Poking fun at the surface: exploring touch-point overloading on the multi-touch tabletop with child users

In this paper a collaborative game for children is used to explore touch-point overloading on a multi-touch tabletop. Understanding the occurrence of new interactional limitations, such as the situation of touch-point overloading in a multi-touch interface, is highly relevant for interaction designers working with emerging technologies. The game was designed for the Microsoft Surface 1.0 and during gameplay the number of simultaneous touch-points required gradually increases to beyond the physical capacity of the users. Studies were carried out involving a total of 42 children (from 2 different age groups) playing in groups of between 5-7 and all interactions were logged. From quantitative analysis of the interactions occurring during the game and observations made we explore the impact of overloading and identify other salient findings. This paper also highlights the need for empirical evaluation of the physical and cognitive limitations of interaction with emerging technologies

Constructing the Cool Wall: A Tool to Explore Teen Meanings of Cool

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating ‘cool’ as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to a hierarchy. The hierarchy includes having of cool things, the doing of cool activities and the being of cool. This paper focuses on a tool, the Cool Wall, developed to explore one specific facet of the hierarchy; exploring shared understanding of having cool things. The paper describes the development and construction of the tool, using a heavily participatory approach, and the results and analysis of a study carried out over 2 days in a school in the UK. The results of the study both provide clear insights into cool things and enable a refined understanding of cool in this context. Two additional studies are then used to identify potential shortcomings in the Cool Wall methodology. In the first study participants were able to populate a paper cool wall with anything they chose, this revealed two potential new categories of images and that the current set of images covered the majority of key themes. In the second study teenagers interpretations of the meaning of the images included in the Cool Wall were explored, this showed that the majority of meanings were as expected and a small number of unexpected interpretations provided some valuable insights

“To Mediate, or Not Mediate, That Is the Question”: Setting Up Get It Now at Furman University Libraries

In late spring 2013, Furman Library set up unmediated Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) access to our pay-per-view journals through Get It Now. Working with the CCC, and EBSCO, Furman set up a custom link to allow students unmediated access to titles previously available only through interlibrary loan or via mediated pay-per-view access. On Tuesday May 21, 2013, we began offering unmediated access to journal articles. Since that time, Furman students, faculty, and staff have directly ordered numerous articles through Get It Now

Formation of desert rose structures in vacuum plasma sprayed electrodes for alkaline electrolysis

The EU FCH-JU RESelyser project is concerned with the development of high pressure, high efficiency and low cost alkaline water electrolysers that can be operated variably and intermittently to meet the demands for integration into energy networks relying on fluctuating renewable energy. The project utilizes NiAlMo alloy electrodes produced at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) by vacuum plasma spraying (VPS). VPS results in a heterogeneous microstructure consisting of a multitude of intermetallic phase sub domains and pores. Prior to electrolysis operation the electrodes are activated by leaching of Al and some Al containing intermetallic phases leaving micrometer pores and nanometer dendritic pores increasing the surface area available for the electrolysis reactions. The vacuum plasma sprayed electrodes were analyzed by high resolution SEM and TEM before and after electrolysis operation and after storage in water. Analyses of cross sections and electrode surfaces revealed desert rose like nano flake structures on the surface and in the pores on several electrodes. The formation of the desert rose structure appeared to be related to the electrolysis operation as well as the duration of storage in distilled water. The size of the faceted flakes varied from tens of nm to a couple of µm where the thickness varied from a few nm to ~50 nm. The desert rose structure was confirmed by TEM to consist primarily of NiO and Al2NiO4 like phases (similar lattice parameters). The possible implications for the application and performance of the electrodes are discussed

Understanding Instagram’s Deep Dive into Teen Mental Health

This paper considers the ‘Teen Mental Health Deep Dive’ slide set created by staff at Instagram in 2019 to present results from internal research and later released publicly along with annotations. The slide set was initially highlighted by the Wall Street Journal in an article focusing on claims within the slide set that use of Instagram was a having a negative impact on teen mental health, especially that social comparison, afforded by features central to the Instagram app, was negatively affecting the mental health of young people. Our goal within this paper was to summarise the content of the slide set from an academic perspective and consider whether the content of the slides provide any insights which are valuable to the HCI community. While the results and conclusions presented within the slides have clear limitations, they did help us identify a set of issues and areas for further investigation

Stress, salt flux, and dynamics of a partially mixed estuary

A field study was performed in the lower Hudson River, a partially mixed estuary with a relatively simple geometry (Figure 1), between August and October of 1995. The objectives of the study were (1) to quantify and characterize the turbulent transport of momentum and salt, and (2) to relate the turbulent transport processes to the local and estuary-wide dynamics. The measurement program consisted of fixed and shipboard components. At a central site, a moored array of temperature-conductivity sensors and optical backscatter sensors (OBS), a bottom-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP), and a bottom-mounted array of acoustic travel-time current sensors (BASS), temperature-conductivity sensors, and OBS sensors resolved the vertical structure of velocity, salinity and turbidity and the near-bottom turbulence structure. Moored and bottom-mounted velocity, temperature, conductivity and pressure sensors at five secondary sites quantified the spatial and temporal variabilty of velocity, salinity and bottom pressure. Shipboard measurements with an ADCP and a conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) profiler, accompanied by an OBS sensor, resolved the spatial structure and tidal variability of velocity, salinity and turbidity along several cross-channel and along-channel transects. This report describes the measurements in detail. Section II describes the instrumentation, Section III describes the deployment and sampling schemes, Section IV describes the data processing, and Section V is a summary of plots of selected data. Section VI documents the data files and Sections VII and VII give acknowledgments and references.Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant OCE-94-15617 and The Hudson River Foundation

Capturing and Considering Idea Development in School Pupils’ Design Activities

There are many ways to look at the efficacy and value of the inclusion of children in design activities within HCI. Whilst the experience of participation can be highly beneficial for children, there is value, even if it is only to confirm the merit of the children's participation, in looking at the process of ideation and in considering to what extent children can ideate. Whilst design is by nature untethered, being able to capture and consider the diversity of design ideas across multiple design teams and to look at how such ideas are developed, can facilitate reflection and potentially improve practice. This work explores the diversity of ideas and the iterative development of ideas during the incremental design of a mobile game with 26 teen informants working in small groups over four design sessions. A method to visualize the evolution of ideas across design sessions is presented. Groups’ behaviors are mapped to three positions according to how conservative and how innovative the participants were. We explore the implications of our work for practitioners and researchers