Last night I attended a Girl Geek Dinner in Bristol. It was a lot of fun. The speaker was Dr. Julie Greensmith of Nottingham University. Julie’s main academic interest is in analysing large quantities of data, and she gave me a very interesting lead for my energy economics work, but her talk last night was about something much more fun – roller coasters.

One of the more interesting areas of modern scientific research is bio-feedback systems. Basically the idea is to monitor people’s bodily functions, and modify some experience on the basis of that. As you can imagine, it has a whole lot of science fictional application, all the way from the armour worn by the military in Starship Troopers to sex toys. You can expect to see it turning up in video games fairly soon. But the work Julie was doing was aimed at allowing theme park owners to better tailor their rides to the needs and desires of their customers. As academic research projects go, that’s pretty neat.

The work is being carried out in collaboration with an organization called Thrill Laboratory, who seem to be a lot of fun.