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Too Much Information – Context-Aware Applications
ChelleChelle writes with a link to IBM research on the limits to and lessons learned from two context-aware computing projects:
"As the researchers Moran and Dourish put it, 'Context awareness is fine in theory. The research issue is figuring out how to get it to work in practice.' The article lays out two attempts by IBM to do just this. Grapevine and Rendezvous are services offered to IBM employees as a means of looking into the promise and perils of context-aware computing. From these two experimental services the authors have drawn several valuable lessons." From the article: "What computer scientists commonly call context often has more to do with technology than with work situations, people, or frames of mind."
I work on the help desk for a large company. Every time I ask the customer to right-click on something and the context menu appears, the customer just freaks out. That makes my job tougher than it should be.
Now see, I'm just the opposite. I believe that Conformity (which includes Consistancey) should be a choice. You don't want your cell phone to be adaptive and adaptable? Fine, thats probably good for you. I LIKE being able to customize things. I want my computer to remember the things I have done in order to help me do things easier in the future.
There does need to be room inside of the human/machine interface for choice, however. I would love to see interfaces be developped that have varying level of adaptation depending on what the user chooses in his settings.
You may not want an unpredictable OS, but I don't like wasting my time, either. You're probably thinking of instances like Windows' "feature" to customize your menus, which is more annoying than helpful. Or Clippy, for that matter.
On the other hand, if I'm trying to contact my cousin, in 2006, I have four options: e-mail, text message, cell phone, home phone. I would rather not go in order if some sort of context-aggregator service knows that her cell phone is on the move somewhere in north-central Illinois. Businesses would appreciate knowing where their employees, or other employees, were at any given point in time.
Or, imagine a website (Gmail, for example) that responds to the user depending on if it knows you're at work, home, or the library, and adjusts its security settings accordingly.
I'm not a time freak and I don't demand to utilize 100% of my time, all the time, but if this could save me some hassle that's come in this age as a result of our technology, I'm for it.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I think some Mac laptops already have that, so all that would be need to be implemented is the software side (ie violently shaking the laptop causes it to kill the process with the most cpu usage, would be most helpful).
Similiar things happened a couple times over the weekend at my parents house. It was mildly annoying. I used this trick occasionally, but it worked almost anywhere. Stereo mini-jack to rca cable. Plug cable into audio player other end into a/v jack on tv. This used to allow anything with an a/v input to play sound off an audio player. No luck, the tv couldn't select that input because there was 'nothing' connected. Tried their vcr, found the same problem, wouldn't allow selection of the input. Ok, no problem, i just bought a new laptop, connect headphone jack of audio player to line in of laptop. Didn't work. It would record the input just fine, it just wouldn't play it directly through the built in speakers. What? Tried calling support and they asked 'why would you possibly want to do that?' I finally tracked down a solution by downloading a driver from another laptop manufacturer using the same audio chip to enable playing of line in directly through a 'monitor' slide in the volume controls. Needless to say i was really dumbfounded.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
I'd be happy with that providing the system always errs on the side of caution and lets you know about something if it's unsure.
For example, I'd want my phone to not ring between 11pm and 7:30am unless it was somebody in my 'close friends and family' group, because they only ring me during that time if they need me urgently, right now, yes I do need to wake you up.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The sudden motion sensor is also on ThinkPads. The ThinkPad control panel for it shows a picture of your laptop; as you shake the laptop around the picture of the laptop on screen also shakes. I still haven't seen any interesting uses of the motion sensor besides the intended purpose (shutting down the hard drive in case of a drop) and novelty things (imitating that Labyrinth game I used to play at the dentist's office waiting room).
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My subject says nothing. That's because "context" these days has become a catch-all buzzword for people in the technology industry and academic circles to try to abstract a very complex entity away to focus on some specific detail. Although this sometimes works, it only works when you the specific detail or thing you want to discuss, observe, or code can realistically be isolated from all those complexities you just swept away by calling them 'context'.
:)
The trouble is, when you say you want something to be 'context-aware' you are saying you want it to be aware of all the complexity. Software cannot do this. You want to create something can run on your computer that is more aware than a human is and not just aware in the data sense of facts and trivia, nor simply in the analytical sense of adding facts to facts and substracting trivia. What you want is intuitive awareness and this is the one thing you cannot have in software and systems of the complexity available today (it remains to be seen if it can ever be gained through deterministic computation - the rote addings and subtractings of on and off states or, if it can be found, if it will collapse what was previously thought of as intuition into merely imperfect analysis that would only be acceptable for a human to conclude).
So what am I saying? I'm saying that "context awareness" is just a buzzword for a de facto implausibility. I point you to this quote from the article: "While people clearly do these things today without additional help from context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the enterprise."
This is contextual statement. It sweeps all the true complexity away in exchange for semantic complexity. It really says nothing and simply uses 30 or so words where two would do: work better.
Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so. There are more concrete things we can attack, things were we can make actual statements rather than vague and amorphous statements about what a system might theoretically do. It's just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and doing some work instead of engaging in intellectual laziness and then wasting other people's time with our frivolities.
Which is all to say that I found the article and information contained therein not worth the time of reading.
All of those things are annoying, I agree, but they're consistant. If my headlights automatically turn off whenever the cars parked for a certain length of time, that's alot less frustrating than it /sometimes/ doing it.
Property is theft.