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場 (ba)Collaborative Places
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BT-1 Wireless webcam: $US 149
and
3M MPRO110 Micro Projector: $US 300
= $USD 449 (= $AUD 626) plus something for shipping.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt1_4Hr_-FA
Tape them together, point them at a surface in arm’s reach, set up a screen-sharing videoconference with someone else with the same setup, and you can share a projected workspace. Cheap, fast and adaptable.
These slides are what I’m using to summarise my project these days. I’m not much of a one for bullet points though, so if you’d like the text you’ll need to come along next time I do a presentation. Or, you could start with the about page.
Susan Greenfield’s latest book is interesting, but it’s jam-packed with assumptions that I can’t agree with. As I follow each chain of logic based on an unsupported premise, I become more and more exhausted. So I’m afraid I’ve only read halfway through the book so far. I suppose that she might blame this on my short attention span, caused by too much time in front of the Commodore 64 in my childhood. Nonetheless – I can’t quite accept that someone so accomplished and brilliant could write an entire book without something of value in it, so I shall persist.
Meanwhile the press has got hold of the Cliff’s notes. I fully expect that we will now be witness to a “debate” in our own (Australian) media between various people whose entire understanding of this issue is gleaned from the British press’ misreporting of half-understood press releases containing excerpts from speeches made about a book that obliquely references actual research.
So below is my response to the Daily Mail’s scintillating ‘Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist‘.
I’m halfway through Susan Greenfield’s book; and although she’s a scientist I’m still waiting for her to introduce some science to support her assertions. It’s full of sentences that begin along the lines of “I often wonder whether” and “It is hard to see how [...] this [...] will not result in” (both of those examples are from your article above).
Baroness Greenfield’s stature as a scientist and public intellectual make her comments worth considering. However if I may put this the way that she seems to prefer: I often wonder whether assertions of correlation made without evidence of causation might perhaps be claptrap.
Ahem.
Really, ouch. However I am now a big fan of the Sydney Hospital Hand Unit.
Quite a cohort from CCS went to OZCHI this year. It was my first, and I got a pretty good overview; I presented a paper, attended a workshop and participated in the Doctoral Consortium. That last was particularly excellent. Paul Dourish, Margot Brereton and Wally Smith generously gave their time to help a roomful of PhD students make a little more sense of our personal maelstroms. All of them helped me considerably. I cite Paul rather a lot, and I’m kind of a fan so that was a buzz as well.
Naturally I twittered constantly, so my stream-of-consciousness impressions of OZCHI 2008 are archived for eternity, along with everyone else’s.
I’m in the UTS Games Studio, the denizens of which are demonstrating the cool toys we have there. First is Leena who has embedded various i-cubex sensors in a teddy bear (well, a dog, but she admonishes us to ignore that), a tennis racket any glove. All of these are generating audio at the moment. Greg and Daniel have been playing with our MERL Touchtable. This is a multi-user multitouch display table; its special capability is that it can distinguish between four users. Other touch tables can support lots of users and touches, but can’t tell who is who. They’ve made a simple but very engaging game called Ball Fight that used this capability nicely. The CCS mob is getting quite excited by the artistic possibilities ^_^
The seal of the Vice President of the United States, like that of the President, is protected under 18 USC Sec. 713 – you CAN NOT HAZ, at least if you’re subject to US law. I suppose that this is why the seal was not in the backdrop behind the candidates at the Vice-Presidential debate held today.
To use or to simulate the seal is not permitted… but why merely simulate, when you can beat reality at its own game? Enter the hyperreal.
Or indeed, the hyper-seal. Forget staid heraldry. This shield is a 3D object protruding into the space. Not a depiction, a virtualisation. The eagle is… surfing on the shield? Surmounting it, anyway, and crushing the arrows and the olive branch beneath its talons. Instead of “E Puribus Unum” (Out of Many, One), we have THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER, like a sailor’s tattoo.
This eagle says I MADED YOU A GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE BUT I EATED IT.
Looks like I’m going to be presenting at this – will have to make some killer slides…
A couple of slide decks for talks I gave recently: last Wednesday a guest lecture for the Interactive Arts class on Responsive Environments as an art form.
Then the previous Wednesday, a presentation to UTS staff on Second Life, in the context of other available metaverses and with some focus on its uses in education.
My slides tend to be all pictures – there’s enough text with me talking over them without writing it all out again so you can read what I’m saying. It does mean though that they don’t stand alone when I stick ‘em on the web. You’ll just have to look at the pretty examples 
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