Wednesday linkfest « Scott Berkun

Wednesday linkfest

Here are this week’s links:

Sentiment Analysis (Can computers interpret feelings?) – This is dumb. There, I said it. First it will never work for similiar reasons to why AI mostly doesn’t work, but more importantly, why not just let someone who’s not a moron interpret why consumers are outraged instead of inventing a technology that will do a suckier job and cost more? If the average person isn’t great at figuring out what other people mean or are feeling, what hope do computers have?
Multitasking muddles brains (see also the mediocre multitasker)- Evidence from an admit-idly small study that yes, multitasking is bad. But it gets better, as the researchers were hoping to figure out what “gifts” multitaskers had that others do not. Turned out no only couldn’t they find it, their research suggests multitaskers perform worse at many tasks.
Coach seats make us hate each other – The design of everyday things applied to one reason people are so grumpy on airplanes.
Learning UX from games – This really should be titled ‘learning UX from good games’. It’s amazing how many $60 XBOX games have horrible out of box and first 20 minutes of gameplay experiences.
Wide screen vs. Full screen – Wonderfully concise example rich explanation of how much gets lost when they “modify a movie to fit TV”. Lots of famous directors give commentary.

Posted Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 am

in linkfest | 7 Comments » |

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Scott Berkun - September 2, 2009 at 11:27 am #

Great quote!

I thought about my “this is dumb” comment and that’s not fair. What I should have said is that this will have a narrow range of use in special applications where it is valuable, but it will never be the general purpose tool this article implies it can be.

So “dumb” is sloppy and ignorant. Hyped or inflated value would have been better.

Phil Simon - September 2, 2009 at 5:53 pm #

Fair enough. All kidding aside, I find it absolutely astounding that BI tools can uncover some sick trends in data. That’s not to imply that we humans are irrelevant, at least yet.

Jason Crawford - September 2, 2009 at 6:50 pm #

Liked the widescreen/fullscreen video, thanks (sent it to a friend of mine in film school).

By the way, I think Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” was the first film to take a different approach for fullscreen, enabled by the CG nature of the film. They didn’t have to crop everything; they could also *add* extra pixels to the screen by re-rendering from the original models, which they did. I think there’s something about it in the special features on the DVD.

Sean Crawford - September 4, 2009 at 3:10 pm #

One of my favorite scenes in Woody Allan’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” is when the sister is auditioning for a “come back” role that could change her life. She makes the mistake, standng on stage, of twisting her ankle like a little girl. When I rented the movie on full screen she was cut off at the knees.