Arend Harteveld died at the age of 50 years on Sunday 7 September 2008. Much too soon and entirely unexpected he was struck down by an accident in the blood circulation. Arend was a good man and a well respected colleague at Delft University of Technology. My thoughts go out to his family, especially to his mother who lived in with him and whom Arend was taking care of.
Arend Harteveld (source)
Arend contributed to much of the research based on which I hope to write my thesis, and these last years would not have been the same without him. He bore quite a burden in providing, more or less on his own, support to many courses and many labs, a burden he used to share with three colleagues in support who all left as a result of reorganisations. Meanwhile, his main interest was to work on research projects himself, and I found his contributions, both in creating software for experiments or for data analysis and in discussing the design of the experiments, to be very valuable. Arend always quickly grasped the ideas behind experiments and had a knack of pointing out flaws in the experimental design.
Arend also maintained a
website with information that shows some of his technical prowess. The website is maintained now by one his radio amateur friends. Arend tells of radio and measuring equipment, chirps, about which he also gave lectures occasionally. From personal experience I know that if a subject gripped him he wouldn't rest until he understood it fully, which happened during our collaboration for example with capturing response times on a laptop. He tried out several clocks of the PC and its processor and experimentally tested delays and variance in delays. As a radio amateur, a passion he picked up in his teens, he was known as PA1ARE. And now, as his brother in law said during the departure ceremony: "PA1ARE is voorgoed uit de lucht".
Snapshots of the three signs used in the experiment.
Examples of three manipulations of the sign SAW. We tested about 68 sign manipulations in total. These were run through the automatic recognition algorithms we had been working on and they were rated by human signers. The paper is about how humans and machines can be compared.
The talk by Magnenat-Thalmann focused on facial expression. (
Jesus and his 
David Healy making the flute gesture. (
These flute bands on Orangist marches are what the gesture refers to.
Get a glimpse of the triumphalist nature of these marches
By coincidence I am currently reading 'The Irish War' by Tony Geraghty. He sketches a long and messy conflict which has gone on for more than 300 years. It is clear that these marches are of an inflammatory nature, and therefore a gesture that refers to them is also inflammatory. It is not just a merry band of flute-playing men. They celebrate Orangist protestant dominance in Northern Ireland at the expense of the catholic part of the population.
The conflict carried over to a Scottish football match called 'the Old Firm' between the Rangers (protestant) and Celtic (catholic), see this 
Paul Gascoigne made the same flute gesture during the old firm (Picture: 
