"Do screen captures in manuals make a difference?": a comparison between textual and visual manuals

Examines the use of screen captures in manuals. Three types of manuals were compared: one textual and two visual. The two visual manuals differed in the type of screen capture that was used. One had screen captures that showed only the relevant part of the screen, whereas the other consisted of captures of the full screen. All manuals contained exactly the same textual information. We examined immediate use on time (use as a job aid) and on learning (use as a teacher). For job-aid purposes, there was no difference between the manuals. The visual manual with full-screen captures and the textual manual were both better for learning than the visual manual with partial screen captures. We found no effect on user motivation. The tentative conclusion of this study is that screen captures seem not to be vital for learning or immediate use. If one opts for including screen captures, then the conclusion is that full-screen captures are better than partial one

Leading For The Bottom Line: A View Of Leadership In A Bottom-Line Context

This paper sets out to establish and describe a new approach to leadership called Bottom Line Leadership. The essence of Bottom Line Leadership is that a leader’s most critical responsibility is to clearly identify, communicate and gain buy-in for the ultimate bottom-line objective of the organization he/she leads, subject to constraints imposed by the market and by the organization itself. In comparison to other leadership models that focus on the general attributes or behaviors characterizing effective leaders, Bottom Line Leadership emphasizes the link between an organization’s purpose and a leader’s behavior. The philosophy that serves as the foundation for this article stipulates that employees, in any type of organization, need to be crystal clear about the purpose and bottom-line objective of the organization they work for. Having this clarity of objective enables employees to not only understand the importance of an organization’s strategy and mission; it also allows them to make sound decisions in support of the organization’s goals. We believe that it is essential that leaders in organizations instill this clarity of purpose and help create the conditions that allow people to channel their energies into the appropriate activities. What results from our leadership and management research is a “virtuous circle” model coupled with a checklist that prescribes precisely what Bottom-Line Leaders do. To arrive at our model of Bottom-Line Leadership, we review the teachings of some of the most popular leadership and management thought leaders. We conclude that effective leadership actually encompasses both traditional leadership attributes (create / inspire / influence) and traditional management capabilities (deploy / control / execute). In short, what we find is that Bottom-Line Leaders instill clarity of purpose in their organization, gain commitment to the ultimate bottom-line objective, and engage employees in these efforts. They do this by deploying methods of communication, inspiration and motivation that constantly maintain a connection to, and are aligned with, the ultimate bottom-line objective the organization is striving to achieve. They also work tirelessly to ensure that employees are in a position to make decisions and take actions in manners supporting the bottom-line objective. In our view, leaders are those who do the right things right and get their people to do likewise

Communicative participation improves following motor speech program treatment in apraxia of speech

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor speech disorder characterized by increase in segment and intersegment durations (segmentation), equal stress over words and/or sentences, dysprosody, and speech sound distortions. With decreased intelligibility, limited or lack communicative participation arises from an inability to be understood or lack of confidence in their speech. Establishing communicative participation measurements is integral to generalizing and establishing efficacy of treatment program progress to a child’s everyday life. This study observes the communicative participation change of a group of children (n=6) with idiopathic CAS, receiving a new four-week, 16-hour treatment called Treatment for Establishing Motor Programming Organization (TEMPO). Clinically significant changes were seen in communicative participation post TEMPO treatment using the FOCUS-34© parental questionnaire with an average change of 50 points. Specifically, sub-scales of intelligibility, social/play, independence, and coping/emotional skills were seen as driving components of this change

A Language Description is More than a Metamodel

Within the context of (software) language engineering, language descriptions are considered first class citizens. One of the ways to describe languages is by means of a metamodel, which represents the abstract syntax of the language. Unfortunately, in this process many language engineers forget the fact that a language also needs a concrete syntax and a semantics. In this paper I argue that neither of these can be discarded from a language description. In a good language description the abstract syntax is the central element, which functions as pivot between concrete syntax and semantics. Furthermore, both concrete syntax and semantics should be described in a well-defined formalism

Music and Speech in Auditory Interfaces: When is One Mode More Appropriate Than the Other?

A number of experiments, which have been carried out using non-speech auditory interfaces, are reviewed and the advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed. The possible advantages of using non-speech audio media such as music are discussed – richness of the representations possible, the aesthetic appeal, and the possibilities of such interfaces being able to handle abstraction and consistency across the interface

Musical Program Auralisation: Empirical Studies

Program auralisation aims to communicate information about program state, data, and behaviour using audio. We have argued that music offers many advantages as a communication medium [1]. The CAITLIN system [4, 16, 17, 18] was constructed to provide auralisations within a formal structured musical framework. Pilot studies [4, 16] showed that programmers could infer program structure from auralisations alone. A study was conducted using twenty-two novice programmers to assess a) whether novices could understand the musical auralisations and b) whether the musical experience and knowledge of subjects affected their performance. The results show that novices could interpret the auralisations (with accuracy varying across different levels of abstraction) and that musical knowledge had no significant effect on performance. A second experiment was conducted with another twenty-two novice programmers to study the effects of musical program auralisation on debugging tasks. The experiment aimed to determine whether auralisations would lead to higher bug detection rates. The results indicate that, in certain circumstances, musical auralisations can be used to help locate bugs in programs and that musical skill does not affect the ability to make use of the auralisations. In addition, it the experiment showed that subjective workload increased when the musical auralisations were used