Thursday, February 12, 2004

E-mail me the truth. This article in New scientist reports on "the first study to compare honesty across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails.The fact that emails are automatically recorded - and can come back to haunt you - appears to be the key to the finding."Assistant Professor Jeff Hancock of Cornell University conducted the study and his results will be presented at a conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria, in April.He asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week.From the article "in it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls." People lie more on the phone than by email [Smart Mobs] 10:38:38 PM    comment []

What we can learn from "Gaming Addiction". What happens when a game is *too* good? You know the sort. The ones you can play for hours on end and not notice time passing? The press usually looks to the most extreme examples of this and labels the effect "gaming addiction." But the more I think about it, the more I see it as a potentially positive effect with important HCI implications hidden inside...... [OK/Cancel] 5:10:03 PM    comment []

Paul Boutin mourns the passing of WebMonkey. [Scripting News] 1:23:57 PM    comment []

Teens secretly txt their problems to nurse. A pilot scheme at Cardigan Secondary School in Great Britan uses text messaging to help pupils through their troubled teenage years, by giving advice and medical help by SMS, according to ICWales. The nurses are available to tackle problems including sexual worries, pregnancy, bullying and acne. [Smart Mobs] 12:27:29 PM    comment []

Robin Leach's best moment of Clive Davis' pre-Grammy ceremony party: If I could read a book, I'd definitely read one of yours - Paris Hilton to Jackie Collins. (Timothy McDarrah reporting in The Las Vegas Sun). 11:16:46 AM    comment []

Why We Need HCI Gurus. Spool says links should be 7-12 words long. Nielsen dislikes Flash, PDFs and frames. Tog hates the Dock. So many HCI/Usability gurus -- so many opinions, and many of them conflicting. So why do we need them at all? [OK/Cancel] 11:00:28 AM    comment []

Dave's talk at Microsoft Research Monday is now on the Web. 10:54:19 AM    comment []

Spyware and its discontents. Ari Schwartz explains why the Center for Democracy and Technology is asking regulators in Washington to crack down on spyware. [CNET News.com - Front Door] 7:19:14 AM    comment []

Blogging creates forum for venting. By Sanela Dzankovic. Five years ago, no one had ever heard of blogging. Today it is all the rage. Weblogs, or blogs, are modern versions of a diary, but with an electronic twist that creates communities in cyberspace. Lara Lanigan, a Webster alumni, created Webster World, an online community where current students, prospective students and alumni can interact with one another. [The Journal] The ads they serve make page loading a lengthy process, but if you wait it out you can read what the reporter reports me saying. I'm pretty sure I talked about self-expression and not just connection (interesting, in light of discussion in my Visions of Technology class last night about the movie, Home Page, in which far more students saw the figures in the documentary as lonely and needing to connect (or gain attention) than as seeking to expres themselves), but the one quotation is accurate. My title is wrong. I don't believe she asked, so they must have relied on an obsolete or inaccurate directory or other source for that. Biggest beef? Wrong url for my blog. Added "www" to the front of the domain name. That could cost me one to two hits in the next week. 7:16:54 AM    comment []

Bush's Military Records May Have Been Intentionally Destroyed. A story from the Dallas Morning News, posted on FarrFeed, suggests Bush's military records may have been destroyed intentionally. Retired National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett said Tuesday that in 1997, then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, told the National Guard chief to get the Bush file and make certain "there's not anything there that will embarrass the governor." Col. Burkett said that a few days later at Camp Mabry in Austin, he saw Mr. Bush's file and documents from it discarded in a trash can. He said he recognized the documents as retirement point summaries and pay forms. [General Stuff's Order of the Day] Restoring integrity since 2000! 6:58:05 AM    comment []

Beating Back the Next Pandemic. Richard Webby knows big, bad diseases. Last year, he developed a vaccine for the avian flu, which killed one in three people infected during the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak. Wired magazine's Stuart Luman asks Webby about SARS and other maladies. [Wired News] 6:52:28 AM    comment []