01 February 2003

Nathan Shedroff on designing human values into interfaces and interactions: "This is not a crisis of technology or computing power, but one of imagination, understanding and courage." 2:30:15 AM    comment []

Talk to the doctor in Cantonese - remote translation by video conferencing in Edinburgh GP's surgery. "Instead of asking interpreters to attend GP consultations in person, Cantonese patients using the surgery will be encouraged to use video conferencing equipment in the doctors' consulting rooms. This will connect the patient to an interpreter based at the City of Edinburgh Council's interpretation and translation service in the Central Library." Given appropriate privacy and security, this could be an interesting model for social inclusion in a number of areas. Centralised interpretation services could effectively serve a large community. And with centralised on-hand staff, ad hoc interpretation would be very much easier. 1:25:20 AM    comment []

Jon Udell passes on Wired's story about the vast Reuters display in Times Square. Talking about data enrichment in public spaces, he says: "Ben Hammersley described a server-monitoring application that translated log activity into birdsong. At normal levels of intensity, it was just pleasant background noise. But when the birds started to sound more excited, Ben reported, people knew that activity was ramping up. In a world of increasing visual overload, this recruitment of the audio channel -- to which we can attend subconsciously -- makes a lot of sense." A recent article in New Scientist describes a similar experiment by Chris Chafe of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. Chafe modelled the reliability and strength of internet connections as a guitar string, changing pitch to represent the transmission time of data - the lower the pitch, the longer the transmission time. Again, using easily-perceived 'musical' changes to monitor technical systems I'm reminded of work I did years ago with one of the big international dealing rooms. They had a small satellite office in the Middle East. With only a few people, it was hard to get any buzz going, any feel for the market conditions. So they put a series of microphones in their much larger London dealing room to pick up the ambient noise. This was piped in real time to the Middle East office, allowing them to hear the state of the market by picking up on the noise levels and excitement generated in London. 12:37:54 AM    comment []

More on Wikipedia passing 100,000 articles from the Guardian (via Ben Hammersley, the author). Over time, the Wikipedia community is able to create balanced treatments of a wide range of subjects. Hammersley says: "It is this 'over time' statement that is the key to the Wikipedia. It aims to deliver an emergent knowledge base. Everything can be refined by every reader and nothing is ever lost to the Wikipedia. All changes can be rolled back again by anyone, back to the first version of a page." People are also using wikis as personal research repositories, hyperlinking their thoughts and ideas in stand-alone wikis on their own machines. 12:24:42 AM    comment []