Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. "I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused."

That poor man is deluded if he thinks there is ever a moment in a classroom when fewer than 20% of the students are bored. Either he's one of the most dynamic and entertaining professors around or he's going to need to set the bar a little lower.

The problem I have with the device is it's binary, rather than on a scale. I may care if I'm boring some people at all, some people a little, and some people a lot, but this doesn't allow for such gradations.

Maaaaaaatttt Daaaaaaaaaammoooooooooonn.

This has possibilities. Consider its use in training someone to be more boring for targeted audiences.

which colleagues would those be, dan?

With snide comments like these about your colleagues, you wonder why you got denied tenure?

Scritic, I'm pretty sure the volume of snide comments has increased/come into existence since the tenure denial; Dan now has no real incentive (save for social costs of failing to adhere to norms, which are really rather low in the end) to hold back his feelings, especially when he's not even naming names. This was obviously not the case before he was denied tenure, and there were far fewer snide comments back then.

Plus, I'm sure being denied tenure by one's colleagues slightly alters one's perceptions of them...

Autism aside, I just want to paraphrase a commenter at Making Light a while ago: Really boring people never learn how to read the "I'm bored" signal from others, becuase they think that that's just what people are like.

Scritic,

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

"Dan now has no real incentive (save for social costs of failing to adhere to norms, which are really rather low in the end) to hold back his feelings, especially when he's not even naming names."

Brenton, do you always speak like this？Failure to adhere to norms?? That means being a jerk, right? For dan to casually insult his colleagues on a blog is a low blow and reveals a great deal about his interpersonal skills. Even though he might be bitter about being denied tenure, his bitterness is going well onto the public record, where even his future colleagues might take note. If I saw my research referred to as piss-poor, I may be reluctant to have any sort of dealings with him whatsoever.

"Dan now has no real incentive (save for social costs of failing to adhere to norms, which are really rather low in the end) to hold back his feelings, especially when he's not even naming names."

Brenton, do you always speak like this? Failure to adhere to norms?? That means being a jerk, right? For dan to casually insult his colleagues on a blog is a low blow and reveals a great deal about his interpersonal skills. Even though he might be bitter about being denied tenure, his bitterness is going well onto the public record, where even his future colleagues might take note. If I saw my research referred to as piss-poor, I may be reluctant to have any sort of dealings with him whatsoever.

Our host didn't "casually insult his colleagues" as a group, he said that "more than one" of them could use the device. How many colleagues does he have? Dozens, I suspect. The idea that 10% or more of academics are terrible bores isn't all that cruel an insinuation. I imagine most of DD's colleagues would agree on that much, even if they disagree on which of them are bores.

Of course, repeating the same comment word for word is pretty damned boring, too, though Elephant Man had no real-time signals from his audience to warn him not to do that.

Odd that anyone would think it is "insulting" to academics to suggest that some of them could profit from such a device. There are people in every industry and profession who have a deficit of emotional intelligence.

I am fairly sure that if I were speaking to a roomful of salesmen or executives, and I described the device and then suggested that there were people in the room who could use it, the response would be laughter rather than hurt feelings.