Introduction to Phenomenology

'When I was your age,' my father was fond of telling me, 'I used to walk 5 miles through a foot of snow just to go to school.' I was impressed for a while, until I noticed that, as he got older, the distance got longer and the snow got deeper. Eventually, he claimed to have walked 20 miles through 6 feet of snow. I became even more suspicious when I found out from my grandmother that they had lived three blocks from school.

In an age of school buses and car-pooling parents, such stories, whether believable or not, conjure up visions of a world almost beyond the imaginations of today's children. I was reminded of that today by an email from my friend and Brandeis colleague Tom Pochapsky, who directed my attention to a fascinating article on the website of Beloit College (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php). Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural background of the students entering college that fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to the Beloit faculty to be aware of dated references. As the website notes, 'it quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.'

So what's the worldview of the class of 2014? According to the latest list, here are a few of the things these 18-year-olds, born in 1992, have experienced - and not experienced:

• Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

• They find that email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. They text. Oh, God, do they text.

• To them, Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive film director than as vigilante cop Dirty Harry.

• For them, Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

• They've never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

• In their world, Czechoslovakia has never existed. There was no Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain is a meaningless phrase, and Russia has never had a Communist government.

• There has never been a world without AIDS.

• The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are classical music.

• Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

• There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

• Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing good to watch has always been the norm.

• The US public has never approved of the job the US Congress is doing.

• Most of them have never seen a long-playing record, or even a tape drive. If they have ever seen a typewriter, it was in a museum, possibly alongside a dial telephone.

• They have never lived in a world without personal computers, the Internet, CD-ROMs or laser printers.

There are, of course, many things they have experienced that we also experienced at the same age. Among these are automobiles, jet airplanes, color television sets, and the Chicago Cubs not having won the World Series. Another commonality has been the enduring hostility between the English and the French.

But they couldn't imagine life without PopTarts, juice boxes, and movies you can have on your home TV, and they have no idea how we could have survived in a world that required carbon paper.

All of which got me wondering: what would the scientific worldview be like for someone, let's say, just starting graduate school today (and therefore about 22 years of age)? Born in 1988, how would their scientific lives differ from the lives of the generations preceding them (including mine, which is the only one I really care about)? It makes for some interesting speculation:

• For today's budding biologists, DNA fingerprinting would have always existed. Actual fingerprinting would have been a recent invention, used primarily to secure laptop computers.

• Protein crystal structure determination would for them never be anything but a routine tool.

• Molecular biology would never have been a discipline in its own right. Instead, it would always have been a set of techniques, introduced to students in better high schools.

• They cannot imagine a world without kits to make experiments virtually automatic.

• Since the first free-living organism had its genome sequenced when they were 7 years old, they have grown up in the age of genomics. They have had access to the complete sequence of the human genome since they were in middle school.

• They have never attended a lecture given with slides from a carousel projector, and they may not have ever seen one given from overhead transparencies either. PowerPoint has been in use for virtually their entire lives.

• In their lifetime, no one has ever pipetted anything by mouth.

• DNA sequencing, peptide synthesis, chemical analysis, and gene synthesis have always been farmed out to specialty companies rather than done in one's own lab.

• They have almost certainly never seen anyone blow glass. In fact, many of them may not know that test tubes were ever made of anything but plastic.

• They have always had the option of going into the biotechnology industry.

• The term 'enzyme' has always referred to both protein and RNA.

• Evolution has always been under attack, and science and religion have largely been seen as incompatible.

• There have always been 'big science' projects in biology.

• Chemistry has always been a declining field in terms of student interest, and physics has always been the province of a small number of practitioners.

• Believe it or not, they have never known a world without cDNA microarrays.

• For them, 'Xerox' is a verb, Polaroid makes LCD TVs, and every piece of equipment is computer-controlled.

• They have never requested a reprint. They probably don't know what one is.

• They believe that no science was done before 2000. Any science not indexed on PubMed was not done either, even if it was done yesterday.

• They cannot imagine that there once was only a single Cell journal, and just one Nature as well.

I'm sure you could think of lots more. I know I could, but we had 10 feet of snow last night, and that 50-mile walk to school is going to take me a while.

The past is a foreign country.

This study aimed to investigate (a) whether it is possible to increase emotional competence (EC) in adulthood; (b) whether this improvement results in better mental, physical, and social adjustment; (c) whether this improvement can be maintained 1 year later; and (d) whether these benefits are accompanied by a reduction in stress-hormone secretion (i.e., cortisol). One hundred and thirty-two participants were randomly assigned to an EC-enhancing intervention (in group format) or to a control group. Participants in the intervention group underwent a specifically designed 15-hr intervention targeting the 5 core emotional competencies, complemented with a 4-week e-mail follow-up. Results reveal that the level of emotional competencies increased significantly in the intervention group in contrast with the control group. This increase resulted in lower cortisol secretion, enhanced subjective and physical well-being, as well as improved quality of social and marital relationships in the intervention group. No significant change occurred in the control group. Peer reports on EC and quality of relationships confirmed these results. These data suggest that emotional competencies can be improved, with effective benefits on personal and interpersonal functioning lasting for at least 1 year. The theoretical implications of these results as well as their practical implications for the construction and the development of effective emotional competencies interventions are discussed.

Conditions and effects of improving emotional competence in adulthood

Today, the prominence of data science within organizations has given rise to teams of data science workers collaborating on extracting insights from data, as opposed to individual data scientists working alone. However, we still lack a deep understanding of how data science workers collaborate in practice. In this work, we conducted an online survey with 183 participants who work in various aspects of data science. We focused on their reported interactions with each other (e.g., managers with engineers) and with different tools (e.g., Jupyter Notebook). We found that data science teams are extremely collaborative and work with a variety of stakeholders and tools during the six common steps of a data science workflow (e.g., clean data and train model). We also found that the collaborative practices workers employ, such as documentation, vary according to the kinds of tools they use. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications for supporting data science team collaborations and future research directions.

How do Data Science Workers Collaborate? Roles, Workflows, and Tools

Gamification is now a well-established technique in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research on gamification still faces a variety of empirical and theoretical challenges. Firstly, studies of gamified systems typically focus narrowly on understanding individuals. short-term interactions with the system, ignoring more difficult to measure outcomes. Secondly, academic research on gamification has been slow to improve the techniques through which gamified applications are designed. Third, current gamification research lacks a critical lens capable of exploring unintended consequences of designs. The 14 articles published in this special issue face these challenges with great methodological rigor. We summarize them by identifying three main themes: the determination to improve the quality and usefulness of theory in the field of gamification, the improvements in design practice, and the adoption of a critical gaze to uncover side-effects of gamification designs. We conclude by providing an overview of the questions that we feel must be addressed by future work in gamification. Gamification studies would benefit from a wider use of theories to account for the complexity of human behavior, a more thorough exploration of the many opportunities coming from the world of games, and an ethical reflection on the use of game design elements in serious domains.

/pdf/strengthening-gamification-studies-current-trends-and-future-1kk6c4hk8p.pdf

Strengthening gamification studies: Current trends and future opportunities of gamification research

Brain-to-Brain interfaces (BBIs) are systems that facilitate direct information transmission between two brains via a combination of neuroimaging and neuromodulation technologies. These systems can stimulate one user’s brain based on the neural signals of another. While Brain-Computer Interfacing is often discussed in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) game and play community, BBI is underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the social play potentials of BBI systems by proposing three types of ”telepathic play experiences” based on a wearable BBI system called ”PsiNet” which we designed, engineered, and evaluated in a previous study. This system measures the neural activity of players via electroencephalogram (EEG) as the input to the system and stimulates associated brain activity in other users using transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) as the system output. We hope this work will inspire game design researchers to create novel play experiences using neurotechnology such as BBI systems.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3450337.3483468

Telepathic Play: Towards Playful Experiences Based on Brain-to-brain Interfacing

An example operation may include one or more of collecting a set of driving data, estimating, from the set of driving data, one or more states that are predictive of an elevated driving risk of an adverse event endangering at least one of a driver, a vehicle's occupants or a vehicle's cargo, determining, from the one or more estimated states, an existence of an elevated driving risk, and alerting at least one of the vehicle, driver or the vehicle's occupants to the existence of the elevated driving risk.

Driving state within a driving environment that includes autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles

Large Language Models such as GPT-3 exhibit generative language capabilities with multiple potential applications in creative practice. In this paper, we present a method for data sonification that employs the GPT-3 model to create semantically relevant mappings between artificial intelligence-generated natural language descriptions of data, and human-generated descriptions of sounds. We implemented this method in a public art installation to generate a soundscape based on data from different systems. While common sonification approaches rely on arbitrary mappings between data values and sonic values, our approach explores the use of language models to achieve a mapping not via values but via meaning. We find our approach is a useful tool for musification practice and demonstrates a new application of generative language models in creative new media arts practice. We show how different prompts influence data to sound mappings, and highlight that matching the embeddings of texts of different lengths produces undesired behavior. 

Using GPT-3 to Achieve Semantically Relevant Data Sonificiation for an Art Installation

The Executive Committee (EC) of ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) organized a series of ten equity talks from March 2021 to August 2021. These were hour-long recorded virtual roundtable sessions, for which we solicited participation from the SIGCHI community on concerns and questions relating to equity, in a number of areas relevant to SIGCHI. Many concerns were listed, some were repeated across topics, and the EC followed due diligence when it came to presenting this information to the community. What comes next?

Equity Talks @SIGCHI

In this special interest group (SIG), we follow up on previous conversations around hybrid models for conferences, conducted in open sessions by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Executive Committee (EC). The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual conferences; as we start to go back to in-person events, it is important to reflect on the types of events we desire, and design these accordingly. With this SIG, we hope to share experiences from previous conferences (successful or not) and discuss potential solutions to pending issues. This SIG will be led by VP at Large Adriana S. Vivacqua, with the participation of other EC members.

/pdf/exploring-hybrid-a-hybrid-sig-to-discuss-hybrid-conferences-eq31lphx.pdf

Josh Andres

Papers

Telepathic Play: Towards Playful Experiences Based on Brain-to-brain Interfacing

Driving state within a driving environment that includes autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles

Using GPT-3 to Achieve Semantically Relevant Data Sonificiation for an Art Installation

Equity Talks @SIGCHI

Exploring Hybrid: A (hybrid) SIG to discuss hybrid conferences