What's my line? glass versus paper for cold reading in duologues

Part of an actor's job is being able to cold read: to take words directly from the page and to read them as if they were his or her own, often without the chance to read the lines beforehand. This is particularly difficult when two or more actors need to perform a dialogue cold. The need to hold a paper script in hand hinders the actor's ability to move freely. It also introduces a visual distraction between actors trying to engage with one another in a scene. This preliminary study uses Google Glass displayed cue cards as an alternative to traditional scripts, and compares the two approaches through a series of two-person, cold-read performances. Each performance was judged by a panel of theatre experts. The study finds that Glass has the potential to aid performance by freeing actors to better engage with one another. However, it also found that by limiting the display to one line of script at a time, the Glass application used here makes it difficult for some actors to grasp the text. In a further study, when asked to later perform the text from memory, actors who had used Glass recalled only slightly fewer lines than when they had learned using paper

The Myth of the New York City Borough Accent: Evidence from Perception

A common language ideology in the United States is that New York City English (NYCE) displays reliable geographic variation across the city’s five boroughs, what we call the Borough Accent Ideology (BAI). In direct contrast, linguists argue that borough accents do not exist, but instead serve as a proxy for socioeconomic differences in NYCE (Hubbell 1950, Bronstein 1962, Labov 1966, Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006:234). This paper contributes the first empirical evidence related to the BAI, with an analysis of perceptual data from an interactive website where listeners heard short audio samples of native New Yorkers and assigned them to one of the city’s five boroughs. The results confirm that listeners cannot accurately discern a talker’s borough of provenance, but also that listeners are not guessing when they vote. Based on the descriptive patterns, we hypothesized that listeners create a binary opposition between Manhattan, which is the borough that is least-aligned with traditional NYCE, and the outer boroughs, where listeners expect to hear higher rates of NYCE features. A regression analysis confirms this hypothesis, and finds specifically that a talker’s use of variable non-rhoticity and BOUGHT-raising are significant predictors of votes, with more rhoticity and less-raised BOUGHT predictive of votes for Manhattan. In addition, there is no significant difference between native and non-native New Yorkers in voting behavior, suggesting that this binary strategy is accessible to speakers from both within and outside New York City. Overall, the results confirm that the BAI remains an ideology and not a linguistic reality, at least for the task in question

Functionality-power-packaging considerations in context aware wearable systems

Wearable computing places tighter constraints on architecture design than traditional mobile computing. The architecture is described in terms of miniaturization, power-awareness, global low-power design and suitability for an application. In this article we present a new methodology based on three different system properties. Functionality, power and electronic Packaging metrics are proposed and evaluated to study different trade offs. We analyze the trade offs in different context recognition scenarios. The proof of concept case study is analyzed by studying (a) interaction with household appliances by a wrist worn device (acceleration, light sensors) (b) studying walking behavior with acceleration sensors, (c) computational task and (d) gesture recognition in a wood-workshop using the combination of accelerometer and microphone sensors. After analyzing the case study, we highlight the size aspect by electronic packaging for a given functionality and present the miniaturization trends for ‘autonomous sensor button

Towards recognising collaborative activities using multiple on-body sensors

This paper describes the initial stages of a new work on recognising collaborative activities involving two or more people. In the experiment described a physically demanding construction task is completed by a team of 4 volunteers. The task, to build a large video wall, requires communication, coordination, and physical collaboration between group members. Minimal outside assistance is provided to better reflect the ad-hoc and loosely structured nature of real-world construction tasks. On-body inertial measurement units (IMU) record each subject's head and arm movements; a wearable eye-tracker records gaze and ego-centric video; and audio is recorded from each person's head and dominant arm. A first look at the data reveals promising correlations between, for example, the movement patterns of two people carrying a heavy object. Also revealed are clues on how complementary information from different sensor types, such as sound and vision, might further aid collaboration recognition