Supporting Answerers with Feedback in Social Q&A

Prior research has examined the use of Social Question and Answer (Q&A) websites for answer and help seeking. However, the potential for these websites to support domain learning has not yet been realized. Helping users write effective answers can be beneficial for subject area learning for both answerers and the recipients of answers. In this study, we examine the utility of crowdsourced, criteria-based feedback for answerers on a student-centered Q&A website, Brainly.com. In an experiment with 55 users, we compared perceptions of the current rating system against two feedback designs with explicit criteria (Appropriate, Understandable, and Generalizable). Contrary to our hypotheses, answerers disagreed with and rejected the criteria-based feedback. Although the criteria aligned with answerers' goals, and crowdsourced ratings were found to be objectively accurate, the norms and expectations for answers on Brainly conflicted with our design. We conclude with implications for the design of feedback in social Q&A.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, Article No. 10, London, United Kingdom. June 26 - 28, 201

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on Fanfiction.net

Fanfiction.net provides an informal learning space for young writers through distributed mentoring, networked giving and receiving of feedback. In this paper, we quantify the cumulative effect of feedback on lexical diversity for 1.5 million authors.Comment: Connected Learning Summit 201

7½ and Weekend Alarm: Designing Alarm Clocks for the Morality of Sleep and Rest

Although clocks facilitate good time-management, they have been used in ways that are detrimental to wellbeing. For example, alarm clocks are used to force a person to wake before they have had sufficient sleep and the ambient presence of clocks encourages a constant and sometimes unnecessary need for punctuality. In this paper, we discuss two alarm clocks that are designed to respect wellbeing, improving the ethics of user-object and designer-object relationships. ‘7½’ runs for exactly seven-and-a-half hours, regardless of when it was started, allowing a healthy amount of sleep. ‘Weekend Alarm’ hides its clock face over the weekend, when keeping to time may be less important. The clock designs were purposeful but did not always fit with conventional expectations on functionality. We discuss the process of designing these artefacts for the morality of sleep and rest, and how we came to propose the addition of some unconventional functions to their conventional designs. To inform our reflection on our design approach, we evaluated the devices with two types of participants: two temporary owners, who experienced discomfort but were able to cope with 7½ during the three-week trial, and six design experts who provided critical reviews of both designs

The Many Facets of Trust in AI:Formalizing the Relation Between Trust and Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Efforts to promote fairness, accountability, and transparency are assumed to be critical in fostering Trust in AI (TAI), but extant literature is frustratingly vague regarding this 'trust'. The lack of exposition on trust itself suggests that trust is commonly understood, uncomplicated, or even uninteresting. But is it? Our analysis of TAI publications reveals numerous orientations which differ in terms of who is doing the trusting (agent), in what (object), on the basis of what (basis), in order to what (objective), and why (impact). We develop an ontology that encapsulates these key axes of difference to a) illuminate seeming inconsistencies across the literature and b) more effectively manage a dizzying number of TAI considerations. We then reflect this ontology through a corpus of publications exploring fairness, accountability, and transparency to examine the variety of ways that TAI is considered within and between these approaches to promoting trust

The influence of duration and level on human sound localization.

Contains fulltext : 59357.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The localization of sounds in the vertical plane (elevation) deteriorates for short-duration wideband sounds at moderate to high intensities. The effect is described by a systematic decrease of the elevation gain (slope of stimulus-response relation) at short sound durations. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain this finding. Either the sound localization system integrates over a time window that is too short to accurately extract the spectral localization cues (neural integration hypothesis), or the effect results from cochlear saturation at high intensities (adaptation hypothesis). While the neural integration model predicts that elevation gain is independent of sound level, the adaptation hypothesis holds that low elevation gains for short-duration sounds are only obtained at high intensities. Here, these predictions are tested over a larger range of stimulus parameters than has been done so far. Subjects responded with rapid head movements to noise bursts in the two-dimensional frontal space. Stimulus durations ranged from 3 to 100 ms; sound levels from 26 to 73 dB SPL. Results show that the elevation gain decreases for short noise bursts at all sound levels, a finding that supports the integration model. On the other hand, the short-duration gain also decreases at high sound levels, which is in line with the adaptation hypothesis. The finding that elevation gain was a nonmonotonic function of sound level for all sound durations, however, is predicted by neither model. It is concluded that both mechanisms underlie the elevation gain effect and a conceptual model is proposed to reconcile these findings

7½ and weekend alarm:designing alarm clocks for the morality of sleep and rest

Although clocks facilitate good time-mana gement, they have been used in ways that are detrimental to wellbeing. For example, alarm clocks are used to force a person to wake before they have had sufficient sleep and the ambient presence of clocks encourages a constant and sometimes unnecessary need for punctuality. In this paper, we discuss two alarm clocks that are designed to respect wellbeing, improving the ethics of user-object and designer-object relationships. '7½' runs for exactly seven-and-a-half hours, regardless of when it was started, allowing a healthy amount of sleep. 'Weekend Alarm' hides its clock face over the weekend, when keeping to time may be less important. The clock designs were purposeful but did not always fit with conventional expectations on functionality. We discuss the process of designing these artefacts for the morality of sleep and rest, and how we came to propose the addition of some unconventional functions to their conventional designs. To inform our reflection on our design approach, we evaluated the devices with two types of participants: two temporary owners, who experienced discomfort but were able to cope with 7½ during the three-week trial, and six design experts who provided critical reviews of both designs

A Fully Portable High Performance Minimal Storage Hybrid Format Cholesky Algorithm

We consider the efficient implementation of the Cholesky solution of symmetric positive-definite dense linear systems of equations using packed storage. We take the same starting point as that of LINPACK and LAPACK, with the upper (or lower) triangular part of the matrix being stored by columns. Following LINPACK and LAPACK, we overwrite the given matrix by its Cholesky factor. We consider the use of a hybrid format in which blocks of the matrices are held contiguously and compare this to the present LAPACK code. Code based on this format has the storage advantages of the present code, but substantially outperforms it. Furthermore, it compares favourably to using conventional full format (LAPACK) and using the recursive format of Andersen, Gustavson, and Wa´sniewski