Interfaces that do too much

The interface of an electronic device may be a little out of the scope of this class, but I want to talk about something I saw. On engadget.com there was an iPod dock, like many others, that has a built in speaker and controls. What it also has is a kitchen scale, because this dock is meant to be used in the kitchen and double as a utensil and a multimedia player. Is this really necessary?? I mean, who is going to buy this just because it has a scale on it. Do you really want to have to drag your mp3 player out of the corner when you have to use a scale? Who even uses a scale in the kitchen to weigh ingredients?

This doesn't only happen with gadgets, it happens in software too. Some software tools have features that belong in another program designed for that function. One thing that comes to mind is the web browser built into winamp, a mp3 playing program for windows. Who wants to use a somewhat functional web browser in a small subset of the whole screen? I know there are plenty of other software utilities like this. Someone needs to let companies know when a feature is out of place.

The influence of uncertainty on motor learning and its neural representation

This is my blog post on a talk by Konrad Kording about how uncertainty affect affects our motor learning. He said that to predict an uncertain event, like where a tennis ball will land, we use prior knowledge and likelihood. He explained how our bodies use Bayesian statistics to account for uncertainty. To prove this, he set up an experiment where people would be misled about the location of their hand under an enclosure. He would see how the movement of the hand would change based on this. He said that it would change, as long as the people believed that the feedback they were receiving was real. If the feedback was radically off, they would be able to tell and ignore it. I found this very interesting, even if it is pretty obvious. The whole talk seemed to explain some of our actions in an easy to comprehend fashion. Basically our body has an automatic way to calculate and correct for uncertainty using Bayesian methods. If you want to learn more about his research you can visit www.koerding.com