Category: Science
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Talking to Myself with SimulScribe
Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that: Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)… wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file… and then emails the raw…
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Aura of Inevitability (or: When a Technology’s Time has Come)
New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example.…
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The Empathy Test
“Let me tell you about my mother…” In the movie Blade Runner, the “Voight-Kampff Empathy Test” detects whether or not a test subject is a real human being or an android “replicant”. A machine reads the body’s physical reactions to various psychologically- provocative scenarios (“Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil.…
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There’s a Ring at Lincoln Center, and it ain’t Wagner
Johannes Brahms, clearly pissed off at Avery Fisher Hall. How is it possible that New York’s most dedicated Brahms lovers can excuse Lincoln Center? A couple of nights ago I went to see a concert of chamber music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, on one of the final nights…
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Action Jackson
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in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Design, Images, Personal, Reviews, Science, Technology, TV & Movies, Web -
Measuring The Morville Honeycomb
Peter Morville’s well-known “honeycomb” diagram (and accompanying article) illustrates seven qualities or “facets” of user experience design, going beyond just usability into six other areas where the user experience designer’s work is cut out for them. It’s a great diagram — I use it with clients to describe all the things we need to address,…
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Elegant Experiments
The classic Skinner box experiment. A comment by Steve Baty on my recent series about design research got me thinking about the fine art of experimental research design: Where research (in all forms) becomes a waste of time and effort is when the research design and methodology applied invalidate the conclusions _before_ they can be…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing
(This is Part 5 — the final part. Please read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , and Part 4 first.) I would certainly agree that more rigorous methodologies can’t hurt in our field. But at the same time, I think that we need to be a little more honest about the value…