Cornell Language and Technology

Presentation Comments: 1 & 2

2006-05-08T18:42:00.000-04:00

Facebook Intro group

Great presentation! I thought it was incredibly engaging and visually pleasing. I found your results and reasoning on probes very interesting. Intuitively, it may seem a bit odd that people ask questions that they already know the answers to. However, in terms of face, it makes perfect sense. Using equity theory, Person B wouldn't want to encrouch on Person A's negative face (autonomy) by providing information that Person A had not explicitly allowed him to have. I enjoyed this finding because of how well it related to the theories we talk about in class.

Emotion group

I really enjoyed your spin on the Hancock et al. study. I think evoking genuine emotion was a great next step. I think someone hit the nail on the head when we discussed in class how people may want to come off as outgoing and friendly upon meeting new people. This would help explain why your results were not what you anticipated. Your presentation overall was incredibly clear and really easy to follow. I sincerely enjoyed it. I especially liked your questionnaire samples on your slides. Great job!

Final Presentation Comments

2006-05-08T14:34:00.000-04:00

#1 Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Cute title! I definitely think it was a shame that you guys weren't able to run more dyads because it seemed like you were getting really interesting results. I think the comment that was made that maybe your data could be reinterpreted in light of the hyperpersonal model was spot-on. Maybe the CMC medium was affecting their feelings by allowing them to self-select and overattribute comments? Also, they were able to imagine whatever they wanted about the other person, probably assuming that they were going to be like them? Great presentation guys.

#2 Examining Emotions in CMC

Color-coordination at its best (although the details of Kevin's undies were maybe a little bit TMI for me...)! Great tag-teaming with the presentation. It was too bad that your original hypotheses didn't work out neatly (as lab-buddies we were definitely rooting for you too), but it seems like what you did find was really interesting. It made sense to me that people would actually try to hide their sad emotions since we generally like to be around positive emotions more than negative emotions, and you might not want to express your sad emotions to someone you'd just met. However, just like our study, it seems like they were leaking cues (more past tense, etc) that receivers weren't picking up on. But then people's were moods being lifted just from being in conversations with people they didn't know? And they were actually lifting the moods of people who hadn't even been made sad? That's definitely some intriguing stuff!

Final Presentations

2006-05-07T23:41:00.000-04:00

Emotion Group - Great job on the powerpoint. I like that there was little text and more explanation from you all. It kept the topic interesting and focus on you all. The samples of your questionaires were also nice giving us a idea of what and how your questioned the participants and what you were looking for. Another thing i thought was very nicely down was the constant changing of speakers with different topics. Alot of people had just went one by one as they spoke but your group seemingless transitioned back and forth between topics. It kept the presentation very interesting!

Gender group - Awesome presentation. Very interesting results. I am really surprised that the class was unable to guess the gender from the readings of the different instructions. Seems that there is a definite trend that males and females may have in writing and giving instructions but mabye when reading so many one after another it may tend to desensitize us of our ability to accurately guess. I know at the end of reading the twenty or so pages, I was confused! And yes I was one of the ones that insisted that "bunny ears" had to be female though.

Presentations - Gender & Emotion

2006-05-07T11:44:00.000-04:00

GENDER

You guys did a good job on your presentation. The “bunny ears” thing is pretty funny, and I will be interesting to see what other words you guys may find when doing a similar word analysis. It’s pretty amazing you guys found differences in men and women despite participants not even realizing they were there! It brings up a very interesting debate (and further research) about what’s causing this phenomenon linguistically, as well as what implications this may have for the recitation of instructions. I think it would be interesting to see if the linguistic analysis program could detect any of the gender linguistic differences. It would also be interesting to see if these results can be generalized in other mediums — namely FTF and over the phone. Knowing what you know now, it would be cool to see how adding the added cue of voice plays a role, as well as the non-verbal cues of FTF.

EMOTION

I was interested by your study because it seemed so intuitive, and I wanted to know if your hypotheses would prove true. Even though it don’t come out the way you wanted, I think that’s great too because you learned about another variable that might affect the process, which (I think, at least) is cool too.

I liked your presentation. It was clear overall and I enjoyed it (the color coding was a nice touch!). Good work relating things to Jeff’s study. I think people wanting to be amicable upon a first meeting as a face-related procedure definitely would explain your data. I know I would never want to express my sad emotions – especially upon first meeting someone – as I wouldn’t want one instance of my emotions to represent me as a person in someone else’s mind.

Final Presentation Comments

2006-05-06T16:00:00.000-04:00

#1: Politeness

Yours was a great project idea! Although the technology is interesting, you showed that it wasn't effective enough, and would even have negative effects on customers who detected that they were receiving canned answers. It's also useful that your data could even be used to study politeness outside of your study of LiveChat; other researchers may be able to extend this to see how else people construe (or misconstrue) messages as polite based on word count, word choice, and other characteristics that your data provide. Your presentation of your project's concept and data went quite smoothly; good job!

#2: Emotion

Your presentation reflected a lot of effort in preparation: figuring out who would present exactly which parts, including questionnaire samples so that your audience could follow along, and even color-coordinating your outfits boldly. The fact that your experimental receivers' moods appeared less negative was surprising; it's apparently common for people to mask negative moods. It'd be interesting to see results for a variety of friends and strangers, though; I generally try to conceal negative moods from strangers or acquaintances, while closer friends can generally tell how I'm really feeling. Likewise, while strangers and friends alike may try to sympathize (and therefore also sound negative), would either group try to talk significantly more positively in an attempt to cheer someone up? Overall, very nicely done!

pres. comment #2: emotion

2006-05-06T12:57:00.000-04:00

Congrats on the successful motivation manipulation!!! I appreciate how important that result is, having grappled with it in our group as well. The explanations of your results were very clear and well reasoned, which made it easy for the audience to follow your examination of a lot of factors. While contrary to your hypothesis, your finding that experimental receivers' moods also became less negative after the conversation is really interesting. I think your explanation of this observation was right on in suggesting the possible positive social effect that interpersonal communication can have on both participants.

Great presentation--your hard work really paid off.

Presentation Comments

2006-05-06T11:53:00.000-04:00

Grounding:

I really enjoyed your presentation since you guys made your procedure and findings very clear, and especially because you examined your data critically even though your results were totally unexpected. I think this also has really cool real world implications, as it would make people really think about how to design CMC technology to take the grounding into account. I thought the comments from the class regarding the possible interpertations of the study were really intriguing as well. I thought of another possibility, which is that maybe the presistent nature of instant messaging would let both parties better analyze what their partner was saying. You did a great job overall, and good luck with your results and writing your paper!

Facebook - public vs private:

Great job on your presentation! I thought you guys had great visuals, which really aided your presentation. You have a lot of great data in there, and I'm sure that your final paper will have lots of cool findings. I liked your choice of using Facebook to explore the private vs. public setting, because it's so salient in our lives right now, and you can definitely expand your findings to other settings. The idea of audience that you presented really brings the course full circle to one of the first things that we learned in 450. Great job!

Presentation Comments

2006-05-05T12:51:00.000-04:00

#1 - Facebook Common Ground

I was interested in your project because it seemed like one of the few studies of the new phenomenon of large groups (myspace, friendster, etc.) online. Great job on your speech and with finding results! First, I liked the diagrams that you used in your presentation - they were cute, well-drawn, and made your concepts easier to understand. One question I had about your project was why the participants did not have any obligation to click on the facebook link in the email you sent them. As you also stated in your presentation, perhaps if you explicitly told the participants to click on the link, you would have obtained more significant results. Also, it seemed like you stated your interpretations of the results as if they were facts; I think you should have emphasized that these were only speculations on your part. However, overall I was excited to hear your interpretations and I thought that given the limitations that you stated, the study turned out very well. Thanks for a ground-breaking study in this field!

#2 - Deception

I was impressed with how well you executed your project - I would imagine it is very difficult to deceive people in studies such as this one. It was also really interesting that your study was a kind of continuation of Professor Hancock's study. I thought that everyone in your group spoke clearly and well, giving your presentation a professional feeling. Also, the division of your results and interpretations into Q1, Q2, etc. helped a lot with clarity. One thing I didn't understand was that your two hypotheses seemed to be contradicting one another. I was also wondering if your choice to put an icebreaker at the beginning of the conversation was based on previous research or your own speculations. Overall, great interpretation of your results and an exciting study!

Group Comments - Gender and Emotion

2006-05-05T09:19:00.000-04:00

Gender and Communication

Great presentation! I really liked the way that you introduced your study, and the methods section was incredibly clear. It looks like you guys got some very interesting results, and I think they have some very interesting implications for the creation of web pages – depending on the intended audience, it might be a good idea to have it created by someone of the same gender.

I do agree with Jeff, though, in that you needed more visuals and more graphs. (I especially thought that the literature review section could have used a lot less text and a few more visuals). Also, graphs will be helpful in your paper for explaining your results.

Overall, I really liked your presentation and your study. Thanks for sharing it with us!

Emotion

First of all, great job coordinating your group for this presentation. I think my favorite part of the entire presentation was the fact that you guys “tag teamed” – it definitely kept the audience on its toes! In addition, I think you guys did a fantastic job of showing us examples during your methods section; it was really helpful to see what your questionnaires actually looked like.

After working in the lab with you guys, I’m so glad to see that you got some interesting results! It’s too bad that your hypotheses weren’t confirmed, but at least your mood induction worked. I think that the way you interpreted your findings was also great. Overall, a really nice presentation, and a great way to close the course!

Comments on Presentations

2006-05-04T22:07:00.000-04:00

#1- Grounding/FOOK:

This was a really interesting research project. I thought you guys did a great job with your presentation, especially explaining your procedure in a way that made the complexity of it easy to understand. The results are very interesting becaue they are counter intuitive- who would have thought that talking on AIM could be more conducive to common ground than face to face? I think it would be really cool if you guys continued this study and got more participants. Awesome study and great job!

#2- Politeness:

This study was really interesting. I think this research has a lot of important implications for the corporate world, especially companies that are trying to improve thier customer service ratings. One would think live chat would be the magical solution because it gives the customer a faster answer and easier access than email and is more direct than calling up and pushing different keys and being put on hold before talking to a customer service representative. However, like you guys proved, having the live chat feature might hurt companies who use it because the customer feels like they were treated very rudely and got a canned answer. If I was a company debating whether or not to put live chat in my website, I would definitely consult your research before making my decision, in order to not offend and potentially lose valuable customers. Cool project and excellent job!

Comments

2006-05-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

#1- Grounding

Overall, I thought your presentation was really clear and interesting. I liked that you had such clear results, even though they went the opposite way of your hypotheses. So a few things-- like we mentioned in class, I too thought that SIDE might have some interesting implications for your study. Also, do you think that the ability to think about what you say before you send it on AIM might make people think that the words had a more powerful effect?

Also, I think that the instructions may have played a role in the figures. CMC does have some interesting effects for things that are task oriented, definitely worth thinking about, I think.

I don't know that I ever understood why you asked about public figures-- I forgot to ask in class. Was that a control for something? Also out of curiosity, which Eliot poem did you use?

Still, great stuff overall, I think your findings are really cool.

#2- Emotion

I wrote down a few things while you guys were presenting, much of which we talked about, but I'll reiterate and add some things here. Do you think the "get to know" instruction affects how people emote? Do people "play" happy or extroverted in conversations? I guess this brings up two separate points. One is meeting a new person. That is to say, I would think that people are more likely going to seem extroverted when meeting someone new to such an extent that it could overwhelm the sadness. This might have an interesting effect if friends were talking instead of strangers, I wonder how that could effect things. Also, the very nature of the task, I wonder (even if it were strangers) if a different task other than "get to know" would have different results. Still, I thought your presentatin was well done, loved the matching outfits. And I thought your findings were definitely really cool. To be honest, I didn't think Sophie's Choice would affect people in such a way it could be detectable, but I thought it was super cool that I was wrong. Great job!!

Comments

2006-05-04T16:32:00.000-04:00

Facebook Common Ground:

I really liked the general idea of seeing how people would act when they had knowledge but might not think it polite to put forth their knowledge/common ground directly. The different ways people approached it, from acting like they hadn't seen the Facebook to casually asking questions that would lean towards information they had gleaned from Facebook, was fascinating in what is says about how people determine the most polite or best way to act in conversation. Really interestin stuff. Great work.

Emotion:

Really interesting project, guys. I find the idea of emotion as a contagion and the differences in how accurately people can detect others' emotions in different mediums really fascinating. I agree with the general sentiment that it would be interesting to do the experiment with friends, and see if they fare better. All around, great idea and great analysis.

Comment #2: Emotions Group

2006-05-04T14:45:00.000-04:00

Wonderful presentation! I was intrigued by your experiment the moment you decided to do it. I was curious to see whether or not, and to what degree you can truly induce emotion (such as sadness) in participants. It's so fascinating finding out that when the experimental group watched Sophie's Choice, they actually felt a lot more sad than the control group. I thought that the participants would try to repress their emotions since they're participating in an experiment and don't want to seem affected by it. But I'm not surprised at the actual result. However I still think that the induced emotion, however real it might be, is still not strong enough than emotions that people feel in their everyday lives, that is, how they feel when something happens around them. I think that, in order for someone to truly be saddened, they have to either experience something that they can relate to, or something like a sad movie (in which they have to sit through the whole thing and not just watch part of it). Only then will their emotions be strong. Therefore, one possible reason for your result (i.e. dyads couldn't detect their counterpart's emotions accurately) might be that the induced emotions weren't strong enough for others to detect.

Also, someone mentioned that friends might be better at detecting each other's emotions. I think
this is very true. If you know someone, you'll know how they act when they're sad--the subtle facial muscle movements, or the look in their eyes. But if you don't know someone, then you might not be able to pick up these subtle elements that indicate the emotional state that your partner is in.

Comment #1: Grounding Group

2006-05-04T14:27:00.000-04:00

Great job on your presentation guys!
I think it's interesting/surprising that you found in your results that your participants were better at assessing each other's knowledge of the poem in an online medium rather than a face-to-face medium. One would think that, if you can see the person that you're talking to, you'd be better at gauging their understanding of the poem because of the abundance of visual/audio cues (i.e. from facial expressions to tone of voice). More generally, I think face-to-face overrules most other communication techniques in terms of aiding in someone's understanding of something. However, as Will mentioned today, we might have overlooked the social aspect of this. That is, when two strangers are put together in a room and are required to interact with each other on a specific topic, not only might it be uncomfortable, but i'd imagine it'd also be awkward. And because of this, the intended effect of having the dyads have a conversation (i.e. so that they can gauge how well each other understood the poem) may not be achieved. Of course, this might not be the case at all. I think with any experiment, it's important to have a large sample size. But given the time limit, I think you guys did great! :D

Comments

2006-05-04T14:21:00.000-04:00

Grounding:

Wow, you definitely got some really interesting results. I think the fact that the participants thought they influenced their partner more over AIM than FtF is explainable - there are fewer visual cues that might suggest otherwise (they can't see their partners shake their heads, etc). But the fact that they were more successful in guessing each other's knowledge over aim is quite unintuitive. You'll have to closely analyze the transcripts to see why the conversations were so different. Maybe there was a lot of superfluous material in FtF that distracted from the utterances about the poem. Great job overall!

Emotion:

It's great that your participants were not suspicious of the setup of the experiment and that mood induction worked as planned. They fact that emotion could not be detected by the participants' partners, even though there were clear language differences, is very intriguing but not necessarily surprising given the content of your transcripts. Indeed, for example, most people would probably not associate the use of past tense with being in a sad state. Also, I'm sure that the fact that the two were strangers had an impact - I find it fairly easy to detect the mood of someone I know well over AIM. Nice presentation and good luck on the rest of your analysis!

#1 [Comment]: Gender and Shoelaces

2006-05-04T01:58:00.000-04:00

Very nice job on the presentation. I was intrigued to see what your results would be since we had to fill out the 24-page-or-so packet in class. I'm glad to see the turnout was pretty telling! A thought: I don't know if this is in any way analyzable, but the descriptions people give may be related to how they were taught to tie their shoes. My reason for that consideration is that I know at one point or another I was taught by a "bunny ears" metaphor by my mother, but I've rejected it for the "threading the needle" approach that I learned from my peers. Consequently, when filling out the questionnaire, I felt more that "bunny ears" style was more feminine than alternatives. Maybe I'm just weird like that, haha. Anyway, great job!

Pres. comment #1: politeness

2006-05-04T01:01:00.000-04:00

Great job presenting - props for going first, too! It definitely seems like there are some serious complications to rating politeness, as you guys acknowledged with the potential word count/cannededness conflict - of something technically fitting the criteria of "polite," but really not feeling polite.

I also found it really interesting that you experienced different "felt" impressions of politeness across synchronous and asynchronous media, even if the same words were used. This observation certainly says a lot about the influence that our expectations have on how we perceive the quality of an interaction. Based on your observation, one suggestion you may offer to designers of automated synchronous help chats such as LiveChat would be to add a feature that would make the user feel more like they were being helped by a real person, like adding a "helper is typing..." feature on par with AIM.

Presentation Comment 2

2006-05-03T21:57:00.000-04:00

Gender group

So men don't use the word "bunny" to describe how to tie a shoe...not surprising, but interesting nonetheless. I would have thought that at least one male would use this analogy to describe the shape of the loops. And the normal person has trouble guessing the gender of the describer...this could be because we have so many fixed notions of the linguistic styles of men and women. As Kate pointed out, it would be interesting to find out if an automated linguistic program could detect the gender of a speaker because this program doesn't have the preconceived notions that humans do and wouldn't be distracted by these notions. You did really good work with such a complicated (at least to me) subject.

Presentation Comment 1

2006-05-03T21:52:00.000-04:00

Politeness group

I thought your presentation was great. I liked the fact that you found results for politeness in different media, but saw that this politeness was due to canned messages, which in themselves, can be seen as impolite! How interesting. Your study and others like it can be useful in trying to find ways to make online questions and answers less impersonal and polite to more personal and polite. Good effort and fascinating content.

Presentation Comments #2

2006-05-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

Deception/Motivation group:
Your study is fascinating. I think that even though many of your results weren't significant, that still says a lot. Kailyn's comment makes an excellent point that we are simply really bad at detecting deception, in any situation, and we also are accustomed to believing that someone is telling us the truth. I think this definitely contributes to the finding that each group had about the same level of detection. I also think that your finding of a much higher word count in the high motivation condition is really interesting, and unexpected. I would love for you (or anyone) to dig deeper into this, and to try to find out why this actually happens. Great job guys.

Presentation Comments #1

2006-05-03T11:52:00.000-04:00

To the gender group:
I really enjoyed your presentation, and hearing your findings. I was amazed that despite the fact that you found so many linguistic differences between men and women, we (as raters) were simply unable to do any better than chance at guessing the gender of the author. I would be really interested to see if, given these linguistic diferences, something like a automated computer program could do better at guessing the gender of the author, as a computer could just focus on these things while we are distracted by so many factors and are unaware of what is truly a difference between men and women's writing styles. Really neat results!

on gender and instructions

2006-05-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

The finding that females use "bunny" analogies a lot in giving instructions to tie shoes was not very surprising, but slightly enlightening. I remember when I filled out the packet, I was thinking that "bunny ears" and other references like that seemed to be much more "girly" and thus, I chose female as the person giving the directions. I think it was a big giveaway, and maybe instructions about something that doesn't have a cute animal analogy would be harder to determine girls from boys. Other than that, it was interesting to know how the gender of the rater factored into how they rated female and male instructions. Overall, it was a nice presentation. Good job!

on raising the stakes

2006-05-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

I'm thrilled that this group got results and that most were headed in the right direction (if they weren't significant). I really liked that they chose to look at anxiety words. It's very interesting that these words come into our language even though we probably don't even realize it. Given the truth bias and the fact that the receivers weren't really expecting lies, it's not a big surprise that the detection accuracy was low. I don't think most people would think a stranger would lie. I also really would have liked to hear the punishment clip. I watched you guys run this study so much that I'm pretty curious about what your participants had to listen to.

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-05-02T21:27:00.000-04:00

Deception and Motivation in CMC presentation
When I first heard the big question about whether raising the stakes would change the way we lie and how good are we at it, I thought that people highly motivated might be better just because they would have a reward and take more time in completing the lie. Your study shows otherwise. Interesting that there is no significance between low motivation and high motivation. But you did find that highly motivated participants used more words. This could lead to more insight on lying and language use.

Assignment #11 - Grounding Results (Draft)

2006-04-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

We asked our participants to complete questionnaires prior to their conversations. These initial questionnaires consisted of four primary sections:

Short answers about understanding the reading;

Multiple choice questions about understanding the reading;

Numerical scales about the participant’s personal traits; and

Yes/no questions about recognizing public figures.

Likewise, we asked our participants to complete questionnaires after their conversations. These closing questionnaires consisted of three primary sections:

Multiple choice about the partner’s understanding;

Numerical scales and short answers about the partner’s actions during conversation; and

Yes/no questions about the partner’s recognition of public figures.

We then performed three types of correlations with these data:

For each participant, compare his/her first questionnaire and second questionnaire;

For each dyad, compare their first questionnaires; and

For each dyad, compare one’s first questionnaire to the other’s second questionnaire, and vice versa.

In each of these correlations, we disregarded the participants’ short answers, and kept them in our records solely for identifying oddities or hidden explanations about our data. Heretofore, we shall refer to the remaining questions by number; for instance, “Q1a.2” will refer to the initial questionnaire for participant A, question 2. Participants in each dyad will be referred to as participants A and B.

Our first correlation examined the extent to which participants felt that they had influenced their partner’s opinions about the reading material. For each participant, we compared Q1a.5-9 with Q2a.3-7, respectively, and noted a score of 0-5 depending on how many of these topics that the participant felt that s/he had influenced the other person in that dyad. We then compared with this score with the participant’s answers for Q2a.8-10.

Our second correlation compares the first questionnaires of both participants. Questions Q1.2-4 are short answer questions, which we cannot compare numerically. Instead, we will compare the participants’ results for the multiple choice questions (Q1.5-9), numerical scale questions (Q1.10-15), and public figure questions (Q1.16-44). In comparing the multiple choice questions, we will measure the extent to which the participants’ initial reactions to the reading material are in agreement. Measuring the numerical scale questions allows us to compare the personal traits of both participants; this would, for instance, identify dyads that cannot communicate efficiently because one is not fluent in English. Lastly, by comparing the results for the public figures section, we can numerically assess the participants’ general common ground outside of the experiment.

Our third correlation compares one participant’s first questionnaire to the other’s second questionnaire, and vice versa. First, we compare Q1a.10 or Q1a.11 (depending on dyad medium) to Q2b.19, Q1a.13 with Q2b.20. We also compared Q1a.5-9 with Q2b.3-7, which allows us to measure accuracy of a participant’s estimation of their partner’s feelings about the poem itself. All of these measures were taken in both directions, i.e. from a to b and from b to a. Lastly, we compare one participant’s recognition of public figures with their partner’s estimation of their recognition of said figures (Q1.16-44 and Q2.22-50). For each person, we assign each person a point if their answer for that person on Q1 and their partners answer for that person on Q2 were the same: this score can be made an accuracy percentage by dividing by the total number of public figures listed on the questionnaires.

We will take these measures for every dyad, and then combine them based on medium to determine average measures in a given medium. This will allow us to inspect the data for differences in results between AIM and FTF conversations. Additionally, we hope to gain knowledge about whether one’s determination about the feelings of other’s knowing is generalized in some way to common ground unrelated to and outside of the task at hand by looking at the measures concerned with the public figures, Q1.16-44 and Q2.22-50.

Through our analysis of the correlations, we hope to see trends where AIM measures in AIM conversations are less than FTF measures, likely due to the lack of FTF cues during AIM conversations. This will support our hypothesis that one’s feeling of others’ knowledge is easier to identify during FTF interactions by observing non-verbal cues that are lacking via AIM.

These findings would imply that grounding is more difficult to establish in online (but synchronous) settings than in FTF. For one, this would also suggest that the process of grounding in communication is something more than just sharing information, and that grounding may have a stronger reliance on non-verbal information than previously suggested. Furthermore, this would have implications for the Cues Filtered Out (CFO) theory as well as Social Identity De-individuation (SIDE) theory. If the correlations are in fact different and the correlations for CMC are stronger, it would show SIDE theory to be true, since there would be more of a social aspect in CMC. However, If FTF is shown to be more strongly correlated, it would suggest FTF was more social and therefore the technology “filtered out” the social aspects, supporting CFO.

[by Will, Stan, Josh, and Ron]

Results: Politeness group

2006-04-25T13:13:00.000-04:00

The data we collected is in the form of email and IM correspondence with customer service representatives. We are analyzing the language quantitatively by counting the number of words and amount of adjunct phrases in the customer service representative’s response. The language will be qualitatively analyzed by rating the politeness of the exchange and by rating the “canned-edness” of the interaction. If the exchange sounds impersonal and very cut-and-pasted, we will interpret it as being “canned.” We will also be comparing the data among coders to look for language that is exactly the same to make an assessment of canned-edness. Because we e-mailed and chatted live with the same companies asking the same question, we found several instances of responses that were clearly copied and pasted. Some of the language from one company is exactly the same among different customer service representatives, making it a completely canned response. This finding suggests that customer service representatives might have a Frequently Asked Questions page at hand so they can cut and paste responses to questions. In particular, we found this to be true for www.boldchat.com. Ironically, this is the company that provides the LiveChat service to other companies and prides itself on its business enhancing live chat feature. The politeness and “canned-edness” ratings are on a scale of 1-9, consistent with Duthler (2006).

In our study, we are comparing the politeness levels in synchronous and asynchronous communication media. Generally, the higher the word count and the more adjunct phrases the response contains, the more polite the exchange is rated (Brown and Levinson, 1987). Duthler (2006) actually disagrees with this conclusion as related to adjunct phrases, and we will test to see if our results support his findings. We will compare the proportion of adjunct phrases to the number of words, and then see how that ratio compares between chat (synchronous) and email (asynchronous). We are hypothesizing that the more wordy exchanges will be more polite. We also predict that the email exchanges will be more polite than the chat exchanges, regardless if the condition is polite or impolite. Furthermore, we will compare how the politeness of replies mirrors the politeness of requests across the two media.

We will be discussing our data based on the “canned-edness” rating of the exchanges. The LiveChat is a relatively new technology for companies to utilize on their websites and is meant to improve customer service. We have found, however, that the exchanges are generally more canned and impersonal than they are spontaneous and personal. Most of the time, we felt like we were talking to a computer rather than a human. Using a synchronous chatting service, such as LiveChat, may actually make customers feel like numbers rather than people, which may cause companies to lose clientele. If we find that the chats are significantly impolite and impersonal, this should indicate to system designers that this chat feature is not working toward the benefit of the companies. This data may also imply that, since the LiveChat feature is not an asset to business, it will not be implemented much longer on websites of established companies and corporations.

On a quantitative level, our preliminary data analysis suggests that our e-mail responses contain more words on average, which correlates with the higher politeness rating of e-mails. We have yet to determine the ratio of adjunct phrases to the number of words to ascertain this assessment of politeness. For canned-ness, our preliminary data analysis suggests that chats are often rated higher on the scale and tend to be more impersonal, copied-and-pasted responses.

On a test of inter-coder reliability, we had very high levels of agreement, which enhances the validity of our language analysis. In general, we were consistent with deciding both quantitative and qualitative assessments of politeness. To reach this high level of inter-coder reliability for the qualitative responses, we created a scale of each politeness measure to determine what qualifies as each rating on the scale of 1-9. For quantitative responses, we decided that adjunct phrases are any of the following: 1. small talk, humor; fluff; identity marker, such as "This is Ryan, how may I help you"; 2. expressions of appreciation; or 3. expressions of forgiveness. We based this on the previous JCMC study on politeness (Duthler, 2006).

Sources:

Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duthler, K. (2006). The politeness of requests made via email and voicemail: support for the hyperpersonal model. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(2), article 6. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/duthler.html

Facebook Intro - Results

2006-04-25T09:22:00.000-04:00

Usage of Facebook

The study found widespread usage of Facebook. Not only did all of the surveyed students possess an account on Facebook, but 92% also stated that they had accessed it at least once in the past month; 35% of the students admitted to using it daily. Only two of the students, however, had ever used Facebook to meet a stranger before.

Knowledge Introduction Process

A statistical analysis revealed significant differences in all conditions, indicating that the average number of Facebook-related, highlighted utterances varied based on whether or not the participant had prior access to their partner's Facebook profile. In other words, if both participants had access to each other's Facebook profiles, students tended to highlight significantly more utterances than either of the individuals in the one-way Facebook condition. This finding can be taken as evidence that Facebook-inspired common ground was introduced into the conversations. Somewhat surprisingly, the individuals in the one-way condition without Facebook access, even after they were told that their partners had looked at their Facebook profiles, tended not to believe that Facebook had contributed at all to their conversation. It is also notable that, across conditions, questions were often interpreted differently by the participants. For example, in the mutual-Facebook condition, the question "what is your major?" was highlighted as a Facebook-related utterance, while in the one-way Facebook condition, the same question was often not highlighted by either of the individuals.

Our coding revealed that the common ground-related information typically introduced in the conversations tended to be academic, personal, or about interests or friends. The participants tended to introduce this information by asking or answering probes, by making explicit references to Facebook, or by making casual references to Facebook-obtained information. While casual references were fairly common, what was particularly surprising was the discovery that 76% of dyads engaged in some form of probing behavior, while only 20% made explicit references to Facebook. One possible explanation for this finding rests in Clark's equity principle; in our experiments, equity appeared to be disturbed either by the participants possessing nonequivalent information about each other or by the participants not knowing how acceptable it would be to introduce Facebook-obtained information into the conversation. As such, it is likely that the observed probing behavior may be the method that the speakers presuppose for maintaining equity with their addressees (Clark 295).
If so, our research may indicate that communicators to some degree use Facebook-obtained information to inform and improve their social interactions.

Of the dyads that used probes to introduce some kind of information, X% of them ended up explicitly mentioning Facebook somewhere in their conversations. Y% of the dyads that used casual references ended up using explicit references as well. The overall number of highlighted references of those whom explicitly mention Facebook was much higher than those whom exclusively used either a probing strategy or casual mentions, suggesting perhaps that after hesitations about the equity-disturbing effects of mentioning Facebook as a source of information have been allayed, the participants were better able to reflect and attribute certain utterances to Facebook.

Gender: Results

2006-04-25T01:48:00.000-04:00

Questionnaires

Our questionnaire contains several questions, each one dealing with a specific aspect of the transcript. We will compute the average score for each question by the gender of the instruction givers and determine whether or not there is a significant difference. For example, it would be interesting if male-given instructions were rated an average of 2 on a 1-7 scale measuring clarity, while directions given by females were rated an average of 5 in that particular aspect.

We also want to see if the gender of the rater has any effect on the scores. Thus, we will compute the average scores for each question across the 4 possible pairings of instructor and rater (male-male, male-female, female-male, female-female). For example, do females think instructions given by other women are more understandable than those given by men?

One of the questions asks whether the rater thinks the giver is male or female. We would like to determine if there is any correlation between the perceived understandability of the directions and the apparent gender of the instructor. For instance, are clear-rated instructions assumed to be written by men? Furthermore, is this assumption correct?

Coding

To start with, it will be necessary to come up with an overview of the
language of the transcripts.  The basic measures mentioned below
(i.e., response length) will serve to give a quantitative overview.
Particular aspects of IM speech can be described by references to
papers which describe it in depth.

Analysis of the language of the transcripts is straightforward, but
discovering meaningful trends will require taking a number of
measurements, the majority of which will probably not be meaningful.
All quantitative measures will be tested for significance and
correlation with actual gender, a clarity metric, and perceived
gender, the latter two being derived from questionnaire responses.

Basic measures are average response length (in characters, words, and
"sentences"), if only to establish a baseline.

Then we will calculate and tabluate the relative frequency of the use
of:

 - words of a particular syntactic category (noun, verb/predicate,
descriptor)
 - use of a particular mode of address
 - use of personal pronouns
 - particular constructions (passive voice [and other marked syntactic
   constructions], indirect speech [which is more a semantic
   distinction])
 - use of particular semantic classes of verb (looking for "action"
   verbs or verbs of movement)

If any other patterns in word choice or speech become apparent, we
will check them for significance, as well.

Some weaker measures which still might be useful are:

 - lexical differences: does one gender use a given term to describe
   something which the other doesn't?  (This is hampered by our small
   sample sizes and a lack of responses which use very similar
   language.)
 - use of a particular mood or tense (This is also hampered by our
   small selection size and the fact that there is probably
   insufficient variation to obtain a significant measure.)

We can also do a speech act analysis of the transcripts and then see
if the prevalence of certain speech acts in the instructions mean
anything, but that will probably not be terribly informative because
everyone is giving the same sort of speech acts.  If we do not find
much in analysis of the basic language used, we will do a speech act
analysis similar to that in the Nastri paper.

It would then be possible to check for correlation of certain speech
act patterns with one of the three measures mentioned above (actual
gender, perceived clarity, and perceived gender), but there may be too
much uniformity in the transcripts to get a significant result other
than, "More words (speech acts) means more clear."

Deception: Results

2006-04-24T23:47:00.000-04:00

1. Automated Linguistic Analysis
We are interested in analyzing the verbal content of the chat transcripts across four categories of linguistic cues: 1) word counts, 2) pronoun use, 3) emotion words, and 4) markers of cognitive complexity. In particular, we are interested in determining within which categories there is a significant difference between high- and low-motivation conditions.

Taken together, these categories of linguistic cues will be used to gauge potential verbal leakage cues betraying highly-motivated liars’ tense, nervous, or otherwise aroused physiological state induced by their high motivation to deceive. In this way, we hope to identify possible verbal manifestations of the nonverbal leakage cues that betray highly motivated liars in face-to-face settings.

We will use a General Linear Model (GLM) to analyze between and within subject factors. In this way, we will analyze linguistic differences between truthful and deceptive communication, and high- versus low-motivation conditions.

Word count
We will compare the mean word counts of high- versus low-motivation conditions. We are interested in seeing if highly-motivated liars produced more words than low-motivated liars. Additionally, we are interested in observing whether more words are produced during deceptive communication than during truthful communication.

Pronoun use
We will measure pronoun use by dividing the number of first-person singular pronouns and the number of other-oriented pronouns by the total number of words, respectively. By doing this, we can compare the frequency of different types of pronouns used in deceptive versus truthful communication, as well as high- versus low-motivation conditions.

Emotion words
Here we are interested in comparing the frequency of emotion words (e.g., “hate,” “worthless,” “care”) in the high-motivation condition versus the low-motivation condition, as well as across deceptive and truthful communication.

Markers of cognitive complexity
We will analyze this category by examining two factors: 1) use of causation phrases and 2) use of negation words (e.g., “not,” “no,” “none”). Here we are interested in frequencies for each factor. We will compare these frequencies across deceptive and truthful communication and high- versus low-motivation conditions.

1) Motivation Manipulation and Deception Accuracy

To test the success of the motivation manipulation (high-stakes scenario), we will analyze the senders’ responses to a general question at the end of the post-interaction questionnaire that asked “How important was it for you to deceive your partner?” To determine the overall success of the high-stakes motivation manipulation, we will look at the mean value of the answers to this question (Likert scale).

To address our main research question of whether highly-motivated liars are harder to detect than unmotivated liars, we will compare the receivers’ accuracy in successfully detecting deception between the high- and low-stakes conditions. The receivers’ deception detection accuracy is attained by comparing the receivers’ veracity judgments of the senders’ communication on each discussion topic with the actual nature of the senders’ communication (deceptive or truthful). The receivers’ deception judgments are measured by questions in the post-interaction questionnaire for each conversation topic (e.g., “If you had to make a decision, was your partner LYING or TRUTHFUL?”). Here we are interested in comparing the mean accuracy percentages of receivers across motivation conditions.

#11: Private vs. Public – Results

2006-04-24T21:00:00.000-04:00

For the results section, our group is going to analyze the three sets of data obtained from our experiment: task messages, historical messages, and questionnaires. We will be focusing on the language content, syntax, and choice of communication used in the messages.

Task and Historical Messages
Our group will be dividing the messages into two categories: wall posts and private messages. Then, we are going to compare the language usage and content of each group. Specifically, we will be using software that counts and reports statistics on the number of times certain words and punctuation appear in each list. Preliminary analysis indicates that private messages contain more “I” words while wall posts contain more “you” words. This may suggest that PMs focus more on the sender while wall messages focus more on the receiver. With personal messages, there is a one-to-one communication whereas with walling there are numerous people who can view the message. Thus, in such a public setting the sender may want to maintain face and focus more on the receiver. We also found that there are more misspelled words and use of slang in wall posts. This observation is interesting because common sense suggests that public posts would be written more carefully than private messages. However, perhaps this is not the case due to the informal nature of walling.

We also plan to examine the data content to see whether there is a correlation between the type of message and the choice of communication used. Our group expects wall posts to be more social-oriented and positive, and PMs to be more task-oriented and negative/neutral. For our six tasks, we designed the statements so that three of them were task-related and positive, while the other three were social-related and negative/neutral. From the data obtained so far, the choices of communication used for five out of the six tasks confirms our predictions. Thus, wall posts in general seem to be more informal and casual than private messages.

Questionnaire
For each set of statements in the questionnaire, we will be evaluating which of the potential reasons listed were favored the most. Then we will relate those preferred statements back to the type of communication that was used for the particular task and see whether it matches our predictions. For example, one question for Task 1 was to circle to what degree the participant agreed with the following statement: “I did not want other people to see it (the message they wrote for Task 1)”. If they had initially chosen to use private messaging for Task 1 and also strongly agreed with the statement, then we can infer that audience plays a significant role in the choice of private versus public communication.

Emotions Group - Results

2006-04-23T15:14:00.000-04:00

For our results, we will look at four different areas: manipulation, perception, transmission, and language use. To compare these different areas, we assigned four different groups: control sender (CS), control receiver (CR), experimental sender (ES), and experimental receiver (ER). ES will be the person who watched Sophie’s Choice, while ER will have watched Mammoths of the Ice Age.

For all areas, we will compare averages between the following groups: CS vs ES, CR vs ER, and ES vs ER.

Manipulation
This area tests whether the subjects’ emotion genuinely changed through the movie manipulation and before the conversation. We will compare positive and negative affect from the PANAS scale as well as questions 3 (“I would rate myself in a sad mood right now”) and 8 (“This movie did not change my mood”) from the first questionnaire. We expect that CS, CR, and ER should have similar responses since they all watched the neutral movie. The responses from the ES participants should reflect a sad mood change.

Perception
This area tests whether the receivers (experimental and control) can sense the mood of the sender. We will compare questions 1, 7, 8, 10, and 12 from questionnaire 2, which were all questions dealing with the partner’s mood and disposition. We would expect that ER would rate ES as sadder than CR will rate CS.

Transmission
This area tests whether the receiver’s mood changed to match the sender’s mood. We will compare questions 6 and 13 from questionnaire 2. We would expect that ER would show more negative effects while ES will show positive effects in comparison to the controls. This is because we expect that ES (who is sad) will influence the mood of ER and vice versa. Another factor we need to look at is time. To do this, we will compare each of the four groups before and after the conversation. We will compare the two PANAS scales and question 3 on questionnaire 1 with question 5 on questionnaire 2. We expect that ER will show negative effects and ES will show positive effects and the controls should stay the same.

Language Use
This area looks at how language is different between sad people and neutral people. We will be using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to help us determine word count, conventions, affect language, pronouns, and negations/assents.

Emotions Group - Methods

2006-04-18T09:35:00.000-04:00

Participants

We plan to recruit a total of 60 students from the Communications courses that offer class credit for participation in experiments. All the participants will be between the ages of 18 and 25. 30 people will be randomly assigned to the control group, and 30 people will be randomly assigned to the experimental group. In this way, both the control and experimental group will consist of 15 dyads. Each dyad will be of the same sex: males will be paired together and females will be paired together.

Our study was conducted on the second floor of Kennedy Hall in Professor Hancock’s laboratory. The two members of a dyad were asked to arrive in Kennedy Hall at separate locations so that they cannot communicate prior to the experiment. Additionally, they were shown to different rooms in the laboratory so that they could not see their partner during the study.

Procedure

The subjects were first told that they were involved in a study that will test their ability to analyze movies. In the control group, both people were shown a neutral clip from the documentary Mammoths of the Ice Age. In the experimental group, one person was shown the same neutral clip from Mammoths of the Ice Age, while the other person was shown a sad clip from the movie Sophie’s Choice. Afterwards, they were asked to fill out a brief questionnaire about the movie and a PANAS emotion scale. We then deceived the subjects by asking them to participate in a second study that will analyze how people interact when they meet someone new online. They were given the task of getting to know their partner for twenty minutes through the medium of instant messaging. In addition, we requested that they not mention the previous study to their partner, as conversation about the movie could affect the mood of both subjects. Following this, both members of the dyad were given a questionnaire that included questions asking them to rate their own mood as well as that of their partner. The subjects also filled out another PANAS emotion scale. After the experiment, we debriefed the subjects on the true purposes of our study.

Materials

As our objective was to use films to induce certain emotions, we chose two different films for the study. The film intended to induce sadness was entitled Sophie’s Choice; the neutral film was a documentary entitled Mammoths of the Ice Age. Our group also used instruction sheets, which we did not show the participants. In addition, we used two computer terminals, one for each participant. We used the basic psychological scale, PANAS, twice in the experiment in order to assess the mood of each participant after the movie and after the conversation. Accompanying each part of our experiment (the film and the online chat) was a questionnaire. One questionnaire asked about the effects of movies on viewers; the second questionnaire asked about the feelings of each participant and his partner after conversing through instant messaging. We expect that both the scales and questionnaires will be crucial to gauge the emotions of our participants.

Since our experiment was divided into two sections, we used two consent forms to aid in deceiving the participants. As a distraction for the single experiment we were running, the participants were told that one form was for Professor Shapiro and the other was for Professor Hancock. Lastly, we had debriefing forms that the participants received after completing the experiment.

Coding

Following the experiment, we will use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program to analyze the emotion expressed through instant messaging. This program will help us determine the 1) emoticons and other CMC conventions, 2) length of responses, 3) use of affect language (divided into subcategories of positive and negative), 4) pronoun use, and 5) the number of negations and assents in the conversations. By hand, we can determine the 1) use of punctuation and 2) content of the conversations. In addition to the transcripts, we will use the questionnaires from our experiment to determine the mood of the neutral participant and to determine whether he could perceive the emotions of his partner.

Assignment #10: Facebook and CG

2006-04-18T03:46:00.000-04:00

[Participants]

The participants in our study consisted of students with a Facebook.com profile attending communication classes at Cornell University. These students received class credit for their participation. Upon completion of the study, we hope to have roughly 40 participants with 10 dyads in each condition of our study.

[Procedure]

Prior to the day of the study, each participant was paired with a partner to form dyads which were randomly split into two conditions: control and experimental. In the control condition, both participants were emailed a participation reminder containing a link to their partner's Facebook profile. In the experimental condition, only one person was emailed the other's Facebook profile, while the remaining participant was simply emailed the reminder. To minimize the likelihood of participants being primed by the Facebook profile such that natural conversation is overtly affected, the reminder e-mail was sent a day before the study occurred, and in neither condition were the participants explicitly asked in the e-mail to follow the Facebook link.

At the time of the study, the participants were brought into the lab one at a time in order to prevent contact extrinsic to the study. After they were situated, the participants were told / reminded of the first name of their partner regardless of which condition they were in, and were instructed to get to know their partners by having a conversation with them on AOL Instant Messenger using screen names that created specifically for the purposes of the study. The participants were allowed to chat for 15 minutes and were given an additional minute to wrap up their conversations.

Afterwards, the participants were presented with a questionnaire. Following its completion, they were asked to highlight portions of their chat transcript in which they thought Facebook may have had an influence on their conversation. Finally, participants were given a debriefing sheet and were urged not to discuss the study with others. Altogether, the entire in-lab process spanned approximately 30 minutes for each dyad.

[Materials]

Some of the participants were sent a link to their partner's Facebook profile via e-mail a full 24 hours prior to the study. These links were obtained by looking up the participants given the e-mail address and name they listed on the signup sheet/s for the study. After coming into the lab and engaging in a fifteen-minute IM conversation, participants also filled out a questionnaire regarding their interaction and their personal Facebook usage. Afterwards, participants were given access to a transcript of their conversation in Microsoft Word and highlighted sections in which they individually believed Facebook influenced the conversation. The highlighted portions were justified via comments recorded by the experimenter, and the transcript was then saved for future coding.

[Coding]

In order to devise a coding scheme, the coders looked at highlighted phrases from the transcripts to see what types of information participants referenced and how that information was introduced into the conversation. The subsequent categories of information were found to include: personal information, courses/major, interests, friends, clubs/sports, and explicit mention of Facebook. More specifically, these rubrics can be subdivided into allusions ("My favorite television show is 24"), probes ("Are you in Arts and Sciences?"), and explicit references ("I read that you like tennis"). These descriptions were attained by observation and analysis of the most frequent ways in which participants introduced information into the conversation, and how these results varied depending on the condition of the participant.

To provide maximum inter-coder reliability, 3-4 coders will review the requisite material and assign data to either one of the three default categories, or to the category "other." Going through and checking that the coders rated the material the same will ensure inter-rater reliability. In the event of disagreement, the coders will reevaluate the offending in light of arguments for/against a category assignment, and if they decide that the data warrants a new category, will devise a name for it and add it to the coding scheme.

Politeness Group Methods Section

2006-04-18T02:32:00.000-04:00

Methods

Participants

The participants in the study are anonymous customer service representatives at a variety of institutions with websites online, including four Canadian car dealerships, www.boldchat.com, Lenox, and Venus swimwear.

Procedure

We examined spontaneous responses to requests made my either email or Instant Messaging/LiveChat. For the polite condition, we emailed our polite request, with a polite salutation and closing, to the customer service representative at the company. For the polite chat, we communicated the polite request via the LiveChat feature. The same format was used in the impolite condition, except the impolite probes were used instead. The requests were ones the customer service representatives would normally be expected to deal with via email and/or chat. The emails were sent to the email address posted on the company’s website, while the LiveChat was initiated by clicking on the corresponding icon on the company’s website. A typical polite email went like this:

Hi!

Could you please explain your financing options?

Sincerely,

Molly Feeney

A typical chat exchange went like this:

Merchant: Welcome to Venus Live! How may I be of assistance?
Chatter: Hi!
Chatter: Could you please tell me what credit cards you accept?
Merchant: We accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
Chatter: Thank you!

Immediately after each LiveChat and upon receiving each email, we copied the conversation/response, respectively, and pasted it into a Word Document. All exchanges were recorded in one document and then all the data were compiled into a spreadsheet and coded.

Materials

We conducted pilot studies to rate the politeness level of our request phrases (i.e. probes). We asked how polite the requests seemed on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 as impolite and 7 as polite. We chose the probes based on how close to 1 or 7 they were rated. The probes used for the polite condition included: 1) Could you please tell me what credit cards you accept?; 2) Could you tell me how to open an account, please?; 3) Could you please explain your financing options?. For retail companies we used the first probe, for banks we used the second probe, and for car dealerships we used the third question. The probes for the impolite condition included: 1) What credit cards to you accept?; 2) Tell me how to open an account.; 3) Explain your financing options.

Coding Scheme

To ensure the validity of our study, we decided to implement strict quantitative measures of politeness for the data analysis process. We based many of our decisions on a past study by Kirk W. Duther entitled The Politeness of Requests Made Via Email and Voicemail: Support for the Hyperpersonal Model. First, our request messages are segmented into distinct areas such as the address phrase and adjunct phrases. The first quantitative measure is simply to count the number of words used in the response of our customer service representatives. We also count the number of adjunct phrases for each response. Finally, we give an overall score for the response on a scale of one to seven, with one being impolite and ten being polite, as a third measure of overall politeness. Our three coders will be tested for inter-rater reliability in the week ahead. In this study, we theorize that as the number of words and adjunct phrases increases, the language moves away from its maximum efficiency and is considered more polite. We also consider the overall rating of politeness as perceived by our coders.

#10 — Grounding/FOOK

2006-04-18T02:11:00.000-04:00

Method

Participants

In our experiments, n students (y males, x females; average age z) from Communication courses at Cornell University participated in the study in exchange for course credit.

Materials & Procedure

At the start of each experiment, participants were given a brief overview about the premise of the experiment. They were told they would be participating in a study on short-term memory to prevent any expectations of the experiment from affecting the outcome. After this overview, each participant was asked to complete a consent form and a demographics form, the latter being used to collect statistics on age and gender.

The participants in each dyad were then separated; each participant was given an excerpt from a T.S. Eliot poem, "Burnt Norton", to read. Afterwards, they were asked to answer a short questionnaire that related to what they did and did not understand in the poem, and how they interpreted it. The final section of the questionnaire tested their recognition of public figures in a variety of fields as diverse as physics, art, entertainment, and crime. After each participant answered their questionnaire, the dyad was brought together either in an AIM
conversation or in a face-to-face setting and was asked to have a short conversation with each other about what they had read. After completing the conversation, the participants were again separated and asked to answer a second questionnaire. Many of the questions on this questionnaire corresponded directly to specific questions on the first questionnaire, but this time asked how they believed their partner in
the dyad had understood the poem. Similar to the first questionnaire, the second questionnaire included a public figure recognition section, which asked if a participant thought their partner would recognize the same people the participant was asked about in the first questionnaire.

Once both participants finished their questionnaires, they were brought together again for a short debriefing, during which they were told about the true premise of the experiment. Each participant received a copy of a standard debriefing document, as well as a copy of the consent form that they had signed before starting the experiment.

Coding

Once both questionnaires had been collected from all participants, the data from each dyad was entered into a spreadsheet and correlated. We plan to perform four types of correlations with these data:

For each participant, compare his/her first questionnaire and second questionnaire;

For each dyad, compare their first questionnaires;

For each dyad, compare their second questionnaires;

For each dyad, compare oneÂs first questionnaire to the other's second questionnaire, and vice versa.

Since many of the questions on the first questionnaire correspond to questions on the second questionnaire, these will be the focus of our numerical correlations. All of these corresponding questions have numerical values ranging from 1 to 7, except for the yes/no questions in the person recognition section. Our correlations will measure numerically how accurately participants intuited each other's knowledge and feelings, as well as how close each particpant's knowledge and feelings were to the knowledge and feelings of their dyad partner.

10 Motivation and Deception

2006-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

1. Participants

The participants in this study were students recruited from undergraduate Communication classes at a large northeastern university, between the ages of 18- and 24-years-old. All students received class credit for their participation in the study, and some participants additionally received $10, although they were unaware of the latter at the time of recruitment. The subjects participated in anonymous same-sex dyads, with X male-male and X female-female pairs.

2. Procedure

Participants arrived at separate locations and were escorted by an experimenter to isolated computer terminals. Participants signed an informed consent form, and were given five conversational topics they were instructed to discuss with an unknown person over an instant messaging program. Participants were informed that there was no time limit for their conversation, and that they should discuss each topic until they felt they had exhausted it.

Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the role of receiver, and were given no further instructions except to keep the conversation going. The other half were assigned to the role of sender, and they were told to lie on either the second and third or the fourth and fifth topics. The senders were further randomly assigned into either the high- or low-motivation sub-condition. The low-motivation senders were simply instructed to lie to their partners. The high-motivation senders were told that if they were successful in deceiving their partners, they would receive a $10 prize, but that if their deception was detected by their partner, they would be forced to remain in the experimental room for an additional fifteen minutes, wearing headphones attached to a random white noise generator. The highly motivated senders then listened to a one-minute sample of this white noise, and their attention was directed to a webcam, from which they were told they would be monitored during this time.

The participants then discussed the five topics in AIM chat while a remote experimenter recorded their conversation from a remote computer. After completing their discussion, each participant was administered a post-interaction questionnaire. The questionnaire completed by senders assessed the effectiveness of the motivation manipulation, whereas the questionnaire completed by receivers assessed whether they were successfully deceived by the sender.

All participants were debriefed post-study, at which time it was revealed that some senders had been misled to believe that they would be punished and rewarded based on their ability to deceive their partners, and that this was a false construct used in order to increase their motivation to successfully deceive their partners. The basic goals of the research were described, and all participants were requested not to discuss the study with others. Additionally, all highly motivated senders received a $10 prize that they were informed was not related to their deceptive success.

3. Automated linguistic analysis

The conversation transcripts were split into sender language and receiver language, and were separated by topic. The first topic was intended as an icebreaker and was not included in any of the transcript analyses. Each dyad produced eight different transcript files: two deceptive topics and two truthful topics for each sender, and two deceptive topics and two truthful topics for each receiver. All transcripts were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (LIWC). This text analysis program was used to analyze transcripts on a word-by-word basis, including punctuation, and compared words against a file of words divided into 74 linguistic dimensions (Hancock et al., 2004). The variables of interest in our study included: word counts; pronouns; emotion words and words pertaining to the senses; and exclusive words and negations, as well as question frequency. LIWC produces the percentage of each variable type by dividing the frequency of the observed variable by the total number of words in the sample (Hancock et al., 2004). Word counts were reported as frequency totals.

#10 Private vs. Public Communication

2006-04-17T15:09:00.000-04:00

Participants
The group plans to recruit twenty to thirty participants for the study. So far, fifteen people have successfully completed the experiment. All of the participants were 18-22 year old Cornell college students with Facebook.com accounts. Each person had been asked individually from among the group members’ friends to participate in the study.

Materials and Procedure
The experiment consisted of three main parts: a task section, a historical data section, and a questionnaire. Before the experiment began, the participants were first briefly told about what they would be expected to do in the study. Then, they were asked to sign a consent form to ensure that their data could be used for future analysis. To guarantee that any personal information would be kept confidential, they were assigned code numbers so that their names would not be tied to the data.

In the task section, the participant was given a procedure form containing six tasks to complete on Facebook. They were required to write messages to their friends using either wall posting or private messaging. The tasks were as follows:
1. Comment on a photo.
2. Ask someone what the homework or reading was for a class. (or ask about a prelim/final)
3. Make an inside joke with a positive connotation.
4. Ask a friend if they have a job or internship after the semester ends.
5. Compliment a friend.
6. Ask someone for more information about an organization that they are in.
After the participants were done with the tasks, they copied and pasted their six messages into a template notepad document that had been provided for them. The participant was told to replace all identifying information with XXX and to indicate for each message whether it was a wall post or private message. They then were asked to sign in to a preexisting Yahoo account made specifically for the experiment. After attaching the notepad document and putting their assigned code number in the subject heading, the participant emailed the Yahoo message to another account made specifically for the study. Throughout the first part, the experimenter waited outside of the room. However, the participants were told that they could ask questions at any time if necessary.

The second part of the experiment was collecting historical data. Each participant was asked to provide five previous wall messages and five previous private messages that they had written in the past. They copied and pasted their messages into another provided template notepad document. Then, using the same procedure and format as in the first part, the participants attached and sent the document by email.

In the final part, the participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The first section consisted of a few general questions asking them about their general usage of Facebook – how often they use it and which method of communication they use more frequently. The questionnaire then also contained six sets of questions pertaining to the tasks from part one of the experiment. Each set was the same, and focused on the reasons behind why the participants chose a particular method for that task when communicating on Facebook. Within each section, they were first asked to reflect on how many people they anticipated would read and understand the message they wrote. Then, given a set of potential reasons for choosing each method, they were asked to rate their level of agreement with each statement. Additional sections were available for writing open responses.

At the end, the participants were debriefed about the purpose of the study and given candy bars for participating in the experiment. Overall, the entire process took around 40-50 minutes for each student.

Coding Scheme
Our group is still working on the coding scheme for our project, but we have a few preliminary ideas:
1. Length of messages – number of words, number of complete sentences
2. Number & type of events contained in the message – i.e. trip, party, meeting etc. and whether academic or personal related

Assignment #10

2006-04-16T22:34:00.000-04:00

Methods:

Phase 1:

Participants:

In this part, we chose Cornell University undergraduate students who were our acquaintances between the ages of 18 and 22. Aiming for an even division between males and females, we selected 9 males and 11 females, all of whom speak fluent English (i.e. having spoken English for at least seven years). Additionally, familiarity with the instant messaging program, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), was required.

Procedure:

First, the participants signed an informed consent form. We then used a predetermined script to ask them, via AIM, how to tie the shoelaces on a typical untied shoe. The participants used their own messaging clients and personal computers and communicated with us from their own environment (generally dorm rooms). After they gave an indication that they were finished, the conversations were saved and the participants were debriefed. Some extraneous content was removed from the final transcripts; this consisted of unnecessary introductory information from the script as well as statements given after the conclusion of the instructions themselves.

Coding:

We coded each transcript for various linguistic features (exact details to be determined).

Phase 2:

Participants:

The participants for the next phase of the experiment were drawn from the same pool as those in Phase I and consisted of approximately 20 students from a communications class at Cornell University, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 22. The same requirement for fluency in English is applied from the previous section.

Phase II participants participated for credit in communications courses which they were taking.

Procedure:

Before beginning, the participants signed an informed consent form. They were then given a packet of the Phase I transcripts, which included a questionnaire for each one. They were asked to read the transcripts and then to grade them on a numerical scale as to whether it tended to be wordy or concise, sloppy or organized, confusing or straightforward, and vague or clear. After making these evaluations, the participant was asked to determine if the directions in each transcript were written by a male or by a female. Finally, the participants were debriefed.

"Why FtF Still Matters!"

2006-04-14T18:30:00.000-04:00

I came across an interesting article recently about how/why FtF is the "golden standard" of communication -- a bit in contrast with what we're learning, but interesting nevertheless. Thought you all might like a look:

[Link]

Blogs: shotgun mouthwash?

2006-04-11T10:10:00.000-04:00

COMM 450 blog entry #9

It looks like my first submission of this entry was swallowed up somewhere, so here is a second one.

I find and believe that most blogs that pretend to any sort of content are repositories of semi-digested intellectual pap. This goes double for the popular ones. My impression is that there exist networks of blogs which are highly self-referential. They are not a source of valid scholarship, and most of the time they serve as little more than a timesink for everyone involved. Latour's theory of how scientific papers attain legitimacy has some bearing here: according to a paper of his I read in my freshman year, scientific papers gain legitimacy
by having a large degree of other papers referencing to them. This is the same principle behind Pagerank. A given blog can have a lot of legitimacy within a certain community because everyone else cites it, but it's a horse of a different color to have any kind of legitimacy in the larger world, whether it be another Web community or some community in real life.

As with most blog entries, this one makes vague, grandiose claims without any sort of proper citation except that of the anecdotal sort (which, as any good academic can tell you, is the best kind, as it can't be questioned). Am I lying about Latour? Who knows?! Here's a link to Wikipedia: hooray!

That said, there are some linkages between real life and blog posts which can lend blogs some legitimacy. When you get a large enoughmass of people together, collaborative environments gain some sort of importance of their own: Daily Kos and Free Republic aren't blogs per se, but they have some kind of clout because a lot of vocal people read them and consider themselves part of their blogging communities. Since people like to congregate and think of themselves as members of groups, blogs and blogging communities won't go away. This is why we need to implement painful penalties for writing stupid things in any public media. I'm open to suggestions as to my own penance.

Assignment 9: woooo..college :)

2006-04-11T09:44:00.000-04:00

Hey kids,

Creative freedom. I like it :). Well, I figured that since most of you now know the convenient linguistic device "cricket," I should introduce you to another fun device, "Wooooo...college." Although it's hard to explain to newbies when using "wooo..college" is appropriate, I find that giving examples are the most helpful.

Staying at the library til midnight and then beelining straight for the bars is "wooo...college." Using an empty beer can as a door stop is also "woooo..college." Currently being without employment after graduation, but having your liberal arts degree to keep you warm at night is definitely "wooo... college."

Once you've become advanced at using "wooo...college" you can "wooooo" other things. For example, "woooo...senioritis," "wooo...unemployment," or "wooo...research project" are all acceptable and potentially hilarious when used in the right context. Now that you've gone through Woo...College: 110 with Kim Biason, my wish for you is to use it liberally to entertain yourself and your friends. Enjoy.

Now, I'm going to go on a completely different tangent because it's my blog and I can do what I want. (wooo...blogging). Being a senior when there's less than two months 'til graduation is WEIRD. You start thinking about what cities everyone will be in next year, how you really want to live it up these last few weeks, and how a lot of your current behavior will be considered inappropriate in the real world. Not being a student for the first time in 18 years is scary. So's leaving this place you've called home for the past 4 years. Wow, that sounded pretty cheesy on my part. I guess I just surprise myself when I'm home in Jersey over break and telling my friends that I have to go home on Sunday because I've got class on Monday. It happened so easily and naturally that I genuinely surprised myself. And in hindsight, I'm not sure if that's such a bad thing, getting so used to something it starts to feel like home.

To the underclassmen, live it up because these 4 years fly by.
To my fellow seniors, wooo...college! I'll see you kids at Senior Week. Best of luck after graduation.
To Amy and Jeff, great class! Thanks for giving me something to look forward to academically.

Thanks for indulging me by reading this blog. Hope you enjoyed it at least a little.

Woooo..posting!
Kim Biason

Assignment #9: Siblings

2006-04-11T09:04:00.000-04:00

My sister, Becca, a junior in high school, came up to Cornell with me yesterday after my weekend at home. My roommate, Alex, was home as well this weekend and her sister decided to come up too for the 'Death Cab for Cutie' concert last night. My other roommate, Carolyn, spent her weekend hanging out with her family in Ithaca because her family decided to visit. I was thrilled Becca decided to come up on her spring break to hang out for a few days, and even more intrigued by the situation of having my roommates' younger siblings-- all seventeen years old-- visiting on the same night.
I know Carolyn and Alex as friends, very close friends, who laugh more than they worry and who are carefree in general. Adding siblings to the mix, however, really changed the dynamics. I saw how Carolyn was very uptight, upset with how her brother, Eric, with everything from how he opened the peanut butter jar to how he was telling stories about their parents. She was also much more judgmental of me-- from what I perceived-- than she normally is, with normally being not very much. Alex, always friendly and jolly, would bark at her sister, Ashley, to get her things from her room, or help Alex clean up her room. Obviously I am not excluded from this critical eye, but I don't think I was markedly different with Becca in the surroundings of my college apartment than I am when I'm with just friends, no family. I was upset with Becca for going into my bedroom to IM her friends for a few minutes while everyone was hanging out in the kitchen, although I know she is old enough to judge situations for herself and determine whether that was impolite or not. Looking back, I wish I was cool enough to let all of her behavior go, and able to stop worrying about how her behavior reflected her, our family, or me.
I guess my friends and I were all worrying about how our siblings were reflecting our families. It’s funny though, to fret about how the sibling one adores is being judged by the friends one also adores when, in reality, they are probably having a great time together and like one another. Truthfully, the judgmental and snippy sides of my friends was mixed in with other wonderful sides of them. Monday morning, Carolyn said to Becca and me that she was so excited when she woke up and saw Eric camping out on her floor. She was very glad he was there and he made her happy. Alex, realizing the weather was much colder than they were dressed for, gave her sister her sweater while walking back from the concert, even though Alex was then left with just a thin undershirt for the walk back from Barton Hall. Ashley insisted she was fine in her T-shirt and that Alex was being silly for offering up her warm sweater, but Alex shut her ears to those comments and soldiered on with her skimpy tank top. Those aspects of my friends are so lovely to see because they are genuine. We consider ourselves far from fake and insincere, but to observe my friends with their siblings in tow was akin to seeing them in their “natural habitat,” and it was beautiful, despite a little judging here and a little snapping there.

A Racy Topic (or, Why I Don't Sleep Enough)

2006-04-11T08:38:00.000-04:00

[Disclaimer: This section of my blog post may not be suitable for the faint at heart, the politically correct, or the humorless.]

At the pizza shop a few days ago, some noisy and obviously inebriated girl was hanging out with a bunch of frat boys who reeked of alcohol. While I was waiting in line (where 'line'=='crowd') to order some pizza, this girl asked me what my name was, and if she knew me. I gave my first name and responded that no, she didn't know me. She asked why I looked familiar.

It took all of my self-control to not respond with, “Either because you saw me when I walked in five minutes ago, or because you can't tell Asians apart.”

In my software engineering class (COM S 501), my group and I are developing a new computer-based system for Olin Library for recording statistics about reference questions. Currently, whenever someone asks a question at the Olin reference desk, the staff member there has to jot down a few details about the question (e.g., date/time, duration, medium) on a standardized paper log.

Our new system will replace their existing paper-based system with an electronic one; the big feature is that it'll later automatically generate statistical reports about the questions. The trickiest part, naturally, is streamlining the user interface to make it as intuitive as possible; I've been using everything I can remember from last year's INFO 345 (human-computer interaction) course. Each member of the team has unique strengths (think of Captain Planet's Planeteers, but replace the Heart one with something less ambiguous); each has adapted to his/her part(s) of the project very effectively, and we're all working unbelievably well together.

Nonetheless, the biggest factor giving impetus to our progress is that, unlike in previous classes, our software will actually be used. That's right—next semester, whenever you ask a question at the Olin Library reference desk, and you see that staff member click a few things on the computer immediately after you get your answer, s/he's probably recording your question in our new system. :)

I leave you with two Foxtrot comics: this one brand new (and mind-numbingly time-consuming), and this one classic (in at least two senses).

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-04-11T07:49:00.000-04:00

Cornell Language and Technology

BBQ-ing

Before I took this class, I never posted on a blog before. But now, I am starting to get used to the whole swing of things. What I want to talk about today is one of my favorite past times, barbequing. I love just chilling on a Saturday afternoon, putting the “game” on and throwing some food on the grill. It’s tough to find nice days here in Ithaca, so it is definitely important to get outside and enjoy them.

Usually one can throw the ball around also while grilling. I especially like to throw the ball around because my baseball glove is very near and dear to me. I have been using it since I was in sixth grade, so you can only imagine how broken in it is. I think that many people have emotional connections with their baseball gloves because it takes so much time just to break one in perfectly and also because you never just use a whole bunch of different gloves. It’s usually you and your glove for a long time. So my relationship with my glove is rather monogamous.

But back to the grilling. What is also important is to know when to flip what you are cooking. For example, when I am grilling some burgers out on my back porch, after a while some juices will cake at the top of the burger. That is a sure sign to press the burger against the grill and then flip it, causing the grill to crackle with a blast of fire from underneath. Usually fat burns very well when it touches the flames underneath the grill. There is also a great debate of whether to use a gas grill versus a charcoal grill. I believe that during the grilling cook-off’s that people have throughout the country, the main consensus is that charcoal is better than gas. However, I don’t know the reason for this and cannot support either argument. So if someone knows the difference pretty well go ahead and respond to my blog.

I believe that BBQ-ing is a relaxing experience if you are able to chill out and enjoy the weather with some friends. Putting on a ball game to enhance the grilling experience also helps. I suggest that whoever reads this blog tries to take advantage of the good weather we will have in the next few weeks and get out there and grill!

Assignment #9

2006-04-11T05:38:00.000-04:00

I wish Pearls Before Swine was in the Cornell Sun, but at least we have Dilbert.

#9 - Barry Bonds

2006-04-11T01:46:00.000-04:00

Wow. This is my first ever blog ... wow ...
So I'm going to write about Barry Bonds and steroids because this needs to be said. I was talking with the physical therapist/track team trainer about these subjects, and I learned some very interesting things that everyone should know.

Steroids 1) improve muscle recovery time and as a consequence stamina - allowing you to hit the ball hard April through August, 2) improve strength, potentially to the point of having excessive bulk (see Caminetti ~1995) depending on the drug and use, but not if taken properly (see Sosa, Bonds, Big Mac, etc...), 3) encourage muscular growth, putting excess pressure on joints, ligaments/tendons, muscles themselves, bone structure (see 50 Cent’s body and head) and decreasing flexibility.

It's easy to confuse muscular strength, stamina and recovery with injury prevention, but DON'T. Steroids can't prevent injuries, rather, they only help with fatigue - by recruiting muscular fibers faster. Therefore, steroids are WAY more likely to cause injuries. Bonds was more likely to be injured while on steroids. Also, people have said that as soon as he stopped taking steroids he started having injuries. But this is basically nonsense, especially when you consider his injuries have been to his knees - probably due muscular imbalance/weight from steroid use and regular wear combined with his body. Remember, he has a family history of bad knees (Willie Mays and his father too), and what's more, wear and tear is from chronic stress (which is the second definition of the word "baseball" in the dictionary).

Many people think steroids lengthened Bonds' career, but this is not so. The problems and injuries he has been having probably resulted from long-term playing, and were only catalyzed by steroids. It seems to me Barry Bonds has only shortened his career by using steroids, despite rejuvenating it significantly over the last few years.

9 moving on

2006-04-11T01:41:00.000-04:00

So the first day I had classes this semester, I walked through that cracked up pedestrian/traffic gauntlet that is the parking lot between bailey and kennedy and I got kind of sentimental. This was going to be the last time I had classes at Cornell. I really liked undergrad. It may have been a cracked up parking lot, but it was *my* cracked up parking lot! The semester has gone by really fast, faster than normal for me, and I kind of can't believe I'll be moving out of Ithaca and away from Cornell.

On the other hand, I know that I'm going to Boston and law school in the fall, and that's kind of a huge source of relief for me as I don't have to worry about getting a real job or any of that just yet. I was at Harvard's admitted students weekend for the past couple of days and while the excitement was kind of buffered by the fact that I visited in January and already had my "omg I'm in love" moment, I had a really fantastic time (although now I wish I had another weekend to do all my work!)

I met some really awesome people who I cannot wait to have as my classmates, my friend from Cornell who was trying to decide between law schools decided he'd be most likely be going to Harvard with me, and I got to have lunch with Jonathan Zittrain, who (aside from being the co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society) is actually really nice and very funny! Berkman definitely made choosing Harvard a no-brainer and I cannot wait to be working with the amazing people there; they do really awesome things like the open net initiative and a clinical program that provides pro bono legal services for cases that involve cyberlaw, new technologies, and other intellectual property issues.

But as much as I am really excited about HLS I am very definitely nostalgic and I'm absolutely still going to miss Ithaca (and my cheap rent!) I don't really know how to reconcile leaving. I know I'll at least come back to visit, but then the Ithaca that I visit won't be the Ithaca that it is now. I don't even feel like I'm growing up, just moving on, but I know that as I move on, I'm taking a lot away a lot.

Assignment #9

2006-04-11T00:29:00.000-04:00

This past Sunday, about 100 juniors from my high school descended on Cornell for their college trip. These annual trips are organized by Stuyvesant High School's college office and generally attempt to visit 2 or 3 schools in one day (after Cornell, they went on to Binghamton). This time the trip fell on Cornell Days, and Cornell was unwilling to provide them with official tours, so they called on Stuy alumni to offer the kids some sort of a Cornell experience. I showed up, but as I was feeling sick I did little other than talk a bit with the students and the chaperones. The trip leader was Ms. Archie, a school administrator I've known since even before high school, and it was nice that she recognized me.
Things like these make me reflect on my past, my future, and everything in between. As a senior I'm especially prone to this, I guess. These kids didn't seem particularly excited to be on the trip, but I'm sure they were thinking of the new great beyond that Cornell appears to be. I wanted to tell them that they are mistaken, but why should I? No one made it any easier for me. I'm starting to think that high school, even more than college, shaped me into who I am, and it seems that things are about to come full circle.

#9 — The Horror, The Horror

2006-04-10T23:24:00.000-04:00

This post will be as boring as dirt and likely hard to understand unless you are a code geek. You have been warned.

I deal with a great deal of legacy code in my job as a systems developer: we have dozens of arcane PHP scripts which were never documented, and even their authors couldn't tell you how they work. Granted, that might be related to the fact that some of our alumn employees did a great deal of their work drunk. Our biggest app, which is used by the HelpDesk and all of the labs on campus to manage employees, is perhaps the most (or least, depending on how you look at it) auspicious example of these things in practice.

One of the most heavily used and poorly written pieces of this application is the scheduling functionality: managers create empty schedules with shift slots, and then people schedule themselves to work in empty slots. The resulting schedules are drawn in a big pretty grid with colors and everything so that people can see at a glance who's supposed to be where when. Unfortunately, the script responsible for actually drawing the grid is nigh incomprehensible, and huge at 1111 lines. In order to determine where it is supposed to actually draw a header cell in the grid, it doesn't use an HTML <table>, which would be simplest, nor does it use something simple like saying "well, the last cell was over here, so if this one is supposed be right next to that one I should put it at here+something." Oh no! Either of these solutions would be far too sensible and simple for this little script. What it does do is this:

$day_name_position = ($num_slots_cumul*SLOT_WIDTH)+($realDayOfWeek)*TIME_WIDTH + ($realweek*7)*TIME_WIDTH + $day_name_offset;
if($day_name_position < 0)
{
  $day_name_offset = -$day_name_position;
  $day_name_position += $day_name_offset;
}

Let's ignore the complete lack of consistency in variable name style. Let's also ignore for a moment that the if statement there will always, when $day_name_position (which specifies where the left edge of a header cell should go) is negative, result in $day_name_position being zero. Now Let's ignore that it manages to accomplish setting $day_name_position to zero in two lines when one would have suited just fine. Instead, let's look at the first line. What. The. Hell? What is this code even doing? Even if I told you what the values of all those other variables are, and how they're calculated, do you think it would make any sense? Hint: it wouldn't. But I'll tell you anyways, just for fun. $num_slots_cumul is the number of schedule "slots" drawn so far. So that, times the width of any single slot, seems fair enough. That should tell you about where the next one should be drawn, don't you think? Apparently not. $realDayOfWeek and $realWeek are, you guessed it, integer representations of the day of the week and the week of the year for which we are drawing a header cell. Why are these necessary? Why on earth should which week of the year we're drawing a schedule for affect how we draw said schedule?

Asking myself all those questions gave me a headache. So I decided to not even attempt to answer them, and instead nullify them by simply removing all the code that was there and replacing with code that worked the way I thought it should. I figured that if there was some obscure reason that the week of the year actually mattered, my code wouldn't work and I would know. So I replaced the above (and some other stuff) with the following:

 $last_box_properties = array("width" => 0, "left" => 0);
...boring stuff...
$day_name_position = $last_box_properties["width"] + $last_box_properties["left"];
...boring stuff...
$last_box_properties["width"] = $day_name_width;
$last_box_properties["left"] = $day_name_position;

Isn't that a bit nicer? Turns out it works perfectly too, at least so far. Of course, I still have the other 1105 lines of the script to try and understand and fix.

stuff on my cat and crying while eating

2006-04-10T23:20:00.000-04:00

Love putting stuff on your cat?
Looking for ideas about more types of things you can put on your cat, sorted by genre?

If you answered with a resounding "omg, YES" to either of the above questions, consider it your lucky day: stuffonmycat.com

Be sure to check out "Best of 2005" as well as "Office on my cat."

It's nice to know someone's getting it right out there...

Also:

not getting enough absurdity in your normal every-day routine?

Option A: get the ball rolling by doing something lewd in a quiet library.
Option B: cry about it. while eating. or just laugh at other people do so: cryingwhileeating.com

Sample video captions:

Deirdre:
what she's eating: gummi worms.
what she's crying about: can't reconcile love of horses with love of gelatin.

and, tying in with the theme of our class:
Stefan:
what he's eating: Cadbury's Brunchbar.
what he's crying about: his overwhelming dependence on technology.

...me too, Stefan. me too.

Death Cab for INFO 450

2006-04-10T23:03:00.000-04:00

Wow, this is the first time I'm actually getting my post done at a reasonable time even though I need to study for my prelim tomorrow night...But anyway, my hilight of the week was definitely the Death Cab concert yesterday. I was really tired though, and I took a nap which I didn't get up from until after 6 PM. I then had to eat dinner, and of course this made me kind of late for the concert but I wasn't really worried since I was only really going to go see the headliner anyway. The line to get in for ticket holders was huge, so I ended up missing the opening act, but I heard they weren't very good anyway. Franz Ferdinand was OK, but I've only heard one song by them previously, and they played for way too long, which made everything start sounding the same at the end. Finally, Death Cab came on and they were absolutely amazing live. I thought their set would be pretty mellow, but they went all out with blasting guitars and drums and Ben has one of the best voices I've ever heard in a live performance. They even came back on stage for an encore to play my favorite Death Cab song, "I Will Follow You Into The Dark". The only problem was that people kind of just stood there didn't move around enough, and one of my friends saw a crowd surfer fall on his head. Other than that though, I'm pretty happy that that's one of like 3 shows that come up to Cornell every year...Not having a car is kind of sucks since I'd actually really like to go down to Syracuse next week to see Allister, but finding a ride is harder than I thought It'd be.

On a semi-related note...I've been embracing Web 2.0 as of late, and I recently stumbled upon this website last.fm which lets people download a plugin for their favorite media player, and upload information about the tracks that they've recently listened to in real time. Other people can then look at it, and see things like most listened to tracks, most listened to artists, etc. I'm wasting so much time browsing around the site right now...and I'm trying to coerce my friends into all signing up so I can waste some more time looking at their tracks. I'm surprised nobody's suggested this site to me before.

Anyway, I should probably start studying for my CS 482 prelim before I waste too much time writing a super long blog post. And I totally agree...I'm not a big fan of emo posts, but emo music rocks =D.

random posts allowed! all right!

2006-04-10T22:54:00.000-04:00

I found out recently that zhongwen.com, a website which is a godsend to all students of chinese (it makes finding unknown characters very easy), is written by an economist who got a degree abroad. One of the main findings of that economist is about 'countersignaling', which differs from regular signaling. Basically, regular signaling may be when the more fit peacocks spend alot of energy to show that they are fit, or when the rich spend alot of money to flaunt their wealth. Countersignaling is when the most fit members of a group do not signal, in order to separate themselves from the medium fitness members. Good examples (from his paper): "People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them." I realized how true countersignaling is, and I thought this was kinda a cool find (who knew the author of a website I use everyday did this?).

Also, I had an unusually eventful last few days, so a summary may be in order:
Friday night badminton was truncated to allow for 'hope night', a pretty well run fund-raising fair working for literacy in china. I beat my first non-caucasian in chinese chess ever there (woohoo) and enjoyed some free food (including bubble tea- YUM). Saturday plans were to have one of our monthly get-togethers (small party of about 10)-- my cousin who just got accepted to Cornell but does not want to attend (he thinks it'd be too difficult, so I need to convince him it's a good match) made a surprise visit on Saturday, so I had to rush to find activities to do with him. I could tell he hated it, and I did a terrible job of convincing him Cornell is the right place (I asked friends for candid evaluations of Cornell and got unexpected results). We had our party (him included), but our girls-who-are-friends who came; the only ones not from our dorm; left early due to boredom. Ouch. Sunday a friend who ate brunch with me stayed in my room from after eating till 6pm, so I played games and talked with her for most of the day. Nighttime was the Franz Ferdinand/Death Cab for Cutie concert: a bit stuffy, but worth it ^^

#9, staring at the blank page before you

2006-04-10T22:40:00.000-04:00

It seems life has been more than ordinary and about as far as Wisconsin from exciting, which begs the question of what to write. Between the frustration of trying to run dyads and a lack of sleep (thanks coursenroll), I think summer needs to roll in a bit quicker. In fact, I bought tulips (pretty pink and white ones) to brighten up my room last Friday.

In other news, I have two new addictions: Snood (very very bad) and Questionable Content (slightly less bad). If you have never played Snood, I highly suggest it for the next time you want to procrastinate. For all of those who have, you know how addicting it can be. As for Questionable Content, it’s a webcomic my sister told me to read (www.questionablecontent.net). I suggest starting at the beginning.

Other highlights this week include: getting a new credit card (fun!), waiting for earrings to come in the mail (from the sister), remembering (and inevitably forgetting) my brother’s birthday, waiting for my mom to call me (since she doesn’t ever want to talk when I call her), and spending (hopefully) lots of time out-or-doors.

Assignment 9: I happen to LIKE emo posts! :)

2006-04-10T22:01:00.001-04:00

I am sure you all know I just a little bit older than the average college senior. Hell, I'm even older than Jeff! It's kind of like taking a class where your little brother is the teacher. Anyway, even though I'm older than most seniors, I really feel like I am way behind in a lot of ways. I will be graduating in December and I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. I know that I want to make a lot of money so I can put my own children through college--I'm hoping they will graduate at 22 instead of 37. I know that I would like to find a job that I will like and where I will feel useful. Most of you already know what you want to do with your lives. You will probably be smart and get good jobs and THEN get married and have children. I did everything in reverse and feel unsure as to whether I will be able to get out there and make up for lost time.
All in all, it's been great going to Cornell (except for ECON 101). I get to mingle with great students and faculty and challenge myself with things I never thought I could do (I think I went overboard with the ECON course, though). I've been dragging my feet about getting my resume together and applying for summer jobs, internships, etc. I think it's a confidence thing. All I've ever really done is sell clothes and wait tables. Will I be able to get a job that has something to do with my degree? I know I can, but will I swallow my anxiety and get out there and do it? Hopefully, you guys aren't as self-conscious as me when you are 36 year-old. Oh well. At this rate, maybe I'll be over it by the time I'm 50. Better late than never, right?

Assignment #9: Beyond Candyland: Board games to satisfy your inner child

2006-04-10T21:57:00.000-04:00

If you are a college student with a limited amount of discretionary income, you’re probably on the lookout for fun activities that will give you the most “bang for your buck.” Here in Ithaca, there tend to be a lot of activities that fulfill this requirement; however, back home in Rochester, it’s a little more difficult to find things to do that don’t cost a lot of money. Luckily, my friends and I have solved this age-old problem with (in my opinion) one of the most fun solutions possible: game nights!

Over the years, my friends and I have spent countless evenings in each other’s basements playing a wide variety of different board games. While we often play the standards (Monopoly, Taboo, Risk, and Pictionary, for example), we’ve also discovered a number of lesser known games that we now count among our favorites. Today, I’ll share three of these with you, in hopes that at least one of them will spark the interest of your possibly latent inner child.

Loaded Questions
In this game, one person asks a question, and the other players write their answers on a piece of paper. The answers are collected and read, and the question asker must match each answer to its respective player. This game works best when you have a group of 5-6 people that know each other well, but it’s also a fun way to build new friendships. No matter what, you’ll always learn a lot about the other players. The questions run the gamut from mundane (“what is your favorite flavor of ice cream”) to the provocative (“if you could change one thing about America, what would it be?”), and I’ve never walked away from a game without a lot of interesting (and humorous) knowledge about the people with whom I’m playing.

Time’s Up!
This game requires partners, and I suggest that very competitive (i.e. me) people not pair with more laid-back gamers (i.e. my sister). If you follow this suggestion, the fast-paced game is much more fun for all involved. The game is a celebrity name guessing game played in three rounds, with each round allowing for successively less clue-giving. Celebrity names are written on cards, and each team must collect as many cards as possible during their one minute turns. It’s a difficult game to find, but it’s worth the search!

25 Words or Less
Players divide into two teams, and the object of the game is to collect 10 cards. Each of the cards has 5 words printed on it, and at the beginning of each round, two clue-givers “bid” on a card by saying how many words they think that they need to get their team to guess all 5 words on the card. The lowest bid wins, and if the team cannot guess all five words, the card goes to the other team. Trust me – it’s absolutely magical when your team somehow gets all 5 words when your clue-giver has given you only four words as clues!

Well, that’s it for now– if you don’t already own one of these games, I’ve included links so that you can check them out for yourselves. And while I don’t want to sound like an advertisement for Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers (I swear, I don’t work for these companies…but I wish I did!), I can’t really think of many other $20ish investments that will provide quite as much long-term enjoyment. So embrace your inner child, and if you’re looking for an extra player here at Cornell, you know where to find me :o).

#9

2006-04-10T21:34:00.000-04:00

The first thing that really gets me about this whole Scooter Libby deal is that the man is 55 years old and still thinks it's legitimate to be called "Scooter". You'd think at some point in your life you'd have a moment where you think, "I'm too old for togas, keggers and being called 'Scooter'". Then again, when you're the founding member of an organization that didn't hear that Manifest Destiny was over with, you probably missed a fair share of memos on the way.

Anyway, on to the substance of the issue at hand. So, Bush declassified an NIE document through Scooter, a CIA agent's cover was blown and.... nothing. A little less than two years ago, before we knew the who and just the what, the outrage was palatable. At some point in time, I even heard rumblings of treason charges. Politically and legally speaking though, there's an awful lot of bravado and not a lot of anything else. After all, tons of presidents have declassified info before when it was a good strategic political option--but it hasn't ever been blowing a secret operative's cover before. Even if history proves that presidents can declassify any document at any time, that should mean it's time to rethink a carte blanche to do so.

So, overall, I guess I'm not surprised by the lack of fallout from this event. I am sad, though. We're slowly chipping away at the separation of powers and justifying some major abuses of executive power. Looks like politics as usual...

The Bob Loblaw Law Blog

2006-04-10T20:31:00.000-04:00

If Gwen Stefani's song "Hollaback Girl" were written in German, it might sound a little something like this:

Einige Male bin ich um diese Schiene gewesen
So ist er nicht gerades Gehen, wie das zu geschehen
Ursache Ich ist nicht kein hollabackmädchen
Ich ist nicht kein hollabackmädchen

Think about that for a minute.

Painful Prelims

2006-04-10T19:22:00.000-04:00

So my blog is going to be a rant. A rant about professors who write exams that would be impossible to break a C- on without a PhD in the subject. I took an in-class prelim today that is an illustration of this painful phenomenon. The exam was supposed to take 50 minutes, but the teacher put 5 questions on it. These were application questions with 5 or 6 sub-parts to each question. If you do the math, that gives you less than two minutes to read and do each sub-part of each question. Factor in tricky wording and concepts that were barely touched on in class and you have my prelim. I know its Cornell and its supposed to be challenging, but when you walk out of the exam and the entire class is on the verge of tears, you know that its gone a little far- even for Cornell. And, as luck would have it, I have another prelim tomorrow which promises to be equally, if not more, painful!

I apologize for the depressing nature of my blog- its just one of those days...

Assignment 9 - My weekend trip

2006-04-10T19:21:00.000-04:00

I love traveling, but I haven’t gotten much of an opportunity to go new places throughout my life, mostly because my parents aren’t too keen on traveling. But last weekend I got to go on a trip…lots of new places to see. Aaron (my boyfriend)’s cousin was getting married in Indiana, so we took the trip out there for the weekend.

We drove all the way, so it was a looooong trip. 10 hours in the car, one way. All the way West through New York, through a bit of Pennsylvania, through all of Ohio, then into Indiana. I had no idea just how flat Indiana is. I mean, it was something I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend until I actually saw it – nothing but land as far as the eye could see, to a far off horizon. The roads were all straight, completely level, no hills like in Ithaca. It was just a completely foreign experience. Luckily, we were going very close to the Ohio/Indiana border, so once we got into Indiana we were almost there, just traveling South for a bit to the small town of Warren (population about 1200) where our hotel was.

The wedding itself was in Fort Wayne, at a huge church that would accommodate the 400 guests. Basically we drove all day Friday (8am-6pm), then spent most of Saturday at the church for pictures, the ceremony, and then spent lots of time with the family at the reception. Then got back in the car Sunday morning and drove all the way back (10am-8pm). We got back to Ithaca Sunday completely exhausted – I fell asleep at 10pm, and slept for almost 11 hours. But it was well worth it! A beautiful wedding, and a wonderful time with friends and family.

Picture Caption:
Myself with Aaron's family at the church(L to R: his sister-in-law, brother, mother, myself, and Aaron).

[a9] who needs emo posts?

2006-04-10T19:07:00.000-04:00

When the first word of your post is "life," what follows is almost sure to be an angsty rant followed by an existential reflection. What a commentary, eh?

Recently, Krystal and I recently put up the Slope Day site after about a week's worth of work. I don't think it turned out too bad. It's encroaching upon Web2.0, using lightbox and a very straightforward design; however, it also has hard corners and basic text layout which makes it non-Web2.0. Pshaw, being "in the loop" isn't as good as constant design practice anymore. Now there's CSS/XHTML validation and no frames/iframes, and everyone and their mother hawking over your code.

If you take a look at Newegg, there's an awesome one day sale on a WDC 250-gig SATA with 16MB cache ($90). That's just plain hawt. I bought 2, then realized I don't have anywhere to put them in my PC! I only have three free 5.25" slots left (the other two 3.5" bays are used by my 111 GB IDE drives). I checked out some SATA enclosures, but they ran at like $40-$100 (yuck!). Eventually, I landed on a Thermaltake iCage, which has a nifty fan at the front and converts three 5.25" bays into three 3.5" bays ($17.50). That worked for me, so I bit. I also purchased a Sennheiser 150 because my headset broke. Well, it didn't really break. I kind of ran over the little volume dongle with my chair a few times and now the board is exposed and the wires are frayed. Consequently, my mic doesn't work. So I bought a Sennheiser (which is supposed to be THE headphone manufacturer of choice), which I have really high hopes for.

I'm good. Yeah, g-zero-zero-d. I got between 8-10 hours of sleep this weekend for the first time since Spring Break, I think, and I'm rarin' to tackle this upcoming week with a lot of passion and (hopefully not too) little sleep.

To quote Bob Marley, "don't worry, be happy." If you need reasons... will a biological and cosmological one do?

Nod your head.

CDL Fashion Show!

2006-04-10T19:05:00.000-04:00

I don't know if anyone in this class went to the CDL (Cornell Design League) fashion show, but it was spectacular. At least, in my opinion it was and that's because....I was a model at the show!! :) How did I get this lucky? One of my housemates is a designer for CDL! And she specifically picked me to model one of her designs this year! :)

Ok enough chit-chat, here are some pictures from behind-the-scenes:

my day

2006-04-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

Today I got up earlier and did some homework before it got too nice out to be inside. Afterwards I took my dogs for a run behind my house on a trail through the forest. Then Rotor Rooter came to my place and got the junk out of the drain, I was very happy with this. Before I knew it lunch time had arrived. I ate pizza bagels. Very tasty! I watched some of the Philidelphia Story because I got bored just alittle. Then I got bored watching the movie so I decided to outside again. My father called while outside. I talked to him for a few minutes until I told him I had to go because I had an assignment that required me to post a blog. Done.

Pistons Own the Heat AND I do not like Shaq

2006-04-10T16:25:00.000-04:00

For starters, I am a huge Pistons fan. However, the team never gets the credit it deserves. They have been phenomenal time and time again and yet sports announcers continue to focus on the ridiculous individual aspects of basketball allstars instead of a team of allstars (which is exactly what the Pistons are). Proof? Take the fact that four of the five Pistons players made the All Star Game this year. Now let me vent about how much I despise the Heat, particularly Shaq. I mean, not only is he ridiculously arrogant but he also extremely lacks many simple basketball skills. Take for example his free throw shooting ability. I mean, just in the recent Pistons versus Heat game he shot 4/10. That's a good day for him. Quite honestly, he's just tall and big and that's all he's got. He only needs to stand on his tip toes to dunk. I mean seriously. And that's not all. He's ALWAYS injured. You can't go an entire season without sports announcers making so many excuses for Shaq, "Oh Shaq's coming off of his injury...he's just hurt that's all and hasn't had time to train," etc etc. This is a common trend let me tell you. I'll tell you how Shaq scores-- he backs his butt into the opposing player and then turns and dunks the ball. Honestly it's pretty smart to foul him most of the time since he's a loser when it comes to free throws. I mean they're free throws!!! Instead of having statues built in his backyard of himself and having his own TV show he could be in the gym shooting free throws like a real pro athlete should be.

But back to the Pistons...My friend Tim (living in Miami) decided that he wanted to bet that Miami would beat us during last Thursdays game. I knew that was silly so I took him up on it. Now he has to wear a Billups jersey out in Miami one night and take pictures with his friends and then post them on Facebook. So sad. Point being, Miami didn't even stand a chance! For one, they didn't make one three-pointer the entire game! How about that for good basketball? Also, five of our players had over 12 points, whereas only Shaq and Wade had over six for the Heat! That proves that we are an amazing team all around and that teams such as the Heat only have two "allstars" (okay Wade is aight) cannot think of beating us. And this is why we own them all with the best record in the NBA (61-15). Score!

Assignment #8, Option 2

2006-04-05T19:27:00.000-04:00

The Kraut paper’s main focus is to examine (through 2 experiments) how important shared visual information is to completing a collaborative task by examining pairs’ success in completing a bicycle repair task under conditions of differing shared visual space. One condition is co-presence, in which both workers and helpers share all the same visual space. Another condition is purely audio (helpers cannot see anything related to the task). Another is limited shared visual space, using a head-mounted video system that provides remote helpers with a view of what the worker is looking at
and a portion of the surrounding environment (partial view of task objects and work environment if it is in the worker’s field of view). The idea is that while completing the task, the degree to which helpers and workers share visual space will impact the language used and success at the task. The paper brings up interesting points related to our readings in Clark, such as the visual aspects of grounding in conversations. When there is shared visual information it is easier for the parties involved to establish common understanding (common ground) in the conversation. For example, a helper can see what stage of the repair the worker is on, so they both have the as common ground the stage of repair. Also, the helper and/or worker can refer to things in the shared visual space to reach common ground like saying “that wrench” and pointing to the wrench they are referring to. The Kraut paper emphasizes the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness (the helper can see what stage of the repair the worker is on, etc.) and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation (grounding).

The paper hypothesizes that the video system will improve the dyad’s performance on the task compared to the audio only condition because the visual cues will improve situational awareness and conversational grounding. (However, the video system will not be as good as co-presence condition.) Also, helpers will use visual information to help them time their assistance, communicate this assistance effectively, and monitor comprehension. Workers are hypothesized to be less explicit about what they are doing and when they need help, because they know the helper can see what they are doing.

Experiment 1 used a between-subject comparison of audio-only and audio–video conditions. The experimental findings showed that although the addition of video did not change performance on the task, it did affect the way helpers and workers communicated in each situation. When lacking visual information (audio only) workers were more explicit in describing the state of the task. They were also more explicit in describing their personal internal state (for example, their understanding of the helper’s instructions). Helpers/workers without video were more likely to acknowledge each others’ utterances with acceptance phrases like “yes” and “uh huh” in order to ground understanding. These things occurred because the dyads lacked visual cues to ground common understand, so they had to use verbal ways of grounding.

Experiment 2 differed from experiment 1 in that the experimenters used a within-subjects design comparing audio-only, audio–video, and side-by-side conditions.

The Kraut paper makes recommendations for the design of a video system for remote collaborative tasks to help people use visual cues for grounding and task awareness. According to the researchers, an effective system should provide a wide field of view that includes both the task object and environment, clarifies what is part of the shared visual space, provide mechanisms to allow people to track one another’s focus of attention, and provide support for gesture within the shared visual space.

Questions for the researchers:
According to the results, the video-audio condition and the audio condition did not have any significant difference in task performance. Do you think you would have gotten similar results with a different task? Using something very commonplace like bicycles seems like it would decrease the probability of the task being completely novel to the subjects, and perhaps increase the workers’ tendency to rely on past experience rather than the helpers’ instructions, closing the potential gap between results in the video-audio and audio conditions. If the experiment used other tasks that had a greater probability of being completely novel, perhaps we would see more results in favor of the video condition.

Why did the experimenters decide to use a head mounted video camera instead of a stationary one? I think that if 2 stationary cameras were used, one focused on the task object and another on the work environment, the results would have been different. It would be common ground between both the worker and helper what was in both people’s view at all times and perhaps they would have been more efficient because they wouldn’t have to constantly ask “can you see that?” This might have helped performance time.

Did the experimenters find any difference based on gender between subjects’ performance in this experiment? Was the task one that would be more familiar to men? Did men and women use different language to explain how to repair the bicycle?

Assignment #8: Option 2

2006-04-05T00:33:00.000-04:00

The Kraut article focuses on the ways visual information is used as a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical tasks, specifically bicycle repair. This visual information plays 2 main roles. It helps people maintain up to date mental models of the state of the task and others’ activities, also known as situational awareness. It also helps people communicate about the task by aiding conversational grounding. 4 sources of visual information include participants’ heads and faces, participants’ bodies and actions, the focal task objects, and the work context. The major limitation of videoconferencing is that not all of this visual information is available. The authors attempt in their experiments to specify the components of physical collaboration that rely on visual info, to identify the types of visual cues each requires, and to understand how properties of specific technologies provide or fail to provide these visual cues.

In the two experiments described in the article, the authors compare performance on a bicycle repair task of pairs in separate conditions: videoconferencing, audio only, and, in experiment 2, physical co-presence. In experiment 1, results showed that pairs, consisting of helper and worker, who shared visual context were neither faster nor more accurate in completing the bicycle repair task than pairs who communicated via audio only. When pairs shared visual context, helpers gave more proactive assistance and workers were also less explicit in describing the state of their environment and what they had accomplished. In experiment 2, results showed that the visual info that the helper received over the video system influenced the form of pairs’ dialogues but did not improve performance on bicycle repair tasks over that in the audio-only condition.

My questions from the reading are the following: If better technology was available and the 4 main visual information sources could be shared, do you think performance would have improved in comparison to the audio-only condition or is there something about physical co-presence that cannot be replicated? Also, was the use of a bicycle repair task supposed to be a novel experience for participants or were they bicycle experts? I think their knowledge of the task could have significantly affected performance results. Finally, one would assume that more proactive help would assist in task performance. Why do you think this seemed to have little beneficial affect in the video condition of Experiment 1?

Assignment #8 - Option 2

2006-04-04T11:34:00.000-04:00

According to Kraut et al, people use visual information to obtain situational awareness and to help with conversational grounding. Situational awareness consists of seeing bodies and their environment, and using this information to keep a current knowledge of the status of the task. Visual information also helps with conversational grounding, which is the knowledge shared by speakers.

Kraut et al first acknowledge that it is too difficult for video systems to relay all of the visual information that we have in face-to-face settings. Instead, they wish to pinpoint the specific visual cues required to perform group tasks, acting under the assumption that if these important cues are presented through video, the group task will be more likely to succeed. Kraut et al chose bicycle repair for their experiments, an activity which falls into the category of a mentor task: a task in which a person performs the physical actions while guided by the speech of another. Kraut et al divided the visual information in the experiments into the categories of heads/faces, bodies/actions, task objects, and environment. They observed the ways in which subjects used these categories in keeping track of task status and others' actions, identifying the focus of others' attention, communicating successfully and quickly, and keeping track of others' understanding.

Kraut et al address the problems in the current video system of "talking heads" - videoconferencing that only provides the cue category of heads/faces. They suggest that this limited visual information requires that people in videoconferences use the same language as with the telephone. With this in mind, their experiment compares task performance in the following three mediums: face-to-face, audio, and videoconferencing with a view of hands, actions, objects, and environment, but not heads.

The conclusion from both their experiments was that while the video system did not affect the final performance, it facilitated understanding between the subjects. My questions from the experiments are the following: What was the reason behind the experimenters initially deciding that helpers could only view objects that were in the worker's field of vision, rather than providing a fixed camera in the room? Why do you think that factors such as eye gaze are unimportant in conversational grounding? Do you believe that further research is possible in testing different views in videoconferencing to see which is best?

Assignment #8 - Option 2

2006-04-04T11:27:00.000-04:00

(I find it ironic that in an assignment discussing — at least partially — why no one uses videoconferencing, one person chose the option to use the medium).

In this article, Kraut et. al focus on the way people use visual information to enhance/improve communication in collaborative physical tasks. Webcams are rarely used compared to other forms of communication, and this paper looked at how it can improve to become a better — and potentially more popular — tool.

According to this paper, visual information has two different categories: situational awareness and conversational grounding. Situational awareness is the monitoring of other participants’ actions to regulate the task using actions. It involves thought about the present and future of the direction of the communication based on the visual information. Conversational grounding is the idea that certain information becomes grounded over the course of the communication and people tend to use these grounded actions more. The study found that video system did not improve performance (for completing a task), but did change its users’ actions and thoughts about the task. In terms of track1 and 2 signals, the system created more track 2 signals than excepted, normally a sign of the establishment of grounding, but in this case likely because of the removal of certain cues through the technology. The research showed that communication combining audio and visual information did not result in better performance than mere audio communication.

I think there are a couple of things that could be further studied in this study. First of all, the constraints of the camera — stationary, location in the room, zoom, etc… — could have a major impact on the type of information people gain and even what information is grounded. Secondly, I think gender was an important factor that was somewhat overlooked. Gender can play a major influence in communication because it can effect how people communicate (across gender, with mixed gendered/same gendered groups, etc…). Males and females tend to have different speech patterns, not to mention very distinct audio and visual information.

I also have a few questions. Would the outcome of this experiment change if the participants didn’t have to complete a task but had to do something more “social” instead, such as talk about their life (that topic was arbitrary). Did/would gender have an effect on the outcomes? Could eye tracking be possible (without being too invasive) to see if it affected collaboration?

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-04-04T11:26:00.000-04:00

Cornell Language and Technology

Assignment 8

The Kraut paper is very similar to our work with Clark because numerous themes of common ground are paralleled between the two. The key point of difference being that Kraut et al highlights the impacts that visual aspects have on common ground whereas Clark discusses verbal aspects. The Kraut paper, like most Clarkian discussions, involves a coordination problem. The collaborative task that must be accomplished is that of repairing a bike.

Kraut et al further postulates that visual information plays two key roles, providing situational awareness and conversational grounding. Situational awareness allows the participants to control their utterances based on whatever task may be at hand. Conversational grounding relates to the mutual understanding that each participant has during the task. As far as conversational grounding is concerned, Kraut et al develops the idea of common ground and conversational grounding by identifying three sources. First, if the two speakers have prior knowledge of each other. The other two sources are linguistic co-presence and physical co-presence. All of these parallel the notions that Clark brings up in his work.

The Kraut paper also makes several hypotheses that seem to be very common sense. Kraut highlights the notion that a rich media will be better for accomplishing the task, which does not seem to be that compelling. The three main hypotheses deal with performance, timing and content of helper instructions, and explicitness of worker descriptions. All of these point to a richer, more visual medium providing a better solution. Hence, these hypotheses seem to be very basic, but perhaps this is the better route to take when conducting such a large experiment.

Despite the rather simple propositions the Kraut paper makes, the findings were somewhat surprising. The fact that video did not change performance, as compared to the audio part of the experiment surprised me. However, I think the main aim of this study was to see how video changed the coordination of conversation, which indeed seemed apparent. I believe this can be attributed to what Clark would term as “affordances.” Based on the nature of the medium, videos definitely change the nature of a coordination problem.

From the reading I have came up with two main questions.

1) What chose Kraut et al to use the coordination problem of a bicycle as compared to a different problem? I think that the degree of how task oriented the problem was would change her measures of performance. Perhaps video could result in better performance than audio.

2) The other question I have is whether there can be some other technology or design similar to video but more effective; however I am not sure if this is even feasible or not.

I like bicycles

2006-04-04T11:11:00.000-04:00

COMM 450 blog entry #8

This paper discusses two experiments that were run to assess aspects
of technologically mediated communication in goal-oriented tasks. The
variables that were controlled dealt with the shared media of two
participants, one of whom was a naive worker and the other of whom was
an "expert" instruction-giver.

Predictions were, essentially, that measured success at the tasks
would increase along a continuum of shared communication space ranging
from least successful with half-duplex shared audio to most successful
with person-to-person contact in a shared physical space. Between
these two extremes existed full-duplex shared audio and shared audio
and video wherein the expert could see a portion of the field of view
of the worker.

Surprisingly, there was little significant variation in success
between using full-duplex audio and video. Here I suggest a few
reasons for that which were not considered in the article, based
around the actions that an instruction-giver may take in a shared
space that may not be taken otherwise.

The article uses the opportunity to make physical gestures indicating
specific objects in a shared space in order to ground discussion of
tasks to be performed and the lack of an equivalent opportunity in a
remote shared-media environment as one reason that a side-by-side
environment is more effective. The availability of a shared visual
environment in the shared video setup helped by allowing deictic
references to items in the shared visual space. I suggest also that
it is easier to partake in interactive dialogue when the
instruction-giver has more than passive control over their field of
view. The experimenters have suggested that the limited field of view
of the video apparatus may have restricted its usefulness; I suggest
also that the fact that the instruction-giver was merely "along for
the ride" and not able to direct their field of view independently of
the worker was significant in the dialogue between instruction-giver
and worker.

One way of testing this would be to mount the video camera that the
worker wears in such a fashion that its field of view may be directed
remotely by the instruction-giver. This, coupled with the ability of
the worker to see the video image that the instruction-giver sees,
takes some of the burden off of the worker to position themself so
that the instruction-giver can see what they are talking about. It
also would provide some feedback to the worker as to what specifically
the instruction-giver is concerned with at a given moment; this would
permit a part of the shared physical environment circumstances to be
duplicated in the remote shared video environment.

Eye-tracking devices similar to those found in camcorders could also
be employed to focus the instruction-giver's camera (which would be
controlled by what the instruction-giver is looking at) or to "box" on
the instruction-giver's viewscreen what the worker is looking at and
to mark in a similar fashion on the worker's HUD what the
instruction-giver is looking at. This is, indeed, suggested as
important for design of such a system in the future within the paper.

This would introduce to the shared video environment further aspects
of some of the nonverbal, unspoken communication that is available to
those who are in a shared physical environment.

A further issue is that of the familiarity of participants with the
video equipment and its limitations. Greater facility at providing
good video input to the instruction-giver might be attained by giving
workers and instruction-givers a chance to experience the experimental
setup from each others' sides as a part of a warm-up exercise. This
could help to defeat some of the asymmetry inherent in the remote
location of the instruction-giver.

Another suggestion I have would be to set up a similar scenario in a
fully virtual environment. It is common in multi-player first-person
computer games to allow players who are out of play to follow those
who are in play using different over-the-shoulder, through-the-eyes,
or roaming cameras. The issue of whether limitations in the video
feed were at fault for a lesser measure of success in the shared video
environment could be addressed by creating a task for a worker to
carry out in a virtual environment, such as running through a maze and
performing tasks at different points throughout it, with an "expert"
to help. Limiting the points of view which would be available to the
expert could provide further edification as to whether different
vantages on another's activities are more or less conducive to giving
instructions in completing a task.

Assignment #8, Option 2: Visual resources in grounding and collaboration

2006-04-04T10:46:00.000-04:00

While we've focused on verbal cues and structures in communication, Kraut et al. focused on visual cues and their impacts on grounding information efficiently. Specifically, they studied the effects of visual cues during a conversation between a worker and a helper, in which the helper is giving instructions to the worker to complete a collaborative physical task. To conduct this conversation, both people needed to attend to the same subject. In terms of verbal (not visual) communication, bother people also needed to comply with Gricean norms of communication, such as informativeness and brevity. In their experiments, Kraut et al. also found that both people would habitually confirm their utterances with each other before proceeding with conversation.

The paper emphasizes that a wide shared visual space can greatly "facilitate task awareness and conversational grounding". With a wide enough shared visual space, the helper can glean such visual cues as the task status, the worker's actions, what the worker is attending to, and the worker's level of comprehension. Using these cues, the helper can determine whether to clarify or expand the instructions given.

Some camera arrangements that Kraut et al. considered were stationary cameras, head-mounted cameras, and none at all (i.e., audio-only communication). The advantage of the stationary camera is that it can cover the entire visual space of the worker at all times. However, the advantage of the head-mounted camera is that it highlights only the current visual space of the worker. Although it sacrifices the ability to see the entire visual space from the worker's point of view, the head-mounted camera does indicate to the helper the objects to which the worker is attending.

Kraut et al. hypothesized that a video feed between a helper and worker would improve task performance, because of the added visual cues in coordinating activities. Furthermore, the helper would be able to remain aware of the worker's activities; this situational awareness would allow the helper to precisely time when to give instructions, and the nature of such instructions. In actuality, experimentation results showed that video technology did not improve task performance, but only influenced how workers and helpers discussed the task; the helper gave more proactive assistance when s/he could see the worker.

Some questions:

One advantage of side-by-side tasks is that the worker and helper can see each other's faces, which helps in tracking each other's focus of attention. The paper mentions that head-oriented video conferencing systems (which, presumably, provides a camera feed of each person's face) were tested, but did not prove beneficial. Why not? How are these visual cues different seeing the other person's face side-by-side, as opposed to via a camera feed?

Rather than using a head-oriented video conferencing system, could an eye-tracking system potentially be used to highlight which objects the worker is looking at? (Is this what the Stiefelhagen, Yang, & Waibel (2002) paper covers?) Granted, since this wouldn't include the worker's face in the visual space, the helper wouldn't see such visual cues as a confused look on the worker's face.

#8 - option 2

2006-04-04T10:30:00.000-04:00

In Kraut et. al's article, the main focus was to study "the ways in which visual information is used as a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical tasks." By varying the amount of visual information avaliable in their experiment (which consisted of a worker and a expert helper completing a collaborative physical task--repairing a bicycle), Kraut et. al were able to study the part that visual information played in maintaining situational awareness as well as achieving conversational grounding (i.e. mutual understanding). In order to achieve situational awareness, both participants must be conscious of where they are at in completing the task (i.e. how much more is there to do before the bicycle is repaired), and what one another is doing at the moment. This will enable them to coordinate their communication to the other's needs. To achieve conversational grounding requires 1) the helper to phrase their utterances so that the worker can understand them as well as the intended meaning and 2) the worker to acknowledge that they have understood the worker.

The first prediction was that: 1) the worker and helper who were co-present would achieve the highest performance on completing the task, followed by the pair who used the video system devised by the experimenters, followed by the pair who used audio cues alone. The second prediction was that: the less the amount of available cues as to provide situational awareness, the more explicit the worker's requests to helpers.

Contrary to their predictions, it was actually found that the use of the video system (which consisted of head-mounting the worker with a camera so that the helper can see, from a first person perspective, what the worker sees) did not improve performance significantly compared to the lack of the video system. The second hypothesis, however, was proven.

A concern I have is that the experimenters never really clarified what the shared visual space consisted of. Only by introducing and telling the participants what each can see will mutual knowledge and common ground be achieved. Perhaps this affected the outcome of the experiment?

Another concern that I have is that if the experimenters used a different kind of camera (e.g. one of higher quality with little bandwidth limitation), or positioned the camera differently, would that affect the outcome of the experiment?

Assignment #8- Option #2

2006-04-04T09:24:00.000-04:00

Visual Information as a Conversational Resource in Collaborative Physical Tasks discusses videoconferencing and compares it to audio-only and physical presence scenarios. It describes two experiments with a collaborative task, bicycle repair, and analyzes performance and language issues as it varies across the different media.
Some ideas that were expected to be relevant in each situation are the need to comply with Gricean norms and the needs to maintain situational awareness and common ground. Situational awareness is directly influenced by the amount of visual information available because it relates to maintaining a person's mental model of the environment. Common ground is affected by both language and environment because all senses can gather information to ground two people.
The experiments evaluated the effectiveness of a head-mounted video system that allowed both the worker and the helper see what the worker is looking at while repairing the bicycle. The first experiment compared solo performers and worker-helper pairs, with the latter varying between three media (audio-only and video with two types of audio). In this experiment, having video did not improve performance-either speed or accuracy-over having audio only. But the language used was different.
The second experiment combined the first one with a third state, that of physical co-presence. This side-by-side condition contained more efficient dialogue as well as better performance. It was again clear that video had shortcomings that canceled out most of its advantages.
To me, there seems to be two components to the problem of visual co-presence. One is the ability to maintain a full view of the environment that is rich enough and stable enough to closely mimic physical co-presence. The other, closely related component, is the interaction between the conversation partners, the worker and helper. If there was lots of feedback between the two and this feedback was natural and easy to provide, the visual image of the environment need not be so rich and complex.
This brings me to the point of "affordances", which Kraut et al mention on p. 21. In the HCI sense of the term, affordance is an object's natural fit or function in its environment. For example, the most natural way to hold a cup is by its handle; that is its affordance. I'm not sure how related this is to the topic of videoconferencing, but it may be worthwhile for Kraut et al to expand on their discussion of affordances. How, in a very general sense, can a videoconferencing system be made to provide very natural, common-sense tools for its users? Maybe these systems should be highly specialized by task (such as bicycle repair) or maybe collaboration can be generalized.

#8 - option 2

2006-04-04T05:15:00.000-04:00

Kraut’s paper describes how collaborative tasks require coordination between the participants. Normally during FtF communication participants can see each other so they derive most of their cues through visual information. There is situation awareness of what the task is and what the other person is doing and conversational grounding where common ground is establishes understanding between the participants.
In the first experiment participants wore a head mounted set that would communicate with the worker or they would work alone. The worker had one of two methods in communicating with the participant, audio or video. The result was that although with help from the worker, the quality of work was superior and the repair tasks were better, but there was not much of a difference between using audio and visual. However communication between the worker and participant in getting the task accomplished was quite different. When the worker could visually see the participant, they offered assistance without them asking where as when audio was used, participants were more verbose and had to give lengthy descriptions of what they were doing and needed help. The second experiment was similar but in one test, the worker and participant would be side by side. Here they found that when side by side, they were much more efficient at the task and communication. The worker was able to point out directly what needed to be done with less explanation to get the task accomplished. Even the video test it may have lacked some visual information that can be gained side by side that made it far more efficient. Kraut recommends four designs for future systems. They suggest a wider field of view, ensure each participant is aware of what each other can see, what they are look at, and also support gestures in the visual space.
Overall the experiments seem very thorough and well done. The recommendations for future collaborative systems had all the suggestions I was thinking of as I read through the paper. I do wonder though if gender had any affect on the experiment. Was there a difference between men and women in any of the experiments? Also would the task affect the outcome also? If it wasn’t something as technical as repairing a bicycle would that of made a difference too?

Assignment 8

2006-04-04T04:57:00.000-04:00

Some of the main conclusions that Kraut et al reached in their paper on visual communication were that having a partner of any sort improves performance on tasks, and having a co-present partner is more beneficial than having audio or video only. However, their studies also found that having video does not make tasks any easier than having audio alone. One interesting observation that I found was that Kraut et al mention that perhaps difficulties using a shared visual field may have negated any positive effects that having the visual field may have provided. For example, they mention how the additional time required to position the camera may have counteracted the benefits of the possibility of using deixis. However, there are benefits to using video conferencing, and the deficiencies are addressed in the paper’s implications for system design.

Two issues remain on my mind after reading this paper. First, the type of task used in these experiments is very specific, where a worker and a helper are picked and assigned to work on a specific task that needs to be completed a specific way. However, videoconferencing can be used to simply allow two users to share a feeling of visual co-presence. Although I personally don’t use videoconferencing, I find my friends who do use videoconferencing don’t use it to actually manipulate physical objects, but rather to use the other benefits of visual co-presence, such as gesturing and facial expressions as grounding. I’m interested in what other tests could be used to see how visual co-presence through videoconferencing could influence other tasks such as simply carrying a conversation, or physical manipulations that aren’t as strictly structured. Second, I wonder why exactly videoconferencing hasn’t taken off quite as much as other CMC technology. While it is more expensive that having simply telephone, and it doesn’t provide a benefit compared to audio alone, I wonder if there are other factors playing into this as well. Telephones had been ingrained into our society for years before widespread videoconferencing had become available. E-mail and IM may also have taken off due to the fact that the user’s attention doesn’t always have to be on the communication. Perhaps figuring out the benefits of videoconferencing on other communication tasks may provide some additional insight on why it hasn’t taken off.

#8 — option 2

2006-04-04T01:47:00.000-04:00

The Kraut et al. paper revealed some interesting characteristics about visual co-presence, particularly as it operates as part of and separate from physical co-presence. Their results that indicated that duplex video resulted in communication no more efficient than audio-only, but still less efficient than FTF, indicates that there is something in physical co-presence that all existing implementations of visual co-presence are missing. Otherwise, the extra linguistic turns in visual co-present media to establish common ground would not be needed. Their own observations also indicate that it may merely be an issue of finding the right implementation, such as systems that indicate data about focus or angle and context, rather than trying to approach the efficiency of FTF by just throwing more video at people, since their experiments and the experiments of others have shown that doesn't work. The problem with their video system (and other video systems) seems to be that people don't actually use visual information directly: they translate visual perceptions into implicit statements (e.g. "So-and-so is looking at the whoosit") which can be much harder to deduce from video feeds than physical co-presence (likely because of issues of depth, resolution, etc.), and so technological communication solutions should try and reproduce the types of data people try and deduce from their visual perceptions more than the visual perceptions themselves.

Since the video system developed in the experiments appears to have not been a successful solution, what might be a more successful design? The conclusion of the paper lists some enticing suggestions and non-video oriented aspects of what might be successful, but how could these be synthesized into a real design? What would be a good balance of raw video data and data distilled from video or other input to present to users? How could such a system be robust enough to be useful, but still usable?

#8, Option 2: Do you see what I see?

2006-04-04T01:17:00.000-04:00

As many of us experienced first hand during several Comm 450 classes, many of the nuances of face-to-face communication are lost when collaborative tasks (i.e. a practical jokes) take place via videoconferencing. As Kraut, Fussell, and Siegel point out, bandwidth limitations restrict the number of task coordination cues that can be transmitted from video screen to video screen. However, the authors believe that by taking a deconstructive approach, it may be possible to ascertain which coordination elements are most essential. Furthermore, the identification of these “critical elements” will allow us to incorporate them into new video systems that are more efficacious for the performance of collaborative tasks.
A main premise of the paper rests on the fact that in order for “two or more individuals to work together to perform actions on concrete objects in the three-dimensional world,” the actors need to coordinate both their speech and their actions. When actors are co-present, visual information plays an important, two-fold part in this process. First, the actors are able to easily establish a mutual understanding of each others’ actions and of their environment – the situational awareness. Secondly, visual information contributes to the conversational grounding: participants that share the same physical setting have immediate access to an important source of common ground. The high levels of situational awareness and conversational grounding in co-present situations should facilitate the accomplishment of collaborative tasks.
Using the above premises as their starting point, Kraut et. al. focused on the effect that videoconferencing had on the ability of interaction partners to complete a collaborative task. In this case, the task involved a “helper” telling a “worker” how to fix a bike, and the researchers performed two separate studies: alone versus audio only versus video, and co-present versus audio only versus video. Based on the results of both studies (which, for brevity, are not included here), the researchers came to the conclusion that video systems do not improve task performance. However, they do have a substantial impact on the type of communication that takes place – for example, workers that knew that their helper was watch their moves on camera were less explicit in describing the state of their physical world.
In my opinion, the study has two very important implications for the future of videoconferencing. First of all, it casts the technology in a precautionary light: clearly, videoconferencing protocols must be improved before they can be useful (and safe!) to use in applications such as the operating room. I am interested to see how successful Kraut et. al. have been seen writing this paper at pinpointing specific elements that facilitate task collaboration in face to face settings, and also how they have translated any elements they have found into effective system designs.
The study also brings up a second excellent point: the reason for which videoconferencing has not reached saturation. The results of this study indicate that visual is little improvement over audio, which may explain why people have been so slow to put the technology to use. In order for videoconferencing to overtake audio conferencing as the method of choice for distributed communication applications, it must have a clear advantage – otherwise, why waste the money for new equipment?
In closing, I’m interested to discuss alternatives to video, especially the system in which messages would be sent to assist in grounding. To me, it seems much more feasible to, for example, create a set of tools with embedded chips than it does to implement some of the suggestions discussed at the end of the study. Such non-video alternatives may be the answer to allowing videoconferencing to realize many of the benefits of visual co-presence, especially in situations where bandwidth is limited.

Assignment #8, Option 2

2006-04-03T23:07:00.000-04:00

Kraut et al focused on determining the key visual information necessary to improve collaboration of joint physical tasks, and to implement technologies that can provide this key visual information to the users. Webcams are not nearly as popular or commonplace as text-based communication mediums, such as IM or text messaging. This paper studied how visual-based systems facilitate communication, and how they can be improved in order to become a more efficient collaboration tool.
The results of the studies showed that a video system did not improve performance, as was predicted, but it did change how workers and helpers talked about a task. Participants using the video system were neither faster nor more accurate, than participants in the other conditions, in completing the tasks. In general, the video system produced way more Track 2 signals than the researchers expected. It appeared to me that the few visual cues the video system provided do not outweigh the additional Track 2 signals required to use the system, versus an audio-only system. This paper helped me to understand what makes Webcams less appealing than text-based mediums, and it did so in a well-organized, cogent manner. Webcams provide a limited view of shared visual space, and when people use video systems, they rely heavily on Track 2 signals for clarification.

Questions for Susan:
1. When studying/experimenting with visual space, nonverbal gestures are present and share the duty of “communication of meaning” with verbal cues. Why weren’t nonverbals (i.e. “movements,” gestures) included as turns in the first place?
2. If someone is using a video system and looks at an object, that object would be in the center of the field of view, correct? Then the system would just need to set parameters for the visual space for both participants. So in the “Implications” section, isn’t clarifying what is part of shared visual space just a subset—not another implication for the system—of the need to provide mechanisms to allow people to track one another’s focus of attention?

Assignment 8

2006-04-03T22:58:00.000-04:00

Kraut et al's paper explores the function of visual information in communication that is focused on the completion of a collaborative physical task. First, visual information provides situational awareness - knowledge of the actions of the other participant and the progress of the task. This ability to draw conclusions about the state of the task allows people to plan out relevant utterances geared toward the completion of the task. Second, when people share the same visual information, they increase their common ground, allowing for more efficient communication. When no visual cues are present, one expects to observe many utterances which contain long, explicit descriptions and clarifications.

The researchers conducted two experiments to analyze the effect of visual technology on task-based communication, in which a worker was aided by an experienced helper with different technologies. Surprisingly, it was found that communication that utilized both audio and video did not result in substantially higher performance in the completion of the task than communication which just used audio. However, the types of utterances varied considerably, as predicted. The lack of visual information prompted workers to give more explicit descriptions and helpers to provide more statements of acknowledgement. Also, workers' descriptions were followed by help in the visual condition more often than in the audio condition because in the former, descriptions were viewed as implicit requests for help, while in the latter, they were interpreted as attempts to ground the helper.

One of my concerns (also mentioned by Kraut et al) is that the results may be too dependent on the specific type of video equipment used. How significantly might the data change if the camera were in a fixed position (on a tabletop, say) rather than attached to the worker's head? A constant view of the entire scene may allow for faster completion of the task. Could this be the reason why there was no notable difference between setups that used video and those that did not? Why did the experimenters choose to use a head-mounted camera rather than a fixed one?

I would also like to know whether gender played a role in the outcome of the experiment. For example, if the two experts in Experiment 1 were comprised of one male and one female, was there a difference was there a difference in how effectively they helped the workers? Similarly, were male or female workers more successful in completely the task efficiently?

Assignment #8[A]: Collaborative Art

2006-04-03T22:02:00.001-04:00

For this assignment, I chose to do a collaborative task with a friend over webcam. We used MSN Messenger (beta 8) for videoconferencing, opting not to use audio. Thus, verbal communication was expressed via typing in the IM window, and visual communication was expressed through the webcam window (see Fig. 1). After some deliberation, I decided to subject her to a drawing task, wherein I would teach her how to draw a red, smiley-face man that happened to be sitting on my shelf.

The session consisted largely of me telling her what parts to draw, showing her my drawings of them, and verifying her responses. The first portion usually occurred over text ("now you draw a big lumpy mouth"), the middle portion over video (*hold up drawing to webcam*), and the last portion over both ("u-turn ARMPIT / NOT RIGHT ANGLE" & *compare drawings*) . Due to limitations in equipment and procedure, I wasn't able to assess and record visual features such as hand/face/body movements and actions; generally, however, she would laugh if our drawings were inconsistent and would gasp (i.e. ":O") if the directions I gave seemed particularly complicated. Both of us would also lean in closer to the monitor if we couldn't see the other's drawing. The task objects that were involved in this situation were our individual drawings and the source model of the smiley-face man. The work context involved some distractors, such as the camera not auto-focusing, the source of light in both rooms not being particularly helpful in illuminating the drawings for the other person, and the facts that we couldn't watch the other person drawing and had to hold the pictures up after every drawing period to keep in sync.

Fig. 1: The conversation window and an example of comparing drawings.

Interestingly, the method by which we chose to interact made the task asynchronous, even though the medium (videoconference) was synchronous. This turn-taking was likely an artifact of the setup though, and the lack of a direct video feed to the task objects available for both parties.

Kraut et al. describe two ways of resolving challenges in collaborative physical tasks: situation awareness and conversational grounding. In the coding schema they used in experiment 2, these factors equated with readings for "task status" and "acknowledgements," respectively. After analyzing and coding the conversation log (link to log), I found this distribution of messages:

procedural: 28
task status: 40
referential: 14
internal state: 13
acknowledgements: 20
other: 36

Much as Kraut et al. found in their study, there was a relatively high amount of task status, acknowledgement, and procedural messages. Indeed, referential and internal state messages weren't as low as found in the study, but discrepancies can probably be attributed to coding errors (admittedly). What the study doesn't account for is the extremely high amount of task status messages. [Note: I think I coded it right -- that is, any messages pertaining to the state of the task or the task objects (her/my drawings, the figure) -- but it couldn't hurt to have a second opinion.]

Assuming the coding was performed correctly, one explanation for this phenomenon may be due to the fact that I had no convenient way of keeping the object in her view at all times. Instead of showing her the object, I merely gave her a good long initial look then showed her my drawings of the portions of the figure after I described them. In other words, situation awareness in the task was lower than that produced by the condition in the Kraut et al. study, causing a magnification of the cited causes (36) and thus a higher amount of task status messages.

Furthermore, Kraut et al. posit that "visual information is used to maintain task awareness as well as to improve conversational efficiency" (39), and go on to note that confirmations (i.e. evidence of conversational grounding) follow a high level of task awareness. My results, however, revealed acknowledgements occured only half as much as task status messages. This dearth of grounding messages may have been due to either our familiarity with each other (have been good friends for 8 years) or our familiarity with each other in the space (online-only friends). This finding may also be attributed to our cross-purposes of completing the task at hand (drawing) while simultaneously holding a conversation, as evidence by the 36 significant "other" messages.

Based on the findings, I agree that a shared visual space is essential for collaborative repair and that videoconferencing was perhaps the most efficient means of conducting a collaborative task at the time. If instead of videoconferencing, however, we had use a social writing implementation (like Writely), she would have been able to actually watch me draw the figure instead of simply seeing the end-result of pieces. Arguably, this would have increased the synchronicity of the visual space and allowed for a more effective effort.

Fig. 2: Final Drawings, with shading examples at top right (mine=left, hers=right).

Assign 8

2006-04-03T21:10:00.000-04:00

The main objective of the Kraut, Fussell, and Siegel paper (2003) was to examine how access to visual information affects collaboration on physical tasks, specifically through its role in situational awareness and conversational grounding. A specific interest of the study was to observe which types of visual information are critical to people in collaborating on physical tasks. Kraut et al (2003) furthermore sought to consider these observations in light of the opportunities for visual information afforded by various communication technologies.

While reading the Kraut et al (2003) paper, several issues struck my curiosity. First, although the clear focus of the study is on the role of visual information in task-oriented communication, it seems more realistic to take into account that access to visual information, which would create an interpersonal communication situation that more closely simulates face-to-face interaction, would also enhance feelings of co-presence of communicators, and with it increased socioemotional information.

This being so, my question is this: what effect could additional socioemotional information (made available by visual access) have on task efficiency, in terms of distracting from pure, all-business task collaboration?

My next question concerns the issue of access to visual information and the accompanying need to coordinate shared physical space between communicators. A main problem raised in the paper is that due to bandwidth limitations, only a selective amount of visual information can practically be transmitted during videoconferencing. At the same time, however, there are different problems and drawbacks to selecting one area or source of visual information over another, as people attend to a diversity of types of visual information in real-life collaborative tasks.

My question concerning this matter can hopefully double as a suggestion for improving shared physical space via videoconferencing: what if each communicator could control his or her own camera-view and pan around at will, like video surveillance cameras that operators can remotely control and observe the feed on their video monitors?

This may be a bandwidth-limitation issue, but the idea does not entail transmitting all possible visual information at once, but rather select areas as determined by the viewer’s informational needs. While this suggestion in itself may not completely avoid the challenge of coordinating which visual information is shared between communicators at any given moment, add-on technologies to compensate for this shortcoming would be simple to design. For instance, people could also have a small window on their screen showing their own camera’s feed, as controlled and viewed by the other person, like a picture-in-picture feature. This way people would not only have access to the visual information of their choice, but also the visual information being used by their partner. The result would be improved shared physical space, better situational awareness and facilitated conversational grounding.

#8, Kraut paper

2006-04-03T18:24:00.000-04:00

Often taken for granted, visual cues provide an enormous amount of information about people, environments and situations. However, as technology becomes more popular as a means of communication, visual cues are often lost. As we discussed earlier, the ambiguity that telephone conversations and instant messenger have because of the lack of co-presence often help the user as opposed to only hurting the conversation. However, in task-oriented situations, one may think that visual cues would be indispensable. The Kraut paper discusses exactly how these cues facilitate communication, specifically to accomplish a physical task, such as repairing a bicycle. The study examines how visual information allows people to maintain awareness about the task and to more easily develop common ground.

To test their hypotheses, Kraut et.al. ran two experiments in which the people had to make repairs to a bicycle. In experiment 1, there were four conditions: solo, cooperative with video, cooperative with full duplex audio, and cooperative with half duplex audio. The paper focused on the difference between the cooperative groups with video and the groups with just audio. The results showed that video did not create any significant difference in the speed or quality of the tasks performed. However, with a shared visual space, the communication was less explicit and the helpers could gauge when the worker needed help better. In the second experiment, there were three different conditions: side-by-side, video/audio, and audio-only. In this experiment, each pair of workers performed three repairs, each under a different condition, to help eliminate individual differences in competence and conversational style. Results showed that side-by-side communication allowed for faster and slightly better completion of the tasks, and more efficient conversation (less dialogue and more deictic references).

Overall, I thought this study was very interesting. I found it very surprising that having a shared visual space did not improve performance over an audio-only situation. However, for both experiments, the helper viewed the situation from the viewpoint of the worker. I feel that this is slightly odd because in a side-by-side situation, you can always see the environment as well as the other person. By using the headset apparatus as opposed to something like a webcam, the body language of the worker was almost completely lost. While a webcam, which is stationary, may inhibit movement a bit more, I think that it would do better in creating a shared visual space. The headset constrains the helper to see only what the worker is directly looking at. A wider visual space may have helped in referencing objects and thus, made communication more efficient. Perhaps this option could be a separate condition and would differ from video where body language is unseen.

What troubled me was the implications for design of future systems for collaborative work. While the four recommendations the paper suggested were relevant and would most likely help task oriented situations, I feel that it also makes the technology very cumbersome. I think that increasing the field of vision and focus tracking mechanisms would make using the equipment annoying and difficult, which begs the question, why would people use it?

Assignment 8, Option 2

2006-04-03T18:14:00.000-04:00

The Kraut et al paper takes many ideas from Clark, and considers them in the visual realm. Kraut et al are interested in seeing how different visual spaces affect the performance and the efficiency of language use while doing a task. In all of their hypotheses they predicted that performance would be better and more efficient in the spaces with the most visual cues – face to face being the “best,” then video conference, then audio conference. In general their hypotheses were correct, except sometimes when they found that simple presence of visual cues made a difference, but it didn’t matter if they were actually co-present or simply visually co-present. Based on all of their findings, the authors were able to make some great suggestions at the end as to how to improve video communication technologies.

One of the main points from Clark that Kraut et al consider is the effect of grounding. In the visual realm, grounding is able to be accomplished many different ways. There can still be verbal input, in the form of acknowledgements and other utterances to show you share common ground. Also, grounding can occur in the knowledge that you can see the same things. When the worker looked at something, the helper could also see it, and they shared that knowledge. Because the technology was not perfect, however, sometimes it needed to be clarified what could be seen and what was out of view. This is something the authors address in their implications.

I am a bit concerned as to the whole premise behind the experiment – the participants were given a small benefit for participating, which is common practice, but they were also promised a $20 prize if they did it the fastest and the best. I am curious if you believe or saw evidence that this may have affected the participants in any way. Being motivated to go fast might have caused them to act certain ways that they wouldn’t have acted otherwise. In many collaborative discussions, there is no prize for getting done quickly, and participants are more at ease. Do you think the promise of reward/stress of going quickly affected the data or experiment in any way? (If allowed to take their time, might the results have been different?)

I agree with your concern about not being able to include any data about non-verbal communication. It is clear from this experiment how beneficial it is to be able to see each other, and part of this is due to the occurrence of non-verbal communication such as gestures or emotions. I believe that non-verbal communication is critical to understanding video communication. What do you think you might have found out if you could have incorporated data from their non-verbal communication? For example, if you could have included gestures, or studied how they reacted to emotion, how do you think this would have affected visual/non-visual communication.

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-04-03T18:08:00.001-04:00

Option 2 Assignment #8

Kraut’s article discusses the role of visual information as a conversational resource in collaborative physical tasks. During physical collaboration, studies have shown that people’s speech is related to the position and dynamics of objects, people, and activities in the environment. During completion of collaborative physical tasks, conversation typically focuses on identification of objects, descriptions of actions to be performed on those objects, and confirmations that actions have been completed. This conversation is often aided by a variety of visual cues that allow the communicators to achieve situational awareness and conversational grounding, but systems that facilitate remote collaborative work are limited so that they can’t provide all sources of visual information. To ease these limitations, the author believes that elements of visual space that are critical to a collaborative physical task be identified and then video systems be designed that make the same visual cues available to remote collaborators that are available to face-to-face collaborators.
In a collaborative physical task, the communicators must overcome two main challenges: receiving instruction at the appropriate time when they are ready for it, and ensuring that their messages are properly understood. These challenges can be overcome with visual cues that maintain situational awareness and conversational grounding. When communication media facilitates off-site communication, many visual cues are lost when communication is limited to the telephone or “talking head” model; however shared views of a workspace and multi-view video systems are more successful.
In the article, two experiments were conducted, the results follow: Experiment 1 found that there was no difference in task performance when pairs shared a visual context and when pairs communicated only via audio. However, communication differed. Workers were less explicit when they shared a visual context and helpers were more likely to treat the workers’ description of a state as a request for help. Experiment 2 found that when pairs worked side-by-side, they performed their task faster and with fewer vocalizations then when they were remotely linked. The pairs used visual information to determine the appropriate time to talk and what to talk about. For pairs using a visual system, visual information influenced dialogue, but didn’t make their performance any different than those who only had audio.
It is interesting that task performance and conversation was different when using the video system compared to side-by-side. The author suggests that the visual system may not have been capturing the most important visual elements, or if it was able to capture these elements, doing so was not efficient and therefore impacted conversational efficiency and worker behavior.
The finding from these studies allowed the authors to develop four recommendations:
1. Provide people with a wide field of view, including both task objects and the wider environment, so that they can more easily maintain task awareness and ground conversation
2. Clarify what is part of the shared visual space. Know what one another can see
3. Provide mechanisms to allow people to track one another’s focus of attentions
4. Provide support for gesture within the shared visual space

Questions:
Have you seen any of you recommendations for system design implemented in systems to support remote collaborative physical tasks?
Do you think the outcome of the studies would have been any different if a more or less complex physical task was assigned?

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-04-03T18:08:00.000-04:00

Assignment #8 Option 2

2006-04-03T17:18:00.000-04:00

Kraut et al. describe face-to-face communication as people using a variety of visual cues to achieve situational awareness and conversation grounding. In order to create a system that supports the remote accomplishment of collaborative tasks, Kraut et al. wish to first identify the elements that are critical to visual space and then create a system around these elements. Situational awareness involves the collaboration of two or more people performing a task and the timing involved in the collaboration. In order to collaborate successfully, each person needs to be aware of the what the other is doing or has done (i.e. in a bicycle repair situation, what repairs have been done so far and to what degree of success) or a the involved parties need to be able to fully attend to the task without disruption. Conversation grounding also comes into play to make certain that messages are properly understood. Grounding involves that interactive process whereby people exchange evidence about what they do and do not understand about the task at hand. They do this over the course of the conversation and accumulate common ground. This can involve sharing previous knowledge, shared linguistic cues, and physical co-presence.

Kraut et al. then discuss the value of visual cues in maintaining situational awareness and grounding. These include watching facial expressions and body orientation, which, in conjunction with the task, makes it easier to assess whether instruction is being understood and the task is being performed properly. Taking all of this into account, Kraut et al. discuss the limitation of the current availability of video systems that cover only part of the visual cues important to maintaining grounding and situational awareness. They suggest that modifications such as providing a shared view of the work area would be helpful in collaboration because people tend to look more at the object being worked on rather than facial expression.

In the first experiment, participants wearing head-mounted cameras worked alone or with a helper to perform a bicycle repair. The helper was either connected to the worker audio-only or with video and one of two qualities of audio. Workers generally performed better with collaborative help, but video did not help workers perform more tasks. Despite this, experiment 1 provided support for less explicitness in describing the physical task in the video condition.

In the second experiment, conditions were similar except that collaborative pairs performed one task per pair in each of three media conditions--side by side, audio-video, and audio only. As in the first experiment, the presence of visual information helped people perform better, although the video system did not improve performance over audio-only.

Keeping these things in mind, the authors provide a few recommendations for the design of future systems, about some of which I have a few questions:

1. Is it possible to use eye-tracking devices to focus on where a person is looking? It would be interesting to see how this would affect the establishment of common ground and make videoconferencing more like face-to-face.

2. Can we truly expect to simulate shared visual space in a collaborative task situation? As much as we would like to capture the essential elements of shared visual space, do you think it is possible to create a virtual shared space?

8(2) visual communication

2006-04-03T16:55:00.000-04:00

Kraut et al point out the possible benefits of visual information for communication coordination, specifically in regards to situational awareness and conversational grounding, the former being the mental concept of the state of the environment (including tasks and activities) and the latter being the shared understanding between conversation participants. However, in real life situations, while visual information might be optimal, it is not always practical or possible. Video systems have been designed to supplement communication when face-to-face visual information is not available, but they remain problematic. While the Whittaker '95 paper asserts that there is little objective evidence that video information (or even face-to-face visual information) improves transmisison of cognitive cues used to determine the understanding of remote participants, and although even very high quality video information was not significantly helpful in transmitting turn-taking cues, there was strong evidence for affective information being transmitted through video, and there was strong subjective data that participants preferred having supplemental video data rather than audio-only conversations. Kraut et al posit that a video system should be designed to provide the same visual cues to participants that they use to communicate when co-located.

Kraut et al use the collaborative physical task of repairing a bicycle, with the bicycle "worker" (who actually performed the repair task) being guided by the "helper," a mentor with generally more experience than the worker, but who was not actually executing any part of the physical task. In some experimental conditions, the helper was not co-located with the worker, but rather communicated via audio or audio supplemented with video data of not only the helper but of the task. Whittaker seems much more optimistic about the usefulness of this kind of "video-as-data," where a video could be used to share information about 3-D work objects, pointing to its current use in hospital surgical wards.

Kraut et al argue that the visual information can be used to create situational awareness of the bicycle repair task, which helps to coordinate when to present information and what information to present. In regards to conversational grounding, they submit that visual information communicates evidence of understanding through nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and visual actions. In the absence of copresence, Kraut et al hope that a video system could be used to achieve the same conversational goals, yet one of the realities of the current technology is that it is practically impossible to share all of the visual information through a video system. For their bicycle-repair experiments, they chose to use a head-mounted video system that communicated information about the wearer's hands and actions and what the wearer turned his head towards.

Comparing experimental conditions where the worker and helper communicated via audio only and where there was video and audio communication, Kraut et al found that there was no significant change in accuracy and speed of task completion, although both conditions were superior to the condition where the worker was not communicating with a helper at all. A second experiment that included a copresent condition found that copresence increased the speed of task completion and the efficiency of verbal communication, and replicated their previous finding that that the video and audio condition did not perform significantly better than the audio only condition.

Kraut et al explain the lack of support for their hypothesis that combined audio and video communication would improve task performance compared to audio-only communication in three ways. First, the video system did not communicate important visual information that lay outside of the view of the camera. Second, while the video did provide important visual information, the "cost" of obtaining this information in terms of conversational efficiency and worker behaviors was high enough to negate the benefits of this information. I might personally add to this that it seems like the unfamiliarity of such a video system, not to mention the physical burden it provided, seem like confounding factors in terms of measuring task outcome as well. Third, Kraut et al suggest that there might be some essential differences between visual copresence and full physical copresence, for instance, information regarding spatial relationships. This last explanation was the most interesting to me, as well as the most difficult to explore and/or correct for.

While I found Kraut et al's work to be very interesting and think that its conclusions are reasonable, in an ideal world I would have liked to see more subjects and better inter-coder reliability. I was also very curious as to why in the second experiment they chose to replace the previous helper participants (who had been professional bicycle repair experts) with a mixed group of both professional bicycle repairers and novices who had been workers in the previous experiment. I would be interested to know if the type of helper affected the project process or outcome. I would also have been interested in qualitative data from the participants themselves about which condition they preferred.

I was surprised that Kraut et al did not see a difference in the first experiment's full-duplex versus half-duplex audio conditions, especially since Whittaker makes it very clear that audio quality is very important for effective interaction. However, much of the data Whittaker uses to bolster this claim was specific to audio lags, so perhaps it is the lag which is so detrimental to communication rather than half-duplex audio. Still, I would be interested in how the research team explained this lack of difference.

Assignment #8

2006-04-03T16:52:00.000-04:00

Kraut et all (2003) discussed the many elements of physical collaboration when trying to accomplish tasks. The concept centers on the fact that what it means to be collaborative requires a lot of synchronization among those whom are participating either through action or by speaking. When trying to complete a task, the participants know how successful the completion process is by “visual information.” This visual information breaks down into two different aspects called situational awareness and conversational grounding. Situational awareness is how participants can monitor the future flow of the communication to complete the task through either utterances or actions. Conversational grounding deals with a basis that the participants can create where certain objects, actions, words or sounds become common between the individuals and are used with more normalcies. These ways that people use to judge on how successful communication is are all visual cues but there are also communication cues that can happen in non face-to-face environments (such as a telephone conversation). For example, I might be explaining how to sew a button on to a friend and I would have to use more descriptive language to do so instead of being right there with her helping. That was another point that Kraut et all brought up about collaborative tasks: that there is someone who is usually the “worker” and someone how is the “helper.” The worker is physically doing whatever the task is and the helper is guiding the worker when he or she finds it necessary. This brings me to one of my first questions on their theory.

There was a lot written on this collaboration of worker and helper. However, I can think of many occasions where two participants fit the role of worker and helper at the same time or a mixture of the two. For example, if these same two people used in the Kraut example both did not know how to put together a bicycle but were trying to do it together then what? My guess would be that they would both become helpers and would be trying to follow the instruction manual. At times it is possible that one person may get catch on quicker and play the role of the helper for the moment, but I do not think that for every task there is always a helper and a worker. My other question is that if it is true that neither person always fits solidly into either role then perhaps can people fit both roles and a mixture of each role during the same task? I would think that tasks could even switch back and forth when trying to find successful completion of a task.

Assignment #8

2006-04-02T20:12:00.000-04:00

Kraut's major assertion is that in face-to-face conversations, there is a somewhat overlooked visual component that both interacts with the normal Clarkian-style conversational grounding and simultaneously provides new important conversational cues and clues. The amalgam of visual information with background knowledge to provide conversation participants with "up-to-date mental models" is referred to under the umbrella term 'situational awareness'. The importance of this situational awareness is that when physically copresent, participants are more able to attend to one another's needs; for example identifying what their partner is working on, keeping track of the current status of a joint task, etc. This active awareness means that conversation partners can be proactive in providing information, predicting how they could be most useful to their partner without explicit prompting.

Physical copresence is an obvious advantage in any conversation, however it is not so obvious how one would go about codifying the particular roles visual information may play. Kraut does a fairly good job of doing exactly this, identifying several major physical and logical categories into which visual information may fall, and then creating a matrix with entries corresponding to both the collaborative process engaged in and the type of visual information assisting in this process. The variety of visual information made apparent by this table immediately leads you to wonder what specific influences different types of information may have on conversation. Kraut addresses at least several of these, designing two experiments to test his own set of hypotheses.

The first experiment compares performance in a bicycle repair task across several variables. Some students were requested to repair a bike without the assistance of another person (using a repair book), while others communicated through a head-mounted visual imaging system. The group receiving assistance was further subdivided into audio-alone, and video+two different qualities of audio. Kraut presents three hypotheses, predicting that in the video condition : (A) performance would be better than in the audio group (more information to coordinate with) (B) instructions from the assistant would be better and more direct (due to situational awareness) (C) those receiving assistance would less explicitly articulate their own actions (due to cognition that their assistant has situational awareness). Interestingly enough, what I would have viewed as the most self-evident hypothesis, hypothesis A, is in fact the hypothesis which accords the least with the data. Though there was not a significant difference in performance, the manner in which assistance was administered was vastly different among the different groups. As (B) would predict, in the visual group the assistants were more proactive in offering help; they could see when the worker was having difficulty or doing something wrong, and took action to assist (even when not prompted). Also, in accordance with (C), when audio-alone is used, workers were more explicit about the state of their task (what they are doing), as well as more explicit about their 'internal state'. That is to say, they presented more Track 2 signals to their helper in an attempt to establish clear communication and to demonstrate their understanding or lack of understanding of a particular utterance.

The second experiment was similar to the first, but with a slightly different procedure. A face-to-face control group was provided, and the coding schema utilized was made more specific to the particular language that participants were utilizing. In particular deixis, pointing gestures, message length and the number of conversational turns were all computed. Again hypotheses were presented, this time (A) face-to-face provides the best performance (B) grounding is easiest face-to-face (C) deixis should be present from most to least frequent in: side-by-side, video, audio. (A) was supported, however again detailed analyses of (B) and (C) yielded some surprises. The proportion of 'internal state' references was highest in the video environment (several possibilities were presented as to why this may be), and also deictic expressions were hugely skewed towards workers and away from helpers in the video group.

On the whole I was fairly impressed with this research. I had expected that many of the hypotheses being tested would be trivially true, and in fact many interesting and unexpected results arose from the data. In further studies, there are several main suggestions that I would make that I feel would improve the quality of data. The first and most important to me is the coding scheme. Though improved upon in the second study, for all the effort that was exerted in the production of these experiments, the conditions that were being coded for seemed to be too simple. The most important thing being investigated in the experiments is the interplay of speech and nonverbal cues-- this ought to be reflected in the coding as well. A closer analysis of what types of speech acts are occurring during specific visual activities might be helpful (for instance, the absence of nonverbal turns should be carefully considered). Also, a synthesis of Clark with visual actions could help clean up alot of the data: what activities are used most frequently in person to 'ground' the conversation? What is the proportion of verbal and nonverbal grounding? What grounding tools are removed when visual access is maintained but copresence is removed?

I admire that the limitations of technology are being investigated by the authors, however I would caution that perhaps one variable at a time ought to be examined. It is nice to have many different subgroups and technologies to generate data with, but I believe that the authors should be careful in the future not to take their technological experimentation too far. That is, I feel it is important to stay grounded in a few base hypotheses you wish to test, and to generate groups accordingly. That much said, I really look forward to reading all the future experiments that will be produced on the role of visual communication in joint activities.

Kraut- Assignment 8

2006-04-02T13:53:00.000-04:00

According to Kraut, sharing a visual space is extremely useful for collaborative tasks, because visual information helps participants in a task to maintain current mental models as well as situational awareness of the progress of the task. Participants can monitor the activities of others and plan what to do and say next according to what they see. Visual information provided in a shared space also aids in the establishment of conversational grounding and allows participants involved in a collaborative task to be less explicit in their directions. Everyone utilizes a number of diverse visual cues in face to face settings where we share a particular space, such as facial expressions and body movements.
In the bicycle repair task described in the introduction of Kraut, an expert guides a novice in repairing the bicycle without touching any of the tools while sharing a visual/physical space. This shared visual space allows the expert to maintain awareness of the state of the task object (the bicycle) as well as the activities of the novice. The expert can correct any false actions carried out by the novice immediately, such as using the wrong wrench. Although the physical co-presence of the novice and expert allows them to share sensory information such as touch and smell, the visual information is most important in aiding conversational grounding for this particular task.
Two studies are described which test the value of visual information and compare different conditions in terms of language and task efficiency. In experiment 1, one condition allows helpers to see workers through a camera so they can see part of the task object and the environment, but not the entire visual space. The control group was not given any visual information; they were given the audio portion only. The results show that the addition of video technology (ie visual information) did not change performance, but it did change the way the workers and helpers discussed the task at hand. When the participants did not have visual information, they were more explicit in describing the state of the task as well as their internal state. Participants without visual cues also contributed more feedback utterances such as “yes” and “uh huh.” Another finding is that helpers provided more proactive assistance when they could see the worker, especially if the worker was struggling.
In the second experiment, workers performed three repair tasks on a bicycle with the help of an expert. The expert was either standing next to the helper, given the same audio-visual cues as experiment 1, or given audio information only. Conversational grounding was measured by message length, number of conversational turns, and use of deictic expressions. In the side-by-side condition, tasks were completed 25% faster and the dialogues were significantly more efficient, using fewer utterances. This reveals that visual information greatly affected the construction of their conversation. Pairs were less likely to acknowledge the other’s messages when performing side by side, and references to internal states occurred most frequently in the audio-visual video condition. Surprisingly, the video condition did not increase the speed of the performed task.
These experiments revealed interesting and (some) surprising results. Yet, I feel that a few things should have been addressed. First, I feel that gender is an important factor in this task, because men tend to have better spatial awareness when compared to females. Studies show that men do perform better on those tasks, which could be a confounding variable for the side-by-side condition in particular. Was gender considered in this task, or were all participants male or female? Also, when men were paired with females, how did the task efficiency differ from male/male and female/female pairs? Do males and females construct their language differently? Also, how does familiarity with the task at hand (fixing a bicycle) contribute to task efficiency? Were questionnaires administered to control for this? I do not recall any mention of any of these factors in the study.
I also think another condition could have been added, which would be a full view of the space from the video. This video portion could be compared to the side-by-side condition to look for significant differences. Why was it important to limit the video to only the task object? Would it benefit the study to include this other condition, and would the full view from the video change the way the language was constructed and the effectiveness of the dialogue? Also, would eye tracking measures be useful to see collaboration between eye movement between the worker and the helper? Would the eye movements be different between the video and shared space conditions?

-Kristen Schneider

#7

2006-03-28T14:12:00.000-05:00

1. “Wisconsin sucks”
This message requires some common ground in that one would probably have to know that by “Wisconsin”, the sender is not referring to the state, but rather the school (or even just a team), since Cornell hockey lost to Wisconsin in the Midwest regional final game. This is an expressive statement, specifically created to express that the sender is upset about the loss. It is intended to convey anger and disappointment.

2. “sleeping”This message is an assertive speech act. It conveys information about the sender’s current state. Interestingly enough, in some ways, it could almost be considered a commissive since the speaker was not asleep when he wrote “sleeping”, but rather is making the claim that when one reads the away message, he will be sleeping.

3. “class, back home around 5”This is a two-part speech act. The first part, “class” is an assertive. It conveys the sender’s whereabouts to the receiver. The second part, “back home around 5” is a commissive in that it commits the speaker to a future action of being home by a certain time.

4. “It’s colder here than in aruba. :-(”This speech act is a little more difficult to qualify. On face, it seems like an assertive statement, that the weather is colder than in Aruba. However, in conjunction with the CMC convention of a frown, it can be seen that it also serves to be an expressive act as well. Interpretation of this speech act could require some common ground as well, since it would probably make most sense to another Cornell student or other friends who were aware that this was referring to an individual’s return to Ithaca from her spring break trip. Common ground might also affect whether or not the receiver interprets the statement as leaning toward assertive or expressive.

5. “out, call the cell"
This speech act is two parts. The first, “out”, is an assertive statement that is intended to inform (with however poor evidence) that the speaker is somewhere else. The second part, “call the cell” is a directive, requesting that individuals who wish to contact the speaker should call her cell phone to do so.

The concern I had with the approach came in some of the more ambiguous away messages that had the ability to serve multiple functions. I felt that it oversimplified both the intent of the speaker and the common ground of the listener. I think the fourth quote above was a clear example of how that could happen. The divisions gloss over these issues, which could in turn affect reliability, if not validity of coding.

Additionally, the effect of grounding can drastically alter the meaning of a message. As seen in the first message above, without knowledge of the game, or that the particular speaker in question is a sports fan, one might think that he has an unnatural hatred of the state of Wisconsin. Thus, the intent of the speaker is lost in coding, since the message is intended for people who would understand the necessary background. Unfortunately, those nuances are difficult to incorporate into a study, but I believe the Nastri paper makes a good start nonetheless.

Assignment #7

2006-03-28T11:33:00.000-05:00

1. softball game today was fuuun!! :-) my tummy hurts... too much chocolate for today.

This quote contains several CMC conventions: the emoticon ":-)", the intentional misspelling "fuuun", the extra quotation marks "!!", and the use of "..." as an emotional indicator. I think that this away message could be characterized as both an expressive and assertive speech act. The CMC conventions used to convey emotion and the use of emotional words ("fuuun" and "hurts") suggests that the message is an expressive one. However, since this message also serves to relay current information to others, it could be an assertive speech act as well.

2. Let what we do in here fill the streets out there; let us dance for You

This away message requires common ground to completely understand it. It is not immediately clear that this message is a quote, since there are no quotation marks around the words. In addition, common ground is required to understand that when the word "you" is capitalized and written as "You", the interpretation should be that it refers to "God" rather than "another human". Although this away message is a quote, I think that it can accurately be interpreted as a directive, since this person probably did not put the quote up only because he identifies with it, but rather because he wants other people to be encouraged to take action based on those words.

3. around, gimme a call if u need me

This away message contains two speech acts. The first part of the message, "around", is assertive since it serves to inform others of a current state. The second part, "gimme a call if you need me", is directive, since it calls the reader to the action of giving this person a call.

4. The dawn is breaking A light shining through You're barely waking And I'm tangled up in you Yeah <3

This away message contains both a common ground based convention and a CMC based convention. First, it must be common ground that these phrases are quotes from a song rather than a literal statement of events happening to this person. Since this quote does not have quotation marks around it, however, people who do not share this common ground could take the statement literally, characterizing the away message as an assertive speech act. On the other hand, someone with access to the common ground knowledge of the song would characterize the away message as an expressive speech act. Rather than thinking that this person is literally tangled up in another person at the moment, the characterization of this away message as expressive means that this person chose this quote because they emotionally identify with the song. Another interesting feature about this away message is that it contains the CMC convention "<3". This emoticon of the sideways heart indicates that this quote was probably directed towards another individual.

5. I'm feeling kind of old right now... it's kind of sucky.

This message is clearly an expressive speech act, written in order to give others a glimpse of this person's emotional state. She writes that she is "feeling... old", and this is "kind of sucky", emotional words used to give a clear picture of her feelings.

In coding my friends' away messages, I found that some of the speech act categories were overly simplified. For instance, the phrase "it's been a long day" could be interpreted as both an expressive and an assertive speech act. I also found that commissive acts are not at all common in my friends' away messages; this is probably due to the fact that people believe when others read their messages, the future event has already occurred. For instance, assertive messages such as "at the mall" are more common than "going to the mall". It is unfortunate that Nastri et al do not analyze quotes in their article. In looking at my friends' away messages, I found that a significant number of people had quotes on their away messages. It would be interesting to analyze the ways in which these quotes can be interpreted. Regarding quotes in away messages, the following questions can be asked: Can away message quotes be seen as a direct representation of the person's own thoughts and feelings? On the other hand, should quotes not be taken literally, but rather be seen as only reflecting the person's fondness for a certain song or book? Which venues are most common for quotes (books, famous people, professors, friends, songs, religious texts), and what is the significance of this?

Assignment #7

2006-03-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

Assignment #7

Away Messages:
1. I hate English!
speech act: expressive- Tells the reader how the writer feels (In this case, the emotion hatred toward the subject English).
There is a common ground convention in this away message- the writer assumes the reader knows that “English” means the subject English, not the language. This information is common ground between people who have been through the American high school system

2. on the phone
speech act: assertive- Informs the reader exactly why the writer is not available to engage in IM at the moment (because they are on the phone).

3. dinner
speech act: assertive- Informs the reader why the writer is away from their computer (because they are at dinner).

4. watching hockey
speech act: assertive- Tells reader why the writer is away from their computer (because they are watching a hockey game).
This away message can be thought to have a common ground convention between hockey fans because it was up on Sunday night, when a big hockey game was on TV, so only people who keep up with hockey would know exactly what game was being watched and why it was important.

5. A dream is a wish the heart makes when you're fast asleep...Dreaming away, leave a message!
“A dream…asleep” is a quote and therefore not included in the coding.
“Dreaming away, leave a message!” consists of 2 speech acts- assertive and directive, respectively. The assertive part tells why the writer is away from their computer and not able to engage in IM (because they are sleeping). The directive speech act tells reader to leave a message.
The ellipsis in the away message is a CMC convention.

I think that the Nastri paper did a good job setting up an initial framework to analyze away messages. I agree that most (not all) away messages serve the purpose of providing information and/or entertaining the reader, and that therefore most speech acts in away messages will be assertive, commissive, or expressive. However, I do think that the Nastri paper tried to oversimplify their analysis of away messages. First of all, they neglected to analyze quotes. In my personal experience I’ve found that quotes can serve the same function as an expressive speech act and tell the reader the writer’s mood. If I’m feeling a bit sad one day, I might leave a sad line from a song on my away message to reflect my mood. Also, I think that when analyzing away messages, one should analyze punctuation more than just noting it as a CMC convention. For example, if my friend left a message that said “out” as opposed to “out!!!!!” instead of just noting that a CMC convention was used, I would note that in the latter message, it seems that they are involved in something exciting as opposed to the first message which just means that they are out of their room. So the second message is almost like an expressive speech act as well as an assertive speech act. Also, because away messages are a written medium, font size, italics/bolding, font color, etc. are important to the meaning of away messages, but Nastri has neglected to analyze these. A more in depth analysis would be needed to truly understand the complexities of away messages and their functions. As for the coding- personally, I didn’t find coding the away messages too difficult

Cornell Language and Technology

2006-03-28T10:33:00.000-05:00

Cornell Language and Technology

Away messages:

1) beautiful day outside

2) going to bed

3) pooped.

4) "It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care"

~Office Space

5) little rascals then bed

With the ubiquity of AIM in our busy lives, the use of away messages is becoming ever more crucial. The past night I searched for five away messages on my buddy list. As found in Clark, the Nastri paper uses the same coding of language that was presented by Searle in our text. There are five main types of speech acts: assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarations.

It’s hard to find interesting away messages when you look for them at 5:30 in the morning and most people are asleep, but I think my examples provide useful insights into how to code away message language. The first away message is an example of an assertive speech act because it informs the reader of the belief of the person writing the message. The second example highlights what a commissive speech act is because the message states that the person is intending and committing herself to “going to bed.” The third away message is an expressive speech act because she is describing her emotional state and expressing it in her away message. The forth away message is a quote and would not be analyzed by the people that wrote the Nastri paper, but it indeed is very expressive. The last away message I chose has two parts; the first part, “little rascals” is an assertive act, while the last part, “then bed” is an example of a commissive act. As far as entertainment value, the forth away message above is probably the only one capable of being entertaining, the others are informative.

Usually conventions can be found in two different parts for away messages, either requiring common ground or just being a regularly found standard in CMC. “Pooped” and “going to bed” are certainly just standards of CMC. “Beautiful day outside” exhibits common ground because my friend also goes to school here in Ithaca and it is understood between the both of us that it is rare to experience nice weather here. “Little rascals then bed” also demonstrates a norm of CMC, someone is just reporting what he is doing. The quote from office space displays the notion of common ground because if I had not seen the movie I would not have realized the full extent to how humorous the message is.

When reading the Nastri paper, one discussion point that was made really surprised me. The fact that gender difference did not make a huge difference in away messages seemed problematic to me. On a typical day when I browse my buddy list, it is almost certain to see several girls’ away messages including song lyrics about something emotional. I do not intend to be stereotypical in this analysis, just honest. I believe gender difference plays a huge role in shaping away messages. In addition, I think an analysis of the color of the fonts used might even play a large role on gender differences in AIM because most away messages I see online from girls include colorful motifs.

Lastly, one part of the Nastri paper struck me as entertaining, although it was not so profound. The paper discusses findings from Grinter and Palen that are very interesting. One such finding is that people dislike default away messages such as “I am away from my computer right now” and believed them to be rude. This finding is consistent with my own real life experiences because whenever I use “I am away from my computer right now” or just leave a blank away message up, I receive comments calling me annoying or boring.

Assignment #7: Speech act analyses of away messages

2006-03-28T10:17:00.000-05:00

Part I: Analyses of away messages

Alysha's 21st Birthday begins!

This is an assertive speech act that is meant to inform others about the event at hand, which is someone's 21st birthday. The most evident common ground convention in this away message is in evincing knowledge of a unique type of information: knowledge of who Alysha is.

One can probably also infer why this assertion was deemed important enough to be an away message: it uses another piece of common ground, this time among college students, who recognize the extent of inebriety that typically surrounds a 21st birthday (in this country). The exclamation point at the end of the message may also imply the person's excitement about this event, which indicates that he may be preparing to join in the festivities.

"It's like flossing your teeth with a Rolls-Royce." —Smallz

This quote is an assertive speech act that indicates to others the strange nature of his recent conversations. It focuses on two pieces of common ground: who "Smallz" is, and the context of the quote. There is a small circle of people who know who "Smallz" is; there is likely an even smaller circle (or pair) of people who know what the context of the quote was. By using information that will be common ground for such a select group of people, this person has followed the common ground convention of distancing himself from "out-groups" (i.e., people who do not have the same information as those in the "in-group").

Some Conan..then some buona notte!

The first part of this away message is assertive, because it indicates what this person is doing at the moment. It uses the common ground convention "Conan", which presumably refers to the television show, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien". There is also a unique usage of punctuation, "..", separating the two parts of the away message; this is a CMC convention that may indicate a pause or directional change in thought.

The second part of this away message uses another common ground convention: use of Italian language. According to the reading, this casual usage may be attributed to his activity with others who also use Italian language frequently. The phrase, which means "good night" in English, indicates that he is planning to go to sleep later; this is a commissive speech act.

You're the metaphors I can't create to comprehend this curse I call love.

This is likely an expressive speech act; it may indicate that the person feels somewhat helpless or "cursed," especially if this person wrote the sentence based on her current emotions. However, if this sentence is instead a quote from a third-party work that this person enjoys (e.g., song lyrics, poem, novel), then the away message may not necessarily reflect her emotions, but simply her appreciation for this specific arrangement of words. Furthermore, if this is quoted from a third-party work, we may view information on that source as common ground.

family guy before bed

This away message assumes that knowledge of "Family Guy," the television series, is common ground between him and his audience. The first part of this away message is either assertive or commissive; he is either away watching Family Guy right now, or is planning to do so later tonight. The second part of the away message is clearly commissive, because he is planning to go to sleep sometime thereafter.

Part II: Critique of speech act analysis

Coding each of these away messages was straightforward. However, those that featured quotes were more difficult than the others, because the intentions behind them were not clear. Is such a speech act assertive (i.e., giving information about the current situation) or expressive (i.e., giving information about the person's emotions)? Or perhaps this quote reflects nothing about the situation or the "speaker's" emotions, and is only indicative of his/her personality (e.g., exemplifies his/her sense of humor or taste in language)? How does one code such a speech act that provides practically no information, only entertainment?

In a broader sense, this highlights points where speech act analysis oversimplifies its subject material: sometimes the speaker has vague intentions, or has multiple intentions (e.g., quoting a favorite movie, choosing a quote that matches his/her mood, and choosing a quote that will also entertain readers). Away messages are especially lacking in cues between the "speaker" and "listener"—nothing more than a static piece of text is transmitted—and therefore need further levels of consideration about the speaker's motives, context, and personal tendencies.

assign 7 - away messages

2006-03-28T10:01:00.000-05:00

Away message #1:

back to reality: [speech act: expressive]

massive reading at stellas while it snows outside. [speech act: assertive]
[convention: common ground based]

so much for mai tais in the pool bar. [speech act: expressive]
[convention: common ground based]

Away message #2: sleeves! [speech act: assertive]
[convention: common ground based]

Away message #3: returning to the gym after a very lazy hiatus.
[speech act: assertive]

Away message #4: class [speech act: assertive]

Away message #5: work [speech act: assertive]

One main thing that I think this approach to coding away messages overlooks is users’ rampant employment of and reliance on inside jokes. While the study tries to account for these kinds of in-group conventions, it only assesses formal group affiliations of the user, such as sports teams, Greek membership, clubs, etc. The study has no way of comprehensively cataloguing each user’s informal, social affiliations, which can be endless and range from as many as a whole high-school or home-town or -state’s worth of people, to one other person with whom the user shares an exclusive inside joke. Since there is no way to gain insight and document all of a person’s inside information with others, there is similarly no way to accurately assess the intent and meaning of certain away messages. This complication leads to all sorts of problems for the validity of coding by the speech act categories employed by the study, as researchers can never know whether a message can be taken at face value, or whether the user’s intent is motivated by insider meaning, rendering codings speculative at best.

A prime example of this difficulty is featured in Away message #2 above. The message (“sleeves!”) would have completely different meaning for the user’s friends than for a stranger (coder). The user’s friends know that she is preparing like mad for the upcoming Cornell fashion show, so the message is designed to make sense to those who know her (that she is currently engaged in making the sleeves for one of her featured designs). The major drawback of the study is routed in the function of the away message community, which is to communicate to people you know. Because of this, is seems unrealistic that an unknown coder can be expected to accurately code such insider-targeted away message content. Moreover, there is also no way for coders to know whether or not they are in fact coding insider information, as a seemingly straightforward message may in fact be rife with sarcasm, double-meaning, inside-jokes, etc.

Away messages are silly

2006-03-28T06:48:00.001-05:00

Five away messages

Ya nye znayu tochni li vesi, no mnye nye xochet'sya ikh proveryat'. Mnye slishkom nravit'sya eta kartina. (i don't know if the scales are accurate or not, but I don't want to check them. I like the picture too much.) — (quotation)

"It's not a beer belly, it's a fuel tank for a sex machine!" — (quotation)

b-bALL — assertive (?)

nevermind the gym....relaxing before tarble and the library.... — assertive / commissive

hmm, monday...and i'm not in the mood for ta-ing today either... — expressive / commissive

(1) is a quotation from the Russian song "Vopros" by the group Кино. It was transcribed as it is shown here. It may be a comment on what the speaker is feeling, in which case it would be an expressive act; it may be a statement of what music the speaker is listening to at the moment, in which case it would be an assertive act; or it may be something else entirely.

(2) is another quotation which I can't properly source. It seems to be a popular phrase intended as a joke. As with (1), it may be a statement with any number of actual meanings, but I cannot readily conceive of an intended meaning that would involve a speech act of a type other than assertive.

(3) is difficult to understand; it appears to assert that the reason that the speaker is (nominally) away from their computer has something to do with basketball. It could be that they are interested in a game which is currently being played, that they have a passive interest in some series of games being played or the sport as a whole, that they are involved in playing a game, that they would wish to play a game, &c. Without further context, it is not possible to determine the exact meaning of the content of the message.

(4) is a simple assertive message stating why the speaker is absent. It is also, after a fashion, commissive, as it states the speaker's intended future location (and, to those in the know, activity).

(5) is expressive, stating the speaker's feelings towards the day and the activity in which they are (presumably) obliged to partake. It also has a commissive character, implying that the speaker is obliged to act in some capacity as a TA on Mondays and will, however grudgingly, fulfill this obligation.

With respect to the Nastri in general, I take greatest issue with the stated assumption that categories of speech act are mutually exclusive. This is shown to be questionable by (4) and (5), above, as there is implicit meaning in a given assertive or expressive statement that commits the speaker to some future action if the assertive or expressive aspect of the message is taken to be true. It may be argued that the primary meaning of a message is of one character or another, but the acknowledgement of primary versus perhipheral meaning already throws mutually exclusive character of speech acts into question. One might also argue that a speaker may intend only to make a particular speech act with a given utterance and that other meanings are simply implications of the statement making the act, but such an argument needs to take into account intentionally ambiguous statements and statements which, arguably, have no proper interpretation as a speech act.

It seems that many away messages do not have content that is of any significant value. For a given away message this may be the case in general, or it may be that an away message has informational content for a subset of those who may read it and is nonsensical for all others. Take, for example, an away message not listed above because it is impossible to categorize without further context:

Coolyss (12:41:58 AM): ok hold your breath ok

Coolyss (12:42:00 AM): i'm going to tell you

Coolyss (12:42:05 AM): i burp sometimes

This may be meaningful to those who are mutual friends of the one posting this away message and of Coolyss, but otherwise it does not carry much significant informational content at all. When such an away message is posted, whether it be a quotation intended to edify or an inside joke to which the reader is not privy, the content of the message is less important than the symbolism of being away and having posted such a message. Writing an away message involves taking into account the ability of those reading it to understand it; part of this process of comprehension involves being able to ground the message properly. Much as I won't write an away message in proper Russian because I know that no one using the stock AIM client can read Cyrillic encoding, I won't write an away message that requires contextual knowledge which no one reading the message can be expected to have, if I want them to be able to understand the message's content. A message is intentionally difficult to ground or otherwise hard to understand may be called cryptic. It is possible to post a cryptic away message in order to elicit a response, but when the practice of posting cryptic messages becomes commonplace, it is impractical for actors with many buddies to follow up on the meaning of the content of a given message, and the content of the away message ceases to be as significant as the simple act of posting the message and choosing to give it cryptic content.

Categorization of utterances is not as simple as dividing them into mutually exclusive speech act categories. Furthermore, the analysis used in Nastri, et al, simply ignores the capacity for speech that references itself or its medium explicitly or implicitly in such a manner so as to make straightforward categorization of an away message dependent upon its recipient.

#7 Away Messages

2006-03-28T04:53:00.000-05:00

Away Message 1: sleep…that’s where I’m a viking!!!
This has two speech acts. The first “sleep” is an assertive act letting others know he is asleep. The second part “that’s where I’m a viking” is also a assertive act letting the others know that he is dreaming of being a Viking. I would say this one has some humor in it.

Away Message 2: fungao.
I am not sure what type of speech act this is. It obviously requires common ground which a specific audience might be able to interpret and understand. I tried looking it up in the Chinese dictionary but was unable to unveil anything. It may be just humor or gibberish but is a mystery at the moment.

Away Message 3: weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
This message has one speech act. My interpretation of this is the sound a very happy person might make so this is an expressive act. It doesn’t really make sense at all for a away message so it may take common ground to interpret further or can be just the author’s sense of humor.

Away Message 4: bbl…need to buy some veggies
This has two speech acts. First “bbl” is be back laters, and is a commissive letting other know that she will return laters although no specific time is set. The next part “need to buy some veggies” is a assertive informing others of why she is gone.

Away Message 5: not here.. duh! call if important
This message has three speech acts. The first two “not here.. duh” are both assertives. The third part “call if important” is a directive telling the addressee how to reach him if needed.

Coding these messages was not overly difficult. At first a lot of people had the default message “I am away from the keyboard right now” or some variation of just “not here”, so it took a little time to sort through away messages or check online periodically for new away messages to be posted. I think the Nastri paper did well in organizing the different speech acts and separating them for analysis. One problem I see is that some people do not use away messages as intended. They leave messages that require common ground in order to understand is and specifically there for certain audience. I noticed humor in many of the away messages but am uncertain if that is what is intended, once again common ground is needed to clarify the message.

Assignment 7 - "insert quote here"

2006-03-28T04:19:00.000-05:00

8-)
This is an expressive message, as it is simply an emoticon that expresses how this person is feeling right now, and it probably indicates that she is in a good mood. It doesn’t actually say anything about what she is doing, but it expresses that it is probably safe to message her and not worry about getting my head bitten off. This message utilizes a single speech act, and a single CMC convention, the emoticon.

I’m not here right now
This is message, which consists of a single speech assertive act, and it doesn’t have any common ground conventions or CMC conventions. This doesn’t offer that much information, other than the fact that the person is not available.

Everyone who said that take-home exams are easier was seriously mistaken
Another single assertive act, which implies to the reader that this person is hard at work at a take-home exam. I think there is a little bit of humor is used in this message as well, since we are meant to look at this person’s misery in a humorous light. There is also a bit of common ground conventions in use here. Although she spells out that she is doing a take home exam, she doesn’t specify what they are easier than. We, as Cornell students, know that she probably means that take-home exams are easier than prelims. Additionally, she mentions “everyone”, meaning that some people earlier must have said to her that take-home exams are easier, or perhaps she is referring to a general consensus, which would both be common ground conventions.

sleep
Presumably another single assertive, but it’s a little ambiguous if this is really the case. This away message occurs quite often, and most of the time, the person is saying that he or she is sleeping. There are no conventions used here, and no humor. In different situations, this can possibly viewed as a directive, telling the readers of the message to go to sleep, but it is somewhat unlikely.

I've stared at the sky And I've asked myself why You've become like an angel to me Still, the days and the weeks and the hours go by And the minutes they just fade away And I'm missing you every second in time And it hurts because you're so far away All those tears that I cry when you're not by my side And all those nights I dream of kissing you goodnight Are on my my mind...
A single quote – a verse of a song by Allister. There is no humor, and no CMC conventions, but the understanding of the quote relies on a piece of common ground information, namely that the reader realizes that it is an Allister song. I found this quote to be pretty interesting because the writer didn’t include any indication that this was a quote (i.e. quotation marks, or an indication of an author). It was totally up to the reader to figure out where the quote comes from. With shorter quotes, it is sometimes hard to even tell that the writer is quoting something, as it can easily be mistaken with something that he just wrote himself.

My messages may come from a slightly biased sample, since I’m doing this assignment at a time that most normal people are sleeping or wishing they could go to sleep. I think the Nastri paper overlooked the fact that people may have used different away messages late at night, since their last samples came at 10 PM. I think these messages definitely would have been different, since there would be presumably fewer directives or commissives, as the message is likely just an indication that the writer went to sleep. It is unlikely that the writer will be asking the readers to do anything, and he probably isn’t committing himself to any action. In fact, when it is very late at night, even a message that conveys little information can be taken to mean that the writer went to sleep. For example, I assumed that the single emoticon, the quote, or “I’m not here right now” meant that the writer is sleeping. In fact, the message had to convey very clearly the person is NOT sleeping in order to have the reader believe that (like the take-home exam message). I find this interesting because these messages take on different meanings during the day, when a similar message probably means that the writer is simply busy doing something.

Second, I found that quotes are used quite often in away messages (although this may be a product of me doing this assignment so late, when a quote is sufficient to convey that the writer is sleeping). I don’t think Nastri et al should have ignored the quotes they collected completely, as I think they could have done some interesting analysis on these messages. Quotes often are used to express emotion, and often fill the role of one of the speech acts. Perhaps some studies can done such as looking at what kind of people tended to use quotes, if they explicitly stated that it was a quote, and what exactly the person was trying to convey with the quote.

#7 away message analysis

2006-03-28T03:45:00.000-05:00

I analyzed the following away messages:

1. I wish next week it was spring break again.

One speech act: expressive, does not contain common ground or CMC conventions, contains some wry humor.

2. philosophizing

One speech act: assertive, requires the fact that the sender is taking a philsophy class to be in common ground for better understanding, does not contain CMC conventions, does not contain humor.

3. Zzzzzzz.

One speech act: assertive, does not contain common ground or CMC conventions (unless onomatopoeia count as intentional mispellings), does not contain humor.

4. Tired.

One speech act: expressive, does not contain common ground or CMC conventions, does not contain humor.

5. perchance to dream

Quotation (Shakespeare's Hamlet): calls upon common ground knowledge that the full line is "to sleep, perchance to dream," thus identifying that the sender is asleep, does not contain CMC conventions, does not contain humor.

I feel that the speech act analysis definitely has its faults; as Clark points out (136) speech acts can often be interpreted as being several categories at once, the line between expressives and assertives being especially fuzzy to me. I was actually quite surprised that the Nastri et al paper reported a 90% inter-coder reliability level as I often found the distinction troubling. For example, in my quote 4, "Zzzzz," while I chose to code this as an assertive (the sender stating that they were asleep) I think it could easily be coded as an expressive (the sender expressing their sleepy feeling).

I thought it would have been interesting to look at message length, especially with the discussion we had in class about politeness and message length. As I look at others' posts I feel a bit cheap; others have quotes that are each longer than all of my quotes combined. However, at this early-morning hour I just didn't have much to work with (that is, my buddies weren't providing me with much). Of course, why bother writing a long, complicated away message if you're just tired and ready to go to bed? It seems functional and expressive - as I have my "awareness moment" checking up on my friends I am reminded that it's the quiet night, they're all asleep, and I probably should be too. I think it would have been interesting to analyze message length in respect to message function and possibly also gender differences.

I was quite surprised at the lack of CMC conventions and sparcity of common ground conventions (although this was another point I found hard to code - while quote 1 "I wish it were spring break again" did indeed invoke some of the common ground I share as a college student who knows what spring break is and how the return to class can certainly be abrupt, I decided that there was no really specialized knowledge required to understand this message). Certainly I expected more CMC conventions, especially when the description was so broad as to include ellipses. I think that lack of capitalization or use of all caps could have easily fallen into the category of a CMC convention, and probably should have.

Assignment #7

2006-03-28T03:02:00.000-05:00

Away Messages:
1. Sleep for a bit
This message is an assertive speech act as it states what the person is supposedly doing at the present time as fact. Anyone who views this away message must assume that the person who put up the away message is sleeping currently. However, “for a bit” could mean many different things and is left wide open as a vague statement. Also, it is quite possible that “for a bit” actually does mean one thing to a certain group of people that share a common ground. One speech act, no humor.

2. hibernating…I miss the sun already
This away message is first an assertive speech act that relies on common ground. Anyone who shares this common ground can assume that the person actually is not in “hibernation” by encyclopedia definition but is probably staying indoors and potentially napping. The second part of this away message is an expressive speech act because the person is stating their emotions on the subject and feeling sad. The two parts of this away message go hand-in-hand and are therefore connected by the three dots (e.g. …) because the person wants to show that they are hibernation because they feel this particular way about the sun being gone. I would also add that “hibernating” is not capitalized to show the dreariness the person is feeling. Two speech acts, humor and CMC.

3. senior design…
This is an assertive speech act because it states exactly where the person is. However, this again requires a great deal of common ground by participants because senior design could have multiple meanings. I do think that this person was intending on stating that they were at a class called “senior “design” and in this way those viewing the message know of this person’s whereabouts. The dots following the assertive speech act leads that the idea of going to this class is open ended. Also, I speculate further that it is not capitalized because there lacks an excitement about attending this particular class. One speech act, no humor, CMC.

4. I GOT MY NEW CAR!!!
This message is an assertive speech act because it is a phrase that proposes a specific idea. In this particular case it is obvious by the way it is written (with capitalization and three exclamation points) that this girl is very excited and wants everyone to know it. We, as viewers, have no idea where the person is who put the away message up (although we might guess she’s out driving her new car). Point being, her goal was to provide us with information, a given fact about something she is excited about. Perhaps in a way that might give her more social credibility. One speech act, humor, CMC.

5. ST. PATTY’S DAY WITH THE CREW THEN ITALY!
This message is a Commissive speech act as the person is stating where they are going to be in the future in a set of events. This message also requires common ground by viewers because of the word “crew.” Those who know this person will probably know who the “crew” is. Also, St. Patrick’s Day is abbreviated in an attempt to add humor and fun to the message. This message is also written in all capital letters with an exclamation mark at the end to show the that this person was extremely excited about these next events he was about to participate in. One speech act, humor, CMC.

The first aspect I questioned on the article was when he spoke of communicative purposes. He said that the goal of an away message is to either inform or entertain. I would like to say that this might be too simplified. I think that there are often multipled intentions for putting up away messages and often these include both being informaional AND entertaining. Also, I would bring up the idea tha ambiguity would not fit in either category most of the time. If someone puts up an ambiguous away message such as "around" this lacks in any evidence and I would argue it lacks in information just the same. The viewer of the away message must "account" for where the other person is and what "around" really means. Therefore, this viwer is providing their own information hence ambiguous away messages fall into neither category.

And as I previously stated, I would argue that in most situations it is the goal for the poster to put up an informational AND entertaining away message. I wonder what a study would look like that would look at the output of away messages with a controlled time and task with allowance for creativity. I think that people write assertive and commissive messages in a non humorous way beause of lack of time primarily. I think face would play a major role in this because if people had the time available I believe they would seek the most entertaining type of away message even in an informational task setting. This is because people hold the need to look socially appealing to others hence the face concept. It is unlikely that one would put "class" as their away message unless they lack time or creativity.