With our researchers we recently talked about ways to share interesting stuff. Email is for other purposes, but here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/roman.bednarik you can find a list and feed of the things I found interesting. Send me yours!
Try to read such text in low light, such as in the evening with just a little reading lamp on. Try a wider paragraph width, larger line-spacing. A 150% of this blog will make it too.
Then look away from the text. You won’t see a thing, but just nice blinds, all ‘burned’ into your retina. The recovery of vision seems much longer than from a black-on-white scheme (reading a newspaper on a direct sun).
And why do I then use the scheme? It looks good. But after this experience, I am considering a change to basic.
I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.
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As I mentioned earlier, I am participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability.
Selecting the students was very hard. There were approximately 8 applicants for each of the two projects, and unfortunately we had to reject applications of excellent guys and gals.
I am mentoring in two projects, namely in Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui and in Improving Jeliot user interface and workflows. In the Qtpfsgui project, Vladimir started redesigning the user interface to improve the preview by letting the users modify the settings of operators and see instantly the outcome. In the Jeliot project, Sharad started big by studying the pedagogical principles of program animation and their effects on the design of user interfaces.
From the research point of view, the Season of Usability is an interesting way how to raise awareness of the usability issues in the OSS community. So far, they have been greatly overlooked. Being part of this is a great experience in itself.
According to news, Lapland’s entrepreneurs tremble for safety should phone-lines be dumped . The transfer of by-wire services to wireless is a process going on for a while in Finland. Especially in scarcely populated areas, the cost of keeping 50 000 lines up are high, while the transfer to gsm and wireless services is not.
It is a logical step from the operators. However, conventional phone is often the only connection a grandma living alone in Kainuu area has with the rest of world. Previously during this year we have been doing some usability research with computer users of age 70+, living in Kainuu area. Seniors use the traditional phone, all of them have serious troubles using a mobile phone (not mentioning using a computer). Answering a mobile phone-call is maybe ok, but anything behind that is a pain. Now, the lines will one day become deaf, and the only alternative is a mobile phone?
Consider this anecdotal situation we witnessed: a grandma loses her mobile phone at home. She uses her normal phone to phone her son to phone her back on her mobile phone so she can find it when it’s ringing. This illustrates the attitude well, a super small, hated, mobile phone, left somewhere. Soon, it will be the only connection to the rest of world.
PS: I hope there is a thick line to Justus’ office.
I will be participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability. SoU is a series of sponsored (up to $1000) projects where students interested in usability apply to work for three months with some open-source software to improve its usability. There are nine very interesting projects, have a look at the openings, and apply!