A mix of posts on gesture, HCI, perception or robots and some personal information.
Sometimes it is hard to believe how far people will go to be able to claim they were offended (or to get a headline in a newspaper). This is a story about a clown, little kids with language problems, and very protective parents. The clown is Mr Tumble, who makes television for small kids, as [...]
The 20th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2007 is a special session on the Psycholinguistics of Signed and Spoken Languages. Nice names, nice titles, nice program.
They seem to have specifically invited veteran sign language researchers to talk to a broader audience. Some especially interesting ones (for me at least): * Gaurav Mathur and [...]
As a young researcher I see opportunities for grand research proposals everywhere. And so it was when my friend Edwin told me about the rugby drama he had experienced in an Irish pub in the final day of the recent Six Nations.
Ireland beat Italy with a monsterscore, and they were about to win the tournament. [...]
When I worked at KPN Telecom in 2001 we developed and patented an idea for a Personal Call Assistant: ELECTRONIC CALL ASSISTANTS WITH SHARED DATABASE (Wipo, Esp@ce)
A telephone exchange (1) arranged to communicate with communication units (2, 3, 4, 5, 7) and to provide a plurality of electronic call assistants to the communication units, a [...]
A colleague, Matthijs Dröes, once pointed Naruto hand signs out to me. They form a nice system of gestures in an animated world of Ninja characters.
Here is a Naruto site (login?) on hand seals:
Hand Seal Guide: Hand seals are as important as Chakra in Naruto. All GenJutsu and NinJutsu need hand seals [...]
Medal of Honour is a game where you play a soldier in World War II. EA created a special version for the Nintendo Wii (and the Nunchuk) and provided some animations of how you gesture to play.
How to jump and crouch. (source)
Here are tutorials on turning around, throwing a grenade, reloading your gun, using your [...]
Dutch soccer referee Braamhaar made a jubilant gesture after Ajax scored 1-5 against PSV. The gesture was picked up immediately by angry PSV fans. They took offense being given the opportunity to unleash their anger at someone else than their own failing side.
Braamhaar: “Ik had de voordeel regel prima doorgevoerd bij de actie van [...]
I promise this will be the last haka post for a while, but I thought it would be nice to round off the story with a final video. It shows the New Zealand basketball team, the Tall Blacks, doing a decent haka.
And so the haka spreads to other nations, and to other sports. There [...]
It appears New Zealand Maori actually introduced the haka to rugby (history), in their tour of Britain in 1888/89. Although this history story describes a somewhat vaguer origin (therefore more likely?) it also credits the ‘New Zealand Natives’ with the first overseas performance of the haka by a rugby team. Since 2001 NZ Maori performs [...]
The haka is conquering the world of battle-like sports it seems. Rugby teams from New Zealand and other pacific islands have performed war dances like the haka for a long time already. But now football teams from Hawaii and even Texas have also adopted the haka.
The first example is of Kahuku High School’s Red Raiders [...]
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