Archive for the Science CategoryAnother neat technique in the vein of SnOil, a physical display Based on ferrofluid that reacts to magnetism. Shade Pixel is a type of physical display that uses deformable skin to represent information. It is very pretty, the dots on the white looks like steps in the snow. Notice how the sound from the solenoid works really well with the “clock” idea! A nice trick to deal with noisy technology. You can see a video about Shade Pixel here:
In the series I love animation, I found this graffiti animation that is really fun to watch. MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
I don’t know why nobody thought of that before. You can now get rid of your books on the virtual space! Web sites sell books, second price books, offer people to sell their personal books, but no site aggregates the needs of users in coordination with students who wants to get rid of their past year textbooks or more recent used books. Selling books online is a new concept and most people do not think to sell used books online. I am not sure of the competitive advantage with local resellers such as university associated bookstores, but this site that allows you to Sell TextBooks is really neat: you enter the ISBN number of your book and it offers you a price for it. If you don’t have a ISBN number for your book or if you’d like a deal for a specific book, you can just email the bookstore. You ship your books to the bookstore (shipping being reimbursed after 10$ of books are being sold to the company). A very convenient way to get rid of your textbooks and you can also check the price for any books you want. They usually buy books that are in good or better condition, that have an ISBN and that have a demonstrated demand in the used book market. Books that they typically do not buy are: encyclopedia sets, magazines, music books, comic books, books that are in poor condition, romance series and western novels, outdated text books, outdated computer books and Time-Life books. I tried with a few books, unfortunately not all of them are popular, so it seems it would work best with university textbooks, but it is worth a try. So if you want to clean your desk or need a new series of textbooks, this is a place to try!
A video on the beach by Keith Loutit that resembles stop motion (effect Tilt Shift) found on this super neat French blog Fubiz. The video animates beach lovers that shape like sharp color points using the fashionable effect called Tilt Shift, effect I used a lot to present my sculpture work, playing with a unusual depth of field, to create optical illusions and to give it a maquette look and feel. This effect is apparently also called smallgantics, popular effect based on a Thom Yorke music video. Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. Another video by Keith Loutit where the effect is even more stunning! Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. A very satisfying video of human motions within the light. Large format camera and filmed in high definition, the video entertains the viewer with light coordinated with motions. It is pleasing and becomes satisfying to watch the dancer twisting and jumping throughout the streets, playing with water and flowers. The soundtrack is a nice add-on by M83 (You appearing, Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun), Sigur Ros (Staralfur) et Besnard Lakes (Devastation). Enjoy! Human Movement in Light from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.
I am currently investigating social research to analyze people’s interaction with reactive systems. I often refer to the book: Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound: A Practical Handbook for Social Research by Martin W Bauer & George D. Gaskell that I recommend to be introduced to the broad range of techniques available for the systematic analysis of social data that is not numeric. It makes the key point that neither quantitative nor qualitative methods are interpretive and at the same time demonstrates once and for all that neither a constructivist perspective nor a qualitative approach needs to imply abandonment of rigor. I wonder about questionnaires and online surveys. Software to generate online questionnaires could help survey a population with a set of pre-defined questions. One site, Zoomerang, helps with many kinds of surveys from the customer satisfaction survey to education and non-profit surveys. It seems to program your questions or suggest the best way to get the feedback you need. The system hosts your surveys to keep heavy survey traffic away from your main site, and to not influence your results with your personal host. If you have no time for running in organizing a clean survey, the system converts paper-and-pencil questionnaire into a high performance online survey for higher participation, faster response and easy analysis. Every choice you make regarding materials, question delivery, and, of course, context, directly influence the attention and type of response that you’re going to get from a subject. Rethinking some of my previous survey work, and the availability of tools such as this, I wonder in which areas, if any, old-school pencil and paper would win out. For instance, in one recent study, I was interested in aspects of an individual’s personal music listening life. Questions were purposely open-ended to allow the subjects the flexibility of considering many different contexts of listening to support general self assessments like, “I consider myself expert in popular music.” In the moment, subjects would ask many different unexpected questions to relate their individual experiences under such global questions. “I grew up in the 60s. It’s completely part of my life, but not really popular today. Does that count?” Or, “I am expert in theory, composition, and music form. Does that theoretical knowledge make me expert despite that I don’t like popular music?” Space for these unpredictable questions was critical to getting an accurate picture of diverse forms of “expertise.” In the end, I wonder if an online survey system could leave a space open like many styles of survey need. However, it seems that such online surveys tool could collect powerful feedback fast as well as provide you with advanced analytics, cross-tab features for in depth study, etc.. so probably the fastest and most reliable way to obtain quick data.
My work “Electromagnetic Field Detector Bracelet” has been accepted as a video. The video will be presented at Ubicomp in Seoul South Korea during the one minute madness Monday 22nd and during the video reception 17:15 - 19:00! We present the design of a cost-effective wearable sensor to detect and indicate the strength and other characteristics of the electric field emanating from a laptop display. Our bracelet can provide an immediate awareness of electric fields radiated from an object used frequently. Our technology thus supports awareness of ambient background emanation beyond human perception. We discuss how detection of such radiation might help to “fingerprint” devices and aid in applications that require determination of indoor location. Come see me to talk about this work! If you cannot make it, here is the video: A bit of motivation for this work
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