University of Canterbury, New Zealand
For the CHI2009 conference, we prepared unofficial ribbons and distributed them amongst the attendees. We were inspired by Brad Myers collection of CHI conference badges and ribbons. All of our 400 ribbons were gone at the end of the conference and a photo of the table on which the ribbons were presented was shown during the closing session’s slide show. It was just great fun. Below you see my conference badge and I found a few other pictures [picture1, picture2].
The Times Higher Education Ranking 2008 has been published and could not help noticing that Germany and Netherlands have both 11 universities in the top 200. That is 57% of the Dutch Universities and only 2% of the German Universities. Sometimes quality beats quantity. The Germany magazine “Der Spiegel” summarizes Germany’s disappointment over this result, since the government had recently pored 1.900.000.000 Euro into the “Elite” universities.
Our research group is soon leaving to its annual strategy week and it was my task (again) to organize the Karaoke session. I would like to share my experiences with setting up a Mac as a Karaoke jukebox. Continue reading “Karaoke on Mac OS X”
Scientific presentations are rarely entertaining. This year at CHI, a presenter used film clips from Rocky to introduce the topic of physical interfaces. That was pretty funny, but not as funny as the following video from the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) humor session showing Doug Zongker:
This Dilbert Episode made me laugh real hard.