Nuno Jardim Nunes

Within me a lunatic sings

My colleague Leonel Nóbrega just released the first working beta version of metaSketch which is the outcome of several years of work on extending and using the UML and MOF in many domains in particular to support agile interactive application development with essential use-cases, wisdom architecture, canonical abstract prototypes, activity modeling, etc. You can also use metaSketch to create any language the editor is completely reflexive, meaning you can use it to create the extensions and then load then to create the models.

All of these “languages” are currently supported in metaSketch in a comprehensive usageCD extension on MOF. metaSketch works on Windows with the .NET 2.0 framework, you should be able to run it on Mac and Unix using virtualization. Let us know about this project and don’t hesitate to give feedback and suggest improvements.

You can download metaSketch at http://www.labuse.org/metaSketch

I’ve been busy setting up the joint CMU Professional Master program and failed to update the blog. Of course the lack of time meant less reading and more music…

Music

Movies

Books

Games

The Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Mathematics and Engineering Department at the University of Madeira now offer a professional Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction. The program, begun at CMU in 1995, will now offered as a double degree with the University of Madeira under the CMU/Portugal agreement and the Information and Communication Technologies Institute (ICTI).

Applications are open until 1 June, check mhci.dme.uma.pt.

I was surprised my recommendations got so much attention, I’ve added a section on Movies and another one on Games.
Here it goes just a couple of days before Spring:

Music:

• Arcade Fire - Neon Bible - the much antecipated second album for the canadian band. I’m still listening to this one but on a first look it’s not as good as the debut Funeral, anyway not many bands out there are capable of doing powerful stuff like this with David Bowie.
• Joanna Newsom - Ys - a beautiful indie folk album from a great artist. It is perhaps overconsidered by the critic but nevertheless it’s a great album.
• Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards - what can I say, it’s simply Tom Waits, can you imagine somebody else doing a masterpicece out of title like this!
• I’ve also revisited a couple of personal classics lately: Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ennio Morricone.

Books:

• Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion - A great book from Oxford ethologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. Thought provoking, brilliantly written with some great British humor.
• Philip Ball - Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another - this one was published a couple of years ago and only now I decided to give it a try.A very interesting perspective on the physics of society a must read.

Movies:

• Babel - there is something disturbing about this movie I can’t explain, following the scripting style of Crash (another great movie) it is a brilliant novel about modern times and globalization. I wonder how an american would look at this story… By the way the music in Babel is great, the end theme Bibo No Aozora was the reason I revisited Ryuichi Sakamoto.
• Pan’s Labyrinth (Labirinto del Fauno) - a great (horror) fairytale in fascist Spain (1944), one of the best movies of 2006 which makes Guillermo del Toro reach the standard of one of my favorite directors Tim Burton.
• The Good Shepherd - a brilliant film about the early story of the CIA from the perspective of a man’s life (Edward Wilson) - there is a magnificent quote in this movie:
  • Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the chuch; the Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
    Edward Wilson: The United States of America, and the rest of you are just visiting.
• Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers - two brilliant movies from opposite perspectives of the same battle. Clint Eastwood doesn’t stop surprising me.
• Deja Vu - an interesting sci-fi movie, it’s not a great movie but I particularly liked the storyline.

Games:

• Microsoft Game Studios - Viva Pinata - if you own an XBOX 360 (yes I own one but I wont admit provocative commentary in class) and you have kids age 7 and above go out and buy this game, it’s a marvelous piece of creactivity that will make the time they spend playing well worth it. This made our home a magnet for the kids at school and the neighborhood.
• Microsoft Game Studios (by Epics Games) - Gears of War - yes I also like to shoot some guys out there, but Gears of War is also an outstanding technical achievement which is use in my classes to show the students how game technology evolved. It’s also the only way I could send the kids to bed while playing Viva Pinata.
• EIDOS Interactive - Battlestations MidWay - I bought this one to see if it was this time they could solve the problem of playing strategy games in a console, meanwhile the console crashed and it’s up for repair. Anyway the game is combination of strategy, tactics and action - very interesting and quite challenging even for a longstanding strategy gamer like myself.

A mindblowing presentation by statistitian Hans Rosling, this is part of his work teaching international health, a great example of how dogma can/must/should be demolished in education.

Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. Give it a try here. A version of Gapminder is currently part of the Google labs stuff.

TED is “an event like no other”… more than 1000 thought-leader together once a year to discuss Technology, Entertainment and Design… Altought I’ve never attended one of the conferences (they are by invitation only and I would need one :-))!

Anyway, recently they started posting TEDTalks online, some are simply brilliant unmissable pieces, what could you expect from Dan Gilbert, Barry Schwartz, Malcom Gladwell, Steven Levitt, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling and Al Gore.
This is already a shortlist of some of my favorite talks, I’ll start with Ken Robinson’s talk about the role of creativity in our education system. An entertaining, brilliant talk from one of the thought leader in education, anybody working on this field should watch. Enjoy!

Well Steve Jobs did it again, Apple just launched the iPhone and AppleTV - two products that clearly make Apple jump into the information appliance arena after the major success of the iPod.
And the fact that “Apple Computer Inc.” is now “Apple Inc.” a confirmation of what HCI research as long predicted with the Invisible Computer and and Disappearing Computer.

A couple of things stand out of this trend, partly why I’m blogging on it (the other part is because I’m a long time MacUser):

• the iPhone includes at least a couple of highly innovative underlying technologies that might go into the right direction. And it’s impressive how Apple takes an edge waiting for the right technology to be there (big high-pres touchscreen with a new technology called “multi-touch, smart sensors that help control the device behavior);
• but it’s not simply hardware, it’s about the integration between HW and SW, that together are capable of creating a new killer product at least for the early adopter that will dominate the market and make room for the stylish trend up to come;

My guess is that those BIG details will make the difference in the long run. Of course quad-band, Gb of storage and all the other features will be important for early adoption, also the styleness and coolness of simply carrying one of this devices… but in the long run if multi touch doesn’t for the user, the iPhone is dead!
So it’s time to revisit Don Norman’s “The Invisible Computer”, there is a chapter available online: Growing Up: Moving from Technology-Centered to Human-Centered Products.

I will have more to say about this on the technical side of things with a paper I’m currently working on.

This is a photo of the New Year’s evening with some of DME’s students… which obviously know how to enjoy one of the most celebrated New Year’s Eve in all the world - the amazing Funchal fireworks which got listed in the Guinness book of records.

A Happy New Year!