A mix of posts on gesture, HCI, perception or robots and some personal information.
Gesture in the news today: Bill Clinton, former US president, wags his finger at a journalist who questions him over ‘failing to kill Bin Laden’.
Do you feel Clinton has anything to apologize for? (video)
I am glad I live in a country where failing to kill anyone is not a political risk factor. But [...]
Come and travel with me
Fly with me to Neverland
Peter Pan will come for us
Just think your happy thoughts
Oh and of course a bit of pixie dust
From the one and only
Tinkerbell
My kids just got the old Disney version of Peter Pan and are loving it. And so do I. What a lovely story about fantasy and [...]
At my university we have a newspaper called TU Delta. They interviewed my colleagues and me about our Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) project.
Browsing the Delta archives I saw an interview with Joeri van Zuilen, a Deaf student at the TUD (and native signer). By chance, Joeri was kind enough to participate in my studies [...]
Why is it that some, like Judie Haynes from the US, would want to teach the young to watch out how they gesture when they meet people from a different culture? She gives 10 examples that are “perfectly acceptable” in the United States but rude, or obscene, in other cultures. However, her examples are sometimes [...]
Are both sign language and gestures best defined in terms of what they should look like?
Reading in Crasborn’s (2001) thesis always gives me plenty to think about. One thing struck me yesterday. The emphasis placed on perception in the modeling of sign language. I read the same before in a review by Sara Fortuna of [...]
The way people gesture is part of the culture of a country. Which is why I present you here a list of decent introductions into the culture of many countries. Be sure to check each second paragraph on ‘Communication Styles’ which includes speech and gestures. You can also learn about displays of emotion, and many [...]
There was a nice bit of gesturing in the speech by Hugo Chavez at the UN General Assembly.
After recommending Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival and calling out Bush as the devil, he invoked heavenly protection. He crossed himself elaborately, including kissing his hands before folding them in a quick prayer to the Lord above. I wonder [...]
Once more let us dream a while
Once more let us consider plant gestures
I wrote previously about the intentions of moving plants, and about their ability to communicate. Do plants gesture? I remain unconvinced. Sure, they move for various practical reasons but not to communicate.
They do appear to provide information to their environment in response to [...]
All Dutch theses (proefschriften) are now available online at DAREnet. But they do not seem to go back very far. I found the 2003 thesis of Inge Zwitserlood on Classifying hand configurations in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT, or Sign Language of the Netherlands, SLN). And there is a 2005 thesis of Keiko Yoshioka on Linguistic [...]
Dark Damian, blogging at Almost Infamous, wrote a nice piece on a gesture he calls the shocker. He saw it on the television. Thousands of other people did not see it apparently.
Is this man making an obscene gesture? (for the answer check Dark Damian)
To be frank I missed it too. I did not know [...]
My Del.icio.us Links Books in My Library