Ruud de Wild as Christ on the Radio

Ruud de Wild, the barely disguised saviour of our ears? Ruud de Wild is a DJ (and uomo universalis) who has prime time shows on the Dutch Radio. He switched to Q-Music in 2007 and this is one of their recent ads. Some people are complaining now but it is still going. There is a billboard poster too:

In the news: Brabants Dagblad: Op posters en in tv-spotjes is De Wild afgebeeld op een manier die doet denken aan een Christusfiguur. Op zijn T-shirt staat een hart omringd met stralen, net zoals Christus soms wordt weergegeven.

It took me a few moments to dig up this image of Christ that looks very similar: Jesus and his wife (?) Mary posing as Ruud de Wild (source) What is on the heart exactly? I cannot read it. Does anyone know? Update: The heart on Ruud's shirt reads 'Q is good for you' while the heart of Christ the King is adorned with the crown or a ring of thorns.

Gestures in language development

Gesture 8:2 came out recently. It is a special issue on 'Gestures in language development'. Amanda Brown, a friend who stayed at the MPI doing PhD research, published a paper on Gesture viewpoint in Japanese and English: Cross-linguistic interactions between two languages in one speaker. Marianne Gullberg, Kees de Bot and Virginia Volterra wrote an introductory chapter 'Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development'. Kees de Bot (LinkedIn) is a professor in Groningen working on (second) language acquisition.

MobileASL progress

A demo describing the MobileASL research project The group of MobileASL researchers at the University of Washington features in a local news bulletin. They have been working for a few years now on efficient transmitting of ASL video over a channel with limited bandwidth. The idea is to enable mobile videophony, which has been the holy grail of mobile applications for quite some time already. Personally, I am not convinced that specific technology for the transmission of sign language video will really have an impact. Here are a few reasons. Bandwidth will increase anyway with costs going down. Processing capacity in phones will increase. Videophony is an application that is desirable for many, not just signers. In other words, there is already a drive towards videophony that will meet the requirements for signing. Furthermore, I am not sure which requirements are specifically posed by sign language. People talk and gesture too, and I imagine they would want that to come across in the videophony as well. Finally, signers can and do adjust their signing to for example webcams. Does the technology address a real problem?

"The team tried different ways to get comprehensible sign language on low-resolution video. They discovered that the most important part of the image to transmit in high resolution is around the face. This is not surprising, since eye-tracking studies have already shown that people spend the most time looking at a person's face while they are signing."

Would this not be true for any conversation between people? On the positive side: perhaps this initiative for signers will pay off for everyone. It wouldn't be the first time that designs for people with specific challenges actually addressed problems everyone had to some degree.

Website Renovations

Hello my dear readers. Perhaps you missed it, but this website was down for almost two weeks. There were some technical difficulties and in the end I more or less started anew, with a less than perfect backup of the content. So, it is possible that pages are missing or that links malfunction. If you would be so kind to report these things it would be highly appreciated. At least the website is upgraded with new blogging software and a new look. Enjoy, Jeroen