Remeber “The Sixth Sense” ?
Well, this semester I take an HCI course and each of the students has to present a research paper at least once, so I choose to present “WUW-Wear Ur World, A Wearable Gestural Interface“, which is all about the sixth sense.
Above is my presentation slide, it also has some demo on it. Enjoy!
I’ve been noticing the way my Indonesian friends send Eid greetings from time to time.
The oldest I can remember is by sending paper cards by post. I still remember the joy of card shopping - choosing the pretties pictures and picking the wisest words, usually during the last week of Ramadan. My father used to order a bunch of these cards, which looks more professional than cute or pretty, to be sent to his colleagues. “You get what you give. meaning, in returns, we also received cards from friends and family. I’d say this media in comparison to other media mentioned here is the more personal, less practical and less environmentally friendly.
Couple of years later came mobile phones with it’s fame replacing all those cards with text messages. Phone call is just for personal VIPs because having to call and say the same words over and over again to many random acquaintances is just too much to do. Not enough by simply saying “EID MUBARAK, people invent the art of Eid text messaging that to my knowledge can be categorized as wise words, poetic (pantun included), pictures made of characters, and jokes.
Confession: I’m a not so good Eid text messages artist and I used to exchange messages I received from one friend to sent it to another.
Imagine how much money those cellular providers made during those days!
The internet gives us more media alternatives to send Eid Greetings. E-cards is quite popular back then. It’s just like the paper cards, except that it’s electronic, and the picture can move, sometimes added by sound and some of them are free. Okay it’s nothing like the paper cards.
But, the most advanced technology in Eid Greetings is probably via Facebook. Here’s some of the things that you can do with it:
Let me tell you what I have been doing this last three days, I watched ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and finished the whole season one and season two for the total of 40 episodes 
It started when a friend of mind, a physicist himself, shared a link to one of its episodes, which contains tips on how to ask a girl out using the Schrödinger’s cat, on his facebook. I, then, couldn’t get enough of it. Btw, I wonder why physicist love cats so much.
“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long CAT. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the CAT.” – Albert Einstein
I found this cool tool that can generate a graph of your friends in Facebook. So, in this graph, a node represents a friend and an edge, which connects 2 nodes, means that there’s friendship between those 2 friends.
I notice that there are 25 stages in generating this graph. Gosh, there’s gotta be a complicated computation behind it. One that crossed in my mind is how to determine a node’s position so that together they build a pattern that is useful for classification.
So here’s my graph (click to enlarge it).
In general this is my friends classification (Unlike in Friendster, I am quite strict on approving someone as a friend in Facebook, those in my friend list are either I’ve met him/her in person or we have lots of friends in common).
There are of course some special cases.
A friend can belong to 2 groups. Like friends who are my high school friends and college friends, friends who are now studying in Boston and get a Fulbright scholarship at my badge, friends who are at the same pre-academic program at ELI and went to Enrichment seminar at San Antonio (There are many places where one can have his/her pre-academic program and enrichment seminar), or a very very special case like Herman and Tika who were my high school friends and my college friend and my blogger friends … well, you’ll know what “teman sekardus” means.
A friend who is a public figure, like Ulil Abshar Abdala, goes in the middle of many groups.
And there are those who are not part of large groups, which does not necessary means I’m not closely related to him/her, like my sister.
Anyway, I found this tool from mas Roby Muhammad’s facebook page. I met him last year Lebaran at mas ulil house. Gosh, he’s sooo smart. He used to study physics, something related to Black Hole if I’m not mistaken, and I suppose he’s done a great job cause a physicist friend of mine were so eager to meet him. But at some point of his life he left it and change his major. He’s now doing PhD in Sociology at Columbia University and one of his famous work was the ‘Six degrees of separation’. I remember he said that network science is applicable in many areas, and to some extend you can use it in politics, economy, education, etc. For example we can investigate the map of political view and how it relates to this network like the one he wrote about swing voters.
If only we can have a real data, and built a real network of people in the world- not just in FB, that will be such a valuable resource. But that’s the challenge who and how would we do that?
Hey, do you know that Google is currently hiring people like mas Roby, a PhD in Sociology?
I watched midnite show at 21 last saturday- Ironman. When it comes to US military technology…dilemma oh dilemma. On one hand, I so against any kind of war and those military technology makes war even more advance, but on the other hand, isn’t internet was originally developed for military purpose? Yet, it give us so many advantages (and disadvantages) today.
But when it comes to Sci-Fi movies????? I’m so NOT against that
The cycle they created is great. To make a Sci-Fi movie ones must have advance imagination and also knowledge about recent available technology but once the movie’s on screen they inspired people to dream and think about how to actually build such technology.
I saw very interesting user interface that Tony Stark used to create his ‘costume’. You’ll see it too in Minority Report. Btw, that guy is so genius- oh!, and he went to MIT(dear God, let me be one of its PhD candidate :D) -oh! . Perhaps, they were inspired by the tangible user interface that Prof. Hiroshi Ishii developed at MIT Media Lab.
I watch a documentary show about The Terminator on Metro TV on Sunday afternoon. Developing the movie takes a lot of knowledge in robotics technology and also military vehicle that they had to visit places in which most advance technology were developed- you know, like NASA or Pentagon. Off course, In the movie, the technology is way more advance because they’re predicting technology of the future.
When terminator was on screen they soon become a box office. It made the lead actor very famous- a governor now. Many people was inspired by terminator. Among them was a men who now owned a company which built the best robot that can grip.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -Albert Einsten
