Author: christinebragg

Today, the generation gap between grandparents, parents, and children are largely blamed on technology. Older generations have coined the phrase of many younger generations as, “mindlessly surfing the web,” or spending too much time on our phones, instead of reading a book or engaging in activities. Yes, it is important for people especially adolescents to get out of the house and do something other than stare at a screen all day, however, this bad stigma takes away from the true art in technologies like web and app design.

Why is our generation so drawn to the next new-hit app or a new website that just arrived on the internet? Some people would say because that is just who we are. Always wanting something new and exciting, but how about because these new inventions, if you will, are incredibly user-friendly, easy-to-use, and personal. The study of human interest in technology has now shifted from asking the question of how can we get kids off the computer or phone? To how can we make these technologies more efficient for every generation to use as tools in their lives?

Web and app design is the answer. Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design and Jessee James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, reminded me of this conflict because of how effortless it is to ignore the craft and plan of web design. Garrett poetically states that every design tells a story. It is composed of a surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy. The surface is what the user sees, the skeleton is the information and navigation design, the structure is how the information is architected, the scope is the functional specification, and the strategy is the products objective. I like how Gerrett made his presentation by concentrating on certain terms such as User Experience. It really is an experience for people to travel through different systems and connect information by human engagement.

What stuck out to me in Shneiderman’s article was when a website becomes more frequently used it is important to, “reduce the number of interactions and to increase the pace of interaction.” This made me think of how annoyed I get when I get the wrong room for a midterm or office hours and have to go through my.ucla.edu, then sign in, click on my class, log in again on CCLE, click on my syllabus, and finally find what I am looking for. Enabling shortcuts allows users to easily access the pages they need to get to.

Another important rule that stuck out to me was how one must design the system so users are, “the initiators of action rather than the responder.” This made me start thinking about app design. Users want to feel in control. This brings be back to my point I made in the beginning of me post about why people are drawn to certain apps. When the designer puts the user in control to take initiative action it makes the app or website more personal and more likely the user will become a frequent user. These articles helped me to better appreciate websites such as Amazon and Yelp, as well as, apps like, instagram or venom which draw users based on their quality of design and explicit goal.

People interested in web design are always trying to think of the next big way to draw in users to view their website. They have to consider what people are drawn to, what would interest a large population, why read their website rather than anyone elses? My freshman year of UCLA I thought I wanted to be a psychology major and focus on working for an advertising company some day. Adversting sounded like the perfect job for me out of college because I liked studying why people do what they do? What makes people more attracted to a certain clothing website? Why do people prefer Coke to Pepsi? Is it because Coke chose the simplicity of red and white as their brand colors?

What Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter did was sometime very radical in the web design world by making the website more hands on and interactive.  The person viewing the site must stay focused and alert when reading the site because it is presented with large texts, different colors, and visuals to keep the viewer entertained. The new author of, “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens”, Benedict Carey says, “The brain wants variation.” The website is formatted from another website called “Big” which allows people to make creative presentations. (http://www.macwright.org/big/) There are many slides that are inconsequential. What I mean by this is that there are slides that are there as enforcers to make things more interesting and fun. By doing this McConchie and Schechter push a user along to stay engaged and continue learning about web mapping.

I have learned a lot about web mapping tonight from McConchie and Schechter’s presentation of the “Anatogy of Web Mapping.” Web mapping is different from a digital or analog map. Web maps are a kind of digital map that are viewed in a browser. Mapquest was the first to use this kind of web service in 1996, but in 2005 Google Maps made tiles faster to load, scroll, and zoom. A map is a composite of these tiles. Each zoom level on a map has its own set of tiles. For example, if the zoom level is 0 and there is one tile of the whole world. With each zoom level the tile number increases. Zoom level 1 has 4 tiles with a closer image of world spread out on those 4 tiles. Tiles are usually rendered in adcanced and store in a cache so no one has to recreate a map.

I love this kind of presentation. It forces users to reiterate what they just learned with an interactive visual.  Carey says that embedding information in one’s memory in two contexts makes the memory stronger. For example, McConchie and Schechter explained what Raster tiles are in text format as the map’s base layer. Layers such as markers are then put on top of the map. They are categorized as data, content, feature, or vector layers. Once I read this I said it my head, “Okay, but what does that look like?” When I continued, the next sides answered my questions. They had an image of a map and everytime I clicked my arrow to the next slide, the map was edited with layers and described what each kind of layer would physically look like. I also really like the layout of the slideshow. By being instructional and personal the presentation reminded me of flashcards to a larger more interactive degree. There is a website/app I use to make flashcards called, StudyBlue, which is similar to this site. It also takes up the whole screen so users are compelled to look only at the large texts in front of  them.

This got me thinking about study strategies. I’m constantly racking my brain to find easier ways to learn rather than to just read and use flashcards. Who doesn’t want to be able to retain knowledge better and faster? With all this new technology individuals are constantly coming up with new ways to answer this question. I think this way of learner is a great way to help people absorb information better.  A lot of the time people take notes on paragraphs after paragraphs of a textbook and then never look at those notes again. How well can anyone say that information was obtained? New ways of studying and obtaining information makes people have more time to do other things like….solve world hunger. By making things more interactive and engaging this can help students of all ages learn and make studying more sophisticated and valuable.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/better-ways-to-learn/?_r=0

http://maptime.io/anatomy-of-a-web-map/#0

For me, I have a hard time pinning exactly what I like and who I am as an individual. My mind is easily distracted I know that, but I’ve never really figured out if I’m quite a visual or verbal learner, social or shy, indecisive or lazy, a multiple-choice test taker or better short answerer, a cancer or a leo…the list goes on and on..I guess one could call me a humanist. I’m filled with “fuzzy thoughts and feelings,” as Professor Posner likes to say. I would like to be able to describe and interpret all these characteristics at the same time, but really should stop and think about them individually.

The reason for my rant of my “struggle” through life is because of a quote from Scott Weingart’s article, Demystifying Networks. He states, “Humanistic data are almost by definition uncertain, open to interpretation, flexible, and not easily definable.” Aka the daily battle young adolescence and college kids go through.

However, when it comes to network analysis, it generally deals with one or a small amount of types of things. Scott uses the example of a book and a type of book is called a node. Computer scientists work with only one or a few types of nodes when creating network analysis softwares.

While reading this article I start to think about how I wish my life was more simple like a node. “Node types are concrete; your object either is or is not a book.” I like this interpretation because it would be so much easier to own and know unchanging characteristics. Humanists struggle with using this software because they want to put all of the data into one place.

Humanists usually care more about the differences than the regularities. This is helpful for a humanist because it shows how objects are unique rather than what makes it similar. However, that expansion of information they are likely to lose by defining their objects as nodes.This also reminded me of when I first got to UCLA I attacked the career center. They have personality tests there to help one figure out what type of personality you are to fit with what job. “Edges” are a way to make these connect relationships. A “dense” network is apparently rarely useful to use. ‘The ability to cut away just enough data to make the network manageable, but not enough to lose information, is as much an art as it is a science.” I really like this interpretation of bring the math and humanities together.

When looking up court cases it can get very confusing and overwhelming when trying to find the right case. I can relate as a political science major myself when looking up cases it is nice to have a concrete reliable website that can help guide you to specific supporting cases. This weeks reading guided me to a website that does just this. 

     This website titled criminalintent.org goes through a tutorial of a new project using Datamining to bring together three online resources known as Old Bailey Onine, Zotero, and TAPoP. Old Bailey is an online resource that uses controlled vocabulary to search through 127 million words of trial accounts. Users can query this website through a dedicated API. Zotero is an information management tool and TAPoR uses analytical tools like Voyeur. 

  When I came across this word datamining I thought it could have something to do with sorting data in a deeper more analytical way. I decided to look up the definition and landed on a website by the UCLA Anderson School of Management. It stated that data mining, “is a process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information.” They describe it as a way to look at data through different dimensions and angles to find patterns and trends. 

   The Criminal Intent website is very unique because it does just this. This new user friendly website allows users to easily look up information of any case by keyword, gender, date range, verdict, crime, etc. The website will automatically filter the results based on your selections and tell you how many cases were found and how many, “hits” of the terms you selected. 

  What I found interesting about this website is how I can connect this to my International Law course I am taking at UCLA. For me this is where it started getting confusing and less specific. For example, if I wanted to look up something to do with international law in the keyword text box it would separately search for international and then law. This is when I learned the website is directed more at users looking for only cases pertaining to London between 1674 and 1913. However, as I continued playing with the search engine on the Old Bailey API website I was able to create a new Voyeur Tools corpus from the result set of female defendants by clicking on “send to Voyeur”. 

  This was the most fun part of my adventure through this website. There are about 20 different graphical tools available in Voyeur to visual your data. The default is, Cirrus (a word cloud visualization), Summary (an overview of the corpus including word counts and aggregate trends) and Reader (a scalable text reader that can be used to scroll very large documents). You can change or add more visuals to sort your data. IT is possible to export a corpus by clicking on the “skin export” icon and choosing a skin builder. This is a very interactive and personal way of sorting case data.

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/obapi/

http://criminalintent.org/getting-started/

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/5/

https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/advertising

The digital world is a unique place other than any other subject in society. It is unique because technology can and is being streamed into every subject or interest that we know of. Whether it be exercising, education, social interaction, studying, examining interests; everything is and will be turning digital. This can sound overwhelming and scary at times to think all the information in the world is floating around in a digital abyss. However, it is also very comforting at times to know that it can not be burnt in a fire, lost in paperwork, or at the bottom of the Indian Ocean ruined and never recorded.

The digital world is becoming so advanced that not only are we not losing information that will never be published, we are recording everything we do. A lot of us try to do this ourselves, including myself, where I try to save websites on my desktop. Eventually these websites of shopping, funny videos, articles i want to read later; becomes a blur of words and safari icons that I must organize one Sunday afternoon for hours and probably never see again.

Luckily for me and anyone else out there with an ego for wanting to organize interests all on our own, there are more sophisticated softwares and personnel doing this very same job for me in a more organized and personalized manor. Among these crafty institutes are Netflix and Facebook two amazing companies that make a huge portion of the population’s lives a whole lot easier.

Generations prior have said that this new Tech Age is making our generation and anyone else after more attention deficit. Our heads are being filled with clutter and over-load of information from the Internet. What those people do not know is that the new age is teaching us new ways to filter that over-capacity of knowledge. For example, the innovators at Netflix created a way to do this by using underlying tagging data to personalize our movie interests. Todd Yellin the VP of Product and creator of Netflix’s system has used underlying tagging data to create 76,897 genres to categorize the movies on Netflix.

What interested me the most was how this system personalizes every individual subscriber specific interests based on what her/she has watched and rated a movie. Netflix goes beyond just machine intelligence of recommending movies this way and uses a hybrid of human intelligence as well by looking at how much of romance, comedy or action based on a 1-5 rating scale is in each movie. They won’t tell you what that is, but will recommend it based on what they know about your preferences.

When I started thinking of personalization in movies I thought of Facebook, which uses this hybrid intelligence for advertisements. Facebook ads have gotten very political because people are afraid their personal information is being exposed or they will be spammed if they click on an ad with a virus. I understand this fear, however, Facebook assures us in their, “Data Use Policy” that they do not release any of our personal information, but work the opposite way by choosing ads who they have partnered with and recommend for individuals. They use the information we provide and links we have clicked on throughout Facebook to show more things that interest us. For me, I have found my favorite clothing websites, news articles, and restaurants through their personalized system. Now instead of spending time procrastinating on Facebook, I am led to 100s of other websites that can give me more substance and increase my interests rather than clicking through pictures of myself on the book.