Jason Hong's Confabulations

It would be nice to have an email client that could send emails at a specified time. For example, if you were up at 4AM, you could compose the mail and then have it automatically send out at 7AM, to make it look like you weren't actually up at 4AM. Or you could write a reply to an email now and have it send out a few days later, to pace the rate of email exchange from another person.

Interesting philosophy and design insights behind the makers of Cranium. They intentionally tried to create something of a less combative and adversarial nature, towards something more communal and fun. No losers, everyone shines. Also amazing is the design rationale, the spirit, and the philosophy embodied in everyday things. I'll have to redouble my efforts when looking at ordinary things. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/magazine/28PHENOM.html?pagewanted=1 That proved unexpectedly tricky with Balloon Lagoon, the game for kindergarten-age kids. The designers developed four activities that touched on children's different intelligences -- like the frog flipping, a test of dexterity, or spelling with the letters fished out of the word pond, a linguistic challenge. Each player had 30 seconds to try each activity, to maximize the chance that every child would win -- ''shine'' -- at least once. They set up a sand timer to count down the 30 seconds. Bu...

Fun article about the RoboSapien toys out. Whenever I saw them in stores I thought that they would be sort of silly, but now I'm intrigued. Interestingly, there was another article in the NYTimes recently about how kids aren't playing with tinkertoys and all anymore, opting rather for video games. Makes you wonder if programmable toys like this aren't a new third way. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/magazine/28ROBO.html?pagewanted=2 When we spoke, Jacob had just made his Robosapien karate chop his older brother in the head ''to see if it would hurt.'' (Not much.) ... Some scientists have predicted that the real advances in robotics will not occur in university or government labs but in entertainment robots like Robosapien, conceived to appeal to consumers. In a remarkable scholarly book, ''The Secret Life of Puppets,'' Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced ...

Interesting trend in gadgets that only do IM. Zipit Wireless IM http://engadget.com/entry/1234000040021751/ Motorola's IMFree http://broadband.motorola.com/consumers/products/imfree/

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65721,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4 Human memory is imperfect, so an RFID-enabled smartwatch that keeps track of the easily lost items in your world could be a boon. The tricky part is making sure the watch doesn't remember everything. At his lab in Seattle, Gaetano Borriello and his University of Washington team have built a working prototype of a smartwatch that operates using radio frequency identification tags to help people keep track of their stuff. The device is destined to become an application for the memory-challenged but is being designed with privacy rights in mind.

http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/videos.html Has a bunch of classic HCI vids, including i-Land, Digital Desk, tangible computing, and so on.

These statistics are incredible, not just because of the fact that they were collected for over 40 years, but also the simple impact of them given the almost trivial cost. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21IDEA.html?pagewanted=2&oref=login Most remarkably, the impact of those preschool years still persists. By almost any measure we might care about -- education, income, crime, family stability -- the contrast with those who didn't attend Perry is striking. When they were 27, the preschool group scored higher on tests of literacy. Now they are in their 40's, many with children and even grandchildren of their own. Nearly twice as many have earned college degrees (one has a Ph.D.). More of them have jobs: 76 percent versus 62 percent. They are more likely to own their home, own a car and have a savings account. They are less likely to have been on welfare. They earn considerably more -- $20,800 versus $15,300 -- and that difference pushes them well above ...

Have to find more uses for WordNet, an amazingly cool data source. http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/ --- WordNet is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

I think just took a triple shot of the Existential Cocktail these past two weeks, consisting of: Reading Catcher in the Rye and The Myth of Sisyphus Watching Lost in Translation , After Life , and Last Night Discovering the sublime music that is Tori Amos' 1000 Oceans , Johnny Cash's cover of U2's song One , and Vince Guaraldi's Cast Your Fate to the Wind And add on top of that a dash of psychologist / philosopher Erich Fromm: Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable. In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. I've clearly got to cut down on the cough syrup when I'm sick.

In his book Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century , Neil Postman actually has the only good argument I've ever seen for teaching Creationism alongside Evolution in classrooms. The story told by creationists is also a theory. That a theory has its origins in a religious metaphor or belief is irrelevant. Not only was Newton a religious mystic but his conception of the universe as a kind of mechanical clock contructed and set in motion by God is about as religious an idea as you can find. What is relevant is the question, To what extent does a theory meet scientific criteria of validity? The dispite between evolutionists and creation scientists offers textbook writers and teachers a wonderful opportunity to provide students with insights into the philosophy and methods of science. After all, what students really need to know is not whether this or that theory is to believed, but how scientists judge the merit of a theory. Suppose students were taught the criteri...

Drive around a race track as a piece of sushi. Who comes up with this stuff? http://www.tokidoki.it/

Was looking for Wellner's Digital Desk video, found this cool site chock full of HCI videos. http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/videos.html

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/11/16/1753230.shtml?tid=156 Sigh. Slashdot just posted a headline about the Natural Programming article on ACM Queue. And once again, Slashdotters prove that they can't: Read the article before making inane posts Distinguish between "Natural programming" and "Natural Language Programming" Make coherent arguments for or against something Make jokes that are actually funny Understand the basics of human-compuer interaction before declaring themselves experts in it

ACM Queue has a good short summary of the Natural Programming project here at CMU. http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=225 It is somewhat surprising that in spite of over 30 years of research in the areas of empirical studies of programmers (ESP) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the designs of new programming languages and debugging tools have generally not taken advantage of what has been discovered. For example, the C#, JavaScript, and Java languages use the same mechanisms for looping, conditionals, and assignments shown to cause many errors for both beginning and expert programmers in the C language. Systems such as MacroMedia's Director and Flash, Microsoft's Visual Basic, and general-purpose programming environments like MetroWerks' CodeWarrior and Microsoft's Visual C++, all provide the same debugging techniques available for 60 years: breakpoints, print statements, and showing the values of variables.

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/11/technology/circuits/11next.html New York Times article looking at why Tablet PCs haven't really taken off yet. According to Andy van Dam, a computer science professor and vice president for research at Brown University, who also serves on Microsoft's technical research advisory board, Tablet PC's and other pen-driven computers won't take off until pen gestures provide new ways of interacting with the machines instead of simply substituting for a mouse. Pen computers could find markets in education, architecture, graphic design and user-interface design, he said. "For these people, a pencil and a piece of paper are more natural almost than a computer keyboard on a desktop." But pen software needs more testing to find out what users really want, he said. "For a relatively pure gesture-driver user interface, it's all research," he said. "None of these have had a field trial with a thousand users, let alone ten thou...

Why is it that economists have so much shared and common data to work with, while we in HCI do not? There is so much raw data out there for economists about the stock market, GNP, GDP, exchange rates, option prices, oil prices, car crashes, sumo wrestling, and so on. Imagine what HCI could be like if we could have that much rich data. Just off the top of my head, some data sources that I'd love to be able to use: Google search terms Orkut and Friendster social network connections Microsoft Windows crash data, (you know, those popups that appear after a program crashes, asking if you want to send it to MSFT. What programs crash most often? What trends are there over time?) Yahoo IM, AIM, and MSN Messenger usage trends ISP usage data (how much traffic is file sharing, web, IM, etc) Yahoo web page usage trends (What happened when a change was made? What changes have been most popular? Least popular? Which parts of the navigation do people use most, ie nav ...

Some more thoughts. Keep in mind that privacy is not necessarily secrecy, but also the persona we want to project to others. Separate email or IM accounts (one for work, one for home) Curtains (closing or opening them) What we wear Where we sit (ex. sit in the back of a class)

Some very clean and impressive social network visualizations. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/networks/

An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i090101 A Venture Capitalist's View of Engineers http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i120101

Interesting point of discussion in the ubicomp class this morning, how do people already manage their privacy today? And how can these be applied to ubicomp systems. Some ideas off the top of my head: Leaning over and whispering to somebody (or lowering your voice in general, or moving to a separate corner or outside to limit who can hear what you say) Letting voice mail or answering machine get the phone call Turning off cell phone Closing a door to have a private conversation How we dress (more along Goffman lines of how we present ourselves) Watching what we say and disclose to others White lies Hiding in some cafe Invisible mode with instant messenger (some of my friends are always in invisible mode these days...) Sitting in certain places to avoid letting people see what's on your laptop Avoiding certain places where friends are (or enemies as it may be) Asking people directly not to disclose something ("Don't tell anyone else, but....

Interesting design principles from Adam Greenfield. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/all_watched_over_by_machines_of_loving_grace_some_ethical_guidelines_for_user_experience_in_ubiquitouscomputing_settings_1.php Principle 0. First, do no harm Principle 1. Default to harmlessness. Principle 2. Be self-disclosing. Principle 3. Be conservative of face. Principle 4. Be conservative of time. Principle 5. Be deniable.

Researchers have been doing this kind of work for a while, good to see a product that finally does it. http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,714638,00.html?cnn=yes By miming the action of page-turning, users can leaf through documents book-style. Tilt the device or slide it like a mouse and you can roam over webpages without clicking or pushing keys. Simply tip it to zoom in or out.