Paper Reading #18: Evaluating Automatic Warning Cues for Visual Search in Vascular Images (IUI 32)

Comments
http://stuartjchi.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-18.html
http://shennessy11.blogspot.com/2011/03/p.html

Reference Information

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

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

   Publisher: IUI '10, February 7-10, 2010 Hong Kong

Summary
The researchers in this paper focused on performing computer-aided visual search. Traditional visual search tasks include finding weapons in x-rayed baggage, targets from a moving vehicle, aerial photographs, cancer areas in mammograms, polyps in colonoscopy, or low credibility areas in automatic medical image segmentation. In many cases, automatic warning systems are used to highlight potential targets. Although, these systems can be imperfect and result in false positives/alarms. Not only that, human error also results due to over or under-reliance on such systems.


To counter this, researchers decided to make a system that alerts the human analyzing the picture for possible areas of interest, letting them decide whether they need to proceed further. They found that the user generally preferred paranoia alerts which typically display false positive instead of a more conservative system. Users performed significantly faster with paranoid highlighting than with no highlighting, and they make significantly less errors.


Discussion
This paper was fairly technical, similar to the last one. It was easy to grasp what they were going for. I thought that the problem they wanted to look at was fairly straightforward, almost obvious. I'm not sure why they thought people might be more comfortable with false negatives than positives. In areas such as cancer/weapon detection, it seems as though there's almost no extent to "too much testing".

Full Blog: Emotional Design

Reference Information

   Title: Emotional Design

   Author: Donald Norman

   Publisher: Basic Books (2005)


Summary

The first chapter of this book explains why attractive things work better. He talks about how emotions help people to make decisions. He also talks about how happiness influences the thought process and encourages creativity. An attractive design allows for a more enjoyable experience. He also talks about the three levels of processing: visceral, behavioral, reflective.

In the second chapter Norman talks about the different levels of processing work in respect to design, and how they play off each other. He mentions visceral design (initial impact of the product), behavioral (the use and experience) and reflective (understanding, reasoning and interpreting). He later goes on to discuss the role memories play. Objects evoke memories and those memories reflect us. He concludes by discussing the goals of a product and the brand.

The third picks up where the last one leaves off. Norman discusses the 3 levels of design: visceral, behavioral and reflective. Visceral design is focused on how things appear physically. Elements to keep in mind are look, feel, sound and initial reactions. Behavioral design focuses rather on function, understandability, usability and physical feel. Function is the most important of these aspects. Reflective design focuses on the meaning a product carries and the way culture is incorporated.

Discussion
Norman, like most of his books, tends to repeat himself very often. It is nice that we didn't have to read the entire book. With that said, I found this to be enjoyable and insightful. He uses a lot of really good examples to help the reader understand the points that he tries to make. I thought the Xbox advertisement in chapter two was really good. I've started to try and learn how to write iOS apps on my own and i'm struggling to design a good interface. Maybe we'll learn something about that sort of thing in this class?

Book Reading #41: Why We Make Mistakes Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Why We Make Mistakes

   Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

   Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 2: We All Search for Meaning (18 pages)

Summary
The focus of this chapter is the meanings we pick up on. Hallinan talks about the ones that we see and hear are more important than the details of the entire scene. He gives a lot of examples as to how details aren't stored well in memory: penny test, slip of tongue errors, recall errors, things like that. He talk about how we should come up with passwords quickly because we won't remember it in the future if we had to figure it out first.

Chapter 3: We Connect the Dots (13 pages)

Summary
In this chapter, the author considers how we connect dots and consider things. He gives a lot of examples. One of them is how voters make quick decisions on who they're going to vote for based on how competent the candidate looks. Another example was wine tasting--people rated more expensive wine as tasting better even if it tasted exactly the same as cheap wine. The author gives a bunch ore examples to help us understand mistake sources.


Discussion
I really enjoy how many examples the author gives us in each chapter. In the first chapter, I thought it was interesting when he talked about password creation. It makes sense that we won't remember it in the future because we had to discover it first. In regards to the second chapter, it amazes me how similar products can be, especially clothing, and prices be so wildly different. There are a lot of ways that products differentiate themselves in the market and it's crazy that price can be one of those ways--like designer handbags and such.

Book Reading #42: Coming of Age in Samoa Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

   Author: Margaret Mead

   Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Appendix III: Samoan Civilization as it is Today (12 pages)

Summary
In this chapter, Mead discusses Samoa when the book was published. She talks about its geography, housing, clothing and demographic qualities. She then talks about the changes that have taken place as a result of outside influence and interaction with other governments.


She discusses schooling and the melding of European beliefs and mechanical devices. Mead also goes on about how Samoa was before white influence. Samoans have been able to take parts from other cultures and incorporate them into their own without losing sight of their own ways.


Discussion
I thought the section about how the Samoans were able to incorporate different parts of other cultures into their own without losing sight of their own was a really fascinating section. 

Ethnography Results, Week 7

Group members include:

Chris Kam (myself)

Steven Hennessey 

For our fifth day of our observation, we chose to go to Buckle. Buckle appeals to college kids a little more than American Eagle, probably about on par with Express. The difference though is that its product is very specific and doesn't have a lot of range.

Our data:

# of customers that walked in: 46

# of males:25

# of females:21

54% male, 46% female

# of customers that purchased something: 8

17% of customers that walked in bought something

# of items bought: 16

2 units/transaction

# of coupons used: 0

# of males:5

# of females:3

0% of customers buying used a coupon

# of people that visited the fitting rooms: 20

# of males: 14

# of females:6

70% male, 30% female

40% of people that visited the fitting rooms bought something

# of items total people brought to the fitting rooms: 64

3.2 items per customer brought to fitting room

females tended to spend 3 minutes longer in fitting room

The mall was fairly crowded but there were not many people that came into Buckle. Our guess is that it is a relatively expensive store with sort of a niche market. The employees were very active in trying to get people to try things on. They checked back with them a lot, almost too much it seems. I figured out later that the people at Buckle work on commission which can obviously explain the customer service experience.

Paper Reading #17: Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso

Comments
http://shennessy11.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-16.html
http://stuartjchi.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-16-creating-collections.html 

Reference Information

   Title: Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso

   Author: Roobert Speer, Catherine Havasi, Nicole Treadway, Henry Lieberman

   Publisher: IUI '10, February 7-10, 2010 Hong Kong

Summary

Language and understanding play a large role in HCI. There are many times when it may be helpful to visualize and understand the meaning of large collections of data in many different dimensions. Users express their opinions en masse on surveys, forums and dialogue systems. Computational linguistics is a way to solve the problem of understanding this sort of feedback and can often yield insights that normal statistics miss.


The researchers propose a system, Luminoso, to help users create and develop specialized semantic networks. Luminoso is an interactive application that aids researcher in exploring semantic spaces in an intuitive way intended to dimensionally reduce the available data. It creates a vector space from a folder of input documents and mines the data in an interactive way. It uses the power of LSA which relies on the co-occurence of words in the input documents, making semantic connections between words.


Discussion
In understand the idea behind this research but I had a lot of trouble reading this article. I felt like there were a lot of technical terms and such that I didn't understand. I also didn't really understand how the user interacted with the system. They mentioned a "grabbing" procedure to move the projected data points on the screen, but I wasn't sure how that dynamically worked across dimensions.

Book Reading #40: Coming of Age in Samoa Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

   Author: Margaret Mead

   Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Chapter 14: Education for Choice (15 pages)

Summary

In what is the final chapter of "Coming of Age in Samoa", Mead talks about the education of youth in America. She mainly talks about how children have so many decisions to make a young age. Mead discusses how there is this American theory where everyone has endless amounts of possibilities. Because of this, people feel overwhelmed by their choices even though there are not nearly as many of them as they think there are.

She also talks about how parents raise their kids in ways that are conflicting to outside the home. She concludes by saying in a civilization of many choices, parents must teach their children "how to think, not what to think."

Discussion

Even though this book was written in the 30's, I feel like a lot of her conclusions still ring true today. I think that the American sense that anyone can be whoever they want if they work hard just isn't realistic. Because of this, I think a lot of people get railroaded into something they don't want to do and stick it out longer than they should.

Book Reading #39: Why We Make Mistakes Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Why We Make Mistakes

   Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

   Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 0: Introduction (10 Pages)

Summary

The chapter talks about the ideas that are going to be discussed throughout the book. Hallinan describes what mistakes are and how the world is designed as to expect us to see things clearer than than they appear. The topics to be discussed: similar mistakes that happen, what one can do to make fewer errors and understanding context.

Chapter 1: We Look But Don't Always See (14 Pages)

Summary

In this chapter, Hallinan talks about how we don't see things as clearly as we think we do. He gives many examples of this such such as the door experiment. He also talks about movie mistakes. Towards the end, the author goes on to explain the beer-in-the-fridge problem and how people have a threshold at which point they will quit searching for something.

Discussion

I really enjoyed the first chapter and introduction. I don't normally read introductions when reading books but perhaps I should. Giving an outline of what is going to be discussed will help me focus more on what is coming. In regards to the reading, I thought the quitting threshold was interesting. I myself know that there are times when if I can't find something, I just give up. 

Paper Reading #16: Creating Collections with Automatic Suggestions and ExampleBased Refinement (UIST 24)

Comments

http://shennessy11.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-15.html 

http://chi-garza.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-16-satellite-cursor.html

Reference Information

   Title:Creating Collections with Automatic Suggestions and ExampleBased Refinement

   Author:Adrian Secord, Holger Winnem¨oller, Wilmot Li, Mira Dontcheva

   Publisher: UIST' 10, October 3-6, 2010 New York

Summary

People love to create collections. One of the most created collections is that of music playlists from personal media libraries. Today, users do one of to things: they manually enter them one at a time or use an example-based recommendation system to automagically generate a collection. The first method is somewhat inconvenient but very precise. The second is much more convenient but usually limited in scope--the algorithm typically chooses an aspect of the song (date, genre, artist) and makes a playlist out of that.

The researchers in this paper want to go farther than that. They propose a semi-automatic interface that creates collections that combine automatic suggestions with manual refinement. They also add a suggestion widget, a mechanism for exploring alternatives for one or more collection items and a two-pane linked interface that helps users browse their libraries based on any selected collection item.

The keyword queries are made to be as flexible as possible. For  example, one could type "some rock, a lot of U2, no Alternative". Each phrase is a user criterion. More complex modifiers can be used such as "mostly," "some", "a lot" and "no". When a modifier is not specified, it is regarded as "some." More complex phases consist of "Michael Jackson before 1990." Should a phrase parse incorrectly, a message will prompt the user to fix the phrase.

Discussion
I found their work to be applicable to real life. I personally prefer to make my own playlists myself, that way I know exactly what is in them. There are several occasions when I use the "Genius" feature on iTunes and I feel like it works very well. I am surprised that the researchers didn't really mention iTunes' genius feature very much. I would've thought they would talk about it under related work. They don't mention until they ask people if they are aware of it and how well they think it works.

Full Blog: Obedience to Authority

Reference Information

   Title: Obedience to Authority

   Author: Stanley Milgram

   Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)

Summary

Stanley Milgram wished to explore obedience, especially in light of the Nazi experimentation. He cites that as an example of obedience gone wrong. The goal of his experiments was to explore adults' willingness to obey authorities and under what circumstances they choose to do so. 


He begins the book by discussing how he performed the study, the location and the procedures involved. Essentially there is a teacher (subject) and a "victim". When the victim got something wrong, the teacher was supposed to administer an electric shock. There were different settings in regards to proximity: only wall-pounding feedback, vocal protests and when the "victim" was in the same room.


Many predicted that nearly all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter and that only a small percentage would administer the strongest voltage. What they found was shocking. 62-65% of adults when told to administer the strongest voltage, did. He performed the study with many different variations and subjects, including women. One of the women was from Germany and decided to stop at 210 volts, most likely in the wake of previous events.


In the last half of the book, he analyzes his previous findings. He discusses that there are many differences between obedience and conformity. Obedience occurs within a hierarchy, conformity is imitation. Action is explicit in obedience and implicit in conformity. Milgram considers many of the forces associated with strain and disobedience. He considers many of the forces that impact a subject before and during the experiment.


In the final chapters, he considers many of the assertions made against the findings of his experiment. He addresses in detail each of them.


Discussion
I didn't realize all of the different experiments that Milgram performed. This book was a very interesting and quick read. I thought that is was great that he included the dissenting opinions and talked about them. The implications of his experiments are scary. Does this change how we can place blame on certain things like WWII or the Vietnam War?

Book Reading #37: Coming of Age in Samoa Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

   Author: Margaret Mead

   Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Chapter 13: Our Educational Problems in the Light of Samoan Contrasts

Summary
In this chapter, Mead compares and contrasts Samoan and American children. There are two very different social environments between the two cultures. American children have many more choices and opportunities depending on who they are with. She notes that Samoan children know much more about life including matters of sex and death.


Mead also discusses the specialization of feeling that occurs with Americans. Samoans display feelings but not nearly at the magnitude that American children do. No Samoan child is spoiled.


She also discusses education. American children attend school but do work that they feel is unrelated to their parents' work. Because of this, the activities they do seem useless. Conversely, Samoan children from a very young age are a part of their parents' daily activities. They grow up learning how they will benefit society.


Discussion
I thought this was the best chapter i've read so far. To be honest, I agree with all of what Mead says. I've been pretty disillusioned with my college life thus far. I feel like there are so many useless classes that I've had to take such as poli sci, history, kinesiology, etc. I understand they want us to have some "general knowledge" but that's what high school is for. Other countries have it right in pushing children towards more technical schools and such. College degrees are imperative nowadays and I don't think we're getting any smarter. Just more in debt. :/

Book Reading #36: Obedience to Authority Microblog

Reference Information

   Title: Obedience to Authority

   Author: Stanley Milgram

   Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)

Summary
Chapter 9: Milgram discusses the difference between conformity and obedience. Obedience to authority occurs within a hierarchy, conformity is imitation. Obedience is not imitation. The prescription for actions is explicit in obedience but implicit in conformity.
Chapter 10: In this chapter, Milgram begins to analyze the findings of the first half of the book. He tries to look deeper at the causes of obedience. He defines the "agentic state" - the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person's wishes. This state is the cornerstone of their analysis.
Chapter 11: Milgram ponders the forces that impact the subject prior to the experiment. He considers things such as the family structure and institutional setting. For forces during the experiment include the perception of legitimate authority, the appearance of the authority figure, the lack of any competing authorities and a visible link between the function of the authority and the commands given.
Chapter 12: Milgram looks at the sources of strain, things that buffer strain and how people address the issue of strain. He states that they typically address strain though avoidance, denial and subterfuges. People blow of steam from strain by verbally disagreeing with authority or physically reacting by trembling and sweating.
Chapter 13: He talks about an experiment done by Buss and Berkowitz in order to investigate aggression.
Chapter 14: Milgram looks at different assertions made against his findings. These included: people in the study are not typical, the subjects didn't believe they administered real shocks, the findings are not applicable outside of the laboratory setting.
Chapter 15: Milgram relates his settings to the real world and how they are applicable. He considers the Vietnam War as an example. In a CBS interview with a soldier, he shows a correlation with his studies and obedience in the war.


Discussion
I enjoyed that Milgram included the section about dissenting opinions in his book. It is nice that he was able to make good points against the opposing side. I also found it interesting that his experiments were repeated in other countries.