Carnival of the Mobilists
The Carnival of the Mobilists, a fine collection of blogging on mobile and wireless communication. Check out No. 29 over at Open Gardens.
Tagged: wireless
history of science and business
Bell Labs, one of the world’s premiere research institutions, was promoting the development of the PicturePhone by 1969. The first article documenting that the sight of lips annunciating sounds affects hearing (the McGurk Effect) was published in Nature, a leading scientific journal, in 1976. The authors of the article, Harry McGurk and John McDonald, were [...]
sensory ecology
The PicturePhone was a spectacular failure in the U.S. in the early 1970s. Many factors contributed to the PicturePhone’s flop. It required significant up-front equipment expenditure coordinated across users. It was expensive to use. It was bulky. It highly constrained the bodily position of users: compared to the PicturePhone, the fixed line phone of that [...]
Tagged: biology
ecology shapes communications technology
It seems that The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes. This is a large-scale example of ecology shaping communications technology. This sort of effect also occurs at a much smaller scale. Compare the geometric patterns in the paintings in the Morgan Picture [...]
Tagged: text
text messaging is unnatural
Recent research indicates that human visual processing capabilities have shaped text. Letters in 96 non-logographic writing systems, Chinese characters, and natural scenes all have similar distributions of topological configurations. The human visual system evolved to process natural scenes. Writing systems from around the world and throughout the history of written language appear to be well-matched [...]
Tagged: text
Public Service Recognition Week
To celebrate Public Service Recognition Week (should’ve been a month), I watched Ikiru. In this film, Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat, notes three rules for bureaucratic success: Always be on time. Never take any vacation. Do no work. He also poignantly sings Life is brief Fall in love, maidens Before the crimson bloom Fades from [...]
rights to communicate using radio spectrum
An important trend in communications policy has been to give persons more freedom to communicate using radio devices. The U.K. Office of Communication (Ofcom) currently is consulting on new ways of defining licenses for communicating using radio spectrum. Ofcom proposes to specify in licenses spectrum usage rights. It proposes to define these rights by specifying [...]