Alexander Shyrokov

Author's details

Name: Alexander Shyrokov
Date registered: July 26, 2011

Latest posts

Collaboration on documents — March 19, 2009
Experiment Wizard — January 16, 2009
Computerized questionnaires — December 15, 2008
Human-human experiments (NECHFES2008) — November 17, 2008
Clear vision with Gimp — October 30, 2008

Author's posts listings

Mar
19

Collaboration on documents

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by Alexander Shyrokov

I was advised to use FolderShare application to share documents with my collaborators. But, in fact, we already have subversion for our code development. This automatically raised a question of why would we use FolderShare if we already have subversion installed on our server and in operation. It is not reasonable to compare subversion with …

Tags: collaboration, dropbox, foldershare, subversion

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Jan
16

Experiment Wizard

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by Alexander Shyrokov

This is a follow up to my previous post about automation solution for our experiments. Taking the automation a step further I have designed Experiment Wizard. Experiment Wizard is a cross platform open source automation tool for scientific experiments. It defines the XML schema for experiment administration, and provides GUI application to execute created experiments. …

Tags: automation, experiment, expwiz, gui, wizard

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Dec
15

Computerized questionnaires

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by Alexander Shyrokov

During our experiments we use questionnaires to collect some data. So far we have used paper questionnaires. The major advantages of paper questionnaires are: ease of administration (subjects know what to do with them); and ease of creation (using a word processor). On the other hand, there are two major flaws: unintentional incompleteness (subjects miss …

Tags: data collection, questionnaire, survey

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Nov
17

Human-human experiments (NECHFES2008)

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by Alexander Shyrokov

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 …

Tags: conference, nechfes

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Oct
30

Clear vision with Gimp

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by Alexander Shyrokov

Often times we include a picture of our simulator in our publications. It turned out to be an interesting problem, because if we want to show a cab – we need light; if we want to show the projected scenery – we need to have a dark room: The obvious solution is to compose parts …

Tags: gimp, simulator

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Sep
30

Firefox and literature review

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by Alexander Shyrokov

Literature review is a big part of a scientific underatkening. Thanks to the Internet, most papers are available on line. This resulted (at least for me) in a big number of papers that I read and stored for feature references… Welcome to the age of data mining. As a researcher I have yet another problem …

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Sep
03

Action video games and visual attention

Categories:

Science

by Alexander Shyrokov

although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing

Tags: attention, computer games

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Jul
18

Automation solution

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by Alexander Shyrokov

Hello, As you know, we have multiple computers that we use during our experiments. We have to prepare every computer before the experiment and then collect the data after the experiment is done. The usual procedure is to use a check list so we do not forget something. NASA have been using this approach for …

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Jul
15

AutoHotKey – free, open-source utility for Windows

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by Alexander Shyrokov

Hello, AutoHotKey is a handy utility that can be used for automation tasks. This program can move the mouse or send key events to different applications. It also can show dialogs. I mostly use it as a macro recorder that works across all the applications. It supports a simple (as in easy to learn), but …

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3 comments

Feb
27

Difference between science and engineering

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Uncategorized

by Alexander Shyrokov

The Essence of Engineering and Meta-Engineering: A Work in Progress aims to define what Engineering is and how it is different from Science. The following quote have caught my attention: The history of science is a graveyard of theories that were empirically successful for a time… The article includes many references and quotations. It’s interesting …

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