Chapter 1
This chapter was about B.F Skinner's experiments and what the author thought about them. The author also conveys Skinner as a crazy guy that raised his children in boxes. She then explained Skinner's experiments from different points of view and explained that overall his contribution to science was actually a really good thing. I personally did not like the way the author wrote this chapter and the information in it. She was kind of all over the place in her writing and although the content was interesting it was sometimes hard to follow what she was saying because of how she wrote it.
Chapter 2
In this chapter the author educates the reader on Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience which was the main topic of the book we read right before this. He had people "electrocute" people and saw how many people would not obey under different circumstances. The author finds people that participated in the study and asked questions about their lives so far since the study. It was interesting to see how the participants lived since the experiment
Chapter 3
In this chapter a psychologist by the name of Rosenhan decided to see what would happen if completely sane people got into a mental hospital and said they were fine after getting admitted. This chapter was actually pretty interesting to me, the results fascinated me. The fact that completely sane people would not be allowed to leave was eye opening to the way hospitals like that work. Also it was funny to see how the hospitals responded, they told Rosenhan to send more people and they would be able to find them easily now that they new he was sending people. The funny part was that they found a number of people over the allotted time period and Rosenhan had actually sent no one to the hospitals.
Chapter 4
It is crazy to hear about the murder that occurred in the first part of this chapter, people not lending aid to a woman who was crying for help. The author explains the 5 stages of lending help. They are: notice an event is occurring, interpret the event as one that needs help, assume responsibility, decide what action to take, and then take that action.
Chapter 5
This chapter was all about Cognitive Dissonance which is something along the lines of someone would change ones behavior to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around which is what people thought. The author starts of by describing an event that happened where people formed a cult surrounding the supposed end of the world. She explains how the cult came about and how someone sent people in to study the cult and their behaviors when they found that the world was in fact not ending.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 was all about Harry Harlow and his experiments with monkeys and how they formed relationships with mothers. He had surrogate mothers that were made of different materials, the purpose of this was to see how the young monkeys would react to a different mother than a regular monkey. It was interesting to see how the monkeys would react to the different surrogate mothers and what they would do in response.
Chapter 7
The main focus of this chapter was addiction, the author goes over several different studies on addiction that were administered on both humans and rats. Overall the author comes to no definitive conclusion about addiction but has some insight on it from the studies.
Chapter 8
This was one of the two chapters about memories, in this one Loftus the main mention of this chapter thought that memories were actually a bad representation of what actually happened, she even thinks that memories can be implanted in people. This theory was pretty interesting as I always thought that my memories were pretty accurate in what happened to me.
Chapter 9
The other chapter about memories, this one starts of with the author telling a story about a guy who had his hippocampus sucked out to cure his epilepsy but ultimately losing his short term memory. She goes on to talk about a scientist who discovered the chemical responsible for connections between neurons.
Chapter 10
This chapter is all about psychosurgery, which is the different surgeries that deal with the brain and things like that. It goes over lobotomies and other common surgeries performed. The author states that although these are dangerous procedures that are very reliable when it comes down to it. This chapter was pretty interesting since I didn't know how the idea of a lobotomy came about and how it was discovered.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Gang Leader for a Day
Chapter 1
This was a good introduction to the book, it helped me get into the story and want to read further. He had a way of pulling me into the story with how he got into the whole predicament on the stairs.
Chapter 2
I was surprised that J.T would allow him to come back and continue his study. It was interesting to see how Sudhir went about conducting his research, how he told J.T it was a biography about him but he didn't even know what he was going to write. Also the end of chapter 2 was crazy since J.T beat up C-Note and Sudhir saw everything.
Chapter 3
This chapter had a lot of information in it, from the lady screaming at the store owner to Sudhir finding another person to talk to about the gang activity in Aultry. How J.T reacted to Sudhir finding someone else to talk to was actually kind of surprising, I thought he wouldn't care but he ended up making Sudhir not go to a certain meeting just cause he was there with Aultry and not him.
Chapter 4
This was one of the most interesting chapters, Sudhir got to lead the gang for a day. He didn't get to do everything of course but he did get to make a few decisions. I was surprised to see how much went into being a gang leader and getting instructions to people.
Chapter 5
This chapter was kind of surprising, it was weird to see what Ms. Bailey does and what kind of power she has over some people. It's almost like she is her own version of J.T, she is kind of like the leader of the tenants and collects what she has to when she has to.
Chapter 6
Sudhir continued to surprise me with how naive he could be, he interview a bunch of people about how much money they made and how they went about making it and then he told Ms. Bailey and J.T how much they made. People said that this was on the side so it should have been obvious that they didn't let them know everything about their financial situations.
Chapter 7
I was shocked to see that this was the first chapter where someone actually got shot, hearing the stories of gangs and stuff I assumed that someone would have gotten shot sooner. At the end I really wanted to know how the big meeting he was supposed to go to was going to go.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8 was just a closing chapter to me, it was one of the more boring chapters. It was basically just telling the reader what everyone ended up doing.
Book Reaction
Overall I thought this was a very good read, a lot better than what we have read so far in this class. It was interesting and I actually wanted to read the whole book to see what happend to the author. He presented his work very well and really pulled the reader into the story and helped the reader empathize with some of the characters. What I mean is that even though some of these people were in gangs I still could see where they were coming from and why they did the things that they did. I liked the way the author presented his findings, he created a story that the reader would be drawn into then along the way he would tell you his findings throughout the entire book and I just thought that it was a pretty good way to do that.
I did think that he wasn't entirely truthful in his book, some of the things that he did were just way too naive for someone to do. It was like he played off on that and just ran with it, like when he was surprised that J.T beat up C-Note, J.T was a leader of a gang in Chicago there was bound to be some violence and he really should have just expected it rather than be shocked by it. Other than that the book in my opinion was one of the best books we have read in this class so far and I probably would have read it outside of class had I picked it up and started reading it randomly.
This was a good introduction to the book, it helped me get into the story and want to read further. He had a way of pulling me into the story with how he got into the whole predicament on the stairs.
Chapter 2
I was surprised that J.T would allow him to come back and continue his study. It was interesting to see how Sudhir went about conducting his research, how he told J.T it was a biography about him but he didn't even know what he was going to write. Also the end of chapter 2 was crazy since J.T beat up C-Note and Sudhir saw everything.
Chapter 3
This chapter had a lot of information in it, from the lady screaming at the store owner to Sudhir finding another person to talk to about the gang activity in Aultry. How J.T reacted to Sudhir finding someone else to talk to was actually kind of surprising, I thought he wouldn't care but he ended up making Sudhir not go to a certain meeting just cause he was there with Aultry and not him.
Chapter 4
This was one of the most interesting chapters, Sudhir got to lead the gang for a day. He didn't get to do everything of course but he did get to make a few decisions. I was surprised to see how much went into being a gang leader and getting instructions to people.
Chapter 5
This chapter was kind of surprising, it was weird to see what Ms. Bailey does and what kind of power she has over some people. It's almost like she is her own version of J.T, she is kind of like the leader of the tenants and collects what she has to when she has to.
Chapter 6
Sudhir continued to surprise me with how naive he could be, he interview a bunch of people about how much money they made and how they went about making it and then he told Ms. Bailey and J.T how much they made. People said that this was on the side so it should have been obvious that they didn't let them know everything about their financial situations.
Chapter 7
I was shocked to see that this was the first chapter where someone actually got shot, hearing the stories of gangs and stuff I assumed that someone would have gotten shot sooner. At the end I really wanted to know how the big meeting he was supposed to go to was going to go.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8 was just a closing chapter to me, it was one of the more boring chapters. It was basically just telling the reader what everyone ended up doing.
Book Reaction
Overall I thought this was a very good read, a lot better than what we have read so far in this class. It was interesting and I actually wanted to read the whole book to see what happend to the author. He presented his work very well and really pulled the reader into the story and helped the reader empathize with some of the characters. What I mean is that even though some of these people were in gangs I still could see where they were coming from and why they did the things that they did. I liked the way the author presented his findings, he created a story that the reader would be drawn into then along the way he would tell you his findings throughout the entire book and I just thought that it was a pretty good way to do that.
I did think that he wasn't entirely truthful in his book, some of the things that he did were just way too naive for someone to do. It was like he played off on that and just ran with it, like when he was surprised that J.T beat up C-Note, J.T was a leader of a gang in Chicago there was bound to be some violence and he really should have just expected it rather than be shocked by it. Other than that the book in my opinion was one of the best books we have read in this class so far and I probably would have read it outside of class had I picked it up and started reading it randomly.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Ethnography Idea
I was thinking that I could do one on people who are hardcore/professional gamers, people that make money to play games and things like that. Also I was thinking it would be cool to look into people that are really into the electronic dance scene, people that go to EDC, Lights all Night, and day glow.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Homework #7
It was pretty fun doing the videos of our set activity. I was more intrigued than I thought I would be, it was interesting to think how different people could do the same task so differently. Also it was cool to see how people reacted to someone wearing a hat with an obvious camera on, you could always tell when someone was looking straight into the camera. Watching my own video was weird since you could see how I walked and what I looked at in the process of doing our activity. It was also cool to hear what was being said at the time and the different sounds people heard even though we will not hear that in class when we see the videos. The only thing that sucked about doing our videos was we had to change our plan since the place we were originally going to go to was closed. With that though I thought it would have been interesting to go ahead and do your own thing and not tell the next person the place was closed and see how people treated the situation of the place being closed, whether they went somewhere else or they went back to the group to find out what they were supposed to do.
Things that I think you could notice that are non-obvious are the way someone walks or you can tell when someone is short or tall no matter where the camera was. You can also notice what they are looking at to maybe tell what gender they are. The speed of the walk could also be key along with where they are looking whether it was in front of them or down or somewhere else. You could also look at how people reacted to the person recording and whether or not they were familiar with a place.
All in all I think looking at the classes videos will be fun and figuring out who is who will be a challenge. Using the non-obvious things in the video will be tough for some people I think, including myself, but will be entertaining for everyone
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Homework #5: Ethnography
The first 2 articles were just describing and defining what ethnography was, the 3rd one was about a woman named Margaret Mead who used Ethnography to write a book about a culture in Samoa. Since we had already talked about what an ethnography were in essence in class the first 2 were pretty much just refreshers on what it was. The second was was a little more interesting since it was about a book someone wrote and how she went about gathering information for it.
The first article was just a page with different definitions for ethnography from different sources like Merriam-Webster and The New Oxford American Dictionary. They all pretty much said the same thing about ethnography, that it was a process in which people try to understand a society that they may not be familiar with.
The second article was just the wiki page about ethnography going over the definition and the basics of ethnography. It also have the insight from different fields of study and how ethnography pertained to that field. It also elaborated on the ethics and ways to evaluate ethnography.
The last article was the most interesting as it was about a book that was produced using ethnography. The book she wrote was top book in the world of anthropology for a while, even though a guy named Derek Freeman said her work was false.
All of these articles were pretty interesting to read and really gave me a different look at what all ethnography entailed and how it has been used in different fields of study. It was interesting to see how Mead gathered her research and how it was received by different people.
The first article was just a page with different definitions for ethnography from different sources like Merriam-Webster and The New Oxford American Dictionary. They all pretty much said the same thing about ethnography, that it was a process in which people try to understand a society that they may not be familiar with.
The second article was just the wiki page about ethnography going over the definition and the basics of ethnography. It also have the insight from different fields of study and how ethnography pertained to that field. It also elaborated on the ethics and ways to evaluate ethnography.
The last article was the most interesting as it was about a book that was produced using ethnography. The book she wrote was top book in the world of anthropology for a while, even though a guy named Derek Freeman said her work was false.
All of these articles were pretty interesting to read and really gave me a different look at what all ethnography entailed and how it has been used in different fields of study. It was interesting to see how Mead gathered her research and how it was received by different people.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Book Reading #2: Emotional Design
In the book emotional design the author presented the idea of design based on how things look and the fact that if they looked better they would be more usable. This seemed to me to be a complete opposite idea of what the same author presented in the book Design of Everyday Things. In the the previous book I remember reading that the author thought that making things aesthetically pleasing was not the way to go when designing things for the user, but in this book Chapter one is all about designing things that way and the pros of it.
The main idea of this is that emotions are a big factor when people are thinking about ways to solve things. The author mentions studies where people were found to brainstorm/problem solve better when in a good mood rather than when they were in a bad mood. The purpose of mentioning that was because he hypothesized that people would be able to figure out something they were getting wrong easier if the thing they were working with made them happy. He also mentioned a study about ATMs where the buttons were arranged "attractively", the study found that people like the ones where the buttons were arranged in an attractive way rather than a normal way.
The main difference in the 2 book written by this author was the way he said to go about designing things and the way he said people should be able to figure things out. In Design of Everyday Things he said that things should come natural to people and that designers should think of that rather than what the device looked like. He even came up with examples that looked good but were terrible designs. In this one chapter of Emotional Design he stated that attractive things work well, which to me means that designers should focus on what the device looks like rather than the usability for the user.
The main idea of this is that emotions are a big factor when people are thinking about ways to solve things. The author mentions studies where people were found to brainstorm/problem solve better when in a good mood rather than when they were in a bad mood. The purpose of mentioning that was because he hypothesized that people would be able to figure out something they were getting wrong easier if the thing they were working with made them happy. He also mentioned a study about ATMs where the buttons were arranged "attractively", the study found that people like the ones where the buttons were arranged in an attractive way rather than a normal way.
The main difference in the 2 book written by this author was the way he said to go about designing things and the way he said people should be able to figure things out. In Design of Everyday Things he said that things should come natural to people and that designers should think of that rather than what the device looked like. He even came up with examples that looked good but were terrible designs. In this one chapter of Emotional Design he stated that attractive things work well, which to me means that designers should focus on what the device looks like rather than the usability for the user.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
The Design of Everyday Things
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 was a very good introduction to the book and what the author was going to talk about. He made the first few pages very interesting to keep the reader going. When reading through the chapter the examples of he made for good and bad designs made sense once I thought about it and read more. The terms in the chapter were very informative and made it easy to follow along
Chapter 2
The falsely blaming yourself section of the chapter was very eye opening, I realized that people do that all the time and even I do it. Learned helplessness and taught helplessness were terms I had never heard of but upon reading the definition and explanation made complete sense. It was also interesting to see how the author explained how people do things, the seven stages of action that he explained was pretty accurate.
Chapter 3
The penny thing towards the beginning of the chapter was pretty cool, I actually couldn't remember what the penny looked like I had to get one to see which one was right. Overall this chapter was a good read, it was interesting reading about how people retrieve things from memory and when that is needed and not needed. The three aspects to mental models, design, user;s, and the system image was interesting to read.
Chapter 4
Before reading this chapter I had no idea that constraints were put in place to help people know what to do, let alone that there were several different kinds of constraints. After reading the chapter I started seeing the different types of constraints in everyday things. Like keyholes, they all have physical constraints, normally if the key does not fit it to the key hole then it's obviously not for that door.
Chapter 5
There is a difference between slips and mistakes, mistakes are making a wrong goal and slips are just messing up on the way to the correct goal. I was surprised to see the amount of different kind slips that were possible. The other main topic, human cognition, was very interesting to to read about. The deep vs shallow and the narrow vs wide concepts were explained well with the chess/tic tac toe example.
Chapter 6
Saying that there was a struggle for designers to make their product more aesthetically pleasing or make it more usable made perfect sense to me. It must be hard for someone making a product to think about the user and what they think looks good vs what they would think is easy to use.
Chapter 7
This chapter was a good overview of the main points in the book and a little further explanation of a few of them. This was a very good idea by the author since there was so many different things in the book that were helpful and an entire chapter on the summation of all those things was good and made it easier to remember some of the more important points he was trying to make.
Good Designs
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Bad Designs
This is what the doors in my house look like, there is a lock on the inside of course but there is also a hole on the other side that someone can stick a finger in to unlock. So if you want some privacy and you lock the door someone can easily unlock the door. Granted it does help if you accidentally lock the door but if you want to keep it locked someone can easily prevent that.
Overall Summary
Chapter 1 was a very good introduction to the book and what the author was going to talk about. He made the first few pages very interesting to keep the reader going. When reading through the chapter the examples of he made for good and bad designs made sense once I thought about it and read more. The terms in the chapter were very informative and made it easy to follow along
Chapter 2
The falsely blaming yourself section of the chapter was very eye opening, I realized that people do that all the time and even I do it. Learned helplessness and taught helplessness were terms I had never heard of but upon reading the definition and explanation made complete sense. It was also interesting to see how the author explained how people do things, the seven stages of action that he explained was pretty accurate.
Chapter 3
The penny thing towards the beginning of the chapter was pretty cool, I actually couldn't remember what the penny looked like I had to get one to see which one was right. Overall this chapter was a good read, it was interesting reading about how people retrieve things from memory and when that is needed and not needed. The three aspects to mental models, design, user;s, and the system image was interesting to read.
Chapter 4
Before reading this chapter I had no idea that constraints were put in place to help people know what to do, let alone that there were several different kinds of constraints. After reading the chapter I started seeing the different types of constraints in everyday things. Like keyholes, they all have physical constraints, normally if the key does not fit it to the key hole then it's obviously not for that door.
Chapter 5
There is a difference between slips and mistakes, mistakes are making a wrong goal and slips are just messing up on the way to the correct goal. I was surprised to see the amount of different kind slips that were possible. The other main topic, human cognition, was very interesting to to read about. The deep vs shallow and the narrow vs wide concepts were explained well with the chess/tic tac toe example.
Chapter 6
Saying that there was a struggle for designers to make their product more aesthetically pleasing or make it more usable made perfect sense to me. It must be hard for someone making a product to think about the user and what they think looks good vs what they would think is easy to use.
Chapter 7
This chapter was a good overview of the main points in the book and a little further explanation of a few of them. This was a very good idea by the author since there was so many different things in the book that were helpful and an entire chapter on the summation of all those things was good and made it easier to remember some of the more important points he was trying to make.
Good Designs
I use glasses everyday whether it they are sunglasses or eyeglasses. They are pretty simple you put them on and they stay on with the thingys in the back. Designed well since its really really difficult to mess up when using your glasses.
Mouses are used throughout the world by millions of people, clearly its made well since so many people have adopted the use of it. Simple 2 button 1 wheel design makes operating a mouse pretty simple. Left click to click on something, right click to bring up a menu, a flick of the wheel will make scrolling easier.
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There is one of these at work it makes brewing coffee extremely easy. Since the one at work is hooked up to a water supply all you have to do is pick whatever coffee you want and press the size of cup you have and hit brew, then you are a few seconds away from a freshly brewed single cup of coffee. The things that the coffee are in make it easy to brew the coffee, they are all one size and you just throw them away after the brewing is done. This is a great design as it walks the user through the process of brewing a cup of coffee and makes it hard to mess it up.
Every guy has a wallet, it makes organizing money, gift cards, credit cards, and other things very easy. It has separate places for money and cards so its designed well. There isn't really a wrong way to use a wallet so in my opinion its pretty well designed
Rubber bands can be used in many different ways, its impossible to use them in a wrong way, and they come in many different sizes. If that's not a good design for something I don't know what is.
Bad Designs
When Nintendo came out with the N64 they shipped with it the N64 controller of course. When I first got this system I was expecting a newer variation of the SNES controller, which had 2 shoulder buttons, a d-pad, and 4 buttons that were used for various things, what I got was 2 shoulder buttons, a joystick, a d-pad, 6 buttons, and a hidden button under the controller. This was poor designed in my opinion even though I eventually got used to it, it was very bulky and figuring out how to hold it depended on what game you were playing which makes no sense to me, I feel you should hold it the same way for each game.
Universal remotes are designed to make life easier and they kind of accomplish that since they do help when you don't have a remote for the TV at hand, but what isn't great about them is the fact that the buttons don't always line up with what you want to do with you TV. The remote is made to be used with every type of TV but different TVs have different functions so the remote can't of course have all the buttons needed to operate your TV to its max potential. So even though it is a little helpful the universal remote isn't particularly designed well.
Medians are not what I mean by the picture, what I mean is roads with medians. Think of Texas AVE for a minute and think about how when you first got here and didn't know any better you were constantly passing your destination and having to turn around because there was a median in between you and where you wanted to be. I think that Texas could have been structured a lot better in the sense of thinking of where the driver would want to go and what would be in their way like a median for instance, it's just annoying to have to turn around because I passed where I wanted to go and I know it happens to everyone because every time it's move in weekend you always see freshman turning around on Texas.
This is a cup holder in one of my friends cars, as you can see you have to move the little black thing to put your drink in the holder. It was very annoying and problematic to keep having to pull that thing every time I took a drink to put it back.
Overall Summary
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