Ethnography Results Week 8

Sweet Eugene’s House of Java
Thursday March 31, 2011
7:15 – 9:15 pm

Quantitative
Totals for the evening:
Order drink to go: ? (I wasn’t in a good place to view this)
On Computer: 26
Reading book/ doing homework: 21 (defined as having book and/or spiral and pencil)
Working with computer and book: 7
Visiting: 12
Main goal to eat:  5 (these people read a book or used their computer until food arrived. Then they ate and left)
Eating and visiting: 0 (I didn’t notice as many eating tonight. It was a major study night.)
Playing cards: 0

Qualitative

My location
I sat in a new spot tonight - a popular spot that is always taken by someone on a computer who remains there the entire 2 hours that I'm at Sweet Eugene’s. The tabletop is clear with a bunch of pennies displayed underneath. It's a convenient spot since there is a bar right behind it that I can put my leftovers and drink on. It gave me a good view of the back of the coffee shop but there was a wall between me and the front.
 

My Crepe Fear - very tasty

My Food
 Since it was my last week coming for the ethnography (and since Alyssa had shown me a picture of the crepe she had for breakfast at Sweet Eugene’s), I decided to try out the food. I had the Crepe Fear. It was way too much food for me but it was really good. I recommend it to anyone who goes there. I also tried a new drink, the frozen green tea, and it was good. I wish I had tried it sooner.

The Employees
Two of the employees I did not recognize but the third I did. They seemed to be enjoying themselves and were talking loudly with each other.

The customers
I wrote about the general trends last week, so I’ll report on the few unique interactions patterns I noticed tonight.

The outlet, the hot commodity
Though not exactly unique, more than ever tonight (it was probably the busiest I’ve ever seen the place), the outlets were greatly sought after. As the place filled up, the tables near outlets were the first to go. One girl at a middle table had her power cord stretched out across a main walkway. It tripped several people almost including me. I remembered to watch out (after watching others trip on it) at the last minute.

Extremely busy
As I already mentioned, the place was busier than ever. I would say that nearly all the tables and couches were occupied by the time I left. A group of four came in searching for a place and had to break off into two groups to sit at small tables near each other since there were no places to sit together. Another group of four came searching for a table and discussed where they might sit. After some deliberation they decided to sit outside.

Somehow quieter than usual
Even without considering how many people were there tonight, the place was quieter than usual. When I think about how many people were there, it surprises me even more. There were a lot more people working alone tonight. Some of the groups of two people were sharing ipods – each using one ear bud. There were also a lot of groups of four or more. Usually people in groups spend most of their time talking, but tonight most people seemed to be working diligently.

Customer-Employee Interaction
I haven’t noticed much customer – employee interaction. I think one week I noticed an employee talking with several girls, but other than that, the most words I hear customers exchange with employees are the common pleasantries of “how are you” or some variation of that.

Tonight one of the employees was going around asking if people were done with their dishes and cups (something I’ve never seen before – were they running low on dishes or did he just choose to do that when there wasn’t a lot going on behind the counter?) and near the end of him asking everyone with empty cups, a girl spilt her drink. He offered to clean it up. She said she would. He insisted on cleaning up the puddle of coffee (luckily the cup was plastic). She insisted again and headed to the front to get napkins and mopped up the mess herself.

Ethnography’s effect on me
Dr. Gill mentioned that we should also note the effect the Ethnography has had on me.

Coffee Effect
I’ve never been much for coffee before this project. I don’t drink soft drinks, so the only caffeine I get is from tea. Usually coffee is my secret weapon: when I need to pull a late-nighter, I drink a cup of coffee and I’m good for another 4-5 hours. However, I’ve grown to like coffee a little more as a result of this Ethnography. I haven’t had to pull too many late-nighters where coffee was warranted (usually a deadline is all I need to keep me awake) so I’m not sure if drinking more coffee has increased my caffeine tolerance or not.

Public Study Spot Effect
I’m more of a study-at-home type. Other than the impulse to check my email often, I can usually ignore common distractions in the home. I thought I would be more distracted in a public environment, but even with the coffee shop as busy as it often is, I found it easy to focus the few times that I came there solely to study or work with my group. Even with the coffee shop as busy as it was near the end of my group meeting, I found it easy to focus. While I still prefer working at home, I think I might come to the coffee shop occasionally or at least go through the drive-thru to grab a java shake.

Ethnography effect
I’ve also noticed that I watch people more in other environments outside of Sweet Eugene’s. I recently went to a restaurant in downtown Bryan and found myself watching everyone’s interactions – some were impressed with the quality of the food, others surprised by the price, and some surprised by the selection – and I could identify how many were first-time customers and how many had come before. Even while shopping I note people and what they’re doing – like at Target when I saw a lady on her cell phone and carrying a baby. Usually I wouldn’t pay attention when I passed but she was angry and chewing out her husband for not coming home and going to some lake instead.

Full Book Blog: Emotional Design

We only read the first three chapters, so here is the full blog on those.

Summary
The first chapter discusses why attractive things work better. Norman explains how emotions help a person make decisions and how happiness increases thought processes and encourages creative thinking. Tying this into to design, attractive design allows for a more enjoyable experience and helps people figure things out. Norman also discusses the three levels of processing: visceral (the automatic layer), behavioral (everyday behavior layer) and reflective (contemplative layer). He then discusses how the three levels interact with each other and how they relate to focus and creativity.

The second chapter discusses how the different levels of processing work within a design and how they work with and against each other. As stated in the chapter, visceral design is about the initial impact of the product, behavioral about the use and experience, and reflective about understanding, reasoning and interpreting. Norman also discusses the importance of memories, how objects evoke memories and how these memories reflect us. He concludes the chapter by discussing the design of products when taking the three levels of processing into account. He discusses the goals of a product, its fashion and how brands are informative.

Chapter 3 discusses the three levels of design. Visceral design focuses on physical features such as look, feel and sound and is about initial reactions. Behavioral design focuses on function, understandability, usability and physical feel with function being the most important. Reflective design focuses on the meaning of the product, the message the product gives and the culture. Norman also presents a case study on the national football league headset and concludes by comparing the process of design by committee and the process of design by the individual.

Discussion
While I enjoyed the ideas presented in the first three chapters, Norman did start to repeat himself, so I’m glad we did not have to read this entire book. The emotional design Norman describes is an important aspect that I think is oftentimes overlooked.

Norman gives plenty of good examples from automobiles to watches to bottled water to help explain the differences between the three levels of design. I enjoyed the part in chapter 3 about how stores will put the most often bought items at the back of the store. I have pondered over this before, but now I’ll probably always be thinking about it when I visit a new store. I also thought the Xbox advertisement was funny in chapter 2, and I enjoyed the way Norman analyzed it.

Paper Reading #18: Speeding pointing in tiled widgets: understanding the effects of target expansion and misprediction

Comments
Alyssa Nabors
Evin Schuchardt

Reference Information
Title: Speeding pointing in tiled widgets: understanding the effects of target expansion and misprediction
Authors: Jaime Ruiz, Edward Lank
Presentation Venue: IUI 2010: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 7-10, 2009; Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper discusses a technique to improve pointing with a mouse, trackball, stylus, etc. While the researchers list several possible techniques to improve performance, they focus on target expansion, which basically means that the target the person means to click on expands to make it easier to select. This isn’t as useful when the targets are in a dense arrangement, so the researchers also focus on a technique for predicting where a user will select in real time. A technique described in the paper is kinematic endpoint prediction (KEP), which “uses the motion profile of a user to define a region of interest on the display.” KEP is described in more detail in other papers referenced in this paper.

Image from paper: Unexpanded widget (top); expanded widget using displacement (bottom)

The researchers perform two experiments. In the first experiment, they test to see if it is possible to expand a certain set of targets that are predicted to be selected and whether target displacement is acceptable. Target displacement refers to targets near the expanded targets shifting their positions to make room for the expanded target. They presented users with a random set of pointing tasks with some tasks using expansion with a simulated predictor said to be highly accurate and some using no expansion. There were seven possible tiles to select.

In the second experiment they used a similar procedure except they used the KEP algorithm to predict which targets should be expanded and tiled the entire screen with targets rather than just displaying seven targets.

Through their experiments they prove that target expansion does improve pointing and selecting performance if there is a small set of targets. They also find that whatever technique is used to predict where a user will select must have an accuracy greater than 56.5 percent. They also determined that there was a limit to how much a target should shift when expanded.

Discussion
Overall this was an interesting paper. Their experiments were thoroughly explained and their findings made sense. I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic. The researchers explain how improving pointing performance by even a small margin can greatly improve a user’s productivity with graphical user interfaces. At least when it comes to programs like Microsoft Word, I don’t think something like this would be useful. Having the most frequently used buttons along the top and using shortcuts seems sufficient to me.

Future work that the researchers mention include improving the accuracy of the KEP algorithm, using different expansion strategies and exploring other techniques to improve pointing performance.

Book Reading #42: Coming of Age in Samoa

 Appendix III
Summary
Appendix III discusses Samoa and how it was when this book was published. Mead describes the geography, housing, clothing, some of the small household changes that have taken place as a result of outside influence and the interaction with the Naval Government. She discusses schooling and how the blending different European beliefs and mechanical devices have created a kind of flexibility within the culture.

Mead also discusses how Samoa is different from the Samoa “before white influence.” She concludes by pointing out that the Samoans have benefited from outside influences – doing away with things such as war, blood revenge, etc. – without negative effects. Mead also writes that the Samoans have taken parts from our culture that made life more comfortable without losing their own ways and culture.

Discussion
This was a good section to read after having read the book. I found the comparison between Samoa before and after “white influence” to be interesting. I also liked reading about how they have incorporated different parts of our culture into theirs without fully losing sight of their own way of doing things.

Paper Reading #17: A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

Comments
 Luke Roberts
Evin Schuchardt

Reference Information
Title: A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students
Authors: Paul A. Gross, Micah S. Herstand, Jordana W. Hodges, Caitlin L. Kelleher
Presentation Venue: IUI 2010: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 7-10, 2009; Hong Kong, China

Summary
In this paper researchers discuss their work with Looking Glass, a system under development that allows people – particularly middle school aged students – learn programming skills through dragging graphical tiles and pop-up menus that allow them to create interactive 3D stories. They add to the Looking Glass system to allow users to reuse functionality from other preexisting programs. While a simple copy-and-paste of code will work for experienced programmers, their goal was to create a way for people who do not understand the code to still capture and reuse its functionality.

Taken from paper: a look at the user interface

To help users identify the part of the animation they want to use in their programmed animation, the researchers make use of a Time Slider and Scene Viewer to allow the user to select the proper start and end time of the animation visually, a Current Actions Pane that displays all methods being executed for a specific character at a selected time and a Code Viewer Pane to allow the user to view the appropriate code. They provide the user with a wizard-style interface to help the user actually extract and integrate the action into their own animation. With this process a user can take an action – say a man kicking a scientist down – and reuse the code for that action to make a kid kick down a samurai.

The researchers also discuss errors that could arise if the 3D objects are of different sizes or different subparts. They resolve these issues during copying by having the user reference subparts by name and choose more subparts if there is no match (like when one character wears a hat but another does not – the user would be asked to give the character a hat).

They did a user study with 47 students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. They demonstrated the basic uses of the system and provided the students with three example programs. When asked questions, they suggested programs from an example library to encourage students to learn from the code and reuse the code. They also had the students break up into groups and show their animations to further encourage students to reuse animations.

Through their results they discovered that the program encouraged students to show each other how they did different animations. 77% of the actions used in the animation contained more than five lines of code, which the researchers consider non-trivial functionality. They also had the students take a programming quiz at the end of the study and found that students who made changes to the code of actions – rather than just copying them – performed better on the tests. Overall they found that their system helped students successfully select and integrate code.

Discussion
I really enjoyed reading about this system. It’s a neat way to introduce programming at a young age. It kind of reminds me of RPG Maker, which I remember playing with a lot during middle school. Allowing the student to see both a visual representation of their code and the actual code being used is a great way to help people new to coding understand how things work.

Future work that the researchers mention is creating a tutorial to help teach students how to build the code for an action. They are also thinking about creating a system that allows for a student to watch actions while they are recorded. This way when a user sees an action they want, they can stop the video and automatically begin the reuse process without have to go through the selection process.

Ethnography Results Week 7

Sweet Eugene’s House of Java
Friday March 25, 2011
8:30-10:30pm

Quantitative
Totals for the evening:
Order drink to go: ? (I wasn’t in a good place to view this)
On Computer: 27
Reading book/ doing homework: 15 (defined as having book and/or spiral and pencil)
Working with computer and book: 4
Visiting: 9 (some of these appeared to have the intention of studying)
Main goal to eat: 9  (these people read a book or used their computer until food arrived. Then they ate and left)
Eating and visiting: 2 (they were eating but that did not appear to be the main goal based on how long they stuck around afterwards)
Playing cards: 4

The front part of the place seemed to be more popular than the back. I sat in the back, so I didn’t have the best view of the front.

Qualitative

Image taken from their Facebook Page

My location
I started out in the middle area where I sat for the first few weeks, but then I moved to an available outlet when I spotted one. Then I was in the spot at the very back of the coffee shop next to the back exit where I’ve been sitting the last few weeks. I couldn’t see the front very easily. I also wasn’t in the best spot to watch a great number of people without looking obvious.

The Employees
I didn’t recognize the employees (one guy and one girl) this time. One guy kept getting the girl to do all the work while he worked the register. The girl complained openly about how she shouldn’t be doing it because she was sick. I gave her a concerned look because she was saying this as she made my java shake. Then she quickly said, “I’m not sick. I’m just sick of him.” Hmm…

The customers
With this being the seventh week, I’d say most of the patterns in the space have been documented. While I did see four people playing cards again, which I have only seen twice, the typical reasons for coming to Sweet Eugene’s seem to be for studying and working in groups. A few come to visit and even a few for the soul purpose of eating, but the great majority that I see – at least in the evenings – are doing some type of school work.

The general patterns for people coming in fall into two main categories. They come in, head for the front to order and then seek out a seat or they come in, stake out their seat by putting their bags down and then go order. Typically people with computers first seek out tables along the walls where the outlets are and a lot of people check out the back room with all the Mona Lisa paintings first.

It’s not unusual for people to clean off a table so they can sit there, and once a dirty dish appears on a table, the table tends to become the designated dirty dishes table until an employee comes around to clean. I’d estimate that about half of the customers take their dishes to the front while the others either leave them on their table or move them to the “designated dirty dishes table.” My estimation is just that: an estimation. I haven’t been collecting quantitative data on that though it would be worthwhile in future studies.

Typically the place is quiet enough that no one seems bothered. That’s not to say that there isn’t noise. People visiting and working in groups talk a lot, but it’s not very often that the noise gets so loud as to distract/bother people.

In general most people respect the rule of not bringing in outside food though I have noticed a few groups over the weeks that have brought in a drink or Chick-fil-A. And typically every person that comes in buys something – usually it’s a drink.

Book Reading #41: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 2
Summary
The second chapter continues the discussion of the first chapter, but doesn’t spend as much of the chapter on vision. The focus is on how the meanings we pick up on in what we see/hear are more important than the actual details of a scene. As in the first chapter, Hallinan gives many examples such as slip-of-the-tongue errors, recalling part of something (like a name) but not all of it and how we forget passwords and hiding places. At the end of the chapter Hallinan relates the discussion to crime and the process of identifying suspects.

Discussion
The penny test provided in this chapter is a common one but a great example of how details aren’t stored well in memory. An interesting piece of advice given in this chapter is that we should come up with our passwords and hiding places quickly. Otherwise, we won’t remember it in the future because we had to figure it out first. I also thought the story of June Siler and Robert Wilson was an interesting one.

Chapter 3
Summary
Chapter 3 focuses on how we consider things. Hallinan begins with an example about people running for election and how voters make quick decisions based off of how competent a candidate looks. He gave another example of how people drinking wine rated the $90 wine as tasting the best when it was the same as the $10 wine – their brains even showed more evidence of being happy with the more expensive wine. Price is not the only thing that plays a part in this. The color of objects and a person’s memory of regret also play a role in people’s choices and consequently their mistakes. The author states that all of these examples are given to help readers better understand sources of mistakes.

Discussion
I like how Hallinan uses so many examples throughout each chapter. One example I especially liked in this chapter was the wine example. It reminded me of peanut butter and how I always used to buy the Peter Pan Peanut butter. When that salmonella problem occurred a few years back, both the Peter Pan Peanut butter and the cheaper off brand were recalled. On the news they said both were processed in the same facility. It made me think about how similar (if not exact) the products are. Now I buy a lot more off-brand products.

Book Reading #40: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 14
Summary
The final chapter of the book mainly focuses on the education of the youth in America. Mead again brings up the point about how boys and girls have to make many decisions at a young age and face conflicting standards. Mead discusses how people are blinded by the American theory of endless possibilities and thus feel overwhelmed by the choices available to them even when there are not as many as they think there are. The author also brings up the family and how parents raise their daughters in ways that conflict with standards outside of the home.

Mead concludes by explaining how in a civilization where there are so many choices and so many ways of doing things, parents must teach their children how to think, not what to think.

Discussion
While reading this last chapter I had to keep in mind when this book was written. While I can draw parallels between some of the stuff she writes and while some of it does still apply even now, some of it was a little out dated (as to be expected from a book originally published in 1930). Still, she makes some good points. I especially liked how she said, “The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” This is very important, and Mead put it very well in such few words.

Book Reading #39: Why We Make Mistakes

Introduction
Summary
As the title to this beginning chapter suggests, it introduces the ideas that are to be explored throughout the book. The author begins by describing mistakes and explains how much of the world around us is designed in such a way as to expect us to see things clearer and remember things better than we actually do. The author also defines “mistake” and outlines some of the topics to be discussed in the book: similar mistakes that happen, what a person can do to make fewer errors and understanding the role of context.

Discussion
Seeing as how I read this Introduction after reading the first couple of chapters, I noticed how he picked certain things from the first two chapters to mention in the introduction. Something I thought was interesting that the author mentioned was how we, as students, tend to go with our first answer on a test even when it might be better to change it. The author explains how this is also the case with investors investing in stock. Another place in which I think it can hold true is in writing. Once I write a piece of fiction, it’s difficult to go back and change it. A lot of writers say the hardest part of the writing process is the rewrite.

Chapter 1
Summary
Chapter 1 focuses on vision and how we don’t always see as much as we think we do. The author, Joseph T. Hallinan, gives several examples through movie mistakes and the door experiment, an experiment in which a person asking for directions switches places with another person passing through and helping carry a door. The author also explains the beer-in-the-refrigerator problem and how people have a quitting threshold when searching for something.

Discussion
I really enjoyed this first chapter. I think it’s really important that people understand why they make the errors that they do – if only that could help us not make the errors so often. One part of the chapter I found interesting that I did not include in the summary has to do with how handedness predicts which direction a person will prefer. A piece of advice in this chapter states that we should look to the left to find the shortest lines.

Book Reading #38: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 13
Summary
This chapter presents a compare and contrast between the Samoan and American youth. Mead discusses the very different social environments between the two cultures. She discusses how American children have many more choices and double standards depending on who they are with. She discusses how much more the Samoan child knows about life, death and sex and how no Samoan child is spoiled. Another important point Mead makes has to do with strong feelings and the specialization of feeling. Samoans do not display these kinds of feelings to the same magnitude that Americans do. Mead also discusses education and how American children attend school and do work they cannot relate to their parents’ work, making the activities seem less useful. In contrast, Samoan children are put to work at an early age doing activities alongside the adults that visibly benefit the family/community.

Discussion
After all the readings we’ve done about the Samoan culture, it was interesting to read Mead’s analysis on the Samoan and American youths. I found the part about American children dreading school since they did not see its purpose to be an interesting part. I remember dreading school as a child but being much more interested in work at home where I could help my mom. Then my parents introduced me to money and started giving me money when I made the A-Honor Roll, and I finally found a purpose for school. :)

Full Book Blog: Obedience to Authority

Summary
In chapter 1 Stanley Milgram discusses obedience and sites the Nazi experimentation as an example of obedience gone bad. He discusses the goal of the experiment (to explore adults’ willingness to obey authority and under what circumstances they do and do not obey) and discusses possible explanations for obeying and disobeying.

Image from: Wikipedia

In chapter 2 Milgram writes about how he performed the study. He discusses  how they obtained participants, the location of the experiment, the procedure of the experiment, the learning task involved, the shock generator and instructions provided by the experimenter, the experimenter feedback, the feedback from the subject, the data they focused on and the interview and debriefing of the subject

In chapter 3 Milgram discusses the expected behavior and the predictions made by psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults with various jobs. They predicted that nearly all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter and that only a very small percentage would be expected to proceed to the strongest voltage.

In chapter 4 Milgram provides data and information about the effect of the proximity of the victim to the teacher (subject). In Experiment 1 the teacher got no feedback from the victim other than a pounding on the walls at 300 volts. In Experiment 2 vocal protests were used. In Experiment 3 the victim was placed in the same room as the teacher. In Experiment 4 the victim only got shocked when he put his hand on a shock plate. When the victim refused (at 150 volts) the teacher was ordered to force the victim to put his hand on the shock plate.

In chapter 5 Milgram presents the readers with information about several of the subjects. Milgram includes their observations of the subject as the experiment was performed, background information received during an interview after the experiment and information they gave in a survey months after the experiment.

In chapter 6 Milgram describes seven other experiments that he did to see how his results changed. Some of the variations in the experiments include changing the location of the experiment, trying the experiment with a new victim and experimenter, including women in the studies, using a contract, performing the study under a different name and allowing the subject to choose the shock level.

In chapter 7 Milgram provides data and information similar to what was presented in chapter 5 but about the subjects who participated in the experiments described in chapter 6. One of the subjects was from Germany, and at 210 volts she decided to stop. Milgram attributes this to her exposure to Nazi propaganda.

Chapter 8 provides information on six more experiments that Milgram performed. In these experiments he changed the position (whether the subject is giving, receiving or ordering the shock), status (whether the person is presented as an authority or ordinary man) and action (the conduct of the people in their positions) to see how his results would change.

In Chapter 9, Milgram discusses the effect of the group and discusses the difference between conformity and obedience. The main differences described are:
-Obedience to authority occurs within a hierarchy
-Conformity is imitation but obedience is not
-The prescription for actions is explicit in obedience but implicit in conformity
Milgram then describes two experiments performed in a group. In one there are three teachers (one of them being the subject) and the two actors that are teachers rebel. In the other experiment the subject does not do the shocking but performs other acts like asking the questions.

In chapter 10, the focus of the book changes to analyze the findings described in the first half of the book. Milgram looks deeper into the causes of obedience. In this chapter he defines the agentic state (the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes). He refers to this state as the keystone of their analysis.

In chapter 11 Milgram considers forces that impacted the subject before the experiment (the family structure, the institutional setting, and a reward system) and during the experiment (the perception of legitimate authority, the appearance of the authority figure, the lack of any competing authorities, and a visible link between the function of the authority and the commands being given). The agentic state is also further explored and its properties defined.

Chapter 12 focuses on strain and disobedience. Milgram discusses sources of strain, things that help to buffer the strain and how people address the issue of strain through avoidance, denial and subterfuges. He also discusses ways that people “blow off steam” from strain by verbally disagreeing with the authority, physically reacting through trembling and sweating and in some cases being disobedient by refusing to continue.

In chapter 13 Milgram considers a different theory about his experiments, aggression, and why it is erroneous to him. He discusses soldiers and a different experiment done by Buss and Berkowitz to investigate aggression.

In chapter 14 Milgram discusses the different assertions made against the findings of these experiments. The main assertions were:
-People in the study are the typical sort
-The subjects didn’t believe they were administering real shocks
-The findings cannot be applied outside the laboratory setting
Milgram addresses each of these in detail within the chapter.

In the final chapter Milgram relates his findings to the real world and discusses the Vietnam War. He includes a CBS interview with a Vietnam War soldier and relates the obedience in the war to the obedience he discovered in the lab.

Discussion
I had no idea Milgram performed so many experiments. He considered a lot more variables than I knew about. While I did appreciate how thorough he has been in his studies so far, it did get a little old since the results were all similar: people generally obey the authority to the point of “hurting” the learner. I also want to note that he was mainly watching for proof that we obey authority, and while I agree with the overall findings of the study, some of the stuff did start to sound bias. Going by what I’ve been taught, in many studies nowadays, they usually have researchers unrelated to the study perform it to avoid such bias, but that wasn’t an option here. On page 47 Milgram seemed almost to be forcing an answer out of a subject when he says, “He does not seem to grasp the concept. The interviewer simplifies the question. Finally the subject assigns major responsibility to the experimenter.” While I know they were trying to get the subject to discuss responsibility, I don’t know how hard they tried to lead him there.

Still, all the different experiments were interesting and well thought out. I’m curious to know how he decided which subjects to include in chapters 5 and 7.

I enjoyed the second-half of the book more than the first-half. While all his findings in the first half were interesting, I enjoyed reading more about the analysis and the discussion that arose as a result of the findings. I appreciate how thorough the book was. Milgram even included the opposing side and made good points against it. I also appreciated how he related his findings to the real world to give us an idea on a grander scale than just that of the laboratory. I also thought it was interesting that these experiments were repeated in so many other places like in South Africa, Rome and Australia.

Book Reading #37: Obedience to Authority

Chapters 9-15
Summary
In Chapter 9, Milgram discusses the effect of the group and discusses the difference between conformity and obedience. The main differences described are:
-Obedience to authority occurs within a hierarchy
-Conformity is imitation but obedience is not
-The prescription for actions is explicit in obedience but implicit in conformity
Milgram then describes two experiments performed in a group. In one there are three teachers (one of them being the subject) and the two actors that are teachers rebel. In the other experiment the subject does not do the shocking but performs other acts like asking the questions.

In chapter 10, the focus of the book changes to analyze the findings described in the first half of the book. Milgram looks deeper into the causes of obedience. In this chapter he defines the agentic state (the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes). He refers to this state as the keystone of their analysis.

In chapter 11 Milgram considers forces that impacted the subject before the experiment (the family structure, the institutional setting, and a reward system) and during the experiment (the perception of legitimate authority, the appearance of the authority figure, the lack of any competing authorities, and a visible link between the function of the authority and the commands being given). The agentic state is also further explored and its properties defined.

Chapter 12 focuses on strain and disobedience. Milgram discusses sources of strain, things that help to buffer the strain and how people address the issue of strain through avoidance, denial and subterfuges. He also discusses ways that people “blow off steam” from strain by verbally disagreeing with the authority, physically reacting through trembling and sweating and in some cases being disobedient by refusing to continue.

In chapter 13 Milgram considers a different theory about his experiments, aggression, and why it is erroneous to him. He discusses soldiers and a different experiment done by Buss and Berkowitz to investigate aggression.

In chapter 14 Milgram discusses the different assertions made against the findings of these experiments. The main assertions were:
-People in the study are the typical sort
-The subjects didn’t believe they were administering real shocks
-The findings cannot be applied outside the laboratory setting
Milgram addresses each of these in detail within the chapter.

In the final chapter Milgram relates his findings to the real world and discusses the Vietnam War. He includes a CBS interview with a Vietnam War soldier and relates the obedience in the war to the obedience he discovered in the lab.

Discussion
I enjoyed the second-half of the book more than the first-half. While all his findings in the first half were interesting, I enjoyed reading more about the analysis and the discussion that arose as a result of the findings. I appreciate how thorough the book was. Milgram even included the opposing side and made good points against it. I also appreciated how he related his findings to the real world to give us an idea on a grander scale than just that of the laboratory. I also thought it was interesting that these experiments were repeated in so many other places like in South Africa, Rome and Australia.

Paper Reading #16: Using fNIRS brain sensing in realistic HCI settings: experiments and guidelines

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Using fNIRS brain sensing in realistic HCI settings: experiments and guidelines
Authors: Erin Treacy Solovey, Audrey Girouard, Krysta Chauncey, Leanne M. Hirshfield, Angelo Sassaroli, Feng Zheng, Sergio Fantini , Robert J.K. Jacob
Presentation Venue: UIST 2009: 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology; October 4-7, 2009; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
This paper explores the idea of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in HCI laboratory settings. The researchers believe that with added information collected from brain scanning and imaging, researchers could improve their evaluation process and design interfaces that use cognitive state information as input.

The researchers describe several sources of noise that may be present during fNIRS: head movement, facial movement, ambient light, ambient noise, muscle movement, respiration and heartbeat. These potential sources of noise are the focus of the paper.

Through five experiments the researchers test to see how problematic it would be for fNIRS when the user moves his head, makes facial expressions, uses a keyboard and uses a mouse. In each experiment they have the user do the same cognitive task to measure cognitive state information. The user has to recall a 7-digit number. The apparatus they used for the fNIRS was two probes attached to the forehead.

Image taken from paper: The user is wearing a fNIRS probe

In the first experiment they assured that they could tell – based off of the scan – that they could identify the point where the user does the cognitive task. In the second experiment they tested keyboard input by having the user type randomly on the keyboard for fifteen seconds, rest for fifteen seconds, type for fifteen more seconds while the number appears, recite the number and then rest again. They found that typing is an acceptable form of interaction when using fNIRS. While typing can be picked up by the scan, they can still identify when the user does the cognitive task based on the scan.

In the third experiment they tested mouse input. It was very similar to the second experiment except rather than typing, the user was required to move the mouse cursor into a square and click. Then the square would move and the user would move the cursor inside it and click again. They found that clicking is also acceptable but only in controlled experiments where the user is clicking during the resting times as well. If the user does not click during the resting times, they cannot identify the resting points and cognitive thinking points on the scan.

In the fourth experiment they tested head movement. The process was similar to the experiments already described. Instead of typing or clicking, the user moved his head up and down. The results were similar to clicking. The user has to move his head during resting times and during the cognitive task for them to be able to identify the point of the cognitive task. In the final experiment they tested facial movement by having the user frown during the test. They found that frowning data can always be distinguished from non-frowning data and that frowning should be avoided during experiments.

At the end of the paper the researchers suggest ways to avoid interference with the fNIRS through chin rests, filter algorithms and isolating caps.

Discussion
While this paper was more of a preliminary one to direct future studies involving fNIRS, the material was presented well and the experiments thoroughly explained. I think researchers interested in this area will find this paper useful as they incorporate fNIRS into HCI areas. I especially liked that they gave suggestions for the problem areas they discovered.

An area of future study mentioned in the paper would be for them to do these experiments in more realistic settings and have the users do more realistic activities like type real words and sentences rather than typing randomly. They also explain that if they could create a database of these different sources of noise and what the noise looks like on the scan, they could devise algorithms to help remove the noise.

Book Reading #36: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 12
Summary
This chapter discusses what the older men and women do in the village. Mead discusses the married couple and how choosing whether to live in the husband’s or wife’s family’s house has more effect on the man than it does the woman. Mead also explains how there is little conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law or father-in-law and son-in-law. The elders are due their respect.

Mead describes the married women of age twenty to thirty as busy and cheerful. However the men are described as striving for titles and acquiring reputations. It is a more difficult time for them. Mead also tells of how when a man reaches the age of fifty-five or sixty, his title is taken from him and given to another younger man. Women between the age of forty-five and fifty-five are described as doing the hardest work of the village.

Discussion
In every chapter we seem to see major differences between this culture and our own – as to be expected – and this chapter is no different. I found it interesting how Mead described older women as being the “mistress of housebound crafts” while the older men are described as being able to tell the lore of fishing but not the technique. I also found it interesting that there is little to no friction between in-laws. The elders simply get the respect they deserve.

Book Reading #35: Obedience to Authority

Chapters 1-8
Summary
In chapter 1 Stanley Milgram discusses obedience and sites the Nazi experimentation as an example of obedience gone bad. He discusses the goal of the experiment (to explore adults’ willingness to obey authority and under what circumstances they do and do not obey) and discusses possible explanations for obeying and disobeying.

In chapter 2 Milgram writes about how he performed the study. He discusses  how they obtained participants, the location of the experiment, the procedure of the experiment, the learning task involved, the shock generator and instructions provided by the experimenter, the experimenter feedback, the feedback from the subject, the data they focused on and the interview and debriefing of the subject

In chapter 3 Milgram discusses the expected behavior and the predictions made by psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults with various jobs. They predicted that nearly all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter and that only a very small percentage would be expected to proceed to the strongest voltage.

In chapter 4 Milgram provides data and information about the effect of the proximity of the victim to the teacher (subject). In Experiment 1 the teacher got no feedback from the victim other than a pounding on the walls at 300 volts. In Experiment 2 vocal protests were used. In Experiment 3 the victim was placed in the same room as the teacher. In Experiment 4 the victim only got shocked when he put his hand on a shock plate. When the victim refused (at 150 volts) the teacher was ordered to force the victim to put his hand on the shock plate.

In chapter 5 Milgram presents the readers with information about several of the subjects. Milgram includes their observations of the subject as the experiment was performed, background information received during an interview after the experiment and information they gave in a survey months after the experiment.

In chapter 6 Milgram describes seven other experiments that he did to see how his results changed. Some of the variations in the experiments include changing the location of the experiment, trying the experiment with a new victim and experimenter, including women in the studies, using a contract, performing the study under a different name and allowing the subject to choose the shock level.

In chapter 7 Milgram provides data and information similar to what was presented in chapter 5 but about the subjects who participated in the experiments described in chapter 6. One of the subjects was from Germany, and at 210 volts she decided to stop. Milgram attributes this to her exposure to Nazi propaganda.

Chapter 8 provides information on six more experiments that Milgram performed. In these experiments he changed the position (whether the subject is giving, receiving or ordering the shock), status (whether the person is presented as an authority or ordinary man) and action (the conduct of the people in their positions) to see how his results would change.

Discussion
I had no idea Milgram performed so many experiments. He considered a lot more variables than I knew about. While I did appreciate how thorough he has been in his studies so far, it did get a little old since the results were all similar: people generally obey the authority to the point of “hurting” the learner. I also want to note that he was mainly watching for proof that we obey authority, and while I agree with the overall findings of the study, some of the stuff did start to sound bias. Going by what I’ve been taught, in many studies nowadays, they usually have researchers unrelated to the study perform it to avoid such bias, but that wasn’t an option here. On page 47 Milgram seemed almost to be forcing an answer out of a subject when he says, “He does not seem to grasp the concept. The interviewer simplifies the question. Finally the subject assigns major responsibility to the experimenter.” While I know they were trying to get the subject to discuss responsibility, I don’t know how hard they tried to lead him there.

Still, all the different experiments were interesting and well thought out. I’m curious to know how he decided which subjects to include in chapters 5 and 7.

Paper Reading #15: Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Shena Hoffman

Reference Information
Title: Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops
Authors: Otmar Hilliges, Shahram Izadi, Andrew D. Wilson, Steve Hodges, Armando Garcia-Mendoza, Andreas Butz
Presentation Venue: UIST 2009: 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology; October 4-7, 2009; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
In this paper the researchers present a way to improve interaction with tabletops by allowing users to work above the surface to intuitively manipulate digital content in three dimensions.

In their first system they use a diffuser to extend the input space so that it can recognize what the users are gesturing. To detect a “pinching” gesture (used to pick objects up), they use an algorithm that identifies the hole that is formed by the thumb and pointer finger touching. The user can then pick up and manipulate the location and angle of the object. The algorithm also calculates the depth of the user’s hand based on the hole formed by the thumb and pointer finger.

They also describe a shadow-based technique and two ways to implement it. In the first they use a shadow-mapping technique that is not described in detail. In the second, more successful shadow-based technique they generated a shadow map for all the virtual objects and stored each pixel’s z-value to be compared when determining how a user is manipulating an object. A benefit to a shadow-based technique that is mentioned in the paper is that they provide users with a natural feedback mechanism.

While they have not done a formal user study, the authors explain that they have presented their system to many colleagues. Based on the results from their colleagues, the researchers found that without the shadows, the users had trouble learning how to work the system on their own. They also noticed that many users wanted to grab the objects, but grabbing was not supported by their system.

Image taken from paper

To address some of the issues presented by their colleagues, the researchers also include information on how they worked to improve the system to include more degrees of freedom in moving objects and a way for the system to recognize grasping objects with all the fingers rather than just “pinching” an object.

Discussion
I think finding ways to improve tabletop interactions is a good idea. The ideas they presented seem well thought out and interesting, but I did find it odd they hadn’t done a true user study and instead said they have demonstrated their “prototype to hundreds of colleagues” and thus “had the opportunity to observe hundreds of users interacting with their system.” Still, they did seem to get very good feedback, which helped them improve upon their system. In future studies, I think it would be interesting to see how this can be applied in different domains like gaming and computer-aided design.

Ethnography Results Week 6

Sweet Eugene’s House of Java

Thursday March 10, 2011
7:00-9:00pm

Quantitative
Totals for the evening:
Order drink to go: ? (I wasn’t in a good place to view this)
On Computer: 25
Reading book/ doing homework: 6 (defined as having book and/or spiral and pencil)
Working with computer and book: 2
Visiting: 14 (some of these appeared to have the intention of studying)
Main goal to eat:  2(these people read a book or used their computer until food arrived. Then they ate and left)
Eating and visiting: 2 (they were eating but that did not appear to be the main goal based on how long they stuck around afterwards)

Collected times for people who left (x means I don’t know when they arrived):
X – 7:27 (2 studying)
X – 7:44 (2 visiting)
X – 8:11 (2 studying – 1 was a tutor)
X – 8:15 (1 on computer)
7:08 – 7:44 (2 visiting)
7:07 – 8:10 (3 watching youtube videos)

 (Many other people came in or were already there when I started and did not leave before me. There were not as many people as there had been during week 5, but it was a fairly busy evening.)

Qualitative

My location
My fiancé, Jesse, and I couldn’t find a place near an outlet and a lot of the tables were dirty, so we ended up sitting on a couch until we spotted two girls beside an outlet preparing to leave. Jesse got some napkins and cleaned off the table the best he could. This evening was probably the dirtiest we had ever seen the place.

Once we moved to the outlet, we were in a spot at the very back of the coffee shop next to the back exit (the same spot as last week).

The Employees
As already mentioned the place was dirtier than usual. There were dirty dishes and trash on a coffee table in front of me, on tables to my right and left, piled along the bar at the window and on at least three different tables in the other rooms. An employee did come and clean but not until almost 9:00, meaning many of the dirty dishes sat around for 2+ hours.

The customers
To Clean or Not to Clean
While ordering drinks, I noticed a girl who came and hesitantly put her plates beside the cash register at the front.

All the dirty cups and plates on several different tables seemed to encourage customers to add their dirty dishes to the pile. The two women who were at the table we later claimed even pushed dishes aside at a table already stacked with dishes to make room for their cups.

I noted at least two people besides Jesse who cleaned off a table so that they could use it.

A place to watch music videos?
Three girls came in and sat on a couch at about the time we arrived and seemed to be watching youtube videos the entire hour that they were there.

Eating Chick-fil-A

Image from: constructbirmingham.wordpress.com

A guy in a suit and a girl sat near us with their Chick-fil-A bag. One had a coffee. I’m not sure whether they were discreet with their Chick-fil-A bag up at the front or not, but they were very open about it in the back room where we were even though there are signs requesting that we not bring in outside food or drink.

Differences from last week
The place was pretty busy and much dirtier than I have seen it before. This was the first time I saw people openly eating food they bought somewhere else.

Full Book Blog: Opening Skinner’s Box

Summary
The first chapter is mainly devoted to B. F. Skinner, his work, and the impact it had on people. The author, Lauren Slater, discusses Skinner’s early days studying frog reflexes, the days when he worked with variable schedules of reinforcement and his time later on when he took care of his daughters and taught their dog to play hide-and-seek with them.

In the second chapter Lauren Slater discusses Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and its implications. She begins with a narrative describing what the experiment was like for the subject: how they slowly increased the voltage of a shock they gave each time a person in another room gave a wrong answer and how that person screamed in pain. After the experiment, it was found that 62-65% of people when faced with an authority, would follow orders to the point of delivering a lethal shock to another person.

Chapter 3 discusses David Rosenhan’s test in which he and eight friends when to various mental institutions, got admitted by saying they heard a voice that said “thud” and then acted normal once in the ward. He discusses how the staff attributed all of his normal behaviors to his paranoid schizophrenic diagnosis. Slater then tells of how people reacted to Rosenhan’s article about the matter. She also discusses the still prominent questions in regards to psychiatry and how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders evolved as a result of Rosenhan’s study.

Chapter 4 discusses the bystander effect and the phenomenon of diffusion of responsibility. It tells the story of Kitty Genovese and then explains the studies that followed by Darley and Latane.

In chapter 5 Slater discusses Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. Slater describes some of Festinger’s experiments including his observation of those who believed a flood would come on December 21, 1954 and an experiment involving having people lie for either $1 or $20. A large portion of the chapter focuses on mother named Linda Santo whose daughter she claims to be a saint that God has chosen to be a victim soul that takes on the pain of others.

Chapter 6 is about Harry Harlow and the research he did with rhesus macaque monkeys to explore the psychology of attachment. Slater begins by telling of Harlow’s younger years and his lack of love growing up. Then Slater discusses the different studies he did.

Chapter 7 explores the work of Bruce Alexander and his studies on rats when researching the effect of one’s social, physical and psychological life on one’s addiction to drugs. After putting sixteen rats in a caged environment and sixteen rats in a “rat park,” Alexander exposed them both to morphine. What Alexander found was that the rats in the rat park chose drinking normal water over the morphine-laced water while the cramped, caged rats preferred the morphine-laced water.

Chapter 8 explores the false memory experiments done by Elizabeth Loftus. With her different studies she was able to implant false memories in her subjects and observe how memories could be changed over time or with some convincing.

Chapter 9 focuses on Eric Kandel’s research with memory. He discovered that the neurons grew stronger when an electrochemical signal reinforced the relationship. He also discovered CREB and the CREB repressor. CREB is a molecule in the brain that “switches on” the genes that produce the proteins that make memories.

The final chapter discusses psychosurgery and Antonio Egas Moniz, the father of psychosurgery. Slater discusses his early research and the results of some of the first surgeries in which he injected alcohol into the brain to destroy nerve tissue.

Discussion
This book was a very enjoyable read. I learned about many of these experiments in one of my psychology classes, but I enjoyed how in depth Slater went into the different experiments. For example, I’d never heard about the rumors regarding Skinner and his daughter being kept in a box or how Harlow actually had some of the cloth surrogate mothers stab the baby monkeys in his later studies.

One of my favorite chapters was chapter 3. It was very interesting to see how easy it was to get admitted to a mental institution back in the day and how easy it still is to get prescription drugs. I also like how in the final chapter, Slater ties this together by saying how doctors who prescribe Prozac are like Moniz because they don’t know exactly how it works but want to help people. I also liked chapter 8, which explored the idea of false memories.

Psychology is such an interesting field that has so much yet to be discovered and fully understood. This was an interesting book that I looked forward to reading each week.

Ethnography Results Week 5

Sweet Eugene’s House of Java

Friday March 4, 2011
9:00-11:00pm

Quantitative
Totals for the evening:
I noticed only 2-3 people who fit into the older age group. The rest appeared to be college students.
Order drink to go: ? (I wasn’t in a good place to view this)
On Computer: 17
Reading book/ doing homework: 8 (defined as having book and/or spiral and pencil)
Working with computer and book: 7
Visiting: 19 (some of these appeared to have the intention of studying)
Main goal to eat: 6  (these people read a book or used their computer until food arrived. Then they ate and left)
Eating and visiting: 2 (they were eating but that did not appear to be the main goal based on how long they stuck around afterwards)
Playing cards: 4

Collected times for people who left (x means I don’t know when they arrived):
X – 10:00 (2 people eating)
X – 10:00 (2 people eating)
X – 10:18 (4 visiting)

 (A LOT of other people came in or were already there when I started and did not leave before me. I’d say 30+ people who were there at 9:00 were still there at 11:00. It was also harder to pinpoint when other groups left due to my location.)

Qualitative 

Image taken from campaignkerusso.org

My location
I was in a spot at the very back of the coffee shop next to the back exit. I couldn’t see the front very easily, so my results were a little different this week. I also wasn’t in the best spot to watch a great number of people without looking obvious.

The Employees
This time there was only one employee manning the counter when I ordered my drink. I’ve noticed the employees haven’t asked me if I want my drink in a glass since Week 1. It seems most people get plastic cups now unless they’re getting a hot coffee. I wonder if this is to cut back on cleaning.

The Experience
I sat in a new spot this week and began the evening by working with my group on the second project. It was the first time I was at Sweet Eugene’s experiencing the environment as a study environment rather than a people-watching environment.  The experience was actually fairly productive. Paola pointed out that the lighting was a little bad for working in a notebook, which I totally agree with. I probably wouldn’t go to Sweet Eugene’s to read unless I was confident I could find a table next to one of the brighter lamps. We also had to clean off a table to get a table near an outlet. Something else I noted was that the Internet would slow down periodically throughout the night – perhaps because of all the people with computers?

The customers
Sticking around for a long time
Too many people to recall stuck around for a long time, many of which were there before I started observing and did not leave until sometime after me. I also fell into this category of people sticking around for a long time. I met with Alyssa and Paola for three hours before doing my ethnography for two.

Trusting Customers
This week was the first week in which I noticed a girl hesitating to leave her bag and purse unattended. The guy who was with her said, “You can bring it with you if you want.” She decided to leave it.

Using Internet from the car
I noticed one guy sitting out front in his car with a laptop in his lap from 10:15-10:37. The guy in the passenger seat went inside, ordered a drink and came back out around 10:30.

Playing Cards
I also noticed a group of 4 playing cards up near the front. I was really excited to realize that I knew one of the guys. I believe he goes to Sweet Eugene’s fairly often, and he has agreed to let me interview him. I’ll likely include that in next week’s results.

Differences from last week
There were a lot more people here than I had seen before. The place was packed to the point that a couple sat at the bar seats in the middle of the shop where I have never seen people sit before.

Paper Reading #14: Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction

Comments
Shena Hoffman -http://csce436-hoffmann.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-14-eden-supporting-home.html
Vince Kocks - http://vincehci.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-14-sensing-foot-gestures.html

Reference Information
Title: Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction
Authors: Shaun K. Kane, Daniel Avrahami, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Beverly Harrison, Adam D. Rea, Matthai Philipose, Anthony LaMarca
Presentation Venue: UIST 2010: 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology; October 4-7, 2009; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
In this paper the researchers discuss Bonfire, a mobile computer system that projects an interactive display on either side of the computer through the use of two projectors and cameras mounted on a laptop. Bonfire can respond to many things in its views. It can copy a picture from a textbook onto the computer, recognize when the user places certain objects down in its view (like headphones or food) and react appropriately to the objects (pause a song until the head phones are picked back up or calculate the user’s caloric intake).

The interactions can be broken down into two main categories: explicit interactions where the user puts an object in Bonfire’s view to use the object in some way, and implicit interactions where the system collects and reports data about the user based on the objects it sees. Bonfire can also provide the user with more screen space by display images or other information on the projected views. However, the focus is on images, because text is not well represented with the projectors.

To identify the objects in its view, Bonfire captures an image of the tabletop when it starts up and identifies the space as the background. To identify objects it uses an object recognition algorithm that employs color histogram matching. When Bonfire cannot recognize an object, it includes it in the background but keeps a list of these objects so that the user can use them if he desires.

Being an interactive system, Bonfire tracks the motion of the user’s fingers by first identifying the user’s skin color at startup, detecting that color as part of the hand during interaction and then identifying the user’s fingers through geometric features described in a previous work. The system supports tapping, dragging, crossing and flicking.

Image taken from the paper: Picture of the Bonfire set up

Discussion
I liked how this paper was presented. Within the first couple of pages the authors provided the readers with a scenario of a girl using her laptop at a coffee shop to help the readers better understand the system. Further on in the paper they provided many more examples on how Bonfire works. They also estimated what the price of the projectors will be by the time the product is in production ($400-$500), which is something I haven’t seen before in a paper.

While I do think this system would have a lot of great uses, I’m not so sure it will be widely used due to how large the system is and how expensive the projectors will be. However, I do like where they’re going with this system. I think Bonfire would be a great study aide and really useful for people with netbooks who need more space.

The researchers mention that for future works they would like to try using more cameras to better see what the user does. They would also like to enhance the system so that multiple people can work together through the system and have uses for overlapping camera and projector views.

Book Reading #34: Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 10
Summary
This final chapter discusses psychosurgery and Antonio Egas Moniz, the father of psychosurgery. Slater discusses his early research and the results of some of the first surgeries in which he injected alcohol into the brain to destroy nerve tissue. In many cases his experiments were described as successes but many point out that he had a poor follow-up.

Slater later discusses Charlie Newitz who goes through with the surgery after having no success with psychiatric medications. Afterwards, he says the OCD is gone but that he feels a little low. He even says he might go back to have another surgery if the depression doesn’t leave him.

Slater also compares psychosurgery to medications and how with Prozac, no one really knows how or where Prozac operates in the brain. Slater says doctors that prescribe Prozac are acting like Moniz since they don’t know exactly how it works but want to help people.

Discussion
I’m not sure where I stand with psychosurgery. I know very little about it other than what I have just read in this book. It is unsettling to me to imagine doctors cutting out a small portion of the brain. However, I am also not a big fan of psychiatric medications or any medications for that matter, so I totally agreed with what Slater said about medications. I especially liked when she wrote, “Drugs are like oil spills; they leak everywhere, and washed up on shore are the slick black birds, the insomnia and sweats.”

Book Reading #33: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 11
Summary
This chapter focuses on the girls who either deviated from the group with their desire to have more choices than is traditional or who could be classified as delinquents. Ana, Sona and Lita fell into the first group, but did not ever encounter any real conflicts with their families. However, the delinquents, Lola and Mala, did encounter some conflict. Lola was “quarrelsome, insubordinate, impertinent” and after a love affair accused her rival of being a thief. No other family group aside from her mother’s household would accept her after that. Mala stole a toy, which branded her as a thief, which no one wanted around since their homes are so open. Mead believes both the delinquents acted this way from a lack of affection.

Discussion
I like sections that focus on the individual girls the most, so I really liked this chapter. It was interesting to see what made a girl a delinquent and how several catalysts for conflict in our culture (like jealousy and religion) did not have a great impact on these people.