It’s an image. It’s an animation. It’s both!!

It’s Imagimation!

The image below may appear to be a 2-dimensional drawing. Hold down your left mouse button and scroll up (or down) and use a little imagimation! Animating a 2d image using an imagined 3d perspective.

You know you’ve got an imagination, but did you know that you’ve also got an ‘imagimation?’ While most people are well-versed at imagining a static picture, far fewer of us regularly practice imagimating, animating that static image. In fact, it’s must harder to do than most people would think.

Why is it that you have to look back and forth at oncoming traffic before making a left-hand turn? Because YOU are limited in your imagimative capabilties.

Fear not though, practice imagimating and you’ll increase your capacity for such heady activity. You might even become happier and more successful! Especially if your newly developed imagimation motivates you to develop other abilities and talents.

Tell your friends and family that you’ve got imagimation and then explain it to them. Not only will you be helping them to think about things a bit differently, you’ll be having a notable achievement!

Occasionally, I’ll come up with an idea that seems so overwhelmingly useful, needed, or just plain interestingly fun, that I’ll begin to consider how I might implement it. When such an idea relates to the internet, I’ll oftentimes first implement it here at plexAV.com. That’s when I open the laptop, open the FTP client, open the text editor or the IDE, open the web browser, open a can of RedBull, and start to crawl ahead into the darkness of the unknown. The way is dimly illuminated; by the glow of the screen and my own sense of curiosity.

When I’m knee deep in PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, et al., there’s nothing that makes life easier than someone else who knows what they’re doing, doing the work for me. When such a person isn’t available, then I at least search to find a good tool to use. Note the distinction between a person and a tool. A person is obviously (at least to me) not like a tool in that a person ought not be ‘used.’ A person generally is due (and ought to expect) some form of compensation, whether that be cash, comestibles, housing, a new computer, etc., and one ought happily and generously provide such.

“Happily” in the proceeding refers to one’s motivation for paying a person. The measure of compensation ought not be based upon the difference between the amount or quality of a person’s work product and that achieved by oneself (perhaps aided by some tool), or another. Instead, compensation ought to reflect one’s appreciation for the creative time a person spends focusing on another’s ideas and acting to realize such.

The difference will seem insignificant to some, and fewer still may consider the foregoing an exercise in hyperbole. Yet I doubt that anyone so insensitive, so inured to the significance between these two motivations, would characterize the distinction as overstatement, intentionally exaggerated for effect.

To those that refuse to consider the foregoing and feel that reading this essay has been a waste of time, consider the following. The amount of creative time each of you has spent focused on these ideas is itself insignificant, and as such, you are fully compensated by the author’s present consideration.

To each of you considering the foregoing, please “comment” with your criticisms, clarifications, or questions. In keeping with the idea, I grant to anyone so “commenting”, a perpetual non-exclusive license in and to the copyright for the present essay.

Summum Bonum,

Kenneth Stein

Copyright 2008 Kenneth L. Stein

All Rights Reserved under U.S. Copyright Law
and all other applicable U.S. and foreign laws.

Interactive (Adj.) - capable of acting on or influencing each other

Interact (Verb) - act together or towards others or with others

Human-computer interaction (HCI) - the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is an interdisciplinary subject, relating computer science with many other fields of study and research. Interaction between users and computers occurs at the user interface (or simply interface), which includes both hardware (peripherals and other hardware) and software (for example determining which, and how, information is presented to the user on a screen).

Does a computer User interact with computer software? Is it an interaction??

Rodney Brooks from MIT claims that interaction between 1) a program, and 2) the world taking place during the computation, plays a key role that cannot be replaced by any set of inputs determined prior to the computation. In the case of artificial intelligence interaction can be viewed as a prerequisite for intelligent system behavior.

The concept of interaction entails some type of behavioral novelty. Intelligent behavior therefore respectively encodes and reflects the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the environmental states “taking place” during an interaction.

An environmental state is a function of a previous environmental state and the occurrence of one or more events.

State1 —> event —> State2

State1 —> event -> event —> State2

Note also that distinct causes have distinct effects, and as such there are many potential initial states that, upon the occurrence of a distinct event, become State2.

StateA —> event1 —> State2

StateB —> event2 —> State2

StateC —> event3 —> State2

Interestingly, using a thermodynamics-based model, upon reaching State2 one is unable to determine from which previous state one arrived.

In most all cases, a person (usually a domain expert) identifies those environmental states or changes that warrant or necessitate a system response. A computer programmer (who also may serve as a domain expert wrt software creation, testing, debugging, etc.) reflects on the pertinent environmental states, and distinguishing and symbolizing each for use in a computer model.

Computer software developed in such a manner lacks the type of intelligence described by Brooks. Why is that the case? The person who considers which environmental states warrant or necessitate a system response is in fact applying a qualitative assessment in determining such. And while such an approach explicitly accounts for the quantitative aspects of an environmental state, any qualitative considerations remain implicit, the person consciously focusing on distinguishing the environmental states quantitatively.

The issue resides in the way in which environmental states are symbolized. Those states that warrant or necessitate a system response, afford a qualitative sense to the person so making the determination. Only after such an affordance does the person ascribe a symbol reflective of the quantitative (objective) aspects of an environmental state. The symbol selected fails to encode for the qualitative considerations that led to the determination that the environmental state warrants a system response.

This qualitative regime must be modeled and incorporated into computer systems to connect the abstract quantitative symbols to the situation being represented. The qualitative aspects afforded by such a situation are what connect people to the environment in which they live. So too must it be the case with any sensitively adaptive intelligence.

Applying these concepts to web applications leads to the concept of Web2.U.

If you’re interested in this qualitative model please email me.

And as always, your comments are invited.

Much Thanks.

Danger Will Robinson……Danger Will Robinson!

Microsoft has recently released a new development environment for creating robotic control software that can be used on multiple hardware platforms. The robotics development and runtime platform is available for download and here’s where we get to the interesting bits (ahem).

Hobbyists, students and academics are offered a license free of charge. Commercial robot developers who use the platform for product development will have to pay a few hundred dollars for each seat.