J’aime à marcher a mon aise, et m’arrêter quand il me plaît. La vie ambulante est celle qu’il me faut. Faire route à pied par un beau temps, dans un beau pays, sans être pressé, et avoir pour terme de ma course un objet agréable: voilà de toutes les manières de vivre celle qui est la plus de mon goût.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les confessions”
(livre quatrième)
Google recently released a special search portal for code. There are some features of code which are extremely difficut to capture for conventional search engine. Also the display of the results seems to play a great deal on the usefulness of such systems. This last product from google seems to be pretty clean and easy to use. I still have to test it intensively though.
Tags: google, search engine
Social policy makers and town planners will soon be able to play ‘SimCity’ for real using grid computing and e-Science techniques to test the consequences of their policies on a real, but anonymous, model of the UK population. Dr Mark Birkin and colleagues, who are developing the model at the University of Leeds, will be demonstrating its potential at the UK e-Science stand at SC06, the world’s largest supercomputing conference in Florida, this week.
[more]
Tags: education, eGov, politics, simulation, urban, urban exploration, urban planning
Nothing new here, but still nice to see that people are interested in multemedia content attached on a map:
bliin YourLIVE! is a social networking service where users can spot, trace and share experiences — pictures, videos, audio and text — with one another in real-time on a Google Map.
Users create ‘bliins’ to navigate and monitor their interests in a location or area. bliins can be saved and shared amongst users. bliin is powered by GeoTracing and built on KeyWorx.
Tags: map algorithms, maps, urban exploration
This week I finalized the feedback tool that I am going to use for the controlled experiment for my thesis. I started with a basic set of features and I wanted to keep the tool minimal. However, for a certain design principle, which I still have not named, things tend to get complex as soon as they need to be used by generic users … 🙂
Anyway, it was fun to learn how to properly build client/server applications with Python, and learning how to use the message Queue. Once more, I am confirmed that Python is fun!
The thumbnail below shows the latest version of the feedback tool. I worked on the readability of the graph and I added some detailed information on what could have been causing a low-score. Finally I added some logging features. Still, I am not super-satisfied with the result but time is running short.
In these days I am pretty busy preparing a controlled experiment for my thesis. The setting will involve two participants jointly solving a task which involves a certain degree of reasoning and coordination. I performed a couple of pre-tests using a low-tech prototype and I found that participants were discouraged after a couple of trials because they could not tell whether their proposed solution was correct.
This made me think that in complex situations we need to offer a feedback over the problem-solving process. This seems to be beneficial both for the meta-cognition process and for the engagement that the participants might have with the task. My colleague Patrick Jermann developed his thesis on the subject of mirroring and guidance systems for computer supported collaborative learning.
Subsequently, I developed my own feedback tool for the participant trying to offer some references for the execution of their task. The figure below shows two instances of the tool. The main concept is to show the history of the scores achieved with each proposed solution. The scores are displayed in a graph which evolves over time. In the task I have been designing, there are four main constraints that needs to be optimized by the participants and which contributes to the final score. Each of the four partial scores associated with each constraint are displayed with a different color to offer an additional information to the participants.
Finally the application has some networking abilities to synchronize the actions of the users across the network. The remaining time is also offered in the bottom-lower corner.
Some links:
[1] Tutorial on Threads Programming with Python
[2] Threading with Python
[3] Basic Threading with Python
Tags: controlled experiments, human communication, interaction design, interaction regulations
The easiest program I was told about was Comic Life for Macs (http://plasq.com/comiclife), but Apple’s Photobooth was also mentioned (although I didn’t try it). I also was given a link to a how to for Photoshop (http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-popart.html) which looks like it is much higher quality than Comic Life but also much more work.
Comic Life let’s you use image filters to make the image look comic-y, but it doesn’t work well with all images. It does let you put in speech bubbles and stuff, though, and it looks pretty good.
Tags: art, image processing
D. Gergle, D. R. Millen, R. E. Kraut, and S. R. Fussell. Persistance matters: Making the most of chat in tightly-coupled work. In Proceeding of CHI2004, pages 431–438, Vienna, Austria, April 24-29 2004. ACM Press. [pdf]
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This paper present a controlled experiment to asses the effect of the history of conversation on task performances. The study shows how the history of the conversation has an impact on computer-mediated communication tasks that require semantic coordination to disambiguate utterances.
The author used a puzzle task where an “helper” has to guide the “worker” to solve the puzzle. In their experimental setup the author controlled wether the helper could see the space of interaction of the worker and can refer to the objects by the mean of deictic expressions. The shared visual space is a resource for grounding that makes the conversation more efficient.
The results demonstrate the importance of two resources for conversational grounding: a persistent dialogue history and a shared visual space.
How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.
Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human computer interaction, interaction design, user experience
Attrape-moi si tu peux (catch me if you can) is a network game where the goal is to catch a murderer, Mister X, who is hiding in the center of London. The Scotland-Yard inspectors, the players, have to follow some hints to find him but dealing with “the city” transport system. They have a limited number of tickets to move around and they have to spend them consciously to find the murder. The game has been developed at Software Engineering Laboratory, at EPFL.
AT T R AP E – MOI SI TU PE UX est un jeu de stratégie en réseau où une équipe de détectives tente d’arrêter Mister X dans sa fuite. Une bonne communication et un sens aigu de la déduction sont nécessaires pour réussir à AT T R AP E – MOI SI TU PE UX, que l’on soit détective ou Mister X.
Tags: map algorithms, maps, games
One of the cool things of the States are Tazo’s teas. I really enjoyed these refreshing drinks after seafood or during lunch. I tried to find them here in Switzerland but unsuccessfully. Fortunately is it possible to shop them online [1], [2]. Also, it is kind of cool to see that social rating is reaching all sorts of markets …
