Encouraging OSN users to respect other people’s privacy

With the increasing use of Social Media and Online Social Networks such as Facebook or Instagram) the question of conflicting privacy settings becomes more and more relevant.

Minkus et al. [1] conducted a study to focus on OSN behavior of parents and found that many privacy breaches may occur to children at the hands of others, namely, their parents and relatives. These authors also designed interventions to mitigate compulsive sharing on social networks. Screenshot 2020-04-05 14.00.01.png

[1] Tehila Minkus, Kelvin Liu, and Keith W. Ross. 2015. Children Seen But Not Heard: When Parents Compromise Children’s Online Privacy. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW ’15). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 776–786. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2736277.2741124

Old good habits

This COVID-19 situation is pushing us to rethink what really matters, how we live and the way we consume resources. My grandmother used to tell me stories of her times. Coming from an agricoltural society, most families back then used to grow their own food. They also used to make bread at home. It is interesting to notice how the current situation nudged families to bake bread and pizza at home: a flashback of 70 years! There is something special about cooking your own food. There is something nice about baking bread: the smell, the taste, and … the wait!

I guess, what I am trying to say is that our society moves too fast. In the rush of consuming we do not appreciate what we have. We do not appreciate the little moments, the little things.

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Change your habits with … electric shocks!

While doing my literature review for a recent project on Multiparty Privacy Conflicts, I bumped on a startup that designed a bracelet that gives little electric shocks every time the user performs a self-defined bad habit (e.g., eating at a fast foot).

I guess, this type of approach might have some positive outcomes for the kind of habits that are automatic (e.g., touching your nose) but I am not sure that it might work to setup behaviors that involve more high-cognitive functions (e.g., learning a new language).

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great names are like knots

great names are like knots—they’re woven from the same stringy material as other words, but in their particular arrangement, they catch, become junctions to which new threads arrive, from which other threads depart

Jack Cheng, writer , June 2012


Great article by Jack Cheng on the Slow Web Movement. I particularly liked these quotes:

– And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness.

– But timeliness alone doesn’t make something Slow Web. …Reliable rhythms lead to predictable outcomes, and rhythm is an expression of moderation.

– Fast Web is destination-based. Slow Web is interaction-based

– Behavior change, not growth. Behavior change is about improving the lives of others, scale is about ego. Getting scale after nailing behavior change is easier than nailing behavior change (and thus having a shot at durability) after hitting scale.

– Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge.

– Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information.

Participants’ personal note-taking in meetings and its value for automatic meeting summarisation

Bothin, A., and Clough, P. Participants’ personal note-taking in meetings and its value for automatic meeting summarisation. Information Technology and Management (December 2011), 1–19. [PDF]

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This paper reports the results of a quantitative study on how people take notes in meetings. The goal of the authors was that of aiding the design of innovative applications to support work-related meetings.

Notes taken during meetings have a pivotal role in helping people understand what happened during the meeting and to recall important information or decisions that were shared during the gathering. Taking notes is usually a tedious activity and therefore lots of scholar have focused on work-related meetings, trying to come up with automatic solutions to summarize what happened during the interactions.

The paper reports interesting references to studies that demonstrate a relation between acoustic features (i.e., pitch, intensity, speaking speed, and pauses) of the recordings of the meetings and annotations created by participants (Arons, 1994; Kennedy & Ellis, 2003).

Also, some possible implications in the design of systems to support annotations: shared note-taking was investigated by Landay & Davis, 1999 and by Wolf et al., 1992. Finally, the possibility to suggest notes to participant was examined by Banarjee & Rudnicky, 2009.

The paper describes interesting related work on how people take notes for personal reasons. These notes are created in daily life meetings regardless of whether specific instructions to create summaries are given to participants. Note-taking mainly takes place tin order to create a personal record to aid remembering what was being discussed. Participants in meetings usually take notes of the most informative events. They contain “personally important” points and details on action items assigned to the note-taker. Most relevant references for these findings are the studies of Khan, 1992; Whittaker et al., 2005; and Wittaker et al., 2008.

These studies point out that during work meetings only salient and personally interesting points are recorded. The notes people generally take are short (i.s., 20-30 s long on average) [Khan, 1992]. These notes are likely to have predictive power for finding the most important parts of meetings.

The same authors examined the role of of individual differences in talking and note-taking activities in meetings (Bothin & Clough, 2010). Participants had different behaviour according to their gender, age, and native language. Women wrote more but men talked more within meetings. The older the participants were, the more they talked and noted. Native English speakers wrote more, but there was no significant difference in talking behavior.

In their experiment, Bothin & Clough examined the AMI corpus, involving 104 participants in total, and found that personal notes were generally short. Single items were around 8 seconds long on average (SD 3). They found a positive correlation between the total meeting length and the total number of the notes (r = 0.21), as well as the total meeting length and the total duration of the notes (r = 0.20). Perhaps people prefer to write down key words only [Khan, 1992] and every time something important to them occurs in the discussion.

Towards a smarter meeting record–capture and access of meetings revisited

Geyer, W., Richter, H., and Abowd, G. D. Towards a smarter meeting record–capture and access of meetings revisited. Multimedia Tools Appl. 27 (December 2005), 393–410. [URL]

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This paper surveys and discusses various ways of indexing meeting records by categorizing existing approaches along multiple dimensions. The authors introduce the notion of creating indices based upon user interaction with domain-specific artifacts.

The paper contain a detailed literature review of previous studies of note taking behavior during and about meetings.

Filochat: handwritten notes provide access to recorded conversations

Whittaker, S., Hyland, P., and Wiley, M. Filochat: handwritten notes provide access to recorded conversations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence (New York, NY, USA, 1994), CHI ’94, ACM, pp. 271–277. [PDF]

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This paper presents a study of how people take notes in meetings. The authors interviewed people who used audio recordings in offices to identify the main benefits and barriers they experienced. Later, they interviewed 28 non-users of audio recording devices about the way they took notes during meetings.

They found a need for supplementing handwritten meeting notes with a verbatim speech record of the conversation. On the basis of this, they built a prototype system that combined co-indexed handwritten notes and recorded audio in a digital notebook. They discussed perceived benefits of this technology.

In their literature review, they discuss some “speech-as-data” applications, such as the Voicenotes (Stifelman et al., 1993) and the Ubiquitous audio (Hindus & Schmandt, 1992). These applications allowed the organization of brief segments of personal audio such as “ideas” or “reminders”.

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