The Mars Desert Research Station project is fascinating in all its enthusiastic, slightly nerdy, and energetic frenzy to find out what it would mean to live on Mars. Now, they have also had a socalled FLAME (family living analysis on Mars) team out in the Utah desert for some research on what it would mean having a family living on Mars. Aside from the expected (primary geological) research, the FLAME team is focused on psycho-social aspects of living together, of coping with frustration and other interesting issues. Perhaps designing for interactions with smart environments on the Mars habitats, creating better potential for peacefull co-habitation in a tincan placed on one of the more unforgiving places in the solar system will come to be a major challenge for human-factors specialists and HCI people sometime during the next decade. I do hope, however, that they will recruit beyond the usual suspects in space exploration: engineers, biologists, and other natural scientists. If people are supposed to live, work, and enjoy themselves in a hermetically closed, high-tech habitat (a wicked problem if there ever was one), input from the “softer” (man, I hate that adjective) sciences will be extremely valuable. Anthropology, sociology, even psychology + a healthy dose of design thinking will be needed if we’re one day supposed to reach the stars!
Bill Buxton gives a brief history of multitouch interaction. I find it interesting to see the amount of reuse taking place, the way, for instance, the 1992 Simon shares a lot of stuff with the iPhone…
Speed cameras in the Scottish Borders may soon be monitored by security cameras to protect them from vandals.
…not only do we increasingly try to make account of ourselves, we’re also training our technologies to make themselves accountable. Ad absurdum! Interesting.
Read this and weep! FedEx refuses to ship arty “novelty” items since they look “suspiciously like bomb making material” - note that bomb-making material, according to the cans, could be stuff like “infinite impropability” rocket fuel or just air: cans with nitrogen (78,084% pure - like the atmosphere) or neon (0,0018% pure) - suspicious, oh but how! What’s the paranoia coming to? Reminds me a little bit of the Steven Kurtz case - only silly!
According to this article from New Scientist, people become more altruistic (in not exploiting the “commons” when paying for coffee in apsychology department kitchen) when a simple pair of photocopied eyes was felt to be watching. The researchers seem to conlude that the “innate altruism” thesis might be on the wrong track. Personally, I’d like to beleive that we are naturally altruistic, and that it speaks more of psychology faculty and students. Also, what kind of altruism are we talking here - the kind of “turn the other cheek” unconditional altruims or the kind of reciprocal altruism (as in tit-for-tat in game theory?). In terms of InC, what are the implications of altruism and cooperation for Social Software, Creative Commons and stuff like that. I’m sure there’s at least a Pscyhology of Animal Behaviour masters here.
Bruce reports on the New Scientist article about the effort to build a surreptitious lie-detector.
THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.
Handy also for bringing up your kids: Did you wash your hands? Yeah! (maybe slight current through surveilled kid) AUCH!!! Gotcha!
Or restaurant personnel, or the prime minister, or…which reminds me of the silly, self-fulfilling spin-detecting algorithm. If you decide that spin is
“text or speech where the apparent meaning is not the true belief of the person saying or writing it”
…well then I suppose it’s relatively easy to make stuff like this. But really, why is spin actually lying or not believing? I mean, it might not be actually untrue, but merely shrouded in popular rhetorics, brushed up a little etc.
Bogard: The simulation of surveillance: hypercontrol in telematic societies. Bogard cleverly calls it a “social science fiction” (is is social sciencefiction or socialscience fiction?) No matter, the book is an interesting take on the relation between Derrida’s simulation and Foucaults surveillance fictions. Bogard argues that surveillance has come to be more than just observation - surveillance in telematic societies is part of an active shaping of lives, of predicting and making our environments controllable. As such, surveillance is a simulation of order, of predictability and discipline and simulation is the extasy of surveillance, of knowing everything in advance through coding and controlling.
