Book Reading #20: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 5: Quieting the Mind

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.


Summary:
In this chapter, Slater discusses Leon Festiger's theory of cognitive dissonance.  This is the thought that people will change their beliefs to match certain circumstances.  Slater found a woman whose child almost drowned at the age of 3.  The mother surrounded her child with religious relics, and after a while, the relics began move of their own accord.  Also, the relics would ooze blood, or strange oils. People began to come to the child and take some of the oils for cures for many different ailments.  The mother then believed that her child was a saint, to take the pains of others to heal them.  Slater says that this is classic dissonance, by the way the mother rationalized what had happened.

Discussion:
I thought that this was an interesting chapter.  I have seen people change their beliefs when presented with new evidence.  I think that it is part of being a human with an open mind.  I would like to think that I among them.  I hope that I am not one of those people who don't concede something even though there is strong evidence to prove otherwise, but also not one of those people who change their beliefs on a whim, or just because someone says so.

Paper Reading #9 Imaginary interfaces: spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback

Comments:
Comment1-Jeremey
Comment2-Alyssa

Reference:
Imaginary interfaces: spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback

Sean Gustafson, Daniel Bierwirth, Partick Baudisch UIST 2010 Conference Summary: This paper is about a wearable device that allows the user to perform interactions, and how this device relies on the users imagination.  These interactions are different for each hand.  With one hand, the user defines the drawing space by holding the forefinger, and thumb at a right angle.  The other hand is then used to sketch something that is stored. The sketches can be sent to someone on the other end of a phone line for example.  Also, if the user stops sketching, and breaks the drawing plane, they can reestablish the plane later, and have the data still stored.  Since, there is no screen to provide visual feedback, the users memory is important.  The authors conducted three user studies to test how the users memory would compare to visual feedback.  The first study dealt with simple sketches, and single stroke characters.  For the single stroke characters, the accuracy rate was high, but it decreased as the number of strokes increased.  The second study tested the movement while drawing effected performance.  The authors saw a decline in performance when the user turned between drawing and annotating what they drew.  The third study was on finding a point in the space based on a given coordinate.  The users were given a coordinate pair based on finger and thumb length units.  The study showed that the further the coordinate was from a finger, the less accurate it was. Discussion: This is an interesting design.  I like the fact that you can sketch something without needing to be at a computer.  However, I don't know how it would be received by the public It seems that there are not very many uses for the device.  Also, from what I read, the device is based on using the left hand for the screen, and the right hand for drawing.  As a left-handed person, I am interested if they have already developed southpaw devices, if they plan on developing them, or if they will just make us lefties suffer.

Paper Reading #8: Early explorations of CAT: canine amusement and training

Paper Reading #8: Early explorations of CAT: canine amusement and training

Comments:
Comment1-Evin
Comment2-Brian

Reference information: 

Early Explorations of CAT: Canine Amusement and Training
Chadwick Wingrave, Todd Langston, Jeremy Rose and Joseph LaViola Jr.
Presentation: 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems

 

Summary:

This paper is about a new design to help train dogs.  There is a projector above the dog and trainer projecting 6 different color circles onto the floor in a ring.  The dog is equipped to a wiimote on is back for tracking.  Then, based on the different game modes, different things need to happen.  The first game is calm.  The human must maintain control of their emotions which are displayed by the projector.  By completing all the levels of each game, a new game is unlocked.  By completing calm, then stay is unlocked.  For stay, the human and dog must enter a circle, then the human must move to an indicated circle, and the dog must stay.  After stay, is come, and the final game is a combination of all three, called twister. 

 

Discussion:

I think that this would be a very fun way to train a dog.  I wish that I had a dog so I could try it out.  I don't know how effective this method will be though, and I am interested to see data determining if this way is better than a more traditional approach to dog training.  

Book Reading #13: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 3: On Being Sane in Insane Places


Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.


Summary:
This chapter discussed an experiment conducted by David Rosenhan.  The experiment was to test the ability of psychiatrists to determine if a person is "sane" or "insane".  Rosenhan and 8 other people went to separate mental institutions and complained that they had a voice in their head, and it said "thud".  All 9 were admitted.  Then as the next step in the experiment, all acted normally, and if asked, said that their symptom was gone.  The time spent in the institutions ranged from 7 days to 52 days.


Discussion:
I thought that this was interesting.  The fact that they were admitted based on just a "thud" in their head, and then viewing the rest of their stories as based on their diagnosis.  I liked the fact that when one institution challenged Rosenhan to send more testers in a 3 month span, they turned 41 people away, but he had sent none.

Book Reading #11: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
Chapter 4: Knowing What to Do

Reference:
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2002.

Summary:
Norman begins by describing the different constraints that affect things that we do.  He illustrates this with an example of assembling a LEGO police motorcycle.  The four types of constraints are physical, semantic, cultural, and logical.  Physical constraints limit the physical possibilities, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  Semantic constraints rely upon knowledge of the situation, and the world, like where the rider should go on the LEGO motorcycle.  Cultural constraints are based on what is deemed culturally acceptable, like having the police sign facing right side up, so it can be read.  Logical constraints are things that make sense, like when there is one piece left, and only one place to put it, then it must go there.

Discussion:
I thought that this example of putting something together without instructions was interesting.  I don't think that it is the best since there are LEGO sets of over a hundred pieces, and there is no easy way to assemble them without instructions.  However, I think that Norman is just trying to make a point with this example that some things are designed simple enough to make without instructions.

Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe

Title:
Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe


Reference:
Celine Latulipe, Michael Youngblood, Ian Bell and Carissa Orlando. ToneZone: Image Exploration with Spatial Memory Cues. In Companion Proceedings of ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009, 427-428, ACM, 2009.

Summary:
This is about a program called ToneZone.  This program allows tone manipulation in images.  The input and output tones have constraints on them.  The program was designed for dual mouse  manipulation.  This would allow the user to alter a rectangle in the image (for changing the tone) while also changing the tone inside of that rectangle.  They also adapted the program for single mouse input since most operating systems are not dual mouse enabled.

Discussion:
I thought that this was interesting.  The program is supposed to be simpler that what is on the market, so that is good.  I think that this could be useful for people who take a lot of pictures, and go back to edit them.
 

Paper Reading #4 - Blowtooth: Pervasive Gaming in Unique and Challenging Environments

Title:
Blowtooth: Pervasive Gaming in Unique and Challenging Environments

Reference Info:
Blowtooth: Pervasive Gaming in Unique and Challenging Environments
Conor Linehan,  Ben Kirman, Shaun Lawson, Mark Doughty
CHI 2010, April 10-15 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Comments:
Comment1-Evin
Comment2-Alyssa

Summary:
The article discusses a pervasive game based on Bluetooth mobile devices.  The game took place in an airport where players were smuggling "illegal drugs" past security.  Since this is against the law, Bluetooth connections were used instead.  The players had to link to bystanders before security checkpoints, aka patsies, and send them a package via Bluetooth.  There was nothing actually sent to the devices, so the patsies were unaware.  Then after security, the players had to retrieve the packages from the patsies in a similar way.

Discussion:
I thought that this is an interesting idea.  Personally, I have thought that it would be somewhat fun to try to find the holes in security checkpoints like at airports.  I think that it would be fun to sneak around security and pretend that you beat it.