Technology

This is mostly a note-to-self that I need to watch this documentary on the “female computers of WWII”. Their excerpt alone is interesting, and poking around the site it seems that the film looks at Mauchly’s project and how these women became not just computing machines themselves but then ENIAC programmers. If it is any good it could be a great complement to the Campbell-Kelly and Aspray book we teach in IT & Society.

Moving financial information tracking to an intuitive interface, MIT’s Media Lab has developed “smart wallets” that provide tactile feedback about your financial transactions. The three designs either vibrate when funds are deposited or withdrawn, grow or shrink with the size of your balance, or become harder to open as you have less money in your account. The video showing these interactions is highly recommended. I like not just the cuteness of the tactile interface, but I also enjoy that they are embedding the interactions in a wallet, which is already linked to financial tracking in our minds, and not just … Continue reading Feeling the Pinch

If you don’t know what an error-correcting code is, or you have never heard of Richard Hamming, this retrospective on Hamming codes and early information theory is a nice read. The details of how these codes allow the integrity of the message’s contents to be verified are left unexplored, but I’m not sure how many people are aware that these types of integrity checks are possible and built into communication technologies. My personally strongest associate with the content, though, is taking my subject GREs about this time of year and reaching a question that simply asked me the Hamming distance … Continue reading Hamming and information theory

The generally entertaining The Daily WTF recent had a nice, more serious than usual article Documentation Done Right about the role of documentation in the development process. Particularly relevant to my Systems Analysis class is the discussion at the end about the role of diagramming, as well as the acknowledgement of the dangers of documentation when that documentation is inaccurate. Provocative quote: “Less complete documentation is generally better all around.” But if you haven’t thought a lot about why documentation is necessary in the world of “self-documenting code”, it’s worth a look. And the weblog in general is a fun … Continue reading Embracing Inaccuracy

Making a note of this so I don’t lose it before the next time I teach Data Structures – a couple of videos not just visualizing but also translating the intermediate states of sorting algorithms into audio, it appears by playing a note corresponding to the magnitude of each data item in the collection being touched as the sort proceeds. We use visualizations like this in class already, but the audio adds a fun wrinkle.

My attention was caught by this description of a company that provides cheap eyetracking for websites on contract. As the article says, full eyetracking studies, whether you do them yourself or contract a consultant, are quite expensive. The title suggests that they keep the costs down because they are using webcams – but I suspect the real savings aren’t the cheap hardware, it is that they have developed a bank of testers who can use their own computers at home and get paid for viewing websites and sending back the data. The way the GazeHawk system then works is that … Continue reading Heat Maps on Demand

This latest variation on ATM skimmers is terrifying: gas pumps are being found with skimmers installed inside them, some with Bluetooth capabilities so that the thieves do not have to do anything more than park near the pump to get the card data off them. Krebs on Security has some good information on this new twist on ATM skimmers, as well as a few photos. I don’t even know what the advice for the average consumer is here. With ATMs, you can recommend that people use machines they are familiar with and pay attention to if they appear to have … Continue reading Skim and Go

I’ve read a couple of interesting videogame related items in the past few weeks – it is times like this that I wish I could assign followup reading to students after they leave a class. I liked this weblog post about recent research into the correlation between videogames and violence not just for the links to some current research, but because of the critiquing of the papers and the general conversation about video game violence going on right now. While I’m not entirely on board with the post’s undercurrent of sceptibility about any psychological research, there are some really interesting … Continue reading More thoughts on video games

In preparation for some work I’ll be doing this summer, I read Nielsen and Pernice’s Eyetracking Web Usability over the past few days. The book reports on the results of a massive eyetracking study that they performed to analyze how people use the web. My primary interest, actually, is in their methodology, which is not part of the book but is available free online as a separate report, “Eyetracking Methodology: 65 Guidelines for How to Conduct and Evaluate Usability Studies Using Eyetracking. But I thought I would start with the publication of the results, both to see what they had … Continue reading Don’t Look Now