Usability: April 2005 Archive Page

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

Incredibles DVD Freezes in My Player (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day, my wife picked up a copy of the widescreen, 2-disc DVD of The Incredibles. The movie disc loaded, played the FBI warning, then froze on the screen that threatens our little family with legal action if we ever offend The Mouse.

I'm used to the annoying tendency of DVDs to refuse to let you jump right to the menu, but this was ridiculous. The screen froze at the warning, and didn't do anything. The only way we could get the DVD out was by shutting off the player.

The bonus features disc plays just fine, and the disk that hung in on our DVD player worked just fine in my laptop. The DVD has imprinted on it "www.TheIncredibles.com/support," but that URL leads to an error. Hacking the URL leads to a Disney site containing no obvious technical assistance.

We brought the box back to Wal-Mart to exchange it, and the same thing happened.

My son suggests that we return the DVD and get a videotape instead, but I doubt Wal-Mart will allow that. Maybe somebody else Googling for this problem will find this page and we can commiserate...

--The Perfect Prescription (New York Metro)

New design for pill bottles, improving legibility and adding several other features.

In the early days of the telephone, the problem of speaking level was widely noted and discussed. The technological innovation was clever: a small amount of a person's voice was fed back to the earpiece, and people then naturally adjusted the loudness of their spoken voice to produce a comfortable level of feedback in the earpiece. Numerous studies in auditory psychophysics were performed to determine the correct amount of this feedback -- sidetone was the technical term. With the advent of the mobile telephone, sidetone has disappeared, and with it, the so-necessary feedback required to maintain voice level.

Why was sidetone eliminated from mobile phones? Two possible answers come to mind, and my suspicion is that both are correct. One is that modern telephonic engineers have no sense of history, and so they lack all the experience and knowledge that led to the early development of sidetone feedback. The second answer is that sidetone poses more difficult problems in the out-of-doors environment of the mobile phone, where wind noise on the microphone and relatively high-levels of ambient noise pose technical limitations on sidetone. --Don Norman --Minimizing the Annoyance of the Mobile Phone (JND.org)

I was recently lined up in the boarding tunnel at the airport. A woman behind me called up her local library to try to renew a book. She put her portable phone on speaker mode, and kept the librarian on the line while she rummaged through her carry-ons looking for the book.

It was the most annoying telephone experience I've had.

When the librarian finally said, "No, I can't renew your book," the feeling of satisfaction in the tunnel was palpable. I would have sworn I heard scattered applause.

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. --Martin Wainwright --Emails 'pose threat to IQ'  (Guardian)

Sign Your Child Up Today!

Make extra money - or start your son's college fund!
We are currently looking for children in your area! Rent your son out on weekends. You have complete control over your child's schedule. All of our clients are fully screened, and you may screen prospective clients before any transaction takes place. --Rent My Son

The idea is, parents rent their kids out to single guys who want to attract women in the park, or to parents of a socially disadvantaged daughter who needs a date to the prom.

Not really worth one "har," let alone a "har har."

The logo doesn't have anything to do with the supposed business plan, and the pages don't feature a link to the home page in the upper left corner -- that's a very strong online convention, and it shows whoever put together this site was not a pro.

The address given on the "Company Info" page matches the address of several federal and local government groups in San Diego. All the suites or room numbers I've seen for that office building have four numbers, but this company is supposed to be in "Suite 100."

When you click on "Make Reservation/Get Quote," the page reloads, and nothing else happens. Tell me that an online business would let that happen. For fun, I signed up under the name "Amusing Hoax," and predictably got an error message.

One kid's profile reads, "This website lets me practice for acting." That pretty much lets the cat out of the bag -- the person doing the writing is thinking of the website, and the website only. And that's all there is to it.

Of course, the whole idea is ridiculous. It's not really good enough to last in the memepool for very long -- not when there are far more bizarre things happening in the world. The design for "Black People Love Us" is cheesier, but the content is far better. The same goes for "Rent a Negro."

Via Metafilter, where nobody's falling for it.

Okay, can you tell I'm bored? I think I have laundry or something to do now...

Although the English word weblog is known in other languages, this has not prevented translations to appear. In Spanish, for example, weblog in general has apparently been translated using the journal-style kind of definition. In effect, in Spanish, weblogs are more commonly referred to as bitácoras, even though the word weblogs is well known. The word bitácora refers in the first place to the journals kept by captains of the old vessels that sailed across oceans, for example the ones used by Spaniards and Portuguese to arrive to the American continent in 1500. A bitácora is clearly different form a personal diary or diario íntimo in Spanish because it implies a trip. It is the account of events that happen during a long journey or physical movement from one place to another. This metaphor of movement in the Spanish language does not exist as clearly in English. Nevertheless, the word journal is used to call those weblogs that have a more personal or intimate tone. --Virginia Melián --Weblogs: nodes of participation in a global context? Non-expert publishing in many languagesDigital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy)

This seems to be a paper delivered at a conference called Digital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy.

I really hate PDFs... using Firefox, I can't copy and paste more than one line at a time from the HTML document that Google generated from the PDF original, so the process of posting an excerpt from a PDF is a royal pain.

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

Six Apart plans to release version 3.16 of Movable Type this Monday, April 18. The new release includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements including significant security fixes making this a must-have for all Movable Type installations. --Movable Type 3.16 on the way (neil's world)

Aah, phooey... just this afternoon I finally upgraded from MT 2.65 to MT 3.15. One weekend and it'll be obsolete.

I really like MT 3.15's comment moderation feature. If someone posts a comment that looks like spam, MT can hold it for moderation -- that is, the blog owner has to click a button to publish the comment.

Once students users approve a comment from a poster, other comments from that poster get approved automatically.

The only complaint I have is that comments awaiting moderation show up on a page that I created to show all comments across all blogs, a page which doesn't seem to be rebuilding anyway. Hmm... that's a bother, but I've been at it long enough today. Time to go home.

When people don't fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it's too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful failure to file your taxes can result in criminal charges. However, the IRS also has an elaborate and complicated set of financial penalties available for people who fail to file their taxes or pay them in a timely manner.

On the other hand, the IRS offers rewards too. As many people overpay taxes during the year, customers who are unsure about their taxes often fill them out early in the hopes of "winning" a refund of their overpayment. This helps keep users interested. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: Bad design can be so taxing (IBM)