Paper Reading #25 - A Code Reuse Interface for Non-Programmer Middle School Students

Comments
Cindy Skach
Joshua Penick

Reference Information
Paul A. Gross, Micah S. Herstand, Jordana W. Hodges, Caitlin L. Kelleher, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary
The program in question here is one that would like to aid middle school students in finding features of a program they use and wanting to capture those features. This is done by recording the feature in question which then finds the appropriate code section and then the student can copy it over for use in their own program. An actual example of this would be the student trying to make an animation where the student wants a certain character to jump and kick a door. The student knows that this happened in a similar animation and then can use this code reuse program in order to extract that action for their own use. The code is extracted in what they call ActionScripts which are then played through until the student finds the exact action that they want.

Discussion
The objective behind these authors' motives is quite a good one. They are trying to get young people interested in coding and computer science at a time when they would be able to create an interest. As the computer science industry has a very lopsided ratio of genders currently, they are trying to get more interest generated in order to even that out. This program is actually a really important device for young people because I think that the biggest pitfall in teaching coding is the initial hump that people must get over in order to really get started. When the student looks at code, they cannot understand or find what they are looking for, but this program will help them ease into it and find more interest in computer science.

Living With Complexity

Summary
The idea of complexity is thought of as the unknown for most people and actually logical and simple for the people that know it. There are times that complexity is needed and times when it is totally overdone. This needs to be considered when designing things, etc. Often simple things in life have needless complexity that arise from them. Passwords for example are one of the most misused things in the office and most workers will think of very simple passwords to use. This annoys security experts but it gives more hassle than it takes away. There are also people that do just fine in the world of all this complexity. They mostly use signifiers as keys to what is going on. These are just subtle clues that some people take advantage of that can tell them a lot of the surrounding world.


Discussion
This book was actually quite helpful in that it can show designers that once it leaves to production that users should not need extra information in order to use it. I also like how it showed the contrast of people where complexity is concerned.

Book Reading #52 - Living With Complexity

Chapter 3-4
Summary
Often simple things in life have needless complexity that arise from them. Passwords for example are one of the most misused things in the office and most workers will think of very simple passwords to use. This annoys security experts but it gives more hassle than it takes away. There are also people that do just fine in the world of all this complexity. They mostly use signifiers as keys to what is going on. These are just subtle clues that some people take advantage of that can tell them a lot of the surrounding world.

Discussion
These two chapters were opposites of each other in that it reveals the complexity that a lot of people run into on a daily basis and also the subtleties that allow a lot of people to live their lives as smoothly as possible.

Book Reading #51 - Living With Complexity

Chapter 1-2
Summary
The idea of complexity is thought of as the unknown for most people and actually logical and simple for the people that know it. There are times that complexity is needed and times when it is totally overdone. This needs to be considered when designing things, etc.

Discussion
I think I like where this book is headed and the idea of complexity is a complex issue that will need to be addressed fully.

Why We Make Mistakes

Summary
The amount of mistakes that any one person will make is quite astounding. These first chapters are reserved to talking about what exactly the kind of mistakes they are and how we fall victim to them. The different ways as to our brain may ignore key information or similar is how we make mistakes. The memory of many of us is often times wrong in the details. Particularly when we do interesting things we will remember them in a positive light rather than what it actually was. This can lead to an argument happening where the person remembers using nice language rather than possibly more stern language. Also, the multitasking of people is usually a dangerous game to deal with. The nature in which people can get focused on something will be devastating if multiple things are occurring. The first chapter mentions the problem that everyone has with their memory and how things are stored away. The data that needs to be stored is often condensed or pattern-ized to be helpful in remembering. This causes us to take information and possibly make errors when trying to make it easier to remember. Then also mentioned was the differences between genders that exist for reactions. The confidence in both genders are usually heavily on the men side even though women might be better at a certain area. Also, the book goes into how guys and girls look at directions or their area. In general most people think of themselves as being slightly better than the average and are pretty good at a lot of things. Obviously not everyone can be above average, so this is an interesting mind state that most people have in order to delude themselves. Also, people are much more willing to do things when the time comes for it to be done rather than to prepare. 

Discussion
I like reading about these concepts that may not cross everyone's mind but show underlying concepts in humans. These can account for many things and be used for research. The book in general was a good way of showing the things that most people may or may not notice and actually analyzes why they are. More importantly how to curb these habits or work with them. The book is quite necessary for the designer and what he or she should think when considering what they are doing.

Paper Reading #24 - Outline Wizard: Presentation Composition and Search

Comments
Jacob Lillard
Evin Schuchardt

Reference Information


Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu, Ravi Konuru, Julie MacNaught, Danny Yeh, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper deals with the common practice of creating new presentations from old presentations. Currently the process is a painful one looking through old powerpoint presentations in order to find the one slide that is needed for the new presentation. Current search technology is not catered to looking for specific slides and topics. The groups proposal is a system called SlideRiver that will index all slides in order to easily be searched or perused. Now obviously slides usually have topics on them that can be searched for but SlideRiver will take it a step further by searching the entire context of the presentation allowing the user to get better tailored results to what they are looking for. The system can also find multiple slides on what is being searched for because a lot of the time a topic that needs to be looked at is over multiple slides rather than just a single one in a presentation.

Discussion
This article has a very good idea, however I believe that it has been innovated over in the past year or two. The article seems to have been written using the 2003 version of PowerPoint. In the recent versions, however, searching through presentations has been made much easier through better file formats from Microsoft. Now the search in many operating systems can search within these files and yield pretty good results. The results that this group got are good, I just think that they should integrate their research into Windows Search or something similar rather than their own system.

Paper Reading #23 - Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues

Comments
Cindy Skach
Joshua Penick

Reference Information
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary
The goal of this paper was to show the benefits of using navigational cues and the effects on exploratory search and knowledge exchange. The first major example that the group gives is social tagging and the effect that it has on people using search or discovery on the web. Sites now allow people to keep track of their web resources by tagging bookmarks in unique ways as way-finders which also allow research into allowing other people to use this information. This idea was then used by the group in order to see the effects on navigational cues. When viewing documents, they created a list of tags that the user could click on. When a tag was selected, a list of associated documents were listed along with other tags that each document might also be related to.

Discussion
This paper seemed a little convoluted for the most part. It was very broad when speaking and went on and on about seemingly nothing. The underlying idea is very important, however. The idea of tagging is getting very important online more and more. Tagging allows for a much easier way to connect to other things that the searcher may or may not have thought to search for allowing for a better search environment. I think the paper would have been better to show more actual real life applications.