2 w/c 17th October: In Sickness and in Health...

I didn't end up in Malta, after all, after norovirus cut its way through my family the night before I was due to fly. So if you were looking forward to my write up of the LUDI meeting, I'm afraid you'll be as disappointed as I was. Still, in the spirit of being grateful for small mercies, at least it didn't hit ten hours later when I was on the plane, and my wife was spared trying to look after an ill family single handedly.

I still wasn't back in time to attend the first Augmented Bodies Seminar on Augmentation, Disability and Embodiment, but I gather it was be very popular (check out my Twitter feed for some of the questions that cropped up), which bodes well for the future.

One significant silver lining was that I did get to attend a useful seminar by Andrew Wilson of Leeds Beckett University (and the natty "Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists" blog) on affordances and throwing. It's an area we're hoping to collaborate on, and for me, the affordance angle is one I've been really interested in for a long time, so having the chance to look at this for a real world task is an exciting opportunity.

Affordances are complicated, and sometimes misunderstood, I'm not even going to attempt to define them here. However, the concept feeds into many of the things I've been thinking about with regards to inclusvity, capabilities, anthropometrics and augmented bodies, so I'll be putting together a blog post on this at some point.

What else? Well, apart from feeling ill and attending seminars, I've polished off my contribution two papers (noting of course the old pareto rule that it's the last 20% of the paper that takes 80% of the time...), and an impromptu proposal building up some work I did a few years ago with Cristobal Miralles from Valencia University. We also had a great meeting of our Augmented Bodies reading group, looking at the "Hands" chapter from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's book Staring: How We Look. Again, some great discussion, and I really need to get it written up. It was a long way out of my field, but it was fascinating how it tied in with the all the stuff I've been looking at in terms of throwing, grip, size weight illusions, even the emphasis was on cosmetic aspects of prosthetics, and unwanted attention.

Anyway, onwards - I'm preparing a seminar presentation on ethics in engineering to the Interdisciplinary Ethics group. That's a bit nerve wracking, as I'm no expert on ethics, but it's a good opportunity for me to think out loud about some of the topics at the back of my mind, and get some feedback on them.

I'm hoping to get a blog post up on this beforehand - a good chance to get my thoughts down. But then, I always hope that, don't I? :op

Bayesian Days

It's hard to believe, but we are now 4 weeks into our 12 week term (including Fresher's Week). As always with the start of term, it's been jam packed with teaching prep, getting undergraduate project selection sorted (which means lots of meetings with prospective students) and projects started.

Not as always, it has also been jam packed with taking a Coursera course on Bayesian Statistics. In PACLab, we're making increasing use of these to analyse data, so a bunch of us have all signed up and we've been running a study group on Wednesday afternoons. They've been quite good - the quizzes are useful for testing your knowledge and the videos are generally well explained. I've certainly got a better grasp on confidence intervals and credible intervals, and I'm looking forward to finishing it off. The study group has been particularly helpful: a good opportunity to get together and share our learning.

Also, PSAT (the Postural Sway Assessment Tool) is taking shape - literally. Or virtually - at least, we now have a working rig and user interface and a CAD model of the mounting systems. Parts have been ordered, and hopefully we will have our first build early next month.

All this (and, you know, actually delivering lectures and tutorials) means that I haven't had space for much else. However, next week, I'll be off to the next LUDI meeting in Malta, as we review guidelines for accessible play. Should be a good one: I'll let you know how I get on!