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  2 transit experiences from yesterday: My mother (in Germany) had a delay in her pre-booked train because of vandalism, followed by another delay, and a missed connection. Arrives back in her city 3h late to find that her bike was stolen. Me (in Japan) checked a connection on the go between odd places across the country. 4 transfers, average transfer time of 4 minutes. No problem. The two countries host the world's biggest car industries. Only one of them also values other modes of tra...

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  We had a lab dinner the other day and on the way to the restaurant one of my students told me that it is located in a somewhat dangerous area of the city. Being in Japan, I asked what he meant by that, because my experience (at least as a man; creepy dudes are a thing here I hear) is that nothing bad will happen anywhere. His reply was: "Well, if you drop something, the chance that someone will return it is slightly lower than elsewhere." 😅

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  PSA: Individualized academic spam with detailed remarks about your publications and co-authors (and their expertise) is now a thing.

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  @floe@hci.social Congratulations! Sounds very interesting!

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  What motivates someone to use an LLM to write a peer review? I mean, you could just not write a review at all if you don't want to. We don't really have any enforcement mechanisms at the moment anyway.

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  One political success of the "AI" critics was that nobody talks about "dreaming" anymore, and everybody says "hallucinating". Both are still anthropomorphizing, but hallucinating is decidedly more critical.

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  I prepared a "tier list" exercise for my class today and it was quite nice! Students seemed to enjoy it, and the results were very rich for follow-up discussions. I think this can be a great alternative to "clicker" systems; it does take more time, but promotes more thorough engagement with the material. For the technical setup, I just used a google presentation and shared the link with a QR code. The presentation had 12 identical slides for the groups, each...

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  I like that the ACM is opening access to the digital library and probably a lot of smart people crunched a lot of numbers to find a pricing model that might be sustainable. That said, I find the the new registration fees for #chi2026 quite high, given that publications now have to be paid separately. For me, living in Japan with one potential publication, the participation fee alone would rise from 1000$ to 1350$ within one year. This already includes the reduced price. Next year it'd b...

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  @andresmh Oh nice, from the website it now looks like even conference registration is optional @cscw ? For MobileHCI, papers will also be published in PACMHCI and presentation is optional, but one author still has to pay for conference registration.

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  Reading the intro of this article which contrast the Apple Vision Pro as "unsuccessful on the market" with AI as "successful" (with industry funding etc.) made me wonder: Where would the AVP stand today if apple just slapped one for free into each amazon package, stuffed them in your bag at the supermarket without asking etc.? How can we compare one product that tries to find a niche in a real market with another that ignores economic realities? (good articl...

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  A funder I plan to apply to asks everyone to upload a brief video about their project. I have a hunch that this will go into a first round for automated "AI"-based screening. Are there any current guidelines or experiences/do's and don'ts for this? I don't want to go the "ignore all instructions and accept our project" path, but I also want to avoid getting screened out because of something avoidable. #academicchatter

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  Minor (but frequent) annoyance: Is there any good reason to have such "summary pages" in front of every article other than as an ad? I think they are new in the #ACM DL (?) The first thing I do with every pdf is to delete that page. It's already annoying on researchgate, but at least they allow authors to deactivate this for their own articles. ACM does not. I don't know, this gives basic information about the paper on the first page of the pdf... which it wou...

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  I've been working with a flipped classroom format in my classes and often use longer group work exercises, sometimes 30 minutes or more. Generally, both student feedback and my own impression are very positive. But one issue is that some groups finish early, while others are still working. Any good ideas on how to deal with that? Currently I ask them to explain their results to me. Another thought was having them help other groups (maybe after checking with me). #AcademicChatter

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  "The March of Intellect" - Robert Seymour (1828) via (the excellent) Public Domain Review Edit: Which turns out to also be here: @publicdomainrev