I gave a lecture for a MIT class earlier today, ESD.40: Product Design and Development. The lecture largely discussed how human interaction factors into product design (surprisingly), although a lot of it was mainly intended to introduce students to different aspects of human interaction and motivate them to consider interaction when working on their products. [...]
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I just worked through getting PASW (formerly SPSS) installed on my MacBook, running OS X 10.5 Unfortunately, when I tried installing the software, an InstallAnywhere application would run, then PASW_Statistics_Installer would start and instantly crash. The system log had some odd error messages: PASW_Statistics_Installer.app/Contents/Resources/PASW_Statistics_Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/PASW_Statistics_Installerʂ(Cv^X^LecionaTT PASW_Statistics_18[1948]: osError = -60031 PASW_Statistics_18[1972:10b] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon [...]
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Very cool project I came across at Berkeley- taking 3D models and automatically generating exploded diagrams. The videos are great because they show the real value, in having the program dynamically show what parts need to be removed to access another part. There’s certainly been a lot of times working on cars that I wish [...]
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I’m always a sucker for isometric projections, so you can imagine the amount of time I’ve spent playing Effing Hail, a flash game where you basically try to create the biggest hail storm possible to cause the most destruction possible. At the same time, there’s some useful info about how hail is actually made! (I’m [...]
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The first steps of my Master’s thesis research was featured today in Wired’s Danger Room in an article titled New Use for iPhones: Controlling Drones. It’s a fun read with some good quotes from my thesis advisor, but it largely ignores the research implications. What the video above shows is us controlling an autonomous quad [...]
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Came across this hilarious Weekly World News cover (the image is on Flickr, by bmindful). The funny part is, for the first time Weekly World News may be onto something. For the longest time, I thought cybernetics was just about the coolest thing that could happen to humans. Who wouldn’t want super human strength, x-ray [...]
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Using Robert Penner’s easing equations is probably one of the easiest things you can do to spice up your UI. Apple’s famous for using CubicInOut almost everywhere they can to make their interfaces look sleeker. The only problem is, it’s hard to pin down the exact equations if you need to implement them yourself, or [...]
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The Washington Post has a great article today about the paradox of humans and automation. John D. Lee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has a choice quote: The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes [...]
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That’s the power button on my DVD player. Now, my DVD player is pretty intelligent- it’ll automatically turn off when my TV turns off, and it’ll even turn on my TV for me if I insert a disc. It’s only a year old, but it shares a fatal design flaw with every, single DVD player [...]
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