Since arriving at UW almost four years ago, I’ve been involved in student politics. I’ve not talked about it here as most of it is rather prosaic and, for those not at UW, largely irrelevant. Every now and then, though, something comes up which might be of wider interest..

In early May, GPSS, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, ran its ( Read more... )

Spacey fun at the symphony last night, with Legeti’s Atmosphères and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, both used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Holst’s Planets.

Atmospheres was subtle, relaxing, and almost entirely without melody - a piece for meditating to, if stark and slightly scary. I really needed that, as Thursday was just one of those days ( Read more... )

Saw a cool presentation today about an implant-based therapy for epilepsy at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering by Jaideep Mavoori of NeuroVista, a company here in Seattle.

The idea is that if someone is warned of an imminent seizure in advance, say 20 minutes out, they can remove themselves from unsafe or embarrassing situations, take ( Read more... )

I was completely unaware of this, but apparently cases of academic misconduct, as evidenced by the retraction of papers from journals and other publication venues, have been on the rise.

According to the article, retractions from journals in the PubMed database have increased by a factor of 60 over ten years, from 3 in 2000 to 180 in 2009. That’s ( Read more... )

I spent Saturday at the HCI for Peace workshop representing the Voices from the Rwandan Tribunal project. It was fairly informal, with only 10 participants, which made it easy for everyone to participate in the discussion. Several participants presented projects they’ve worked on, including:

• Lahiru Jayatilaka, a Sri Lankan PhD student from Stanford ( Read more... )

Took a break to play Jonas Kyratzes’ recent short game “The Fabulous Screech“.


( Read more... )

I’m feeling pretty jazzed at the moment about patronage as a funding model for creative endeavours.

It’s a pretty simple idea: instead of today’s dominant practice, where creative works are funded and owned by someone expecting to make money back from advertising or sales through a limited distribution channel, under patronage, creators fund their ( Read more... )

While driving back from Akaroa this evening, I got to thinking about enjoyment and time, probably as a result of the flow that navigating windy roads always brings. It seems to me that you can think of enjoyable or otherwise positive experiences as existing in four possible temporal spaces:

• Before - Looking forward to something is often as ( Read more... )

Played in Big Gaming Week 2011 this week, a gathering of friends now scattered around the world as part of the NZ diaspora, drawn home for Christmas and New Years. We’re in our eighth or so year now. In addition to the normal LAN, board, and RP games, we added a few things to line-up, including a big group brunch, a wine tasting (with games, of ( Read more... )

The topic of in-character (IC) conflict has come up a little recently in my Dragonlance campaign. I’ve not really thought about it a lot in the past; it’s always been there, of course, but I’ve never dealt with it directly before. So far, in this game, it’s not been a definitively negative experience as it’s engendered a lot of character growth ( Read more... )