It’s been around too months since I last updated - its seems longer to me. And in honesty it isn’t because there was nothing to say - but because there was no time to say it in, or more properly, no time to think it in. As the £9,000 pa student fees start to bite, the resultant reduction in student numbers needs to be addressed, this means more teaching preparation, more student administration to make ourselves better (and faster) at fixing student issues, and more grants.

As I said a few weeks ago, this week it’s Vint Cerf on Accessibility. So what does one of “the fathers of the Internet”, and new ACM President have to say about accessibility and its importance. Actually, for him even to be talking about accessibility sees a significant change from the past; when accessibility was mainly lip-service. So it Vint kicks off by telling us that “I sometimes think that, of all the disciplines, ours ought to be the most effective at adapting to the varied needs of users, including those that are challenged to interact with computing systems in one way or another.

So you may already know my views on Open Publishing and the ACM Authorizer Service; and as promised the ACM has some exciting news about Open Publishing in different forms. As you may know I’m Chair of ACM SIGWEB and as such twice a year I attend the Special Interest Group Governing Board meeting. This time there was plenty of discussion about open publishing and we’ve just received a quick summary of what happened at the Pubs Board and Council Meetings.

Our analysis shows that for the most popular 500 sites, JavaScript is used in 93%, Flash in 27% and about one-third (30%) use XMLHttpRequest, a technology used to generate dynamic updates. Uptake of XMLHttpRequest is approximately 2.3% per year across a random selection of 500 sites and is probably higher in the most popular sites. So, when examining dynamic updates from the perspective of visually disabled users, evidence suggests that, at best, most users can currently reach updated content, but they must do so manually, and are rarely given any automated indication that any update has occurred.

Or rather - “A cross-disciplinary approach to identifying requirements for an online health and social support system for people with lung cancer”. This was our submission to the ACM ASSETS 2012 Conference, but unfortunately was rejected - to some extent because it didn’t fit a limited -in my opinion- view of the definition of accessibility and its link with disability. Our abstract asserts that people with lung cancer have reduced access to peer support due to situational and combinatorial impairments (including those related to ageing).

Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need.

“It seems to me that gamification may be useful to add a little spice but that without answers to the possible transfer of negative game playing traits the amount of value-added may turn out to be smaller then we imagine.” I’ve recently been having a twitter conversation with Rui about gamification in the context of UX. Now I see myself as far more circumspect than Rui, in that I see gamification as a convenient term to describe ‘digital umami ’1.

“How would you describe HCI in just research papers - and indeed, could you do this as a teachable unit?” Paris Observatory Astrolabe Inspired by the recent A History of the World in 100 Objects, it’s a simple idea, describe the last two million years of world history by focusing on 100 objects created in the time period from all over the world. Here’s one you may like: “The astrolabe was highly developed in the Islamic world by 800 and was introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain (Andalusia) in the early 12th century.

This year’s W4A will fast be upon us. Accommodation has been booked, travel has been finalised, tickets have been bought, and suitcases are about to be packed for the annual Web accessibility conference, a conference I enjoy the most. In the spirit of anticipation I decided to look through the Provisional Programme offered this year to see if there are any interesting papers which looked a little different from usual.

I was recently offered the ability to publish one of my journal papers in a reputable journal but ‘Open Access’. The facility for me to do this was at the bargain price of $3250. I also considered using PLoS ONE via the public library of science, but at approximately $1000 per article again the price seemed to preclude publication. I understand the rational of open publication but it seems to me at these prices the ‘open’ aspects are not really being transferred to the author, only the reader, and therefore the suggestion of increased citation.

I’ve recently been arguing ideology with a reviewer of one of my papers. It’s quite strange that we don’t seem to do this much in HF and so I think we get pretty rusty - and resort to flame based shouting. In reality I’m not sure how much ideology should come into play when we talk about science - the scientific method should insulate us from most of this. But as humans we are fallible and so maybe a good argument means that we can change the way we think about ideas we have held sacrosanct for so long.

We use the term ‘Computational Thinking’ in one of our visit day slides - the day prospective students come the School to find out more and get their offer - but we don’t really go into it in any more detail on the Website or explicitly in the Undergraduate Programme; as far as I’m aware. It was hot a year or so ago but in reality I never saw the point, it seemed obvious or as though Computer Scientists wanted to cling to this all encompassing concept - think the Web Science ‘Flower’ - to justify our interdisciplinary existence.

Seems to me like the new work in information management is social aggregation. It also seems like that thorny problem of information overload is now being applied to social networks as the number of presences an individual has increase to un-manageability. Aggregation seems to be the answer to some - with Sony Ericsson’s Timescape and Mediascape, Spindex, and applications like the Moblin/ Maemo / MeeGo aggregator seeming to provide a solution - but as we already know cognitive overload is a critical problem when navigating large information resources, aggregated or not.

Well first off, let’s say goodbye to 2010 and welcome in 2011 - I’m sure Time Square will be as crowded as it was in the 1950’s - different but the same! Now lets look at research funding [1] - I think this can be equally applied to paper acceptance rates - in the hope of a better funded 2011! Current thought seems to be that 30% is about the right level of acceptance for funding.

So I recently attended the Web, Art, Science Un-conference / Camp and I must say it was pretty good. While it was a small affair attracting about 35 participants, the bulk being Web Scientists from Southampton, it was refreshing to see different literary work and analysis in a scientific context. I’d say that for the next one a greater effort needs to be made to attract practising artists and writers as opposed to scientist and academics studying literature.

Noah Mendelsohn (an IBM Distinguished Engineer) defines Decentralized Extensibility (DE) in HTML5 as: “The ability for a language to be extended by multiple parties who do not explicitly coordinate with each other.” The rationale for DE is that: “The Web is too big for any central group to invent or cooordinate all needed extensions to languages like HTML” Indeed, HTML5 supports DE: “When vendor-neutral extensions to this specification are needed, either this specification can be updated accordingly, or an extension specification can be written that overrides the requirements in this specification.