Alien Registration- Beckwith, Laura (Presque Isle, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34414/thumbnail.jp

Gender HCI Issues in End-User Software Engineering Environments

Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals. The possibility of gender issues within software, however, has received almost no attention. We hypothesize that factors within software have a strong impact on how well female problem solvers can make use of the software. Evidence from other fields and investigations of our own have revealed evidence supporting this hypothesis

Reasoning about many-to-many requirement relationships in spreadsheet grids

Traditionally, research into end-user programming has focused on how to make programming more accessible to end users. However, few researchers have considered providing end users with devices to help improve the reliability of the programs they create. To help improve the reliability of spreadsheets created by end users, we are working to allow users to communicate the purpose and other underlying information about their spreadsheets using a form of requirement specifications we call "guards." Guards were initially designed for individual cells but, for large spreadsheets, with replicated/shared formulas across groups of rows or columns, guards can only be practical if users can enter them across these groups of rows or columns. The problem is, this introduces many-to-many relationships, at the intersection of rows and columns with guards. It is not clear how the system should reason and communicate about many-to-many relationships in a way that will make sense to end users. In this thesis, we present the human-centric design rationale for our approach to how the system should reason about such many-to-many relationships. The design decisions are presented with their reasons gleaned from two design-time models--Cognitive Dimensions and Attention Investment--and from the users themselves in a small think-aloud study

People and politics: Urban climate resilience in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The rapid growth Cambodia has experienced over the past two decades has resulted in a dramatic transformation of its built environment, in particular, its largest city, Phnom Penh. The shape this urban development has taken echoes that of many developing countries whose urban landscape features gleaming skyscrapers, apartment buildings, and edge-city projects spread across a rapidly expanding urban area. Such a pattern of urbanization is occurring in Phnom Penh while the city faces increased flooding, lack of adequate urban infrastructure, and vulnerability to impacts of climate change. At the same time, embedded within national policy discourses of climate change and social/economic planning, and backed by international donors, are calls for strengthening or developing resilience. Yet, in the city there are signs of land dispossession, marginalization, inequality, and exacerbated poverty. In parallel to high-level discourses of urban resilience, on the ground there have been “everyday forms of resilience” that show how people enact and build resilience through collective action and advocacy for the rights of the urban poor. In reconciling this dichotomy, we argue that the continued reproduction of a technocratic-focused discourse on resilience in Cambodia by national and international actors overshadows the everyday contestations, strategies and resilience-making practices of people in urban areas. Through three examples, we showcase the varying ways in which these contestations and strategies occur in, and despite, an environment of suppression, and how they are challenging the status quo. In doing so, we shed light not only on the politics of resilience but, more importantly, the implications of the political agendas that ultimately contribute to exacerbating vulnerabilities of urban residents, even as calls continue for increased urban “resilience.

Gender HCI: What about the software?

Computer, 39(11): pp. 97-101

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone

Iron Line Spectroscopy of NGC4593 with XMM-Newton: Where is the Black Hole Accretion Disk?

We present an analysis of the 2-10keV XMM-Newton/EPIC-pn spectrum of the Seyfert-1 galaxy NGC4593. Apart from the presence of two narrow emission lines corresponding to the Kalpha lines of cold and hydrogen-like iron, this spectrum possesses a power-law form to within 3-5%. There is a marked lack of spectral features from the relativistic regions of the black hole accretion disk. We show that the data are, however, consistent with the presence of a radiatively-efficient accretion disk extending right down to the radius of marginal stability if it possesses low iron abundance, an appropriately ionized surface, a very high inclination, or a very centrally concentrated emission pattern (as has been observed during the Deep Minimum State of the Seyfert galaxy MCG-6-30-15). Deeper observations of this source are required in order to validate or reject these models.Comment: 6 pages, 3 postscript figures. Accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ