You can always change this.

People who drink, earn more than their abstaining peers. That is a short summary of a study published in the Journal of Labour recently. According to the study, people who socially drink earn about 10 to 14 percent more than those who do not. As an explanation the authors offer their theory that drinking fosters social relations and those, in turn, lead to the higher numbers on the payrolls.

An executive summary can be found on one of the author’s web-page here, and an article making the findings understandable for general audience here.

An interesting implication of that study is that the currently promoted anti-alcohol policies regulating public drinking (e.g. on universities) push drinking into private and thus lead to decreased social capital.

A beer today, anybody?

Have you noticed? Newer cars conceal their exhaust pipes, there are not anymore the symbols of the power at the rear. I must have missed the year when this became a status quo in the car-design.

During last spring our mini research group on eye-tracking sharply expanded from one to about four members, as we got some talented master-students. Among others, we came up with two interesting topics, Tersia has been working on a gaze-aware game interface and Alfya is implementing a gaze-added digital-tv interface.

These topics were motivated by the fact that at the moment there are not many applications that would utilize gaze-direction as an interaction modality. I believe that one way of promoting the gaze-aware interaction and thereby decreasing the curently high prices of eye-tracking is to create more applications that make use of the eye. (About current efforts in decreasing the prices of eye-tracking, look at $1 000 000 challenge here).

To our great suprise, this call for student competition in creating gaze-aware interfaces has arrived last week. To me it indicates that our thoughts during the spring were heading in the right direction. So, both Alfya and Tersia will submit their applications and I wish they both can win the main prize!

Later durign the fall we will invite you all to come and test our new stuff, check back soon!

According to recent findings, “Having a common enemy brings out the best in men“. Well, I’m quite sceptical about the results, it just seems so counter-intuitive for me! I call for a direct replication of the study! Let’s build some new conrnerstones!

Dear fellows, our competitor is the university from the neighbouring city, I will hold the fund and you and other volunteers can contribute any amount between 0-5 euros.

A week back we had an interesting seminar talk titled “How to Create the Center of Excellence in Research?” delivered by Jari Multisilta. In his research, prof. Multisilta tried to extract the characteristics of centers of research excellence. He claims that the most important value in such a center is the quality of the research, followed by the “aim to discover deep scientific knowledge”.

I expect that there are many research groups that strive for high quality and want to discover new things. They even value the “open and conversational atmosphere” as found from the interviews with the leaders of the centers of excellence. Think about edtech, all applies. So with respect to these conclusions, the talk was actually nothing new.

Yet, there was one attribute found that I think we shall in our future strive for, regardless we would like to become a center of excellence or not. That attribute is called proximity to and presence of experts, and my impression is has been a bit overlooked at the present department. It is very common, in our research group at least, that we embark on topics that nobody around is an expert in. Often, those topics do not build on anything done in past by the present members of our group. For those reasons, I think, we need experts to stay here with us. It is not enough we get a visitor for two days. It is not enough we go for conferences, though by far those were/are the greatest eye-openers for me. We need more experts. Otherwise, we will stay where we are, progressing slowly (and not surely).