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

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this article, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and in the process discuss the spawning of related subfields. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

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Image retrieval: Ideas, influences, and trends of the new age

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Cognitive engineering

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

How do we conceptualize and design mixed reality environments (MREs)? Here we describe a first pass at a conceptual framework and use it to inform the design of different kinds of activities for children to experiment with. Our aim was to investigate how different MRE setups affected children's exploratory behavior and their understanding of them. The familiar activity of color mixing was used: different setups were provided, where paint or light colors could be mixed by using either physical tools, digital tools, or a combination of these. The findings of our study showed that novel mixes of physical and digital "transforms" engendered much exploration and reflection.

A conceptual framework for mixed reality environments: designing novel learning activities for young children

Mobile computing presents formidable challenges not only to the design of applications but also to each and every phase of the systems lifecycle. In particular, the HCI community is still struggling with the challenges that mobile computing poses to evaluation. Expert-based evaluation techniques are well known and they do enable a relatively quick and easy evaluation. Heuristic evaluation, in particular, has been widely applied and investigated, most likely due to its efficiency in detecting most of usability flaws at front of a rather limited investment of time and human resources in the evaluation. However, the capacity of expert-based techniques to capture contextual factors in mobile computing is a major concern. In this paper, we report an effort for realizing usability heuristics appropriate for mobile computing. The effort intends to capture contextual requirements while still drawing from the inexpensive and flexible nature of heuristic-based techniques. This work has been carried out in the context of a research project task geared toward developing a heuristic-based evaluation methodology for mobile computing. This paper describes the methodology that we adopted toward realizing mobile heuristics. It also reports a study that we carried out in order to assess the relevance of the realized mobile heuristics by comparing their performance with that of the standard/traditional usability heuristics. The study yielded positive results in terms of the number of usability flaws identified and the severity ranking assigned.

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Appropriating and assessing heuristics for mobile computing

Browsing large information spaces such as maps on the limited screen of mobile devices often requires people to perform panning and zooming operations that move relevant display content off-screen. This makes it difficult to perform spatial tasks such as finding the location of Points Of Interest (POIs) in a city. Visualizing the location of off-screen objects can mitigate this problem: in this paper, we present a user study comparing the Halo [2] approach with two other techniques based on arrows. Halo surrounds off-screen objects with circles that reach the display window, so that users can derive the location and distance of objects by observing the visible portion of the corresponding circles. In the two arrow-based techniques, arrows point at objects and their size and body length, respectively, inform about the distance of objects. Our study involved four tasks requiring users to identify and compare off-screen objects locations, and also investigated the effectiveness of the three techniques with respect to the number of off-screen objects. Arrows allowed users to order off-screen objects faster and more accurately according to their distance, while Halo allowed users to better identify the correct location of off-screen objects. Implications of these results for mobile map-based applications are also discussed.

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Visualizing locations of off-screen objects on mobile devices: a comparative evaluation of three approaches

This article reviews empirical research conducted in the last decade on the subject of how online display advertising affects the usability and quality of user experience of websites. In particular, from an in-depth analysis of research questions, methods, and findings of the reviewed studies, the following is discussed: (a) which conceptual and theoretical background knowledge, based on psychological explanations of user cognition, affection and behavior, can best support the design and investigation of online advertising, and (b) which specific adverts features and properties are key to understand and favor certain types of effects on users. By capitalizing on this benchmark knowledge on benefits of adverts and their hidden costs, web researchers and practitioners are encouraged to approach online advertising from a deeper and more comprehensive perspective, which is centered on qualities of web interaction that go beyond traditional usability factors. It is speculated that many of the theories and mode...

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A Review of Online Advertising Effects on the User Experience

Several techniques have been proposed to support user navigation of large information spaces (e.g., maps or web pages) on small-screen devices such as PDAs and Smartphones. In this paper, we present the results of an evaluation that compared three of these techniques to determine how they might affect performance and satisfaction of users. Two of the techniques are quite common on mobile devices: the first one (DoubleScrollbar) is the standard combination of two scrollbars for separate horizontal and vertical scrolling with zoom buttons to change the scale of the information space, the second one (Grab&Drag) enables users to navigate the information space by directly dragging its currently displayed portion, while zooming is handled through a slider control. The last technique (Zoom-Enhanced Navigator or ZEN) is an extension and adaptation to mobile screens of Overview&Detail approaches, which are based on displaying an overview of the information space together with a detail view of a portion of that space. In these approaches, navigation is usually supported by (i) highlighting in the overview which portion of space is displayed in the detail view, and (ii) allowing users to move the highlight within the overview area to change the corresponding portion of space in the detail area. Our experimental evaluation concerned tasks involving maps as well as web page navigation. The paper analyzes in detail the obtained results in terms of task completion times, number and duration of user interface actions, accuracy of the gained spatial knowledge, and subjective preferences.

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Silvia Gabrielli

Papers

A conceptual framework for mixed reality environments: designing novel learning activities for young children

Appropriating and assessing heuristics for mobile computing

Visualizing locations of off-screen objects on mobile devices: a comparative evaluation of three approaches

A Review of Online Advertising Effects on the User Experience

Navigation techniques for small-screen devices: An evaluation on maps and web pages