1) Head nod to Boy in Static who mentioned my photos on their blog. I really dig their website which is full of great color and life. Their music video features a similar theme which makes for a wonderful and adorable narrative. They’ve got an album on iTunes this week – check em out!
2) If you’ve ever wanted to find a sweet bike route in Oakland, or whatever neighborhood you’re in, check out bikely.com. Here’s some rides in Oakland
3) More gestural user interfaces for ya: A sensor 3d company called Canesta is developing a TV remote without the remote. You can see in the movie that the user waves his hands in motions to change channel, fast forward, and pause a movie as well as flip through channels. No button pressing needed, but it seems a user must climb a bit of a learning curve to get handy at it. Smart SF design firm Kicker Studio did some user testing and they noted that flailing and whining were common responses in people using the device. They got some innovative ideas over there at Kicker (no, seriously – check out their case study on the device here) and I personally would check out Kicker employee Dan Saffer. Dan Saffer’s ideas and work in the field of gestural interface are at his page, odannboy.com.
4) Also, a Brown University-led robotics team created a gesture-controlled robot. mmm… robot
5) From the AdaptivePath blog – tactile illusions. Although gesture and touch interfaces are all the rage, see how our tactile faculties can easily be fooled. Kinda gimmicky (illusions with combs and post-its and such), but nevertheless a thing to consider when programming for faulty human perceptions.
6) Lady, Baroness, and Professor Susan Greenfield says to House of Lords that social media rots kids brains
A stark piece this week shows that one can so easily use science to make claims promote the status quo, and inhibit progress. New media oppositionists have long held games, television and digital media accountable for teen pregnancies, school shootings, and other disintegrations of our youth’s moral standards. Now they tell us… they could be re-wiring kids brains! No way!!!@ This really doesn’t say anything new scientifically, except reaffirms that our brain is a highly malleable organ capable of adjusting to using different tools to reach our social and personal goals. Yes, there’s re-wiring going on.
While I do personally agree that kids should be socializing instead of being on Facebook, this is more old-school pandering about bringing it back to the golden days where we walked to our friends house if we wanted to tell them something. Yeah right. Kids are picking up these new tools which makes our generation better than the last. The kid who made a buck off an iPhone app, or has thousands of people following his blog isn’t one with stunted growth. They’ve got a headup in making their ideas soar.
Some more food for thought came from one comment to the article:
This is all supposition, where are the facts, the research? It doesn’t exist, it’s just people who do not understand children, as children, but see them as statistics, which they are not. The problem today is that in a lot of schools education is boring to children, they are not being taken into consideration by government when it changes direction every day virtually, so teachers are fighting to engaged as they should be. I am a governor of twenty years standing and our school goes out of it’s way to include the children and we don’t seem to have the problems that these supposed specialist go on about. Children have always had a short attention span, this is not new, teaching methods have been designed around just that fact!! I worry that these people are just making these unproved statements to get noticed for funding purposes! You can’t go on the experience of one teacher of 30 years, maybe it’s her ability that has declined! (from Nigel in Sommerset)
Should social media companies be targeting children? No, I think its highly inethical, but digital media is much like other consumer products who market to children who are below the “age of consent”. I might as well be going after Kool-Aid for marketing it as such a kool guy’s drink for kids, when it provides little nutritional value. Susan Greenfield would rather focus on the ills of social media rather than looking at ways to enrich kids lives as students, family members, and important parts of local communities. Children who have to resort to outlets on the internet often have to escape the an environment with no enrichenment opportunities and few interesting sources of interaction – I’d rather her advocate for more parks in inner cities or something.