Week 10 - last post

I find it interesting that the guest speaker on Tuesday was a girl that has been in my CSE classes before and she was introducing a lot of stuff that she said was new, like ubiquitous presenter, even though that sort of system has been used in my CSE classes since I was a freshman here. Now that I think of it, maybe I sort of took the system for granted, assuming that everyone else has used it and that it was used by universities everywhere. It wasn't until later that I realized that this prevalent technology in my CSE classes was only contained within the CSE department. It's very useful for me, as a student and so I had assumed everyone else was taking advantage of this, I actually didn't even know it was an ongoing experiment for most of my classes, really, I'm a bit embarrassed now at my assumptions. My experiences with ubiquitous presenter was usually great, save for the one or two times the professor lost the file that saved his inked notes. I thought it was cool that the TA also doing audio charting research, which would go great with ubiquitous presenter if done right. I've actually had friends who run nerd gatherings like 'bar camp' and SuperHappyDevHouse show interest in ubiquitous presenter, but I don't think it's open to the public. (Which is too bad, they really wanted something like ubiquitous presenter to preserve the lightning talks they have at meets.)

On another note:

I find it interesting that everyone likes to follow the ad hoc design of the curly tail to indicate a content is being copied when, in my own mind, I find it kind of lacking in usability. I kept hoping that most tablet companies would come up with a pen like the ones Wacom uses for their artist tablets, with little buttons built in on the pen so that you can actually use it like a mouse (with a left and right click). But I've noticed that most tablet pens are very simple, which is too bad, because I think clicking on a pen lends it self to being more easily ingrained subconsciously without having the user memorize key strokes required to do certain actions. The technology is certainly there, I'm just surprised that most companies haven't borrowed upon that idea. Moreover, they've even gone a far as adding additional components, like foot pedals and knobs to take care of the copy command issue, when adding a few buttons on a pen really isn't that difficult. It's surprising, what we overlook sometimes when pursuing a design.

Week9

Jan Borchers

I thought a lot of the projects he was currently working on to be quite interesting. I particularly liked the orchestra simulation and the ubiquitous snowboard instructor ones. Considering the sort of technology behind it,

I actually think the technology behind the ubiquitous snowboard instructor can easily translate to training in just about any other physical activity. For example, in baseball, it would be a great way for batting instructors to see exactly which part of a batter's swing is off, if it's because he cocks the wrists too early or follows through too early, if his feet are the incorrect distance apart, etc. If you had waterproof hardware, you could do the same for swimming. In fact, if you want to take it one step further, you can even use it for training in jobs that require someone to do physical things, like if you're a cook at a fast food chain restaurant. Unfortunately, the downside of allowing things like big business to get their hands into such technology is almost a guarantee of abuse of power. While in concept, it would be a good idea, in real life it would only allow employers to invade the privacy of their employees' even more.

Professor Borchers also mentioned tentative work with organic things, but organic technology is still very unstable at the moment because there haven't been any real breakthroughs in bioengineering that can really allow the cognitive science side to drive forward with innovations. However, I think Professor Borchers should keep an eye on the current movement to make electronic transistors carbon based. They've been able to successfully pull off making a carbon transistor, and they claim that using carbon transistors will require less electricity than silicon or germanium based transistors. Because the future of transistors may be carbon based, this might open the doors for a lot of bioengineering research. Unfortunately, there is still the electricity problem to contend with, and a lot of new organic technology (like glucose batteries that have a water bi-product) still cannot handle the electricity conductance problem.