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.

Ethnography Results: Week 7

This week I was not able to observe any D&D groups. All of the groups I've been following have been members of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy organization Cepheid Variable. This weekend they ran AggieCon 42, a Sci-Fi/Fantasy convention. While I wasn't able to directly observe any tabletop games, I was able to glance in on AggieCon's gaming room. The room was massive this year, comprising one of the hotel's larger rooms. It had the longest hours of any room in the convention, opening at 10am and closing at 2am in the morning. Several of the convention's Guest of Honor were somehow related to tabletop gaming, including one of the guests being a writer for a game's setting. They all ran their own game during the convention, which had incredibly long wait lists, which filled up quickly.

Another thing I noticed was how many people were buying tabletop games. Several of the dealers sold esoteric, non-mainstream tabletop games which people bought on impulse. Despite the people knowing of the game's existence, it took the games physically being in front of them for most people to take the leap into purchasing them.

Paper Reading #17: Personalized User Interfaces for Product Configuration

Comments: Chris Kam, Derek Landini.
Reference Information: 
Title: Personalized User Interfaces for Product Configuration
Authors: Alexander Felfernig, Monika Mandl, Juha Tiihonen, Monika Schubert, Gerhard Leitner.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary:  In their paper, the authors discussed product configuration for software packages. The software packages they were configuring were sold to clients, who want to customize them to their specific needs before they implement it in their business. The authors designed an algorithm which looks at the features the user implements, and it suggests and automatically configures additional features. Their results were somewhat mixed, with some clients liking the customizations, others finding it cumbersome and hard to use. The authors admit that their research is in it's early stages.

Discussion: This paper was fairly interesting, but VERY technical. It's explanation of it's algorithms was highly technical, and not very easy to follow. The research as a whole was very interesting however.

Book Reading #40: Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: In the final chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead discusses the American education system, and what it is like for young women in our country to grow up, circa 1930. She touches on things such as the American educational system, decisions and responsibilities of children, and the overwhelming number of choices they have.

Discussion: I particularly agreed with Mead's sentiment of teaching children "how to think, not what to think". It's interesting that a book about Samoan culture would have an entire chapter dedicated to American culture. It's surprising given the age of the book how relevant it is today. 

Paper Reading #16: Creating Collections with Automatic Suggestions and Example-Based Refinement

Comments: Joshua Penick, Felipe Othick.

Reference Information:
Title: Creating Collections with Automatic Suggestions and Example-Based Refinement
Authors: Adrian Secord, Holger Winnemöller, Wilmot Li, Mira Dontcheva.
Venue: UIST’10, October 3-6, 2010, New York, New York, USA.

Summary: The authors of this conference paper found that current digital media management software is lacking in their implimentation of libraries, or playlists, in the case of music. Their system, rather than being a completely user generated list, or something based on tags and Boolean operators, uses natural language to crate a library that suits the user's needs. By providing input such as “some rock, no Madonna, lots of U2,”, users can get useful playlists with little work on their part.

At the end of their research, the authors found that while their computer generated playlists were fairly well regarded, users wanted a way to manually edit the items contained in their library. Their future work will delve into working with different types of mixed media and varieties of formats in a single library.

Discussion: The researcher's experiments were fairly interesting. The playlist creation seemed well suited to organizing music, but it relies heavily on information being properly labeled and tagged. I know personally my photo collection is full of IMG_009.jpg, and similar files, so such a system would not be too useful there. If I ever got to the point where I did properly tag everything, making Boolean libraries based off of their various tags would have very similar results to the computer generated library.

Book Reading #38: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes
Author: Joseph T. Hallinan
Publisher: 2009 Crown Archetype

Chapter 0 & 1:

Summary: Hallinan begins his novel describing the various mistakes that people make in the world today. In the second chapter, he mostly takes about "Looking Without Seeing." People often observe things without actually perceiving what they are seeing. He drives this point home with a long example about crime witnesses.

Discussion: I love these contemporary books. Novels like this are much easier to read and understand then something like Coming of Age in Samoa or Obedience to Authority. My favorite portion of this reading was the example of people being interrupted mid conversation, not noticing that the person they were talking to had changed.

Obidience to Authority

Reference Information:

Title: Obedience to Authority

Author: Stanley Milgram

Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)

Summary: In Obedience to Authority, Milgram outlines his classic experiment. A subject is brought in, told that they are going to be doing a leaning experiment with another subject. However, the second subject, the "student", is an actor, pretending to be another participant in the experiment. The legitimate subject plays the part of the "teacher", and is tasked with reading a list of words to the student, who then repeats them back. If the student cannot remember the word list, the teacher is instructed to shock them.


Before the experiment, most psychologists predicted that people would be obedient to a point, but stop before a "lethal" voltage was applied. However, the experiment found that the majority of people will in fact continue to apply the shocks long after the "student" is in visible amounts of sever pain.

Naturally, people were skeptical of Milgram's results at first, but he continued his research and did a good job of accounting for all variables, inside of the experiment and externally as well. While taking into account the dissenting opinions, Milgram made an incredibly convincing argument for his experiment's findings that people are much more obidient than originally hypothesized.

Discussion: I found Obedience to Authority an incredibly compelling novel. Milgram's experiment, while questionable in it's ethics, brought up very interesting questions about the extent of people's limits of obedience. It helped greatly in explaining how things such as the Holocaust could have happened. It is unfortunate that Milgram's experiment remains so controversial today, since it no longer can be performed due to the aforementioned ethical concerns.

Book Reading #37: Obedience to Authority

Reference Information:

Title: Obedience to Authority

Author: Stanley Milgram

Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)

Chapter 9-15:

Summary: In chapters 9 through 15, Milgram discusses the possible interpretations of his findings. One particular point Milgram made sure to emphasize is the difference between Obedience and Conformity. Conformity is a very personal, intimate sensation, where Obedience is not. Further analyzing his findings, Milgram examines external factors in the person's life, such as how they respond to stress, or the different types of authority figures that they respond to. Finally, Milgram presents several different interpretations of his data, ranging from his beliefs that obedience is easier to coax out of people than initially hypothesized, to the findings perhaps being misleading due to the laboratory setting. In closing, Milgram applies his results to various real world situations, such as the the action of

Discussion: I found it very refreshing that Milgram made time to point out the unfavorable or dissenting ways of interpreting his findings. Far too often today, scientists seem blinded by their longing for the data to indicate one trend over another, that they often ignore other opinions.

Book Reading #38: Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: In the thirteenth chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead compares Samoan children with American children. Mead found that Samoan children are more experienced in matters such as birth and death at an earlier age, and that their education can more directly relate to what their parents are doing because they're put to work so early. American children on the other hand, while being ignorant about life and death, express more strong feelings, or they have specialized feelings.

Discussion: In most of my discussion sections for this novel, I have compared the Samoan children to American children, so it was interesting to see Mead do this herself. I'm not sure if I completely agree with her assessment of schools however. I usually found what I was learning relevant, even if it didn't seem immediately applicable to the world around me.

Book Reading #35: Obedience to Authority

Reference Information:

Title: Obedience to Authority

Author: Stanley Milgram
Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)


Chapter 1-8:


Summary: Milgram outlines his famous experiment testing, you guessed it, a person's Obedience to Authority. He goes into detail about the different variables of the experiment, such as a subject's proximity to the actor, influences from the person's background such a gender and nationality, as well as other information gleaned from post experiment surveys. Milgrim also spends a good deal of time discussing the hypothesis of his colleges.

Discussion: Milgram's novel has been very insightful. His chapter of Opening Skinner's Box was one of my favorites, so it's nice getting to read about all the different variables. I'm still surprised at how obedient the test subjects are.

Opening Skinners Box

Reference Information:

Title: Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

 

Summary: In Slater's novel Coming of Age in Samoa, she discusses several different famous psychologists, giving both scientific and anecdotal data about their research. Each chapter is devoted to a specific scientist, and general proceeds through times in a chrnological fashion. In the beginning of the novel, Slater started with relatively simple concepts, such as learned behavior and operant conditioning. However, as the book progressed, Slater's topics became more complex, moving onto subjects such addiction, the formation of memories, and cognitive dissonance.

Slater's approach to each subject was unique for a scholarly work. She would normally begin with some sort of anecdotal story, or a bit of background about the scientist's personal life. Then, as the chapter progressed, she would delve into the specific details of the experiment. After fully explaining the impact of the research, she would generally move onto a personal interview with a family member of the researcher, a scientist who worked on the experiment with the researcher, or someone who was actually part of the experiment.

This method was particularly useful in creating a memorable effect on the reader. After presenting a large amount of qualitative information about the researcher, she would assault the reader with a emotional appeal, centered around a personal, subjective collection of qualitative data. However, despite this approach Slater did a good job of staying relatively impartial, allowing the reader to make up their own mind about the more controversial researchers.

Discussion: Slater's novel was a roller coaster of opinions for me. During the professional portions on the experiments, Slater was an excellent writer, detailing the relevant portions without overloading the reader with useless knowledge. However, for the portions of the book where Slater did her interviews, the professional atmosphere suddenly dropped, replaced with irrelevant comments on the Victoria's Secret catalog the interviewee has lying around.

Overall, I walked away from the book with an overall positive feel, but there were several portions that rubbed me the wrong way. Slater needed to decide if she was working on a professional academic work, or a non-fiction, but for entertainment page turner. The tone shift was highly distracting, but it did not completely take away from the information she was trying to imbue on the user.

Ethnography Results, Week 6

Last week I spent in Washington DC, so I wasn't able to join up with our regular D&D groups. I don't think they were meeting anyways, due to so many people being out of town. Since I couldn't observe any groups, I researched a few simple "pick up and play" games that our D&D group might be able to play as a final observation in the class.

One I found interesting in particular is game called Gamma World. Gamma World, unlike most tabletop games, takes place in a post apocalyptic world ravaged by a nuclear holocaust. Mutants roam the countryside, and people have to fight just to survive. The game's rules are a riff on the standard D&D 4th Edition rules, so people who know that system can play Gamma World without having to lean too much. The game is designed to be light hearten, and have a relaxed atmosphere. It costs $50 for enough materials to play a complete campaign, so it seems like it would be a good choice for us to play if we wanted to do something simple and fun before this project finishes.

Paper Reading #15: Designing Adaptive Feedback for Improving Data Entry Accuracy

Comments: Derek Landini, Aaron Kirkes.
Reference Information:
Title: Designing Adaptive Feedback for Improving Data Entry Accuracy

Authors: Kuang Chen, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Tapan S. Parikh.
Venue: UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USA.

Summary: In their paper, the researcher's ouline the current limitations of data entry software, and described their ideas to develop an "adaptive" data entry system called USHER.  USHER examines the data being given by a user, and adapts the user interface accordingly. Such adaptions involve examining the data for likely illegal entries, and comparing entries such as birthdays and ages for mis-matched records.

The group tested their software with a group of data entry workers in Uganda. In the end, they found that while the number of errors did not greatly decrease, the speed of entry increased. This speed increase is mostly attributed USHER's auto complete features.

Discussion: I found this paper highly interesting, although a bit technical. I found it interesting that it helped intermediate users the most. I know that personally, auto-complete features generally are irritating for people who know how to do things own their own. For instance, for every time my finger accidentally slips off the shift key and Microsoft Office capitalizes the first letter of a line for me, there's about twenty instances where I actually wanted the first letter to legitimately be lower case.

Book Reading #34: Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: In the latest chapter of Mead's ethnography, she changes gears and explores women in their later stages in life. Mead observed the living choices of 40-50 year old women, and their interactions with their in-laws. While the women work hard even late into life, there is very little fighting within families.

Discussion: Once again, Samoan culture surprises me. No fighting between in-laws? Talk about advanced! It's nice to see a culture where people cooperate. It's a shame that the elders get their titles stripped from them as they grow into elders, but overall the system seems to work fairly well.

Ethnography results, Week 5

This week, I visited Coleman's tabletop session once again, and watched them play a game called 7th Sea. 7th Sea (yes, the "7th" shortening is the official title), is a Swashbuckling and Fantasy tabletop game where heroic deeds and over the top actions are the normal. Our heroes were a band of 6 adventurers, washing up on the shore of unfriendly territory, attempting to meet up with a contact, played out by a newcomer.

Once again, this session started 25 minutes after it was scheduled. Unlike Hackmaster or Dungeons and Dragons, 7th Sea was not played with a board, and the overall tone was much more laid back. The players seemed to have a hard time getting in a serious mood when important events were happening, unlike the earlier games. One reason for this might have been the fact that some of the players were split up for a good portion of the early game, making the lulls in the action much more noticeable.

There were two stand out characters in the game, one who was nearly unstoppable in battle, and one who was so charismatic that he could talk the natives into just about anything... even though he had to go through two translators to do it. Which brings me to the new aspect of this game: languages. There were about six languages in the game, and the different player characters did not know a universal language. Every character was bilingual, but only three of the seven players had a single language in common. Because of this, if the group wanted to talk, they almost always had to go through a translator. This wasn't strictly enforced in the game play however, and it was understood that if someone said something, that as long as a translator was present, what was said out loud was passed onto everyone... even if it took a two or three person translator chain to do it. The players eventually came up with a series of hand gestures to show which language they were using.

The session went well, and I got to observe some interesting interaction between the players. After about an hour and a half, halfway through their first encounter, the game got called short due to the DM being urgently called away. This was mostly a moot point however, since one of the characters was a few turns away from successfully summoning a hurricane to deal with a few harmless street thugs.

Book Reading #34: Opening Skinner's Box

Reference Information: 

Title: Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

 

Summary: In the final chapter of Slater's novel, she discusses psychosurgery, and the work of Antionio Moniz. She discusses different surgeries in the field, such as the curing of a man's OCD.

Discussion: This section was just was interesting as the last few, and emphazied just how little we know about psychosurgery.

Book Reading #33: Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: In the eleventh chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead discusses "Girls in Conflict". This chapter focuses on delinquent and deviant behavior of the young women, which can have various levels of repercussions. In particular, women labeled thieves are generally ostracized.

Discussion: This chapter focused more on individual girls than the previous chapters, which was a nice change of pace.

Paper Reading #14: A Conversational Interface to Web Automation

Comments: Patrick Frith, Derek Landini.
Reference Information:
Title: A Conversational Interface to Web Automation
Authors: Tessa Lau, Julian Cerruti, Guillermo Manzato, Mateo Bengualid, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jeffrey Nichols.
Venue: UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USA.

Summary: The researchers who published A Conversational Interface to Web Automation worked to create a more natural way issuing commands to web pages. Using various ways of parsing commands, they came up with an interpreter which can understand normal English phrases instead of commands built with a strict syntax.

The system uses an open API, and works using SMS, Twitter, Email, a native Android application, Unix CLI, a lightweight webpage, and a REST API. The API has a 77% success rate, and the users of the system were overall satisfied with it's use.

Discussion: This article was fairly interesting. Natural language parses are an area of HCI which could use significant amounts of research. Unlike more out there areas of HCI, natural language processing has immediate and apparent benefits.

Book Reading #32: Opening Skinner's Box

Reference Information

Title: Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

 

Summary: Slater continues her analysis of memories in this chapter, telling the story of a person who had a frontal lobotomy. Due to this procedure, he no longer can form long term memories.

Discussion: This chapter was just as interesting and informative as the previous, giving a interesting look into how we form memories. Concepts like amnesia have always fascinated me, so it was interesting to look at someone who not only had lost memories, but could no longer form new ones.