Social media and narcissism at HASTAC

I just posted a response to Mark Bauerlein's latest blog post at Chronicle.com. The link is below.

Social media and narcissism

The Cupertino Effect

From now on I plan to refer to “collaboration” as “Cupertino.”

"The Cupertino Effect" is the technical term for a correct word that is consistently erroneously replaced by spell-checkers. It's named for Microsoft Word 97's habit of changing "co-operation" (a common British spelling) to "Cupertino," yielding such boners as "a 1999 NATO report mentions the 'Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe'; an EU paper of 2003 talks of 'the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes'; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for 'improving the efficiency of international Cupertino'."

When spellcheckers attack: The Cupertino Effect

FluidTunes: Motion interface for iTunes

I downloaded FluidTunes, a gestural interface for iTunes, yesterday and started playing with it. The software, which is Mac-only, uses the iSight camera on your Mac to interpret waving gestures which are used to browse your iTunes music library. Right now FluidTunes is only available for Mac, and it only works on systems with a camera. Here’s a demonstration:

While the software is pretty innovative, I found the user experience to be disappointing. Your iTunes library can only be navigated song-by-song which makes FluidTunes unwieldy for large music libraries. Additionally, I found it somewhat difficult to control the interface. Positioning my hand in the correct part of the camera’s view to get the program to recognize my motions was tricky, so it was hard for me to select the song I wanted. My head, however, was always in the right position, so if I moved it slightly—by stretching my neck, or turning around—it caused me to further lose my place.

Overall, I think this project is a great demonstration of the kinds of things that can be done with the iSight camera, even if it still needs a bit of tweaking.

via: LifeHacker

Technology-assisted out-of-body experience

This article on creating the illusion of body swaping using virtual reality gear made me think of the mirror therapy for phantom limb pain (Wikipedia description / smarty-pants description). Here’s the abstract of the new study, by Valeria I. Petkova and H. Henrik Ehrsson:

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.

via Boing Boing

Amazon mobile app powered by … humans!

Amazon has just released an iPhone app. Called Amazon Mobile, the app simply allows users to browse the products on the site. As some commentators have noted, this doesn’t make it much better than visiting the Amazon site online with your phone.

However, the app does have one unique feature. Called Amazon Remembers, it allows users to snap a picture of an item they want. The photo is then uploaded to Amazon, and, if the item can be identified in Amazon's catalogue, users will eventually see a link to purchase the item, both on their phones and on the Amazon home site.

This feature is interesting because Amazon is using people—rather than any kind of fancy image recognition—to identify the items in the photos, presumably using their Mechanical Turk service. It will be interesting to see how well the service works. Perhaps more interesting will be what Amazon does with the usage data the service generates. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company will use the information gathered by its classifiers to develop some kind of automatic image recognition, just as Google used GOOG-411 to build its voice recognition database.

Facebook Connect launch

CNET’s Rafe Needleman on tomorrow’s launch of Facebook Connect. A lot of companies (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have tried to crack the portable-I.D. nut with little success, so it remains to be seen how the Facebook venture will work out.