Navigating Telephone-Based Interfaces with Earcons

Non-speech audio messages called earcons can provide powerful navigation cues in menu hierarchies. However, previous research on earcons has not addressed the particular problems of menus in telephone-based interfaces (TBI's) such as: Does the lower quality of sound in TBI's lower recall rates, can users remember earcons over a period of time and what effect does training type have on recall. An experiment was conducted and results showed that sound quality did lower the recall of earcons. However, redisgn of the earcons overcame this problem with 73 % recalled correctly. Participants could still recall earcons at this level after a week had passed. Training type also affected recall. With 'personal training' participants recalled 73% of the earcons but with purely textual training results were significantly lower. These results show that earcons can provide excellent navigation cues for telephone-based interface

Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their ‘intractability’, whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for ‘Evidence Based Policy’ (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoliticizing political decisions. This paper aims to help resolve these conflicts and, in doing so, consider how to address this particular feature of problem wickedness. Specifically the paper delineates two forms of evidentiary bias that drive intractability, each of which is reflected by contrasting positions in the EBP debates: ‘technical bias’ - referring to invalid uses of evidence; and ‘issue bias’ - referring to how pieces of evidence direct policy agendas to particular concerns. Drawing on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology, the paper explores the ways in which competing interests and values manifest in these forms of bias, and shape evidence utilization through different mechanisms. The paper presents a conceptual framework reflecting on how the nature of policy problems in terms of their complexity, contestation, and polarization can help identify the potential origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias leading to intractability in some wicked policy debates. The discussion reflects on whether being better informed about such mechanisms permit future work that may lead to strategies to mitigate or overcome such intractability in the future

Evaluating market segmentation research priorities

Set against a transforming social and economic climate, this empirical study reignites debate about the degree to which theory and practice priorities are aligned in the academic market-segmentation research agenda. Results from an online survey of academics researching and publishing in the market-segmentation field suggest little change in the scope or content of these priorities in the past 30 years. This reopens discussion about the slowly changing nature of the segmentation research agenda and raises questions about the ways in which research priorities are shaped by the external environment. The findings further suggest that the conflicting nature of academic and practitioner requirements is a barrier to opportunities for a successful academic/practitioner interface. We conclude that the segmentation research agenda has become too narrow, outlining the need to broaden debate and re-emancipate this important field of research

Comparison of Male and Female Adolescent Tennis Players Through Selected Eurofit Test Battery

Adaptive hypermedia techniques provide users with personalisation of contents and links. Some of the criticisms of adaptive systems are that users do not always understand why the system is adapting the content and links, and that the adaptation process can lead to prolific or out of place linking. This paper introduces the concept of a multi-dimensional linkbase to describe a single linkbase containing links annotated with metadata that places them in several different contextual dimensions at once. We also allow users to have control over personalisation by enabling direct manipulation of the linkbase. We argue that this approach answer some of the criticisms of adaptive hypermedia