Attended a thought-provoking seminar last week given by Robert St. Amant on Physical Metaphors for Problem Solving. seminar thoughts Metaphors shape the way we interface with machines. they can be useful (in exposing intuitive interfaces), but also can be wrong/halfmapped. For example, on computers, we use “windows” as metaphors–but while some of our uses of […]
Category Archives: General
Physical Metaphors for Problem Solving
20-Sep-05neat! my fiance has started blogging her dissertation research… it is such a joy to be marrying a woman who is technologically literate, intellectually curious, and academic in areas completely orthogonal to my own academic bent. what a sucker am i… after four years of dating, i read a blog post, and i find myself […]
Off to Portugal
02-Sep-05I’ll most likely be incomunicado for the next week. Will be in Lisbon, Portugal, presenting at the Eurospeech conference. Look me up if you’re in the area ;)
Accelerando
26-Aug-05The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0 —Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk novel by Charles Stross A good read, and Creative-Commons-Released-For-Free-Download. Aside from a too-explicit-for-my-puritan-tastes S&M scene near the beginning, […]
Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy?
25-Aug-05So, we have some really nice folksonomies out there now. And they’re really good for humans. But what can machines do with them? Can we use del.icio.us to further the sisyphan goals of the semantic web? More specifically, I was talking to HaoChuan tonight about how one might automatically use a folksonomy to populate an […]
i heart my apartment
16-Aug-05Ahhhh. Moved in on Sunday (thanks Jeff, Bassam, Yuko, Ben!). 10 minute commute to work. (wow. just wow). I no longer need to fear walking around at night after reading about the weekly armed mugging published in the USC DPS Crime Alert restaurants abound 2 minutes walk to Cafe Brazil (pricey, but their weekend slow-roasted […]
craziness of late
09-Aug-05Visitted an immigration attorney yesterday morning, to see what legal bumps we might encounter for the upcoming marriage in december, and subsequent applications for permanent residency and/or citizenship. While our situation is on the more typical side, I felt the high price of an official legal opinion was a worthy exchange for the security-of-mind that […]
Memex and Bush: 60 years
20-Jul-05Slashdot had a story commemorating sixty years Vannevar Bush‘s As We May Thunk. The signal-to-noise of comments on slashdot stories is usually too low to be good reading (even browsing at +5), but commentary on this story was surprisingly good. Notably, there was the link to this story on Bush by Wired. I find it […]
bleh
13-Jul-05Welcome back to America, Nick: Monday: come down with cold Tuesday: Car broken into (while it’s parked in front of my apartment), CD player stolen Wednesday: Find out I’m being relocated at work, from 9th story window office to 4th story interior office