How Push-To-Talk Makes Talk Less Pushy

This paper presents an exploratory study of college-age students using two-way, push-to-talk cellular radios. We describe the observed and reported use of cellular radio by the participants. We discuss how the half-duplex, lightweight cellular radio communication was associated with reduced interactional commitment, which meant the cellular radios could be used for a wide range of conversation styles. One such style, intermittent conversation, is characterized by response delays. Intermittent conversation is surprising in an audio medium, since it is typically associated with textual media such as instant messaging. We present design implications of our findings.Comment: 10 page

Making Space for Stories: Ambiguity in the Design of Personal Communication Systems

Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction, ambiguity is often identified as an important resource for resolving social difficulties. In this paper, we discuss two design cases of personal communication systems, one based on fieldwork of a commercial system and another based on an unrealized design concept. The cases illustrate how user behavior concerning a particular social difficulty, unexplained unresponsiveness, can be influenced by technological issues that result in interactional ambiguity. The cases also highlight the need to balance the utility of ambiguity against the utility of usability and communicative clarity.Comment: 10 page

Remedying School Segregation: How New Jersey's Morris School District Chose to Make Diversity Work

Beyond the districtwide numbers, the Morris district has achieved remarkable diversity at the school building level. Since the district has only one middle school and one high school, these are not where the diversity rubber meets the road. Rather, the test is the elementary school populations. There, the Morris district shines. Despite the fact that students live in relatively homogeneous, segregated neighborhoods, the elementary schools they attend defy that pattern. For example, to achieve perfect racial balance between black and white students at the elementary school level, only about 2.6 percent would have to change their school assignments.The Morris district still struggles with two aspects of diversity, however. First,—in common with virtually every diverse school district in the country—it is still attempting to bring meaningful diversity to every program and course within its school buildings, from higher-level Honors and Advanced Placement courses to special education classifications and rosters of disciplinary actions. Second, in common with some but hardly all diverse districts across the country, the Morris district is trying to cope with the explosive growth of Hispanic students, many of them in recent years economically disadvantaged students from Central American countries where they often failed to receive a solid educational foundation in their own language and culture. Understandably, these students tend not to score well on standardized tests, especially in their early years in MSD. This contributes substantially to the Morris district's record of relatively poor achievement levels in three substantially overlapping student categories—Hispanic, English Language Learners (ELL), and economically disadvantaged students—as compared to its relatively strong achievement levels for white and black students.As to both challenges, the Morris district is manifesting a remarkably can-do spirit and a palpable will to succeed.In all these respects, the study of the Morris district reported on here is designed ultimately to extract lessons for other school districts in New Jersey and the rest of the nation. This report begins by exploring briefly the historical, political, and legal context of educational integration in New Jersey, and how that led to the creation of the Morris School District. It then analyzes and discusses the successes—and the challenges—of MSD's integration efforts. Along the way, it contrasts the successes of MSD with two other districts in New Jersey—Plainfield and New Brunswick—that attempted integration by district merger, but failed. It concludes by making recommendations not only for improvements in MSD's approach, but for school districts across New Jersey and the country that are seeking to integrate their schools and classrooms

A Health Plan Work in Progress: Hospital-Physician Price and Quality Transparency

Assesses health plans' efforts to provide consumers with price and quality comparisons on hospitals and doctors in twelve metropolitan areas. Looks at the plans' motives and strategies, as well as the limitations, risks, and challenges of transparency

Detecting User Engagement in Everyday Conversations

This paper presents a novel application of speech emotion recognition: estimation of the level of conversational engagement between users of a voice communication system. We begin by using machine learning techniques, such as the support vector machine (SVM), to classify users' emotions as expressed in individual utterances. However, this alone fails to model the temporal and interactive aspects of conversational engagement. We therefore propose the use of a multilevel structure based on coupled hidden Markov models (HMM) to estimate engagement levels in continuous natural speech. The first level is comprised of SVM-based classifiers that recognize emotional states, which could be (e.g.) discrete emotion types or arousal/valence levels. A high-level HMM then uses these emotional states as input, estimating users' engagement in conversation by decoding the internal states of the HMM. We report experimental results obtained by applying our algorithms to the LDC Emotional Prosody and CallFriend speech corpora.Comment: 4 pages (A4), 1 figure (EPS

Can You Spot the Fake?

The ability to correctly interpret smiles is a skill that can be helpful in many aspects of life. One key feature that people look at is a smile, but smiles may not always be genuine. In our study, we focused on the detection of genuine and fake smiles and trained subjects to detect deception. The first training group was given applicable information, through PowerPoint, on distinguishing between smiles along with two videos presenting a genuine and fake smile. The second group viewed a PowerPoint with applicable information without videos. The third group viewed a PowerPoint containing just videos. Our control group was asked to think about situations where a fake or genuine smile would be used. Before training, participants viewed 10 smile videos and indicated whether each smile was genuine or fake. Following training, the participants viewed 10 new videos and again indicated whether each smile was genuine or fake. We hypothesized that the training groups would identify more smiles correctly than the control group. One week later, all groups viewed the same 20 videos again to determine whether the training had a lasting effect

Gender and Ability to Distinguish between Sugar-Free and Sugar Peppermints

Do men and women have the same ability in distinguishing sugar free peppermints from regular, with sugar, peppermints? Many would say that women have a stronger sense of taste and smell, possibly due to motherly instincts. Fourteen male and fourteen female students from the Human Subject Pool at Lindenwood University participated in the study. The students were asked to taste two peppermints and record, which they thought was sugar free. The results revealed no statistically significant sex difference in the student’s ability to identify the sugar-free candy. However, there was a significant finding in order effects. Seven out of the eight participants who could not tell differences between the mints, were administered the sugar-less mint first