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Bluetooth to combat drink-driving (British Police)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7773424.stm
I thought this is very interesting for the police to use the current technology and wanted to share this.
Basically, the police carrying a device and near the pubs or clubs, they send messages to the Bluetooth enabled cell phones. In this way, they say they can discourage the drunk driving.
I thought this is a clever way to prevent car accidents caused by the drunk driving. However, the counter argument was that it can increase accidents. The argument is.. if the drivers receive messages while driving, the messages can distract driving, leading to more accidents.
Interesting use of the current technology~!
When I was taking one of the Social Informatics class last semester, we had a discussion on Remediation. In class, the movies, Star Wars and Matrix were largely discussed. Here is one of the remediation examples.
When I was watching a YouTube video again last week, I thought about the remediation and about how it could work well in terms of interaction culture.
Even though, as in the video above, Lego is not actual part of the movie, Lego was used to recreate Star Wars character. When the video started, the very famaliar music from Star Wars played. Even without watching the video and the characters in the video, a lot of people can figure out that it is a music from the movie, Star Wars. Then, if they see the characters in this YouTube video, they can understand somebody recreated Star Wars in a funny way. Anyone who knows about Star Wars can understand what the signifiers and the signifieds are in this video.
Here is another video… haha… I just wanted share this video because everybody is getting stressed because of the finals. Just for some laughs..
When we look at the logos or signs, we can easily find how great the products are.. because they all are the best in their products.
Today, I was having a coffee, but I could not agree with the coffee cup saying “Serving the Best”. To me, they are not the best, but with the “Serving the Best” sign on the cup, I could somehow believe that they are not that bad, and this was why I got the coffee. A lot of companies use this kind of words to tell the customers that they are the best ones so that they customers should choose theirs.
For HCI designers, it will be very important to design something that users want to use. Choosing a proper language(choosing a proper signifier) for their designs will be very important and this will help users to feel comfortable and more intimate to the product.. and… more selling…
When I received and opened an e-mail from eBay, I found an interesting mark on the address of the sender. It was an envelope with a key on it. When I searched for the meaning of the mark, I found that it is DomainKeys Identified Mail, DKIM. DKIM technology is designed to verify both the DNS domain of an email sender and the integrity of a message. Therefore, if the sender has DKIM mark on it, it signifies that the sender is genuine, not a phishing. The image below is the sender’s address with DKIM on it.
DKIM can’t be a perfect solution to distinguish the genuine mail from spam mails, but this is another way to protect myself from the spam mails. DKIM tells me that I can rely on the information in the mail I received.
“About a boy” & “The Matrix”
(Signifier: red shirt, Signified: Cypher playing a bad role in the movie)
When I watched The Matrix, the first one, my sister told me that Cypher was wearing a red shirt, which I did not realize during the movie. She knew that Cypher was going to turn out to be a bad guy later in the movie. It was amazing to see that my sister actually saw Cypher wearing a red shirt. And it was more amazing to see how many different colors are playing their roles in the movie. Below is the link that I found while searching for the meaning of Cypher’s red shirt.
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/9175/neo/matrixcolors.html
(Signifier: Accents, vocabularies, driving on the right side, Signified: It’s a different country, not the United States.)
When we watched the movie, “About a boy”, in class, I could realize where the film was shot. Of course, it was not shot in the States. (Maybe it is possible that they shot some of the films in Hollywood) It was because, when they are talking in the movie, their accents and vocabularies were different from the English used in the U.S. Also, Hugh Grant drove his car, sitting on the right side of the car. If you are in the U.S., you drive on the left side of the car. (Of course, some people have cars with the handle on the right). Accents, vocabularies, and driving on the right side were signifiers to me to realize that the movie was not shot in the U.S. and the background of the movie is not in the United States.
Other than what I wrote here, I believe that there are way more signifiers that the movie makers put intentionally in a single movie. However, people mostly do not think about all those signifiers when they are watching a movie. Each little signifier plays a role and in sum, they deliver the message that the producer want to deliver to the audiences. If those delivered well to the audience, I assume it can be judged as a good movie. As a HCI designer, I think it would not be an easy work to do, but it is important to keep that in mind when designing.
안녕, 친구들 그리고 Jeff
제가 지금 뭐라고 쓰는지 알 수 있나요? 아마 Eugene은 조금 알겠네요.
만약 이 Blog posting을 한글로 쓰면 분명히 전 저희 classmate 들에게
쓰는 것이니까 맞는 Recipient에게 쓰는거죠?
그렇다면 지금 저는 맞는 Recipient 이지만 틀린 Addressee에게 글을
쓰고 있다는 말인가요?
Hi, friends and Jeff
Does anyone understand what I am writing right now? Maybe Eugene can understand some of these.
If I write this blog posting in Korean, I am writing to my classmates and Jeff.
Therefore, am I writing to correct recipients?
Then, does this mean that I am writing to correct recipients, but to wrong addressees?
Two paragraphs are the same, but in two different languages.
Lesson learned: Save your writing before actually hit the “Save” or “Publish” button. All I wrote a few minutes ago is gone now. So I guess I will write shorter and save it before publishing the post. =(
In one of the Informatics undergraduate class, the professor showed an e-mail that s/he received from one of the studetns in class. (Of course, I will not tell which class it was.)
The e-mail looked very normal until the professor explained to us why s/he was very mad about this e-mail. The professor did not care much about his/her students saying “Professor ….” or using the first name. However, the e-mail that the student sent was starting with “Hey” even without first name.
So.. it was “Hey. Blar Blar Blar…”
The professor said “I am not your friend, but your professor.” and s/he told us that this kind of e-mail is not acceptable and if this happens again, s/he would reveal the name of the student next time.
So… Another lesson learned:
To your friends? Maybe these are acceptable. BUT, Do not use “Hey. Blar Blar Blar” or “What up, beeyatch?” when you send an e-mail to your professor or to your boss.
We talked about the hammering in class and the article was very interesting. Of course, the carpenters pay more attention to the hammering. However, they will need to think about the hammerness first because they will have to make a decision on which hammers they need to use. The carpenters, I assume, have different kinds of hammers and other tools. Now they want to make a chair. Before starting to make a chair, they will gather all the tools they need in making a chair. When they prepare the tools, they may have to think about the hammerness. Of course, they do not want to use a small hammer to drive a big nail. They will use bigger and stronger hemmers for bigger nails. So… I guess they think about the hammerness first, and once they started making the chair, they are “hammering”.
When I was writing above, I guess I was not thinking about the keyboardness. (or typingness.. haha) I was not thinking about how the keyboards are composed or what keys do. I just started typing to write on this blog.
After the class, it was interesting to see that most of the time, we do not think about the “hammerness”, but just hammering. It would be really great if we can design something and users, at all, do not care about the “hammerness”. However, would it be really possible? I hope later I can really design something that the users can just start hammering…
When I was searching for a flash memory to use for school, I visited several websites. Most of them had FAQ or search option so that I could find some information. Some of those website really had a nice search engine so that when I entered a question, it gave me great results(great answers to the questions). It just made me feel like my questions were answered by real people. However, it was just a computer.
When I visited one site, it was saying “Live chat” with a real person. When I started the chat, I thought that it was one another search engine answering my answers. (Partly because it was late at night and I had to enter my name before starting. When it started, it was saying “Hi, Junyoup”). In less than a minute, I realized it was a real person taking my questins and answering them. Compared to other systems that pretended real, the live chat system gave me realistic interaction (I felt that I was talking to a sales person at the real shop), even though I was chatting through a medium, which is a computer.
I think today there are many formalistic interaction that pretend to be real. I wonder how real they can really be.
When I was watching the Jurassic Park, I could not stop thinking that this is true. In the movie the scientists took the blood of dinosaurs from the insects in ambers and used the DNA to clone the dinosaurs. I really do not know this can really be true. However, because I knew there were the human genome projects going on at that time, I just had to believe that this can be true in some sense.
Then… the movie started. All the dinosaurs walked around and chased the actors. The faces looked so real and all the spcial effects made me believe that this is really true. I think that those effects and computer graphics did a very good job in the movie and also the background science knowledge even helped more to have the audience to fall deep in the movie and feel that the movie is real.
One small question… Where can we find the readings for Tuesday? I checked Oncourse, but there were no article uploaded. Is it just me with Oncourse problem?
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