Elite Sports Training as Model for Future Internet Practices?

This paper reflects on the experience of using ethnographic and experimental research at a high-performance athletic training center as model for drawing conclusion about the future everyday use of ICT and Internet technologies. The research project has consisted of field studies of training session and everyday life at an elite training center where athletes live and train as well as experimental design processes where new internet and media technologies has been explored within elite sports training. While in some aspects the research has been sports specific (such as using advanced video technology to analyze precise movements), in other aspects the training center has seemed like a more intense, extreme and streamlined version of our contemporary technological everyday. The training center has been a laboratory where issues of quantification of self, goal-orientation vs. creativity, and individual vs. community has been displayed in a more clear, isolated and focused way than observations of everyday life can glean. The conclusion is that studying the intense environments of elite athletes can be a fruitful approach to studying the sociology of Information technology. However, this is only the case as long as our societies are dominated by the same values as elite sports such as competitiveness, goal-orientation, specialization and efficiency through technology and discipline

Interpretable Machine Learning for Privacy-Preserving Pervasive Systems

Our everyday interactions with pervasive systems generate traces that capture various aspects of human behavior and enable machine learning algorithms to extract latent information about users. In this paper, we propose a machine learning interpretability framework that enables users to understand how these generated traces violate their privacy

Portfolio Building: The relationship with literacies in students’ everyday lives

This article explores some propositions about how students’ everyday lives may interact with their success at learning in a large Further Education College in England. Some students, on paper, have all the appropriate entry qualifications, but still struggle to complete their courses. Indeed, some do not complete at all. So, what could be done to help these students achieve success? As a member of a large-scale research project team, I have been investigating the home literacies of further education students. Papen (2005a:14) points out that ‘it is useful and necessary before any intervention can be planned, to carry out research which identifies learners’ everyday literacy practices’. Of course, there are many other aspects of people’s everyday lives that will influence their learning success. However, in this article I want to focus on the possibility of the influence of home literacy practices, by exploring how the reading and writing in the everyday lives of students could be drawn upon and utilized in order to help these students to succeed on their chosen college courses

Cross-Cultural Understanding of Interface Design: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Icon Recognition

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study that investigated cultural aspects of understanding the website of a virtual campus. Results indicate differences in expectations and understanding due to the users’ knowledge of everyday life and real world experience, and suggest that the campus metaphor that was used is not universally transferable

The use of paper in everyday student life

The information we encounter in modern life, in developed countries, is a hybrid of the physical and the digital. Personal archiving tools allow users to capture and retrieve aspects of their everyday lives in digital form. In this paper we use a diary study of students’ interactions with paper-based information to inform the design of such archiving tools

Effects of alcohol on subjective ratings of prospective and everyday memory deficits

Background: Research has shown that heavy alcohol use has a detrimental effect on retrospective memory. Less is known about the effect of alcohol on everyday memory. Methods: This study examined self-ratings of two aspects of memory performance: prospective memory (for example, forgetting to pass on a message) and everyday memory (measured by cognitive failures, such as telling someone a joke that you have told them before). To ensure anonymity and expand on the numbers of participants used in previous studies, data were collected by using the Internet. Data from 763 participants remained after data screening. Results: After controlling for other drug and strategy use, there was clear evidence that differential use of alcohol was associated with impairments in the long-term aspect of prospective memory and with an increased number of cognitive failures. Conclusions: These results support and extend the findings of previous research: our findings are consistent with the idea that heavy use of alcohol does have a significant and negative effect on everyday cognitive performance. Possible causes of these impairments are discussed

Everyday and prospective memory deficits in ecstasy/polydrug users

The impact of ecstasy/polydrug use on real-world memory (i.e. everyday memory, cognitive failures and prospective memory [PM]) was investigated in a sample of 42 ecstasy/polydrug users and 31 non-ecstasy users. Laboratory-based PM tasks were administered along with self-reported measures of PM to test whether any ecstasy/polydrug-related impairment on the different aspects of PM was present. Self-reported measures of everyday memory and cognitive failures were also administered. Ecstasy/polydrug associated deficits were observed on both laboratory and self-reported measures of PM and everyday memory. The present study extends previous research by demonstrating that deficits in PM are real and cannot be simply attributed to self-misperceptions. The deficits observed reflect some general capacity underpinning both time- and event-based PM contexts and are not task specific. Among this group of ecstasy/polydrug users recreational use of cocaine was also prominently associated with PM deficits. Further research might explore the differential effects of individual illicit drugs on real-world memory

#CHIMoney: Financial interactions, digital cash, capital exchange and mobile money

Interactions around money and financial services are a critical part of our lives on and off-line. New technologies and new ways of interacting with these technologies are of huge interest; they enable new business models and ways of making sense of this most important aspect of our everyday lives. At the same time, money is an essential element in HCI research and design. This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners involved in the design and use of systems that combine digital and new media with monetary and financial interactions to build on an understanding of these technologies and their impacts on users' behaviors. The workshop will focus on social, technical, and economic aspects around everyday user interactions with money and emerging financial technologies and systems

Aspects of everyday design: Resourcefulness, adaptation, and emergence

This article discusses how families appropriate artifacts and surroundings that lead to the design of everyday household systems, such as combining a chalkboard, a door frame, and a hanging basket with paper and sticky notes to manage lists and messages. Such systems continually evolve through the catalytic pressures of individual actions and design-in-use. The article reports on a study of four families in which the concept of everyday design in the home was being researched. In-depth descriptions and discussions of the observations and patterns are presented. The design implications of this study are also discussed. The research contributions are an explanation of everyday design as a novel way to understand interactions and routines in the home, descriptions of the key actions and process in everyday design, and the need to reconstruct the user in the sense of an everyday designer

Metalanguage in L1 English-speaking 12-year-olds: which aspects of writing do they talk about?

Traditional psycholinguistic approaches to metalinguistic awareness in L1 learners elicit responses containing metalanguage that demonstrates metalinguistic awareness of pre-determined aspects of language knowledge. This paper, which takes a more ethnographic approach, demonstrates how pupils are able to engage their own focus of metalanguage when reflecting on their everyday learning activities involving written language. What is equally significant is what their metalanguage choices reveal about their understanding and application of written language concepts