End of GOOG-411, Google's "phoneme harvesting operation" - via Pogue's Posts

Here's a quick link to a recent "Pogue's Post":


Farewell, GOOG-411
NYT 10/14/10


Google:  In Service of Data


"On Nov. 12, Google will turn of 800-GOOG-411 forever...It was one of the best, juiciest, most useful services in all phonedom...In case you missed it, GOOG-411 is a free, voice-activated directory assistance service..."


Pogue goes on to quote Google's Marissa Mayer, from a 2007 InfoWorld presentation:
"If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation.  So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so we can ultimately train off of that.  So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that:  Getting a bunch of different speech samples."




RELATED
Comments to Pogue's Post, Farewell, GOOG-411


Schalkwyk, J., Beeferman, D. Beaufays, F., Byrne B., Chelba, C., Cohen, M., Garret, M., Strope, B. (Google, Inc.)  Google Search by Voice: A case study (pdf)




Google Shuts Down GOOG-411
Google Operating System Blog


SOMEWHAT RELATED
Android phones are secretly collecting private user data
Andrew Wozny, Canada Social Media Examiner


Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers
Ryan Paul, Ars Technica


Best Practices for Handling Android User Data
Nick Kralevich, Tim Bray, Android Developers 8/4/10 


Why Google keeps your data forever, tracks you with ads
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica


Google's Eric Schmidt: You can trust us with your data
Shane Richman, Telegraph UK 7/10/10

"Out My Window", a web-based, interactive 360-degree panorama, multimedia storytelling/documentary creation, directed by Katerina Cizek, of the National Film Board of Canada

National Film Board of Canada's "Out My Window",  part of the Highrise Project. 


Tracey Boyer, founder and managing editor of the Innovative Interactivity blog, recently posted about "Out My Window", a web-based interactive documentary filmed in 360-degree panoramic video, directed by Katerina Cizek,  a participant of the National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project.


After I read Tracy's blog post and explored her link to Out My Window,  I felt that it was worth sharing it on this blog.  Tracy's post provides a good description of the project, which represents a collaboration of over 100 people from around the world:  Multimedia must-see:  NFB's interactive 360 panorama documentary, "Out my window"


The opening page/view/scene of Out My Window provides the following description to the viewers/participants:


"You see them all over the world.
Concrete residential highrise buildings are the most commonly built form of the last century.
On the outside, they all look the same.  But inside these towers, people create community, art, and meaning.  Explore."


For the best experience, I recommend that you take the time to find a nice large touch-screen display or IWB to participate in the documentary - and maybe with a friend or colleague. (Some of the content is in French.)  I also recommend that you take Tracy Boyer's advice and make sure you experience the interactive documentary with a good speaker system.  The soundtrack is awesome! 


HIGHRISE Trailer



The NFB's Highrise project unveils its new interactive web documentary, Out My Window
Julie Matlin, NFB.ca Blog, 10/15/10


About HIGHRISE and Director Katerina Cizek (From the Highrise website)

"HIGHRISE is a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. Under the direction of documentary-maker Katerina Cizek, the HIGHRISE team will be making lots of things. Web-documentaries, live presentations, installations, mobile projects and yes, documentary films. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first.

In the first Filmmaker-in-Residence project, we worked at a major inner-city teaching hospital with doctors, nurses, researchers, and patients, challenging the conventional notions of “documentary” and academic research — and did more than just observe and record. We produced dozens of documentaries — and photo exhibits, participatory media workshops, and a feature-length web documentary.

How can the same approach be applied to urbanism? How can documentary help re-invent our cities at their edges? By going global and local at the same time, HIGHRISE is based in intensive community collaboration, married to an international vision for what documentary can be."


RELATED
Yellowbird 360 Video:
"See the world like never before with 360 video.  Can you imagine?  People like to look at 360 photos of the streets they live on, or discover their next holiday destination.  How exciting, if it was a full-motion 360 video instead of a still image?  With 360 video you can create ultimate online expereince for your clients. Share  real-life settings of the environments or events...Press play and look anywhere you want to by clicking and dragging your mouse."


Interactive 360-degree video demo-reel from Yellowbird
Yellowbird 6-lens 360 degree video camera creates web-based, interactive 3D videos

Information Visualization for the People: The End of Swivel & Lessons Learned - a great post by Robert Kosara (Eager Eyes)

The following post is worth reading:

The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com
Robert Kosara,  Eager Eyes 10/12/10


Swivel.com is (was) a web-based information visualization company that incorporated the concept of "social visualization" by providing a means for people to explore and interact with large data sets, and then share their insights with others.  Robert Kosara's recent blog post about the demise of the company sheds some light on how a company with a great concept withered away.


RELATED
Why Swivel Shut Down 
Nathan Yau, Flowing Data 10/19/10



(Image taken from Robert Kosara's Eager Eyes blog)


Review:  Swivel vs. Many Eyes (Robert Kosara, 2/18/07, Eager Eyes)

Many Eyes 
"The site will be down from 10 a.m. EST until the move is complete, which should take a day or two if all goes well. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this causes, but it will ensure a more reliable service in the long run."  10/19/10-Many Eyes Blog


About Robert Kosara - from eagereyes.org

"Robert Kosara is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte. His main research interests are information visualization for visual communication and theoretical foundations of visualization. Robert received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Vienna University of Technology (Vienna, Austria). His list of publications can be found online on his vanity website.

Robert can be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing. You can use this site's contact form to send him an email."

About Nathan Yau & Flowing Data - from flowingdata.com

"FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all...As for me, I'm a PhD candidate in statistics. I live and breathe data. I also have a background in computer science and design. I do some freelancing from time to time, but mostly I'm just trying to work on my dissertation. You can find more about me here."

"

Words of Wisdom (and more) from Harry Brignull: UX Roots in Psychology, Design, Info Architecture...and so much more!

Harry Brignull is a User Experience Consultant at Madget in Brighton, England. According to his "about" page info, his work involves "building experiences by blending User Research, Interaction Design, and process consultancy."  Harry's 90 Percent of Everything blog is a well-spring of information and inspiration.

Back Story
I came across Harry's work in 2004 or 2005, when I was taking a VR Class (Virtual Reality for Education and Training) and working on an assignment about large-screen displays.   At the time, Harry was a Ph.D. working in the Interact Lab at the University of Sussex on the Dynamo project, in collaboration with researchers from the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham.

I revisited this work again in early 2007 when I was studying HCI and Ubiquitous Computing, and researching information about collaborative interaction on large displays in public spaces.  The following research article inspired me at the time, and looking back, I consider the work of this team to be seminal, and worth revisiting once again.

Izadi, S., Brignull, H., Rodden, T., Rogers, Y., Underwood, M. (UIST'03)
Dynamo: A public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media (pdf)  



(The picture was taken from the Dynamo project's website, and shared on my 2007 blog post, Revisiting promising projects, Dynamo, an application for sharing information on large interactive displays in public spaces.)


Links to a few of Harry's useful blog posts:

UX as Applied Psychology:
Clear Reporting & Critical Thinking:  Why User Experience Needs to Remember its Roots in Psychology (10/4/10)

"There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when almost everyone involved with UX research had a background in Psychology.  Back in those days, the term "User Experience" didn't really exist, and the nearest discipline was Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)..."

Comment:
As a school psychologist, I'm well-steeped in the process of research, observation, and data collection.  I also know that the fundamentals of applied psychology are a very important ingredient in UX work.  Don Norman, one of the "grandfathers" of UX/HCI, was a cognitive psychologist.  He was the co-author of one of my psychology textbooks when I was a university student the first time around. Coincidentally, Norman's book, Design of Everyday Things was required reading for my HCI graduate class.

























Mobile Usability Testing for Low Budgets
Mobile Usability Testing Tip: Recording from Two Webcams
In this post, Harry discusses quick and cheap methods of using two webcams for mobile usability testing. This method could be used in other situations, such as developing presentations. (It might also be applicable for use in therapeutic and special education settings.)

Image: Nick Bowmast


UX Brighton Presentation on Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People
My Presentation on Out of Box Experience Design  (Harry Brignall)
David Ogilvy: We Sell or Else


RELATED
Links to Harry's Blog Posts, By Topic

• Bad Design
• Good Design
• Information Architecture
• Madgex
• Methods & Tools
• Mobile
• Theory
• User Experience

SOMEWHAT RELATED

Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles:  Dan Saffer's Lists, Don Norman, and Interaction Design 

Online Physics Games for Interactive Whiteboards and Touch Screens (including mobile devices)

I have collected lots of resources for interactive whiteboards and other touch-screens, such  all-in-one Touch PC's such as the Dell and HP TouchSmart.  Some are optimized for use on mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Droids.  

I'd like to highlight a few online educational games on this blog from time-to-time.

The PhysicsGames site is full of games that can be embedded into a blog or web page, making it easy for teachers and parents to organize and arrange the games as they see fit.  This feature also lets students do the same.

On the main page of the website, the games are arranged in alphabetical order, with picture icons for each game.  The titles of the games and the pictures on the icons give you a quick idea of what each game is about.  The games were created by a variety of developers, professionals, teachers, and if I'm not mistaken, tech-savvy students.

Below are links to the various categories of physics games found on the site. The games I explored all had music and sound effects, so make sure that the sound is turned on!  (Note: The site is supported by sponsors, but the advertising is not annoying-in many cases, you can skip the ads.)

Featured | All | Block Removal | Construction | Demolition | Platform | Projectile | Stacking | Othe

Here are a few examples:

MOONLIGHTS (please be patient, there is an ad!)

Online Physics Games

Video of Moonlights Gameplay

Physics Fidget

Online Physics Games

ROCKET SCIENCE, by NoFunZone.com

Online Physics Games

Cross posted on the TechPsych blog.

In Honor of Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals on the Web -Julia Set, set to the video of Jonathan Coultron's "Mandelbrot Set", +more

It must be true : (

The NY Times reports that Benoit Mandelbrot has died at age 85. According to the Times, he passed away on Thursday October 14, 2010, at a hospice in Cambridge, Mass. He had suffered from pancreatic cancer, the same disease that took the life of another one of my inspirational heroes, HCI researcher and computer scientist, Randy Pausch.

"A music video for Jonathan Coulton's song Mandelbrot Set by Pisut Wisessing made in Film 324: Cornell Summer Animation Workshop, taught by animator Lynn Tomlinson every summer for Cornell's summer session, in the department of Theatre, Film & Dance." -Summerkitechenstudio YouTube Channel 

I was hoping against hope that the news of Mandelbrot's passing was just a rumor designed by some graduate students to study fractal patterns of social networking. My hunch was a long shot, and I was wrong.

RELATED
Mandelbrot's seminal book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982)



Wikipedia:  Fractals
(lots of pictures & animations)
Fractal Generating Software

A few examples of Fractals, from a Google image search

Benoit Mandelbrot: A Patterned Way of Viewing Life (video and links)

This morning I heard rumor that Benoit Mandelbrot, the "father" of fractal geometry, passed away. Mandelbrot is one of my inspirational heroes.  The quote below, from his 2010 TED Talk, makes me smile: 

"One day I decided, halfway through my career... Could I just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a very long time and find something dramatically new?" -Benoit Mandelbrot

2010 TED Talk: Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the Art of Roughness

"Benoit Mandelbrot is the pioneer of fractals, a broad and powerful tool in the study of many forms of roughness, in nature and in humanity's works--including even art" - TED Website

"Seeks a measure of order in physical, mathematical or social phenomena that are characterized by abundant data but extreme sample variability. The surprising esthetic value of many of his discoveries and their unexpected usefulness in teaching have made him an eloquent spokesman for the "unity of knowing and feeling."  - Quoted from Mandelbrot's website

RELATED 
"He Gave Us Order Out of Chaos" - R.I.P. Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010
Matt Blum 11/16/10, GeekDad, Wired
Benoit Mandelbrot's website at Yale University

 Previous Post:  "Fractals in our world:  "I'm a mathemetician and I'd like to stand on your roof" - Ron Eglash on African Fractals (Ron Eglash is another mathemetician known for his work in fractals and "ethno-mathematics.)

BENOIT MANDELBROT'S 2010 TED TALK TRANSCRIPT 
Note: The same transcript is available on the TED website, but is set up in a way that you can click on any phrase to play the Mandelbrot's video at that point. http://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_of_roughness.html

"Thank you very much. Please excuse me for sitting; I'm very old. (Laughter) Well, the topic I'm going to discuss is one which is in a certain sense very peculiar because it's very old. Roughness is part of human life forever and forever. And ancient authors have written about it. It was very much uncontrollable. And in a certain sense, it seemed to be the extreme of complexity, just a mess, a mess and a mess. There are many different kinds of mess. Now, in fact, by a complete fluke, I got involved many years ago in a study of this form of complexity. And to my utter amazement, I found traces -- very strong traces, I must say -- of order in that roughness. And so today, I would like to present to you a few examples of what this represents. I prefer the word roughness to the word irregularity because irregularity -- to someone who had Latin in my long-past youth -- means the contrary of regularity. But it is not so. Regularity is the contrary of roughness because the basic aspect of the world is very rough.

So let me show you a few objects. Some of them are artificial. Others of them are very real, in a certain sense. Now this is the real. It's a cauliflower. Now why do I show a cauliflower, a very ordinary and ancient vegetable? Because old and ancient as it may be, it's very complicated and it's very simple both at the same time. If you try to weigh it, of course it's very easy to weigh it. And when you eat it, the weight matters. But suppose you try to measure its surface. Well, it's very interesting. If you cut, with a sharp knife, one of the florets of a cauliflower and look at it separately, you think of a whole cauliflower, but smaller. And then you cut again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again. And you still get small cauliflowers. So the experience of humanity has always been that there are some shapes which have this peculiar property, that each part is like the whole, but smaller. Now, what did humanity do with that? Very, very little. (Laughter)

So what I did actually is to study this problem, and I found something quite surprising. That one can measure roughness by a number, a number, 2.3, 1.2 and sometimes much more. One day, a friend of mine, to bug me, brought a picture, and said, "What is the roughness of this curve?" I said, "Well, just short of 1.5." It was 1.48. Now, it didn't take any time. I've been looking at these things for so long. So these numbers are the numbers which denote the roughness of these surfaces. I hasten to say that these surfaces are completely artificial. They were done on a computer. And the only input is a number. And that number is roughness. And so on the left, I took the roughness copied from many landscapes. To the right, I took a higher roughness. So the eye, after a while, can distinguish these two very well.

Humanity had to learn about measuring roughness. This is very rough, and this is sort of smooth, and this perfectly smooth. Very few things are very smooth. So then if you try to ask questions: what's the surface of a cauliflower? Well, you measure and measure and measure. Each time you're closer it gets bigger, down to very, very small distances. What's the length of the coastline of these lakes? The closer you measure, the longer it is. The concept of length of coastline, which seems to be so natural because it's given in many cases, is, in fact, completely fallacy; there's no such thing. You must do it differently.

What good is that, to know these things? Well, surprisingly enough, it's good in many ways. To begin with, artificial landscapes, which I invented sort of, are used in cinema all the time. We see mountains in the distance. They may be mountains, but they may be just formulae, just cranked on. Now it's very easy to do. It used to be very time consuming, but now it's nothing. Now look at that. That's a real lung. Now a lung is something very strange. If you take this thing, you know very well it weighs very little. The volume of a lung is very small. But what about the area of the lung? Anatomists were arguing very much about that. Some say that a normal male's lung has an area of the inside of a basketball [court]. And the others say, no, five basketball [courts]. Enormous disagreements. Why so? Because, in fact, the area of the lung is something very ill-defined. The bronchi branch, branch, branch. And they stop branching, not because of any matter of principle, but because of physical considerations, the mucus, which is in the lung. So what happens is that it's the way you have a much bigger lung, but if it branches and branches, down to distances about the same for a whale, for a man and for a little rodent.

Now, what good is it to have that? Well, surprisingly enough, amazingly enough, the anatomists had a very poor idea of the structure of the lung until very recently. And I think that my mathematics, surprisingly enough, has been of great help to the surgeons studying lung illnesses and also kidney illnesses, all these branching systems, for which there was no geometry. So I found myself, in other words, constructing a geometry, a geometry of things which had no geometry. And a surprising aspect of it is that very often, the rules of this geometry are extremely short. You have formulas that long. And you crank it several times. Sometimes repeatedly, again, again, again. The same repetition. And at the end you get things like that.

This cloud is completely, 100 percent artificial. Well, 99.9. And the only part which is natural is a number, the roughness of the cloud, which is taken from nature. Something so complicated like a cloud, so unstable, so varying, should have a simple rule behind it. Now this simple rule is not an explanation of clouds. The seer of clouds had to take account of it. I don't know how much advanced these pictures are, they're old. I was very much involved in it, but then turned my attention to other phenomena.

Now, here is another thing which is rather interesting. One of the shattering events in the history of mathematics, which is not appreciated by many people, occurred about 130 years ago, 145 years ago. Mathematicians began to create shapes that didn't exist. Mathematicians got into self-praise to an extent which was absolutely amazing that man can invent things that nature did not know. In particular, it could invent things like a curve which fills the plane. A curve's a curve, a plane's a plane, and the two won't mix. Well they do mix. A man named Peano did define such curves, and it became an object of extraordinary interest. It was very important, but mostly interesting because a kind of break, a separation between the mathematics coming from reality on the one hand and new mathematics coming from pure man's mind. Well, I was very sorry to point out that the pure man's mind has, in fact, seen at long last what had been seen for a long time. And so here I introduce something, the set of rivers of a plane-filling curve. And well, it's a story unto itself. So it was in 1875 to 1925, an extraordinary period in which mathematics prepared itself to break out from the world. And the objects which were used as examples, when I was a child and a student, of the break between mathematics and visible reality -- those objects, I turned them completely around. I used them for describing some of the aspects of the complexity of nature.

Well, a man named Hausdorff in 1919 introduced a number which was just a mathematical joke. And I found that this number was a good measurement of roughness. When I first told it to my friends in mathematics they said, "Don't be silly. It's just something [silly]." Well actually, I was not silly. The great painter Hokusai knew it very well. The things on the ground are algae. He did not know the mathematics; it didn't yet exist. And he was Japanese who had no contact with the West. But painting for a long time had a fractal side. I could speak of that for a long time. The Eiffel Tower has a fractal aspect. And I read the book that Mr. Eiffel wrote about his tower. And indeed it was astonishing how much he understood.

This is a mess, mess, mess, Brownian loop. One day I decided that halfway through my career, I was held by so many things in my work, I decided to test myself. Could I just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a long time and find something dramatically new? Well, so I looked at these things called Brownian motion -- just goes around. I played with it for a while, and I made it return to the origin. Then I was telling my assistant, "I don't see anything. Can you paint it?" So he painted it, which means he put inside everything. He said: "Well, this thing came out ..." And I said, "Stop! Stop! Stop! I see, it's an island." And amazing. So Brownian motion, which happens to have a roughness number of two, goes around. I measured it, 1.33. Again, again, again. Long measurements, big Brownian motions, 1.33. Mathematical problem: how to prove it? It took my friends 20 years. Three of them were having incomplete proofs. They got together, and together they had the proof. So they got the big [Fields] medal in mathematics, one of the three medals that people have received for proving things which I've seen without being able to prove them.

Now everybody asks me at one point or another, "How did it all start? What got you in that strange business?" What got me to be, at the same time, a mechanical engineer, a geographer and a mathematician and so on, a physicist? Well, actually I started, oddly enough, studying stock market prices. And so here I had this theory, and I wrote books about it, Financial prices increments. To the left you see data over a long period. To the right, on top, you see a theory which is very, very fashionable. It was very easy, and you can write many books very fast about it. (Laughter) There are thousands of books on that. Now compare that with real price increments. and where are real price increments? Well, these other lines include some real price increments and some forgery which I did. So the idea there was that one must able to -- how do you say? -- model price variation. And it went really well 50 years ago. For 50 years people were sort of pooh-poohing me because they could do it much, much easier. But I tell you, at this point, people listened to me. (Laughter) These two curves are averages. Standard & Poor, the blue one. And the red one is Standard & Poor's, from which the five biggest discontinuities are taken out. Now discontinuities are a nuisance. So in many studies of prices, one puts them aside. "Well, acts of God. And you have the little nonsense which is left. Acts of God." In this picture five acts of God are as important as everything else. In other words, it is not acts of God that we should put aside. That is the meat, the problem. If you master these, you master price. And if you don't master these, you can master the little noise as well as you can, but it's not important. Well, here are the curves for it.

Now, I get to the final thing, which is the set of which my name is attached. In a way it's the story of my life. My adolescence was spent during the German occupation of France. And since I thought that I might vanish within a day or a week, I had very big dreams. And after the war, I saw an uncle again. My uncle was a very prominent mathematician and he told me, "Look, there's a problem which I could not solve 25 years ago, and which nobody can solve. This is a construction of a man named [Gaston] Julia and [Pierre] Fatou. If you could find something new, anything, you will get your career made." Very simple. So I looked, and like the thousands of people that had tried before, I found nothing.

But then the computer came. And I decided to apply the computer, not to new problems in mathematics -- like this wiggle wiggle, that's a new problem -- but to old problems. And I went from what's called real numbers, which are points on a line, to imaginary, complex numbers, which are points on a plane, which is what one should do there. And this shape came out. This shape is of an extraordinary complication. The equation is hidden there, z goes into z squared, plus c. It's so simple, so dry. It's so uninteresting. Now you turn the crank once, twice, twice, marvels come out. I mean this comes out. I don't want to explain these things. This comes out. This comes out. Shapes which are of such complication, such harmony and such beauty. This comes out repeatedly, again, again, again. And that was one of my major discoveries was to find that these islands were the same as the whole big thing, more or less. And then you get these extraordinary baroque decorations all over the place. All that from this little formula, which has whatever, five symbols in it. And then this one. The color was added for two reasons. First of all, because these shapes are so complicated, that one couldn't make any sense of the numbers. And if you plot them, you must choose some system. And so my principle has been to always present the shapes with different colorings, because some colorings emphasize that, and others it is that or that. It's so complicated.

(Laughter)

In 1990, I was in Cambridge, U.K. to receive a prize from the university. And three days later, a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing. So where did this come from? Obviously, from extraterrestrials. (Laughter) Well, so the newspaper in Cambridge published an article about that "discovery" and received the next day 5,000 letters from people saying, "But that's simply a Mandelbrot set very big."

Well, let me finish. This shape here just came out of an exercise in pure mathematics. Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

Thank you very much."

(Applause)

"Animate" Graphic Presentation: Sir Ken Robinson's RSA talk, Changing Education Paradigms -great presentation AND content

The following video is an "Animate" of a talk by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce).  How do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century, given that we can't anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week?

 FYI: An Animate is a video in which a talented illustrator draws images related to the content of a speaker's presentation. (It is a great way to engage visual thinkers, in my opinion.)

The video explains it all.

RELATED
The following video is the longer original presentation by Sir Ken Robinson, responding to the question about how change can happen in education, and what we might do to make it last:

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the link!

About the RSA:

"For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action. 

- We encourage public discourse and critical debate by providing platforms for leading experts to share new ideas on contemporary issues, through our public events programme, RSA Journal and RSA Comment.

- Our projects generate new models for tackling the social challenges of today.

- Our work is supported by a 27,000 strong Fellowship - achievers and influencers from every field with a real commitment to progressive social change."

Oh! No! Sony's "Mother of Remote Controls" for Google TV. 74 Buttons and Counting.

Today we switched from DISH to Time Warner Cable, and tonight I had to battle with a new remote control, the UR5U-8780L.  The experience with this remote led me to search for something better. What a coincidence!  In this day and age of touch-screens,  I was hoping for something better than....

Sony's Mother of Remote Controls!

-From the SonyStyle website: Television, meet internet., 

I first learned of this complex addition to the world of TV/Internet surfing from an article and a video in a recent article in Engadget:  Sony's Google TV controller outed on ABC's Nightline (video) Ross Miller,10/5/10.  Harry Brignull also posted about the new controller- Sony, Sony, what have you done?
(Harry is a UX Consultant at Madgex, and author of the 90percent of everything blog.)


ABC Video, via engadget

It is 2010, and with TVs connected to the internet, we'll be interacting with content in ways we could only dream of in the recent past.  Interactive TV is here.  Do I really have to push a lot of buttons in order to have the best "interactive" experience?  




OTHER OPTIONS
Xfinity Remote Prototype for the iPad


Turn Your iPhone into a TV Remote Samuel Axon, Mashable/Apple
L5 Remote: Turn your iPhone or iPod touch into a universal remote control:

Not Yet Available:  Vizio's XRT100 touchscreen remote

My Fancy New Remote, Instructions Included:

RELATED
Sony, Sony, what have you done? (Harry Brignull, 90percent of everything)
Usability of a Remote Control (my post)
Interactive TV Game Controllers- A variety of permutation for the present and future (iPhone, iPod Touch Wii-mote, XBox 360 Controller, Gesture ....
Usability Review of a Remote Control (Chris McEvoy)

Update on Josh Blake, newly designated Microsoft Surface MVP

Josh Blake is the Tech Lead of the InfoStrat Advance Technology Group in DC.  He has been creating multi-touch applications Microsoft's Surface multi-user table-tops for a while. Recently, his team built a suite of applications designed for use by young children at a museum.  Below is a video demonstration of some of this work. It really looks exciting!


Microsoft Surface and Magical Object Interaction

Josh Blake's blog is called Deconstructing the NUI- for those of you new to this blog, NUI stands for Natural User Interface (also known as Natural User Interaction).  See his post, Microsoft Surface and Magical Object Interaction, for more information!

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Here is a plug for Josh Blake's book, "Multitouch on Windows"

Book Ordering Information

FYI:  InfoStrat  is hiring  WPF experts as well as Microsoft CRM and Microsoft SharePoint experts.


Microsoft Surface MVPs
Dr. Neil Roodyn
Dennis Vroegop
Rick Barraza
Joshua Blake