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.

Gesture Based Presentation System

Control a Beamed Powerpoint Presentation with Gestures These students appear to have created a gesture based application that we also considered about four years ago. I know IBM and Philips were interested in this sort of application. So, well done guys! And excellent presentation too. I think they managed to make the best of it, given a difficult application. Why is a presentation system a difficult application? Well if someone is presenting he will usually gesture during talking. These gestures are directed at the audience and not at the presentation software. So, the first task of such a system is to discriminate between those gestures: what is for me and what is for the audience. Furthermore, a presenter may also be fidgeting during his talk which shouldn't be interpreted as a gesture. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether these students treated these issues. The things they did do seem to be designed well enough. I think I like the calibration they designed: It creates a connection between the user's physical environment and the camera he must address. It grounds the interaction. The subsequent examples of the functionality they have built in is less impressive. The forward-back commands are okay, but the drawing and highlighting are not very valuable in my opinion. People in the audience can see that you are pointing at something so there is perhaps little need to do more. But maybe these are first steps which need a bit more maturity in their interaction design to become useful. On the whole, excellent work.

A Case of Co-Speech Gestures

A wonderfull new video on YouTube of two guys (programmers, it says) talking and 'co-speech-gesturing' (is that a verb?). "Real programmers use sign language" (by ekabanov) I think it is safe to assume that it is for real. Their whole behaviour looks too natural and wacky to be scripted. I also think this is a great case study to spend some time on while discussing some of the ideas of David McNeill. Because what we have here is what his theories and ideas are concerned with. There is (of course) no sign language nor did I spot any other 'emblematic gesture' (those vulgar things you get fined or jailed for or the goofy ones that seem to be must-haves for ad campaigns). I also do not see any pantomime. No, this is the stuff they like in Chicago: Co-speech gestures. An episode full of deictics, beats, iconic and metaphoric gestures, right?

From the McNeill lab: A misconception has arisen about the nature of the gesture categories described in Hand and Mind, to wit, that they are mutually exclusive bins into which gestures should be dumped. In fact, pretty much any gesture is going to involve more than one category. Take a classic upward path gesture of the sort that many speakers produce when they describe the event of the cat climbing up the pipe in our cartoon stimulus. This gesture involves an iconic path-for-path mapping, but is also deictic, in that the gesture is made with respect to an origo --that is, it is situated within a deictic field. Even "simple" beats are often made in a particular location which the speaker has given further structure (e.g. by setting up an entity there and repeatedly referring to it in that spatial location). Metaphoric gestures are de facto iconic gestures, given that metaphor entails iconicity. The notion of a type, therefore, should be considered as a continuum --with a given gesture having more or less iconicity, metaphoricity, etc.

Wrong! Apparently the main problems of McNeill's typology of gestures, that has sent many an engineer on a wild goose hunt for iconic gestures, are now even recognized at the source (McNeill, 1992). It is not mutually exclusive but rather an index of the functioning of a gesture ('as a beat' - 'through spatial reference (deictic)' - 'referring thorugh iconicity to something concrete' - 'referring via iconicity first to something concrete and second through metaphor to something abstract'). Good. I never liked 'beats' for example. I don't think I ever saw one. But to say that it was a misconception... I vaguely recall an annotation procedure called the 'beat filter' that begs to differ. Anyway, at least this clears up the discussions regarding 'metaphoric gestures' considerably [they are de facto also iconic, the metaphor functions on another level]. And it also clears the way for an annotation of this video. Any volunteers? Well, you would have to get a decent file of the movie instead of the YouTube flash stuff anyway, so let's forget about it. McNeill wrote a new book recently (2005) which is mostly about growth points. But before you read the summary by McNeill you might want to check Kendon's brilliant poem called 'The Growth Point', which he delivered at McNeill's festen. I find it neatly captures my feelings towards growth points (and more that is beyond my grasp). I am at once awed, baffled, and stupefied when I read about growth points and catchments. And so it goes. Again I tried to get it. Again I failed to learn anything from reading about growth points. One thing only. If David McNeill (or Susan Duncan) is right, then annotating gestures in episodes like this will be eternal hell :-) And without the speech it will not work. Thank God. I can go to bed with a clear conscience. Books: McNeill, D. (Fall 2005) Gesture and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeill, D. (2000) (Ed.). Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.