Increasing Engagement with the Library via Gamification

One of the main challenges faced by providers of interactive information access systems is to engage users in the use their systems. The library sector in particular can benefit significantly from increased user engagement. In this short paper, we present a preliminary analysis of a university library system that aims to trigger users' extrinsic motivation to increase their interaction with the system. Results suggest that different user groups react in different ways to such 'gamified' systems

Public Intellectuals: Styles, Publics, and Possibilities

The status of the public intellectual is debated continuously in the United States, but what is not up for debate or theoretical examination is how public intellectual practice is mediated between style and publics. To that end, this study examines three public intellectual figures: Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Reich. Each examination analyzes and describes particular public intellectual styles — performances of culture — which trace three dominant public intellectual practices. These styles contain, invite, and deploy certain publics to engage with the public intellectual and vice versa. First, the study is a theoretical engagement with public intellectual practice as a performance and embodiment as opposed to state of being or set identity. Second, it is a practical toolbox for theorists of publics, intellectuals, and public intellectuals, and any wishing to better understand the rhetorical interfaces — stylistically produced constructs that shut down, enable, or change the relationship between intellectual production and public discourse — that make for more nuanced public intellectual practice. Each rhetorical interface operates through tropes, common places in language around which thinking and action turn, such as faith, economy, democracy, freedom, truth, power, the public and fraud. With each come limits and possibilities not only for analysis but also for application. Rhetorical interfaces and the styles that mediate them draw together sets of practices that can, and have been taken up, in a variety of registers in and beyond the public intellectuals who best depict or inhabit them. For any intellectual production, academic or otherwise, such a toolset is invaluable for making our labor count. Last, this study aims to place a relatively new set of scholarship, publics theory, in conversation with public intellectual practice and rhetorical theory. We then see amongst a plurality of style and deployment, a set of possibilities for engaging an increasingly multi-modal world

Boardroom Roulette — A Reflective Look at International Goals, Failures, Crises and Remedies in the Field of Corporate Governance

Article published in the Michigan State International Law Review

Functionalised Clathrochelate Complexes – New Building Blocks for Supramolecular Structures

Tris(dioxime) iron(II) clathrochelate complexes functionalised with 3- and 4-pyridyl groups have been employed as building blocks in the preparation of supramolecular structures by coordination-driven self-assembly. These complexes possess a number of desirable characteristics, being straightforward to synthesise and offering ample opportunity for steric and functional modification. Clathrochelate-based 4,4'-bipyridyl metalloligands from 1.5 nm to 5.4 nm in length were prepared in up to two steps and their potential as building blocks for supramolecular architectures demonstrated through the preparation of a discrete molecular square and a three dimensional (3D) coordination polymer. Furthermore, the structure-directing capability of clathrochelate building blocks was illustrated through the synthesis of octahedral cage compounds, which are capable of encapsulating the large, hydrophobic BPh4– anion in aqueous solvent mixtures

Visual Reasoning Strategies for Effect Size Judgments and Decisions

Uncertainty visualizations often emphasize point estimates to support magnitude estimates or decisions through visual comparison. However, when design choices emphasize means, users may overlook uncertainty information and misinterpret visual distance as a proxy for effect size. We present findings from a mixed design experiment on Mechanical Turk which tests eight uncertainty visualization designs: 95% containment intervals, hypothetical outcome plots, densities, and quantile dotplots, each with and without means added. We find that adding means to uncertainty visualizations has small biasing effects on both magnitude estimation and decision-making, consistent with discounting uncertainty. We also see that visualization designs that support the least biased effect size estimation do not support the best decision-making, suggesting that a chart user's sense of effect size may not necessarily be identical when they use the same information for different tasks. In a qualitative analysis of users' strategy descriptions, we find that many users switch strategies and do not employ an optimal strategy when one exists. Uncertainty visualizations which are optimally designed in theory may not be the most effective in practice because of the ways that users satisfice with heuristics, suggesting opportunities to better understand visualization effectiveness by modeling sets of potential strategies.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE VIS 202

Techniques and heuristics for improving the visual design of software agreements

End users must regularly agree to lengthy software agreements prior to installing software or using software services. However, despite the fact that these agreements contain terms of direct concern to users—e.g., data collection policies—software agreements are typically read by less than 2% of the population [30]. This thesis presents techniques and heuristics for improving the presentation and visual design of software agreements, to better capture reader attention and improve comprehension. In contrast to other techniques, these techniques are applied to the full agreement content, rather than a summary, as summaries have been found to distract readers from the full content of the agreement [44,56]. This thesis introduces two techniques for improving software agreements: narrative pictograms and textured agreements. Narrative pictograms are a pictorial technique designed to improve the communication of agreement terms to non-native readers of the language of an agreement. An experimental study shows that they can successfully communicate the basic concepts of a data collection policy without words. Textured agreements are visually redesigned software agreements that highlight information relevant to users. A pair of experimental studies shows that they increase both reading time—by 30 seconds, from 7 in the first experiment and 20 in the second—and comprehension of agreement content—by 4/16 points, from 0. Finally, a solid understanding of users’ attitudes towards specific agreement content is needed to inform the design of improved software agreements. To that end, this thesis presents an analysis of EULAscan, an online community of anonymous reviewers of software agreements. An open coding is used to categorize 191 EULAscan reviews. From this analysis, functionality emerges as the most prevalent concern. The wide variety of other concerns across reviews suggests that static designs of software agreements would inadequately serve a large population of users. Instead, this thesis proposes a focus on end-user tools that identify and highlight clauses of possible interest to a given user—for example, terms that the user has not seen before