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.

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.

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 

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.

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 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

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.

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 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.

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

Homework 3

            This could have been a very interesting paper had the author written it very differently. I did not like the style he wrote the paper and the way he explained his points. This paper was about minds brains and programs. What the paper was about was the author attempting to differentiate between strong and weak AI and explaining what he thought would be strong AI. Weak AI is mainly just a tool but according to the author strong AI is a mind and can learn and think for itself. He starts the paper by explaining in detail what he thinks the definition of strong AI. He mentions a something about humans understanding stories; he tells a story about a man in a restaurant and explains that even if something is not said in a story a human would be able to infer that something happened and that strong AI would be able to do the same thing.

            After that he explains a way that would test the theory, the way to test it is called the Chinese room. What that is is lock a person into a room who does not understand Chinese and you give them papers with Chinese writing on them. Then after this first batch of papers you are given a second batch but with this one you are given a sheet of rules on how to match up the symbols in English. To someone sitting outside the room it looks as if you understand Chinese and are able to read the stories that are presented. The point of this is to show the basic way programs would work in “understanding” things. In this situation you are the program, matching symbols with a list of rules and the user is the person giving you those symbols and rules.

            After this example and explanation the author decides to poll different people in the AI field as to what strong AI is exactly. Then he basically shoots everyone who replied down saying that he was right and there was no way that they were right. At one point he says “This objection really is only worth a short reply” and gives a very short paragraph of how he was right and that the reply was just pointless.

            The objection he said that to, in my opinion was actually one of the better ones, what it said was "How do you know that other people understand Chinese or anything else? Only by their behavior, now the computer can pass the behavioral tests as well as they can (in principle), so if you are going to attribute cognition to other people you must in principle also attribute it to computers.” This statement actually makes sense to me, what I get from it is that you don’t see the people understanding what you are saying or in what language you know by their behavior that they do in fact understand you and if a computer can do that then that means that the computer is understanding you.

            Overall I didn’t really like this paper, it was not well written and the author seemed like he didn’t care what the other people he polled said they were wrong and he was right. So that kind of took away from the paper and made it not a very good read for me.