Bus Stops

So, I had my first real meeting with my group today. I've been feeling somewhat sick, so I unfortunately missed Tuesday's class. (I hope it's not Strep.)

Presently, it looks like we're going to be observing how people figure out what bus to take, when they get to a bus station. It'll be a combination of observation and interview. We'll then propose better ways of designing bus stations. Exciting stuff!

I set up a wiki for us to keep notes, etc.

Visuwords

Visuwords:

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.

Looks really cool. It presents connections between words and ideas in a somewhat straightforward way. It'd be cool to see a network for the same meanings for two different languages, to visualize the differences in the topology.

Daylight Savings Time

My phone automatically updated its clock for daylight savings time. A fantastic feature, and one that I expect in all my timepieces. I haven't set a clock in my life.

However, it also updated my alarm clock settings, making an 8 AM alarm wake me up at 7.

This seems to be a feature designed only to make me angry.

Assignment 2

For this project, I've joined a team of four others. We met briefly on Thursday and it seems that we're going to be observing the use of the buses. Presently we're considering using city buses, as it would show a wider spectrum of activities. This will be fun. I'm looking forward to getting started.

Midterm

Check.