Full Book Blog: Living With Complexity

Summary
The first chapter serves as an introduction to complexity. Norman differentiates between things being complex (state of the world, the tasks we do and the tools we use) and the idea of things being complicated (the psychological state of a person attempting to understand, use or interact with something in the world). He discusses keys to coping with complexity, he brings up how some complicated systems occur as a result of poor design and he provides several examples of how we like complexity in certain instances (like when we already know a lot about the topic or where complexity truly seems appropriate). He also mentions that one way to measure complexity is by the amount of time it takes to learn and master a task (10,000 hours).

In chapter 2 Norman brings up the idea of the conceptual model (the underlying belief structure held by a person about how something works), and how it helps to simplify the complexities of different systems. Norman discusses “featuritis,” adding more and more features, and explains how complexity is in the mind of the beholder. He also discuses how simpler looking does not always equate to simpler to use and how users tend to prefer an intermediate level of complexity.

mitpress.mit.edu

In chapter 3 Norman discusses how things get more complicated as the number of items increases. He provides remembering passwords as an example, and explains how we cope by putting the information in the world (pasting the passwords to the monitor or under the keyboard). He discusses the “scaling problem,” something that works well with only a few cases, but often fails as the number grows. He mentions how in an ideal world we would not need signs and how too much information makes things complicated. He concludes by discussing the benefits of forcing functions and provides examples through a discussion on toilet paper.

Chapter 4 focuses on social signifiers, indicators in the environment that allow people to navigate in otherwise complex and confusing environments. These signifiers are referred to as “perceived affordances” by some. Norman also discusses culture as another source of complexity and uses salt and pepper shakers as an example. Norman writes about the importance of signifiers and how they provide valuable cues as to the nature of the world and how people should act.

Discussion
Norman provides a lot of good examples throughout all the chapters that we read. He really digs down deep when explaining what complexity is, what causes it and the different types of complexity. I think one of the funniest to read was the one on toilet paper since he was so serious about it. I also thought it was interesting to read about how it takes 10,000 hours of work to be an expert.

Something I thought of while reading chapter 3 was how once when I was driving in a construction area, there was a sign on the left side of the road that read, “Left lane closed,” but on the right side of the road read a sign, “Right lane closed.” There were only two lanes and the cars were bumper-to-bumper. While I’m sure there would still be traffic regardless, I think things would have ran more smoothly if the signs had been accurate. Only the people who put the signs up knew which one was correct. (I think the left lane was the lane that was truly closed.)

Book Reading #52: Living With Complexity

Chapter 3
Summary
In chapter 3 Norman discusses how things get more complicated as the number of items increases. He provides remembering passwords as an example, and explains how we cope by putting the information in the world (pasting the passwords to the monitor or under the keyboard). He discusses the “scaling problem,” something that works well with only a few cases, but often fails as the number grows. He mentions how in an ideal world we would not need signs and how too much information makes things complicated. He concludes by discussing the benefits of forcing functions and provides examples through a discussion on toilet paper.

Discussion
Something I thought of while reading this chapter was how once when I was driving in a construction area, there was a sign on the left side of the road that read, “Left lane closed,” but on the right side of the road read a sign, “Right lane closed.” There were only two lanes and the cars were bumper-to-bumper. While I’m sure there would still be traffic regardless, I think things would have ran more smoothly if the signs had been accurate. Only the people who put the signs up knew which one was correct. (I think the left lane was the lane that was truly closed.)

Chapter 4
Summary
Chapter 4 focuses on social signifiers, indicators in the environment that allow people to navigate in otherwise complex and confusing environments. These signifiers are referred to as “perceived affordances” by some. Norman also discusses culture as another source of complexity and uses salt and pepper shakers as an example. Norman writes about the importance of signifiers and how they provide valuable cues as to the nature of the world and how people should act.

Discussion
In discussing signifiers, Norman mentions traffic and how people tend to interpret it as there being an accident up ahead when sometimes there is not. This happens so much in Houston (and likely in all other major cities). Whether it be a fire or an accident on another part of the highway, people tend to slow down. I often remember thinking that there must be an accident only to find that eventually the traffic lightens up and I never actually see the cause for the slow down.

Paper Reading #25: Tagsplanations: explaining recommendations using tags

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Tagsplanations: explaining recommendations using tags
Authors: Jesse Vig, Shilad Sen, John Riedl
Presentation Venue: IUI 2009: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 8-11, 2009; Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Summary
This paper discusses tagsplanations, explanations based on community tags that are made up of two parts: tag relevance (relationship of the tag to the recommended item) and tag preference (relationship of the user to the tag). They discuss an algorithm used to determine tag relevance and tag preference and present a study to see how users like tagsplanations.

Image taken from paper: Results sorted by tag relevance

To test the implementation of tagsplanations, the researchers use MovieLens, a movie recommendation site. They compute tag preference based on user behavior (by movie ratings in their MovieLens implementation). For example, to determine a user’s preference for the tag, violence, they would look at the user’s ratings of other films with the tag, violence, and calculate a weighted average for the preference value. They use the weighted average because some movies have been tagged with a certain identifier more than others and thus should be weighted more during the calculation. For tag relevance, they calculate the correlation between a user’s preference for a tag and their preference for the movie.

In their study the researchers sorted results in four different orders and then checked to see how well each interface helped users understand why an item was recommended and decide if they would like the recommended item. The researchers also checked to see if the recommended item matched their mood.

The results of the study showed that tag preference was more important than tag relevance but that tag relevance seemed to be the best way in which to organize the results. The interface that only used tag relevance (ordered by tag relevance and displaying tag relevance only) seemed to work the best for mood compatibility. They also found that subjective tags (tags expressing user opinions) performed better than factual tags (tags identifying facts about the movie such as concepts, people or places) overall.

Discussion
While I have found current recommendation systems to work just fine for me, I do think the researchers have presented some good ideas here that can make the entire system more informative and perhaps more relevant. In looking at their interface, I think they’ve done a good job of condensing a lot of information into a small amount of space.

Overall this was an interesting paper. They explained their motivations well and provided an in-depth user study. For future works the researchers mention making it so that users can inform the system when it is wrong and the system can inform users as to how different actions impact the results they receive. They also mention exploring other techniques to estimate tag preference.

Book Reading #51: Living With Complexity

Chapter 1
Summary
The first chapter serves as an introduction to complexity. Norman differentiates between things being complex (state of the world, the tasks we do and the tools we use) and the idea of things being complicated (the psychological state of a person attempting to understand, use or interact with something in the world). He discusses keys to coping with complexity, he brings up how some complicated systems occur as a result of poor design and he provides several examples of how we like complexity in certain instances (like when we already know a lot about the topic or where complexity truly seems appropriate). He also mentions that one way to measure complexity is by the amount of time it takes to learn and master a task (10,000 hours).

Discussion
This was a good first chapter on complexity. I think one of the most interesting things Norman points out is how musical instruments can be just as damaging to the hands as using a computer can be, but only computer companies tend to be sued for such injuries.

Chapter 2
Summary
In chapter 2 Norman brings up the idea of the conceptual model (the underlying belief structure held by a person about how something works), and how it helps to simplify the complexities of different systems. Norman discusses “featuritis,” adding more and more features, and explains how complexity is in the mind of the beholder. He also discuses how simpler looking does not always equate to simpler to use and how users tend to prefer an intermediate level of complexity.

Discussion
I liked the example he provided about how we as shoppers might take two items (like two types of toasters) and compare their features. Like he says, we’ve probably all done this. Usually I compare the features and the prices and ask myself if the additional features are worth the extra money. That’s what gets me thinking about whether I really need those extra features or not. Looks like I need to take that way of choosing an item one step further and really just think about what I need and not what has more knobs and buttons.

Paper Reading #24: Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques
Authors: Simon Tucker, Steve Whittaker
Presentation Venue: IUI 2009: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 8-11, 2009; Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Summary
This paper discusses different Interactive Compression (IC) techniques to allow a user to remove information in documents they do not wish to see and making important information more visible.

The IC techniques they explore at different compression rates are:
1. Word Excision – remove unimportant words and replace them with periods
2. Utterance Excision – remove utterances (segments of de-emphasized information) and replace them with white space or an ellipsis for longer utterances
3. Highlighting Words – marking important words
4. Highlighting Utterances – marking important utterances
5. Keyword Context – use Utterance Excision but leave one word in place and grayed-out to let the user know the utterance is there
6. Fisheye View – split the screen into five views that display certain things such as important words, important utterances and segments of unmodified text

Taken from paper: Example of Word Excision

After doing an initial user study and finding that the two most successful IC techniques are Word Excision and Word Highlighting, they performed another more in-depth study on these two specific techniques.

Their results show that Word Excision and Word Highlighting allowed the users to extract the important information from documents more effectively even with the presence of an occasional error from the algorithm. Users were also found to prefer IC over unmodified text. There was no distinct preference for the level of compression used. It was different for each user. Word Excision allowed users to scan the document faster since words were omitted. For users who used Word Highlighting, they scanned the documents slower but did not lose any important information since nothing was omitted from the document.

Discussion
This paper was mostly about exploring current IC techniques. I can see it being referenced a lot in the future as other researchers delve deeper into this research topic. I think these different techniques could be very helpful. Personally, I would probably like the highlighting version the most, because it would allow me to still read information that is not highlighted if I want more information on a specific topic.

Recently I was assigned to read a paper about summarizing documents and now I had to read this one is about compressing the information provided. I think these areas of research go hand in hand and that the researchers could learn a lot by comparing their different findings and algorithms.

Areas of future study that researchers mention include improving their algorithms and IC techniques and exploring other ways to determine which parts of the document are important. They also want to test their system on other types of documents besides the type of documents used in these initial studies, documents from meetings.

Full Book Blog: Why We Make Mistakes

Summary
The Introduction 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.

whywemakemistakes.com

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 4 discusses how we tend to remember our actions with rose-colored glasses. When remembering things that we do and say, we tend to make ourselves sound better than we actually were/are. Hallinan presents several examples: students remembering their grades as being better than they were and remembering good grades more than the bad grades, the Watergate scandal and how John Dean remembered the events entirely differently than how they really went down (proven through tape recordings) and how gamblers remember their wins and how losses are near-wins in their eyes.

In chapter 5 Hallinan explores the idea of multitasking and how we don’t actually do it. He discusses how multitasking slows us down, can cause us to forget what we are doing and creates a need for downtime, the time it takes to refocus on a task. The author provides examples of a pilot, a bus driver and drivers in general who do other tasks (like texting, talking on the phone or fiddling with a GPS) while driving. He explores in depth the car and the many distractions being created to “aid” us distract us and how drivers need downtime when switching between tasks while driving.

In chapter 6 Hallinan discusses framing, how we look at something. He uses examples such as buying a certain wine depending on the music being played, the location of information regarding a company in a newspaper and the time that we make decisions (immediate or future) can affect our decisions. Hallinan also writes about multiple-unit pricing and the impact it has on shoppers. In seeing the tag, “4 for $2,” the number, 4, acts as an anchor that makes the shopper more likely to buy four of the item rather than just one or two. He relates this same idea to selling a house.

In chapter 7 Hallinan begins by showing us some examples of how we skim material and how this ability to skim comes with a trade-off: details are overlooked. He discusses how we skim when we read by only reading the first few letters of a work and assuming the rest, how a rookie piano player once noticed an error that had gone unnoticed for years and how a thirteen-year-old boy corrected NASA on their estimation regarding an asteroid.

Hallinan also discusses the importance of the context we are in when recognizing and remembering information. Hallinan demonstrates this with several examples: reading a description of doing the laundry before and after we know the context and a study in which people memorized words above and under water.

Chapter 8 focuses on a person’s desire to keep things organized even in memory. Hallinan begins with several examples to demonstrate this: people drawing the Seine River straighter than it actually is and stating where Reno, Nevada is in relation to San Diego, California. Hallinan further explains the idea of tidy memories through his discussion on how we like to organize information into a hierarchy. Hallinan also explains that who the person is will affect how he or she remembers things. In other words, people rationalize memories and change them, as shown in the study where people were asked to recall a folktale. When telling stories, people are also known to leave out details or make them up depending on the purpose of the story. These added or omitted details sometimes cause the person to remember the event differently.

Chapter 9 seemed to be a compare and contrast of men and women. Hallinan discusses the relationship between overconfidence and perceived risk. He also discusses how women seem to have less confidence than men in several areas. Examples he give includes getting lost while driving, selling back lottery tickets and fixing bugs in a spreadsheet. Hallinan relates some of these differences back to how boys tend to tinker more than girls, and boys tend to explore further out than girls.

Chapter 10 focuses on how people tend to believe they are above average. In other words, people tend to be overconfident. Hallinan sites many examples of this: golfing, paying for the gym on a yearly or monthly basis rather than day-to-day and credit card rates. Hallinan then discusses calibration, the difference between a person’s actual and perceived abilities. He discusses that calibration tends to be poor, but weather forecasts are well calibrated. The power of feedback is also discussed (feedback is poor when it comes to gym memberships). Hallinan also notes that as a task gets harder, people tend to be even more overconfident. The reason described for this is that people are overloaded with information and believe all the information actually makes them more likely to be right.

In chapter 11, Hallinan discusses how even professionals have difficulty in knowing how good or bad they are at something. He also discusses how experts become experts by practicing, starting at a young age and creating a library of specialized knowledge within the mind. Hallinan also presents information on a study of cognitive maps and mice, discusses how do-it-yourselfers hurt themselves with nail guns and how people prefer to do things without manuals in part because of how long the manuals can be. He then points out how people tend to do something in the first way they learned it – referred to as functional fixity – and backs up the idea with a task involving jars of water. Hallinan concludes by saying we should think outside the box though we usually do not when we already have learned a certain way to complete a task.

In chapter 12, Hallinan discusses constraints and affordances. He defines constraints as “simple mental aids that keep us on the right track by limiting our alternatives.” He defines affordances as “clues to how a thing can be used.” He discusses the technique by which different organizations name things and gives two examples: prescription drug names and identifiers that pilots use. He also discusses the importance of finding the root cause and knowing where to look (the culture of the place where we work) when searching for the source of an error. In discussing pilots and doctors, Hallinan also explains the effect that attitude has on errors.

In chapter 13 Hallinan begins with an example of two people who moved to L.A. and then ended up moving back to Wisconsin. He uses this example to show how people mispredict how they will feel about important life decisions in the future because they focus on relatively minor factors. He uses the same idea of misprediction to explain why gift cards are great for the company but not so great for the consumer.

In the Conclusion Hallinan gives some advice on how the readers can apply the ideas presented in this book to their lives. Some of the things he recommends we keep in mind are:

1. Think small
2. Calibration can be taught
3. Creating a written record helps a person fend off the rose-colored-glasses of hindsight bias
4. In some cases it will be important to look for and even expect failure
5. Don’t be set in your ways
6. Slow down
7. Be aware of the anecdote (he references NutriSystem here)
8. Get plenty of sleep
9. Be happy

Hallinan concludes by discussing how money does not eliminate mistakes and is not the currency of life.

Discussion
I really enjoyed this book and how the author presents so many examples to back up his claims. I especially liked the Conclusion, because Hallinan does a great job of summarizing his ideas without going overboard. It’s short and concise but effective. Some of the discussion in class was about how while this information is great, it is difficult to apply it to our lives to help prevent mistakes. While I still think this is true, I like how he gives some advice on how we can try to prevent the mistakes. I also think this book will be beneficial in helping us better understand mistakes we make, and as a Computer Scientist, I think this book will help us design better systems that prevent users from making certain expected mistakes.

Paper Reading #23: Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation

Comments
Luke Roberts
Shena Hoffmann

Reference Information
Title: Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation
Authors: Pei-Yun Hsueh, Johanna D. Moore
Presentation Venue: IUI 2009: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 8-11, 2009; Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Summary
This paper discusses a new approach to improving the summarization of meetings. The researchers discuss two types of summaries. The first provides a general summary of the meeting and is the type of summary produced by current systems (according to the paper, the general summary represents 30-40% of the meeting). The second provides a more decision-focused summary that is shorter than the general summary (according to the paper, the decision-focused summary represents 1-2% of the meeting).

The researchers performed a study in which they provided participants with four meetings through a Meeting Brower Interface. They asked the participants to summarize the decisions made in the meetings. Participants were randomly assigned one of four summary displays that were embedded into the browser interface that presented different information about the meeting. Some of the descriptions provided general summaries while others provided information generated by an algorithm described in another paper that pinpoints decision-related dialogue acts. In the study they focused on task effectiveness, report quality and user perceived success.

The researchers found that displaying decision-focused summaries were more effective and helped users get a better overview of the meeting. Even decision-focused summaries generated by the algorithm were more effective than general summaries created manually. However, it was found that decision-focused summaries written manually were still more effective than the ones generated by the algorithm.

Discussion
This sounds like it could be very useful for people who miss meetings or want to review meetings after they have occurred. As with most of the papers that I read in this class, I’m always left wishing I could know more about the actual algorithm they used, but the information provided in this paper was still interesting and proved that the algorithm and their interface can be useful for users.

As far as future studies, the researchers could focus on further improving the algorithm and they could run more experiments on meetings that are more and less structured to better identify the strengths and weaknesses in their current algorithm.

Image from paper of the Browser Interface

Book Reading #50: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 12
Summary
In chapter 12, Hallinan discusses constraints and affordances. He defines constraints as “simple mental aids that keep us on the right track by limiting our alternatives.” He defines affordances as “clues to how a thing can be used.”

He discusses the technique by which different organizations name things and gives two examples: prescription drug names and identifiers that pilots use. He also discusses the importance of finding the root cause and knowing where to look (the culture of the place where we work) when searching for the source of an error. In discussing pilots and doctors, Hallinan also explains the effect that attitude has on errors.

Discussion
Hallinan makes a lot of good points in this chapter about the different ways we look at things. The recurring examples between pilot and doctor were great. I also thought it was interesting to see this author also discussing affordances and constraints, something we know a lot about after reading several of Norman’s books.

Chapter 13
Summary
In chapter 13 Hallinan begins with an example of two people who moved to L.A. and then ended up moving back to Wisconsin. He uses this example to show how people mispredict how they will feel about important life decisions in the future because they focus on relatively minor factors. He uses the same idea of misprediction to explain why gift cards are great for the company but not so great for the consumer.

Discussion
In some ways I feel this might be one of the most beneficial chapters, because I can see myself applying these ideas to when I make decisions in the future with at least some success. As in all the other chapters, he provides some good examples that will encourage me to think more about the things that really matter when making big decision rather than the easier and what I will call surface reasons.

Conclusion
Summary
In the Conclusion Hallinan gives some advice on how the readers can apply the ideas presented in this book to their lives. Some of the things he recommends we keep in mind are:

1. Think small
2. Calibration can be taught
3. Creating a written record helps a person fend off the rose-colored-glasses of hindsight bias
4. In some cases it will be important to look for and even expect failure
5. Don’t be set in your ways
6. Slow down
7. Be aware of the anecdote (he references NutriSystem here)
8. Get plenty of sleep
9. Be happy

Hallinan concludes by discussing how money does not eliminate mistakes and is not the currency of life.

Discussion
Hallinan does a great job of summarizing his ideas without going overboard. It’s short and concise but effective. I especially like the last couple of sentences of the book: “…it’s not where you live that makes you happy; it’s how you use your time. Forgetting that may be the biggest mistake of all.” It was a great way to conclude a book dedicated to explaining our mistakes. Time is something we often take for granted, but it’s also something we can learn to make the most of one day at a time.

Book Reading #49: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 10
Summary
Chapter 10 focuses on how people tend to believe they are above average. In other words, people tend to be overconfident. Hallinan sites many examples of this: golfing, paying for the gym on a yearly or monthly basis rather than day-to-day and credit card rates. Hallinan then discusses calibration, the difference between a person’s actual and perceived abilities. He discusses that calibration tends to be poor, but weather forecasts are well calibrated. The power of feedback is also discussed (feedback is poor when it comes to gym memberships).

Hallinan also notes that as a task gets harder, people tend to be even more overconfident. The reason described for this is that people are overloaded with information and believe all the information actually makes them more likely to be right. Hallinan uses handicappers at horse races and decisions made by corporate executives as two examples where this holds true. Hallinan also defines metaknowledge: “an appreciation of what we do know and what we do not know.”

Discussion
While interesting, there was a lot of information to absorb in this chapter. I think my favorite part was the history of weather forecasting. We’ve always had probability statements included in the forecast, and it makes so much sense to use them that I never even wondered what might have made weather forecasters start to do use them. I also thought the part about overconfidence and its relation to NutriSystem was an interesting read. I’ve always noted the “Results not typical” notice in those commercials as a reason for people not to use the system. I never considered that people would disregard the message. I just assumed they didn’t notice it.

Chapter11
Summary
In chapter 11, Hallinan discusses how even professionals have difficulty in knowing how good or bad they are at something. He also discusses how experts become experts by practicing, starting at a young age and creating a library of specialized knowledge within the mind. Hallinan also presents information on a study of cognitive maps and mice, discusses how do-it-yourselfers hurt themselves with nail guns and how people prefer to do things without manuals in part because of how long the manuals can be. He then points out how people tend to do something in the first way they learned it – referred to as functional fixity – and backs up the idea with a task involving jars of water. Hallinan concludes by saying we should think outside the box though we usually do not when we already have learned a certain way to complete a task.

Discussion
We actually discussed some of these ideas in class last week when we discussed using keyboard shortcuts. While some of us will be interested in learning better ways to do a task, I know a lot of people – usually people who are not as comfortable with the object they are interacting with – who would rather stick with the first way in which they learn something. I also like the part about reading manuals. I tend to read manuals but most of my friends and family do not. So when they’re having a problem with something, the first thing I ask is “Did you check the manual?” When they say no – which they almost always do – I find the answer for them. There’s a learning curve for those manuals. Read enough of them and you’ll figure out how to best use them.

Paper Reading #22: User-oriented document summarization through vision-based eye-tracking

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: User-oriented document summarization through vision-based eye-tracking
Authors: Songhua Xu, Hao Jiang, Francis C.M. Lau
Presentation Venue: IUI 2009: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 8-11, 2009; Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Summary
This paper discusses a new algorithm for document summarization using vision-based eye-tracking and word semantic analysis.

They use an eye-tracking setup with a web camera and an eye-tracking algorithm described in a different paper. They take gaze samples on the words, noting which words got the most attention. They then compare the semantic similarity between words, and if the determined similarities are similar enough, they assume that the user will give both words the same amount of attention. The algorithm they use to determine semantic similarity is described in a different paper. They then select a number of words that have the highest semantic similarity. They use the same idea when predicting how much attention a user will give to a sentence.

They then make an algorithm unique to the user that will summarize the document based on what the user seems to find important about the article. They restrict the algorithm to only output a percentage of the sentences given the most attention. The percentage is based on the size of the document.

The researchers performed a study to see how accurate their algorithm was by comparing it to two popular text summarization algorithms already in use (MEAD and Microsoft Word AutoSummarize). They also compare the summaries to the summaries produced by the users on their own. They had users read different articles from two sets: science articles and entertainment/leisure articles.

The researchers found that their algorithm could create more personalized summaries based on the user’s interests, especially for the entertainment/leisure articles, than the other two algorithms could.

Discussion
With all the reading we’ve been doing for this class this semester, I’ve got admit I was really excited to read this paper and see how they went about making this algorithm. Aside from the several references they gave to other papers, they were thorough in explaining how their algorithm worked.

However, it seems like they rushed their results section. They didn’t given much information on how the users responded to their system. They just said it was better than the others and presented a few equations on how they calculated the recall and precision of their algorithm. However, I still did find the paper and the techniques described to be interesting.

The researchers note that in future studies they would like to make it so that their algorithm can work even on articles that the user has not read based on results from previous articles that the user has read. They also mention improving the overall algorithm and allowing for feedback from the user to improve summarization.

Image from paper showing which words were given the most attention based on their algorithm

Full Blog: Media Equation

Reference Information
Part 1
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon
Presentation Venue: Journal of Social Issues; Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2000, pp. 81-103.

Part 2
Title: Computers are social actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence; April 24, 1995; Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Part 3
Title: Can computer personalities be human personalities?
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, Chris Dryer
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems; 1995; Denver, Colorado, USA.

Summary
In Part 1, The paper discusses how people tend to apply social rules to computers and have certain expectations of their computers. In one set of experiments they show how users tend to apply social categories to computers. In this experiment they had users be tutored, tested and evaluated with a computer with either a male or female voice output. Results show that people found the male voice friendlier. They also examined ethnicity through interactive video manipulation.

In another set of experiments they show how people tend to act polite towards their computers. They had a computer ask about its own performance. Then the researchers had a different computer ask about the first computer’s performance. Then the researchers asked the same questions through a questionnaire. Responses about the computer were found to be more positive when it was the one doing the questions rather than when a second computer asked the questions or a questionnaire provided the questions. They also tested reciprocity – working harder to help a computer that has helped you in the past – and reciprocal self-disclosure – having the computer tell a bit about itself, asking a personal question and then getting an intimate response.

In a third set of experiments they show how people value information provided by a computer when it is identified as a “specialist” rather than when it is identified as a “generalist.” They used televisions with news shows and entertainment shows. All of these experiments help to show how people react mindlessly to computers by applying social interactions between people to how they interact with their computers.

They then explore alternative explanations for their findings. They discuss anthropomorphism, the act of believing something is essentially human. They also discuss how some believe people aren’t reacting to the computer but to the programmer. They then discuss the methods of their experiments.

In Part 2, paper further explores the ideas in the first and sites that the reason that people act the way they do with computers has to do with how commonplace and easy it is to generate such responses. The paper describes five experiments in which they test whether a person will be polite to the computer, whether a person will apply the notion of ‘self’ and ‘other’ to the computer, how a person distinguishes between ‘self’ and ‘other,’ whether or not they will apply gender stereotypes to computers and why people act the way they do with computers. The findings were similar to the findings described in the paper in part 1 of this book reading assignment. Something to note from the fifth study was that they found that users did not see the computer as a medium for social interaction with the programmer.

source: yourscrapbookingtips.com

The researchers conclude by saying that the computer-human relationship is a social one. They also note that effort to make interfaces with realistic faces and personalities may not be needed since even the basic computer encourages a fundamentally social relationship with the user.

In Part 3, the paper explores the idea of creating a personality for a computer, the minimum set of cues needed to make the personality and how powerful the effects of the personality are on the user. They focus on making a computer seem dominant and then submissive, assuring that the personality trait is noted and seeing how the trait makes the user react. They also test to see how much a user prefers the computer based on how similar they are when it comes to the trait of dominance/submissiveness.

The main difference between the personality traits shown in the computers was the style of communication. The dominant computer used strong language and displayed a high confidence level. The submissive computer made suggestions, asked questions and showed a low confidence level. Their findings show that people did perceive the dominant computer as more dominant than the submissive computer and that people preferred to work with a computer that was similar to them in terms of dominance and submissiveness. When the personalities were similar between computer and user, the user reported the interaction as being more satisfying.

The researchers conclude by saying that it is easier than expected to manipulate a personality even in its simplest form and that these findings also imply that humans respond socially to computers.

Discussion
In Part 1, I really enjoyed reading about the reciprocal self-disclosure experiment. It was hilarious to read, “This computer has been configured to run at speeds up to 266 MHz. But 90% of computer users don’t use applications that require these speeds. So this computer rarely gets used to its full potential. What has been your biggest disappointment in life?” Since people were found to give more intimate answers to a computer that did this, I wonder if anyone has a done a study on the physiological benefits of computers. I really enjoyed reading about these studies and how mindless we really can be when it comes to interacting with computers.

I thought the paper in Part 2 was a good paper to read after the one in part 1. It further explored the studies in part 1 and strengthened their findings. I also agree with the conclusions they drew. It is simple to interact with a computer the way we do with people. However, there are still major differences between the interactions. While people might be more polite to a computer’s “face” than when they are away from the computer, I cannot see people becoming attached to their computers or developing relationships that when lost would cause major distress. The computer is still a tool. It’s just easy and feels natural to interact with it in a more human way, at least in some instances.

Before reading the paper in Part 3, I hadn’t given much thought about a computer’s perceived personality and the impact it could have on the user. It was neat to read about how even a simple trait like dominance and submission could have such a profound impact on the user. As the researchers note, these findings also back the findings described in the other two papers about how people respond socially to a computer.

Book Reading #48: Media Equation

Reference Information
Part 1
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon
Presentation Venue: Journal of Social Issues; Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2000, pp. 81-103.

Part 2
Title: Computers are social actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence; April 24, 1995; Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Part 3
Title: Can computer personalities be human personalities?
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, Chris Dryer
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems; 1995; Denver, Colorado, USA.

Part 1
Summary
This paper discusses how people tend to apply social rules to computers and have certain expectations of their computers. In one set of experiments they show how users tend to apply social categories to computers. In this experiment they had users be tutored, tested and evaluated with a computer with either a male or female voice output. Results show that people found the male voice friendlier. They also examined ethnicity through interactive video manipulation.

In another set of experiments they show how people tend to act polite towards their computers. They had a computer ask about its own performance. Then the researchers had a different computer ask about the first computer’s performance. Then the researchers asked the same questions through a questionnaire. Responses about the computer were found to be more positive when it was the one doing the questions rather than when a second computer asked the questions or a questionnaire provided the questions. They also tested reciprocity – working harder to help a computer that has helped you in the past – and reciprocal self-disclosure – having the computer tell a bit about itself, asking a personal question and then getting an intimate response.

In a third set of experiments they show how people value information provided by a computer when it is identified as a “specialist” rather than when it is identified as a “generalist.” They used televisions with news shows and entertainment shows. All of these experiments help to show how people react mindlessly to computers by applying social interactions between people to how they interact with their computers.

They then explore alternative explanations for their findings. They discuss anthropomorphism, the act of believing something is essentially human. They also discuss how some believe people aren’t reacting to the computer but to the programmer. They then discuss the methods of their experiments.

Discussion
I really enjoyed reading about the reciprocal self-disclosure experiment. It was hilarious to read, “This computer has been configured to run at speeds up to 266 MHz. But 90% of computer users don’t use applications that require these speeds. So this computer rarely gets used to its full potential. What has been your biggest disappointment in life?” Since people were found to give more intimate answers to a computer that did this, I wonder if anyone has a done a study on the physiological benefits of computers. I really enjoyed reading about these studies and how mindless we really can be when it comes to interacting with computers.

Part 2
Summary
The second paper further explores the ideas in the first and sites that the reason that people act the way they do with computers has to do with how commonplace and easy it is to generate such responses. The paper describes five experiments in which they test whether a person will be polite to the computer, whether a person will apply the notion of ‘self’ and ‘other’ to the computer, how a person distinguishes between ‘self’ and ‘other,’ whether or not they will apply gender stereotypes to computers and why people act the way they do with computers. The findings were similar to the findings described in the first paper in part 1 of this book reading assignment. Something to note from the fifth study was that they found that users did not see the computer as a medium for social interaction with the programmer.

The researchers conclude by saying that the computer-human relationship is a social one. They also note that effort to make interfaces with realistic faces and personalities may not be needed since even the basic computer encourages a fundamentally social relationship with the user.

Discussion
This was a good paper to read after the one in part 1. It further explored the studies in part 1 and strengthened their findings. I also agree with the conclusions they drew. It is simple to interact with a computer the way we do with people. However, there are still major differences between the interactions. While people might be more polite to a computer’s “face” than when they are away from the computer, I cannot see people becoming attached to their computers or developing relationships that when lost would cause major distress. The computer is still a tool. It’s just easy and feels natural to interact with it in a more human way, at least in some instances.

Part 3
Summary
This paper explores the idea of creating a personality for a computer, the minimum set of cues needed to make the personality and how powerful the effects of the personality are on the user. They focus on making a computer seem dominant and then submissive, assuring that the personality trait is noted and seeing how the trait makes the user react. They also test to see how much a user prefers the computer based on how similar they are when it comes to the trait of dominance/submissiveness.

The main difference between the personality traits shown in the computers was the style of communication. The dominant computer used strong language and displayed a high confidence level. The submissive computer made suggestions, asked questions and showed a low confidence level. Their findings show that people did perceive the dominant computer as more dominant than the submissive computer and that people preferred to work with a computer that was similar to them in terms of dominance and submissiveness. When the personalities were similar between computer and user, the user reported the interaction as being more satisfying.

The researchers conclude by saying that it is easier than expected to manipulate a personality even in its simplest form and that these findings also imply that humans respond socially to computers.

Discussion
Before reading this paper, I hadn’t given much thought about a computer’s perceived personality and the impact it could have on the user. It was neat to read about how even a simple trait like dominance and submission could have such a profound impact on the user. As the researchers note, these findings also back the findings described in the other two papers about how people respond socially to a computer.

Paper Reading #21: Towards maximizing the accuracy of human-labeled sensor data

Comments
Evin Schuchardt

Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Towards maximizing the accuracy of human-labeled sensor data
Authors: Stephanie L. Rosenthal and Anind K. Dey
Presentation Venue: IUI 2010: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 7-10, 2010; Hong Kong, China

Summary
In this paper the researchers discuss the impact that different amounts of information have on people when they label things. The main types of information given to labelers that the researchers explore are:
1. Different amounts of contextual information
2. High and low level explanations
3. Prediction
4. User Feedback
5. Level of uncertainty

Image from paper: Users were asked questions about a task to help differentiate between tasks

To study the impact that the above types of information have on labelers, they used the wizard-of-oz technique and presented labelers with varying amounts of information to test their accuracy when labeling. They also focused on the differences between people labeling data they had not seen before and their own data.

After the study, they found that the five types of information had a positive affect on the labelers, because it gave them more information or helped to direct their thought processes. For example, when asking for feedback, some users changed their label to a better one as they thought more deeply about why they had labeled it the way they did. The researchers also found that whether the labeler was familiar with the data before the labeling or not had no impact on the accuracy of the label.

Discussion
After reading the first page of this paper, I just stopped and decided I would read it another day, because I had no idea what they were talking about at first – intelligent agent’s data classification, say what? I think the only reason I caught on when I did was because someone had done a presentation on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is mentioned in this paper.

I didn’t fully follow all of their studies or understand why they chose to do them. They just jumped right into the topic, rendering someone like me who knows little about this kind of work confused. While I think it could be worthwhile to improve the accuracy of labelers, this paper did nothing to encourage the idea, in my opinion. In future studies the researchers mention focusing on other types of information besides the five given above. They also say they need to do more tests in more long-term studies.

Book Reading #47: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 8
Summary
Chapter 8 focuses on a person’s desire to keep things organized even in memory. Hallinan begins with several examples to demonstrate this: people drawing the Seine River straighter than it actually is and stating where Reno, Nevada is in relation to San Diego, California. Hallinan further explains the idea of tidy memories through his discussion on how we like to organize information into a hierarchy.

Hallinan also explains that who the person is will affect how he or she remembers things. In other words, people rationalize memories and change them, as shown in the study where people were asked to recall a folktale. When telling stories, people are also known to leave out details or make them up depending on the purpose of the story. These added or omitted details sometimes cause the person to remember the event differently.

Discussion
This chapter made me think about gossip, and how it can get out of control really quick, especially when the gossip begins with a person telling a story of what they saw. Everyone has their own view of the world and pays attention to different things. Compound this idea with the idea that people will add details to make it more interesting and the story can get blown out of proportion really fast.

Chapter 9
Summary
Chapter 9 seemed to be a compare and contrast of men and women. Hallinan discusses the relationship between overconfidence and perceived risk. He also discusses how women seem to have less confidence than men in several areas. Examples he give includes getting lost while driving, selling back lottery tickets and fixing bugs in a spreadsheet. Hallinan relates some of these differences back to how boys tend to tinker more than girls, and boys tend to explore further out than girls.

Discussion
Maybe it’s just me, but men seemed to be given a bad rep in this chapter. Still, it was interesting to read through the different studies and examples Hallinan provides. I totally agreed with the discussion on getting lost and how guys tend to have better spatial skills than girls. I think an interesting way to show this is through video games. I like to play RPGs and first-person shooters with my guy friends. I’ve noticed that whenever we get to a point where we need to find our way back to a certain place, the guys always have a much better idea of where to go – even on new games where I know we’re on the same level experience-wise with the maps.

Paper Reading #20: Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources
Authors: Alia Amin, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman
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, the authors discuss comparison search, a task in which people search for similarities or differences between sets of data. They focused on the cultural heritage domain. After doing a preliminary study on experts trying to compare sets of artworks, the researchers developed LISA a tool for cultural heritage experts doing complicated comparison searches of artwork.

Image of the LISA interface taken from the paper

Their paper mainly discussed the interface of the system and the interaction with it. They recommended reading another paper for information on the technological infrastructure.

In their design they focused on several selection and comparison challenges:
1. Searching artworks
2. Selecting artworks
3. Comparing artworks

For searching, the researchers included in their interface a place to type an artwork’s property (artist’s name, the date, the material used in the piece, etc.) and included an autocomplete feature to assist the user. They also assured that their system supported name aliases.

When selecting artwork, the user can include more than one piece of art in their set. They can drag and drop the thumbnail or select all search results at once and insert them into a set.

Currently their system only allows for two sets to be compared. Their system supports both single property (represented with a bar chart) and dual property (represented with a scatter plot) comparisons. Some of the properties compared include material, subject, height and date.

The researchers also mention that they implemented LISA on top of ClioPatria, a web-based application for searching through heterogeneous sets of data. They refer the reader to other papers for further information on this and information related to the dataset used.

They also did a user study to test the three features mentioned above. Different people affiliated with museums, art historical archives and universities participated in the study, which took place in their work places.

They compared the ease of use of LISA with RKDimages, a widely-used online cultural heritage archive. They found that overall LISA was easier to use than RKDimages, especially when it came to searching for many artworks and selecting artworks. They also found that the number of artworks searched for and selected did not degrade LISA’s performance. Overall, the participants preferred LISA over RKDimages. They appreciated the different ways to display the data. However, they wanted to know how the graphs were made and what they were based off of before they would trust the results.

Discussion
I found the paper interesting and the topic unique. I don’t know much about artwork or what researchers do when they search for artwork and do research with it, but the participants in the study did seem to appreciate the system. I also liked their interface. It looked easy to use and looked self-explanatory. While I am curious to know the more technical side of things, I did appreciate how in depth they went with their studies and explanations on why they designed the interface the way they did.

Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t think the authors ever mentioned what LISA stood for.

For future work they mention that they would like to improve the autocompletion feature, provide bookmarking, provide a search history feature and allow for more interaction with the artwork to enlarge it on demand.

Book Reading #46: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 6
Summary
In chapter 6 Hallinan discusses framing, how we look at something. He uses examples such as buying a certain wine depending on the music being played, the location of information regarding a company in a newspaper and the time that we make decisions (immediate or future) can affect our decisions. Hallinan also writes about multiple-unit pricing and the impact it has on shoppers. In seeing the tag, “4 for $2,” the number, 4, acts as an anchor that makes the shopper more likely to buy four of the item rather than just one or two. He relates this same idea to selling a house.

Discussion
Hallinan continues to provide us with plenty of examples to back up his claims. I really like the discussion on shopping. While I am aware that “4 for $2” means “1 for 50 cents,” I do tend to end up buying four – or at least more – than I might have bought otherwise. This chapter had a lot to do with money and how we spend it, but Hallinan also provides some examples unrelated to money that are also interesting like the survey questions about a disease and how wording them differently can affect the outcome.

Chapter 7
Summary
In chapter 7 Hallinan begins by showing us some examples of how we skim material and how this ability to skim comes with a trade-off: details are overlooked. He discusses how we skim when we read by only reading the first few letters of a work and assuming the rest, how a rookie piano player once noticed an error that had gone unnoticed for years and how a thirteen-year-old boy corrected NASA on their estimation regarding an asteroid.

Hallinan also discusses the importance of the context we are in when recognizing and remembering information. Hallinan demonstrates this with several examples: reading a description of doing the laundry before and after we know the context and a study in which people memorized words above and under water.

Discussion
I had never thought about skimming in the way described here, but after reading the chapter, I can totally see what he means about how we assume what the rest of the word is. I also liked the part about how the context affects our learning. We discussed this in my psychology class and discussed how we should apply this idea in class by always sitting in the same place. Then we’ll be more likely to remember information come test day if we sit in that same seat.

Full Book Blog: Things that Make Us Smart

Full Blog on the chapters we read: 1-4

Summary
The first chapter discusses how technology should be more centered on the human. He discusses how technology can aid people but can also make them dumb and enslave them. He writes of how technology that is designed to aid people more often confuses people and interferes with thought processes. He differentiates between hard (sciences that rely on accurate measurements) and soft (sciences that relies on observation and classification) sciences. He also discusses two types of cognition: experiential (a state in which people react effortlessly and quickly to events) and reflective (a state in which thought and decision making takes place).

In chapter 2 Norman begins by discussing museums and how little they teach their visitors. He revisits experiential and reflective cognition and discusses how technology needs to strike a balance between the two rather than forcing users to one extreme or the other. Norman also defines three types of learning: accretion (the accumulation of facts), tuning (the practicing of a skill and the transition from novice to expert) and restructuring (the hard part of learning where one forms the right conceptual model). The first two are experiential modes and the third is reflective. He also defines optimal flow, the peak experience where the mind is fully involved, and how important it is to learning.

Chapter 3 deals with external aids (two of the most important being paper and pencil) and how they make us smart. Norman discusses cognitive artifacts and how they help people keep track of complex events. He defines two ingredients for a representational system: the represented world and the representing world. He uses different examples such as tic-tac-toe, getting flight information, representing numbers and filling medical prescriptions to discuss how the way a person represents something makes the task related to the representation easier or harder to do.

In chapter 4 Norman continues his discussion about artifacts and things to consider when fitting the artifact to the person. He differentiates between surface artifacts (what we see is all there is) and internal artifacts (part of the information is represented internally). He uses three puzzles (The Tower of Hanoi, Oranges and Coffee) in which the problems are the same but to a person seem different due to how much or how little information is present in the environment. Norman then discusses different ways to represent information and how the best way depends on the information and the task to be performed with the graphic. He also mentions how technology has affordances and uses voice-messaging systems as an example of a technology that in some instances forces a medium into usage that violates the affordances and gets in the way.

Discussion
While I complained about Norman’s tendency to be long-winded in my discussions for the first two chapters, he does make some interesting points. However, I feel that DOET is the best of Norman’s books. Norman gives a lot of great/interesting examples in chapters 3 and 4 that got me really thinking about how something is represented and how much or how little thought is needed depending on the design.

One of my favorite discussions was about the analog and digital displays in cars. My car has a digital display for the speedometer, which I really like. It might just be because I’m used to it now, but whenever I drive a car with an analog display, I feel it takes just a little longer for me to check my speed than it does with the digital display. Something else nice about the digital display in my car is its placement. It’s placed above all the other gauges, making me only need to shift my eyes down slightly to glance at the speed.

Book Reading #45: Things That Make Us Smart

Chapter 3
Summary
Chapter 3 deals with external aids (two of the most important being paper and pencil) and how they make us smart. Norman discusses cognitive artifacts and how they help people keep track of complex events. He defines two ingredients for a representational system: the represented world and the representing world. He uses different examples such as tic-tac-toe, getting flight information, representing numbers and filling medical prescriptions to discuss how the way a person represents something makes the task related to the representation easier or harder to do.

Discussion
I appreciated Norman’s examples in this chapter, and I found the section on representing numbers particularly interesting. Though it’s a simple task, I had never thought about how easy it is to add up roman numerals. While I do feel some of this was covered in his other books, I do feel he takes the whole power or representation thing one step further.

Chapter 4
Summary
In chapter 4 Norman continues his discussion about artifacts and things to consider when fitting the artifact to the person. He differentiates between surface artifacts (what we see is all there is) and internal artifacts (part of the information is represented internally). He uses three puzzles (The Tower of Hanoi, Oranges and Coffee) in which the problems are the same but to a person seem different due to how much or how little information is present in the environment. Norman then discusses different ways to represent information and how the best way depends on the information and the task to be performed with the graphic. He also mentions how technology has affordances and uses voice-messaging systems as an example of a technology that in some instances forces a medium into usage that violates the affordances and gets in the way.

Discussion
As in the last chapter, I liked the examples Norman uses, especially the ones about the three puzzles. I also found his discussion on analog and digital displays to be an interesting one. My car has a digital display, which I really like. It might just be because I’m used to it now, but whenever I drive a car with an analog display, I feel it takes just a little longer for me to check my speed than it does with the digital. Something else nice about the digital display in my car is its placement. It’s placed above all the other gauges, making me only need to shift my eyes down slightly to glance at the speed.

Paper Reading #19: Local danger warnings for drivers: the effect of modality and level of assistance on driver reaction

Comments
Evin Schuchardt

Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Local danger warnings for drivers: the effect of modality and level of assistance on driver reaction
Authors: Yujia Cao, Angela Mahr, Sandro Castronovo, Mariët Theune, Christoph Stahl, Christian A. Müller
Presentation Venue: IUI 2010: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 7-10, 2009; Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper focuses on various local danger warning presentations while driving as it pertains to situation awareness (SA) theory. SA is broken up into three phases for the driver:
1. Perceiving elements in the environment
2. Comprehending what these elements mean
3. Predicting the future states of the environment

The researchers focused on two major factors in their experiments to test different warning presentations: modality and level of assistance. Modality affects the driver’s perception through auditory or visual warnings, and level of assistance affects decision-making through suggestions such as ‘change lanes’ or ‘brake.’

In their experiment they used simulation software that they put inside a Mercedes-Benz. They projected the scene of a one-way highway with two lanes and no other vehicles on the windshield of the car. They displayed visual warnings on a screen to the right of the steering wheel. Auditory warnings were heard through a PC speaker. They included four types of obstacles (broken-down vehicle, fallen tree, rock and lost cargo) that were described to the driver in terms of type, location and distance ahead. They tested visual + blinking red bar, visual + a beep, visual + speech and speech-only warnings. After running the experiment as described, they ran it again, this time including auditory suggestions to measure level of assistance. They also ran a baseline experiment where the drivers were given no warnings.

The researchers found that in all cases, drivers reacted better with the warnings. They found that auditory suggestions helped drivers switch lanes and brake faster. The users were also reported to like the assistance and believed it would be more useful in real-life driving. The researchers point out that these results do not match with results from earlier studies in which users preferred less assistance.

Image taken from the paper

As far as modality, they found that the best warning came in the form of a visual and speech combination and speech-only warnings gave the worst results. The researchers decided that the duration of the speech message was too long and could not convey the location of the object to the driver in the same way as a visual warning could. Based on a survey given after the experiment, users preferred a beep over a blinking red bar, and the visual warning without sound received the lowest score on average.

Discussion
Overall this was a good paper. The researchers were thorough in the experiments and their explanations were easy to understand.

Something really interesting about this paper was how well it related to things we’ve been reading about in class. At the beginning of the paper, the researchers discussed how auditory warnings were thought to be better than visual ones because driving makes great use of perception. They also discussed how while sound is useful, it can also become annoying if not designed well. However, they also predicted that visual warnings (taking 1.8 – 3.6 seconds, according to the paper) will eventually be better than auditory (taking about 5 seconds, according to the paper) ones, but in chapter 5 of “Why We Make Mistakes,” the author explains that a “single two-second glance doubles the risk of an accident,” which could defeat the whole purpose of the system.

As far as future work goes, the researchers mentioned using a head-down display rather than having the display fill the entire windshield. They could also include traffic in their experiments and more types of hazards.

Book Reading #44: Why We Make Mistakes

Chapter 4
Summary
Chapter 4 discusses how we tend to remember our actions with rose-colored glasses. When remembering things that we do and say, we tend to make ourselves sound better than we actually were/are. Hallinan presents several examples: students remembering their grades as being better than they were and remembering good grades more than the bad grades, the Watergate scandal and how John Dean remembered the events entirely differently than how they really went down (proven through tape recordings) and how gamblers remember their wins and how losses are near-wins in their eyes.

Discussion
I’m really enjoying this book because he backs up his explanations with so many interesting examples. I also love learning how the mind works. He pointed out in one of the chapters that even with the knowledge gained in this book, we don’t often learn to act/think differently as a result of the learning. While I think that’s true in some cases, I also think this knowledge will help us analyze our mistakes after the fact in all cases and help us understand other people’s mistakes better.

Chapter 5
Summary
In chapter 5 Hallinan explores the idea of multitasking and how we don’t actually do it. He discusses how multitasking slows us down, can cause us to forget what we are doing and creates a need for downtime, the time it takes to refocus on a task. The author provides examples of a pilot, a bus driver and drivers in general who do other tasks (like texting, talking on the phone or fiddling with a GPS) while driving.

He explores in depth the car and the many distractions being created to “aid” us distract us and how drivers need downtime when switching between tasks while driving.

Discussion
I really enjoyed Hallinan’s discussion on multitasking and the explanation as to why and how it is impossible for the brain to truly multitask. I also liked the lengthy discussion related to vehicles and distractions behind the wheel. Hallinan is able to explain so much through all these studies and real-world examples.

Book Reading #43: Things That Make Us Smart

Chapter 1
Summary
The first chapter discusses how technology should be more centered on the human. He discusses how technology can aid people but can also make them dumb and enslave them. He writes of how technology that is designed to aid people more often confuses people and interferes with thought processes. He differentiates between hard (sciences that rely on accurate measurements) and soft (sciences that relies on observation and classification) sciences. He also discusses two types of cognition: experiential (a state in which people react effortlessly and quickly to events) and reflective (a state in which thought and decision making takes place).

Discussion
I didn’t realize this was a Norman book until I read the first few pages and noted that the style matched Norman’s style: long-winded and plagued with his own set of vocabulary words and definitions. By page 11 he’s jumped back onto the design bandwagon and it starts to feel like a rehash of DOET and Emotional Design for a while.

Chapter 2
Summary
In chapter 2 Norman begins by discussing museums and how little they teach their visitors. He revisits experiential and reflective cognition and discusses how technology needs to strike a balance between the two rather than forcing users to one extreme or the other. Norman also defines three types of learning: accretion (the accumulation of facts), tuning (the practicing of a skill and the transition from novice to expert) and restructuring (the hard part of learning where one forms the right conceptual model). The first two are experiential modes and the third is reflective. He also defines optimal flow, the peak experience where the mind is fully involved, and how important it is to learning.

Discussion
I’m realizing that I don’t like Norman’s books and that the main reason I enjoyed the others has to do with the pictures that broke up the reading and drew my attention away from his style of writing. I did enjoy the last part of the chapter where he compared teaching in the classroom to video games. Finding that balance between the two that both engages and instructs the user is not easy to do but I think it could give great results.

Full Book Blog: Coming of Age in Samoa

Summary

source: borders.com.au

 Chapter 1 acts as an introduction to the book that gets the reader thinking about how each civilization affects the people within it. Margaret Mead begins by explaining how difficult it is to study the affects of civilization on adolescents since they cannot be studied and controlled like plants and animals.

In chapter 2, Margaret Mead describes a typical day in Samoa. She begins early in the morning, describing the men going to work, young boys fishing and girls giggling. She describes the evening as a lighter time when the Samoans dance and wander through the village together.

Chapter 3 focuses on what the girls learn as they’re growing up. As babies the girls are taken care of by children. They receive a simple education until about the age of five at which point they should, among other things, be housebroken and never address an adult in a standing position. They are then in charge of younger children and learn simple tasks including how to make pin-wheels and break open a coconut. The girls take care of babies and young children until they are strong enough to work on the plantations.

Chapter 4 explains the inner workings of the Samoan household and how the household is actually made up of several households throughout the village. Mead describes the way the different members of the household interact, the role and selection process of the taupo and provides more information on the matai and what they do within the household.

In chapter 5 Mead discusses the different groups of friends a girl has as she ages. She gives several examples of girls who interacted differently with the different groups. Mead also spends a little time discussing the groups of friends the boys have.

Chapter 6 focuses on the role girls play in the community. The organization of young men is called the Aumaga, and the organization of young girls, wives of untitled men and the widows is called the Aualuma. The chapter also discusses the women’s fonos of which there are two kinds: the ones that follow or precede communal work and the ceremonial fonos.

In chapter 7, Mead explains how relationships work between the sexes. Mead explains that there are two types of sex relations besides marriage that are recognized by the community. The first is love affairs between unmarried people and the second is adultery, something that does not always imply a broken marriage in the Samoan culture.

Chapter 8 discusses the important role dance plays in the Samoan culture. Being the single activity that all age groups participate in, dancing emphasizes individuality and can lead to inferiority if one is not a good dancer.

Chapter 9 explores the personality of Samoans and their attitude towards it. The word, musu, means that one is unwilling and obstinate and what Mead finds is that it is treated with “almost superstitious respect.” Once a person demonstrates musu, the Samoan doesn’t question why the person feels that way. They just accept it and move on.

Chapter 10 gives the reader some insight into the average girl. Mead writes about many of the girls individually such as Pele and Tuna.

Chapter 11 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.

Chapter 12 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.

Chapter 13 presents a compare and contrast between the Samoan and American youth. Mead discusses the very different social environments between the two cultures.

The final chapter of the book mainly focuses on the education of the youth in America. 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.

The different appendices describe different information. In Appendix II Mead explains how she went about studying the Samoan girls and what she focused on. Appendix III discusses Samoa and how it was when the book was published. In Appendix V Mead presents some of her findings in the form of tables, lists and descriptions.

Discussion
Overall this was an interesting book. I enjoy learning about other cultures and this was one I’m sure very few people had knowledge of prior to reading the book. However, I’m not sure we needed to read this entire book. Reading a couple of the appendices and maybe four or five chapters at the most probably would have been sufficient to give us a good idea of how an ethnography could be done. I’ve also heard from liberal arts students that they were told this was an example of how not to do an ethnography.

On the plus side, though, every chapter did present interesting information that kept me engaged. As a result of reading this, I might be willing to pick up other ethnography books later down the line to learn about other cultures.