the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S5) gives you PowerPoint-like presentations in pure XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. See it in action here. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license, and backwards-compatible with OperaShow Format 1.0 — Neat!
I’m not giving up using Keynote, but it sounds perfect for retro-folk who still like writing your slides in Emacs or Vi…
Slide shows in pure XHTML, CSS & JavaScript Read More »
From an interview with Donna Ducarme of Democrats Abroad, in the November 5th issue of The Amsterdam Times:
I’m physically wiped and sore all over and mentally tired. I’m so angry I can hardly breathe. Those of us who fought for Kerry are very disappointed and frightened that he lost. We’re worried for the future of America. I’m so angry that he conceded before all the votes were counted.
My thing was to register all the voters we could possibly register; one of the reasons we got them registered is that we promised that their votes would matter and then he conceded before any of our votes had been counted. Kerry has created a problem amongst individual members but he’s also cut us overseas voting activists off at the knees because not only will potential voters not believe Kerry anymore, they won’t believe us.
I personally believe he has disenfranchised every overseas voter. We’re all voting by post and, when he conceded, all of our ballots were still sitting there in the boxes waiting to be counted. It’s a betrayal of a sort I’ve never experienced in my political life. We galvanized voters who’d not been involved in politics since the Vietnam years because they thought they could make a difference. Are we supposed to wait another thirty years before we rally those troops again and what happens to our country in the meantime?
Ex-pat Democrat on Kerry’s concession Read More »
During the day the Red-Light district is mostly downtown shopping with cute fashion shops, Chinese restaurants and British sports pubs. OK, and hash bars and prostitution, but the vibe is still downtown shopping district. Come dusk every few blocks you’ll hear a quiet whistle, and if you turned your head someone would offer to sell you coke or X (low quality, according to my tourist guidebook). The prostitutes were all out behind their windows, preening under red neon in bikinis or lingerie and looking rather bored.
Going down a side alley (I know, never go down the side alleys…) I ran into a very friendly gentleman who wanted to pick my pocket. We chatted for a while, him asking questions like “have you taken any pictures of your trip,” and patting his pocket, as if to say “now you pat the pocket where your camera is!” I never gave him a lead and kept to the touristed streets, glad that I’d zipped everything in my inside jacket pocket. Eventually he asked if I smoked pot and I when I told him I didn’t we parted ways, and I went to the Hash Museum.
(No pictures — even during the day I didn’t want to take my camera out.)
Amsterdam Red-Light District Read More »
The Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum was far more interesting than I expected, even after getting past my initial American surprise of seeing the potted marijuana plant that adornes the sidewalk entrance to this place. Their small establishment is full of the history of the use of the hemp plant as both textile and drug, plus a great collection of ’30s & ’40s anti-marijuana propaganda.
The best part was getting to meet Eagle Bill, a self-described “half biker, half hippie” and former canabis breeder and smuggler from the US. It’s hard not to like Bill from the get-go — he’s got an infectious smile and the same love and passion for his drug of choice that you see in wine growers and conesuirs up in the Napa Valley. He was demonstrating his vaporizor system for inhalation of smokeless, pure THC vapor. It’s safer than smoking, obviously, but what surprised me is his claim that with vapors you get high (giddy, euphoric) but not stoned (zoned out). I’ve never done pot myself so this may be common knowledge in other circles, but when smoking he claims some breeds, like Indica, will get you stoned while others, like Sativa, would get you high. With the vaporizor you just get high. That makes sense if the vapor really is just pure TCH (the breed shouldn’t make a difference then except amount of vapor produced) but it makes me wonder what the extra chemicals are in the smoke that makes one stoned instead of high.
Another interesting comment by Bill — his main complaint about today’s pot is that it’s too strong. Back when he started smoking it was about 4% THC, now the stuff you buy on the street is about 18%. It’s still the same chemical (I assume, though see above), but now one joint is like smoking four old-fashioned ones in the same time period. Reminds me of the bathtub gin of the Prohibition era — when you’re risking getting busted, you don’t bother making a nice 4% alcohol Merlot.
Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum Read More »
[still clearing my backlog — this is from about a week ago…]
Amsterdam is gorgeous. Take a cross between Boston & San Francisco, remove the hills & homeless and replace them with a canal every 2 blocks and you’ve pretty much got Amsterdam. The canal district is Becon Hill, the Red-Light District is a cross between Haight-Ashbury & the Combat Zone (only with more overt illigal-drug sellers on the street and the prostitutes solicit from inside heated rooms), and in this alternate universe Critical Mass won the war.
It’s very much my kind of town.
I happened to arrive the day of their 5th annual Museum Night, where 39 museums are open from 7pm-2am all for one price, with special events at each and free water-ferry & trams between them. I must’ve hit 7 museums, the highlights being the black-gospel choir at the Bible Museum, blacklight-painting exhibit at Rembrandhuis and the lit-up Botanical Museum. For continuity sake, I ended the night at the NEMO science museum to check out their Smart Fashion exhibit.
Update: pictures are now up!
Thinking back on last week’s ISWC & ISMAR, I think there are three especially ripe areas of wearables research in the next few years:
Fusion of Wearables and Ubicomp: This is an area I’ve thought was ripe for a while, but apart from location-beacons and markers for AR (Augmented Reality) there’s surprisingly little research that combines Ubiquitous Computing and Wearables. There are exceptions, like Georgia Tech’s work with the Aware Home and some work in adaptive “universal remote controls” for the disabled, but it feels like there should be some good work to be done combining the localization of Ubicomp with the personalization of Wearables. It also nicely fits with Buxton’s argument that the key design work to be done is in the seamless and transparent transitions between different context-specific interfaces.
Social Network Computation, Visualization & Augmentation: This research has been going on for awhile, especially at the University of Oregon and more recently at the MIT Media Lab, but it seems to be getting traction lately. This sort of research looks at what can be done with multiple networked wearables users in a community. Typical applications include automatic match-making (along the lines of the Love Getty that was the craze in Japan several years ago), keeping a log of chance business meetings at conferences and trade shows, understanding social dynamics of a group like whether one person dominates the conversations, and real-time visualization of those social dynamics.
AugCog / Wearable Brain-Scanning: As I mentioned in a previous post, this is potentially a big breakthrough. I don’t mean in the sense that it solves problem the wearable field has been struggling with, but rather that this could open a whole new branch of research. Neuroscience has taken off in the past 10 years with advances in brain-imaging technology like functional MRI. The downside is that you can only see what the brain is doing when performing tasks inside a lab setting — it’s studying the brain in captivity. Wearable sensors give us the ability to study the brain in the wild, and to correlate that brain activity with other wearable sensors. That plus the lower price should enable all sorts of new research into understanding how we use our brains in our everyday lives. That, in turn, will hopefully lead to new ways to augment our thinking processes, whether by modifying our interfaces to match our cognitive load, providing bio-feedback to help treat conditions like ADHD or perhaps addiction, or even physically stimulating the brain to treat conditions like Parkinson’s.
That’s not to say there aren’t broad and potentially frightening aspects to this technology, but the issue that concerns me most applies generally to our recent understanding of the brain: I don’t think our society is prepared yet to deal with the coming neuroscience revolution. Our justice system, religion and even our system of government is based on the worn-out Cartesian idea that our minds are somehow distinct from the wetware of our brains and bodies. It’s been clear for decades that that assumption is false, but so far we’ve tried to ignore that fact in spite of warnings from science fiction and emerging policy debates about mental illness, psychoactive medication, addiction as illness and the occasional the-twinkies-made-me-do-it defense. The applications envisioned by AugCog are going to force the issue further, and societies doesn’t make a shift like that without serious growing pains.
Trends in Wearables Read More »
From a New York Times story on how San Jose police are struggling with the bad UI on their new touch-screen-based mobile-dispatch system:
Perhaps the biggest misstep of all, Mr. Marcus said, was that the officers themselves were not consulted beforehand, especially when it came to the design of the interface.
Yup, that’d do it…
Step one in designing an interface Read More »
One of the most exciting talks for me was the joint ISWC/ISMAR keynote by Dr. Dylan Schmorrow, one of the program managers for DARPA. The program managers are the guys who decide what research projects DARPA should fund — the best-known PM was probably JCR Licklider, who funded the Intelligence Augmentation research that led to the invention of the Internet, the mouse, the first(?) hypertext system, etc. The current program Dylan talked about was Augmented Cognition, which I’m now convinced could become the biggest breakthrough in wearable computing yet.
Intelligence Augmentation tried to support human mental tasks, especially engineering tasks, by interacting with a computer through models of the data you’re working with — that was really the start of the shift from the mainframe batch-processing model to the interactive computer model. AugCog is about supporting cognitive-level tasks like attention, memory, learning, comprehension, visualization abilities and basic decision making by directly measuring a person’s mental state. The latest technology to come out of this effort is a sensor about the size of your hand with several near-infrared LEDs on it in the shape of a daisy, with a light sensor in the center. The human skull is transparent to near-IR (that’s how you get rid of all the heat your brain produces), so when it’s placed on the scalp you can detect back-scatter from the surface of the brain. By doing signal processing on the returned light you can detect blood-flow and thus brain activity, up to about 5cm deep (basically the cortex). They’ve already got some promising data on detecting understanding — one of the things DARPA is especially interested in is being able to tell a soldier “Do this, then that, then the other thing… got that?” And even if he says “Yup” his helmet can say “no, he didn’t really get it….” Outside of military apps (and getting a little pie-in-the-sky), sometime down the road I can imagine using this kind of data to build interfaces that adapt to your cognitive load in near real-time, adjusting information displayed and output modalities to suit. In the more near-term, these devices are starting to be sold commercially and cost on the order of thousands of dollars, not tens or hundreds of thousands. That means a lot more brain-imaging science can be performed by a lot more diverse groups.
For more info check out www.augmentedcognition.org, or go to the Augmented Cognition conference being held as a part of HCI-International in Las Vegas July 22-27, 2005.
[I’ve been trip-blogging this past week but haven’t had convenient net access, so I’m afraid the real-time aspects of blogging are lacking… now that I’m hooked into the wireless at DEAF04 here’s some of my backlog.]
Bill Buxton’s ISWC keynote made a lot of points, but the one that struck me most was derived from three basic laws:
The problem then is how to deliver more functionality without making the interface so unwieldy as to be completely unusable. Buxton went on to talk about the trade-off between generality and ease-of-use: the more specifically-designed an interface the easier it is to use but the more limited its scope.
The key, he argues, is to make lots of specific applications with interfaces well-suited for their particular niche. Then you don’t need a single general interface, but instead can concentrate on the seamlessness and transparency of transitions between interfaces.
It’s a nice way of thinking about things, especially when thinking about the combination of wearables and ubicomp (see next post).
Buxton at ISWC: it’s the transitions, stupid! Read More »
Kevin Drum’s latest comment on Tom Wolfe) rings very true for me:
In other words, they [Red-State folk] disagree with us, but not so much that they can’t be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.
I think that’s spot-on — and it works both ways too. My step-dad and I are a great example I think (hi Frank!) — we get along great and pretty much share the same core values when it comes to life, but go completely loggerheads when it comes to arguing politics. My sense (and he’s welcome to correct me here) is the thing that sets him arguing most is any argument that smacks of intellectual/long-haired-hippie/lecturing elitism — almost regardless of the policy in question. I’m on the other side of that equation — I claim to hate Bush because of his incompetence and policy (and to some extent I do), but what really gets my teeth on edge about him is the anti-intellectualism he sides with and stands for. That more than anything is what drives me, a third-party-voting fiscal conservative who thought Iraq was a threat that needed to be dealt with, further and further taking the position of the Left.
Don’t think for a minute that the pundits of both sides aren’t doing this to us on purpose…
More on Red vs. Blue Read More »