Posts Tagged news

Pink Noise: It’s out there

Posted by jasonwong in good design on March 2nd, 2010

When I was a graduate student at George Mason University, there was a professor there named Chris Kello. He has moved on to one of the University of California-Merced, but his area of study remains the same: pink noise. What is pink noise? Well, we all know what white noise is: that random noise that we often hear as static. This is different from noise that indicates a clear signal within that random white noise – a radio broadcast, a WiFi signal – something that has a distinct pattern that can be clearly picked out of the noise. Pink noise is essentially a quasi-random yet somehow organized pattern that can be detected in the noise. Think self-organizing systems like the weather. Think chaos theory, think fractals.

Those studying pink noise have found patterns in the stock market, weather patterns, and Chris Kello looked for pink noise in basic cognitive functions. Now, scientists say that movies – namely, the length of scenes as they are shown in order – follow a pink noise pattern.

From The New York Times:

According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

So there you have it: it’s everywhere, waiting to be detected. In our stars, our heartbeats, our thinking, and our movies. Pink noise. It’s out there.

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What ever happened to SecondLife?

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, navigation, training on December 2nd, 2009

Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you’d be forgiven for asking if it’s still going.

Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn’t plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.

The BBC posted a story recently asking what happened to the Virtual World known as SecondLife, created by Linden Labs in 2003. It had so much promise – finally, a 3-D immersive metaverse where we could interact with each other “face-to-face,” but the promise really did not pan out.

The article lists several reasons that you can read for yourself, but there are several that stand out for me. I actually just starting using SecondLife for work (via SecondLife Enterprise), so these are personal impressions.

  • Difficult to control: Someone helped me set up an account and got me familiar with the navigation controls in the 3-D environment, but it is still insanely difficult to move around and make your avatar do what you want it to do. Seems to take a lot of work just to get around.
  • Walking/running/flying takes too long: Sometimes I just want to GO RIGHT THERE and instead I have to sit there, holding the “Up” key until I get there. Seriously? I have better things to do.
  • Pay pay pay: I got in once and decided to try and customize my avatar. So I went to some clothing shops. And had to pay a bunch of money. Nevermind. I found some free clothes and tried to put them on and… some weird glitch. Help files? Useless.
  • Bandwidth issues: At work we have to access SecondLife over a Verizon AirCard, and that is painfully slow. Even at home, though, on my fast cable Internet connect? It takes a very long time for the world to load. Again – I have better things to do, like use the real Internet
  • What is SecondLife good for? This stems from the article and summarizes perfectly why I haven’t really tried to get good at SecondLife – what is the point? Is it a game? No, not at all. Is it a social networking site? Well… we have IM, Skype, e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… I could go on. Is it a tool for creating your own 3-D environment that you would like to live in? Perhaps, but not my thing.

So what IS it good for? Well, the Navy is starting to push into SecondLife – not just a public presence, which doesn’t really have any real-world use. They are starting to develop some modeling and simulation tools to prototype new technologies cheaply and create augmented cognition training tools. Honestly, there is some neat stuff being developed, but it is very Navy-specific.

VirginiaC2

The creation of SecondLife Enterprise will really help this along, but public SecondLife is… well, sometimes you get pummeled with -censored-

chung-flunged

Some of the “motivation to learn” issues I listed above will be tackled because I will actually have to use SecondLife. The bandwidth issues will be solved because it will be hosted behind the Navy firewall, so that will be fast. So, for my job, SecondLife will soon become useful to me. I do not, however, expect to use it in my free time. Which could very well be a problem for SecondLife as a whole.

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Counting Ants? Pretty close!

Posted by jasonwong in animal cognition on November 26th, 2009

Well, not quite. NPR has a story about research done at the University of Ulm about desert ants. Scent trails do not work in the desert, so the scientists hypothesized that ants kept track of how many steps away from the nest they were.

The experiment is the coolest part of this entire thing – they set a whole group of ants loose from the nest and they all found the food. Then, the ants got split up into three groups: one group was allowed to return to the nest normally, one group got tiny little stilts attached to their legs (go figure!), and one group got their legs cut off at the knees (not as fun).

stilts_wide

The result of this is that if ants do remember how many steps they’ve taken, those with longer legs will take longer strides and walk right past their nest, and those with shorter legs will stop short of the nest.

And guess what? That’s exactly what happened. The experiment is ingenious, the hypothesis was simple, and the results confirmed what the researchers thought. Great science.

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More on the pilots who overshot MSP by 150 miles

Posted by jasonwong in automation on November 7th, 2009

NPR says: Expert: Wayward Flight Shows Risks Of Automation

Link to article

As aviation consultant Michael Goldfarb tells NPR’s Renee Montagne, it’s still very safe to fly. The problem, he says, is that pilots are now more susceptible to boredom and fatigue.

“There’s so much automation in the cockpit that, literally, an aircraft taking off from Los Angeles and landing in New York can have very little attendance by the crew,” says Goldfarb, a former chief of staff at the Federal Aviation Administration.

In fact, there was a panel discussion at the recent 2009 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society annual meeting called “Current Concepts and Trends in Human-Automation Interaction.” What did Dietrich Manzey of the Berlin Institute of Technology speak on?

Automation-Induced Complacency: A Controversial Concept of Human-Automation Interaction

Complacency induced by automation, eh? Sounds… familiar.

Here is a copy of the conference proceedings paper for more information: Conference Proceedings

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Human Factors in the News

Posted by jasonwong in attention, automation on October 23rd, 2009

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference took place this past week in San Antonio, TX. I saw a lot of interesting talks that are relevant to my work with the Navy, and I got to see a lot of friends from my previous life as an undergrad at the University of Illinois and grad student at George Mason University.

I am honestly amazed, however, that this story happened during the Human Factors conference:

Pilots missed Twin Cities by 150 miles – but how?

WASHINGTON — Were the pilots distracted? Catching up on their sleep? Federal investigators struggled to determine what the crew members of a Northwest Airlines jetliner were doing at 37,000 feet as they sped 150 miles past their Minneapolis destination and military jets readied to chase them. Unfortunately, the cockpit voice recorder may not tell the tale.

A report released late Friday said the pilots passed breathalyzer tests and were apologetic after Wednesday night’s amazing odyssey. They said they had been having a heated discussion about airline policy. But aviation safety experts and other pilots were frankly skeptical they could have become so consumed with shop talk that they forgot to land an airplane carrying 144 passengers.

They did not respond to communications from air traffic control, they missed every alert the flight management system threw at them… who knows what else they missed? Was it a case of pilot fatigue? Inattentiveness due to a heated discussion?

And if it WAS all due to a heated discussion, what does that mean for us drivers? No more passengers in the car? If you get into an argument or too involved in a conversation that you have to pull over?

Insanity! It seemed like everyone was talking about this story. At least you had 1000+ human factors professionals on the case!

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