Informing and performing: investigating how mediated sociality becomes visible

In the human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing literature, making people's presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer-mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of "awareness," "social translucence," "social activity indicators," "social navigation," etc. Although the name and details vary, the central ideas are similar. By making social presence and activities more visible or perceivable, they provide social context for members to make sense of situations and guide their activities more informatively and appropriately. In this work, we introduce a class of visualizations called social context displays, which use and share graphical representations to depict people's presence and activity information with an explicit focusongroups. The aim ofthis workis to examine social context displays in use and contribute new abstractions for understanding how making social information more visible works in general. Through our first-hand experience with user-centered design and empirical investigations of two social context displays in real settings, we uncovered not only how they provide social context to inform actions and decisions, but also how members perform and manage their self-and group-representations through the display. Drawing on Goffman's performance framework, we provide a detailed description of how people react and respond to these two social context displays and reconsider some of the broader issues associated with computer-mediated interactions such as privacy, context, and media richness

Ferromagnetism in the Mott Insulator Ba2NaOsO6

Results are presented of single crystal structural, thermodynamic, and reflectivity measurements of the double-perovskite Ba2NaOsO6. These characterize the material as a 5d1 ferromagnetic Mott insulator with an ordered moment of ∼0.2μB per formula unit and TC=6.8(3)  K. The magnetic entropy associated with this phase transition is close to Rln2, indicating that the quartet ground state anticipated from consideration of the crystal structure is split, consistent with a scenario in which the ferromagnetism is associated with orbital ordering.This article is from Physical Review Letters 99 (2007): 1, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.016404. Posted with permission.</p

An empirical study of the use of visually enhanced voip audio conferencing

IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing (IEAC) is a VoIP-based audio conferencing system that, like several other systems, provides a visualization showing who is present and their states (e.g., speaking, muted). This paper presents the first study of the use of such a system. Drawing on log files collected over six weeks of use by over 1300 corporate employees, and interviews with 10 of them, we look at how and why various features of the system are used and what sorts of practices are supported. Our findings shed light on the factors that drive the use of visual enhancements to audio conferencing, and suggest further research topics