A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
Posts related to: Engineering
Blogging for the iPhone
I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn't morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface....
How does my browser know I am Indian?
Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. For instance this page (a story about ipods being used by the army) contains a set of banner ads that seek...
On finding the right (parking) spot
I had posted earlier about a "virtual speed bump" a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here's another one: Directions in a car park... As the...
Browsing for gender
Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows: Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 24% Likelihood of you being MALE is 76% Try it out for yourself, or read more about how...
Ask-ing Cuil questions of Google
How do we evaluate a search engine? Chris Wilson attempts to answer this question (with help from the crowd) in his article on Slate "How To Talk to a Search Engine: Three queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you?" The three search items he...
AllTop
I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.
Pogue on design
David Pogue has couple of great examples in his latest posting about bad design in the world of software. Check out: It’s the Software, Not You. Potentially useful in CEP817/917...
Killing with a thought
I had recently posted a note (It's only a game...) building on some thoughts in an article by William Saletan. In this article Saletan describes how weapons are increasingly becoming like games. His recent post takes that whole thing one level further. He describes...
Not so Cuil
I was just trying out Cuil the new search engine and came up with some strange results. This is what the front page looks like, rather dark for my liking, but again they had to do something different from Google's stark white front page. if you click on the "About...
sci-Phone
In a previous posting I raised the question about when does a piece of technology become an educational technology? One of the coolest pieces of technology today is the iPhone. Can it function as an educational technology? I have been considering getting one for a...
Only one recipe…
I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...
It’s only a game…
... but what if real people die? Excellent article by William Saletan on Slate about a new breed of war-toys that blur the line between video games and real war. As the article says, "if looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people." As it turns out,...
The story of stuff
Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie... [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucMJ32-xp64] For the new version of CEP817 or maybe even CEP917
Design related videos
Just a link to online videos related to design. Check it out by clicking here Relevant to CEP817 and CEP917 (and maybe even CEP818)
Distributed creativity
Re-Public: re•imagining democracy, an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, has a special issue devoted to Distributed Creativity and Design. This may be a useful resource for my Learning technology by design...
Slipping into uncanny valley
MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and...
Senseless signage
Great examples of funny, absurd and weird signage from across the world. Archived for use in my 817 or 917 classes. Check out Senseless signage, parts I through 10.
Gender & GPS
During our recent NY / New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away. I used this unit extensively...
How to author 85,000 (or is it 200,000) books…
Andrea Francis just emailed me a note about Professor Phillip Parker who is the world's fastest book author. He has over the past five years over 85,000 books to his name. He is also the most eclectic. As the article says, "He has authored some 188 books related to...
Unpacking Design & Creativity @ Purdue
The presentation Unpacking Design and creativity: What I think I know, and what I (quite certainly) don't is done, and it went well (I think). You can read the abstract here or view the presentation below Or see it full screen, by clicking here. After the presentation...
@ Purdue
Sending this note from Purdue University where I am visiting the School of Engineering Education. Had a great dinner last night with Karl Smith (whom I am catching up with after a couple of years) and Johannes Strobel. Karl picked me up this morning and drove me over...
Design & Creativity at Purdue
I will be at Purdue University, at the School of Engineering Education later this week, making a presentation titled: Unpacking Design and creativity: What I think I know, and what I (quite certainly) don't. I am quite looking forward to this trip, mainly because I...
That synching feeling
David Pogue has an article about SugarSync, an automated Internet backup and synchronization service that can keep track of (and backup) files across multiple machines. The description sounds wonderful - a great example of cloud computing. If only it were a bit...
Children & anthropomorphic toys
Andrea Francis and I recently presented a paper at AERA titled "Differences in children's verbal responses and behavioral interactions with anthropomorphic toys." The abstract is as follows: Interactive toys for children are becoming more popular for both play and...
Malik, Mishra & Shanblatt win best paper award
Qaiser Malik called me yesterday to tell me that a paper we have been working on: Malik, Q., Mishra, P., & Shanblatt, M. (2008). Identifying learning barriers for non-major engineering students in electrical engineering courses. Proceedings of the 2008 American...