My Followup Thoughts on the Navigation User Interface Study

Written with the school equivalent of a gun to my head BUT I'M NOT BITTER

So about five days ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a study that tested a new interface for navigation.  This navigation system was supposed to be a background process that allowed the user to operate any app on their phone while still receiving directions.  In this study, I played some game while following the navigation to get to a certain place.  The test was run by Manoj Prasad and Ayo (I forgot Ayo's last name).  There were three different styles of navigation to test, though two of them were very similar.

  

The first test involved purely phone based guidance, where the phone's motors would vibrate in certain patterns to tell the user which direction to turn.  This one is personally my favorite because it's an effective navigation method that is very easy to implement.  I think if it were calibrated for high speeds, this would be ideal for vehicle navigation for people who would rather listen to something besides the navigation software.  Of course, throughout the study, my main concern was doing well in the game, since it saved local high scores.

The second trial is basically the same as the third, so i'll just describe the third.  For those trials, I had to wear a vest that looked more like a harness.  This vest had some motors in various places that would tell me where to go through vibrations in key areas.  The third trial vest was a newer prototype of the second, and it included some sonic proximity detectors.  It's an interesting idea, but people have to go through a lot of trouble to put it on.  I was told that they could be put into clothing, but that raises the cost of manufacture by a lot.  Additionally, the proximity detector took a while to work, and I almost ran into Manoj on several occasions.  This isn't pedestrian navigation, but it might be easier to put those motors into car seats.  Of course, if Google cars become a big deal, the entire vehicle navigation aspect of this could be obsolete.

Also, 2nd place in the local high scores on whatever game I was playing!  And I apparently walked faster than everyone else.  Sounds like a win to me.  

An Ethnographic Journal about the Bryan Salsa Dancing Scene

Not just like the movies

When Kim, Matt, and Amanda said that they would be doing salsa dancing for their ethnography, I thought "well, that does not sound like the thing for me."  My original intention had been to visit Halo, the gay bar in downtown Bryan.  I had never been there, primarily because of how far removed from my usual bar scene it is, and I had heard many things about it.  However, the group for Halo seemed to dwindle in size, as people exchanged their Halo idea for something apparently more desirable.  Being left in a group with two other guys, I decided that our group had fallen below critical mass, so I transferred myself into the salsa group, which had a total of four members after I joined them.  As I indicated before, salsa dancing is not something I had ever done, and only maybe secretly wanted to try it.  This is how I knew it would be perfect for an ethnography.
All of our preliminary research came from the website for the venue, www.thevillagedowntown.com.  According to the website, the only times they do salsa dancing are 8:00pm to 12:00am on Wednesdays and 10:00pm to 2:00am on Saturdays.  Because we need to spend ten hours with the group, it was necessary for us to go three of the four meetings before the deadline of this journal.  Because Matt and I had separate prior engagements from the group, Kim and Amanda went to the first meeting on Saturday.  I thought that a salsa club would have a fairly nice dress code, like black shoes, dress pants, and a jacket, like you would see in the movies.  But the picture on the website shows the majority of the people wearing pants, tennis shoes and a t-shirt.  Relieved, I opted to wear just that.
This is the night of my first visit to the salsa club.  Along with a second glance at the website, I took a look at the ethnography guidelines for this project to see exactly what I needed to write.  I see that this isn't supposed to be a report, but just a collection of notes, so the prose form I used above is needless and an excessive amount of work.

---

I arrived at 8:00 on a cold Wednesday night.  Parking was free, but parallel, like many spots in old downtown areas.  Surprisingly few parking spots for a Wednesday night, there were probably 15 full spots that were closer than the one that I chose.
The doorman was a big black guy sitting on a bar stool.  Felt just like Bryan.  However, when the doorman greeted, he had a surprisingly effeminate tone.  The perfect mixture of downtown Bryan and a dance club.  Cover was $8.00, and $5.00 if I were to come after the dance lesson, after 10:00.  After paying cover, the doorman presented me with a sort of member's card with one stamp printed on it.  He informed me that if I bring this card into the club eight times, my ninth visit would be cover free. Of course, I had no intention of visiting this many times, but I took it, just in case.
The building was about 30' wide and 100' long, with hardwood flooring everywhere.  The actual dance area is closer to 15' x 50'.  Strange paintings covered the walls, all for sale too.  I've seen those style paintings in a Mexican restaurant.
A total of four couches lined two corners, three tables ran along one of the walls by one of the sets of couches.  On the wall opposite of the couches was a bar, which also served other beverages/food items.  The alcoholic beverages served are beer - $2.50-4.00, wine - $5.50, & sangria - $3.50.  It is apparent from the "localize" signs around the bar that they are in favor of local business, probably because they are one.
At 8:05, when I walked through the door, there were maybe 7 other people who wanted dance lessons. Five of those people were there for school reasons, such as CSCE 436, or some other class.  We sat around and talked until about 8:30, when the dance instructor, Chris, told us to form a loose circle in the middle of the dance floor.  He said he wanted to teach us to salsa faster than any of his past classes.  I didn't want this, I'm trying to take up time!
He certainly got into the actual dancing quickly, there was no speech about salsa, or even a demonstration of it; he just told us to form pairs with a dance  partner of the opposite sex.
After everyone paired up, i was surprised to find that there were actually more males at the lesson than females.  This concerned me at first, but I eventually realized that this meant less actual dancing for me, since we had to then rotate partners.
He told the guys to hold out their hands, and the girls to take them.  He told us how the hand should be held, but I later found that the more experienced people rarely followed his form.  His teaching style consisted of showing us the move once or twice, having us try for a few minutes to mimic that move with our dance partner without the music playing, and then practicing the move with salsa music.
I had never danced salsa in my life, nor had I really paid attention when people did it in the movies or at other clubs I'd been to, but this is my quick breakdown of what he told us to do:

The lead takes a step forward with his left foot.
It seemed like Chris told us to return the left foot to its original position, but when I watched people dance, the left foot looks to be half a step behind where it originally was.  I eventually made this change to my own style, but at first, I was just trying to get the steps down.
Next, the leader's right foot is brought back a step, and then returned to its original position.
During this, the follower matches the leader's steps, but with the opposite foot.
Chris didn't tell us this, but something should be done with the arms, such as rotating them while holding his partner, kind of like an egg beater.  I don't know how to explain the motion.
I learned later in the night, that Chris' guidelines could not be followed too rigidly.  I found out while researching the dance at home that there are several different styles of salsa.  I saw people at the club moving side to side, or in a strange diagonal pattern.
Of course, there is more to it than this, otherwise it would be extremely boring.  The leader can spin his partner, or he can spin himself, and a multitude of other different steps can be performed, seemingly at the whim of the leader.  He just has to make his intention clear, usually through some sort of subtle hand signal that the follower has to look out for.

Because we were continuously swapping partners every few minutes, I inevitably had to dance with every girl there.  Because of the great ethnographer I am, and also because it would have been awkward otherwise, I talked to my dance partners...About half of them had never danced before.  Maybe 40% had danced a few times, but still didn't consider themselves great at it.  And then the rest obviously had done it before, for several years.  The vast majority of them were college students, but there were a few who looked to be in their late 20's and a few who looked like they were closer to 40.  I'm mad that I didn't ask very many people what their major was, since I felt like that was a cliche conversation topic, but at the time, I never considered how demographically useful that information would be.  All I remember is that one of the guys there was a chemical engineering major, and one of the girls was an English major.
During this lesson, people continued to arrive until there was hardly any room to make a mistake.  By the end of the lesson, there were probably 50 people, some of which clearly already knew how to salsa.  A few of them were clearly regulars and already knew Chris.  At about 10:00, Chris announced the lessons over, and gave everyone free reign of the dance floor.  At this point, they turned off the overhead lights, and the only light sources consisted of lasers with a single light by the dj's table, and one by the front entrance.
Eager to take a break from dancing so that we could better take in the details of the club, our ethnography group sat down at a table.  Free water was dispensed from a water cooler between the dance floor and the bar, but Matt and I bought a beer; being completely sober  in a club doesn't feel right to me.
After cover dropped at $5.00, people started to come in at a more regular rate.  After 10:00, The Village becomes just like any other dance club.  Groups of friends would arrive at the club and claim their own sitting/leaning space.  They would talk or dance in their group, relatively socially isolated from the rest of the people in the club.  Occasionally, one of their men would leave the group to dance with a girl, or a guy would come to ask one of the girls in the group to dance.  After the song, they would return to their default state.
It was very hot in the club.  I would step outside on several occasions to cool off, usually after dancing with someone.  Matt and I spoke to another guy while outside the club, who revealed that he enjoyed salsa dancing because of the number of cute girls that visit the club.  He wasn't wrong about that either.
Actually, it was interesting to me that the appearance of girls at the club ranged from average to beautiful, while the range of guys who visited the club pretty much covered the entire spectrum, aesthetically speaking.  While I only spoke to one male regular, the females who visited the club claimed that they did it for fun.  Whether or not this is fully honest is unclear, but there's a catch-22 in finding why people come to the club.  I don't have as many opportunities to talk to the guys at the club, who are more likely to be honest with someone of the same gender (we understand each other, plus he doesn't have to try to impress us).  Conversely, I spoke to perhaps dozens of women over the course of this ethnography, but they probably felt it would be inappropriate to say that they want to dance with attractive men.
As it grew closer to 12:00am (closing time one Wednesdays), the crowd began to thin out, but not by much.  At midnight, they turned on the lights, and played "We are Young", a song that did not at all match the latin-based setlist they had been using all night.  Of course, this is a common tactic in clubs to indicate that people need to get out.  The Village is a nice sandwich/coffee shop during the day, so the doorman began moving tables from the back and arranging them in the fashion you would expect for a restaurant.
New patrons of the club would leave with their friends, maybe wave goodbye to any new friends they might had made that night.  The regulars said goodbye to others, often hugging and then going their separate ways, sometimes alone.
I spoke to Chris afterward, and he told me that this is a pretty typical representation of a Wednesday night.  (He also says hi, Dr. Hammond)

---

I showed up again the next Saturday, but this time, Amanda was the only other ethnographer who was able to make it.  Saturday is a more proper night to visit the club scene, so I anticipated a much larger group.
  On weekends, the club opens at 10:00pm and stays open until 2am, with a brief 30 minute lesson at the beginning.  I presented him with my members card, and paid cover, which was only five dollars this time, for reasons that became immediately apparent upon entering.
This lesson was much more succinct, and Chris covered far fewer dance moves than he had the previous night.  I was quite thankful that I had gone to the Wednesday class first, or this could have been a very embarrassing night for me.
Already, the crowd was much larger, perhaps 20 people were present, and only two of us were there for school reasons, as far as I knew.  There were a small handful of people that I recognized from the Wednesday class, excluding employees of the club.  These were the people who had done salsa before, so I'm sure that they are regulars to the club.  But the majority of the people there I had never seen before.
I would estimate that about 150 people showed up during the night.
In addition to salsa, people danced merengue, they two stepped, and at one point, there was a dance circle where people would just jump in and do whatever moves they could improvise, solo.
I spoke to the doorman while cooling off outside.  I had been calling him a bouncer in my paper up to this point, but he told me that his title was that of a doorman.  His job seemed to consist of admitting guests and taking their money, and moving tables for the next day.  He didn't personally know how to Salsa, I guess because he is stuck at the door instead of actually dancing.  I hadn't actually prepared a list of questions for him, otherwise, I would have asked how long he had been doing this, and what his roles are in full.

---

In many ways, Saturday's are just like Wednesdays, only it becomes more of a regular club on the weekends.  There are no rules dictating that people have to dance salsa at the club, it is merely suggested by the selection of music that they play.  There are a handful of regular attendees, but for the most part t is just like any other club.  People might attend this club every once in a while, simply because they want to go to clubs, but there is a limited selection, and they want to alternate between them.  Then there are people who have never done it before, who are interested in trying salsa, just for fun.

Chapters 9 & 10 of Opening Skinner's Box

We get to the meat of the brain.  Literally

As we progress farther into the book, I am happy to see that Slater interjects her own life story into the book less and less.  In addition, her writing style becomes less stream of conscious and more of a presentation of the story.  She still throws her own insight into the story, but at least it's relevant to the current situation.  

As far as the actual chapter goes, I read about these neuroscientists "guessing" at the probable location of various thought patterns and memories, and I just think "how?".  It's not like you think about something and feel that thought occurring somewhere in the brain.  How did Dr. Scoville know that Henry's seizures originated from his Hippocampus?  It's not exactly the sort of thing you guess and check.  And it's a shame he couldn't guess and check.  Henry's short term memory was shot, and he was forced to live the same day every day.  I'd seen plenty of fictional characters who, in some sort of accident, lost their short term memory, and they would go about their life thinking everyday is the same.  Meanwhile, their families would go to great lengths to preserve that illusion, while some external person would unknowningly try to introduce the present with hilarious results.  

In the section about Kandel, she starts to discuss the moral implications of having a drug that can prolong or remove our memory.  I agree that this is a valid concern when she brought up the man who could remember any minor detail without a problem, but his mind was so bogged down with these details that he could never make any use of them.  Conversely, a pill that would let you forget the events of the previous day would be pretty useful, and a good number of video games and movies begin with a character who has no knowledge of prior events, while still having to deal with the fallout of that event.

The final chapter of the book discusses the amazing advancement process for the field of neurosurgery. It moved from carpet-bombing parts of the brain with alcohol solution to using precision lasers to cut a specific part of the brain.  I didn't know that lobotomy was still a medical solution to any problem in the brain, as every reference i've seen to it has related it as a crude and dark solution to madness.  As far as the surgery with Charlie goes, I am quite irritated with Slater for starting the story of his surgery, and then interrupting it in the middle with a "commercial" about the rising popularity of the lobotomy.  The worst part is that she did it at the point where it looked like Charlie's surgery started encountering some issues.  But that's fine.  She got back to it after a page of distraction, and we find that Charlie is fine.  Better than fine, although slightly depressed.  And now the book is finished, and I am enlightened.

Chapters 7 & 8 of Opening Skinner's Box

This post brought to you by OxyContin

Chapter seven covered a really interesting topic, which is over addiction.  I have never had any sort of addiction to drugs, but one might argue a case for video game addiction.  In this chapter, Slater speaks to Dr. Bruce Alexander about the nature of addiction.  He conducted a series of studies on addiction, which worked to prove that addiction was caused more by the circumstances that a person was in, and less by the chemistry behind the drugs.  
In a very Lauren Slater fashion, she brought the situation onto a personal level, by bringing up her friend Emma (I hope this is a pseudonym, because I can just imagine the problems that a science dean of a college would have to endure because of being labeled in a book as a junkie).  This woman is 63 years old, and is addicted to the painkiller OxyContin.  I actually learned about OxyContin in my civil law class; it was cited as a lawsuit in the liability section.  OxyContin was being sued because their drug - when crushed into a powder before ingestion - was found to cause addiction.  The company claimed that people should not have been misusing the drug like that, but it was found that they knew this was a risk during drug testing, and just didn't tell the FDA about it.  However, in Emma's case, she seems to be addicted to the drug without crushing it into the powder to gain a quicker release.  
As for Alexander's research, the fact that it had never reached the mainstream kind of made it harder for me to take the research seriously.  If very few of the professionals in that field believed the experiment, I probably shouldn't either.  Even though the research was interesting, rats do not correspond to humans perfectly, and there is too much evidence pointing the the biological dependence for me to put all my faith into Alexander's research.

So it seems to me that as we progress through the book, the research presented in a given chapter becomes more obscure and more heavily criticized.  In chapter eight, we meet a person who I sort of feel sorry for.  Elizabeth Loftus has made many enemies with her research, which has not particularly gone anywhere.  Her personal life doesn't seem that great, and she has to stay ridiculously busy, presumably so that she doesn't have any time to think about how unhappy she might be.  It's almost like Harlow, except he thought that his life was bad when it really wasn't, and became an ass as a result.  
The experiment that this chapter focuses on was inspired as a result of the vast number of people that were accusing their parents of some sort of heinous act decades after the alleged perpetration.  She would select her subjects and have them read a booklet.  This booklet contained some childhood memories, as recorded by family of the subject, along with one false memory of being lost in the mall.  Her experiment found that 25% of subjects would create a memory of being lost in the mall, when in reality, they had never done any such thing.  The shocking thing is that the memory would have very vivid detail, as though it had just been created.  The shocking detail that the subjects recalled the event with should have tipped them off that perhaps something wasn't right.  I've been lost in the mall once or twice myself.  All I remember is that we were in one of the many department stores in the mall, and that my parents somehow got separated from me.  I might have been seven years old, and I could have been hiding in one of the circular coat racks, but I don't actually know, i'm just inferring that based on the fact that I used to do it a lot.  
The other experiment that Loftus performed was based on repressed memories.  She claimed that they actually do not exist, a fact that was received with much hostility from the psychological community.  How can you say that all these people who suffered a traumatic event never actually suffered this event.  Although, if we were able to convince people that they were never traumatized, perhaps they could be at peace once more.  Then again, that's probably the exact equivalent of memory repression, which kind of says to me that it is a thing, despite what Loftus says.

Chapters 5 & 6 of Opening Skinner's Box

Of Misconceptions and Monkeys(/Lies and Love)

Chapter five begins with a 1950s housewife deciding that the world was going to end soon.  Somehow, others decided that her story held water and formed a sort of cult.  When the fateful day arrived, all of a sudden, nothing happened.  Rather than decide that maybe they were wrong like a normal person, they conjured an explanation for why their prediction had not come to fruition.  This is cognitive dissonance, and it explains why it is so hard to convince some people that they are wrong.  More interesting, however, Slater visits Linda Santo, a mother of a rather remarkable comatose girl.  While reading this portion of the chapter, I was less interested in cognitive dissonance and more interested in whether or not this stuff is for real.  So, I looked it up in the ultimate authority, Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has a more skeptical approach to the story, and explains away a number of facts, but doesn't give a comprehensive list of her "miracles", so I won't say %100 whether or not this is dumb.

The other part of the story had to do with Harry Harlow.  For starters, I don't really like this guy.  He sounds like an asshole with a problem with alcoholism and fidelity.  Nevertheless, the research he did is fascinating and changed the face of child-rearing in America, which was laughable at the time ("send your child to bed with a smile and a handshake, not a hug").  He pretty much tried every variation of this experiment, including the cruel and pointless part where he tried to make socially deprived monkeys raise children.  Instead they killed or ignored their young, which nobody can genuinely be surprised about.  

Ch 3 & 4 of Opening Skinner's Box

In chapter 3, we find about the not so scientific study conducted by David Rosenhan on the psychiatric institutions of America.  The goal was to see if he and his friends could lie about being crazy to get into a mental institution, and then proceed to act normally to see how long it takes to get out.  Personally, I agree with Rosenhan's confederates; it would be fun to get into a psych ward for a while, but really, I don't have a whole month to devote to a silly game.  But the description of what transpired in the experiment is fairly limited, since Slater only has a chapter to write about it, and she still has to leave space for her needless musing.  

After talking to Spitzer, Slater decides to repeat Rosenhan's experiment herself.  Thats when we find out that she had been admitted to a psych ward for legitimate reasons already.

I knew she was crazy!

Everything I ever read by this woman is going to be biased because of the knowledge that she legitimately had psychological issues in the past.  Now I have give her credit for having the dedication to her book to actually retry the experiment.  Actually...the stuff she's doing sounds more like it would be a TV show.  On the history channel.  I'm also surprised that none of her psychiatric evaluators recognized that she was using the exact same circumstances as Rosenhan.  Though I thought it was funny that the majority of them diagnosed her with depression, which she was not at all intentionally conveying, though she did have it in the past.  That just proves that she is a little crazy...

The fourth chapter presents to us the utterly appalling case of the genovese murder.  Well, rape and murder.  Actually, this line struck me as odd: "[he was] unable to achieve an erection.  So he lay down on top of her and had an orgasm then".  Maybe they oversimplified that part, but I don't think that would happen.  I'm having an equally hard time believing that over the course of 30 minutes, this woman could be attacked 3 times and raped with absolutely no help coming from the people on the block who saw this event happening.  They couldn't even call the police?  This entire chapter just made me sort of hate people.  

One day, I was waiting at the bus stop at the trigon, speaking on the phone.  I hear a shuffling noise, and look across the street to see a person lying on the ground.  They continue to lie there for a few seconds, at which point, me and a few other people rush across to help this person.  It was an elderly Chinese woman, an employee for TAMU dining services.  It was very difficult to understand her, but we weren't sure if her communication issues had anything to do with a head injury, her potentially low blood sugar (she was holding an uneaten sack lunch) or the blistering Texas sun that we were all standing in.  Someone calls her an ambulance, while another person tries to communicate with her and wipe the blood off her face.  I reassembled her glasses, which had popped apart with my mini screwdriver.  The ambulance arrives, checks her vitals and takes her away.

This is why I have such a hard time believing that dozens of people wouldn't take the slightest steps to save a person's life.  In this chapter, I don't have much to say about Slater, because I'm too busy hating all those New York residents.  Although I still thought it was funny that she actually bought a gas mask in light of the anthrax attacks.

Opening Skinner's Box, Ch 1 & 2.

So this book we're reading appears to be an overview of numerous popular psychological experiments of the 20th century.  I did not realize this fact until after I had complete chapter one.  I had been expecting a long analysis of B.F. Skinner's experiments, and figured that chapter one would be just the beginning.  I was quite surprised when the topic was suddenly switched from Lauren Slater sitting in Skinner's daughter's house, considering eating a 10 year old chunk of chocolate to Stanley Milgram's experiments on authority.  But that was my own fault for not understanding fully what the content of the book would be.

However, I had no reason to expect this book to be written in such a poetic fashion.  It was so poetic, in fact, that it appeared contrived.  There were two lines that stood out to me, and while I do not have the book handy in front of me as I write this in a coffee shop a block from my house, I will provide the gist of her statements.  The first example occurred early in chapter one, where Slater apparently visualized Skinner and his girlfriend parking in front of whatever lake happened to be located nearby, taking off their clothes and then skinny dipping.  Who even thinks of such a thing, especially for someone who has got to be 50 years older than you.  The other example was just a needless use of descriptive dependent clauses; Slater talks about her daughter who is yelling out "obscura", which happens to be the title of the chapter.  The last sentence of that chapter is something along the lines of "I pick her up with my hands, my <adjective> and <adjective> hands.  I say <adjective> because I don't remember the exact adjective used, and anything I would thing of would just embarrass me and the author.  My knowledge of grammar is informal, but I believe you can drop the dependent clause from a statement, and the statement should still be grammatically correct.  "my <adjective> and <adjective> hands" is the dependent clause, so Slater says that she picked up her daughter with her hands, a statement which seems blatantly obvious to me.

As far as complements go, I like the premise of the book; it is good to hear the first hand accounts of the subjects from various experiments-very interesting, in fact, but the fact that people have complained that Slater misquoted them is upsetting...