1,474 research outputs found
The Guidebook, the Friend, and the Room: Visitor Experience in a Historic House
In this paper, we describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a
study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook,
visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with
three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its
contents. For example, we found that most visitors played audio descriptions
played through speakers (rather than using headphones or reading textual
descriptions) to facilitate communication with their companions
Practical Strategies for Integrating a Conversation Analyst in an Iterative Design Process
We present a case study of an iterative design process that includes a
conversation analyst. We discuss potential benefits of conversation analysis
for design, and we describe our strategies for integrating the conversation
analyst in the design process. Since the analyst on our team had no previous
exposure to design or engineering, and none of the other members of our team
had any experience with conversation analysis, we needed to build a foundation
for our interaction. One of our key strategies was to pair the conversation
analyst with a designer in a highly interactive collaboration. Our tactics have
been effective on our project, leading to valuable results that we believe we
could not have obtained using another method. We hope that this paper can serve
as a practical guide to those interested in establishing a productive and
efficient working relationship between a conversation analyst and the other
members of a design team.Comment: 11 page
Sotto Voce: Exploring the Interplay of Conversation and Mobile Audio Spaces
In addition to providing information to individual visitors, electronic
guidebooks have the potential to facilitate social interaction between visitors
and their companions. However, many systems impede visitor interaction. By
contrast, our electronic guidebook, Sotto Voce, has social interaction as a
primary design goal. The system enables visitors to share audio information -
specifically, they can hear each other's guidebook activity using a
technologically mediated audio eavesdropping mechanism. We conducted a study of
visitors using Sotto Voce while touring a historic house. The results indicate
that visitors are able to use the system effectively, both as a conversational
resource and as an information appliance. More surprisingly, our results
suggest that the technologically mediated audio often cohered the visitors'
conversation and activity to a far greater degree than audio delivered through
the open air.Comment: 8 page
The host with the most? The effects of the Olympic Games on happiness
We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom to the fourth income decile. But they do not last very long: the effects are gone within a year. These conclusions are based on a novel panel survey of 26,000 individuals who were interviewed during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013, i.e. before, during, and after the event. The results are robust to selection into the survey and to the number of medals won
Configuration mixing of angular-momentum and particle-number projected triaxial HFB states using the Skyrme energy density functional
We present a method based on mean-field states generated by triaxial
quadrupole constraints which are projected on particle number and angular
momentum and mixed by the generator coordinate method on the quadrupole moment.
This method is equivalent to a seven-dimensional GCM calculation, mixing all
five degrees of freedom of the quadrupole operator and the gauge angles for
protons and neutrons. A first application to Mg24 permits to analyze in detail
the effects of triaxial deformations and of K-mixing.Comment: Discussion of difficulties with pathological energy kernels
shortened, conclusions and outlook expanded. Accepted for publication in
Phys. Rev.
Identification of ribosomal RNA genes in metagenomic fragments
Motivation: Identification of genes coding for ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is considered an important goal in the analysis of data from metagenomics projects. Here, we report the development of a software program designed for the identification of rRNA genes from metagenomic fragments based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). This program provides rRNA gene predictions with high sensitivity and specificity on artificially fragmented genomic DNAs
Prompt Optical Observations of Gamma-ray Bursts
The Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) seeks to measure
simultaneous and early afterglow optical emission from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).
A search for optical counterparts to six GRBs with localization errors of 1
square degree or better produced no detections. The earliest limiting
sensitivity is m(ROTSE) > 13.1 at 10.85 seconds (5 second exposure) after the
gamma-ray rise, and the best limit is m(ROTSE) > 16.0 at 62 minutes (897 second
exposure). These are the most stringent limits obtained for GRB optical
counterpart brightness in the first hour after the burst. Consideration of the
gamma-ray fluence and peak flux for these bursts and for GRB990123 indicates
that there is not a strong positive correlation between optical flux and
gamma-ray emission.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJ Letter
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