A mix of posts on gesture, HCI, perception or robots and some personal information.
Talking about gesture and metaphor often gets me into a critical state. I am not sure I agree with McNeill’s idea of opposing iconic and metaphoric gestures (just because they refer to something concrete or abstract respectively). I was also somewhat puzzled by the MPI Lecure on Metonymy in Metaphoric Gestures by Cienki and Mueller. [...]
Marija Šerifović recently won the Eurovision Songfestival with a nice song called Prayer.
Marija Šerifović (photo by Indrek Galetin)
She is also the main character in a nice story about a gesture: the Serbian Three-finger Salute: The three-finger salute is a Serbian salute with the thumb, index, and middle fingers open.
The origin of this [...]
I will be at the MPI in Nijmegen Thursday May 10 en Friday May 11. There is an international Workshop on Visual Prosody in Language Communication, organized by Alexandra Jesse and others (program). I am giving a talk called when does sign recognition start? on friday around 10.30u.
Maybe I will see you there?
Sunday the French will cast their final votes and get a new president: either Sarkozy or Royal. On the big final TV debate there was one ‘gesture’ that received considerable attention. Segolene pointed her finger repeatedly at Sarkozy while accusing him of something.
Watch out for the scene that starts around 4:00 in this video [...]
NewScientist.com: Bonobos and chimps ’speak’ with gestures.
Abstract: Human spoken language may have evolved from a currency of hand and arm gestures, not simply through improvements in the basic vocalisations made by primates. This “gesture theory” of language evolution has been given weight by new findings showing that the meaning of a primate’s gesture [...]
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