I am saddened to hear that Benoît Mandelbrot has passed away. His The Fractal Geometry of Nature excited and intrigued me when I was in high school, though I admit that while I, like many others, examined all the pictures, I read only scattered parts of the text. The talk of his I attended as an undergraduate was the first technical talk by a famous mathematician that I understood, essentially, in full.  The popularity of fractals was due to the gorgeous pictures,  and was aided by the simplicity of some of the underlying mathematics, which made it accessible to so many, and to the connection of fractals to so many phenomena. That fractals appeared at all scales in nature, from galaxies, to coastlines, to trees, I knew from looking at his book, but their tie to economics was new to me. He struck me as arrogant, but in an endearing way since his pride in his contributions stemmed from his intense love of the work and his absolute conviction of its importance. He clearly enjoyed his maverick status as someone who worked in a different way than most mathematicians, and on non-standard mathematics. Although he taught us to look for self-similar patterns throughout the universe, we won’t find the like of him any time soon.

A writer for the TC blog, Erick Schonfeld, recently posted a description of an encounter he had with a Stanford student at a drug store trying to recruit users to experiment with a paper prototype. The prototype and study were being carried out as a requirement for an HCI course the student is taking. The TC writer, in short, found the whole experience ridiculous, especially with respect to all of the whiz-bang, interactive demos he is used to seeing. While, as many point out, paper prototyping is a standard technique in HCI, that does not mean that it always works or is always appropriate. In fact, in my experience with early stage prototypes I was overall underwhelmed with paper prototyping. But I realized over time that experience did not reflect a problem with the prototyping tool per se, but rather a lack of understanding of the context of the user.

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AT&T Bell Labs has recently made their entire archive of the Bell Systems Technical Journal (BSTJ) available for free on-line. The collection goes all the way back to 1922. In fact, the first issue has an article on the transmission characteristics of the submarine cable. For example, in 1978 an entire issue of the journal was dedicated to a new operating system called Unix.

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The September-October issue of ACM interactions includes an essay by Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen in which they critique various aspects of gestural interactions as implemented on the new crop of touch-enabled devices: the iPhone, iPad, the Android family, and the like. The gist of their concern is that the design of these interfaces, while incorporating useful and pleasurable interactions based on touch (swipe, pinch, etc.) also introduce a range of usability problems well known to the HCI community.

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Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatami, and several other people from MSR published an interesting analysis of how to combine pen and touch input on table-top displays. The work draws inspiration from observations of how people manipulate paper to derive design guidelines for bi-manual and bi-modal interaction. The paper contributes a thorough description of integrated touch and pen-based interaction and offers a thorough analysis of design principles that underlie these kinds of interactions.

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Fox@fury is an interesting blog I have started following. Kevin Fox displays a keen design eye for offering small usability improvements that can potentially yield important usability benefits.

In a recent post, for example, he offered a simple suggestion for how to alter the appearance of Chrome tabs to improve the user’s ability to determine which of many open tabs is active. In another, he analyzed the Android app market to show some of the fundamental flaws in its design.

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Michael Bernstein and a cast of thousands published an interesting paper at UIST 2010, which was honored with the Best Student Paper award. The paper describes and evaluates Soylent, a tool that uses Mechanical Turk to generate corrections and suggestions to improve writing. (The name Soylent is not a substitute for dairy in the weeks leading up to Easter; rather, it is derived from the film Soylent Green.)

This work is interesting in a number of ways: it automates the distribution and collection of Mechanical Turk tasks and then integrates the results into an interactive system, it recognizes the limitations of fully-automated approaches, and it suggests a design pattern that can be applied in other contexts .

The main contribution of this paper is the idea of embedding paid crowd workers in an interactive user interface to support complex cognition and manipulation tasks on demand. These crowd workers do tasks that computers cannot reliably do automatically and the user cannot easily script.

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October is Family History Month, and I thought I would start it with some reflections on genealogical searching. This post builds on some earlier observations on genealogy and information retrieval.

Genealogy searches are an interesting example of many aspects of information seeking. In some ways, this endeavor reveals the limitations of our classification of information seeking systems and behaviors, such as recall-oriented vs. precision-oriented search, known-item vs. exploratory, etc. While each query one runs should be high precision (find me records for the person I am interested in at the moment), there are many aspects (dates and places of birth and death, details of immigration, residence, occupation) resulting in many queries. And often you really do want to try to find as much as can be found, so the overall task is recall-oriented. Similarly, you start with searching for facts for people whose existence you are documenting, and you can often recognize relevant records when you see them. This has all the hallmarks of known-item search. On the other hand, you may also discover relatives you didn’t know existed, facts you had not expected, new kinds of historical records, etc. This feels much more like exploratory search.

Finally, there is the issue of where to search for information, which databases to use, etc. The range of potential sources for the serious genealogist is quite broad, but for those just starting out there are a few obvious choices beyond interviewing your relatives. Ancestry.com is a family of web sites that federates access to a large range of historical data on individuals. While it’s not the only place one can start, it’s not a bad choice.

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The proceedings of IIiX 2010 are finally available through the ACM Digital Library! In addition, it turns out that ACM has a special series page that links to all IIiX proceedings. In addition, here are the slides from Tefko Saracevic’s keynote address.

The Best Paper award winner was a paper by Sanna Kumpulainen and Kalervo Järvelin (University of Tampere, Finland) titled “Information Interaction in Molecular Medicine: Integrated Use of Multiple Channels.” Two other papers were nominated: “Evaluating search systems using result page context” by Bailey, et al., and “Supporting polyrepresentation in a quantum-inspired geometrical retrieval framework” by Frommholz et al. The Best Poster award was shared by Loizides and Buchanan “Performing Document Triage on Small Screen Devices. Part 1: Structured Documents” and Liu et al., “Identifying Queries in the Wild, Wild Web.”

The diversity of tablet-based textbook and ebook devices seems to be increasing of late. The success of the iPad seems to have emboldened hardware manufacturers (e.g., Sharp, Dell, NEC, etc.) to announce a number of similar devices for the Android platform. In addition, there has been some competition in the software textbook space (e.g., CourseSmart, Inkling, etc.).

Another interesting development is the approach taken by  Kno: The Kno device is a prototype textbook device that seems to be designed around explicit feedback from students about how they use textbooks. It hasn’t been released yet (I couldn’t even figure out much about the hardware and OS that it will be running), but some things are clear: Kno is an integrated hardware/software platform aimed at high school and college students’ use of textbooks. It has been announced in a two-screen and a one-screen version.

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