Thursday, July 30, 2015

Strategy Strategy Strategy

Due to a number of medical problems back home I haven't been able to satisfy my experiment schedule.

More specifically I don't think I will get to the Open University labs before August. This means I won't be able to do my experiment in time for the CHI2016 deadline. It's a bit of a bummer.

In the evening I was watching an episode of "Halt and catch Fire" TV series about programmers. I realised that the fundamental difference between computing research and HCI research is that computing research can be done at all hours. You can work late into the night. Given that HCI research generally requires people this is not an option.  With computing research all you really need is a computer and a supply of coffee. I think it also appeals to the heroic 'CodeWarrior' in me.

I've also been looking at CUDA recently (GPU programming - don't ask me why I like the notion of making something running 100 times faster ). It reminds me of how far the world of algorithums is from the world of HCI. Which is weird- I mean HCI needs the 'infinitly fast machine' so fast operation is vitatal so yo would think algorithums would abound but no.




Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Monday, July 6, 2015

Sit? Stand? Move! | Workplace Blog | Spacelab

Sit? Stand? Move! | Workplace Blog | Spacelab: As you are reading this, you are probably sitting. So am I, writing this blog at the moment. Sitting is what most people do most of the time during their day, either at work, at home, or in other places. While there is nothing wrong with the activity of sitting per se, it is the duration of sitting that raises concerns. Prolonged periods of sitting, also called ‘sedentary’ behaviours or lifestyles, and physical inactivity in general, have been identified as a serious health risk by researchers. The notion that ‘sitting is the new smoking‘ has made the rounds, popping up at workplace conferences, in press articles and social media alike, as for instance argued in the Harvard Business Review and of course there are a couple ofTED talks on the subject matter, too.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. - PubMed - NCBI

Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. - PubMed - NCBI: nces for different brands of strawberry jams were compared with experts' ratings of the jams. Students who analyzed why they felt the way they did agreed less with the experts than students who did not. In Study 2, college students' preferences for college courses were compared with expert opinion. Some students were asked to analyze reasons; others were asked to evaluate all attributes of all courses. Both kinds of introspection caused people to make choices that, compared with control subjects', corresponded less with expert opinion. Analyzing reasons can focus people's attention on nonoptimal criteria, causing them to base their subsequent choices on these criteria. Evaluating multiple attributes can moderate people's judgments, causing them to discriminate less between the different alternatives.

The New Statistics: Confidence Intervals, NHST, and p Values (Workshop P...

I still can't belive that statistics changes. This is about a new post p value approach.