NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

This article presents nearly 10 year's worth of System Usability Scale (SUS) data collected on numerous products in all phases of the development lifecycle. The SUS, developed by Brooke (1996), reflected a strong need in the usability community for a tool that could quickly and easily collect a user's subjective rating of a product's usability. The data in this study indicate that the SUS fulfills that need. Results from the analysis of this large number of SUS scores show that the SUS is a highly robust and versatile tool for usability professionals. The article presents these results and discusses their implications, describes nontraditional uses of the SUS, explains a proposed modification to the SUS to provide an adjective rating that correlates with a given score, and provides details of what constitutes an acceptable SUS score.

An Empirical Evaluation of the System Usability Scale

Patient-centredness: a conceptual framework and review of the empirical literature.

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is an inexpensive, yet effective tool for assessing the usability of a product, including Web sites, cell phones, interactive voice response systems, TV applications, and more. It provides an easy-to-understand score from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive). While a 100-point scale is intuitive in many respects and allows for relative judgments, information describing how the numeric score translates into an absolute judgment of usability is not known. To help answer that question, a seven-point adjective-anchored Likert scale was added as an eleventh question to nearly 1,000 SUS surveys. Results show that the Likert scale scores correlate extremely well with the SUS scores (r=0.822). The addition of the adjective rating scale to the SUS may help practitioners interpret individual SUS scores and aid in explaining the results to non-human factors professionals.

Determining what individual SUS scores mean: adding an adjective rating scale

Astrophysical magnetic fields and nonlinear dynamo theory

Usability is not a quality that exists in any real or absolute sense. Perhaps it can be 
best summed up as being a general quality of the appropriateness to a purpose of 
any particular artefact. This notion is neatly summed up by Terry Pratchett in his 
novel Moving Pictures:In just the same way, the usability of any tool or system has to be viewed in terms 
of the context in which it is used, and its appropriateness to that context. With 
particular reference to information systems, this view of usability is reflected in the 
current draft international standard ISO 9241-11 and in the European Community 
ESPRIT project MUSiC (Measuring Usability of Systems in Context) (e.g. Bevan 
et al., 1991). In general, it is impossible to specify the usability of a system (i.e. its 
fitness for purpose) without first defining who are the intended users of the system, 
the tasks those users will perform with it, and the characteristics of the physical, 
organizational and social environment in which it will be used.

https://www.hell.meiert.org/core/pdf/sus.pdf

SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale

Rather more than 25 years ago, as part of a usability engineering program, I developed a questionnaire---the System Usability Scale (SUS)---that could be used to take a quick measurement of how people perceived the usability of computer systems on which they were working. This proved to be an extremely simple and reliable tool for use when doing usability evaluations, and I decided, with the blessing of engineering management at Digital Equipment Co. Ltd (DEC; where I developed SUS), that it was probably something that could be used by other organizations (the benefit for us being that if they did use it, we potentially had something we could use to compare their systems against ours). So, in 1986, I made SUS freely available to a number of colleagues, with permission to pass it on to anybody else who might find it useful, and over the next few years occasionally heard of evaluations of systems where researchers and usability engineers had used it with some success.

SUS: a retrospective

We study a mean field model of the solar dynamo, in which the non-linearity is the action of the azimuthal component of the Lorentz force of the dynamo-generated magnetic field on the angular velocity. The underlying zero-order angular velocity is consistent with recent determinations of the solar rotation law, and the form of the alpha effect is chosen so as to give a plausible butterfly diagram. For small Prandtl numbers we find regular, intermittent and apparently chaotic behaviour, depending on the size of the alpha coefficient. For certain parameters, the intermittency displays some of the characteristics believed to be associated with the Maunder minimum. We thus believe that we are capturing some features of the solar dynamo.

/pdf/towards-a-model-for-the-solar-dynamo-5m0gbw30n1.pdf

Towards a model for the solar dynamo

The ability to describe the Grid resources needed by applications is essential for developing seamless access to resources on the Grid. We consider the problem of resource description in the context of a resource broker being developed in the Grid Interoperability Project (GRIP) which is able to broker for resources described by several Grid middleware systems, GT2, GT3 and Unicore. We consider it necessary to utilise a semantic matching of these resource descriptions, firstly because there is currently no common standard, but more fundamentally because we wish to make the Grid transparent at the application level. We show how the semantic approach to resource description facilitates both these aims and present the GRIP broker as a working prototype of this approach.

Semantic Matching of Grid Resource Descriptions

/pdf/decision-making-in-general-practice-4gv7ipn75m.pdf

John Brooke

Papers

SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale

SUS: a retrospective

Towards a model for the solar dynamo

Semantic Matching of Grid Resource Descriptions

Decision-Making in General Practice