Book Reading #44: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

 

Summary: In chapter four of Why We Make Mistakes, Hallinan discusses hindsight, and how we almost always view our previous actions and performances better than they actually were. He uses several different examples, ranging from specific ones that students can recall in their own personal lives, to that of documented political scandals like the Watergate incident. In his next chapter, Hallinan discusses the topic of multitasking, and dispite how good we all think we are at the skill, we'd actually be much better off doing one task at a time. His examples from this section generally stick to the automotive industry, and the various distractions that drivers have to deal with.

Discussion: Books like this have always fascinated me. No matter how many times we're told things such as "You're better off not trying to multitask", it's very hard to actually take to heart the advice offered in this book, even when you know it to unequivocally be true.

Ethnography Results: Week 8

This week, I once again watched Coleman's 7th Sea game. This was the first time they had been able to meet in a month (due to Aggiecon and Spring Break), so it was interesting to see the group try to get back into things.

The session they played this week was very role-play heavy. The characters had gotten washed away in a hurricane at the end of their previous session, so they spent most of their time regrouping, and then wandering around. The GM seemed to be struggling a bit. Over the course of the game, more players kept arriving late, so the GM had to keep coming up with more and more creative ways to explain their character's presence. The other plays seemed to be able to sense the miandering nature of their game, and so their attentions often wandered, unlike previous outings.

The one aspect the players did enjoy was when the party arrived in a St. Petersburg knockoff. The town offered an expansive amount of shops and taverns to hang out in, so the players got a chance to equip themselves with more gear before loitering around with the local non-playable characters.

Overall I got to see some interesting player interactions. The senior players in the group have been slightly irritated at the youngest member of the party, and have been playfully teasing him in game, but forcing him into a contract where he's required to pay for all of the party's alcohol. Their teasing isn't spiteful, and is more akin to a brotherly interaction. None the less, it was interesting to see them try and resolve their irritation with him in the game, rather than confront him in "real life" about it.

Final Project Proposal

For our final, we decided to design something which would be helpful for the tabletop role playing gamers that we have been studying for our ethnography project. Tabletop gaming is a field which generally does not use much technology, and has traditionally pushed back against things such as electronics character builders or electronic books. Instead of designing a redundant piece of software, we're going to design an "electronic dice" for them. The dice we're designing will rely on an Arduino microcontroller, will provide feedback via and LCD screen, and take input through simple pushbuttons. We hope that our electronic dice will be able to provide a player or game master with real time statistics they normally do not have access to during a game. Using the experience we've gained from out ethnography, we hope to take into account factors which an outsider to tabletop gaming may not take into account.

Book Reading #42: Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

 

Summary: In this appendix, Mead discusses the current stat of Samoan culture at the time of publication. She lists quantitative data on information such as housing, geography, clothing, and other demographic qualities. She spends the rest of the appendix discussing the effects of western influence in Samoa.

Discussion: It was interesting getting to see the before and after effects of western influence in Samoa. It was nice seeing that they were able to maintain their own individual identity while incorporating western influences.

Book Reading #41: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

 

Chapter 2 & 3

 

Summary: In the second chapter of Why We Make Mistakes, Hallinan continues to drive home the same topics as the first chapter, but with more detailed examples. He discusses how we don't learn details of things we do not need to know to function, such as what a penny looks like. In the third chapter, Hallinan discusses people's thought processes, and how we make decisions based on arbitrary things such as a politician's looks.

Discussion: I'm still continuing Hallinan's novel. His examples are fascinating, and I'm sad to say I wasn't able to pick the penny out of the presented pictures. I'm looking forward to the next few chapters, and what sort of examples they might present.

Paper Reading #18:

Comments: Derek Landini, Luke Roberts.

Reference Information:

Title: Evaluating Automatic Warning Cues for Visual Search in Vascular Images

Author: Boris W. van Schooten, Betsy M.A.G. van Dijk, Anton Nijholt, and Johan H.C. Reiber.

Publisher: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper focused their study on computer aided visual search. Visual search is a task that traditionally has required humans to implement well, such as monitoring a security camera feed, or analyzing medical scans.


Rather than making a judgement call of the content in a photo or video, the researchers decided to make a system which alerts the human analyzing the picture to possible areas of interest, letting them decide if the area is of concern or not.


The researchers found that users generally prefer paranoid alerts, which display false positives, instead of a conservative system which displays false negatives. This is contrary to earlier reviews, but the performance gains that the researchers discovered are hard to ignore.


Discussion: These IUI papers are much more technical than the ones in the past, but this paper was easy enough to understand. I'm surprised that researchers in the past believed that users would want to see false negatives over false positives. The researcher's findings seem fairly obvious after reading through their paper.

Emotional Design

Reference Information:

Title: Emotional Design

Author: Donald Norman 

Publisher: Basic Books (2005)

 

Summary: In Norman's second book, he does an about face from his pervious 1988 novel, The Psychology of Everyday Things. While he doesn't completely discount his earlier works, he acknowledges that a item designed purely from a functional point is at a disadvantage to something designed with substance and style. If a product's design makes a person happy, then can overlook it's functional deficiencies.

Norman discusses three main aspects of design in his novel. Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective design. Visceral design focuses on the physical features, behavioral on the functional, and reflective focuses on the meaning behind the products, and their cultural influence. Norman also discusses the effects memories play in our interaction with everyday items.

Discussion: It's interesting to see Norman take such a drastic turn from his earlier novel. His points mostly remained valid from the earlier novel, but his new points about emotional design also make sense. I'm glad we only have to read the first three chapters of this book, Normand unfortunately has a habit of repeating himself, and even in the first portion of the book he began to drive the same points home.