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...

My Reaction to "Obedience to Authority", by Stanley Milgram

Why do terrible things happen because of good people?

Chapter 1

The first chapter basically told me everything that I already knew about the obedience to authority experiments before reading the book.  It starts with an added philosophical preamble, and also serves to introduce me to the writing style of Stanley Milgram.  This will be a rough read...

Chapter 2

Chapter two goes into the specifics of how the experiment was carried out, complete with pictures of the recruitment ad and the victim.  I did appreciate knowing what the victim looked like, as it helped me visualize who the subject had to torture.

Chapter 3

Chapter three serves as the hypothesis of the experiment, where Milgram thinks that people are generally good and independent, and will do what you figure you would do in that situation.  Oh, he was wrong...

Chapter 4

This chapter contains the results of the original experiment, where we find that people will inflict pain as long as they are told, almost regardless of their own moral inhibitions.  Like a good scientist, Milgram tries all kinds of variations on how the experiment is carried out.  In this chapter he finds that the closer to the subject that the suffering occurs, the quicker they come to rebel against the experimenter.

Chapter 5

Another chapter that I appreciated, Milgram gives us the verbal reactions of some of his test subjects.  You can sense a palpable unease on the part of the subject, while the experimenter remains a calm neutral voice.

Chapter 6

Now, Milgram et. all decide to try additional variations of the experiment.  This is one of the more interesting chapters, due to the fact that this part of the experiment was new information to me, and the fact that it is the most action-packed part of the book.  Action packed in the sense that it is full of situations and results.

Chapter 7

This is basically another chapter five, except that the subjects are commenting on the experiments from chapter six, not four.

Chapter 8

Really, this is just the chapter where they just throw out whatever situation they could think of.  I think this is the only part of the book where I found any of the situations funny, such as the victim demanding that he be shocked "for science".  Considering the previous chapters, this one had a hint of situational irony. 

Chapter 9

Chapter nine has a more sociological feel in my opinion.  These experiments all involve peers and confederates, and we see that the effects of conformity are in fact stronger than the effects of obedience.

Chapter 10

And now, the fun is over.  There are no more experiments, but instead, Milgram begins his analysis of why the results were the way they were.  His evolutionary explanations make sense to me.

Chapter 11

This chapter is the one that actually convinced me that it is not entirely preposterous that so many people went to the end of the board.  When he brought up the agentic state, I started to think about situations in which I tried to impress authority figures with my ability to perform some task.

Chapter 12

At this point, Milgram explains the discomfort that people feel when they have a conflict between their orders and their values.  I think it is interesting that people undergo such an ordeal when they have a conflict like this.  

Chapter 13

In chapter 13, Milgram entertains the possibility of a Freudian explanation, where everyone is inherently evil, and obedience just serves as a scapegoat to let people be as awful as they want to be.  But I think this is silly, and the experiment where the subjects were allowed to choose their voltage proves that this idea is unfounded.

Chapter 14

Scientific method necessitates a section of the book that acknowledges any flaws with the method of the experiment.  The only major problem that was brought up was that people may not have legitimately believed that they were administering an actual shock to a victim.  It's hard to gauge people's honesty on this, but I think the guy who made it sound silly to believe the experiment proved it's validity, when people admitted to believing the experiment at the risk of seeming foolish.

Chapter 15

Just as in the first chapter, chapter 15 contains a little philosophical discussion on the effects of obedience, featuring an appaling example from the Vietnam war, where an American platoon massacred a village.

Book as a whole

I didn't realize it until I started looking at my chapter descriptions, but this book is structured just like a lab report based on the scientific method.  It contains an introduction, methodology, hypothesis, results, analysis and discussion, possible errors, and a conclusion.  After realizing that, I forgave Milgram for his dense writing style.

The difference between this book and any of the previous books that we've read is that I don't have much to say about this one that I couldn't fit in the chapter descriptions.  This book was completely unlike Gang Leader for a Day, in that the chapters in this book were very small and abundant.  So my book summary may be shorter than gang leader for a day, but there are twice as many chapter descriptions here as the other book, so I feel that my writing quota has been met.

To be honest, this is the kind of book I read because I have to.  Yes, I am actually interested in the results of the study, along with Milgram's explanation for it, but the book as a whole is not what I would call a delightful read.  It is very densely worded, and occasionally I will find that I've made it to the bottom of the page without knowing what I just read.  This may sound bad, but I would have much rather read a summary of the results, probably from Wikipedia if I had been interested in finding out about this on my own.

A Chapter by Chapter Reaction to the Book: "Gang Leader for a Day"

A book where naivety is a research tool

Chapter One:

After reading this chapter, I am just astounded by this guy.  He shows up to one of the most notorious ghettos in America, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, and asks how it feels "to be black and poor".  That should be the end of the book right there.  I don't know how he survived in that neighborhood, but judging by the number of pages left in the book, I guess he sticks around for quite a while.

Chapter Two:

We begin to learn a good deal about the environment in which Sudhir studies the gang, the Black Kings.  Luckily, he managed to gain traction with the local gang leader, J.T. By luckily, I mean that if J.T. had decided not to talk to him, this whole story wouldn't have happened, at least not in the Robert Taylor projects.  We also begin to see that this is still a gang, with strong ties to violence, indicated by the battery of some squatter who wouldn't move his cars for the gang.

Chapter  Three:

A few sentences isn't enough space to write our reactions to each chapter, simply because of the fact that each chapter is a large series of events, seemingly separated by events in which he hits a rough patch with J.T.  I think that J.T. is a little possessive over Sudhir, trying to prevent him from going to the boys and girls club.  He claims it's for protection reasons, but I feel that J.T. just doesn't like his "biographer" talking to outside sources.

Chapter Four:

I always get excited when I reach the title chapter of the book, because it seems like the action must be in full swing at this point.  Sudhir got a little too into his honorary gang leader role to a comical degree,  and we realize the full breadth of J.T.'s responsibility.  It's funny, I almost respect J.T. more for limiting the amount of violence in his area, compared to other gangs.  But then I remember that the level of violence that was allowed would be unconscionable in our society.

Chapter  Five:

In this chapter, we meet Ms. Bailey, basically the landlord of the tenement.  From Sudhir's first conversation with her, I decide that I didn't like her; she reminded me of my unfriendly landlord when I had an internship in Florida.  But as the chapter progressed, I could see that she actually did things for her tenants, she just had to work with what she had, though maybe she didn't work as hard as she could have.

Chapter Six:

I've never thought of a sociologist as a hustler, but, all things considered, it makes sense.  Either that, or he's an idiot.  He manages to get basically everyone in the Robert Taylor economy to open up about their business practices, and then he shares this information with the two people who could and would screw it up for everyone else.  It is also at this point that I decide I hate Ms. Bailey again, for the horrible things her tenants let her do, just so that she would do her job.

Chapter  Seven:

I was wondering if we would see any actual gang violence in this book.  It was interesting how they wouldn't get the cops involved, but then I realize that the cops are the worst gang of all, because they had city backing and actual contempt for the other gangs.  Finally, it becomes clear that Sudhir's research was coming to a close, and we start to see Sudhir having the upper hand, emotionally speaking.  He was moving on with his life, and J.T. was having a hard time letting go.  It made me sad.

Chapter Eight:

This chapter had a melancholy tone, in my opinion.  We get to see the highest leadership of the Black Kings, only to find out that the parties only get more tame as you move up.  J.T.'s life has peaked, and things seem to go downhill as his territory literally starts to crumble.  I hate Ms. Bailey even more for being corrupt, and actively fighting against her tenants getting any help for free.  And T-Bone dies in prison?  He may have been in a gang, but I never actually read about him doing anything illegal.  It then occurs to me that all these things are happening because the national crime rate is decreasing, and I feel better about things.

The Whole Book:

This is probably the best non-fiction book I have ever read, which automatically makes it better than any book we've read in this class so far.  Well, the dialog isn't 100% accurate i'm sure, but its basically non-fiction.  It still seems insane to me that this Indian kid from suburban California would actually seek out the worst ghetto in Chicago, having no clue what lay ahead.  Actually, this ignorance is probably what allowed him to proceed, because anyone who knew what could happen would say "nope" and go bark up some other research tree.  But somehow, the best case scenario plays out for Sudhir, and he meets the leader of the local gang AND maintains his interest so that he could build a rapport with him.  I always think about "what coulda been", and Sudhir is truly lucky, because he "coulda been" with a shank in his gut for the stupid questions he asked that first day.

I basically proceeded through four cumulative phases of interest when reading this book.  The first was basically no interest; I was reading this book because I had to.  After chapter two, I read the book for entertainment value as well, it was a better way to pass the time than Reddit, for instance.  Eventually, I realized the sociological value of this book; I was learning about the economy of inner-city ghettos and gangs, something that I was quite unfamiliar with, and found it fascinating.  Midway through chapter seven, I gained some degree of emotional attachment to the story, and started to feel sadness that the study was ending soon, but also that these people were going to be displaced soon.  Only at the fourth state will I read a prologue and epilogue of a book.  I'm never going to read a foreword written by someone else because frankly, I don't care about that person's opinion, and it doesn't expand the story.

As far as specific chapters go, I've pretty much said everything I wanted to say.  I don't mind reiterating that I hate Ms. Bailey, and the cops seem like bastards as well, but I can sort of understand why they feel like they do, though I don't see why they became cops if they were going to act like thugs.  My only complaint with the book would be that the chapters are entirely too long.  Chapters are supposed to separate unrelated events, but this book is divided into times where he pisses people off.  This leaves us with too many unrelated events happening in one chapter, and it gets hard to process everything that had just happened, especially when writing chapter summaries (I had to condense my thoughts like no other to keep them less than a paragraph).

As entertaining as this book was, should this be something that we read?  Sudhir broke a lot of rules in ethnography, and risked losing his rapport in each group and being ostracized as a result (a death sentence for ethnographers).  But it still makes for a fantastic read, well worth my time.

Ethnography Choice Announcement

I'm not 100% sure what I want to do yet.  It will either be a study of the atheist or catholic groups on campus.  Probably atheist because I have less experience with them.  HOWEVER, Matt brought up the idea of bonfire groups, and as I understand it, that is a very unique culture.  So we'll see.

Assignment 7: Non Obvious Observation 

Not a euphemism for how to be a creeper

So when I read the assignment for this paper, my video game-addled mind thought about Assassin's Creed, how your character could sit on a bench and eavesdrop on two people in the distance to gain information.  Not the case here.  Our readings were supposed to help us to realize that there are very subtle hints about people that can actually reveal a lot about them, without them realizing it.  In the paper's we read the non-obvious cue was the word choice of people when writing and speaking.  Specifically, pronouns.  After reading these passages, i'm sure that there are other hidden cues that could be used to identify them.
I'm not actually going to write about the readings (though one was horrible and one was good), but rather how I can take this knowledge, and apply it to the ethnographies we performed in our videos.

In our "run", we went to the Dixie Chicken, which is a bar on Northgate, and played a round of 42, a game involving dominoes.  While wearing the camera on our heads, we would walk into the bar, ask the bartender for some kind of drink, and then sit down at a table of 3 volunteers outside of our group.  We would then play the game, maybe talk for a while afterwards, and that was it.  Each run probably took about 5 minutes each.

There are many obvious things we could look for, such as the person's apparent height, or their hands if they appeared in the video.  But the non obvious cues could be more telling, or at the very least, they would be more fun to use as clues.  For instance, we could look at the choice of drink that the person ordered.  There are certain social stigmas on men getting colorful, girly drinks, for example.  But people can still break such rules.
Another thing to consider is the relationships of the three volunteers that we played 42 with with each of our group members.  two of them were good friends with one of our group, the rest didn't know them at all.  The third volunteer was in a relationship with one of our group members, and the rest of the group knew this person in ranges from not at all, to pretty well.  As a result, the behavior and levels of eye contact of each volunteer around our group members might vary a lot.

Also, the bar was full of mirrors, so any one of us could have our own friggin' reflection on tape.

Assignment 5: Ethnography Readings

In this assignment, we were given links to a page on the americanethnography.com website, and two wikipedia articles.  The first link basically contained definitions for ethnography.  The second is an encyclopedic article about ethnographies.  It better explained the concept of the ethnography, and really gave more information than I probably needed on the subject.  The final article is an example of a very famous ethnographic article written by Margaret Mead, and the fallout caused by it.

Upon clicking the link for the first page, I thought "wow, this is just a few sentences, this assignment will be no problem at all.  So I blasted through that one and started the page on ethnographies.  That was the one with all the substance in it.  Frankly, this article was particularly hard for me to focus on, because I have taken an anthropology class where I had to conduct several ethnographies.  As a result, I felt like everything here was review, so I didn't focus too terribly hard on it.  I realized while taking the quiz in class that anything that is ever presented in an enumerated format must be memorized because we WILL be quizzed on it.  The third article contained new material to me, and it wasn't as dry as the previous one, so I was actually able to pay attention to the events it described.  This is the only article that I found any bit entertaining, possibly because of how scandalous it was considered during the 20s' and beyond.

My favorite character was Derek Freeman, just because he spent the majority of his career being a giant conservative asshole in the anthropological community.  I can't believe he spent all that time bashing Mead, especially AFTER she died, and couldn't refute any of his claims.  He waited until then to publish his own study of the Samoan people, 60 years later.  This Samoa and its people were under completely different circumstances from the 20s when he came to them.  I don't know why he didn't just publish his book, noting how Samoa had change since being converted to Christianity instead of insisting that that was how Samoa had been the entire 20th century.  In the end, the American Anthropological Association met without inviting Freeman, and denounced everything he said.

Way to make the other Freemans look bad.

Pictured above: more likable Freemans

Assignment #4:  Ch. 1 of Emotional Design, by Donald Norman

A comparison between two of Norman's books.  One of which tells you how to hack your brain into working like you want it to.

Well, this reading was educational.  Contained within the chapter was the knowledge I need to control how I solve problems in the future, and explanations for why certain things look nice, or why my boss over the summer was so chill about figuring out how to solve various problems.  And all we have to do is trick our brains into feeling a certain way.  Man I wish I knew this stuff sooner.  But that's not what this post is supposed to be about...

"The Design of Everyday Things", also by Donald Norman, has a very similar style.  He writes in a fairly relaxed tone, which makes both books feel more casual, like I am, in fact, reading the book for leisure.  When more convenient, he uses first person descriptors, another trait that gives the book a more conversational tone.  Also just like before, there is an abundance of examples and anecdotes that help illustrate his point.  In fact, in the first chapter alone, I think I saw two examples that were present in both "Emotional Design" and "The Design of Everyday Things".  And I liked the first chapters of both books, more so than the following chapters of TDOET.

Considering the fact that we only read the first chapter of the book, it is a little difficult to accurately gauge the difference between the two books.  That is what I thought at first, but after re-scanning the first chapter of TDOET, I realized that I can make some decent generalizations.  First, I felt like in TDOET, I was already learning terminology, such as mapping, affordances, and conceptual model.  In ED, once you learned what the three layers of processing were, you could just sit back and enjoy the following expansion on the three subjects.  

In addition, TDOET has a more technical feel to it; the examples are quite specific, and reference particular objects and actual scenarios to prove whatever point is being made.  ED is more general, and while it still has concrete examples, many of them are just hypothetical situations and lists that Norman speculated on, and then wrote down.

Also, TDOET had more pictures.

A Chapter by Chapter Opinion of "The Design of Everyday Things", By Donald Norman

As assigned to us

Chapter: 1

Without reading any other chapters, I say this: this first chapter is basically a lesson in how stupid people aren't; every mistake we make using technology seems to be justified by the stupid mistake of the product's designer.  Apparently, the biggest travesty to modern design are office telephone systems.
However, there is useful knowledge to be gained from the chapter as well, such as the fact that a well designed product has subtle cues for its use, called affordances, constraints, and mappings.  Since I'm just revealing my thoughts on the chapter, i'm not going to explain them (sorry).

Chapter: 2

As I read chapter 2 of this book (and part of the preface), I begin to realize that it's not just the first chapter of the book dedicated to justifying people's ineptitude, but rather, the whole book.  Once more, we look at the ways that designers mess things up, but with new reasons, examples, terms, and therefore, new quiz questions.  Norman suggests that people appear take a perverse pride in technical incompetence, but i'm pretty quick to blame the designer first.

In summary, this chapter makes me feel like a jerk.

Chapter: 3

This chapter has the common theme of "you don't have to know very much to know a lot".  By this, I mean that much of our knowledge for most things is supplemented by cues in the world, or fabrications of our mind.  He talks about the travelling poets who were able to recite long plays from memory, by knowing the important plot points, and filling the rest in as they go along (which still sounds pretty damn hard to me).

Also, this is the chapter where he predicts the advent of smart phones.  You know what i'm talking about, because how could anyone read the lower paragraph on page 74 and not think of a smart phone.

Chapter: 4

This book is so dated, it's as funny as one of Charlie Chaplin's talkies.  I see references to VCRs, land line telephones, and slide projectors.  Anyway, this chapter seemed like a repeat of chapter one, but with extra door-hate, and less phone-hate.  Just like chapter one, chapter four discusses affordances, constraints, and mappings, with an abundance of examples, as always.
He mentions the idea of having microwaves that are able to scan codes from the packaging, and cook them accordingly.  Why is that not a thing already?

Chapter: 5

Oh look, a chapter on erors.  Such a concept is novel to me, but it came with plenty of anecdotes which were more comical than the those from the previous chapters.  He talks about the different kinds of errors that can manifest themselves in our day to day lives, and the probable causes of each.  This part was more enjoyable to me than the next.
And then it starts to talk about how we think and how we organize tasks.  Basically trying to explain the human brain OS.  But really, this section was intended to corroborate the statements about errors made earlier in the chapter.

Chapter: The Longest (Otherwise Known as 6)

A   chapter  about   

                            thechallenges  

              of      good     design   and 

                                                                                 usability.

I forget how long it takes products to finally have a great design, such as the phone and typewriter.  It took each device years to perfect, iterations of attempts out in the market.  However, I was more interested in the in the part about poorly designed design museums.  Isn't it ironic (don't you think)?  The fact that those museums weren't entirely about learning upset me somewhat, and damaged my faith in humanity.

I find it interesting that in the case study for faucets, he pretty much says automatic faucets would be the worst solution to the faucet problem (I don't care for them myself, either).  Yet, I see them in public bathrooms about as much as I see regular faucets.  

But even though I agree with Norman on the faucet issue, he starts talking about featurism as a disease.  Dang, what?  I don't know how things were done back in the 80s, but if I can draw conclusions from Terminator and Back to the Future, then he is sorely mistaken how things will turn out in 20 years.  Most products have a million features, but it's handled by the fact that you can hide and ignore features that you don't care about.

And then we get to move on to computers, something that applies more directly to us than anyone else.  Explicitly says that programmers should not be responsible for the computer's interaction with the user...

       Then why are we taking this class?

No, I think we need to learn how to minimize the list of problems that he describes in the next page.  Implementing ease of use so that it meshes well with the program body can best be done by the person(s) who implemented the body.

Chapter: Se7en

       This chapter is about designing so that the USER is at the center of things (give or take a few spaces).

Tips for how to do this have been mentioned throughout the book, so this chapter contains some repetitions, but several new steps to follow:  Simplify tasks, make things visible, exploit constraints, design for error, or standardize when all else fails.  There's the book in one sentence, I just didn't realize it until 207 pages into it.

Once again, Norman talks about the future, and it makes me laugh.  He predicts the possibility of having unlimited information placed at the user's fingertips, but complains that it would be too difficult to find what you're looking for.

The Book as a Whole

It is not often that I read books of a serious nature cover to cover.  I am generally not interested in the subject matter enough to pursue reading it in my spare time.  Even a novel that I enjoy does not get read within the span of one week. 

However forced the reading may be, this book was fairly entertaining, yet educational.  I definitely would say that the way that I view objects in the world has been changed.  I will likely assume a more critical stance when using a new technology, searching for ways to improve it.  Actually, I sort of already do that, but now the book has given me some methods by which to go about doing this with some discipline. 

I had plenty of laughs just reading any statement made that referenced some point in time, just because the perspective in the book is so outdated.  I mentioned the big ones in my chapter by chapter replay, but I did omit a few.  In the future, he predicts that the typewriter will soon replace the pen and paper.  That ship has already sailed, and was replaced with a rocket ship.  Computers are the new typewriters are the new pen and paper.  Somewhere else, he discusses how impractical it is for us to be using the imperial system of measurement when the metric system is more efficient and logical (I KNOW RIGHT?).  He guesses that we might adopt it within the next few decades.  A pretty optimistic guess, looking back, since we have made nearly no headway converting to the logical system.  Slightly later he mentions microphone keyboards.  I was going to laugh at such a concept but I just remembered that my phone contains such a feature, which I use frequently.  So some of his predictions are actually pretty good, and I won’t legitimately fault him for any incorrect prediction.

In a more substantiative thread, I felt that the book was longer than it needed to be.  Probably 25% of the content was examples.  I don’t want to complain about the examples though, because anyone reading the book purely for entertainment would appreciate the examples, since they were the most fun part to read.  I just was under a little too much time pressure to read the book for purely leisurely purposes.  Aside from the examples, I felt that there was a lot of repetition in the book.  Many concepts covered in chapter one and two were covered again in subsequent chapters, and reading through concepts I already understood was a laborious undertaking.  I might find myself blankly staring at the lines, and then realize that I'd already read past the explanation of the concept I understood, and then have to backtrack to the beginning of the new content.

On the whole, I think it was a very good and enlightening book.  I keep wishing that we had read one of his newer books, but I’ll have to take the word of past students that they are actually no good, or at least, not as good as The Design of Everyday Things.

Ten Terrible or Awesomely Designed Products

This feels like a Cracked.com article already

I have compiled a list of products/objects that I felt were either well designed or poorly designed, using the principles from the book as my gauge.  They are in no particular order, except that good and bad designs alternate.

1.  Childproof Medicine Bottle Lids (Good)

This is a great example of designing something to be intentionally difficult to prevent the wrong people from using it.  It is counter intuitive to push down on a lid to remove it; most children who have used lids before will probably try to pull up on the lid while twisting.

2.  SunbeamToaster Oven (Bad)

I received this toaster oven for free for helping out at a church garage sale some years ago, because I used my parent's toaster oven as much as the microwave.  The top dial is temperature.  The middle dial is a timer.  The bottom dial is an arbitrary auto timer so that you can determine how dark your toast should be on a 1-7 scale.  It is activated by moving the temperature dial down to the "toast" setting, which will then bypass the timer as well.  The toast setting is activated by the on off switch at the bottom; if the temperature setting is on a number, it is on as long as the timer is greater than 0.  It took me months to become proficient in ignoring the toast setting altogether.

3.  Line 6 Guitar Amplifier

Aside from being reasonably priced, this amplifier meets a lot of criteria in the book.  It has mappings, where any of the 5 buttons pressed at the top light up to indicate the active mode (although you can hear the difference).  More importantly, that the line-in and line-out sockets are on opposite sides of the amplifier, so that generally, you will not mistake them for one another, although no harm is really done if you plug your guitar into the line out - it just wont make any noise

4.  Certain showers

Pictured above you see my shower.  With its narrow body and overly simple plugging mechanism.  But those things don't bother me because I don't take baths.  Rather, if you look closely, you'll notice that the H is on the left and the C is on the right.  Counter intuitively, the shower is made hotter by rotating the control to the right - in the direction of the C.

I couldn't find the picture of a shower I used in Miami, but it was probably worse. It was designed so that the curtain curved inward with the bath basin which was placed inside a sort of "stage" in the bathroom.  The basin had a lip that prevented water from flowing back into the tub after it got onto the stage, and it looked very nice.  However, water coming from the shower head frequently ended up on the stage, and the longer that the head stayed on, the more that water would build up.  Eventually it would overflow the stage, which wasn't meant for holding water, and it would end up on the bathroom floor, which then flowed into the hallway of hotel room.  That shouldn't be a thing in a 4 star hotel...

5.  Power Smith Power Drill

I think that many drills have the same properties as this one, but this is mine.  It is battery operated, and the battery slot is pretty clearly located; i'm pretty sure you can see it here, and would correctly guess what you had to do to get it out of the slot.  In addition, there is a little flashlight at the end of the drill that lights up when you start to pull the trigger, but before the drill comes on (it also stays on while spinning).  This helps map the trigger function to something happening on the device.

6.  "Modern" Stairs

These stairs hurt my ankles to look at.  Each step you take attempts to throw off your balance, and send you back to the ground.  Talk about a harsh penalty for a slip.  But they probably won an award...

7.  Most Batteries

There isn't much to a battery.  The positive and negative ends are fairly well differentiated.  And most people understand which end goes in certain parts of their electronics.  Perhaps there is some room for improvement, such as making the ends different shapes so that they can only possible fit in one orientation.  The other benefit of the design is that it is very difficult to shock yourself using one of these.  You cannot easily complete the circuit using your thumb and forefinger, since the resistance in your hand is too great.  The only feasible way is to put the battery in your mouth.

8.  Misleading doorbell panel

This doorbell has a sign underneath it labeled "BELL", with an arrow pointing to the left.  Those using it reported looking to the left of the panel for a doorbell before realizing that the arrow had nothing to do with the sign.
What was the arrow for then?  It pointed at the door.

9.  AutoCAD

AutoCAD is a program that is used to create drawings of 2D or 3D objects.  I rarely mess with the 3D side of it, but I do use it professionally, and I can say that it is a very good program, considering the number of features it has.  Each time you try to take an action, it will prompt you in the command window at the bottom to supply the correct arguments, one at a time, or none.
Maybe you notice that there is an excess of buttons on the screen, but those buttons are fully customizable, so that you can have as few buttons as you like.  In addition, each command can be typed if you prefer, and if you want to do something, but aren't sure if it's a feature, just try typing it out (that's how I found the area of an irregular spline).  

10.  SolidWorks

Like AutoCAD, SolidWorks is another drafting program for computers.  However, SolidWorks is more tailored to 3D applications.  To be fair, I won't complain about making anything 3D in this program, the 2D aspects are troubling enough.  To draw a shape, you must first draw out the shape that you want it to be, and then go back and specify the actual dimensions that the shape should have.  This always throws off my flow, as I prefer to set the length of an object, and then see a line of that length get drawn.  I spent a semester using this for a project before I started using AutoCAD consistently, and, while I was always able to complete my design, I was always frustrated after finishing.

An Evaluation of the Chinese Room

A psychologist’s attempt to explain computers

In this article, John R. Searle of Berkeley’s Department of philosophy attempts to discourage the idea that a computer could ever “think”.  That is, he is arguing against the notion of strong AI, which I believe would do more for psychology than 100 years of human study (incidentally, it would probably require 100 years of human study to create a strong AI). 

The test used to disprove strong AI is this:  You are locked in a room with a large batch of Chinese writing, which cannot understand at all.  You are then given another batch of symbols with instructions on how the two batches correlate.  A third batch is then given to you, along with instructions to give back symbols from the first two batches based on symbols from the third batch.  Now say that you get so good at doing this, that you can reply to any combination of symbols with the proper Chinese characters so that no Chinese person in another room would be able to tell that you didn’t speak a word of Chinese just by asking you questions (a version of the Turing test).  But the fact remains that you do not at all understand Chinese.

Searle tries to prove his point by oversimplifying it to the point that anyone could see that he was correct in his example.  He is practically describing an encryptor that converts Chinese characters to other Chinese characters, instead of English characters to other English characters (that would make no sense to us).  No one argued that an encryptor understood English, but that’s essentially what he’s arguing. 

He addresses the “Systems” reply, first by calling it embarrassing, but more irritating is the claim he makes at the end of this reply.  He quotes a man from 1979 who says machines as simple as a thermostat can have beliefs.  Now, I do not believe at all that a thermostat has a belief in the literal sense, but Searle uses the absurdity of the statement in his argument.  He actually says “One gets the impression that people in AI who write this sort of thing think they can get away with it because they don’t really take it seriously, and they don't think anyone else will either. I propose for a moment at least, to take it seriously.”  Why??  It’s just poor debate practice.

My favorite argument is the brain simulator reply, “what if we write a program to simulate the synapses and neural firing of a human brain?”  This sounds legit to me, but Searle breaks it down into a man operating valves and pipes in such a way to mimic neural firings, based on instructions he’s been given to output Chinese answers.  The pipes and man still have no understanding of Chinese.  Now I just want to say that synapse firing in the brain is all chemistry and physics, which are the instructions of the universe.  But…that means Searle proves another valuable point:

Humans Can’t Understand

I’m pretty much out of space, but I still want to list the biggest issue with even arguing AI ever.  He didn’t define his terms.  At no point does he say what it even means to understand something; he didn’t list what qualifies as a belief.

In addition, 60% of the way through the paper, he basically recants everything he said for the first 10 pages.  He acknowledges that an exact artificial replica of a human would be able to think, and that a program could think, because minds are programs, but a program within a computer could not think.  He disagrees with himself, so I really can’t be swayed by his argument.

Reading #6:  Not Doing but Thinking: the Role of Challenge in the Gaming Experience

do I write about anything besides games?

Introduction:

At last, I present the final of the required blog posts...for assignment one.  It was written by four researchers at both University College London, and the University of York.  They are:

Anna L Cox, UCL Interaction Centre, University College London.  http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/a.cox/people.htm
Paul Cairns, Dept of CS, University of York.  http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/

These two people appear to be undergrad students, because they have no personal webpage:
Pari Shah, Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London.
Michael Carroll, Dept of CS, University of York.

Summary

Gaming is arguably one of the most successful applications of computing.  Immersion is one of the key aspects of video game design.  It is directly responsible for making the user enjoy the game by allowing them to become cognitively unaware of their surroundings.  This paper revolved around how to maximize that immersion, so as to improve the gaming experience (GX).

An example of a tower defense game, used in the study

Related Work

Each of these papers highlight studies that explore how to best utilize whatever application they may choose, much like this one.

Optimal Experience of Web Activities.  This discusses the best way for the user to experience the internet via web browser:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563299000382

Video Games and the Future of Learning.  I actually worked for a game developer who created games intended to help people learn.  This explores the possibility of teaching students via game, so that we can better hold their interest:  http://gise.rice.edu/documents/FutureOfLearning.pdf

From Content to Context:  Video games as designed experience.  This paper combines the idea of teaching with video games with increasing the teaching effectiveness by increasing immersion:  http://edr.sagepub.com/content/35/8/19.short

Understanding Online Gaming Addiction and Treatment Issues for Adolescents.  This paper deals with the issue of too much immersion in a game, whenever it starts to pull reality out from under players: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01926180902942191

Social Software: Fun and Games, or Business Tools? Discusses the potential of web software in the new age of "web 2.0":  http://jis.sagepub.com/content/34/4/591.short
 

A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion:  Studies three varying degrees of game development, much like this paper does:  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=986048

Behavior, Realism, and Immersion in Games.  This paper sets out to clearly define the term immersion, and what affects it: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056894

Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games: Just like the previous paper, this one also attempts to better define immersion, since gamers and reviewers seem to have different definitions:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581908000499

I wish I were a warrior: The role of wishful identification in the effects of violent video games on aggression in adolescent boys. This study tested the levels of aggression in young poorly educated boys.  The results said that the more aggressive boys related to video game characters, especially when they were well immersed in the game:  http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/43/4/1038/

Evaluation

There were three experiments performed on subjects.  

The first tested how physical effort affects immersion. This was done using a tower defense game.  The researchers used an objective quantitative measure for this, because it simply counted how many "creeps" were destroyed before the player was completely overwhelmed.  There was also a Qualitative survey at the end of the test, asking how the players felt during each game.

The second test measured the effect of time constraint.  This was done by having players play a Bejeweled game, half playing in a timed mode, the other half playing with unlimited time.  This time, the quantitative value was how many matches the player could make before their timer ran out, or if they were playing an untimed mode, how many sets before there were no possible moves left.  Once again, they were required to take a qualitative survey after the games.

The third and final test measured the cognitive difficulty of the game.  This was accomplished by having the subjects play games of Tetris at varying difficulties.  The objective quantitative value was how many rows the player could create before their screen was overflowed.  The subjective quantitative value was a personal rating of how good at the game the player felt that they were, and then a numerical rating of how difficult they thought the game was.

Overall, the researchers found that the key to immersion is to have it so that the game's difficulty level best matches the player's skill.

Discussion

I know firsthand the power of immersion over a player.  As far as game design goes, this is a very important study to do.  However, due to its importance, these studies have been done many times before, so this one is not particularly novel.

Reading #5:  A twin strike of short gaming articles

Part 1:  Experimental Investigation of Human Adaptation to Change in Agent’s Strategy through a Competitive Two-Player Game

Introduction

This paper was written by researchers in Japan.  After reading the article, I found out that the primary researchers' webpages are in Japanese, so I can't really make anything of it...

Kazunori Terada, Gifu University: http://www.elf.info.gifu-u.ac.jp/terada/programming/jikken3/grab_v4l2.html

Seiji Yamada, National Institute of Informatics:  http://www.nii.ac.jp/en/faculty/digital_content/yamada_seiji/

Akira Ito, Gifu University, is an English student, so his page is legible.  However, he seems to be an undergrad, so there isn't really anything to write:  http://www.otago.ac.nz/profiles/otago000603.html

Summary

There is no denying that all humans adapt when competing with another individual.  This paper was simply a study to determine how human adaptation was affected when competing with humans vs. competing with computers.  

Related Work

I will do five pieces of related work here because a.) i'm doing two articles, and b.) the paper states that not very much research has been done in this field:

A paper on humans and game strategy: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2098880

On changing strategy in a game:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825685710305
paper highlighting the importance of intelligent AI in games:  http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/viewArticle/1558
About changing strategy in games where not all information is known (such as the game in this study):  http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3689430
Changing AI strategy in games that are more complex than the one in this study:  http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA385122

These articles largely deal with strategy in games much like this one.  This paper is different in that it compares strategies that people form vs humans or machines.

Evaluation

The researchers formed two hypotheses:

     1.  An adaptation phase exists when a human is confronted with a change in the opponent’s strategy.

     2: Adaptation is faster when a human is competing with a robot than with a human.

These hypotheses were tested by having the subjects play a penny matching game vs a computer.  Half the players were told it was a computer, and the other half were told they were playing vs a human.  For the penny game, each side would choose heads or tails on a penny.  If the pennies matched, player A received both pennies, if they differed, player B got them both.  Ten games were played, with six rounds each.  In the 6th round of each game, the payout was 20x.  The computer used the exact same strategy vs all players, with a permanent change in strategy in the 4th round.  Below shows the percentage of wins in the sixth round.

The researchers' hypotheses were accurate, with one additional fact: in the 7th game, those playing against a human appeared to expect another change in strategy, when there wasn't one.

Discussion

This study helps AI designers to understand people's perception of computer opponents.

The paper acts like this is a novel study, but this seems significant enough to have been done before.  By significant, I mean important enough for game creators to look into.

Part Two: Through the Azerothian Looking Glass: 

Mapping In-Game Preferences to Real World Demographics

A paper about World of Warcraft

Introduction

This paper wasn't so much about CHI I think as it was just a census of World of Warcraft.  Regardless, useful information can be gained from such studies.  The authors are:  

Nick Yee, Palo Alto Research Center, has recently moved to Ubisoft, and is now studying gamer behavior.  Appropriate, given the nature of this paper.  http://www.nickyee.com/

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Palo Alto Research Center, has also moved to Ubisoft, and works with Nick Yee doing the same research.  http://www.linkedin.com/in/ducheneaut

Han-Tai Shiao, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is a graduate student working for the department of electrical and computer engineering.  http://www.umn.edu/lookup?SET_INSTITUTION=UMNTC&UID =shiao003

Les Nelson, Palo Alto Research Center, has worked on a number of inventions with Xerox.  His work has led to 2 products, 20 patents, and several publications in HCI.  http://www.parc.com/about/people/136/les-nelson.html

Summary

Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) are a huge source of data (among other things).  The purpose of this paper was to conduct a large survey/census, which would allow conclusions about the playing habits of certain demographics.  Ultimately, it will reveal what makes WoW such a popular game.

Related Work

These five articles are similar to this article because they deal with people in MMOs, and in one case, using MMO demographic information in games (EXACTLY like this article)

A study to see why people enjoy playing online games more than others:  http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

A paper written by Nicolas Ducheneaut that seeks to explain the social behaviors of people who play MMORPGs. http://www.springerlink.com/content/n00107m734617388/
A report on the potential of using MMORPGs for demographic purposes:  http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/pres.15.3.309

Why people play MMORPGs at all: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

Paper about the type of people who generally like video games.  This is a much more general study than the one conducted in this paper:  http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1984.55.1.271

Evaluation

The study called for 1000 volunteers to provide demographic information, and allow the researchers to collect character information for each person.  Over the course of six months, the researchers ran a script that checked if each character was online.  This information, combined with the given demographic data and publicly available character data allowed the researchers to draw many conclusions.  They found that age, gender, work schedule, and marital status all had impacts on people's playing habits, and that different ages and genders preferred different activities.  All information was objective and quantitative, but the information inferred from it is objective qualitative.

Discussion

The only plausible use I could foresee with this information is how to create a better game that appeals to a wider demographic.  This isn't particularly useful information for anything else, as far as I can tell.

Honestly, I'm not sure that this paper belonged at a CHI conference, whether it was interesting or not.