Margaret Kivelson, one of the most distinguished space physicists, gave a talk at a colloquium held by UNH Physics Department on Nov. 10. 2008. She is a professor at UCLA and an author of a textbook most commonly used by students in space science field, which may be why most people in the field know about her.

She has been working as investigator and co-investigator of numerous satellite projects such as CASSINI, CLUSTER and THEMIS. I’ve met her at many conferences and seminars before but this was my first time to see her give a talk for general audience. She has been in this field since the late 50’s but is still very energetic, devoted, and full of academic passion. Her lecture was very well organized and easy-to-follow, which, I believe, would be a very helpful guide for those who like to know what space science is about although it focused mostly on the magnetospheric dynamics in the solar system. I had an opportunity to talk with her personally after the lecture.

I could ask some questions and found that she was very sincere in answering them. What an honor!

Hyomin Kim
Research Assistant, Space Science Center
Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, UNH

Hello ecebloggers,

Throughout the semester, Ivan Elhart, Michael Farrar, and myself, have developed a handheld-display
projection application, allowing users to transfer the handheld displays’ contents to an
alternative viewing platform. We have recorded several scenarios demonstrating the
system and would like your feedback. In each video, an image of the handheld
displays’ contents will be shown in the lower-right corner of the frame.

Click here to help us and take the survey.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

As Matt and Mike pointed out, several of the students here at Project54 attended the NECHFES 2008 Student Conference at Northeastern. Being from a suburb of Boston, it was nice to be in the city again and Northeastern served as a great venue for this conference. Several students from around New England (predominantly from the Boston area) presented and while each was interesting, there were a few presentations from other universities that especially captured my attention.

At Project54, we find that video demonstrations go a long way in describing the experiment, the problem, the environment, etc. One video from UMASS Lowell by T. Do showed the environment of a shrimp factory in Vietnam; it was interesting to see the human factors considerations (or lack thereof).

Another video by Romoser from UMASS Amherst showed the result of attaching a camera to a person’s head to show the amount of secondary looks taken while making turns. He showed that there are specific intervention techniques that can improve an older driver’s performance behind the wheel.

S. Gabree from Northeastern had one of the best short student presentations I have seen. His audience interaction displaying the adjustments our vision makes with contrast and color replacement was “eye opening” and fun! He and Zeljko both won the best student presentation awards given by the two sponsors of the conference (Aptima, Inc. and Charles River Analytics, Inc.). Congrats to you both! I sure have learned a lot from not just their presentations, but everyone’s. Be sure to check out the abstracts of the participants of the conference here. I sure hope that I have the opportunity to do this again. My thanks go out to Matt, Professor Kun, Oskar Palinko, the rest of Project54, and NECHFES for making this an enjoyable experience!

Brad Gillespie, a friend and UNH alumnus, pointed me to this article by Don Dodge. Don is greatly concerned about the high dropout rate at US engineering schools and he offers some ideas on how to fix this problem. For schools like UNH some of his ideas sound good only in theory (e.g. provide full scholarship to all students - that may be expensive, and Don acknowledges this), but others are indeed well worth looking at (basically, engage students from day one, show them that an engineering career is fun).

What do you think about all this? How does engineering education at the undergraduate or graduate level strike you? Just right? Boring? Engaging? Any ideas on how to make it better?

Andrew Kun

This year Mark Taipan and myself were fortunate enough to be selected as one of the 18 presenters for the New England Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (NECHFES) yearly student conference. This year the conference was held at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Here we were able to not only learn about the research and work that is being done at other universities, but we were also able to talk with the other students about their roles in that work. This allowed for many interesting conversions and quite a few new thoughts and perspectives.

Overall we had a great time learning new ideas and sharing a few of our own. We definitely look forward to next year!!

2008 NECHFES University of New Hampshire Presentation Group.

Hello ecebloggers,

Last week, a group of us from the lab had traveled to Boston’s Northeastern University, attending the NECHFES student conference.  It was my first conference experience and I do have to say that it surpassed my expectations.  The atmosphere was very relaxed, and presentations were nicely sequenced with 10 – 15 minute breaks.  Of course, breakfast and lunch were served, both of which were outstanding, and free!  The keynote speaker, Daniel Serfaty from Aptima Inc, had some unique perspectives on the ubiquitous computing world of today, and tomorrow, very interesting!  Photos of my speech, entitle “Using voice to tag digital photographs on the spot” can be found here, and the complete presentation here.  I look forward to attending similar events.

Michael Farrar

The title of my talk for NECHFES2008 student conference was “Multi-threaded spoken dialogs in hands-busy and eyes-busy environments: Human-human experiments”. That talk was mostly about our new experiments that we plan to run. We will use variation of a Twenty Questions game in our experiments. This game allows us to control the search space for the solutions and clear identification of adjacency pairs. I’ll be posting more information about the experiments later.

Thanks,

Alexander Shyrokov

If you have had the chance to use an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might have noticed a “small” inconvenience: these devices do not appear as removable storage drives in Windows, like prior versions of iPod (classic, nano, etc). This effectively prevents the iPhone and iPod Touch to be used for data transfer. There is some discussion online about why and how this happened. In my opinion, this is a two thumbs down situation for Apple for trying to limit the possible uses of these cool devices. I hope that this business model will soon be replaced by a more open-platform approach.

Fortunately, Albert Pelhe, a good friend of mine, informed me about a workaround to this problem. DigiDNA came up with DiskAid, an application that lets the user copy files to and from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is freeware and claims to have 0% of adware, spyware and virus content. The only inconvenience is that it must be installed on every computer where the device is meant to be used as a removable disk drive.

If anyone from Apple reads this blog I have a request for them: please let information flow freely. You can try to control it, but you will become unpopular in the realm of techies. Thanks,

Oszkar

I’m reporting today from the NECHFES Student Conference held this year at the Northeastern University in Boston. Here you can see our participants: Matt, Mark, Zeljko, Nemanja and Mike. Alex was also present.

So far we have heard very interesting driving simulator talks from NEU students. Hui Cai presented his results on estimating driver emotional state using various physical measurements (heart rate variability, skin conductance, etc.)

After him, Z. Yin presented his study on driving simulator sickness. He has found that, optical flow affects largely this type of motion sickness.

That’s all for now. We will have more posts about today’s very interesting conference.

Oszkar

Yesterday, at the GIS Day 2008, Cameron Wake gave the keynote speech on the topic of ‘Climate Change in the Northeast’. Professor Wake is a distinguished researcher in the field of climate change at UNH.

Since GIS Day is an event geared towards elementary and high school students, Wake urged the millennium generation to talk to their parents about climate change and to educate themselves on the topic. His lectures are always very interesting with fascinating, eye-opening graphs.

The image above shows the increase in the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere in the last 50 years. All significant scientific research shows that today’s climate change is largely influenced by humans. At the end of the lecture I asked professor Wake what could be the motivation of those people who do not want to accept climate change to be caused by man, against all the scientific results. He answered, that those people might have ideological reasons for doing so, since all research data shows otherwise.

Oszkar