Dealer chipno m…

Dealer chip

no money no bidding

 less than 2 game over!

Announce, skipping a player for this round

FIX drag:select for cards (selecthionbox hits)

Starcraft Game Spectating

a CHI 2011 quote

From the health panel, regarding paper vs. digital EMRs, paraphrased:

“Paper has its value. You can bleed on it… pour [bio-stuffs] on it… drop it on the ground….”

Tracking User Behavior

As popularized by Google Page Rank, the idea of gleaning valuable information about documents (or anything) from traces of user-behavior (e.g. links, footprints, etc…) is quite the rage. Scientists constantly approach the online world with new tools to uncover or analyze traces of human behavior. 

I thought that it is interesting to point out that the online world is a artificial place that was and is continually engineered and reengineered. Since web designers and others are in control of this environment, that means that, in addition to watching humans behave, we can design enviroments that lead users to behave in such a way that we learn more about what we are trying to gather data on.

For example, in a search engine, we can construct the search results page to also collect data on potentially relevant hits. For example, we could occasionally place a search result that technically has a lower score within the top ten results. This “mistake” and the related click-through data can then be used to calibrate the search engine. 

Granted, to build a webpage that collects user data is not a new idea, but it would be interesting to apply that theory to online spaces that scientists have been approaching in a very naturalistic fashion.

Housewives & Linux

From zdnet

In an article in the Asian business publication Tech-on reporter Tomohiro Otsuki writes:

Retailers and contract manufacturers in Taiwan say that novice PC users there, like students and housewives, tend to buy the Linux version of the Eee PC701, while geeks go for Windows XP.

Does that sound backwards?

Yet a quick look at Amazon shows that Asus Eee’s with XP roughly $35-$100 more than their Linux brethern. Housewives know a bargain when they see one.

Or… to take another shot in the dark, is it that students and housewives are so unfamiliar with XP that the difference between XP and Linux is negligible?

Although, another factor to take into account is that the flavor of Linux on the eee pc has been advertised as simple and straightforward.

“User-input”

I just thought of a model for looking at sources of meta-data. Thought I would share it with people who want to employ meta-data from systems like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc… to the design of intelligent and aware information systems.

On Designing New Technologies

To design novel technologies is a way to advance the functional capacity of the existing technological infrastructure in a user’s everyday life. The contribution of the telephone system, the Internet, and the tools that make it more powerful or easier to use: the cell-phone and the web-browser, for example, is that it changes the infrastructural landscape such that what was previously difficult or impossible became a technological affordance and, eventually, was embedded into the rhythms of everyday life. These tools now exist as infrastructure: taken for granted, appropriated for a variety of tasks, and, often, essential.

ACM Search Plugin for Firefox

I’ve been “out” for the past few weeks because I was writing for my general exams. When I was preparing my materials I was using the ACM Digital Library very heavily. So much so, that I ended up producing a search plugin for the built-in search bar in Firefox. Here is a polished version of it.

Instructions are:

(1) Download these two files:

a. acm.src

b. acm.gif

(2) Save them in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

(3) Restart Firefox.

Enjoy!

CHI 2007: A Game Design Methodology to incorporate Activist Themes

A Game Design Methodology to incorporate Activist Themes
Mary Flanagan, Helen Nissenbaum

“The contribution our project makes to the next decade of game design is a rigorous, systematic means to take human values into consideration in design at many levels.”