Tiree Touchtable – the photos

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At last, the photos from the week making and installing the Tiree Touchtable.  You can see all the photos on Flickr, but here is small selection:

The main components – projector, Kinect (on top of projector) and mini-Mac:

The Kinect disassembled:

Platform to attach to roof beams and support projector and mini-Mac:

Add mirror:

Andrea adjusting the mirror:

It works!

Alan gently centre-punches location for screws on Kinect frame:

note the tool … after this the Kinect didn’t work … can’t think why?  But happily there was a second Kinect 🙂

Then Andrea screws Kinect to timber support:

Testing on the workbench:

Moment of truth — on the way to the Rural centre to install … second Kinect carefully cradled in Alan’s old jumper:

       

Parts laid out, ready to go:

Steve fits mounting brackets, Alan looks on:

Alan thinks, “platform looks secure”.  Fiona thinks, “Alan doesn’t”.

Gets boring standing at the bottom of the ladder

Andrea fitting Kinect drop arm:

Andrea fitting the mini-Mac:

“Yep, that seems to be OK”

Let there be light:

Looking down — behold, Tiree Touchfloor:

The secret of true engineering … if the table is too low for the sensors, lift it higher:

Holiday Reading

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Early in the summer Fiona and I took 10 days holiday, first touring on the West Coast of Scotlad, south from Ullapool and then over the Skye Road Bridge to spend a few days on Skye.  As well as visiting various wool-related shops on the way and a spectacular drive over the pass from Applecross, I managed a little writing, some work on regret modelling1. And, as well as writing and regret modelling, quite a lot of reading.

This was my holiday reading:

The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved, Robbins Burling (see my booknotes and review)

In Praise of the Garrulous, Allan Cameron (see my booknotes)

A Mind So Rare, Merlin Donald (see my booknotes and review)

Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (see my booknotes)

  1. At last!  It has been something like 6 years since I first did initial, and very promising, computational regret modelling, and have at last got back to it, writing driver code so that I have got data from a systematic spread of different parameters.  Happily this verified the early evidence that the cognitive model of regret I wrote about first in 2003 really does seem to aid learning.  However, the value of more comprehensive simulation was proved as early indications that positive regret (grass is greener feeling) was more powerful than negative regret do not seem to have been borne out.[back]

Tiree Touchtable installed

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It is there!

Suspended high in the ceiling of Tiree Rural centre, a slightly Heath Robinson structure (pictures to come) that powers Tiree’s first public touchtable.

It was a long day, starting at 9:30 in the morning and not finishing until after 9pm in the evening.

The first few hours were simply getting the physical supports in place — with special thanks to Steve Nagy, who fixed the major elements, in particular the awkward tasks of suspending a two foot square (60cx x 60cm) platform that had to be positioned to lock into four steel rods, all while standing on a ladder 20 foot in the air.  Then a long task up and down ladders, huddled over computer screens, adjusting extending, puzzling over strange banding effects that we eventually concluded were artefacts of low level processing with the Konect’s image depth algorithms.

A squadron of flies constantly circled in the projector beam, their shadows suggesting maybe a virtual ‘squat the fly’ game could be developed!   There had been a sale in the cattle ring on Friday, so the flies presumably a remnant of that … but curiously, in the absence of cows or sheep, it was the Konect sensor itself that was their focus of attention, occasionally landing on one of the lenses — maybe they were attracted by the Infra-Red transmitter – a whole new area for etymological research.

The team cleaning the cattle ring, watched and chatted, and then returned with a spotlessly cleaned (it had been covered by ‘you know what’!) sheet of white wood to act as a table cover.

And now, well there is still work to do: permanent electric supply up into the rafters (to replace the temporary tangle of strung together extension cables, that hung from the ceiling during testing), improvements to the algorithms to extend the range to allow the sensors to be as high as possible (to avoid being hit by the next passing ladder), and of course applications to run in the space.

But we feel the back has been broken and a good weeks work.

D-Day for Tiree Touchable

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This is it, D-Day — installing the projected touch table in Tiree Rural Centre (see “microwave — Tiree Touchtable“).  Everything made up and ready on the ground after a week of sawing, screwing, drilling and gluing.  So now just (!) climbing up ladders and bolting it all onto the beams, 5 metres up, then seeing if it all works!

A few minor problems along the way, lost one Kinect due to (Alan’s) over-enthusiastic use of a centre punch when drilling holes.  One broken mirror — oops, don’t I remember something about those?  And tetchy projector that doesn’t want to talk to its remote control (helpful manufacturers online FAQ says, “if the remote doesn’t work, use the control panel”).

If we manage the day without dropping a computer 20 foot, we will probably be happy.

Full report and photos later today …

microwave – Tiree touchtable

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To compliment the biannual Tiree Tech Wave weekends, this week is a microwave!  Andrea Bellucci is here for the week and by the end of the week the table in the Rural Centre, where Tech Wave runs, will be a giant touchtable.

We have 3500 lumens projector, mini-mac and a Kinect to be mounted high in the ceiling.  Andrea’s software will then use the Kinect distance sensing to be able to pick up movements over and on the table-top and hence enable the kinds of touch interactions we are familiar with on mobile phone or pads.

This week we will be happy if we get all the equipment working in situ (visions of us all teetering 20ft up ladders), and maybe some test.  However, once in place we hope it will be a great resource for innovate applications for future Tech Waves and a means to run long term applications for tourists and locals.  In particular, we will soon have geocoded data for the ‘On the Ground‘ project (making island heritage archives available through mobile phones) — using this same data we cshould be able to create a classic tourist map projected on the table so that visitors can select locations and look at images and information about them, all by simply touching and dragging on the table.

Costa del Muscle – athletic spirit hits the Hebrides

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It has been a great (albeit exhausting) week.

Will Wright, fresh back from Spain where he was competing in the Long Distance Triathlon World Championships1, has been working hard to make the rest of Tiree, well, if not as fit as he is, at least fitter then they were before! Continuing the Spanish theme he called it, ominously, “Costa del Muscle”.

Each day last week, twice a day at 9:30 and 5:30, on the sun-drenched mahair of Sandaig, looking out over basking sharks leaping in the seas towards Skerryvore, twenty Tirisdeach2 gathered, from 10 year olds to those in their 60s, from svelte teenagers to those, well, carrying a mite more weight.  The passing minke whale or grey seal, if they had looked towards the shore, would have seen flaying arms in sweat drenched t-shirts, and perhaps catch Will’s cheerful voice, rising over the crash of breakers and faint sound of wheezing breath, announce, “nearly finished the warm up”.

  1. The long distance triathlon is about three times the length of the Olympic triathlon. [back]
  2. Tirisdeach = person of Tiree[back]

a radical design for mobile telephony

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We are all aware of the phenomenal growth in smartphone and tablet use.  However, these are often designed with the needs of media and internet access above plain telephony.  Touch screens do not have tactile feedback leading to mistyping, especially problematic when using touchtone-based phone services, for tablets especially, the form factor is far from optimal, … and try answering your phone call quickly by sliding your finger across the screen!

There are solutions.  A recent gigaom post “Here’s why tablets (yes, tablets!) will replace the smartphone” suggested that hands-free headsets were already common, hence reducing the brick-to-the-ear effect.  This of course does not deal with the key pad, but there are some solutions to this using the vibrator motor to give simulated tactile feedback, and various technologies are in development that will (in time) allow tactile features to be programmed onto the screen (e.g. see “Mobile tactile tech gets physical“).

Over a slightly longer time frame we can expect smart materials to develop to the point that concept pieces such as Fabian Hemmert’s Shape-Changing Mobiles will become possible.  Instead of being a fixed shape not only will your tablet screen be able to develop solid buttons of all shapes on demand, but will potentially become travel mug, long-haul flight pillow or angle grinder.

The trouble is that not only are such technologies some years off, they are also tinkering at the edges, attempting to fix piecemeal some of the fundamental flaws of smartphone and tablet technology when it comes to telephony.  Clearly a more radical approach is required.

While Bluetooth headsets are effective, they tend to suggest call centre rather than cool, a single device would be preferable.  In addition this should ideally include some form of miniature key pad to facilitate typing telephone numbers (more extensive tasks such as address book management can be performed on the full-size tablet screen, especially if this is augmented with tactile feedback). Furthermore, for times when it is inconvenient to carry your full size tablet and it is in your handbag, rucksack or its custom wheelie bag, the perfect telephony attachment should also have a small additional screen to view the number you are dialing.

As a result of extensive research into user needs and in the spirit of the information appliance, the single purpose device optimised for a a single purpose, I have devised the perfect device: small, yet not too small to be lost, pocket sized so that it can be easily accessed when you receive a call, tactile, exploiting the deep understanding of the physicality community and knowledge from writing TouchIT. It will connect via Bluetooth to your existing smartphone/tablet and of course via WiFi or (in premium models) using 3G/GSM direct to mobile networks if you accidentally leave your smartphone at home.

I plan to demonstrate my early prototype at the forthcoming Physicality 2012 workshop, where Fabian will be giving a keynote.

Alt-HCI open reviews – please join in

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Papers are online for the Alt-HCI trcak of British HCI conference in September.

These are papers that are trying in various ways to push the limits of HCI, and we would like as many people as possible to join in discussion around them … and this discussion will be part of process for deciding which papers are presented at the conference, and possibly how long we give them!

Here are the papers  — please visit the site, comment, discuss, Tweet/Facebook about them.

paper #154 — How good is this conference? Evaluating conference reviewing and selectivity
        do conference reviews get it right? is it possible to measure this?

paper #165 — Hackinars: tinkering with academic practice
        doing vs talking – would you swop seminars for hack days?

paper #170 — Deriving Global Navigation from Taxonomic Lexical Relations
        website design – can you find perfect words and structure for everyone?

paper #181 — User Experience Study of Multiple Photo Streams Visualization
        lots of photos, devices, people – how to see them all?

paper #186 — You Only Live Twice or The Years We Wasted Caring about Shoulder-Surfing
        are people peeking at your passwords? what’s the real security problem?

paper #191 — Constructing the Cool Wall: A Tool to Explore Teen Meanings of Cool
        do you want to make thing teens think cool?  find out how!

paper #201 — A computer for the mature: what might it look like, and can we get there from here?
        over 50s have 80% of wealth, do you design well for them?

paper #222 — Remediation of the wearable space at the intersection of wearable technologies and interactive architecture
        wearable technology meets interactive architecture

paper #223 — Designing Blended Spaces
        where real and digital worlds collide

I want to pay more tax too

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Some of the ‘super rich’ in the US are beginning to ask publicly why it is they pay so little tax.  For those of us less rich, but still with above average salaries, perhaps we should be asking the same.  In the UK the effective rate of tax is 32% for those on average pay and 40% for those on high pay, hardly a progressive system.  Yes government, please tax the super rich more, but tax me properly too.

I have just have read Stephen King fantastic article “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”1 where he joins Warren Buffett in questioning why he, as part of the super rich, does not pay more tax.  He does give to charity, but argues that that this is not the same as paying tax, which is crucially abut citizenary.  This all falls out from statistics that show the richest in the US end up paying a far smaller percentage of their income than the average citizen.  Effectively King argues that the issue here is not about entitlement or rights, but responsibility.

King is talking about the super rich in the US and similar statistics in the UK show the richest 10% paying only marginally more taxes than the poorest 10%, and certainly less than the average tax payer.

However, the same arguments also apply to those who are not super rich, but on the better end of the income scale —  including me.

In recent years I have cut my income substantially by choosing to work part-time in order to (try to!) do more personal research, still some of my income falls into ‘higher rate’ tax — so by that measure I am well off2.

You might think that being in the higher tax threshold means you pay a lot more tax; after all the basic rate tax in the UK is 20% and the higher rate is 40%.  You might think that, but think again!  Even without tax avoidance measures used by the very rich or the fact that the poor tend to end up paying more indirect taxes such as VAT (purchase tax) and duty (on alcohol and fuel), still my marginal rate is only slightly higher than that of basic income.  I pay an effective marginal rate of 40%, but those on lower income in reality pay 32%, not the 20% that it says ‘on the tin’.

The reason for this is National Insurance.  For those not on the UK, this is an additional tax, started in 1911 and expanded in the 1940s to pay for health, pension and other welfare provision — just as you might take out a private health insurance, or pension, national insurance was intended to be a sort of pooled insurance arranged by government.  However unlike private insurance, it has always been redistributive — the rich pay more, but do not get proportionally higher benefits.

In the UK since the Thatcher years, but continued by subsequent Labour governments, there has been a gradual shift from ‘in your face’ income tax, to less visible taxes, notably National Insurance and VAT.  In 1978 National Insurance was at 6.75% (on income over a lower threshold) and the standard rate of VAT, paid on most basic goods and services you bought in shops, was 8%3.  Currently the equivalent figures are 12% for National Insurance and 20% for VAT.  That is the combined effect of these less visible taxes has more than doubled from 14.75% in 1978 to 32% today4.  Because these are flat rate taxes, they hit the poor as much as the rich.

However, it is worse than this first appears.  National Insurance has a maximum cut off point.  Above a certain point, you pay no more National Insurance … and crucially this point cuts in just before higher rate tax starts.  This means that in one’s pay cheque if you are earning an average wage you pay 32% of every additional pound in tax, whereas if your income is higher, over £40,000 or so, you pay 40%.

I’ll say this again, as it always seems unbelievable — in the UK, without any additional measures to reduce tax liability, the real difference between basic rate and higher tax is just 8%.

If then the person earning £15,000 buys a basketful of ordinary VAT goods, out of the 68p they have left they pay over 13p VAT, whereas the person with £50,000 income out the 60p in the pound they have left pay an additional 12p.  Adding the effect of VAT that makes the effective total rates of tax on an ordinary shopping basket at 45.6% for basic rate tax payers vs 52% for those on higher income.  In fact, even this is a little of a simplification, as some goods are zero rated (principally food) and some have additional duties (principally alcohol and fuel), but in fact this tends to make things worse as typically richer households have spending patterns that have a lower proportion of VAT and duty.

Like the US, the UK system is not progressive; so with Stephen King I say, “I want to pay more tax”5.

In particular, take the lid of National Insurance, make me pay full National insurance on all my income.  At a conservative estimate this would be equivalent to the revenue of 5% VAT6 — if we all paid full NI, then either spending cuts could be less draconian, or the VAT rate could be cut by 5%, either of which would have a dramatic effect on those at the bottom of society for whom the pressing problem is not getting the best offshore tax break, but finding the next meal.

  1. Which he wrote in April, so I am a bit behind![back]
  2. Although you do have to be careful in using higher rate threshold as meaning ‘well off’, as the UK system is incredibly family-unfriendly.  Because tax is on an individual not household basis, if a couple earn £20,000 each they pay very little tax, but if one is not working — in particular if engaged in full-time child care — and one is earning £40,000, then that is heavily taxed.  This anomaly became apparent recently when the government proposed removing child-benefit, one of the few universal benefits, from those where one of the parents is paying higher rate tax. Strangely, when it comes to welfare benefits households become the unit! [back]
  3. See UK Tax History for historical rates of National Insurance and VAT.[back]
  4. See HM Revenue & Customs site for current NI and VAT rates.[back]
  5. And yes, I know that I can give to charity and indeed do tithe through Charities Aid Foundation and make other payments, but, as King argues, that is NOT the same as paying taxes.[back]
  6. I recall doing the calculations for this when the new government put up VAT some years ago, it was hard to get detailed figures for higher rate tax earnings, but made this estimate based on lower bounds of various brackets.[back]

open data: for all or the few?

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On Twitter Jeni Tennison asked:

Question: aside from personally identifiable data, is there any data that *should not* be open?  @JenT 11:19 AM – 14 Jul 12

This sparked a Twitter discussion about limits to openness: exposure of undercover agents, information about critical services that could be exploited by terrorists, etc.   My own answer was:

maybe all data should be open when all have equal ability to use it & those who can (e.g. Google) make *all* processed data open too   @alanjohndix 11:34 AM – 14 Jul 12

That is, it is not clear that just because data is open to all, it can be used equally by everyone.  In particular it will tend to be the powerful (governments and global companies) who have the computational facilities and expertise to exploit openly available data.

In India statistics about the use of their own open government data1 showed that the majority of access to the data was by well-off males over the age of 50 (oops that may include me!) – hardly a cross section of society.  At  a global scale Google makes extensive use of open data (and in some cases such as orphaned works or screen-scraped sites seeks to make non-open works open), but, quite understandably for a profit-making company, Google regards the amalgamated resources as commercially sensitive, definitely not open.

Open data has great potential to empower communities and individuals and serve to strengthen democracy2.  However, we need to ensure that this potential is realised, to develop the tools and education that truly make this resource available to all3.  If not then open data, like unregulated open markets, will simply serve to strengthen the powerful and dis-empower the weak.

  1. I had a reference to this at one point, but can’t locate it, does anyone else have the source for this.[back]
  2. For example, see my post last year “Private schools and open data” about the way Rob Cowen @bobbiecowman used UK government data to refute the government’s own education claims.[back]
  3. In fact there are a variety of projects and activities that work in this area: hackathons, data analysis and visualisation websites such as IBM Many Eyes, data journalism such as Guardian Datablog and some government and international agencies go beyond simply publishing data and offer tools to help users interpret it (I recall Enrico Bertini, worked on this with one of the UN bodies some years go). Indeed there will be some interesting data for mashing at the next Tiree Tech Wave in the autumn.[back]