2017 week 2 in review

Work

The first week of the W2017 semester went off without any major crises. MUCH smoother than the F2016 semester start (which is fair, since that was the first full-scale semester we’ve hosted in the TI). I’m constantly amazed at the diversity of courses (and instructors and students) who are working in the TI - every course is different, from almost every faculty on campus. Every class session is different - with instructors and students moving furniture into different layouts regularly, and using the tech in new ways.

This first week of the semester was still pretty hectic, but is starting to calm down already.

PhD

Jennifer Payne gave a pre-defence talk about tangible artifacts for visualizing data - exploring how making or interacting with physical representations may be different than just barfing out a pivot chart in Excel. Interesting stuff.

I had my first class for the human-robot-interaction course. Looks like I’ll be working on some insanely interesting and challenging stuff this semester. Love it!

Read

• Newsblur starred feed items ¹
  • Kin Lane: When The Companies Who Have All Your Digital Bits Promise Not To Recreate You
  • David Hedley: A global approach to research
  • Jim and Beth Harger: PA028: It’s Time to Make a Change – Exposing Feedback Assumptions
  • mcruz: Did Media Literacy Backfire?
  • Rob Beschizza: Animated robots trapped in a Vicious Cycle
  • Caroline Siede: The story of a tiny Yorkie who served in World War II
  • Andrea James: Woman turned her prenatal ultrasounds into a VR experience
  • Cyrus Farivar: LA Community College paid $28,000 to free itself from ransomware
  • Anonymous: How to Build a Production Studio for Online Courses
  • Sarah Derouin: How to Crochet a Coral Reef–and Why
• Saved links on links.darcynorman.net
  • Early in Trump era, U of C sees dramatic increase in U.S. applicants - Calgary - CBC News - “obvious in hindsight. this will have lasting effects for decades.”
  • Immersive telepresence using a NAO robot - YouTube - “this is cool. what if a remote participant could physically be in a face-to-face session through this?”
  • RealSense - Project Avatar: A Gesture-Controlled Fully Immersive Telepresence Robotics System with NAO* | Intel® Software - “The human operator should actually be able to see the world through the eyes of the Nao robot including the field of view in 3D. This is realizable by using RGB stereo cameras. Using tactile sensors the robot is able to send touch events over the feedback communication channel to the human controller. So the controller can actually feel sensor based events occurring in the environment at the robot’s site comparable to some kind of force-feedback”
  • shmcgrath/newsBlurSavedStories: This python script will save all saved/favorite/starred stories from the users NewsBlur account into a markdown document. - “This python script will save all saved/favorite/starred stories from the users NewsBlur account into a markdown document. Based on my horrible hackish code as a starting point.”
  • Online Tools - Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything - “Here are some links to various online tools to help both teaching and learning. The online tools all work with laptops and Chromebooks unless stated otherwise”
  • REEM-C - PAL-ROBOTICS - “REEM-C is a full-size biped humanoid robotics research platform. It’s flexible, reliable, open, standard and upgradable. An advanced robot to boost research areas like navigation, HRI, vision or AI.”
  • Discover Nao, the little humanoid robot from Aldebaran | Aldebaran
  • iCarMode - “iCarMode is like your in-car dashboard, providing quick access to the things you need most when you’re on the road.”
• Medium recommended stories via RSS
  • Noah Levin: 3 Tools for Design Managers to welcome new designers and help them grow
  • Daniel Jeffries: Learning AI if You Suck at Math
  • Thomas Oppong: This Simple Life-Changing Technique Can Help You Achieve 10x Results
  • Ben Werdmuller: Affordable healthcare made my career possible
  • Gil Fewster: Hi D’Arcy.
  • danah boyd: Reality check: I blame the media.
  • danah boyd: Did Media Literacy Backfire?
  • Ev Williams: Renewing Medium’s focus
  • Alan Levine: Hey You! Don’t **** With My Unaffordable Healthcare
  • Tristan Harris: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

Other

We had an absolutely perfect day at Nakiska - great snow, nice and cold, sunny. I worked on a few things, and felt much stronger and fluid as a result. Still not fast (at. all.) but moving better.

Sunshine Village upgraded one of their webcams to a new HD camera, and the feed is amazing. I decided to try making a timelapse. It plays perfectly on my computer, but YouTube appears to have done something funky to it. This was the fourth time trying to upload it, and each time something different went janky. Anyways. I’ve lived next to the Rockies my entire life, and have never stopped being in utter awe of them.