Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Book Reading: Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 1:
B.F. Skinner is the author. In this book, shape is the operative word which means the behavior of people subjected to gears and boxes and buttons and strict schedules of reinforcement. There is two part in our brain for learning, which are basal ganglia and frontal cortex. Author had talk with Skinner's daughter to find out how is Deborah doing. She went to Skinner's house to understand more about him. He is not just a scientist, but also a humanist.

Chapter 2:
Stanley Milgram's experiment is here again. It begins with his famous experiment and talks more about his childhood and how he became a scientist. Laughter during the lab is a sign of between comedy and tragedy.Author meet one of the subject, and he reply he stop because of afraid that he will get heart attack. Joshua is the subject and a solider in WWII. Milgram has turned down by universities and start to has heart problem. Jacob is another subject who didn't face his life before the experiment. Obscura means darker in Spanish.

Chapter3:
David rosenhan is a Stanford professor who want to test how well psychiatrists were able to distinguish sane and insane. He ask 8 of his friend to participate in this experiment. Spitzer , a professor working in bio metrics lab at Columbia, wrote report on Rosenhan. DSM is diagnostic and statistical manual on mental disorder. Author decided to redo the experiment by herself. She done it eight more times. Doctors give her antidepressants and anti-psychotics. She is not admitted to any hospital and professionals was nice to her. And she didn't talk to Rosenhan.

Chapter 4:
Darley and Latane's training manual- a five stage approach.
1. I, You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring
2. you must intrepret the event as one in which help is needed
3. you must assume personal responsbility
4. You must decide what action to take
5. You must then take action
Their experiment is to see what happens when, in a group crisis, there is no authority to take charge.  size of the group does matter which if subjects in any size group didn't report the emergency within the first three minutes, they were highly unlikely to so at any point.
There is second experiment which when people are filling out form, they has smoke come out from vent. But one seems calm about it, then the subject will stay calm too. This is social cuing.

Chapter 5:
Leon Festincer is from Russian studied at University of Iowa mentor by Genman psychologist Kurt Lewin.  His work is "The psychological opposition of irreconcilable ideas held simultaneously by one individual, created a movtivating force that would lead, under proper conditions, to the adjustment of one's belief to fit one's behavior- instead of changing one's behavior to fit one's belief(the sequence conventionally assumed)." He organized a few cohorts to go under cover to see how do human beings react when prophecy fails. people start to leap to lies, overlook, sift through, sort out, tamp down. Another experiment is he paid some people 20 dollars to lie and other only 1 dollars to lie. And who had lied for one dollar were far more likely to claim that they really elieved the lie. people paid with $20 experienced less dissonance. Dissonance theory predicts taht the more paltry the reward for engaging in behavior that is in consisitent with one's beliefs, the more likely the person is to change their beliefs. He called what happens in the cult is Belief/Disconfirmation Paradigm, and lying for money he called the Insufficient Rewards Paradigm. Meet Audrey and Linda who had accident before and become a saint now.

Chapter 6:
Harry Harlow's experiments with wire monkeys. Infant monkeys cared more for a soft surrogate mother than a metal milk-bearing one. He is raised in Iowa who doesn't fit into the crowd. Terman gave him a job at University of Wisconsin. He is studying monkey and he found they love the towels. Contact comfort as an essential component of love. Money will still choose the inprint mom instead of masked mom. But the result actually is wrong, and Rosenblum had made another monkey that could rock.

Chapter 7:
Their idea is to test the animals in a truly benevolent environment, and to see whether addiction was stil the inevitable result. if it was, then drugs deserved to be demonized. Bruce Alexander stated there is no such thing as a chemical that causes addiction. Milner and Olds wanted to locate the brain's pleasure centers and hypothesized that they existed in the subreticular formation. They think our body adapts to the synthetic input by ceasing its own private production which is called the neuroadaptive model.author did the experiment herself, and it show her maybe she live in a colony, maybe didn't proceed to injection.

Chapter 8:
This chapter is about giving false memory into people's mind. The experiment works like the family talk through the journals to the subject, and including the false memory. The false memory is about lost in the mall. One out four people actually believe this and gave detail about this experience.

Chapter 9:
This chapter discusses Eric Kandel and his research on human memory and its storage in the brain. It talks about Henry who experienced seizures and convulsions, due to epilepsy, and had his hippocampus removed by Dr. Scoville. The brain surgery stopped Henry's seizures but also kept him from being able to make new memories. After reading about this story Kandel learned about neurons and human memory. He performed experiments on sea slugs because of their easily accessible neurons and discovered CREB and CREB repressors. CREB is a brain molecule that triggers the production of proteins that hold memories. Later, Kandel started a company that produced pills to help with memory enhancement.

Chapter 10:
Psycho surgery and lobotomies are the main topics of this chapter. The author talks about Antonio Moniz, the father of lobotomy, and his experiments in psycho surgery. The author also talks about the positive and negative effects that a psycho surgical procedure can have on a person's life. However, she notes that some people would rather face the negative effects of a surgery than deal with their depression, anxiety, and other related issues. Late in the chapter, Charlie Newitz and his OCD is discussed. He tried a bunch of different medications, however nothing worked so he underwent psycho surgery. After the surgery his OCD was gone, but also reported feeling depressed. He did think that dealing with depression was better that dealing with OCD. 

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Book Reading : Obedience to Authority

Chapter 1:
Author start with an example of Nazi that people follow authority's order even to kill many other ordinary people. It then talks about the experiment which is about a learner and a punish-er  After the experiment  most people reply with "I am just doing what I have been told".  People just escape from the responsibility of what they did. Many people would say just followed the order from above.

Chapter 2:
One important theory is people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake. The study is not done with undergraduate at Yale, but the High Heaven community. Victim's reaction is  important factor for controlling subject's behavior. This chapter explain the procedures of how the experiment will go on depends on the subject's behavior.

Chapter 3:
The author ask subjects to participate in a survey and predict what or when they will stop the experiment  As result, most of them said they will stop the experiment at learner's will or 150 volts. The participates includes psychiatrists, college students, and an audience of middle class adults of varied occupations.

Chapter 4:
As experiment 1, subjects can't hear the learner nor the learner can hear or see the subjects. As result, 26 obeyed the order of experimenter to the end. There are four experiments conduct with 40 adults, which are remote, voice feedback, proximity, and touch proximity. As more directly contact each condition gets, the less obedience.

Chapter 5:
This chapter is taking us from the experiment to the subject's world. It describe all four conditions with different users within it. I was surprise by touch proximity condition and the man just do all the orders without question. For other condition, I expected some of the result to be like what it is. However, many people complain about this experiment when they conduct it which is what I expected.

Chapter 6:
This chapter gives more variation in the experiment  In experiment 5, the experiment change into the actor would mention that he had heart problem. I am so surprise that 26 out of 40 would ignore this fact and continue to the end. In experiment 7, it makes the experimenter leave the room and give instruction by telephone. This decrease the obedience of the subjects. In 9, it's about the subject would notice there is a legal agreement between them. This would increase the disobedience too. In 10, it's about changing the location from Yale University. This also result in lower obedience. In 11, people are freely to choose any lvl of shock, and the mean is around 30.

Chapter 7:
This chapter give more details on how the experiment was. It details out the conversation during the experiment. It shows many people would continue to the end of the experiment with question. They would continue only if the experimenter take the responsibility  There is a German woman refuse to give shock at 45 level which is surprise. 

Chapter 8:
It start with defining three elements of this study, such as position, status, and action.In experiment 12, the role exchanged as learner demand for shocks. The result is every subject stopped administering shocks upon the experimenter's order. Experiment 13 is instead had the authority giving out instructions, it was an ordinary man. Result drop quite a bit. The next few experiment go with authorities change roles.

Chapter 9:
Hierarchy, imitation, explicitness, and voluntarism is important in this experiment  In experiment 18, group effect take in place which two peers would say stop the experiment. In result there is only 10% obedience. In 19, it's about two peer suggested go to the end of the experiment. As result, only 3% refuse to go to the end.

Chapter 10:
Few major points, "organized social life provides survival benefits to individuals who are part of it. Hierarchies can function only when internal modification occurs in the elements of which they are composed." There are two mode for anyone, which are autonomous and systemic mode. In here, it defines why people would administrated  the shock. It's because when a person sees himself under another person from higher status, he will define himself as an instrument to carry out action that other person wants.

Chapter 11:
This chapter talks about why people will not stop carry out the experiment  There are two factors that will cause people to get into agentic state, which are antecedent conditions and binding factors. Antecedent condition includes pre and immediate antecedent condition. binding factors are anxiety  situation obligation,and sequential nature of action.

Chapter 12:
There are several strain that talks about in this chapter - moral, law, cries from learner, self image, and direction from learner. There are few ways to reduce the strain, take away the responsibility, turn around, ask aloud.  There are few consequences for strain, such as disobedience, dissent, physical conversion.

Chapter 13:
This chapter talks about aggression which they define it as action to harm another organism. It said this experiment give condition that people can harm another under science. But actually people gave themselves to authority, and that's the key.

Chapter 14:
People states there are three problems of the methods used in this experiment  such as people are not typical   they didn't believe they are actually giving shocks, and it's not possible to generate this to world.
Chapter 15:
This last chapter gives an example of why solider obey orders to kill people. This is mainly because that they learned they need to obey the authority during training, before get into army, and in mission. The way it works is separate them from the world, and give them harsh way of punishment and reward. This will makes them remember what is right or wrong.

To the whole book:
This book talks about obedience to authority is exist in many places, even in a lab. Through out this lab, people obey the authority is due to many reason. I do think these factors do make sense and help me to understand more how authority in the society work. The one society that we all are in is school right now. We learned how to obey professors, if we dont then we might fail the class. This is because they have more authority level than us which they can give orders to us.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Ethnography idea

There is a good idea for others to do which is magic club. This is a very open club and also ambiguous club. The things they do is very fun and good to study with. Another idea that I would do is to study FUSED which is a dancing club. I know every dancer has their own theory of dance or life. And I had a little touch with one of their members which showed me that they are really open to anybody. therefore, I think this would be a good idea to study with.

Book Reading #2: gang leader for a day

Chapter 1:

Sudhir is a college student who is doing research on African American. He was a the University listening to seminar, and he felt those are lifeless that he want to "actually" know the answer. He approach to a professor, but the professor told him his project going on. However, this still doesn't answer his questions. He decided to go to black neighborhood and he meet many gangs there. They first threaten him a lot, but after he meet J.T. , the leader of this gang, he decided to hang out with them to study more about them. And J.T. invited him to hang out with them, therefore, author shows up and hang out with them.

Chapter 2:
Sudhir gets more to know about J.T. who's the gang leader. He found out that J.T. is not an average gang leader, he actually is a mindful person. He would give some question to Sudhir to test on him. One day, J.T. took him to Rober Taylor to meet Curly, a gang in Robert Taylor. After the conversation, J.T. needs to move to there, and he invited Sudhir to meet him there too. One day, he meet J.T. 's mother - Ms. Mae. She persuave Sudhir that this is a community, not a project.  At the end of chapter, C Note got beaten up by J.T. This really question Sudhir is J.T. had some other side that he never show him.

Chapter 3:
Sudhir witness another beat up case,  which is Brass. J.T. and his gang members beat up Brass because he didn't pay his squatting fee. This bring even more question up for Sudhir. J.T. explained this is necessary to hold his authority. After that, Sudhir attend Lenny' talk about how to live in this community. One afternoon, a woman was scarming out and everyone try to see what happend. She claim a man raped her daughter and gave her S.T.D. which found out is from other people later. They use another way to found out the truth. Rober Tayler A only has three apartment, and Robert Taylor B has large group of children. And there is problem from A trying to get over to B. Autry invited Sudhir to a basketball meeting which J.T. is really mad about.

Chapter 4:
In this chapter, Sudhir has his chance to be gang leader for a day. He had to deal with issue that J.T. normally does. He promise not to use any weapon and violence to settle things down. There is a case, Billey and Otis who both saying they own each other's money. In the end, Sudhir concludes that Otis stolen the money from Billy which is Otis's fault, and he punished him.

Chapter 5:
Sudhir takes his focus from J.T. to Ms.Baily, who takes in charge of the community. She is a chair man for the building which hold a tennat meeting on daily basis. During the meeting, people try to blame her for having a new tv, but not helping others. Ms. Baily turns back to them and accuse them for other new stuff she help them on. She never do anything for free, such as the way she get donation from people. It's not a actual donation which is exchange for what they need. There is one more instance that shows how powerful she is and how she fix problems for people. BeeBee was beating up by her manager and she called C-NOTE to take care of this. She can actually takes care of anything in the building.

Chapter 6:
Sudhir talking to Ms. Bailey and J.T. about legal obligations such as having to tell the police about any violence he see's. J.T. and Ms. Bailey were aware of this and give Sudhir the 2 options: go to jail or rat on the gang.
At the end of the chapter Sudhir goes to a council meeting held by Ms. Bailey. Many women are not happy about Sudhir's appearance at the council and yell things at him. Finally he realizes women think their daughters and sleeping with him during the writing workshop. Sudhir ends the chapter realizing it's hard to think of any tenants that weren't mad at him.

Chapter 7:
 the residents of Robert Taylor were out and about around the building. having a barbecue in the summer heat. Everyone was relaxing and having a good time until a car pulled up with a few of men in it and started shooting. Sudhir was asked by J.T to attend the next regional BK meeting with J.T. Reggie had invited Sudhir to the bar with him to hopefully further his insight of what the police men do on a daily basis, while at the bar on of Reggie's fellow cops started to become arrogant towards Sudhir and sending threats towards him. Just a few days later Sudhirs car got broken into at the Boys and Girls club.

Chapter 8:
The Robert Taylor research, had finally rewarded Sudhir a junior fellowship at Harvard’s Society Of Fellows. Announcing this news to J.T left an awkward tension between the two. Everything relatively related to the Robert Taylor Homes had fallen apart. Ms. Bailey and J.T were struggling to find employment or any sort of pay. As the months passed, Sudhir and J.T’s friendship fell apart. Sudhir’s last thoughts were “ How could I learn so much, absorb so many lessons and gain so many experiences at the side of a man who was so far removed from my academic world.”

Monday, October 8, 2012

Article Reading: Non-obvious Observation

Video for observation study

The video we created as a group is about walking from the entrance of Annex and borrow a DVD. We do not have any restrictions to this scenario  We as a group agree on the following route: walk from the entrance of Annex Library, take the stairs to level 4, borrow a DVD, return DVD, and walk back to the entrance. This is very boring route, however, we can do whatever we want during all the time. It might be hard to distinguish the difference or identify our group members from those videos. As what I said before, I will give few hints here. Look for mirror reflections, this is a great way to identify the group members. 

Non-obvious things

There are many non-obvious thing that we can discover more about a person. As the author of "Secret Life of Pronouns" mentioned Sherlock Holmes, he is a great example of whom discover non-obvious things. The first chapter basically talks about how the author come up with a word counting program. As what I have read, I understand the way people talks would be one of the most important way we get information of a person from. The word choices, emotions, or even categories of a word would matters. Another way I might be take note about is to look at a person's gesture and the way they stands. One example would be crossing hand on their own chest would mean they are conservative on the topic they are talking about. 



Friday, October 5, 2012

Ethnography Readings

People are interested in values, worldview and ethos of the culture. the process is first determine the meaning of  a gesture, then the appropriated situation to use it. After that, move to another region to see if it still mean the same thing. Cultural boundary of communication is founded by this way.

Ethnography is widely used, such as in business, communication studies, and sociology. They used it to analyze communication behaviors to find out the answer of why and how come of human communication. There are five ways to evaluate ethnography  they are substantive contribution, aesthetic merit, reflective  impact, and express a reality.

The author of Coming of Age in Somoa is Margaret Mead. Her study was to see does the civilization changed the nature of adolescence . After her research, she state few facts that shocked the public and became remarkable figure in this area. However, after few years she passed away that a man publish a book indicated her founding is a joke. He found the participant in her study to show her study was based on their jokes. This is huge debate between that, since Mead passed away and no one will notice the truth. In my opinion, I think Mead did a good job on study in this group of people. Freeman is only trying to be famous by take her down from this remarkable figure. 

Monday, October 1, 2012

Book Reading #2: Emotional Design chap 1

Comparison:
In this book, the author mentioned about three levels of process which are visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Examples for each are sense something is good or bad, unconsciously driving a car, and consciously think something while driving a car.
The author tried to find the relationship between asetheriac and function. He stated at the beginning that this is not related at least in his own country  however, he founds out this is related and did experiment to it. he mentioned good feeling will affect people's behavior and how bad feeling will drive people crazy at a problem.All of these things he mentioned, are mainly his view points in chapter one. 

The difference between the two books which are one teach how to design a product in a easier way in behavior and the other is through emotion. This book actually inspire me more in design this way, such a way that I never really look into. From all the classes in A&M, this is the only one that mention about how to design a product related to customers' emotion. And I do believe this is a very important view in designing. This is mainly because people buy a product depends on their emotion and use a product under a certain emotion. This emotion will greatly affect their way of using a product. In design of everyday things, they help readers to develop a design cycle within their mind. This is very important to any design process. 

In my opinion, I think both books talks about different major view point in designing process. I am glad that I have been read these two books before I am graduating. This will reinforce me to develop a better product in the future.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Book reading #1: Design of Everyday Things(Book) with examples

Reaction to the book:

This book opens a new world of design to me in many ways. I think maybe the ideas are outdated when I first saw this book. Instead, I do think I can apply what I read in this book into my project and work. I do enjoy reading books that are not outdated even after 30 or more years. This really mean something to me, because I think the author does have a really good view of how future will look and how current is. 

This books starts about how we should design some very simple thing in daily life. It give an example about how door can be separate into good and bad design. That's when I really gets into this book, because I was thinking doors are doors that it can't be better. However, I am absolutely wrong about this. He mentioned that a bad door can trap people inside it. I was surprised about this example, and I do think some doors are complicated than what it should be. This is just a starting of this book, it has many different parts to it. 

One concept mentioned in this book that I really agree on is mapping. It basically means the number of controls should match the number of functions of the product. I have always get confuse by some product that one control unit has multiple functions to it. It will alternate the function depends on how we interact with it. I think this kind of product is hard to use, because of the limited memory in our brain. And there is one more concept that I love which is constraints. I think Apple's magic mouse is a bad designed product in my own opinion. This is because the is not much constraints to it. It actually did amazed me at first, but after a while, I think there is not enough constraints to each option. 

Overall, this book in my opinion is very good to read and to think about while you read. I like the ideas that it presents and how it presents it. 

Bad Examples:

Watch

This watch I found a problem with actually is occur in all watches. This problem maybe bother to everyone else, but in my view that it is a problem. When we try to tie the watch to the smallest hole, there is always a gap between the watch bands. 
I think this is lack of constraints, since it will not have the gap between the watch bands when we choose other holes. As you can see, there is a huge gap when it's plug into the smallest hole. This maybe not be any function problem, but to me it's a vision problem. It's really to fix this problem, the designers can make the other side of watch band to be longer. 

Lotion bottle

This bottle is lack of constraints since the opening is no other assisment to it. The lotion in this bottle is liquid, not like normal lotion. The problem with that is when people try to pour the lotion out, the water will flow out of control. There is one way to fix this problem, designer can put a soft cap allow users to push for more lotion. It has actually good mapping because when I try to close the cap, it will squeeze all the way down. It has high quality feedback, since the cap will indicate if the bottle is closed or not. However, the problem I mentioned is a huge problem;therefore, this is not a good design.

Commercial Poster

It's lack of constraints that it doesn't have any instruction for how to close it. As in the picture show above, the poster actually can form a square. However, the crease of the paper indicate close the paper inward. This would cost some problem that if people try to continue to close one by one. This is the problem of incorrect conceptual model. This folding would cost time to refold it. The designer can design it into a Z shape folding, in that way, its visibility is increase. Overall, the design is not good enough. 

Hole Puncher

It's lack of constraints that it doesn't indicate number of fingers or hand to operate it. The problem is when you apply different pressure at different force point that you will have different outcome. And normally the outcome is not good. As I mentioned, the visibility is not good enough for people to know which part is easiest to operate with. The feedback is actually good in this case, the machine will click a sound after it has done its job. However, I still believe it should have some more instructions or visibility to it.

Dell mouse

It's lack of constraint because of the clickable area is too big. People does accidently press on wrong side of the mouse and delete things. The visibility is not really good as I mentioned above. Their design doesn't indicate which part user should click on. It has a incorrect conceptual model which let me think the clickable area should be only at the top of mouse. However, the clickable area is too big that we never expect that. Overall, the design is not good enough in my opinion.

Good Examples:
iPad Smart Cover 

I brought this one long time ago, and it still works fine. It has only two functions and two positions which is a perfect ratio. So the mapping is really good. It sleeps the iPad when it's flat and wakes up the iPad when it lifted up. It can form a triangle to support the iPad to stand up or tilt. Its constraints is really good that people will get use to it really fast. The magnets on the side will allow it to stick to iPad and pull off when we dont need it. Overall, I think this design is perfectly designed, simple to use.

Microsoft mouse

It has four buttons and 4 functions which is perfect ratio. It's design to be easily used. It will automatically install the software when we plug in the usb, in that way we can use it right away. Many constraints to this product, such as only right handed, finger rest area, and thumb area. It's all really clear and visible to the users. Overall, this product is well designed. 

Stapler

It only one function and two area to operate with. It's reasonable ratio. It has a thumb press down area that's designed for users. Its constraints is when you push all the way down, that it will have a little click sound. The conceptual mode is correct as what I think as it is, which its only operation is push down to staple papers. Overall, it's a great design and I enjoyed using it.

iPhone 3GS

It has five buttons and 6 or 7 functions to it. It's a good ratio. It has not much constraints to it, but few good ones. Its size is reasonable for one hand to hold. But the buttons are designed for people to easily to press when they hold it in hand. This doesn't matter if you hold it in right hand or left hand. The visibility is very good that we know how we should holding the device. Overall, this device is a good design.

Power gear

The most useful tool for cutting branches of a tree. There are constraints that help people to hold and operate with. The hand grip at the end of handle visibly indicates the hand position. Also the visibility is good for the scissor on top. The curved shape and short length indicates the functionality of the device, which is for strong and small branches of a tree. The conceptual model is really good since the device show a correct conceptual to me when I first look at this device. Overall, the design of this device is really good.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Article reading #1:Chinese Room

In the field of computer science. There are four concepts that developed by computer sciencetists that consider to be important to understand Chinese Room.
Strong AI is the first concept that they mentioned. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig observe that most AI researchers "don't care about the strong AI hypothesis—as long as the program works, they don't care whether you call it a simulation of intelligence or real intelligence."In my own opinion, this is what I was thinking. However, Searle's idea is to sets no limit on this is a simulation.
One part is symbol processing. The computer manipulates the symbol without really understand the meaning to what they process of. This is like what the computer does in Searle's mind.

They assume Chinese Room as Turing machine too. This is mainly because the author thinks Chinese room has all the ability that Turing machine also has. A Turing machine simply consist with a program, memory,CPU, and tools to write the memory. Based on this context, I do think Chinese room can actually act as Turing machine.
The last part is Turing test. This simply is a test that a judge will ask question to the machine and human. however, he would not know if he is actually asking a human or machine. If he cannot reliably tell the difference between them, then the machine passed the test.
So after understand these four concepts, I will summarize the Chinese Room concept below. Suppose there is a computer that understand Chinese, and it takes Chinese as input and output Chinese. It will follow some kind of program that been designed. The idea is did the computer really understand Chinese or not. Searle argues that the computer doesn't understand Chinese. He then later talk about how he 
After reading this Chinese Room, I have many concerns about this topic.First is that has this problem been solved. I found the answer in the reading which is no, and there are many people question about how correct that Searle set this room. This is very important to a research like this, and in my own opinion, I do think he set this correct without any biased factor. Other than that, there are many replies to this idea. Also I have a reply to Chinese Room which is 

Monday, September 10, 2012

Book reading #1: Design of Everyday Thing (Chaps)

Reaction to first chap:
It opens the door for me in the area of design. It gives a solid idea how to design simple things with multiple criteria  These criteria include two main principles, such as good conceptual model and make things visible. This is mentioned in first chapter with great explanation to them. The conceptual model is mental simulation of a device's operation. And make things visible means interface must have visible features, inferring the right messages to people. He give a good example for poor visibility, the glass door. He mentioned about how his friend is trapped inside a glass door because there is no sign or clue how to use it. This example showed how important visibility is in the real world.
In the market, there are many poor design of any thing. As a engineer, I think about my future jobs when I was reading this paper. I feel like I should simulate my product on the customer's side of view. This will be helpful for create any thing in the future.

Reaction to Chap2:
The author introduce 7 stages of action which are forming the goal, forming the intention, specifying an action, executing the action, perceving the state of the world, interpreting the state of world, and evaluating the outcome. These seven states help for checking if gulfs of execution and evaluation are bridged. I am really how he explains Aristotle's naive physics. He said this is our naive way of explaining the phenonmenon we witness in everyday life. And there is one more important point that I agree with him, which is spiral of silence. I believe people do these really often on daily life.

Reaction to Chap3:
This chapter talks about memory is in knowledge in the head and the world. The most interesting thing I got out of this chapter is the four reasons that we can complete a task without precise knowledge to it. The reasons are information in the world that we get touch with, great precision not required, natural constraint, and cultural constraint. This explain why sometime people can complete some task that they never done before. The reasons behind this kind of task is what really get me interest in it.

Reaction to Chap4:
This chapter talks about how constraint makes a good design. I really agree to what the author states that people normally can't choose when there is more than one option. He uses build a Lego motorcycle as an example to illustrate the idea. He mentioned constraints includes physical, semantic, cultural, and logical. To conclude, a good design should have good constraints to limit how can a person to operate it.

Reaction to Chap5:
This chapter is mainly about how to design a product with minized error and able to correct them right away. He introduce many kinds of errors, such as capture, description, data driven, associative activation, loss of activation, and mode errors. As a programmer, error detecting is one of the main function we have to write about. This chapter reinforce how important this is to me once again.

Reaction to Chap6:
This chapter describes the process of design. He describe a good design should be tested, found the problem, and modified the design. And this kind of process should be repeat until out of resource. However, there are some people that have two kind of problems, and I did meet some of this kind of people. It was really not a good experience when we have time constraint to our project. So back on track, the two kind temptations are creeping featurism and make it complex just because it looks cool. These two problem can really cost problem to occur, and no one wants it!

Reaction to Chap7:
This chapter basically summarize the whole book which is about user center design. It reinforce the idea that we are designing something that users need to easily understand and to use. In my point of view, I do think this is very easy to talk about. However, it actually is really hard to design. I agree an idea that it talks about, which is simplify the structure of tasks. It basically is saying that we should use technology to make something invisible(parts that we don't want users to see) and visible(parts that users need to operate with). And I do think this is what technology is for, so I give a plus to this idea.







Sunday, September 9, 2012

paper reading #6:Improving Command Selection with CommandMaps

Intro:
title:Improving Command Selection with CommandMaps
reference information:Austin,Texas
author bios:Joey Scarr†, Andy Cockburn†, Carl Gutwin‡, Andrea Bunt. All three come from different Unviersities, Unverisity of Canterbury, University of Saskatchewan, and University of Manitoba. Their majors are all the same: Computer science.

Related Works:

  1. Measuring the true cost of command selection: techniques and results
  2. Benefits of merging command selection and direct manipulation
  3. Toolglasses, marking menus, and hotkeys: a comparison of one and two-handed command selectiontechniques
  4. Integrating laboratory and field study for improving selection: Development of a battery for predicting air traffic controller success.
  5. Marker-assisted selection to improve drought resistance in common bean
  6. mproving command and control speech recognition on mobile devices: using predictive user models for language modeling
  7. Speech-based cursor control: understanding the effects of target size, cursor speed, and command selection
  8. Design and analysis of delimiters for selection-action pen gesture phrases in scriboli
  9. Improving the execution speed of compiled Prolog with modes, clause selection, and determinism
  10. Using task context to improve programmer productivity
The related work talks about how to use command selections to improve programmer speed, or other speed of users. However, the topic of this paper I read is very novel according to what I have read. It talk about how to improve the command selection, and in other works that they try to combine command selection to improve performance. This is related, however, it's totally different idea. It's not common to see this topic in other papers. In one related work, it talks about benefits of merging command selection and direct  manipulation. This is very command in other related work, but this paper have totally different idea. 


Summary:
Current GUI application's commands are design in hierachal structures. This increase the time to find a specific command for expert users. And they found there is way to improve this performance by CommandMap. This technique has two main properties: they show all of an application's commands at once, and they do so in a spatially stable fashion, allowing users to build up spatial memory of frequently used commands.They have integrate this CommandMap within Microsoft Office Word. As the research goes on(details on evaluation section), they found out there is not much effiency for novice users; however, much faster result for expert users.


Evaluation:

Their overall hypothesis is that spatial memory can be the basis for command-selection interfaces. The first study consist 12 participants from local university, and ask to perform three tasks. The first one is to determine familiar commands which is to inspect the study system's mock up of the Word 2010 interface and to indicate which Ribbon-based commands they were familiar with. Second tasks is to specify locations with Ribbon hidden, and last task is to select commands using the Ribbon. The result founding is for many commands, people do have a spatial memory of the commands' locations in the GUI were known to within 100 pixels. And other founding is people know the tab location of most of their familiar commands. And there is another main experiement which consists 18 participants, and they were ask to use Commandmap and normal menu with similiar task I described above. The result showed speed increase for expert users of 34% over menus and 25% over Microsoft's Ribbon, and the other showing no significant performance differnce for novices. They used unbiased measuers and quantitative measures according to what I showed above. The methods they use is systemic because it did many studies over this topic.

Discussion:
I do think this work did contribute to many other areas. In the related works I read from, if this people use CommandMap and other works together, then the speed of computing would be much faster for novice and expert users. The contribution is very novel in this area, since other works didn't talk about it.I am really intereseted in this topic that I hope I can do something related to it in the future.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Paper reading #5:Tell Me More? The Effects of Mental Model Soundness on Personalizing an Intelligent Agent

Intro:
Title:Tell Me More?The Effects of Mental Model Soundnesson Personalizing an Intelligent Agent
Reference Information: In London
Author Bios:Todd Kulesza1, Simone Stumpf2, Margaret Burnett1, Irwin Kwan1
Students and Staff at Oregon State University and City University London. They interest in artificial intelligence.

Summary:
People are using intelligent agents more frequently, such as Facebook, amazon, and Pandora. In Facebook, they use facial detection to guess who is in a particular photo. But this kind of intelligent agents need to learn from the users. And this paper is wonder how to improve the intelligent agents by users. The result is people who knows how to debug the intelligent agents will have better agents. This is due to their knowledge how to fully operate the agents.

Related Works:

  1. Intelligent agent supported personalization for virtual learning environments
  2. Intelligent agent-based systems for personalized recommendations in Internet commerce
  3. User models to personalize an intelligent agent
  4. Intelligent techniques for web personalization
  5. User–interface agent interaction: personalization issues
  6. Personalizing information appliances: a multi-agent framework for TV programme recommendations
  7. “ARCHIMIDES”: an intelligent agent for adaptive-personalized navigation within a WEB server
  8. Programming with an intelligent agent
  9. Learning for automatic personalization in a semantic taxonomy-based meta-search agent
  10. Agent technology for personalized information filtering: the PIA-system


I think this topic is about novel, due to existing and recently trends of usage of intelligent agents. The work I found has many research on this topic, however, I still think the work I read about is novel in this field. Many research has the familiar result as the paper I read of.

Evaluation:
There are 62 participants in this study and separated into two groups. One group with only necessary information with the AuPair (Radio station that researchers developed to research on) and one group with deep explanation how the radio station will operate depends on their actions. The researchers use quantitative and unbiased measures. The method is systemic.

Discussion:
I think the contribution of this paper is medium that is due to there are many familiar researches out there. This paper did not mention how it will really applied their research into the real world.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Paper #4: Digital Pen and Paper Practices in Observational Research

Intro:
Title:Digital Pen and Paper Practices in Observational Research
Reference Information:
Author bios: NadirWeibel, Adam Fouse, Colleen Emmenegger, Whitney Friedman, Ed Hutchins, Jim Hollan
  All of the authors are from University of California, either a PHD student or Professor.

Summary:
This paper talks about how digital pen and paper practice can be integrated. It contains many studies that goes along with this topic. They show how their research can use on many different reality world, such as video process for flight control, take notes with digital pen, and process notes with digital pen.

Related Works:

  1. Beyond paper: supporting active reading with free form digital ink annotations
  2. Annotation: from paper books to the digital library
  3. Usability testing of a digital pen and paper system in nursing documentation
  4. Only touching the surface: creating affinities between digital content and paper
  5. PenLight: combining a mobile projector and a digital pen for dynamic visual overlay
  6. Designing pen-and-paper user interfaces for interaction with documents
  7. Papiercraft: A gesture-based command system for interactive paper
  8. Despite technical problems personal digital assistants outperform pen and paper when collecting 
  9. Tabletop displays for small group study: affordances of paper and digital materials

    10.CoScribe: Integrating paper and digital documents for collaborative knowledge work


The work I read about is not novel, this is because many people had research on this kind of topic already. It talks about other related work in the study since they use other's work to combine with theirs.

Evaluation:
Both qualitative and quantitative measures. Aviation human factors researchers used  symbol to quantify the number of AER interaction. for qualitative, they used forms for emergency drill.  It's systemic because they conducts many researches to show their research result, such as handwriting recognization for categorical data and the proximity of the elephants.

Discussion:
I think this topic is very interesting to read about and had much contribution in this field. This field is very useful to researchers and students like me, since we have to take many notes in school. Today in the society, we are transiting from paper notes to digital notes. With that in mind, this function is super useful to everyone in the society.

Monday, September 3, 2012

paper #3:Curation, Provocation, and Digital Identity: Risks and Motivations for Sharing Provocative Images Online(1),TeleAdvisor: A Versatile Augmented Reality Tool for Remote Assistance(2)

Intro:

Title:Curation, Provocation, and Digital Identity: Risks and
Motivations for Sharing Provocative Images Online
Reference Information: Carnegie Mellon University
Author Bios: all three authors are from Carnegie Mellon University. all of them are PHD student researching in Digital Data.

summary:

In this paper, they discuss why people want to posting personal images online that would risk their identity.They conduct a study based on 10 Flickr users, and ask them what is their intention for posting these kind of photos. Each duration is around 1-2 hours. As result, they found people advocate for the right to be themselves, the rights of others, and seek to protect others.

Related Work:

  1. Images of organization
  2. Teens and sexting
  3. Sharing neuroimaging studies of human cognition
  4. MySpace, my friends, my customers
  5. Camera phone use and its implications
  6. Provocative awareness
  7. Managing corporate image and identity
  8. Examining students' intended image on Facebook:“What were they thinking?!
  9. Provocative and unforgettable: Peter Carey's short fiction–A Cognitive Approach
  10. Social communication in advertising: persons, products & images of well-being

    It's about novel that the paper i have read. It did talk about previous researches and how it contributes to theirs. The previous researches didn't ask the same question, but come out with the same answer. The related work is mostly on the same topic, however, they are not doing survey instead of the paper i read about. 

Evaluation:

They used qualitative and biased measures. The method is systemic since this is the only way to ask true feelings of people. The study consists 10 Flickr users that vary in the gender, age, interest. I think even the number is pretty small, however, it does include the whole system. They interview 10 users and ask what do they think about posting inappropriate pictures online. And then they would analyze the answer and discuss the answer to readers.

Discussion:

I think the work is pretty concise and tell us what people think about photo sharing. It did contribute to whom is interested in people who like to share photos. Especially most of the users they ask has post photos that are considered inappropriate to most parent. This study is actually really fun to read since it tells us about what people think and why they think that way.

Intro:

title:TeleAdvisor: A Versatile Augmented Reality Tool for Remote Assistance
reference information: Israel
author bios: They are all from Israel doing research. Their lab is IBM Haifa Research Lab.

summary:

teleAdvisor is remote assistance device that consists camera, projector, and a machine hand. it bascially is a remote helper. it's used to help people over the network with portable device.  it is able to project text, image, and pointer. So the device can help people to go through some simple installation.

Related Work:

  1. Remote assistance: a view of the work and a view of the face?
  2. The development and deployment of a multi-user, remote access virtualization system for networking, security, and system administration classes
  3. Personal networks enabling remote assistance for medical emergency teams
  4. Remote assistance experiment during the manned space flight Altair
  5. System for the remote monitoring of a reproduction apparatus
  6. Cooperative assistance for remote robot supervision
  7. Telesurgery:: Remote monitoring and assistance during laparoscopy
  8. Enabling secure remote assistance using a terminal services gateway
  9. Wireless video audio data remote system
  10. A digital television based solution for remote health care of rural people

    This idea is not very novel, since this topic has many people research on it. This is also because this is mainly what many people thought of when they think about computer human interaction. The related work I read about seems to have a well developed situation on this topic. Compare the works i read to the paper, it seems like the overall situation is well develop. However, in the paper, they said this is just initial step of this kind of work.

Evaluation:

it uses qualitative measure mainly and unbiased measures. I believe it did measure part of the system, since it only did a study over 10 people with two tasks. The first task is ask the participants to build Lego assembly work, and the second task is to install TV and DVD cables.  It did show a good result on the study. 

Discussion

I think the work is a very useful device to develop on. However, it's only still in a baby stage that many people have not try to make it into reality. The evaluation is appropriated since it help us to understand more about this device. The contribution is about novel, because it show people a way of doing remote assistance.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Paper Reading#2: JigsawMap: Connecting the Past to the Future by Mapping Historical Textual Cadasters

Intro:
   Title -- JigsawMap: Connecting the Past to the Future by Mapping Historical Textual Cadasters
   Reference Information -- Korea
   Author Bios--Current:Associate Consultant at Exaserv
   Past:Graduate TA (Database) at Georgia Institute of Technology
  •    Research Assistant Intern at Yeungnam University Medical Center

Summary: JigsawMap is a text visualization tool for making historical textual cadasters. People use great amount of time for making pre-modern textual cadasters to modern textual cadasters. This is mainly because historians need to analys great amount of data and draw them on a paper. however, this tool use visualization that will able anyone to do an expert's job.

The work I read is about novel and they did talk about related work. They mention about their work is based on previous research on different fields. The related work is about at the same level of the paper I read about. The related works seem to not have a device that is well developed as I read in the paper. 

Evaluation: They ask a student that has no experience in this kind of work before to participate, and a professor that has fully experience on it. The student will use the Jigsaw Map, and the professor used his hand drawn map to do everything by his own hand. The outcome is the student did in a much faster way than the professor. The student uses only two weeks to completed the task, and the professor use more than a month. They use qualitative measures and biased measures. The method they used is systemic since it did ask people that are familiar to this kind of work to participate and people that are not. It works pretty well based on their prediction. 

Discussion: I think this work contributes much to the historians. This will decrease the amount of time they work for mapping. Therefore, the historians can use other time to investigate other more important things. 

Paper Reading #1:Learning how to feel again: towards affective workplace presence and communication technologies

Intro:
  • Title: Learning how to feel again: towards affective workplace presence and communication technologies
  • Reference Information: Illonios Unviersity

  • Author Bios: All authors are students who studying computer science at Illonioous Unveristy. For Xu, his research interest is  to Creativity Support Tools, Crowdsourcing and Visualization.


Summary: In this paper, they talk about how people are lack of each other's cue of affect in today's live. 
This is mainly because everyone in work place communicate via computer-mediated channels. They insist that affect is very important to communication and collaboration in the work place. In their work, they try to capture people's affect state during work time without any invasive way. They ask a group of workers to work together in a building. The workers know each other very well and they use myUnity to communicate. During the day, they will sent out text messages and email five to eight times. At each time period, participants were asked to report their location, current communication media preferences , preferences with respect to requests from colleagues , current affective state (Figure 1c), and, optionally, their estimate of another colleague’s affective state. As a result, the participates rarely felt confident to guess others affective state(26% of the time) and when they guessed, the number is 57%for pleasure and 59.1% for arousal. From the information shown above, participates have difficulty for assess affective state of others.

Related work not referenced in the paper: 

  1. Virtual teams: Technology and the workplace of the future
  2. Informal workplace communication: What is it like and how might we support it?
  3. Introducing instant messaging and chat in the workplace
  4. Health Communication on the Internet: An effective channel for health behavior change?
  5. Assessing social presence in asynchronous text-based computer
  6. Interactivity and vividness effects on social presence and involvement with a web-based advertisement
  7. Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action
  8. Monitoring online communication: can the development of convergence and social presence indicate an interactive learning environment?
  9. Perceptions of mediated presence in an asynchronous online course: Interplay of communicationbehaviors and medium
  10. How to compete: the impact of workplace practices and information technology on    productivity

I think the work I read is about novel. Since this problem appear these past decade, I think the topic is novel. And they did talk about related work, such as myUnity. They also mention some other early project about this topic, such as Active Badge System which provide awareness of people's physical environment through video feed.

Evaluation: They use qualitative measures and biased measures. The method does work and they measure only part of the system. Since they only did one study and it's only done with 23 people.

Discussion: I think the methods they used is good in terms of non invasive way. Their contribution is not that big since the result of study is obvious to most people. However, this is only the initial step of their approach. in the paper, they stated there will be more studies and improvement in the future.

Blog #0


  • Photo of yourself (real photo).
  • E-mail address.
    • fl415@neo.tamu.edu
  • Class standing (e.g., 3rd year Junior, 7th year Senior)
    • 4th year Senior
  • Why are you taking this class?
    • Because I am interested in how computer interact with human
  • What experience do you bring to this class?
    • Actually I have not much experience in this field.
  • What are your professional life goals?
    • To get in a top computer company, such as Apple
  • What are your personal life goals?
    • To happily live forever
  • What do you want to do after you graduate?
    • To get a miserable job
  • What do you expect to be doing in 10 years?
    • Programming
  • What do you think will be the next biggest technological advancement in computer science?
    • Iron man!
  • If you could travel back in time, who would you like to meet and why?
    • My dad. Because he taught me a lot, and I want to learn more from him
  • Describe your favorite shoes and why they are your favorite?
    • Nike, it has been my favorite since childhood.
  • If you could be fluent in any foreign language that you're not already fluent in, which one would it be and why?
    • Japanese, I always wanted to learn this language since my childhood. Mainly is because cartoon and their culture.
  • Give some interesting fact/story about yourself.
    • I do magic since high school, however, I kind of quit this hobby. But I am still good at it!