Previously the realm of science fiction, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created an improved holographic projector – a device able to create images in midair that you can touch… sort of.
The device, currently on display at SIGGRAPH, the well-known computer graphics and technology conference, functions by displaying the holographic image in midair (not new technology) and using focused ultrasonic waves to simulate a tactile response.
In other words, it fires ultra high-frequency sound at your fingers in the shape of whatever it is that the projector is displaying so that it feels like you’re touching something real. Demonstrations at the conference include a ball, raindrops, and a small creature running around your palm.
As this technology improves, I can see the training applications explode – imagine being able to put employees in a virtual environment that they can actually touch. I only wonder if such improved fidelity will actually improve training outcomes. Some evidence suggests that high-fidelity training distracts away from the underlying psychological changes you’re aiming for.
For example, take a training scenario where all employees need to use a new machine (let’s call it a widget-machine). If you a lot of training design effort into making an extremely realistic model of a widget-machine, employees will indeed be able to use that machine perfectly well. But what if that machine changes? An employee trained on a lower fidelity widget-machine may be better able to generalize what they learned during training to the new machine, since they had to generalize to the old machine too.
I suppose only time will tell. All I know is that I want one for my lab to see what it can do. Grant applications, here we come…
Courtesy worth1000.com
Through this post at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, I learned Dr. Steven Shavell, director of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business has written a piece on whether copyright should be abolished for academic works and how realistically that might happen (available as a PDF). It’s an interesting read, also laying out the motivations for academic publishing in such a way that it’s very depressing but also illuminating to a lay audience (which is, I imagine, his purpose).
I say depressing because it reminds me just how little external motivation there is to be an academic – in other words, if you’re looking for cash, this isn’t the way to do it. Take this snippet from a footnote on page 29 on royalties from books:
…my understanding is that under a typical arrangement, an academic author would
receive a royalty rate of 15% of revenue. If a book sold, say, 1,000 copies at a price of $60, the royalties
received would be $9,000. If the book were 300 pages in length and the author spent an average of 3 hours
a page, the implied hourly rate of pay received by the author would be $10.
As a person who has always wanted to write an academic text, knowing that such an effort would only be valued at a slightly higher rate than the hourly pay of a fry cook is a little troubling. Although I suppose it means I’m cut out for this work, since it doesn’t phase me in the least.
As for the abolishing of copyright, Dr. Shavell lays out an interesting case. In the current system, costs are absorbed by the publisher. Academics write articles and essentially give away all of their rights to those articles in order for them to be published in academic journals, in exchange for prestige and career advancement. The publishers make their money on advertising and subscription sales, hopefully earning more than the associated printing and distribution costs. In a copyright-free system, publishers would lose much of their revenue – for example, readers have no motivation to pay for a journal article when it is freely available elsewhere. With decreased revenue, costs must be passed to someone else – either the academics themselves, or more likely, the academic institutions they work for. Although the alternative, of course, is online self-publishing by universities, and removing the for-profit publishers from the equation entirely (although this passes the costs, although smaller, into still-shrinking higher education budgets).
The benefit to getting rid of copyright (while assuming for-profit publishers cannot be avoided) is increased freedom of information for academic papers. Lay people and scientists alike have easier, free access to scholarly work, encouraging both increased public involvement and greater readership. Greater readership leads to increased interest, which leads to increased research, which leads to increased readership… you get the idea. We also want to avoid situations where academics don’t even have the freedom to print material from research they themselves conducted and published in the past.
And as a hilarious sidenote, I just wanted to point out footnote 14 on p.12: “I do not consider negative prices – the possibility that authors would pay individuals to read their works.” Perhaps he should!
By the way, if you haven’t taken the GRE recently, yes, the title of this post is an analogy, and yes, it took a few moments to figure out whether academia would be oil or water. But the principle remains the same!
PsyBlog, one of the more popular psychology blogs, has a piece up listing a variety of “superb psychology blogs” and surprise, surprise – it’s all clinical, cognitive, and social, with a dab of neuroscience, with not a dab of I/O to be found.
Not that this is PsyBlog’s fault, of course. It’s just another example of the lack of visibility of the areas of psychology outside those traditionally considered most “interesting” – those dealing with clinical disorder, social habits, and the brain.
But I/O is interesting too, really! We (try to) answer questions like:
- Are leaders born or made?
- How do people learn?
- How should managers judge subordinate job performance?
- Are people happy with their work?
- What happens at home when you’re stressed at work?
- What happens at work when you’re stressed at home?
- How does personality influence work?
- When are teams useful?
- What can we do about discrimination?
- What are the effects of harassment at work?
- What happens when people are angry at work?
- What leads to sudden career change?
- What happens when people get burned out at their jobs?
In the United States, full time is 40 hours/week, which means people spend roughly 25% of their prime years (18-67) at work. On top of that, much of what happens at work bleeds over into quality of home life and even quality of sleep, which means that many I/O topics have as much of an impact on people’s lives as anything in clinical or social psychology. Which is exactly why it is so frustrating that no one seems to realize it outside of I/O – a frustration that runs so deep that many I/O psychologists want to change our society’s name to help address the problem.
So the best way to depress an I/O psychologist and make them laugh simultaneously? Just ask the last time someone called them a therapist.