HCI projects at CMU

[gusl]

HCI projects at CMU How cool are these projects?!?

Here's a highlight:

Markets for Attention
As Herb Simon said, in the computer age, "information isn't the scarce resource: human time and attention is." Economic markets are the social institution for fairly allocating scarce resources. The goal of this research is to formalize the intuition that markets for attention can efficiently match the interests of information senders and recipients, and to test the value of these markets empirically.

Also, Alice teaches programming through stories. What I don't understand is how/why this programming environment is any different from programming in Flash or any other interactive animation package. (I don't know anything about the latter)