, it won’t come to pass exactly like this but near to it” variety. It is systematic. And such systematic exaggeration is of more than mild concern. “

The sort of myth Thrift debunks here are for example:

“a common rule in this literature is “the more virtual the more real” (Woolgar 2002), that is, the
introduction of new “virtual” technologies can actually stimulate more of the corresponding “real” activity.
(…)
The idea that increasing speed somehow has causality is an urban myth so deeply engrained in Western individuals’ idea of themselves and how they are that it is probably not dislodgeable – but that doesn’t mean that philosophers have to power it up.“

Why do I blog this? Having read (and enjoyed) some books written by Paul Virilio, I was interested in these critiques. They actually echo my feelings about that author. Somehow, I have the same impression with all the books I have read in the same vein (mostly from french sociologist/thinkers/philosophers) such as Jacques Ellul, they are inspiring, they point to interesting issues but they’re often exaggerating or hyperbolic (“forcer le trait“). And generally, it’s because of the distance between the author and what happens down there. This is sometimes atrocious, when you read books from thinkers speculating about web2.0, television or video games and you definitely know that those persons are not using these technologies (some still call radio “TSF”, the word employed 50 years ago in France).

Thrift, N. (2005). Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the Esthetic of Disaster, Cultural Politics, 1(3). 337-348.

Mini street art

Mini street art seen last week in Amsterdam, a little door+street number plate that we encountered while wandering around.

Yet another thing to add in the list of objects stuck on street material. Beyond classical stickers and graffiti, the mini-doors is a quite intriguing move.

Game vest to simulate impacts on torso

There is an article in Technology Review about tangible interfaces for video-games by Erica Naone. It’s basically about a vest (called 3rd Space) that aims at bringing more realism to the game experience by simulating impacts. It’s based on pneumatic cells which produce impacts of various strength in different locations on the player’s torso.

The article gives a brief overview of user experience issues:

“Force feedback devices are already popular among gamers, and Ombrellaro says that his vest promises an even more realistic experience than today’s vibrating controllers. “The drama moment with this is getting shot in the back in a first-person game,” he says. In market tests for the vest, he says, people would turn around in surprise when they felt the impact in the back, even though they knew intellectually to expect it. Based on feedback from its tests, the company chose a standard strength of impact, which is palpable but not bruising. “We’re pushing the edge,” he says. “We’re still keeping it very fun but, at the same time, giving you tactile cues that are important. There’s even subtly a message–that there are consequences to shooting people.” Ombrellaro says that he also plans to ship vests with a more powerful compressor for a subset of gamers who want to feel stronger impacts and for use in military and police training.”

Why do I blog this? video-games (as well as lots of digital environments) engage people in immersive experience but the body is often less involved (although the Wii suffers less from that issue…). In this case, even though the player cannot be hurt, the proprioceptive sense is mobilized in an interesting way.

Cognitive mapping of various means of communication in 1996

In The social representation of telecommunications, Leopoldina Fortunati and Anna Maria Manganelli explore “common knowledge of telecommunications”. In a sense, they try to reconstruct how technologies of information and communication “have been metabolised in the system of social thought, and the way in which they have been integrated conceptually.

Using Moscovici’s frame of reference (social representations), they analyze data gathered from telephone survey carried out in 1996. Interviewees were asked to freely associate two terms with certain cue words: ‘telecommunications’, ‘fax’, ‘television’, ‘telephone’, ‘computer’, ‘mobile phone’, ‘radio’, ‘video-recorder’, ‘stereo’ and ‘newspapers’. Cluster analysis allowed them to represent the similarities between the communicative technologies (represented by the cue-words) through a dendrogram of similarities:

The authors conclude that:

“In conclusion, the analysis of the similarity between means of communication shows that in 1996 there already existed a scission between the real telecommunication technologies, that is, ‘fax, telephone, mobile phone and computer’, and technologies which were not telecommunication, such as mass media or means of reproduction of sounds and images. The first were based on technologies that carried circular communication, the second on uni-directional communication technologies. Furthermore, in the first cluster (not telecommunication), we must note the clear distinction between technologies that reproduce sounds and images and those that carry information. The position of the ‘radio’, assimilated as it was to ‘stereo’, was yet a further indication that this medium was experienced essentially as music.

From this first analysis what emerged is that the profiles of the different forms of telecommunication and the division and cooperation among them were reflected with clarity and precision in common knowledge.“

Why do I blog this? I was looking for reference about representation of technologies an ran across this paper; found the methodology quite intriguing (there are lots of other results to check). What I found pertinent is the idea of having a a detailed description of the cognitive integration of the various means of communication. How would that be perceived now? with new forms of communication? with so-called “digital natives”?

Fortunati, L. & Manganelli, A.M. (2007).The social representation of telecommunications. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 1617-4909.

P&U computing: Special issue about movement-based interaction

The last issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing is devoted to movement-based interaction. The 7 papers address what is referred to by a plethora of terms such as “physical interaction, embodied interaction, graspable interfaces, tangible interfaces, embodied interfaces, physical computing and interactive spaces”.

As the editors put it:

“We start the issue with three papers that present lessons learned and perspectives gained from the design and evaluation of a number of concepts, prototypes and applications, all using a range of movements and tracking technologies to enable interaction. (…) These three papers should move the discipline forward by providing other researchers and practitioners with frameworks to bounce ideas against and concepts to describe and understand movement-based interaction.
(…)
We also selected four papers that we hope will further the understanding of movement-based interaction through their theoretical and methodological contributions by explicating different/new theoretical approaches and understandings, and extending the methods available to designers in this area.“

Why do I blog this? material for current work about tangible interface in gaming contexts. More about this later, as soon as have time to go through them.

Current stuff

(maybe a personal blogpost to keep track of current things I’m involved in)

• Writing (and meeting people from a telco or) a research project in 2008 about the user experience of mobile gaming.
• Meetings with lots of people in Paris: j*b to chat about our current projects (bravo pour la thèse), Bruno Marzloff to discuss about possible collaborations (which starts with a short text I am currently writing), Pascal Salembier to talk about our current research project/positions as well as his recommendations for a young researcher like me (he advises me to write a book about space/location-awareness/mobility/collaboration), Rafi Haladjian to discuss Violet‘s project, his talk at LIFT and possible collaborations, and the FING people because it’s good to hang out there.
• A talk at the Cité des Sciences for the Rencontre des Cyberbases, an event organized by the big french bank Caisse des Dépots. It’s basically their annual seminar where all their teams have workshops and seminars about technological issues. My talk was one of the three keynotes; speaking after the director of this initiative and a member of the European Commission, I presented what is Ubiquitous Computing are some critical elements about it (mostly the talk I’ve given here). Thanks Sophie Bernay, Isadora Verderesi and Charlotte Ullman for the invitation.
• Get back home and headed for the third workshop of the in-betweeness series at the Waag Society in Amsterdam. Somehow related to urban computing, space/place and design, these workshops focuses on places that do not fall into the classic categories (home, café, work) and can be difficult to define: public waiting lines, transitional spaces, toilets, etc. The point of these workshops is to look at how people behave in these places or how things are designed to understand the implications for the design of future technologies. Organized by Karen Martin, Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer. Enjoyed the informal+ethographical spin+discussion at this workshop. The field trip dimension of the workshop was very pertinent as well as the discussion of what each group collected, what they mean in terms of behavioral traits, social issues, and design implications.
• Preparing a talk I will give tonight at the University of Geneva about location-awareness and social computing to students from a master in IT. Possibly material for future talk at research centers for two big IT companies
• attend an event in Geneva about FON: the Geneva city council to sign a convention with FON to consolidate the small existing wireless network available in some key locations of the city. Discussed last month with Jean-Bernard Magescas about this.
• writing research papers on my PhD dissertation, the first review from a journal paper came and have two other papers in the process
• write a chapter about new interaction partners (pets and pervasive gaming) for the near future laboratory book
• work on a survey/interview about mobile gaming.
• work on some presentations about web2.0 implications for the video game industry or cognitive sciences and gaming for a client and finish the slide for my talk about tangible interactions the European Game Design Conference

Registrations for LIFT are now opened

We recently opened the registration for the LIFT08 Conference. The program is still taking shape, we will announce few things soon (especially the next graphic design ).