Friday, November 13, 2015

This Week in EID - Episode 80



With most of our conference coverage over, we are getting back to the usual slate of EID topics. There will be a few guest posts covering some of the award winning sessions and competitions that we didn’t cover here ourselves. While I give myself only a week to get these all written and in the queue, I am much more generous with guest writers (hint – if you are interested in guest writing, please let me know).

We started the week off with the Human Factors Prize.  This has become quite a prestigious award for the best research of the year in a domain that changes each year.  This year the topic was sustainability and the winner covered range stress – that sinking feeling you get that you don’t have enough fuel to make it to the next fueling station.

On Tuesday, I shared a personal story about texting and crossing the street. There is a remarkable amount of research coming out on this. While the danger involved in this practice might seem obvious (as many of our commenters noted), there is a lot of nuance in the details.

The last two articles of the week dealt with video games, but in very different ways. One was the benefit of physical contact on interpersonal bonding.  Even when it was limited to the touching of hands while using a touch screen. The second was on the urge to bling out one’s avatar in an online game to show off your creative style and/or your success in the game at earning the virtual currency needed to acquire the bling.

Have a great weekend.