Fade to Play

According to this article in Canada.com, elementary schools around the USA are using finger scanning in the lunch room.

Colleges and high schools have used fingerprint scanners to stop non-students from sneaking into dining halls and gyms. Now elementary schools are joining in, hoping that biometric devices are a good way to keep lines moving and pay for meals.

Districts elsewhere in the U.S. use finger scans to dispense medicine, take attendance, check out books in the library or ensure that bus-riding students get off at the right stop.

Jay Fry, CEO of biometrics maker IdentiMetrics Inc., said elementary school districts are one of his company’s fastest-growing markets.

Relevance: This would make my life alot easier on campus. I have a fob to access my lab, I have a UBC student card that I use for the library, a gym card, and a bus pass. If I access all these university services and places with my finger, it would be way cool.

Technorati Tags: schools, children, technology, biometric

Reading this article in the Globe and Mail about how teens are becoming addicted to coffee reminds me of this funny video by LisaNova. I started drinking Vanilla lattes from Starbucks earlier this year and love it. I also drink tons of Lady Grey tea each day. I guess these teens are preparing earlier for life as a university student.

But along with countless other youngsters, Tali and her friend Melissa Florence rely on coffee to perk them up. Tali drinks it black at home but usually buys Java Chip Frappuccinos at Starbucks with her $10 weekly coffee allowance. Melissa, also 14, likes “anything mocha”.

On a recent chilly morning, they and hordes of other teens — mostly girls — dashed into a Starbucks in midtown Toronto for their daily fix before heading to class balancing coffee cups, cellphones and backpacks. In the afternoon, several lingered over lattes while catching up with friends or doing homework.

Technorati Tags: coffee, teens, youth

Tonight at 2am I will turn my clocks back, I will still be away madly working on my CGSA proceedings paper.

You can read about the history of daylight savings time in this CBC article.

Daylight time was first enacted in Germany in 1915, quickly followed by Britain and much of Europe and Canada.

Because the sun shone for a time while most people were asleep, it was reasoned that light could be better used during the day. The solution was to push the clocks ahead one hour in springtime, forcing people to wake an hour earlier. They would therefore expend less energy trying to light their homes, for instance, if time were adjusted to suit their daily patterns.

When the days started getting shorter in the fall and people awoke to increasing darkness, the clocks were turned back an hour to get more light in the morning.

Technorati Tags: time

This article in BBC News Technology section discusses present research and technology that uses the body as the interface. Technology that seems only to be in movies, is coming to the real world.

New Mexico-based Lumidigm generates fingerprints by using wavelengths of light to probe fingers for information both at the surface and beneath the skin. It highlights characteristics such as skin layers and collagen fibres that are part of what makes a fingerprint unique.

Current technologies have an error rate of up to 16% but Lumidigm says its technology reduces this to less than 1%. They also have a “liveness” detection to avoid the Hollywood scenario of digits being cut from hands to be used by criminals.

In the real world, the sensors are being used in a theme park in the US to allow customers to access rides and attractions according to their tickets.

Relevance: Today I left my house without my wallet. I only need my Starbucks card and my bank card for any purchases I planned to make today. What if I make my Starbucks purchases with an iris scan? Would I prefer this or question my privacy?

Technorati Tags: technology biometric

IEEE Pervasive Computing (http://www.computer.org/pervasive/)
Call for Papers
Urban Computing special issue

Also available online at http://tinyurl.com/yfxlvs

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 January 2007
Author guidelines: www.computer.org/pervasive/author.htm
Submission address: http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com
WIP Deadline: See below
Publication date: June 2007

IEEE Pervasive Computing invites articles about urban computing: the
integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into our
everyday urban settings and lifestyles. Successful integration requires
taking several facets of the urban environment into account at once.
Urban settings frame social behaviors; they encompass architectural
forms and features that may or may not be harmonious with given
technologies; and they are increasingly but variably permeated by
wireless networks and fixed and mobile devices. A key challenge is the
great diversity and density of people, devices, and built artifacts
found in urban places. Urban computing ranges from city-wide
transportation-sensing infrastructure, to services embedded in a cafe,
to the bluetooth “aura” of an individual’s mobile phone as he or she
walks down a street.

We welcome papers on all aspects of pervasive technologies embedded
specifically in the city, especially those that combine social,
architectural, and technological perspectives. We encourage reports of
user studies and other data-gathering exercises; lessons learned from
technology designs and deployments; conceptual frameworks for urban
computing; and fully worked-out visions for the cities of the future.

Example topics include

* Clicks and mortar: the built environment as a tangible interface
to services and applications.
* Archi-tech-ture: designing technology for architecture and
architecture for technology.
* Wireless society: accounts of media or bandwidth sharing and
other social phenomena that emerge from increasing densities of
bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks in urban areas.
* Theories of the urban landscape such as space syntax applied to
technological embeddings.
* Street riders: applications for transportation systems and
vehicular technologies, especially car-car and car-street interactions.
* Citizen sensors: sensors that people wear or carry to measure
such factors as pollution levels or the presence of individuals nearby,
and especially applications that combine results from across the city.
* Urban interaction: displays, smart posters and other public
interaction facilities.
* Digital identity: the presentation of self in digital urban life.
* Sous les pavés, la plage (”under the paving stones, the beach,”
from Paris, 1968): investigations exploring alternative digital tags,
markings, traces, and graffiti.
* Urban experiences: technologies for events such as festivals,
mediascapes, other new ways of experiencing the city.
* Come out and play: street games, especially perpetual games, that
remix the city landscape as gameboard.
* Downtownware: middleware for smart streets, buildings, buses,
pedestrians, and so forth—a key aspect being the highly dynamic nature
of these systems.
* The city as a system: system support for metropolitan scale
computational abstractions. One example is spatial programming, where
tuple spaces are embedded as a location-dependent coordination
mechanism, potentially across the city.
* Urban noir: the darker side of urban life: privacy, security …
opportunity or barrier to adoption?
* Real-world deployments: experiences, and lessons learned.

Submissions should be 4,000 to 6,000 words long and should follow the
magazine’s guidelines on style and presentation. All submissions will be
peer-reviewed in accordance with normal practice for scientific
publications. Submissions should be received by 15 January 2007 to
receive full consideration.

In addition to full-length submissions, we also invite work-in-progress
submissions of 250 words or less (submit to Molly Mraz at
mmraz@computer.org). These will not be peer-reviewed but will be
reviewed by the Department Editor Anthony Joseph and, if accepted,
edited by the staff into a feature for the issue. The deadline for
work-in-progress submissions is 1 April 2007.

Guest Editors:
Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow, matthew [at] dcs.gla.ac.uk
Michael Joroff, MIT, mljoroff [at] mit.edu
Tim Kindberg, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, timothy [at] hpl.hp.com
Eric Paulos, Intel Research, Berkeley, eric [at] paulos.net

Technorati Tags: mobile phone, ubicomp, pervasive, urban, tagging, technology, space, games

outside.in is a location-based geographic web for neighbourhoods. It enables people to use their computer to view a digital map that has real world activities on it such as a local fair, a restaurant opening, or celebrity sighting. It is a mixed space (digital map displaying real-world physical events that are local to a neighbourhood).  They are not yet in Canada though.
As Steven Johnson, who launched it today explains:

For the handful of us who have been building outside.in over the past six months, the site is ultimately about a new kind of experience. You sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code — perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you’re visiting or interested in — and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you’ve entered. Not just restaurant reviews or upcoming concerts, but the broad, bustling range of information flowing through a lively neighborhood: complaints about the local school; rumors of a new bar opening up next week; a crime report for a mugging the night before; a promising open house this weekend. Up to now, only the most connected local experts in any neighborhood could keep up with all these evolving conversations. outside.in is designed to let you see it all in seconds.

Relevance: I continue to be amazed at the different games and applications that have been developed with google maps. For our own _The Fugitive game_, it was very beneficial in providing a clear campus map to use for the game.

Technorati Tags: location-based, google maps, ubicomp, mixed realities

This article from Sunday’s JournalStar.com outlines that the next generation of mobile phones will be able to anticipate your needs and know your location. The issue is how much information provided by one’s phone is relevant vs. being annoying.

The system will combine knowledge about where someone’s phone is with his calendar schedule so, for example, it can send incoming calls to voice mail when she’s in a conference. Eventually, the system may turn up her home heating system 10 minutes before arrival.

IBM researchers last month announced a test in collaboration with Telenor, a Norwegian telecom.

“There are a lot of sensors and information sources,” said Vova Soroka, research manager for IBM’s lab in Haifa, Israel. “They have motion sensors and biosensors of all kinds. You could even tell from a sensor in the phone whether someone is walking or bicycling.”

Relevance: Yesterday I couldn’t find my mobile. I looked all over my lab and room and when I had given up, I heard it ring — my friend was calling. Knowing where my misplaced mobile phone is, is relevant information to me, or knowing that I am about to lock myself out of my room, would also be useful.

From IFTF Future Now

Technorati Tags: presence, mobile phone, ubicomp

Ack. I love my mobile phone, but I may be decreasing the likelihood of children. According to an article in today’s Times Online, men who use mobile phones for long periods of time (4 hours +) may be at risk of damaging their sperm.

Both the quantity and quality of a man’s sperm declines as his daily mobile use increases, a study of 361 infertility patients in the United States has found.

The greatest effects were seen among very heavy users who talk on a mobile for more than four hours a day, these produce about 40 per cent less sperm than men who never use a mobile at all. Smaller falls in sperm count were also seen among those who use mobiles less frequently.

Relevance: As a male mobile phone user, I may have reason to be concerned, however I don’t use my mobile nearly that much at one time

Technorati Tags: health, mobile phone

I just downloaded and activated firefox 2.0. The one issue I have is that my del.icio.us extension is not compatible with it so I wish I had held off for a bit. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly by del.icio.us.

found via lifehacker

Technorati Tags: firefox, browser, internet

update: I have installed the del.icio.us extension from  yesterday and it seems to work ok, although my toolbar bookmarks are missing

What: Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play!

When: October 18-20, 2007

Submission Deadline: February 1, 2007

Where: Vancouver, Canada

————

Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play!

International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of
Internet Researchers

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Workshops: October 17, 2007

AoIR conference: October 18-­20, 2007

Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2007

Let’s Play

The Internet ­ better, internet/s - is at once part of the background hum of
the developed world and an exotic realm of fantasy and play. It is an
essential, mundane part of daily life, and simultaneously radical,
revolutionary, profane, and fun. Internet/s invite us to play. We surf,
blog, role play, and chat in the interest of work, learning, and play.
Serious technologies and applications invite playing around as a way to
learn how to use them. Playful applications take root in serious business,
as online chat becomes a business communication tool. Games find
applications in education, business, and war. Playful blogging evolves into
a social and political force to be reckoned with. We play with our identity
online, shaping current and future roles offline. The play goes on

Our conference theme of play invites empirical research and theoretical
reflection on how human beings ³seriously play² with one another on, via and
through internet/s, on local, regional, and global scales. We call for
papers that explore the intersection of the serious and the playful, the
sacred and the profane, the revolutionary and the mundane, and fantasy and
the reality.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline,
methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines,
methodologies and communities, that address the (playful) blurring of
boundaries online. The following TOPICS are suggestions simply intended to
spark initial reflection and creativity:

- Mundanity implies normalcy, and thereby, the efforts to understand and
regulate online interactions in ways that are analogous to and consistent
with offline practices and norms (e.g., privacy protection, norms for
community interaction, efforts to regulate information flows involving
pornography, hate speech, etc.). As internet/s become interwoven with
ordinary life on multiple levels, in what ways do these alter ordinary life,
and/or how do prevailing community and cultural practices reshape and Œtame¹
such internet/s and the interactions they facilitate?

- Global diffusion: how do internet/s, as they exponentially diffuse
throughout the globe facilitate flows of information, capital, labor,
immigration ­ and play ­ and what are the implications of these new flows
for life offline?

- eLearning: how can such practices as distance learning and serious games
utilize the liminal domain (the threshold world of dream and myth, in which
important new skills, insights, and abilities are gained in the process of
growing up) to go beyond traditional ways of learning? Are they necessarily
better, or easier, to use or to learn from?

- Identity, community, and global communications: how will processes of
identity play and development continue, and/or change as the role and place
of the Internet in peoples lives shift in new ways ­ including the expansion
of mobile access to internet/s?

- E-health: what do new developments in sharing medical information online
and expanding telemedicine technologies into new domains imply for
traditional physician-centered medicine, patient privacy, etc.?

- Digital art: from downloading commercially-offered ringtones to
facilitating cross-cultural / cross-disciplinary collaborations in the
creation of art, internet/s expand familiar aesthetic experiences and open
up new possibilities for aesthetic creativity: how are traditional
understandings of aesthetic experience affected ­ and how do new creative /
aesthetic / playful possibilities affect human users of art?

- Games and gaming: the average gamer in North America is now a
twenty-something whose lifestyle is more mainstream than adolescent. As
games and gamers grow up ­ and as games continue their diffusion into new
demographic categories while they simultaneously continue to push the
envelopes of Internet and computer technologies ­ what can we discern of new
possibilities for identity play, community building, and so forth?

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the
conference theme, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes
on that theme. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social,
cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet
beyond the conference theme - e.g., in CSCW and other forms of online
collaboration, distance learning, etc. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary
and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations
from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome
proposals for traditional academic conference papers, but we also encourage
proposals for creative or aesthetic presentations that are distinct from a
traditional written paper.

We also welcome proposals for roundtable sessions that will focus on
discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized
panel proposals that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.
- PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- CREATIVE OR AESTHETIC PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- PANELS - submit a 500-750 word description of the panel theme, plus
250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
- ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the
roundtable discussion and interaction

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted
proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and
overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a
proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel
session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting OR submit
a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers
as long as you are not presenting them.

Detailed information about submission and review is available at the
conference submission website http://conferences.aoir.org [available
December 1, 2006]. All proposals must be submitted electronically through
this site.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Several publishing opportunities are expected to be available through
journals, based on peer-review of full papers. The website will contain more
details.

GRADUATE STUDENTS
Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. Any student
paper is eligible for consideration for the AoIR graduate student award.
Students wishing to be a candidate for the Student Award must send a final
paper by June 30, 2007.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
Prior to the conference, there will be a limited number of pre-conference
workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or
creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference
workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will
invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals
should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose,
methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as
well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals
will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add
significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on
experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections.
These proposals and all inquires regarding pre-conference proposals should
be submitted as soon as possible to the Conference Chair and no later than
March 31, 2007.

DEADLINES
Submission site available: December 1, 2006
Proposal submission deadline: February 1, 2007
Presenter notification: March 31, 2007
Final workshop submission deadline: March 31, 2007
Submission for student award competition: June 30, 2007
Submission for conference archive: July 31, 2007

SUBMISSION OF FULL PAPERS
Full papers and a conference registration by at least one of the paper
authors must be in place by July 31, 2007 for papers to be presented.

Formatting: Please submit papers in PDF with simple formatting, using sans
serif font and in-text referencing. If you can’t submit in PDF, use DOC or
RTF format.
Submission process: Submit full papers to aoir2007@gmail.com by July 31,
2007.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Program Chair: Dr. Mia Consalvo, Ohio University

Conference Chair: Dr. Richard Smith, Simon Fraser University

Vice-President of AoIR: Dr. Charles Ess, Drury University
Association Website: http://www.aoir.org
Conference Website: http://conferences.aoir.org
Technorati Tags: cfp, internet, games, cscw, digital space