![[ meme – hazard ]](http://www.meme-hazard.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/mh_banner.png)
Since arriving at UW almost four years ago, I’ve been involved in student politics. I’ve not talked about it here as most of it is rather prosaic and, for those not at UW, largely irrelevant. Every now and then, though, something comes up which might be of wider interest.. In early May, GPSS, the Graduate… Read More »
Saw a cool presentation today about an implant-based therapy for epilepsy at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering by Jaideep Mavoori of NeuroVista, a company here in Seattle. The idea is that if someone is warned of an imminent seizure in advance, say 20 minutes out, they can remove themselves from unsafe or embarrassing situations,… Read More »
I was completely unaware of this, but apparently cases of academic misconduct, as evidenced by the retraction of papers from journals and other publication venues, have been on the rise. According to the article, retractions from journals in the PubMed database have increased by a factor of 60 over ten years, from 3 in 2000… Read More »
I spent Saturday at the HCI for Peace workshop representing the Voices from the Rwandan Tribunal project. It was fairly informal, with only 10 participants, which made it easy for everyone to participate in the discussion. Several participants presented projects they’ve worked on, including: Lahiru Jayatilaka, a Sri Lankan PhD student from Stanford, who presented… Read More »
I’m feeling pretty jazzed at the moment about patronage as a funding model for creative endeavours. It’s a pretty simple idea: instead of today’s dominant practice, where creative works are funded and owned by someone expecting to make money back from advertising or sales through a limited distribution channel, under patronage, creators fund their work… Read More »
Clearly I’ve got work to do, because I’m procrastinating with blog posts. #include<speculative comments about motivation> Interesting piece about the futurist implications of the promising new technologies on the horizon becoming corporate controlled walled-gardens, much as everything is now. It’s clear that some level of profit driven development is good, as it spurs innovation, but… Read More »
Imagine a search engine that, instead of just doing text matching, attempts to parse your statement into questions it can answer, then provides you with as many of those answers as it can. Imagine a search engine that can deal with numerical relationships and analysis. Imagine a search engine that’s tailored towards returning facts and… Read More »
Check out this rather impressive imagining of virtual world construction in a fully tangible VR / AR environment. The interface used is quite cool and inspirational, but there’s a lot of funky interface videos out there, and the basic idea of creating worlds from within isn’t new; Snow Crash has this sort of thing, and,… Read More »
So, everyone knows what r stands for, right? What about v? Or f(x) and f'(x)? OK. How about x, y, and z? If you’re not a math geek of some kind, you’re probably not reading anymore, but just in case you are, the point is that each of these letters has a common meaning in… Read More »
While waiting for pizza this evening, I read an article by David Allan Grier in IEEE Computer about the ways in which technology has changed entertainment, particularly the theatre, over the last 40 years or so. In particular, he discusses how automated lighting, sound and so forth can afford a stage manager the opportunity to… Read More »